“The corporation, as we know it, has passed its expiration date.” — Nick Carr, SuperNova, 22-July-2007
Heard on IT Conversations Podcast, “Technology’s Potential to Reshape Business” with Chris Meyer
You are here: Home
DLSLUG Notes, 5-June-2008: Bill Stearns, FUSE filesystems
Twenty-two people attended the June meeting of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group held as usual on the first Thursday of the month. We were fortunate once again to get room 041 in the lower-level of Haldeman, with power and ethernet jacks at each seat.
As seems required at each LUG meeting, persuading the projector to show X is always a challenge. Bill Stearns is a big believer in the “power on the projector first, then the laptop connected to the projector” theory, which I also like. Today, though, 800 x 600 was the best he could do, even with this work-around. There’s a good Summer of Code project in there somewhere, if not a PhD thesis. Video negotiations between machine and display start with bootup and BIOS code and run through X configuration and ends with xrandr or direct x.org tweaking. (Update: I saw a new applet in the “What’s New in Nine” session at FUDCon where the configuration of video on the fly was a lot easier! Looking forward to trying it out!)
Bill McGonigle also recorded the audio from the event. Keep an eye out for an announcement on when the recording might be available. (With gas prices climbing, I’ll be attending more meetings virtually via podcast. Someone ought to do a meeting on… 🙂
Bill Stearn’s presentation was on FUSE filesystems, additional file systems over and above what’s needed to start your system. There are infinite possibilities on what you might want loaded as a block device and manipulated with the tools that know how to work with a filesystem: a compressed archive, a remote music source, a database, an encrypted volume, etc., and there’s a good chance someone’s already started writing a FUSE driver for it. The list of drivers under development is pretty impressive and some of them fairly innovative.
Bill started with a couple of slides to establish the basic terminology and to walk through the basic commands of setting up a couple of the FUSE filesystems. Soon abandoning the slideshow, Bill hopped into a shell and actually performed the operations, showing how an encrypted filesystem might work, how archives could be read as files (or grepped or wc’d or…) and how gluster, a cluster file system capable of managing petabytes, could be used. There was a lot of audience participation and “Yeah, but what if…” questions and a good time was had by all.
Roger Trussel is scheduled to present jUnit at the July meeting.
Thanks to Bill Stearns for his great presentation and handouts, Bill McGonigle for organizing, promoting and herding cats at the meeting, to Heidi Strohl (http://www.heidistrohl.com) for providing the refreshments (awesome cookies!) and to all for attending and participating.
Cringely bids Bill a happy retirement
Robert X. Cringely, the pseudonym not the trademark, bids Bill Gates a fond farewell and good wishes on his retirement: “What’s sad is that it didn’t have to happen this way.”
Go forth and continue your good works, Bill.
Sun PDF Import Extension for OpenOffice.org 3.0
Saw a tweet for a new Sun PDF Import Extension for OpenOffice.org, a new add-on for the upcoming OpenOffice.org version 3 that will allow you to open and edit PDF files. Cool!. I dug around to learn more about the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Features. Lots of stuff to look forward to!
Notes from CentraLUG, 2-June-2008: Mark Boyajian, Open Source Advocacy
Twelve folks attended the June meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the first Monday of the month, but at the summer venue of the Hopkinton Public Library. Attendance was a delightful mix of regulars and new visitors.
As the crowd had some new members, I spent some time introducing the GNHLUG and its many chapters, its purpose and that upcoming events (there are many!) can be found on the gnhlug.org web site. We had a round of announcements and introductions and got into the main presentation.
Mark Boyajian has been working with Bill Sconce to demonstrate and encourage the use of Open Source software at the Lawrence Library in Pepperell, MA, strongly encouraged by the Library Director Debra Spratt. Deb has been instrumental in getting equipment set up, encouraging them to establish an information kiosk where they could feature news and posters about Open Source, as well as setting up an older machine with Linux. Mark brought along some pictures to show their setup and talked about the good reception they’ve got from attendees and the interest generated. Mark had some success stories to share and some interesting stories of the misconceptions he tried to address.
Thanks to Mark for the presentation, to Bill Sconce for providing the projector, to the Hopkinton Public Library for use of the facilities, and to all for their attendance and participation.
Notes from PySIG, 22-May-2008: IPython and Frangoes
Twelve folks attended the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group, held as usual at 7 PM on the fourth Thursday at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, New Hampshire. Vigorous discussion, idea exchange, job openings and, yes, Python, was discussed in depth.
Bill Sconce was the master of ceremonies and lead off with his usual printed agenda of items: Welcome, Announcements, a round of introductions, Janet’s Famous Cookies (this week, Frangoes! Awesome!), open announcements and discussions of gotchas.
Sample Q: how to debug binary text that may or may not be Unicode? A: Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Encoding Detector, [link updated, tr] originally part of his famous Universal Feed Parser.
