SPUG: Meeting Announcement -- Magicpoint-EZ & SPF - 21 September 2004

Andrew Sweger andrew at sweger.net
Wed Sep 8 11:12:38 CDT 2004


             September Seattle Perl Users Group (SPUG) Meeting
             =================================================
  
       Title: Magicpoint-EZ - A Preprocessor for Magicpoint Presentations
     Speaker: Dr. Tim Maher

          and

       Title: SPF - Sender Policy Framework
     Speaker: Jonathan Gardner

Meeting Date: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 
Meeting Time: 7:00 - 9:00 p.m. (networking 6:30 - 7:00)
    Location: Geospiza
              3411 Thorndyke Avenue West (See directions below)
        Cost: Admission is free and open to the general public
        Info: http://seattleperl.org/

             ===========================================

SPUG welcomes back the man who started SPUG, Dr. Tim Maher, to show us
more of the labor saving power that can be unleashed with Perl. Also learn
how intense the spam game is about to get with Jonathan Gardner's
presentation. See details below. We are once again meeting at Geospiza.
Expect to see old friends, enemies, and complete strangers all speaking
some form of Perl (at every level). Expect to be exposed to 2.4GHz
frequency hopping non-ionizing non-licensed radiation (i.e., 802.11b/g
WiFi). Packet transit to what's left of the Internet provided gratis
(i.e., free as in the beer) by our hosts at Geospiza. If you want to
exchange PGP/GnuPG signatures, please contact me with your public key
directly (now!) and I'll bring fingerprint checklists for participants.

Here's what's in store for you at our next meeting:


Magicpoint-EZ - A Preprocessor for Magicpoint Presentations
===========================================================

About Dr. Tim Maher:
--------------------

Founder, CEO, and lead trainer of Consultix.

Tim has over 27 years of experience with the Unix operating system and its
associated utilities and languages, as both a system administrator and
programmer.

Before founding Consultix in 1986, he developed and taught original
courses as a professor of Computer Science at a major American university
(Univ. of Utah), he developed software as a Sr. Systems Analyst for the
university that did more than any other to develop UNIX into what it is
today (U. C. Berkeley), and he developed and taught UNIX classes for the
company that invented it (AT&T).

About the Presentation
----------------------

Magicpoint is a popular open source presentation package with a strange
mix of wonderfully advanced and unbearably primitive features. As examples
of the latter,there's no practical way to ask for a particular word to be
italicized, or for the contents of a specified file to be inserted at an
arbitrary position, or even for page numbers to be shown atop each page.
Even worse, there's no support for tables or user-defined styles.

Don't get me wrong; I'm very fond of Magicpoint. But if there was ever an
application in desperate need of a preprocessor to amplify its ergonomics,
this is the "mother of all such applications".

Magicpoint-EZ to the rescue! It converts text files written in an enhanced
Magicpoint dialect into standard Magicpoint format,allowing Magicpoint to
be used to view sophisticated presentations -- in spite of its primitive
support for their construction. As an added bonus, Magicpoint-EZ also
makes the development of presentations more efficient, because the
developer typically has to type only 40% of the characters that ultimately
appear in the resulting Magicpoint file.

Magicpoint-EZ is over one year old, and has been used to create hundreds
of impressive slides that have been shown at YAPC, TPC,and Perl mongers
meetings -- where attendees have found it hard to believe they were
viewing a Magicpoint presentation! This talk will demonstrate the features
of Magicpoint-EZ, and describe the pure-Perl code that implements it.
Along the way, attendees will learn generally applicable Perl techniques
for automating the conversion of one body of text into another. Naturally,
the presentation will be developed using Magicpoint-EZ itself, and
presented using the standard Magicpoint program.


