Tag Archives | CentraLUG

Notes from CentraLUG, 6-Dec-2010: David Berube, MySQL Operations

By Ted Roche on December 30, 2010 in Apple Macintosh OS X, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Ruby, Technology, Web Development

Six people attended the December 2010 meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux Group, held at the NHTI‘s Library from 7 to 9 PM. David Berube was the featured speaker, talking about his experience with large scale high-performance MySQL applications.

David is an independent software developer and consultant. One of his larger projects over the past couple of years has been an application for scheduling actors for auditions. This involves agents and projects, auditions, roles, videos and a number of other entities in a complex and fast-moving application. He’s used Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, a NOSQL database, Amazon S3, A rack of Mac Minis, BSD, Linux, and a number of other elements. He had some insightful things to say about the development process, managing a client project, handling difficult requirements, scaling up million-row databases for subsecond response times and more. It was a meeting well worth attending.

There were a lot of useful tools and reference sites mentioned, and I was only able to take note of a few: Useful Ruby add-ons: New Relic, Query Reviewer, Percona Operations Day, Cacti for data aggregation. An In-depth discussion of NoSQL (“Not Only SQL”) Databases: what are they, what are they good for, what are the liabilities? A good discussion of the trade-offs of using NoSQL, reference to the NHRuby presentation on Redis a few months ago, and more.

Thanks to David for an informative presentation, to the attendees for a dynamic interactive session, and to the NHTI Library for the facilities. Future meetings at the Concord location have been suspended, we encourage our regulars to attend the Manchester ManchLUG meetings. If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to the announcement list so you’ll know when there’s an upcoming meeting. (Subscribers to the discussion list will automatically receive the announcements, too.)

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

By Ted Roche on December 3, 2010 in LAMP, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

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 CentraLUG, 4-Oct-2010: Patent Absurdity

By Ted Roche on October 6, 2010 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology

Five people attended the October meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group, an affiliated chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. We met at the NHTI Library, Room 146.

We had an attendee with a tech support question we weren’t able to answer on the spot, but gave him some resources to pursue. He was plugging his camera into his Ubuntu machine, and he wanted to set the mount point to be a fixed mount point rather that something dynamically created by dbus. He made some changes, but wasn’t sure of exactly what he had changed, and the device no longer appears when he plugs it in. It does appear on other machines, Linux Mint and Windows, so the device is unlikely to be broken. No one present was sure where the settings might be stored for this. We suggested joining the gnhlug-discuss list as well as the support forums provided by Ubuntu Linux. I look forward to some of our experts helping our friend out.

I let folks know that I’ve reserved the room for November and December. After that, we’ll likely start meeting with the ManchLUG group, unless someone else wants to keep running meetings in Concord. We reviewed the GNHLUG wiki for upcoming meetings. Especially noted were the upcoming DLSLUG meeting “About Lisp -or- Lambda, the Ultimate Lecture, presented by Yoni Rabkin” and the New Hampshire High Tech Council‘s TechWorld 2010 conference ($25 – $210) coming up next Thursday and Friday. We discussed the idea that a nicer-looking forum software, like Drupal, would be nice to implement on the GNHLUG site, and talked about the past efforts to do that, and some of the challenged past projects have run into.

We mentioned that there’s a effort to create a community-driven site to support and distribute a new fork to OpenOffice.org named LibreOffice. Some of the other projects involved in the MySQL – Sun – Oracle mergers have been making interesting news as well.

Thanks to Dave Rose for providing the projector. We used a Live USB version of Fedora 14 beta which shipped last week and saw a pretty remarkable “It Just Works” effect: plugging in the running ThinkPad (a T61, 1680×1050, with an nVidia controller), the open source nouveau driver recognized the Sharp projector and automatically reconfigured the display (1400×1050) for side-by-side (“twinview”) layout with the internal screen. No xrandr, no rebooting of the machine! Wow. We brought up the Gnome display properties dialog and moved them around and finally settled on a mirrored display for the main presentation. This is a huge time saver and convenience for doing presentations!

Our main presentation was a viewing of the documentary, “Patent Absurdity, How software patents broke the system” and a discussion afterwards on what you can do (contact your Congress-person, contribute to organizations, etc.). Everyone learned something from the show, and perhaps from the discussion afterwards.

Thanks to all for attending to Dave for providing the projector, and to NHTI for providing the facilities!

Notes from CentraLUG: Joseph Smith and the Coreboot project

By Ted Roche on August 4, 2010 in LAMP, Linux, Technology

Nine people attended the August meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, held at the Hopkinton Town Library on August 2nd. We announce our meetings in advance on the GNHLUG-announce mailing list, a very low traffic list we encourage everyone to subscribe to. Joseph Smith presented some information on the Coreboot project, had some hardware to show off, and had a lot of insights into the workings not only of the machines but of the vendors in the space.