Sample Gotcha: scripts with a she-bang line might not always be transportable between Windows, Unix and OS X because of line ending differences. If your parser complains about invalid commands on the she-bang line, make sure your line endings are correct for the platform.
Shawn K. O’Shea arrived and proceded to note every passing mention (with links!) in his great blog entry at: http://www.eth0.net/blog/?p=12 — thanks, Shawn!
Kent asked about using Python to interface with an existing C++ code and a lot of useful suggestions were forthcoming.
Arc updated us on the state of PySoy: the major bug that was crashing PySoy seems to have been isolated, and the code is orders of magnitude more stable. Bug fixing is proceding apace and an end-of-summer major release appears feasible.
Discussion on the upcoming Software Freedom Day got an enthusiastic reception, with several folks considering something in their communities.
On to the main presentation: Kent presented his monthly Kent’s Korner featuring the IPython interactive shell. IPython is slick, with a slew of features and quite a bit of documentation as well. IPython is not just a shell, but also an embeddable library that can bring scripting features into your application, and can also be used as a non-blocking interface to graphical environments like GTK, Qt and Wx (unlike the standard Python shell, which only works against Tk). Anyone doing a lot of work with Python from the shell needs to check out IPython!
Thanks to Kent for the presentation, to Bill for running and promoting the show, to Janet for the awesome Frango cookies, to Shawn for the excellent capture of the night’s events, to ABI for their great facilities and to all for participating!
openSUSE News » Thesis on openSUSE Published
openSUSE News » Thesis on openSUSE Published
A year’s research on Novell and the openSUSE project is now published as a master’s thesis at the University of Oslo. “Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities” details the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. Community members and employees in Novell have participated in the study.
It’s cool seeing some serious study of how for-profit companies can work successfully with for-merit software development efforts like OpenSuse, Ubuntu or Fedora and make it a win-win situation for both. There’s a mercifully short executive summary for those who want the highlights, and the full 130+ page thesis available online.
(via LXer.com)
Notes from NH Ruby/Rails Group, 20-May-2008
Five members attended the May meeting of the New Hampshire Ruby / Rails group, held as usual at the offices of RMC Research in Portsmouth.
Nick Plante entertained and educated the group on Rack, a foundation layer that interfaces between the web application handler (like Mongrel or FastCGI) and the actual web application framework adaptor (like Merb or Camping or Halcyon or Sinatra) in a manner similar to the Python WSGI layer. It allows for the creation of custom web frameworks while removing a lot of the grunt work. Nick had a sample application whipped up where a few lines of code could define the routing of various requests and cleverly answered “Hello, World” to the correct RESTful query.
For those for whom Rails isn’t the complete answer or those who want to build their own web functions with components other than those used by the Rails framework, Rack is a foundation on which you should be plugging together your building blocks.
Brian Turnbull volunteered to fill in for Scott Garman, who had to cancel at the last minute. Brian had been using NetBeans only a brief while, but had a great story to tell on using the built-in debugger to trace out a problem with Rails-generated CSS meta tags always getting a cache-breaking URL. While a feature in development, when the CSS was being served from a caching store like Amazon’s S3, the ever-changing URL defeated the point of caching. Brian showed how breakpoints could be applied to the code and step-by-step tracing (why is it that all debuggers have Step-In, Step-Once, Step-Over, Step-Out icons that all look the same and can’t be told apart?) and walked from his code into the Rails framework down to the mis-behaving component.
Having identified the problem, our discussion took a tangent into a discussion about monkey-patching, and how this ‘feature’ was a bug deserving of an optional switch to disable, and ought to be submitted upstream to the Rails maintainers. To confirm, we went through the steps to grab the latest version of rails as a plug-in (gem? I’m not sure.) so that we were working with the latest ‘edge’ code to confirm the problem hadn’t already been fixed. By installing this way, we were overriding the Rails framework only for this application, and could easily revert to the stable version, without disturbing the main shared code on the machine. We talked about how this was a Best Practice when bringing an app under development up to production, so it was isolated from changes outside of the app’s control.
Plenty of time was available for discussion, and we talked with Tim a bit about configuring a new machine with all the tools he’d need to develop a Rails app with NetBeans: Ruby, Rails, a couple good gems, the Java runtime. Nick and Brian noted that the default Rails environment within NetBeans is JRuby not MRI (Matz’ Ruby Interpreter) and how you might want to reconfigure NetBeans to use MRI instead if you weren’t planning on deploying to a JRuby environment.
Thanks to Nick and Brian for their presentations, to Scott for arranging the meeting, to Tim and RMC for providing the great facilities and to all for attending the meetings! Discussion is ongoing now on the topics for the June meeting; join the mailing lists at http://mail.nhruby.org/mailman/listinfo/ and keep an eye on the new meeting plans at http://wiki.nhruby.org/index.php/Upcoming_meetings.
CentraLUG, 2-June-2008, Hopkinton, NH: Open Source Advocacy
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
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!