Tag Archives: GNHLUG

ManchLUG, 25-Jan-2011, Marc Nozell and Sheeva Plug, Kenta Koga with Boxee and Kinect

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Seventeen people attended last night’s meeting, held at Wings Your Way on Elm Street in Manchester. A good time was had by all. There was no dearth of conversation, whether on-topic or dissing Perl.
Marc Nozell brought a Sheeva Plug to show us the tiny computer. Marc has owned it for a couple of years and uses it as his in-house file sharing server. The Sheeva came with an older Ubuntu installed, he has used a couple of different Debian installations. It’s an ARM-based processor, has 512 Kb Flash and 512 Kb RAM. It has an MMC slot that supports Compact Flash, and that’s typically where Marc keeps his OS. The box also has USB and Ethernet connections, so it can host external drives via a powered USB hub and have a network presence. Marc passed it around and there were a fair number of questions on installation and configuration and file system choices.
Kenta brought his Mac to show Boxee, an application based on XBMC (originally, XBox Media Center, but its evolved to be more hardware-generic). Kenta talked and demonstrated how Boxee could show his social media feeds, NetFlix, Hulu, YouTube and more. It’s a pretty slick application for the next generation of media centers. We talked about some of the hardware available, proprietary and not, and the evolution of the media space.
Kenta also brought a Microsoft Kinect and showed how he had hacked it to work on his Mac. We talked about some of the new immersive and interactive technologies out there.
Thanks to Kenta (and Chip Marshall) for organizing and announcing the meeting, to Wings Your Way for the fine facilities, and to Marc for his presentation, and to all for attending and participating!

Notes from NH Ruby/Rails, 17-Jan-2011: Brian Turnbull, OmniAuth, Nick Plante, Mirah

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Seven members attended the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails group meeting held on 17-January-2011 at the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center (NH-ICC). We had two presentations: Brian Turnbull talked about OmniAuth and Nick Plante showed a project he’s doing with Mirah on the Android platform.
Brian Turnbull is an engineer working for ARRIS and injects Ruby into his build tools whenever he gets the chance. A recent project required authentication against multiple providers and he did some research on OmniAuth. Brian presented a slideshow explaining the basic concepts of authentication and how they’re implemented in OmniAuth. Apparently, OmniAuth was the authentication method of choice during the most recent RailsRumble, used by most of the contestants. Brian outlined the process needed for working with an existing provider and demonstrated it with clear and simple code. He followed that up by showing how to build your own custom provider and authentication strategy. Brian’s sample code can be found on his github account.
Nick Plante has been working on an Android rich client app as part of a web-based social application that’s soon to launch. Nick told us that working on Java for Android has reinforced his love of Ruby. There’s not yet a good port of Ruby to the Android platform, but he has been impressed with the Mirah language, a hybrid solution that compiles to bytecode and runs natively on the JVM. He has developed a Ruby generator called protoform to construct the skeletons of a Mirah app. He gave us a tour of the components and built a simple “Hello, World” app, deployed and ran it on his Android VM.
Thanks to Brian for organizing the meeting and for the OmniAuth presentation, to Nick for talking about his Mirah project and to the NH-ICC for providing the fine facilities.

CentraLUG, 6-Dec-2010, David Berube, MySQL Operations

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The December meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group will be held as usual in Room 146 of the NHTI Library – details and directions can be found at http://www.centralug.org – and will feature David Berube presenting “Real World Experience with Large MySQL Deployments”

David recently attend the Percona Operations Day training covering real world howto’s on big MySQL deployments and will share what he’s learned.

About David: David is a principal at Berube Consulting. David Berube is a software developer, consultant, speaker, and writer. He is constantly researching, perfecting, and practicing his trade. He is a prolific writer, appearing in places such as Dr Dobbs Journal, Linux Magazine, IBM DeveloperWorks, PHP International Magazine, and many others. He speaks frequently, notably including his seminar series, “Making Money Using Open Source Software”. He authored the books “Practical Rails Gems” and “Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails”, and co-authored the book “Practical Rails Plugins.” He is also a leader in the Open Source community. He was involved with the AmphetaDesk project, developing much of its Win32 GUI code.

Notes from the Python Special Interest Group, 18-Nov-2010

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Four members attended the November meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held a week early due to the Thanksgiving holiday (anticipate a similar schedule for December). The Amoskeag Business Incubator was kind enough to allow us to use their smaller meeting room, which worked out perfectly for the smaller crowd.

It was an open Q&A evening, and boy, did we have Qs and As! Topics covered included:

  • Getting scanners working on Ubuntu 10.10
  • sharing printers in Ubuntu
  • Why DSL isn’t always at its rated speed
  • what a CO and a DSLAM is
  • Win7 Starter Edition blue-screening on an Asus Aspire One
  • the New Microsoft/Verizon KinONEm KinTWOm
  • the disaster that was the Microsoft-Danger hiptop acquisition
  • Microsoft’s announcement of Java as a “first class citizen” of their Azure cloud
  • Microsoft’s “Embrace, Enhance, Extend, Extinguish” history
  • Maybe they’ll call it IronJava? And, hey, where did IronPython go?
  • Oracle and Java and licensing and FUD
  • Oracle and MySQL and licensing and FUD
  • A public library looking for a Linux-based solution to reserving PC use
  • A great suggestion to consider Gnome Nanny
  • generating PDF Forms out of a LAMP app using pdftk
  • OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice
  • Generating PDF fill-in forums out of OpenOffice.org, courtesy of Solveig Haugland
  • the difference between “business class” and “consumer grade” machines
  • Dell and HP, Linux support, HPLIP Open Source project
  • printing to PDF in Ubuntu only worked when App Armor was removed
  • the ease of hooking up a projector to Fedora 14 with the new video subsystem and Noveau drivers
  • installing NetworkManager on Debian Lenny (there’s python in there!)
  • a quick tour of NetworkManager on Fedora 14
  • a demo of using Elementree to parse and modify an XML file used to manage installs of Atlassian Jira
  • using BeautifulSoup to parse an HTML file and generate an INI file
  • the Venus software for generating an RSS aggregator page
  • hacking WSDLs for SOAP using suds

Those were the Qs. You needed to be there for the As. And the awesome gingerbread cookies and frosted cake.

Thanks to Janet for the desserts, to Bill for organizing the meeting, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for the facilities, and to all who attended and participated. Look for the December meeting announcement with the date tentatively planned for the 16th.