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… and you have a remote power monitoring tool! Make magazine shows off the Tweet-A-Watt:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/tweetawatt_a_twittering_power_meter.html

The twenty-second of the month was the fourth Thursday, the usual night for the Python Special Interest Group to meet at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, New Hampshire. Thirteen attendees made it to the January meeting, making PySIG one of the more popular regional/topical meetings of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group.

As usual, coordinator Bill Sconce had a printed agenda with lots of news to go over. We had a round of introductions, though it was mostly a gathering of the regulars. We talked about Gotchas! — those little surprises that pop up while working through the day — and “reverse-gotchas!” — the ah-ha moments that bring enlightenment.

Kent Johnson presented his regular Kent’s Korner presentation on context managers and the ‘with’ statement. Kent’s notes for this and all past Kent’s Korners can be found on his web site. The with statement, along with decorators and generators (see how the KK sessions build upon each other!) can make a very powerful and very pythonic addition to writing Python code.

Arc Riley made the main presentation, on writing extensions in C. Arc was apparently one of the very first programmers to actually attempt to build an extension from scratch in Python 3.0, as he found that some of the key documentation was missing and some of the most important declaration about structures can only be found by reading the source code of Python itself. Arc documented his adventures for us, found a bug report to the Python folks, and provided the group with a very useful document of where the gotchas are, and some very useful bookmarks. The last link includes Arc’s notes as well as the C and Python code for the sample extension.

Thanks to Arc and Kent for great presentations, to Janet for the cookies and Ray for bringing the milk. Thanks, as always to Bill for running the meetings and to all for attending and participating!

I’ve added a link to the GNHLUG PastEvents page that provides a comma-separated file listing all the events from calendar year 2008. Some interesting highlights:

• Despite under-counting or -reporting of many events, we recorded attendance of 589 people, total, at GNHLUG events. This looks to be down a bit from last year, but I know I didn’t post as many numbers as last year. And it’s almost the same as 2006. Worth watching.
• The best attended event of the year (30) was the GNHLUG cookout. Thanks to Bruce Dawson and Carole Soule for hosting the event!
• Tied for second (at 22) were:
  • MerriLUG’s Linux Digital Audio Workstation presentation by Christoph Doerbeck,
  • DLSLUG’s presentation by Bill Stearns on FUSE, and
  • Kent Johnson‘s Python 101 presentation at MerriLUG
• The bronze medal goes to Máirí­n Duffy’s Photographic Prowess (MerriLUG ,20)
• Honorable Mentions:
  • Ben Scott’s Linux Server that Could (CentraLUG, 19),
  • Arc Riley’s PySoy (PySIG, 17),
  • James Fogg’s Administrator in a Box (DLSLUG, 17),
  • Guy Pardoe’s Joomla 1.5 (MonadLUG, 16)
  • And another tie: Richard Weait’s OpenStreetMap (MerriLUG, 15), Ed Lawson’s Scribus DTP (CentraLUG, 15) and my Cascading Style Sheets (DLSLUG, 15)

In terms of cumulative attendance, MerriLUG was on top as usual:

• MerriLUG (140)
• CentraLUG (83)
• PySIG (80)
• DLSLUG (65)
• MonadLUG (57)
• RubySIG (48)
• SLUG (46)

This is certainly a measuring issue, too: I record CentraLUG’s numbers every time, but many groups only infrequently post their numbers. Finally, by average attendance, a few numbers change, pointing out the many unreported ??? posted to the web page, and also reflected the varied numbers of times each group met:

• DLSLUG: 16.25
• MerriLUG: 14
• PySIG: 10
• SLUG: 7.67
• MonadLUG: 7.13
• CentraLUG: 6.92
• RubySIG: 5.33

If anyone would like to work with the data, you’ll find the CSV linked here (below the heading for each year, a link labeled “CSV format”) or linked directly off the bottom of individual year’s pages: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005. And if anyone is really into it, I’ve got an OpenOffice.org spreadsheet I’d be glad to share.

