Friends, With an overcast sky threatening overhead, the prospects of the meeting didn't look too good....it certainly didn't go the way it was expected. To start with, Indra turned up at venue before anyone, which is a great landmark in the short (till now ;) history of ILUG-Cal...and then shortly afterwards Mr. J.P Mathew did. By the time Indra left the meeting he was rather in awe of Mr. Mathew. Indra was also confused as how to address him... "Sir" seemed too formal for an LUG meeting, the same goes for "Mr. Mathew". While trying to be on firstname basis seemed slightly audacious, and somehow he managed through the meeting with the fail-safe option "you" *grin* Partha'da...our guardian at the ROCK (aka SXC) was second to arrive. Shortly afterwards the following penguins waddled in...Arup Kanjilal, Rajarshi Guha, Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, Subhodeep Goswami and Ignatius D'Rozario...with this sorry flock of 8 locating themselves at the SXC staffroom, the meetng was soon underway. With the introductions out of the way, the discussion focussed on using Linux for e-commerce solutions....Mr Mathew who is the COO (Chief Operating Officer for the acronym-impaired ;) of Astralsys Software, spoke to us about the elaborate plans his company has on implementing Linux-based e-commerce solutions...it all sounded terribly exciting, particularly to Arup ;-) As expected with Arup around, the discussion degenerated into a debate over the performance issues for client-server applications built around FastCGI and mod_perl vis-a-vis those using Java....Arup argeed that using Java makes it easier to program cleanly, but he expressed his doubts about performance of the JIT compiler...Mr Mathew immediately countered it by saying that the solution in that case throw in a wickedly fast machine with loads of RAM that can do the job. While this was going on in the foreground, another process was silently going on in the background....we were having a cup coffee each -- courtsey Partha'da. However, as Arup and Mr Mathew did most of the discussing/explaining they were rewarded/honoured with an extra cup of coffee :) With e-commerce around our talk touched the issues on credit card authentication, use of public-key encryption, the conservatism of the banks and related stuff like that. Our free-wheeling discussions, led us to ponder upon the pros and cons on PCQuest distribution of Linux vs. Chip's recent forey. PCQ was pronouced to be The Just and The Good. We moved on to topics like proxy servers, IP_masqing and dial-on-demand setups using Linux. As promised the Official Debian 2.1 (Slink) CDs were handed over to Ignatius for burning the copies. Anyone interested to get a copy (at the cost of the media) can send in their request to Indra. The members who had promised to send-in articles for the ILUG-Cal web-site, but haven't done so yet, were duly warned of their horrible end in the hands of the Evil Moderator.....It is hoped that they will take heed and mend their ways ;-) And now the best part...Mr. Mathew has very generously offered us access to his office in Salt Lake where we will soon be holding the first hands-on demo on networking with Linux...hopefully, Indra will soon be posting the details of that meeting. Other exciting plans too are on the anvil. Mr. Mathew also made some suggestions as how ILUG-Cal could start funding itself. To this end he has expressed his willingness to provide some of essential infra-structural support the LUG needs badly. To end this posting, we didn't even touch our proposed agenda, but it is great to have someone like Mr. Mathew with us to work towards our goal...ie taking Linux to more people, enrich ourselves knowledge-wise, if not rupee-wise ;-) VIVA LA LINUX! Cheers, --Indra. Indian Linux User Group -- CALCUTTA Chapter --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mailing List : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web-Site : http://www.ilug-cal.org/ (under construction) Web Page : http://members.tripod.com/ilugcal/ (temporary site) --------------------------------------------------------------------- GNU/Linux -- MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU. -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the body "unsubscribe ilug-cal" and an empty subject line. FAQ: http://www.ilug-cal.org/faq/listfaq.html
