March 13 2017: Farewell to Stephane Meet

Only Stéphane had announced something to share; so

John W asked about freezing rows and columns in LibreOffice Calc. This has changed recently but involves placing the cursor in the highest cell on the left hand side which you do not want to freeze and then selecting Windows->Freeze in older versions and View->Freeze cells in the newer versions.

John H commented that he remembered having this feature in Supercalc in the 1980s and, in response to a question about Excel, said that, as with Gnumeric today, Supercalc was aimed more at scientific and engineering work than business. It also had stunning vector graphics charts, originally available as a separate program with the CP/M version and then incorporated into the DOS version.

John had encountered a problem accessing Windows on his laptop after he had installed a Debian mini-iso on a flash drive. After various attempts to edit Grub, including using the Super Grub Disk program, System rescue revealed that the Windows partition tables had been trashed, presumably during the mini-iso installation.

Stéphane’s big news was that, after being sacked following Brexit and trying to make his way as a freelance consultant with some success but not with sufficient income to prevent his reserves draining away, he had begun to apply for a variety of Java related jobs, in one instance not succeeding because he was overqualified, and then heard that he had a new landlord who was terminating all contracts. He had been almost at the end of applying for a job which involved a variety of online tests which he had managed to complete when he got the offer of a consultant post back in Paris, in effect with his old employer. So he will be returning to Paris after ten years in the UK.

For his final contribution, he demonstrated using screen to write and run a small program.

Au revoir, Stéphane; nous vous envoyons nos meilleures pensées.

Past Meetings