We had a couple of announcements, mentioning upcoming meetings on the gnhlug.org web site. We had a round of introductions. We then asked for questions, announcements, job searches or job postings, etc. One attendee had a problem with having Ubuntu insisting it was updating grub with newer kernels, but the kernels were never appearing in the menu. The group had several very good suggestions to follow up on, including the suggestion to join the -discuss mailing list for more help and support.

I mentioned that the CentraLUG is affiliated with several publishers who offer discounts on their books, and that InformIT/Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley, Cisco Press, IBM Press, Prentice-Hall, Que, Sams) sends out a newsletter and holds a monthly user group contest/raffle for good stuff on their web site.

Finally, Joseph Smith got to do his presentation. You can find his slides here. Joe is an AS400 Administrator for a local well-known retailer’s headquarters, but had always enjoyed tinkering with hardware. It was frustrating to find that set-top boxes and other devices were restricted in what they could do (or run) due to defective or proprietary locked-in BIOSes. He was delighted to find the coreboot project and has been contributing ever since. Joe attended NHTI to polish up his software skills and earn a certificate. He brought along several boxes to show us what he was working on. He talked about the sequence of events that occur within the BIOS and how coreboot can replace them. He demonstrated booting a machine with a serial console and minicom monitoring a fully-verbose debugging session. He talked about the issues with getting coreboot running on a new machine, how vendors cooperated and contributed to the project (or not!) and the problems with turning a BIOS chip into a brick and how to recover. It was a fun and interesting presentation.

Thanks to Joe for his presentation, to Bill Sconce for supplying the projector, and to the Hopkinton Town Library for use of the great facilities. Note that CentraLUG will not have a September meeting due to the Labor Day holiday (come on up and see the Hopkinton State Fair!) but plans to meet in October, November and December at the NHTI Library. Stay tuned for announcements.

Notes for CentraLUG, 7-June-2010: Wikis

By Ted Roche on June 7, 2010 in Technology

The topic of the month is Wikis. “Wiki Wiki!” is Hawaiian for “quick, quick!” and is a pattern of presenting a read-write web site. There are more variations and implementations than grains of sand in the universe. but we’ll look at a couple of them, specifically:

Twiki, written in Perl, running gnhlug.org (http://twiki.org)
MediaWiki, written in PHP, storage in MySQL, which runs Wikipedia.org (http://mediawiki.org)
Dokuwiki, also in PHP (http://www.dokuwiki.org/)
Redmine, written in Ruby, which includes a wiki module. (http://www.redmine.org/)

We’ll talk a little bit about the range of markup languages, the technology behind the wiki, the social and community aspects of how a wiki works (or doesn’t), and how Free/Open Source has played into the success of wikis.

Recommended Reading: “The Wiki Way, Quick Collaboration on the Web” by Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) and Bo Leuf, Addison-Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-71499-X and http://wiki.org/. We’ll have a copy there for your browsing.

Comments from other members suggest we might also want to look at:

MindTouch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dekiwiki/)

Wekkid https://launchpad.net/wikkid

Wikipedia’s entry on Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software and

a list of software with comparisons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wikis

and http://www.wikimatrix.org/

My most active Wiki experience: http://fox.wikis.com (Not open source, either in implementations nor base language).

Git presentation, CentraLUG, 3 May 2010

By Ted Roche on May 3, 2010 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

The Central New Hampshire Linux User Group will meet at its usual place and time, NHTI Library, Room 146, 7 PM – 9 PM. Directions can be found at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/NHTILibrary.

In keeping with the tradition of 3-letter presentations (CSS, Vim, SQL, er, HTM), I’ll talk abut Git, the distributed version control system. Git was originally developed by Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel and is licensed under GPL2. It’s become popular in Rails development as well, especially with the hosted site GitHub.com. Similar to Mercurial [Updated link, Ed.] or Bazaar, Git is a DVCS – a distributed (or Decentralized) version control system or revision control system. DVCSes introduce an easier way to work on shared project. We’ll talk about how DVCSes work and Git in particular, look at some of the available references, handy cheatsheets, and sites to host your DVCS.

As always, we’ll have some time for introductions, job postings, folks looking for work, questions and hopefully answers.

Hope to see you there.

Some additional links, besides the ones I posted to the announcement above:

Scott Chacon is the authority on Git. Check out his book, his tweets, his online reference, his PDF, and Why Git Is Better Than X.

The Git wiki is a good source of reference materials.

