Phil Windley gave a presentation to Brigham Young University's Unix User Group on “Power Laws, Longtails, and Software.” An interesting view of the power of the Internet.
Archive | September, 2006
CentraLUG: 2 October 2006 7 PM: Demos, Q&A, future topics
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of the month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/directions.htm. This month, we'll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on the map at the link above. The main meeting starts at 7 PM and we finish around 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.
At this meeting we'll cover a couple of quick demos, including a tour of the GNHLUG wiki and a demo of the NX remote desktop access tool. We'll review upcoming meetings for GNHLUG and discuss what presentations we'd like to see this fall and winter. Over the summer we had a couple of good meetings and talked about learning a bit about software development on Linux. I'd like to open up the discussion to what these “users” are that we are supposed to be a group of, and what sort of presentations these “users” might like to see. Over the summer, I attended two “Open Mike” meetings, one in Nashua and one in Peterborough, that were very interesting and highly interactive. We'll certainly include some Q&A in this meeting, and perhaps include it as a permanent part of the meeting. MonadLUG has also added a “man page of the month” to their meetings; let's consider this as well.
7:00 Welcome, Announcements
7:15 Questions
7:30 Demos
8:00 Answers
8:30 Discussion: Future meetings
There's lots more information about CentraLUG and its parent organization GNHLUG at http://www.gnhlug.org.
Apple releases Airport patch
Apple's made available the second patch this year to their Airport wireless NICs to prevent stack overflows and arbitrary code execution on your Mac. Details here. Get Patching!
Python Special Interest Group: September 28: byte codes and TurboGears
Bill Sconce posts the news for next Thursdays Python Special Interest Group meeting in Manchester:
PySIG — New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group
Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH
28 September 2006 (4th Thursday) 7:00 PM
PySIG meetings are seminar-style, hands on. Laptop-friendly: 'Net access, wired + wireless. Python questions, war stories, examples always welcome.Everyone is welcome. Free of charge. Free of braces.
7:00 PM: Introductions –Bill & Ted & Alex, Milk & Cookies –Ben, Janet
7:10 PM: Happenings & AnnouncementsL Python 2.5 Released! Hosstraders 5-6 October, Hopkinton…
7:15 PM: Anyone's question(s) about Python, Python Module of the Month, Favorite-Python-Gotcha contest, Topics for future meetings…
7:30 PM: Bytecode Disassembly & Reassembly, presented by Bill Sconce, In Spec, Inc., Milford NH
Bill: “An August announcement on python-announce-list caught my eye — a bytecode assembler/dissassembler for Python. Because I spent one of my former lives as project leader for a bytecode/stack-pseudomachine, JIT-compiled, commercial language I thought it'd be fun and instructive to poke into Python's pseudomachine. It was and is. This easy-to-use tool makes it easy for anyone to get a start looking at Python internals.”
Bill Sconce is co-founder and chief cookie-procurer at PySIG, teaches Python, and writes in Python as often as he can.
8:10 PM: TurboGears, presented by Lloyd Kvam, Venix Corp, Lebanon NH
Lloyd: “I am impressed with the TurboGears (TG) approach to combining data and templates. They have a 20 minute tutorial that took me an hour – I insist on trying to understand how the magic is done. TG has a very ingenious use of decorators to link templates and data.
“The result is very different from Myghty which is much more like PHP with lots of snippets that get combined any which way you like.
“I am not sure I really understand all of the tradeoffs between the TG and Myghty approaches. That could lead to some interesting discussion.”
Lloyd Kvam is a charter member of PySIG and has given a number of Python tutorials at PySIG and elsewhere.
IBM Publishes Linux Client Migration Cookbook, v.2
From DesktopLinux.com: “IBM has published a final draft of its “Redbook” titled Linux Client Migration Cookbook, Version 2: A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux. The 376-page book, which targets enterprises needing to begin an evaluation of desktop Linux, is available for free download. “
Mary Jo Foley leaves Microsoft Watch, starts blog
Scripting News points to Mary Jo Foley: “Blogging is the future of journalism.” MJF drops the bombshell that after eleven years at Ziff-Davis, she'll be leaving the helm of Microsoft Watch and striking out on her own. She says, “There still is no other company in the tech space, IMHO, that matters as much as Microsoft.” Keep an eye on her new blog at All About Microsoft.
Longer Essays
Linked within these pages are longer posts that were created as “Stories” within Radio Userland, or essays that pre-date my blogging days. For other papers and articles I’ve written, check out the Ted Roche & Associates White Papers page.
WordPress Exercise Page Sandbox
WordPress includes a WYSIWYG editor within an HTML page.
My blog is located here.
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
- This is an unordered list
- of items
- with bullets
- This is an ordered list
- of items
- with numbers.
This is a snippet of code:
import win32com.client
SSafe=win32com.client.Dispatch("SourceSafe")
SSafe.Open("c:ProjectsVSSPathsrcsafe.ini","troche","secret")
Root=SSafe.VSSItem("$/MyClient/MyProject")
VSSItems=Root.Items
print VSSItems.Count
for loNode in VSSItems:
print loNode.Name, loNode.VersionNumberJoel previews Sprint's Power Vision Network and the LG Fusic
Just a bit of advice for folks trying to market to the A-List: Have something worthy. Else you might end up on Joel's bad side:
The phones they send us are so lame there is literally no area you can go into without being disappointed and shocked at just how shoddy everything is and how much it costs and what a rip off scam they're trying to run here with the music that costs too much and the movies that you don't want to watch on the screen that makes them unwatchable and you just KNOW that if you call to cancel the extra $7/month, their customer service department is going to give you the phone menu runaround and then put you on hold for an hour and then you'll get some cancellation specialist with an incomprehensible accent who will spend 15 minutes trying to talk you out of canceling the useless service until you just give up and let them have the goddamned $7 a month.
Great commentary. Read it all.
HP Board of Directors spying case just keeps getting worse…
GrokLaw is reporting “HP Spying More Extensive: Who Knew and When. We begin to learn now who knew and when, in an article in the Washington Post. They did broad background checks on their targets, but also on relatives of their targets. They tried to recover a stolen Keyworth laptop, so they could examine it. They targetted and sought phone records and fax records of relatives, like wives, of board members and reporters too. They got the records for 240 of 300 phone numbers they went after. The spyware sent to the reporter at CNET was not just to track email forwarding. It was keylogging software.”
And HP sells a server line called Integrity. This is disgraceful behavior.