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CentraLUG, 2-June-2008, Hopkinton, NH: Open Source Advocacy

By Ted Roche on May 22, 2008 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months. On June 2nd, we’ll be meeting at the Hopkinton Public Library from 7 PM to 9 PM. (Directions and maps here. [Edit: updated to current link 2014, too late for you to make the meeting, sorry.]) Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends. At this meeting, Mark Boyajian, Bill Sconce and other special guests will discuss “Open Source Advocacy.” I hope this spurs some discussions on how we can duplicate their success and avoid problems they can experienced.

About the presentation: Mark and Bill have been working with the Pepperell (MA) Lawrence Library to raise awareness of Open Source software solutions. They kicked-off this effort with a presentation last October in support of Software Freedom Day. The enthusiasm of library director Debra Spratt resulted in the Lawrence Library Tech Talk series: a monthly presentation on Open Source software and issues. Additionally, Debra has facilitated the creation of an Open Source information kiosk as well as a Linux-based computer in the reference library for use by the public!

The Tech Talk series formally launched in February and has consistently drawn a good audience. The kiosk and computer have been up and accessible since March. The experiences of working with this rich environment has surprised, challenged, and taught us many things we never expected. We are all working and adapting to better understand the [technical] needs and interests of the community and how the library can support them.

About Mark and Bill: Mark is an IT consultant (Simple Solutions) specializing in curriculum development and training, database development, and information management using Open Source solutions wherever possible. Mark “started life” as a music teacher, spent 20 years as an environmental field scientist specializing in wetlands and data management, and launched Simple Solutions as a full-time endeavor in 2001 built on Open Source solutions.

Bill Sconce is the proprietor of In-Spec, Inc., a Milford, NH-based consulting company. Bill is an activist with the Greater New Hampshire Linux Group, Secretary to the Board of Directors and coordinator of the Python Special Interest Group. He’s presented to most of the chapters and advocates for Open Source software at many other venues, including the McAuliffe and the NELS/FOSSEd conferences.

Future Meetings: Stay tuned for details on the upcoming bbq/picnic all-hands meeting in July, and for the location of the August meeting, still TBD. As always, meetings are subject to change. You are encouraged to join the low-traffic announcement list at http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-announce to get announcement and cancellation information.

Meeting promotions: I’ve posted this meeting at lots of locations: FindEventsFast, Eventful, zVents, Upcoming, the GNHLUG announcement list, NHPR, the Concord Monitor. I’d be interested in hearing about where you learned of the event to better tune the meeting promotions.

Notes from CentraLUG, 5-May-2008, Ben Scott, The Linux Server That Could

By Ted Roche on May 8, 2008 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Nineteen people made May 5th’s CentraLUG meeting the second best attended of any LUG meeting so far this year, and the most populous CentraLUG meeting in over two years!

The meeting starting with a rag-tag band of Linux enthusiasts wandering around the campus looking for a room to meet. It’s finals week at NHTI and we’d been bumped from our regular spot. From the Library to the Crocker building to the Little Building we moved as more and more and more attendees arrived and we outgrew our first and second choices of rooms. Thanks to all for patience and multiple moves, and apologies for any folks we lost along the way.

The hassle was worthwhile, as Ben put on a great presentation on “The Linux Server That Could: Setting up a Small Office Server.” Over the years, both as part of his work and his hobbies, Ben has set up many multi-purpose computer servers: a single machine to serve a small workgroup with mail, files, printing, centralized DNS, DHCP. Ben had some slides to introduce the concepts and frame the problems his scripts solves, and then he dove into how to set up and configure the services. Providing a running commentary while he showed us configuration files, he offered a number of Best Practices tips for configuring, naming your intranet ‘domain,’ how CentOS/Red Hat family distros work, the differences in different flavors of Linux distros, editing configuration files, viewing error logs and more. It was a content-filled hour!

Slides and sample scripts and configuration files can be found on the GNHLUG web site here. Thanks to Ben for a great presentation, to Bruce Dawson for last-minute projector duty, to Bill Sconce for helping with the raffle, to the NHTI staff for helping us find facilities, and to all who attended and participated!

Koolu hacking

By Ted Roche on May 3, 2008 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Found a couple of good leads on setting up the Koolu as a MythTV front-end, through persistent searching in specific forums, like the Ubuntu support forums and the MythTV mailing lists. A couple quick clues:

1. Hit DEL on startup to get into the BIOS, use the BIOS options to expand the memory dedicated to the video card. Options are: 32M, 64 M, 128 M. Not sure how much of an effect it will have.

2. Hit Shift-F10 early in the startup (prompt only appears for a second) to disable the RealTek attempt to launch the machine from a network boot image via PXE. This saves 10 or 20 seconds on every boot.

3. The /etc/fstab had an entry for a swap partition, but the UUID was incorrect. Just reassigning the device to hda5 rather than the UUID was enough to get the swap to come up.

