Tag Archives | GNHLUG

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!

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.

Notes from PySIG, 27-March-2008: urllib2 and PySoy

By Ted Roche on March 28, 2008 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Seventeen people attended last night’s Python Special Interest Group, one of many active chapters of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group. It was a long meeting, starting at 7 PM with a round of introductions, discussions of gotchas, announcements, problems people are working on (creating a lamda that does ‘Nothing’ — for a certain definition of Nothing!), subclassing Array.Array, learning a few new tricks about SciTE.

Mark had great news on his progress in getting Open Source in the Lawrence Library in Pepperell. The librarians have been very receptive, setting up an area to display information, promoting ongoing meetings, etc. Go, Mark!

Kent put on a very good Kent’s Korner on urllib2, and Arc Riley gave a very interesting presentation on PySoy, a powerful 3D gaming engine driven with Python.

Sean O’Shea provides extensive notes with even more links at his blog — thanks for the great notes!

Thanks to Bill for organizing and announcing, the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the great facilities, and to all for attending and participating!

PySIG, 27-March-2008: PySoy and urllib

By Ted Roche on March 26, 2008 in LAMP, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Organizer Bill Sconce announces the monthly Python Special Interest Group to be held on Thursday, March 27th, at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH. The main presentation will be on PySoy, a 3-D gaming engine. The Kent’s Korner will feature urllib2, a utility module for working with http, ftp and similar protocols, with supports for POSTs and GETs, authorization and so forth.

MonadLUG notes, 13-March-2008, Philip Sbrogna on WINE

By Ted Roche on March 18, 2008 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, PHP, Technology, Web Development

Twelve people attended the March meeting of the Monadnock Region Linux User Group, MonadLUG, held as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the SAU 1 offices on Hancock Road in Peterborough.

Charlie called the meeting to order at 7 PM and we had the usual round of announcements. One member offered an HP LaserJet 4L and a new cartridge to anyone interested. There’s problems with the paper feeding, likely the rollers, and he didn’t have the inclination to fix it himself and went out and bought a new duplexing laser. If anyone’s interested, we can try to get you in touch with him.

Philip Sbrogna was the main presenter, speaking on Wine. Philip works as sysadmin for a local company, and has past experience as a game software developer (as well as a nuclear power
operator, a past profession we share) and is very interested in getting games working well under Linux. Wine Is Not an Emulator, but a API layer that provides the resources Windows executables need to run under Linux. The main page is at http://www.winehq.org and there’s a lot of information available there. Philip was running OpenSuse 10.x and demonstrated how easy it was to use the built-in YAST tool to locate, download and install a current and stable Wine release, version 0.9.42. Despite having practiced it several times, things don’t work the same during a presentation, and Philip was great about rolling with the punches and showing us how to configure, troubleshoot and tweak on Wine. We talked about the commercial alternatives, CrossOver Office from CodeWeavers and Cedega’s work with getting high-end games working, the Application Database at WineHQ where you can examine the list of programs known to work or known to have limitations and pick up suggestions on how to tune the application to your needs.

Ken got a chance to show off the new facilities of the meeting room. A new hi-tech podium’s in place that supports two projector screens, one of which is a touch-screen, dry-erase screen. The project supports computer video, TV tuner, DVD, videotape and a color video camera that can scan and preserve on memory cards,a 21st century opaque projector. Beautiful equipment! It may take us a while to learn the magic X configuration to get it working, so be prepared for a little struggling at the beginning of the meetings.

Next month, Guy Pardoe will demonstrate Joomla 1.5, the newly-released (and significantly re-engineered) content management system written in PHP. There’s a book on Joomla 1.5, written by Barrie North, who’s spoken at the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group. It’s published by Prentice Hall PTR, an imprint of Pearson Education. Attendees to the recent CentraLUG meeting may recall we had a copy raffled away.

Thanks to Philip for a great presentation, to Ken for providing the space and facilities, to Charlie Farinella for organizing, promoting and moderating the evening, and to all for attending and participating!

MonadLUG notes, 11-October-2007: Ben Scott and DNS

By Ted Roche on October 27, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Late post: a great meeting Thursday night the 11th of October: thirteen people made it to the October meeting of the Monadnock Area Linux User Group, held as usual at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough on the second Thursday at 7 PM. Thanks to Ken for sponsoring us at the offices, and dealing diplomatically with the double-booking of the space.

Ben had a little trouble finding the place, after a long, long drive from Dover. We forgot to mention in the driving directions which of the dozens of “Use other door” doors the meeting was held behind, so Ben had to find the Boy Scout meeting and the girls volleyball practices before finding us. Charlie promised to update the directions.

