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I've been a reader for a while, but have never attended a meeting. I see the Virginia Beach meeting is still listed in the meetings area. Do you happen to know if this is still going on? Or maybe have the contact info of whoever heads it up? I'm interested in going.

Icarus

If it’s listed, then it still exists, at least until enough people say it doesn’t. We don’t give out any contact info but many meetings have official websites and you might be able to make some connections there. Otherwise, just show up and bring a friend if you can. It’s not unusual for attendance to vary from month to month and, if you find it’s not as big as you expected, you can play an important role in improving that by spreading the word and getting the enthusiasm level up. This is why every meeting belongs to every attendee equally. We all have the power to make it worthwhile.

Dear 2600:

I didn't see any listing at all for West Virginia, so I was wanting to make one for Clarksburg. I haven't ever been to any 2600 meetings, but I would love to go. All are very far away! I would like to see one for Meadowbrook Mall.

Also, you can tell everyone that this place (www.almostheavendesserts.com) has a computer you can use for free and they don't monitor it very much. As far as I can tell, there are no restrictions. I have to type fast because I don't want them to know that I wrote this.

Anyway, I was wanting to see if you can post a wanted meeting for West Virginia or something. If not, then I understand. Plus, I won’t be checking on this account since I have made it here. LOL

jason

And another great meeting enters the gestation period.

Clarifications

Dear 2600:

Just an FYI. Lived in GTMO for six years and the payphones from Naval Base GTMO (27:4) are actually not "pay phones." All local calls in the base are free and all long distance calls from these phones have to be made with a calling card.

DR

From the pictures, they do appear to be payphone-like in nature and these days it’s not at all unusual for such phones to no longer take coins. Other than that, we’d like to know of any specific operational differences along with more detailed pictures.

Dear 2600:

In the article “Bash Bash Bash!” by Douglas Berdeaux (27:4), there are several instances where pairs of apostrophes (') have been replaced in the printing by smart quotes. This makes the shell scripts difficult for a person to read, and impossible for a computer to execute.

The first one is at the bottom of page 6, where the sed command should read: sed -e 's/ /\\/g' -e 's/\-/\\-g'

There are numerous others involving the quoting of arguments to sed. Three more at the top of column 2 of page 7, in the l33t translator. Another one three quarters down that column. Three more smart quote replacements of apostrophes in the script at the bottom of column 1 of page 8.

Adding to the confusion is the author's use of back-tick substitution at the bottom of page 6. The line could be rewritten using $() instead, as: MEDIA$(echo $1 | sed -e 's/ /\\/g' -e 's/\-/\\-g') This is much more readable.

carl

Thanks for the input. We hope you appreciate the humor of your last two sentences to anyone who isn’t a programmer.

Dear 2600:

Many thanks for an interesting magazine.

I do have a couple of minor corrections/alternatives for the "Bash Bash Bash!" article in 27.4.

Douglas Berdeaux has an example on how to use a shell script to make VLC not spawn a new window every time he clicks on a video file in Nautilus. And though it probably works, it’s an example of bad practice. A way better method would be to always run VLC with the "--one-instance" flag and never issue killall.

It’s also a bad practice issue with systematically using the -9 flag for killall, as SIGKILL is the dirty method to end a program. As such, it should only be used as a last resort when getting rid of unwanted processes. So, in case you still want to end the process and launch anew, -15 (SIGTERM) is a better first choice. (It’s also the signal that will be used by kill and killall if no signal