4. I’m convinced there’s a way to get a lot more performance from the video, but need to dig in more. The AMD LX800 driver should support buffering, just need to find the trick to turn it on.

5. There’s an error in the Xorg.0.log file that indicates the kernel doesn’t support MTRR and should be recompiled to do that.

Continuous Learning Curve: Javascript

By Ted Roche on April 30, 2008 in CSS, FoxPro, Home Page, JavaScript, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, OpenSource, Perl, PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, SourceSafe, Technology, Web Development

I’ve avoided spending too much time delving into Javascript. My four-year switch from Windows-uber-alles (including VFP, VSS, SQL Server, Ingres, Oracle, HTML, OLE, ODBC, SCC, COM, XML, MCSE, MCSD, XSLT, DCOM, RSS, MS Office, Exchange, MAPI Bad, SMTP Good, MVP and more acronyms!) to Linux-Apache-MySQL-Postgres-PHP-Python-Ruby, not to mention XHTML, CSS, bash, Smarty, Django, TWiki, dojo, et al had kept me busy enough. But a new client assignment needs a highly-interactive web site and dropping in great big globs of someone else’s Javascript is not going to solve all the problems; at a minimum, I’ve got to be able to read it, debug it and tune it for the client’s particular needs.

Did you know that a limited version of Safari, the O’Reilly online library, is included with a membership to the Association of Computing Machinery? I’ve been an ACM member for years and been meaning to get around to trying this out. My Javascript studies seemed the perfect occasion. I’m reading Shelley Power’s Learning Javascript online and getting quite a bit out of it. I love when you settle down with a book and start going “Oh, is that what that meant?” or “Now I get it!”

Notes from PySIG, 24-April-2008: Questions, Answers, Brownies!

By Ted Roche on April 29, 2008 in OpenSource, Python, Technology

Eight attendees had a great time last night eating all of Janet’s brownies, cookies, cupcakes and Ray’s milk while discussing Python, news, questions, life, the universe and everything. The April meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group took place as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester.

Shawn K. O’Shea took some great notes with links to dozens of the topics on his blog at: http://www.eth0.net/blog/?p=11 (what a cool domain, eh?)

Thanks to Bill and Alex for arranging the meeting, to Janet for the awesome confections, to Ray for bringing the milk, to the ABI for the great facilities and to all for attending and participating!

The Patch Window has closed.

By Ted Roche on April 21, 2008 in Security, Technology

Over at the SANS Internet Storm Center, John Bambenek describes the increasingly grim situation for keeping machines secure. Automated patching triggers automated reverse engineering and the development of exploits in The Patch Window is Gone: Automated Patch-Based Exploit Generation. Deeply troubling.

MerriLUG Notes, 17-April-2008: Dan Walsh & SELinux

By Ted Roche on April 18, 2008 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Security, Technology

Eleven people attended the April meeting of MerriLUG, the Merrimack Valley chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. Heather called the meeting to order at 7:30 PM, noted the that attendees were pretty much The Usual Suspects, and dispensed with the long-winded announcements for new members. http://www.gnhlug.org will tell you all you want to know.

Dan Walsh was the main presenter tonight. Dan had a very special visit from the Demo Gods, just before he was to start. His hard drive decided that his boot partition wasn’t. Never heard of ext3. Ouch. Ever the good showman, he borrowed my laptop, downloaded his presentations from the web, and put on a great show.

Dan mentioned that he’d lost his previous laptop during his recent tour in Europe when it was stolen and that maintaining your home directory encrypted was a Good Idea.

Dan reviewed the history of SELinux and the iterations we saw in Fedora 3 though 8 and RHEL 3 through 5 and what to expect in 9. He talked about the evolution of the policies, the different feature sets available, how the SELinux architecture can meet the stringent requirements of DoD level organizations (with bullet points like: “RHEL5: MSP Policy: EAL4+, LSPP, RBAC” – who wouldn’t be impressed?) to the Significant Others at home who really just want a machine to use the browser on.

Dan showed off the new kiosk policy, xguest, which was essentially a minimal-permissions user (no setuid, no executables in the home directory, no installation abilities, etc.) extended to run FireFox. Perfect when someone wants to borrow your machine for a second! In the default settings (installable in F8 or 9 with sudo yum install xguest), it creates a fairly ‘safe’ user that can’t do a lot of harm and whose directories are temporary RAM-based and vanish when the user logs out. (You can modify it to keep a persistent home to store cookies and bookmarks.) Ideal for a library or public kiosk situations. Yes, the evil minded boys in the room could come up with some work-around exploits, but this is a promising start!

Thanks to Dan for a great presentation under trying circumstances, to Heather and Jim for managing and promoting the meetings, to Martha’s Exchange for providing the facilities, and to all who attended and participated.

UPDATE: Dan’s posted an article to Red Hat Magazine, “Confining the user with SELinux” that covers a lot of material in the presentation, with more detail than my notes and links for further study.