Five members attended the December meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, one chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the New Hampshire Technical Institute Library Room 146. (Note that there will not be a January meeting at NHTI, as the facility will be on break.)

A good time was had by all. We discussed and demonstrated the new Fedora 10, released on 25-November. Attendees were impressed with the depth and breadth of the Network Manager, version 0.7.0. We reviewed the dialogs with configuration for wireless, wired, broadband mobile (cell), DSL and VPN configurations. Bill Sconce did some Googling and reported that Network Manager, the application, was available for several other desktop managers, including his favorite, Fluxbox.

We also admired the updated “Monitor Resolution Settings” available off the System|Preferences|Hardware|Screen Resolution GNOME menu. In combination with the latest X.org, the interface gave us the ability to detect the projector and adjust the laptop’s screen display and arrange the geometry of the two outputs, either mirroring them or placing them side-by-side or top-to-bottom. Very slick!

We talked about the ease of upgrade: I had Fedora 9 installed on this laptop and used the Fedora-supplied “preupgrade” package to stage the laptop and perform the upgrade very easily. A restart into the new kernel and confirmation that the /etc/fedora-release version was correct, and I was upgraded! I have never seen an easier upgrade in a RedHat-family-based system.

We discussed the challenges in digging up solutions to more complex troubleshooting problems, not Fedora 10 related. Mark talked about a problem it took him months to track down that eventually pointed to remarking out a single module in rc.d. Dave referred us to A.P. Lawrence.com where he was able to come up with the magical incantation to correct the timezone settings on an SCO box.

Meanwhile, back at Fedora 10, we looked at the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 and talked about some of the compelling features in the new version. The ability to edit PDF files was something that generated a lot of interest. Bill pointed out that there is no concept of text flow within a PDF, so while you can correct a typo, you can’t expect the text to be reflowed.

There were questions on OO.o compatibility with other office packages, like MSOffice and WordPerfect. Novell has come out with a translator to read Office-BASIC macros and translate them into OpenOffice.org’s StarBASIC. Version 3.0 can apparently read the new proprietary Office DOCX documents. We talked about where to find good resources for OpenOffice.org (suggestions welcomed!). Bill mentioned that Jim Kuzdrall’s presentation on OpenOffice.org styles (see Sept 20, 2007 for links to notes and slides) was a real help in him getting OpenOffice.org working. We also mentioned that Solveig Haugland’s blog was a great resource for more information.

Thanks to Bill Sconce for bringing the projector, to all for participating and to the New Hampshire Technical Library for the great facilities. Note that there is no January meeting planned at the moment, but keep an eye out for a February announcement.

In order to get access to a client’s VPN, I needed to get their VPN client software installed on my Fedora 10 workstation. Following their basic directions, it was apparent that there was an attempt to run Java in FireFox, and it was failing. Running FireFox from a shell, I could see IcedTea errors. So, I went off for instructions to get Sun’s Java installed.

There were some clues from the http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1356952, and few promising Google results. The Fedora Project had an FAQ on Java that was a good start. That pointed to http://www.city-fan.org/tips/JpackageJava with some fairly intricate instructions to download the Sun JDK package and invoke some serious RPM magic on it to turn it into a set of RPM packages that could be installed on Fedora. Once I followed the instructions, the ‘alternatives’ script showed me that Java was installed – hurrah! I tried the VPN install again, but no joy, same IcedTea error messages. Hmm. It turned out that the global Mozilla FireFox plugins, stored in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins, had two shortcuts: libjavaplugin_oji.so and libjavaplugin.so. Running FireFox and examining about:config and searching for plugin told me that Moz should only be using the first one, but that was pointing to the correct place. The second, on the other hand, was pointing to the Iced Tea installation. FireFox’s about:plugins showed me that Iced Tea was still the preferred plugin. I deleted the second, libjavaplugin.so, link and tried it one more time. Yes! Installed. Whew!

Now to get to work…