Re: SFPUG Meetings

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, elein wrote:
> Our attendence at our meetings leaves something to be desired. David
> Fetter hospitably offered lovely, and obscure CasaDonde, but only Dan
> and I showed up.
>
> Are we having an east bay/SF divide? Are people *interested* in
> meetings? What would you like to get out of face to face meetings?
> What would you like to contribute to meetings?

Greetings all-

I'm sorry to hear that turnout was poor. Yes, I'm interested in the
meetings. The only reason I didn't show is that the meeting wasn't easily
BARTable. My primary preference is for the meetings to be held near BART,
and secondary preference is for downtown SF. I'm hoping that someone
works for a benevolent employer who can provide space. Barring that, I'll
look into Glen Park Rec Center space or perhaps even my house (depending
on numbers).

As for what I'd like to get out of sfpug:
- exposure to (and sharing of) tips & tricks
- discussion of neat applications
- practical administration tasks
- technical assistance
- learning about related tools (Josh... how 'bout that GUI discussion?)

Here's what I can contribute (to a meeting that's BARTable):
- schema for protein sequence annotations
incl. some advanced stuff like table inheritance, triggers, server-side
C functions
- writing server side functions in C, perl (I'm a beginner, but I've done
it and can show examples)
- hairy queries, some with solutions and others I'd like help with
- current problems for discussion (like unexpectedly slow joins through
views)

And topics I'd like to see:
- techniques for query optimization
- GUIs, especially ones which reverse engineer to E/R diagrams
- PHP + pg
- using JDBC (from the beginning... I'm a java idiot)

Finally, perhaps we should be willing to occasionally have roundtable
discussions on a theme (e.g., "bring your hairiest query") rather than
presenter-listener format.

-Reece

--
Reece Hart, Ph.D. rkh(at)gene(dot)com, http://www.gene.com/
Genentech, Inc. 650/225-6133 (voice), -5389 (fax)
Bioinformatics Department
1 DNA Way, MS-93 http://www.in-machina.com/~reece/
South San Francisco, CA 94080-4990 reece(at)in-machina(dot)com, GPG: 0x25EC91A0