[ale] Alabama LUGFest

[Charles Shapiro]

Well, that was pretty low-key. There were about 17 folks at the Birmingham
LUGFest on Saturday at about 10:00.  Almost all were from Birmingham proper
-- I was the soul Atlanta guy, there was one other Georgia fellow from down
near Macon, and three guys came down from Gadsden. One female
self-identified head-hunter also showed.  I knew it was gonna be light when
there were only two folks at the pre-LUGFest gathering the night before.
Apparently there was some question on whether the event was actually gonna
take place, and that scared a lot of folks off. Scuttlebutt was that they'd
like to do some kind of annual event in Birmingham to replace the Atlanta
Linux Showcase.

The presentations started with a couple of short bits on yslow (
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/ ), a pretty interesting firebug plug-in
which grades the efficiency of a site and offers suggestions on how to make
it faster, another on using the GIMP to highlight parts of interest on a
screen shot (select the interesting parts, invert the selection(s), and then
shade down the rest of the screen).

The formal presentations included a pretty ok thorough one on ssh-agent, and
another on using the svn-server program to run subversion in an environment
which lacks httpd 2.0 or better. We then broke for lunch at Nicks, which
featured big servings of Mediterranean food on a nice outdoor patio. In the
afternoon, we did a session on vim(1), yours truly's rapid 30-minute bash
talk, and a pretty good ok talk on iptables.   We finished with a
presentation on  RAID, followed by some general hangin' out and viewing of
web videos.  I was on the road back to Atlanta around 17:30.

All in all it was, well, an Adventure.  I've not seen Linux guys who dip
tobacco before -- this conference had two.  Live 'n' learn. I did pick up a
couple of handy vim(1) tricks, and I even got to contribute one (s/foo/bar/
== s!foo!bar! )

-- CHS
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