[vox-tech] Talks, mentoring, etc...

[vox-tech@lists.lugod.org]

begin Stephen M. Helms <Mytho_X@pacbell.net>
> Maybe we could even have a group mentoring project?

  Sounds good.  What format were you thinking of?

  As Pete said it's always a problem finding people who
who have time and interest in doing the organization or prep work.  
Finding bodies to come to things is easy.  If no one from lugod wants 
to show there is always the CS Club... ;)

  I've been thinking about trying to put together a hacking party,
or some sort of local hacking group.  Basically people meet and 
work on some coding/debugging project for a few hours...  but I don't
think I'd be able to interest enough skilled people to put in effort 
in organizing.  Some of the formats I was thinking about would support 
little mentor sessions before and during.


On Friday 12 April 2002 10:29 am, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> i think this was the point of the 10-20 minute talk thing i wanted to do
> at lugod meetings.  we had a few of them.

  I agree the mini-talks are good... easy to find something to talk about
for 10 minutes, easy to prepare, doesn't bore people to death if they are
not interested but it only lasts a short while.

  A few weeks back I asked Bill to give a short 10 minute demo of the mmap 
interprocess communication and process state freeze/thaw stuff I did at 
your place a few weeks back.  A few people may be very interested in
using it, some may find it interesting to hear about, the others the
material would go way over or wouldn't care (not applicable to them).  

  Since seti@Home was being presented, Bill suggested doing it at the 
next meeting instead (I'm glad I didn't cut into the Seti@Home time,
very interesting talk).
  The last meeting being April 15th was bad, scheduling that day is always 
complex (when I owe I wait till the last day to mail, and sometimes 
things get complex, the last two years I've found myself walking past 
hundred of stopped cars in West Sac a few minutes before midnight :).

  So I'm very glad I didn't try to demo last meeting too, but would like 
to give a quick demo of the mmap stuff... maybe at the next meeting.


Other mini-talks subjects I'd be interested in covering that come
to mind right now are:
  - mmap IPC, realtime monitoring, and freeze/thaw of running program.
  - Debian packaging system short tricks (dpkg -L/-S, ac search/show, 
    ag -yu/update/upgrade, zgrep Contents, debsums)
  - netselect (and netselect-apt).
  - Debian reportbug
  - how to locally mirror Debian...
  - Fun With Poll (how to have a single process serve thousands).


> i can give a 10 minute talk on marks and registers in vi which would be
> a nice complement to verbus's presentation.  i can also give a 10 minute
> talk on using strace, although mike would be more suited for this.

  I thought I gave a talk to lugod about strace already, a good while 
back.  If there is still interest I've certainly done a few more bizarre 
things with it since then, which I can only explain.  (Can not demonstrate 
because I don't have access to the code to do a demonstration anymore and 
it would take motivation to recreate something that complex right now).  

the cream of the pile:
  - real-time generation of transaction server logs from strace output.
  - millisecond timing of message flows in Oracle database servers.
(those might fit in 10 mins, no more than 15).

  or I could just cover strace's main useful purposes... figure out
what a program is doing.


On Sat, Apr 13, 2002 at 12:01:22PM -0700, Rusty Minden wrote:
> I have an interest in mentoring both to mentor and be mentored.
> 
> My questions would be:
> 1	Who is interested.
> 2	When would you like to meet.
> 3	[...] interest paths
> 4	What are the limits. 
> 5	[...] you should be expected to mentor another. 

1 - interested in both.  
2 - some weekend day, maybe as much as twice a month.  
3 - many.  really want an overview of packages that fit a category 
    (strengths and weaknesses) rather than in-depth material
    on one option.  This is because it's normally not hard finding docs
    and learning a particular app once you know it does what you want and 
    it's best in class (so you don't waste time).
4 - What I would recommend is any questions are free game at the talk
    or during discussion after the talk.  Then after the session breaks
    up only questions via public mailing lists (unless you are being paid
    or want to).
5 - I agree the objective is good... continued flow of knowledge, but
    it's hard to arrange.  Many people who want to learn things don't know
    something well enough to be of interest to others... and I think most
    people don't learn something well enough to be able to teach others
    until they use it for a while.