A great diagram and discuss about using git branches in a real development and production environment.

Notes from CentraLUG, 1-Feb-2010

By Ted Roche on February 2, 2010 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Five people attended the February 1st meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group. We met at Room 146 of the New Hampshire Technical Institute’s Library from 7 to 9 PM.

There were lots of interesting discussion. Ed was attending for the first time, and is getting back into software engineering after some time in another career. He had some questions on what the different distros were and how they worked, and there were, of course, plenty of opinions. Susan had some updates on her research on the BF scheduler, the bleeding-edge Ubuntu releases, realtime kernels, and the Dragon Naturally Speaking application. I reviewed some of the upcoming meetings, and there was a lot of interest in the Seacoast LUG’s “Sugar on a Stick” presentation and the Cascading Stylesheet presentation at PySIG at the end of the month.

Mark McSweeney made the main presentation. Mark works in a small office with a few partners, and budgets are tight. A few years ago, they had deployed a Microsoft back end and discovered that there were no satisfactory solutions for spam filtering on the Exchange server they had as a mail server. Mark came up with a very effective and economical solution using PostFix, Amavisd-new, ClamAV, DCC, Razor, Pyzor and SpamAssassin. Mark’s slides can be found at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/SpamFilter, including links to the solution he followed, an updated version of which can be found at http://www.freespamfilter.org/

Member Susan Cragin will be making the presentation at out March 1st meeting, on the Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 program running on WINE. Stay tuned for more details.

Thanks for Mark for his great presentation, to the NHTI and Library staff for the great facilities, to Dave Rose for bringing the projector, and to all for attending and participating!

CentraLUG, 6 July 2009: Philip Sbrogna, WINE

By Ted Roche on June 23, 2009 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

WINE may or may not stand for “WINE Is Not an Emulator;” you might consider coming to the meeting to find out.

The July meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux User Group, CentraLUG, will happen on the usual first Monday of the month, starting at 7 PM at the Hopkinton Public Library’s Community Room. Gather for Q&A and informal chat at 6:30.

Philip Sbrogna, an activist with the Monadnock Linux User Group, MonadLUG, will be presenting WINE. Philip got his start in the field of computers programming games for early microcomputers in ’79 after which he spent some time on mini’s at DEC. After an intermission on submarines he returned to the world of corporate computing where his daily fare at a small southern NH company provides him some opportunity to do the DB & Web dev thing. Personal interests include optimizing algorithms & innovative datastructures; particularly NXDs. He’s been a Linux enthusiast since switching from Coherent to Slackware in ’94.

Learn more about running Windows programs under Linux natively (Ubuntu Jaunty for presentation). Talk will include architectural overview & practical demonstration of what works and what doesn’t. Bring your favorite Window program along to see how it fares.

Note this meeting is at the Hopkinton Public Library 61 Houston Drive, Hopkinton/Contoocook, NH. Google map here. (Also, if you are coming from the southwest on route 202/9, the route 127 road over the Hopkinton Dam is once again open after a long repair closure.)

No CentraLUG meeting tonight

By Ted Roche on June 1, 2009 in Home Page

I had no luck in securing an alternate location in time to advertise the Central NH Linux User Group meeting that usually meets the first Monday of the month, and so have canceled the meeting. Please join us in July on July 6th at the Hopkinton Public Library when Philip Sbrogna will make a presentation on Wine, the Windows runtime environment for Linux.

CentraLUG Notes, 4-May-2009, Cole Tuininga on MySQL Optimization

By Ted Roche on May 28, 2009 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, Technology, Web Development

Sixteen people attended the May meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group. Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for the use of their meeting room and projector!

Announcements:

David Marston, SwaNH Dinner, May 14th
Maddog: working with Koolu on Freerunner-based phone, running “Cupcake,” the version 1.5 of the Google Android phone OS. See http://www.engadgetmobile.com/tag/koolu/ and
Me: watch gnhlug.org for future meeting announcements

Cole works for Dyn Inc, the parent company to DynDNS and the other Dynamic companies. Cole Tuininga presented tips and tricks on optimizing the performance of MySQL in high-traffic, large-dataset situations. He talked about the selection process Dyn, Inc went through to select databases and the large scale processes they have automated at Dyn. You can find the slides on the GNHLUG site at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MySQLOptimization.

By the way, seven of us made it to Panera Bread before the meeting for a breaking of the bread. I hope to make this a regular extension to the regular meetings.

Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for providing the facilities, to Cole for the presentation, to all for participating!

June meeting *Might* be next week, or we may have to reschedule — securing a location has proven to be a problem. Stay tuned.

Older posts

Navigation