SPF - Sender Policy Framework
=============================

About Jonathan Gardner:

Jonathan Gardner graduated with a BS in Physics from the University of
Washington. He has been a perl developer since 2000. He's worked at
CarDomain Networks, Classmates.com, and Smooth Corporation. Now he is a
mass mail systems developer at Amazon.com, where he has championed SPF. He
also writes a lot of Python code, and actively develops on the PostgreSQL
project. His most recent interests include forming an organization to
actively market open source technologies in the puget sound area.

About the Presentation
----------------------

"SPF fights email address forgery and makes it easier to identify spams,
worms, and viruses. Domain owners identify sending mail servers in DNS.
SMTP receivers verify the envelope sender address against this
information, and can distinguish legitimate mail from spam before any
message data is transmitted." (SPF homepage at http://spf.pobox.com/ )

Jonathan Gardner will discuss the history of SPF, the current status of
SPF and competing protocols like Domain Keys and Sender ID, as well as the
future of SPF. He'll also show how SPF will be one of the steps needed to
solve spam once and for all. He'll also show what steps your organization,
large or small, need to take to deploy SPF.

   ================================================================

Directions to Geospiza:
-----------------------
    Geospiza
    3411 Thorndyke Ave. W
    Seattle, WA 98119


By carpool: (send requests to spug-list at pm.org)
-----------
    Definitely a more fun way to spend the driving time.


By Bus: (http://transit.metrokc.gov/)
-------
    The 15 & 18 stop at West Dravus Street on 15th Avenue
    The 44, 46 get to Ballard at Market St & 15th Ave
      (1/2 mile walk, xfer to 15 or 18 at Walgreen's, request a pick-up)
    The 75 gets to Ballard 4 blocks from Walgreens (see 44, 46)
    The 17 stops south of the Ballard Bridge


Coming from I-5:
----------------
1 - EXIT onto 50th Street toward Seattle Pacific University 
    (Larry & Gloria Wall's Alma Mater)

2 - TURN SLIGHT LEFT at light at bottom of hill onto Green Lake Way
    North (following signs toward Fisherman's Terminal)

3 - TURN SLIGHT RIGHT (following traffic flow) onto N 46th St
    (Following signs to Ballard)

4 - FOLLOW TRAFFIC WINDING down the hill into Ballard 
    TO JOIN NW 55th Street, which is called Market Steet at this point

5 - TURN LEFT onto 15th Ave NW
    (a major intersection - Safeway, Walgreens, Denny's)

6 - CROSS the Ballard Bridge

7 - RIGHT EXIT onto West Dravus Street (West Dravus Street is the
    major overpass over 15th Ave West that leads into Magnolia. It's
    south of the Ballard Bridge, north of the Interbay Golf Center.)

8 - RIGHT TURN onto West Dravus Street, westbound

9 - STRAIGHT for 2 blocks, passing QFC on right

10 - TURN RIGHT onto 17th Ave West (turns into Thorndyke Ave West)

11 - STRAIGHT for 1.25 blocks

12 - Geospiza is on your left: 3411 Thorndyke Avenue West


Coming from Downtown:
=====================

1 - Get onto Elliot Avenue West, heading north

2 - SLIGHT RIGHT onto 15th Avenue West

3 - RIGHT EXIT onto West Dravus Street

4 - TURN LEFT onto West Dravus Street, westbound

5 - You're now within 1/2 mile. See directions above.

6 - STRAIGHT for 2 blocks, passing QFC on right

7 - TURN RIGHT onto 17th Ave West (turns into Thorndyke Ave West)

8 - STRAIGHT for 1.25 blocks

9 - Geospiza is on your left: 3411 Thorndyke Avenue West

================================================================

Mapquest:  http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&countryid=250&addtohistory=&searchtab=address&searchtype=address&address=3411+Thorndyke+Ave.+W&city=Seattle&state=wa&zipcode=&search=++Search++

Yahoo! Maps: http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?ed=XKC6Qup_0ToFdKje6jM_UZzJhylBjoFqlp8tBW5T&csz=seattle%2C+wa&country=us&new=1&name=&qty=



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