Notes from NH Ruby group, 15-April-2008

By Ted Roche on April 16, 2008 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Eight people attended the April meeting of the Ruby Special Interest Group, http://www.nhruby.org, held as usual on the second Tuesday of the month in the meeting room at RMC Research.

We lead the night off with a brief video on Passenger from Phusion.nl, a new Apache module that host rails, like a mod_rails (not _ruby) module. Nick reported he’s been running it on one of his sites for a while and is pleased with the performance and the marked decrease in load. Having a mod_rails option available is likely to get hosting companies offering fractional horsepower shared virtual machines to be able to host Rails apps, bringing Rails onto the $7-a-month commodity hosting sites. Cool!

I asked for recommendations on the right way of parsing incoming XML and SOAP packets and was referred to Hpricot and soap4r. Another attendee asked for recommendations on Content Management Systems. Nick mentioned Radiant (which we got to see later in the presentation). comatose and railfrog. We got into a couple discussions during the evening on the stability and applicability of Ruby and Rails for many situations, citing high traffic web sites and the several runtime engines/VMs like JRuby in which Ruby code can run.

Finally, we arrived a the Live Hacking session where we got to watch Scott and then Nick show how to add new functionality to an existing app. Actually getting to see another craftsman at work brings out all sorts of good questions. Scott added chronic to his To-Do application. Chronic is a “natural language datetime parser,” according to the web site, and Scott showed how it could easily be integrated into an existing app, and accept values like “Next Tuesday” or “Thursday last week” and return sane datetime values. We also looked at what would be involved and set up a unit test to check our changes.

Nick showed us a little more of the Radiant application, and his work on making the Radiant CMS support multiple sites. The source he’s working on is stored at github.com, and the networking graph is a thing to behold. Nick spent a little time getting us familiar with the different philosophy of git (branching is inexpensive, merging is very smart, branches can interact in many ways including pushing to and pulling from each other) and then grabbed the most recent code and hopped right into to refactor a code snippet that was an inelegant hack using a deprecated technique into one that was more proper, running our unit tests before and after to confirm the refactoring didn’t break anything.

An excellent evening as usual! Thanks to all for their attendance and participation, to Scott and Nick for organizing, announcing and presenting, and to RMC Research for providing the nice facilities.

CentraLUG notes, 7-April-2008: Coleman Kane and FOSS development for Windows

By Ted Roche on April 8, 2008 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Eight people attended the April meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual at the New Hampshire Technical Institute Library, Room 146, on the first Monday of the month (see below, we’re evicted until fall).

Coleman Kane was the main presenter, showing us how the MinGW and GNU binutils packages could be used to create a cross-compiling environment to create Windows-compatible binaries on Linux (or actually, starting from BSD in Coleman’s case). He had a great slide deck and example source and was able to push through 55 slides in 75 minutes in a comprehensible fashion. The pace was fast and furious as he covered all of the highlights, took questions from the audience, edited and compiled code, and switched the projector between his BSD box and a Windows machine to show the code running. Whew! Well done and very informative!

CentraLUG’s meetings will be on the road for the summer. The library will be closed for evenings during finals week (!) and the summer hours have the library closing at 6 PM until fall semester begins. “See you in … October!” We’ll be announcing the location for upcoming meetings Real Soon Now. You’ll want to see Ben Scott’s May presentation on “The Linux Server That Could: Setting up a Small Office Server.”

Thanks to Colman for his great presentation, to Bill Sconce for providing the nice projector, to the NHTI for providing the facilities, and to all who attended for their attention and participation.

Listening last week to… April 5, 2008

By Ted Roche on April 6, 2008 in Home Page, OpenSource, Python, Technology, Web Development

Backdating this post a bit, as I didn’t get it posted yesterday,…

In Fresh Ubuntu, Harlem and Peter lead off this week with a conversation with Michael Ramm about productivity and GTD in “Michael from Blackbelt Productivity.”

PyCon2007 had a good and a not-so-good set of audio recordings: “Python and wxPython for Experimental Economics” was quite interesting, though there wasn’t as much deep programming insights as an interesting diversion about experimental economics. “Iterators in Action” (slides) was a flop, though. The recording was in the back of an echoing hall, and cut off in a little less that twelve minutes. I’ll ping the organizers to find out if that can be resampled.

Clay Shirky talks to Moira Gunn on Tech Nation “Here Comes Everyone.” Clay did one of my favorite presentations of all times, audio available on IT Conversations and a white paper here. Clay’s got a new book out and he’s marking the rounds of the media. I heard him on “On the Media” last week.

Tim Spaulding talks with Jon Udell about LibraryThing. in Jon’s “Interviews with Innovators” series on IT Conversations. I mention LibraryThing two years ago on this blog, and have been a regular visitor to the site. They continue to come up with intriguing features and make browsing through the stacks a lot of fun.

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