Nonplussed by all of this, Ben gave a great presentation on DNS, reprising his previous presentations. He’d replaced the MagicPoint presentation with S5, and had a few technical issues with getting it to behave, but persevered. I expect we’ll see an update to the slides on:

http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PresentDNS

But the other files there (bind configuration files, sample inside and external zone files, etc.) should be relevant.

Ben gave a great overview of the Domain Name System and how it works from several client OSes, how the trail of DNS queries is processed, the structure of zone files, the structure of the BIND configuration files, and many of the common misconfigurations that lead to errors or just quiet failures.

It was a meeting well worth attending. Thanks to Ben for efforts above and beyond, to Charlie for hosting and managing the meeting, and to Ken and the SAU#1 offices for providing the facilities.

PySIG notes, 25-Oct-2007, Kent Johnson and Beautiful Soup sprint

By Ted Roche on October 26, 2007 in LAMP, OpenSource, Python, Technology

Thirteen people elected to skip watching the second game of the World Series (Go Sox!) to attend the October meeting of the Python Special Interest Group (PySIG), held as usual at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, New Hampshire, on the fourth Thursday of the month, 7 PM until… well, 10 PM last night!

The usual slew of announcements was made: the PySIG won’t meet on the usual night due to the Thanksgiving holiday. A meeting might happen the week after, since there are five Thursdays. Stay tuned for the official announcement. Other affiliated GNHLUG meetings are posted to http://www.gnhlug.org and all are welcome.

I had proposed a programming challenge to PySIG: following recent discussions on the GNHLUG mailing lists about attendance at meetings, Jim Kuzdrall had suggested we more closely analyze the attendance data that’s been posted to the GNHLUG wiki [1] for the past two years or so. The data is accessible from there, but the HTML format is not too easy to manipulate into an analyze-able format.

Enter BeautifulSoup. BS is a utility written in Python that parses HTML, with a lot of toleration for somewhat malformed HTML, and produces a parsed tree that can be traversed or queried or parsed into its various elements. Kent S Johnson continued his great Kent’s Korner series with a presentation on the basics of using BeautifulSoup. Kent noted that the documentation on BS is remarkably good, with illustrative examples and exhaustive discussions. BS is in its third major version and continues to be supported by its original author.

After Kent’s Korner, Bill Sconce took the driver’s seat, set up BS on his machine and we began with the kernel of source Kent had supplied to parse the source. The group participated, suggested, yelled at typos, experimented, threw out code, started over, changed the angle of attack, and successfully produced code that not only parsed the existing page, but generated a comma-separated-value file with proper escaping, thanks to the csv module. Along the way, we discussed issued of character conversion (since BS uses the aptly-named UnicodeDammit module and csv wants ASCII), escaping issues, coding styles, and more.

At the end of the presentation, Kent got the projector again to show a somewhat different tack he had used to parse the HTML, with an emphasis on writing small functions to clean each column of the idiosyncracies found in the data (a “Saturday” in the date field, a date field a two-day event, approximated attendance ~24 and so forth) and generate some results: which groups had the highest attendance for the year? No one was surprised that Nashua/MerriLUG was #1, but who knew that PySIG was #2? Woo-hoo! We noted that RubySIG was last, but there’s a good sampling problem: they had just started up early in the year, and a couple attendance figures were missing.

To follow up from the meeting, we intended to merge Kent’s improvements into the group’s code and generate some CSV files that we can make available for download from the GNHLUG wiki for all to analyze, graph, visualize and study.

Thanks to Kent for preparing his Beautiful Soup presentation, to Bill Sconce and Alex Hewitt for arranging the meeting, to Bill again for having the patience to type while twelve people tsk’d at him, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the fine facilities, and to all for attending and vigorously participating in the meeting!

[1] which actually breaks down to:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents2007,
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents2006, and
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents2005

Adding a “skin=print.pattern” eliminates some of the “chrome”
surrounding the content.

Python Special Interest Group, Manchester, NH, 25-Oct-2007: Kent Johnson and Beautiful Soup

By Ted Roche on October 25, 2007 in LAMP, OpenSource, Python, Technology

The monthly meeting of the New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group takes place at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH on 25 October 2007 (the 4th Thursday as usual) at 7:00PM. The Beginners’ session precedes at 6:30 PM. (Bring a Python question!)

Kent S. Johnson will be the featured speaker. Along with his regular Kent’s Korner presentation, we’re going to try hacking at some actual code problems tonight: using Beautiful Soup to parse a web page and produce some useful data. Should be interesting.

Organizer Bill Sconce posts the meeting announcement here.

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