Re: A New Focus for AKLUG

On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Fielder George Dowding wrote:

<snip>

> One of the areas that my education is lacking and AKLUG has not been
> helpful, is in the area of software development. I have made a couple of
> abortive attempts to participate in the development or maintenance of
> Debian packages, and I started a project on sourceforge which quickly
> bogged down as my day to day focus was forced to concentrate on draining
> the swamp despite the presence of alligators, water moccasins, and other
> entangling flora and fauna.
>
> So, I would like to know what projects others may be supporting and at
> what level. Is there anyone else out there who has a software project
> that is stillborn? I remember the young fellow developing software for
> Amateur Radio use of WiFi hardware. I remember trying to download
> something, but then the alligators took my attention. Can we consider
> this sort of effort one of the activities supported by AKLUG?
>
> This inquiring mind wants to know. =:)}}}

I have to point out that there's several of us who specifically talked about
AKLUG providing a track for exactly this, turning those members who are
willing into hackers. The gist of what I got out of that whole flamefest is
that "AKLUG is primarily a group of users who just want to run applications,
so you hacker types should go away". <pop!> I think a fuse just blew.

George: there's many of us whole sling code on a daily basis. Many of our
projects will be of no interest to you, and that's after you've narrowed
down the choices to languages you're willing to learn, but I can't think of
any of us who wouldn't welcome some participation.

If AKLUG in general has any interest in becoming less hostile to the hacking
element I'd be happy to share what little I know. Even the small things
have a lot of value outside of programming, like gnu make. I use that not
only for my projects (my entire distribution can be built from scratch
from a handful of make commands) but for other things like generating PDFs
from tetex files, etc.

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Thu Sep 27 15:15:32 2007