Date: Tue, 7 Dec 2004 20:35:59 -0500 (EST)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Cc: leeandalexis at hotmail.com
Subject: [WSFA] Minutes; Philcon
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

The minutes of the latest meeting are available online at
http://www.wsfa.org/minutes.htm

Please inform me if there are any errors or omissions.  Thanks.

I created a CDROM containing the entire WSFA website and (with Mike
Nelson's permission) also the entire SMOFCON 22 website, and mailed it
to Elspeth.  (I got it to the post office with ten minutes to spare.)
Elspeth, you should get it tomorrow, Thursday at the latest.  If you
don't get it by Thursday, tell me, and I'll create another and
hand-deliver it to Lee.

Lee, thank you for volunteering to sit behind the WSFA/Capclave table
at Philcon.  My understanding is that the CDROM will be loaded on
your laptop computer which will be at that table for fans to view our
website.  No Internet connection is necessary.

Elspeth also has 20 December WSFA Journals and 5 November WSFA
Journals for that table.  Also, I inadvertently left several November
WSFA Journals at your house after November's First Friday.  Please
bring them to Philcon, too.  Thanks.

There were problems with the CDROM I created before SMOFcon.  I had
never created one meant for a Windows machine before.  I got it almost
right, but despite Seth Breidbart's assistance at SMOFcon, not quite
right enough -- long filenames were truncated.  Most of them could
have been un-truncated by hand, given enough time, but some of them
overwrote other files whose names began the same.  It was a mess.

Besides, doing it again let me put the minutes of the latest meeting
on it, and let me correct the fact that the disposable email address
on the previous CDROM was already obsolete by SMOFcon, let alone
Philcon.  Instead, I put a special disposable address on the CDROM
that has never appeared anywhere else, and which will never expire
unless it starts getting spammed.

It should be possible to point any browser to index.htm on the CDROM.
Or, if there are 370 free megabytes, the contents of the CDROM could
be copied to disk, which should allow faster access.  I hope someone
at Philcon volunteers to help Lee with this if necessary, and to
spell her so she doesn't have to spend the whole con behind the
WSFA/Capclave table.

I won't be at Philcon.  I was only at last year's Philcon because a
friend let me stay at his place.  That friend has since moved away
from Philadelphia.

The CDROM doubles as a good backup.  After Philcon, perhaps it could
be given to Adrienne, since she's recently been concerned about what
happens if various WSFA members are run over by trucks.  While the
contents of our website are unlikely to be wiped out by anything short
of a simultaneous nuclear strike on DC, NYC, and Minneapolis, it might
be difficult for others to access all the files if I were run over by
a truck.  Sam does have the password to the WSFA website, however,
though he'd probably need help from someone familiar with Unix.

For those technically oriented WSFAns who are curious, the commands I
used to make the old CDROM were:

  mkisofs -L -R -o /usr/kfl/new/cdimage.raw /kfl/wsfa
  vnconfig -v /dev/vnd0 /usr/kfl/new/cdimage.raw 512/864652/1/1
  mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/vnd0c /mnt
  cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=15,0,0 /usr/kfl/new/cdimage.raw

The commands I used to make the new CDROM were:

  mkisofs -l -R -o /usr/kfl/new/cdimage.raw /kfl/wsfa
  vnconfig -v /dev/vnd0 /usr/kfl/new/cdimage.raw 512/733180/1/1
  mount -r -t cd9660 /dev/vnd0c /mnt
  cdrecord -v speed=4 dev=15,0,0 /usr/kfl/new/cdimage.raw

I look forward to hearing how Philcon went at Third Friday.