[volunteers] February 1st SVLUG meeting

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Kevin Dankwardt (kevin.dankwardt at gmail.com):

> Yes, that talk is the plan as I have scheduled it.
> 
> https://www.meetup.com/SVLUG-Silicon-Valley-Linux-Users-Group/events/235962243/

I'm narrating this as doing the job, to make the point yet again about
how to do it.

ssh into www.svlug.org.  
cd to 'www', which is a symlink from each user's homedir, pointing to
the Lightthpd document root, /var/www/svlug-main .

Open in your favourite editor (vim for me) 'events.html', which is the
www.svlug.org front page's right-side 'Events' column and is supposed to
always show in abbreviated form the next two meeting dates.  It still
shows Jan. 4th and Feb. 1st, because nobody'd gotten to the needed
maintenance, yet.  (This is one reason to always show _two_ meetings; to
make the page somewhat forgiving of deferred maintenance.)

I first bulk-moved the lines for January down below those for February, 
then edited them into a TBA entry for...

:r! cal March 2017

     March 2017     
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31   
                    
...Wednesday, March 1st, 2017.

Go up a few lines to the February entry.  Edit 'TBA' to reflect the
particulars of the Dan Cauchy talk Kevin put on Meetup.

Poke around
https://www.meetup.com/SVLUG-Silicon-Valley-Linux-Users-Group/ to see if
Kevin happens to have put anything tentative for March.  Nope.  (That is 
not a complaint, Kevin!  ;->  )  Check archives of the Volunteers
mailing list (navigate from listinfo page
http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/volunteers or wherever works best
for you) to refresh my recollection about whether Kevin had a tentative
for March.  Nope.  You said James Briggs might be available mid-February
(Supporting Java for Linux Sysadmins, Advanced HAProxy, or Managing
Microservices with Puppet on Linux), but that seemed to be still to be
arranged.  OK, so we have the front page right, and it's time to attend
to the meetings pages.

The meetings are on meetings.php (upcoming) and prevmeet.php (previous), 
both of which are generated from a single template file, meetings.txt .
The PHP automatically moved January's meeting from meetings.php to
prevmeet.php at the end of the day on the 1st.

Anyhow, now we edit meetings.txt .

Lisa Corsetti designed this template file, and put a 40-line block of
comment lines right at the top, as an example.  You can create a date's
set of lines by block-copying the comments, uncommenting them, and 
customising.  _Or_ you can copy a past-meeting's set of lines, 
which might be less work.

Either way, it's important to understand how PHP parses the template to 
create the two pages.  All PHP does is look for flush-left line DATE:
YYYY-MM-DD .  That delimits the beginning of a meeting's details, _and_
(the important bit) YYYY-MM-DD is the date through which it's to be
included on meetings.php .  After that day, PHP includes it in
prevmeet.php instead.

So, for example, the January 4, 2017 meeting's bloc had his at the top:

DATE: 2017-01-04

That says to PHP 'Retain the bloc of lines that follow in meetings.php
until the last second of January 4th, 2017, and then move it to
prevmeet.php from that moment onward.'

People maintaining meetings.txt have in the past gotten this wrong
because they had no idea what the DATE: line is _for_.  I remember that
a member of the Web Team was perplexed about why his meeting bloc 
vanished from meetings.php.  It was because he'd copied a prior month's 
bloc to create the newer one, and ignored the DATE: line.

(I've just prepended three additional comment lines at the top of the 
template to exlain what DATE: does.)

Tip:  In vim, I set 'noai' (no autoindent) and 'tw=500' (text width =
500 character-long lines) before bulk-copying lines so that vim doesn't 
do troublesome things line line-wrapping or fooling with indentation.

In this case, I bulk-copied the January 1st bloc to create the February
one, because it's the lazy way.

On the bloc just created, I immediately edit DATE: 2017-01-04 to DATE:
2017-02-01, so that I don't forget.

Within the bloc, there is a second date specification, and this
(finally) is what's shown for the meeting description.  Change 'January 4' 
to 'February 1'.  _Also_ change the 'th' left over from 'January 4th'
to 'st', because we look really silly saying 'February 1th'.

Around the beginning of the year, it's also important to not
accidentally copy a bloc from the prior year and forget to edit (say)
2016 to 2017.  Fortunately, we're already past this pitfall for the
year.

Edit 'Sanket Agarwal,' (from January) to 'Dan Cauchy,'.

Edit 'Software Engineer, Android Automotive, Google, Inc.' (Sanket's
title) to 'General Manager of Automotive, Linux Foundation'.

Edit topic 'Car Infotainment Systems and Architectures' (from Jan) to
'The Future of Open Source Automotive Software'.  (We use uppers and
lowers for topic titles.)

Then the long-description text and the About the Speaker text.
I always do some light editing, in part because this text is usually 
from software engineers, and let's face it, they're not wordsmiths.
Software engineers tend to omit needed commas, omit needed other
things, skip paragraph breaks necessary to have mercy on readers' 
eyeballs, etc.

Or, worse, sometimes the text is from bureaucrats, with self-important
pointless capital letters, buzzword bingo, etc.  In this case, I suspect
participation from both coders and bureaucrats, the latter evident 
from PR-speak and ludicrously redundant phrases like 'what lies ahead
in the future' (from which I sliced off the back half).

In all, I did some subtle writing, shortening, and tightening up of
prose.  (Feel welcome to steal that back if you want, Kevin)  I also 
found and added URLs for several things.

Save work in editor and (impotant!) don't exit yet.  Reload meetings.php
in Web browser.  Make sure page is OK.  This is now done.

Exit editor.

$ svn status

The two files edited need checking in.  Also, some (doubtless me) hadn't 
checked in changes to svlug-news.txt, another PHP template file
producing SVLUG News in two places.  Someone (possibly me) pointlessly
checked in meetings.php, shown as 'M' = modified.  This is pointless
because it's generated from meetings.txt, so we wont' update now.

$ svn ci -m 'Catch up with Feb 2017 plus unlogged changes to
svlug-news.txt' events.html meetings.txt svlug-news.txt
Sending        events.html
Sending        meetings.txt
Sending        svlug-news.txt
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision 366.
$

'svn status' now shows the mistaken meetings.php 'M', and a bunch of
untracked files (shown with '?') in the tree.  Most are deliberately
untracked:  We don't check speaker presentation files or generated pages
into version control.  I see three exceptions, stuff I recently created
but haven't yet added to svn:

?       directions/cavium.php
?       images/maps/cavium.png
?       images/maps/cavium-cafeteria.png

Checking image files into version control is dubious:  After all, you
aren't going to diff them.  But we do it anyway so there's a record.

$ svn add directions/cavium.php images/maps/cavium.png
images/maps/cavium-cafeteria.png
A         directions/cavium.php
A  (bin)  images/maps/cavium.png
A  (bin)  images/maps/cavium-cafeteria.png
$ svn ci -m 'Venue starting 2017' directions/cavium.php images/maps/cavium.png images/maps/cavium-cafeteria.png
Adding         directions/cavium.php
Adding  (bin)  images/maps/cavium-cafeteria.png
Adding  (bin)  images/maps/cavium.png
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision 367.
$