Peninsula Linux Users' Group Tomorrow Night

Wed Sep 24 16:06:02 PDT 2003

Tomorrow evening, Thursday, Sep 25, we will have a meeting of the
Peninsula Linux Users' Group at Oracle building 100, room 104, in
Redwood Shores.  For directions see our website:
	http://www.penlug.org

Agenda:

7:00-7:30 PM:	Nuts & Bolts presentation by Rick Moen:
		"Personal encryption with PGP and GnuPG"

7:30-8:30 PM:	Keynote presentation by Edward Cherlin:
		"Simputers and Free/Open Source software for the poor"

8:30-9:00 PM:	App of the Month Club discussion facilitated by Bill Ward:
		"vi and vim"

9:00 PM:	Adjourn to a local restaurant (TBD) for social & food time

Details about each item:

* PGP and GnuPG are not used as widely as maybe they should be.  With
  them we can encrypt and authenticate our email.  Public-key crypto
  and the "web of trust" model helps it scale to a worldwide scope.
  Rick will explain what it's all about and how you can use it in your
  daily email.

* The Simputer is a low cost portable alternative to PCs, by which the
  benefits of IT can reach the common man.  It has a special role in
  the third world, particularly in India, because it ensures that
  illiteracy is no longer a barrier to handling a computer.  Based on
  Linux, the Simputer provides a simple and natural user interface
  based on sight, touch and audio.  Edward will tell us about the work
  he has been doing with Simputer to bring computers to the masses
  worldwide.

* Our third topic is the old workhorse editor for Unix, "vi".  Bill
  will be facilitating a discusison of some basic and not-so-basic vi
  skills. Your homework is to play with the vim tutorial and/or read
  Bill's article in the current issue of Linux Journal magazine, and
  try at least one vi command you never knew before.

Hope to see you all there!

--Bill.

-- 
William R Ward            bill at wards.net          http://www.wards.net/~bill/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           PROFESSIONAL PROGRAMMER, CLOSED COURSE.  DO NOT ATTEMPT.