[CLUE-Admin] Newsletter, rough draft

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

Quick rough draft of the newsletter, ignore the weird linebreaks... an
html version is here:

http://www.dissociatedpress.net/clue/Clue.Newsletter.Jan.html

Comments, suggestions, other? 

Greetings Cluebies!

This is the first newsletter of 2003, and the first CLUE newsletter in a
while.
I'm taking over editing the newsletter, and I'll be trying to see that
we
actually have one a month. This month, Jed Baer was kind enough to take
notes
at the DTC meeting so I'd have something to report. Barring accidents,
I'll be
at the DTC meetings each month from now on -- but if someone would like
to
submit a summary of the CLUE North meetings, that'd be great.

This newsletter will be a bit on the shortish side while I warm up. If
anyone
has any suggestions for what they'd like to see in the CLUE newsletter,
please
feel free to drop me a note at jzb at dissociatedpress.net. Thanks, and
have a
great January. See you at the next CLUE meeting!

---------------
Upcoming Meetings
---------------

The next DTC meeting is scheduled for February 11. See
http://clue.denver.co.us
/ for more info.

The next CLUE North meeting is scheduled for February 27. See http://
clue.denver.co.us/north/ for more info.

---------------
DTC Meeting Summary
---------------

These are edited down a bit from Jed's notes. Let me know just how much
detail
that you'd like to see from each meeting.

---------------
Meeting Sponsors
---------------

Hall-Kinion
Techangle
SoftPro Books
O'Reilly Books

---------------
KISS Session
---------------

Noting that the KISS session actually precedes the meeting, and
explaining that
the KISS session is a short simple presentation, and further noting that
he
would be the speaker, Jeff proceeded to his presentation on configuring
KMail.

Jeff's presentation was a "live" demonstration. Openning with the usual
"RTFM"
admonition, Jeff ran the KMail program, demonstrating the basic options,
such
as setting the background color and the font for various display
elements. He
then showed how to set up Kmail to use multiple e-mail accounts,
identies, and
mail folders. He also demonstrated defining mail filters to deliver
incoming
mail into specific folders. Discussion included questions about KDE in
general,
address books, and HTML-formatted mail.

---------------
Announcements
---------------

If you have an announcement, feel free to send me a note at 
jzb at dissociatedpress.net. We'll report the announcements given at the
CLUE
meetings every month, but if you can't make it to the meeting or
inspiration
strikes after the meeting feel free to drop me a note with your
announcement.

Call for CLUE presentations

Linux Fun-damentals is moving from their current location (The Parsec
Group)
after this month's meeting. (Dave Wilson) Dave re-iterated that
Linux-Fun meets
on the 1st and 3rd Wednesday each month.

CLUE-North topic this month will be a "Show & Tell" by the Hacking
Society.

Kevin announced that his employer had allowed him to donate 3 HP
Laserjet III
printers for door prizes.

Bob announced the formation of new job prospect club in Aurora.

Jeff Barnhart is the new CLUE Events Coordinator.

The 1st quarter Installfest is being planned for February.

---------------
Main Session
---------------

Following the announcements and a short break, Jeff introduced the main
speaker, Scott Marlowe. Scott's topic was an overview of PostgreSQL new
features.

Scott's engaging and enthusiastic presentation gave rise to lively
discussion
throughout. He started with a brief statement of the origins of
PostgreSQL at
UC Berkeley, where it has a common ancestor with the now commercial
database
product Ingres. PostgreSQL is still maintained at UCB. Scott contrasted
PgSQL
with other databases, particularly MySQL, DB2, and Oracle, mentioning
that one
of its strengths are that it's transactional, and that it uses a
"Multi-Version
Concurrency Control" mechanism for allowing read-consistency to co-exist
with
updating. Scott summarized recent improvements in PgSQL, such as:

  * Schema support
  * New "table" data type in stored procedures
  * Prepared queries
  * Dependency tracking
  * Fine-grained privileges
  * Multibyte and locale now on by default
  * Logging is more fine-grained
  * Many bugfixes

Scott concludes that these new features make PgSQL "indestructible", and
that a
PgSQL server will now survive a "pull the plug" event without data
corruption.

Scott followed with a summary of PgSQL tuning techniques, mentioning the
most
important build and startup parameters, and speaking to database design
and
query construction.

---------------
Other News
---------------

This is where you'll find book reports, links to other Linux news and so
forth.
Summaries of discussions on the mailing lists and other goodies.



-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier   -- Freelance Author
Tel: (303) 695-0772       -- Cell: (720) 971-1742
jzb at dissociatedpress.net  -- http://www.dissociatedpress.net/
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"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no 
influence in society." -- Mark Twain