MonadLUG meeting last night: Ray Cote and find, mpom, and Ted Roche on NX server

Seven folks attended the September meeting of MonadLUG last night.  
Charlie Farinella ran the meeting in Guy's absence, and we had a  
brief discussion on keeping the administrative overhead to minimum to  
focus on the contents of the meeting. All were in agreement and we  
dove in.

It was Ray Côté's evening to present the "Man page of the month" and  
Ray chose the "find" command. Armed with a two-sided handout for us  
(to be posted to the wiki once polished up a bit), we review the  
basic syntax, some variants, and talked about worthwhile application  
of the command to isolate files by certain filters and execute  
further commands upon them. The technique of using -exec to execute  
directly on the files inline was contrasted with the use of piping or  
xargs to process them, and the -print0 argument for separating files  
was explained with the matching -0 argument to xargs to spilt  
filenames with spaces embedded.  We all picked up a trick or two.  
Thanks, Ray!

I did the main presentation, and can't really comment on how well it  
went, as I was too busy trying to make it go well. Slides for the  
presentation are linked from the wiki's event pages and available on  
my website for attendees who want to reference them. In two  
sentences: NX gives you remote X Windows access suitable for low- 
bandwidth use with most common configuration tasks taken care of for  
you. If you're looking to experiment with the technology, choose the  
newly-Open-Sourced NX 2.0 technology or the more mature freenx  
project, but don't try to mix the two.

Brief announcements included the exciting Software Freedom Day  
tomorrow at Hopkinton Library 10-2, MerriLUG's exciting data carving  
meeting next week, and Hosstraders only three weeks away. Hope to see  
you at one or more of these events!

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com