Tag Archives | Linux

New Hampshire Python SIG tomorrow night

On the Python announcement list, Bill Sconce posts: “The next meeting of the Greater New Hampshire Python & Milk/ Cookies SIG will be tomorrow night — Thursday, April 27th, at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, 7:00 P.M. (the usual place, the usual time).”

“Also, we have a special program. Paul Koning, who had never used Python until recently, will tell us about his first, “getting to know Python” programming experience. Something just a little bit challenging: rewriting PDP-11 TECO.”

“It should be an interesting evening, especially to hear about what went well (or not) in learning a new language in such an environment. Can you imagine writing TECO as your exercise to learn C++? (And of course, now we have TECO for Linux. And for the Mac. And for everything else wherever Python runs.)”

“We’ll also have our usual Q&A, and Python trivia. Because several people asked us about Python at LinuxWorld last week we’ll include some material for newbies. (Please be thinking about that – should we have a newbies segment EVERY meeting?)”

WHO: New Hampshire Python Special Interest Group

WHERE: Amoskeag Business Incubator, 33 South Commercial Street, Manchester, NH
Travel directions

WHEN: The fourth Thursday of each month at 7 PM, holidays allowing

WHAT: Paul Koning, TECO in Python, General Python Q&A

Hope to see you there!

End to End

I spent Thursday evening in Nashua, New Hampshire listening to a presentation at the Merrimack Valley Linux User Group (MerriLUG) by Eric Eldred, a Director at Creative Commons and plaintif in the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision rendered by the Supreme Court. Eric has a very low-key, well thought-out and persuasive presentation on the use of the Creative Commons license (the license used for this blog as well as millions of others). Great presentation! Based on discussions at that meeting, I’ll likely be dropping the “-nc” portion of the license. Paraphrasing what Eric said, “if you can figure out a way to make a million dollars off what I wrote, go to it!”

Friday morning involved a long scenic drive north through Franconia Notch to meet with hostmaster Jason Kern of KernBuilt and confer with a potential new client on an interesting social software application. Jason and I lunched at Miller’s Cafe and Bakery in Littleton, NH.

Accompanying me north via the wonders of podcasts was Doc Searls interviewing Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun MicroSystems, at the Syndicate 2005 conference. Jonathan had a slew of interesting insights and statistics. Sun has apparently woken from their slumbers of the late nineties, completely revised their product line, “Open Sourced” their OS (devil’s in the details, I’ll need to dig into this one a bit – what license, what terms, etc.) and are offering some pretty interesting machines – very low power, very high performance. Two great tidbits: who’s the number one camera manufacturer? What’s Google’s number two expense (People’s number one)? Very entertaining; made the trip go swiftly.

CentraLUG, May Day: What We Saw at LinuxWorld Boston

CentraLUG next meets on Monday, May 1, 2006 7pm at NHTI

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

This month’s meeting will feature GNHLUG members who attended the recent LinuxWorld conference and expo in Boston in an informal panel discussion “What We Saw at LinuxWorld.” Members of all GNHLUG chapters (as well as the general public) are encouraged to attend. As always, we’ll have some time to network and to ask that FOSS question that’s been bothering you. Tell your friends! Tell your co-workers! More details about the group are available at http://www.gnhlug.org. Hope to see you there!

Bruce Peren’s discusses the State of Open Source

Slashdot: Bruce Perens on the Status of Open Source. Lars Lehtonen writes to tell us that Bruce Perens has posted the text of his LinuxWorld press conference. In his talk he takes a look at many of the hot topics surrounding the open source community including ODF, NTP vs RIM, and GPLv3.” Very interesting. I’m not sure I follow the Abramoff-Delay-Gates-ODF scheme, but Peren’s covers a lot of interesting legal ground.

Parallels Virtual Machine for Mac OS X Intel

The surprise earlier this week was the Boot Camp software to dual boot Intel Mac machines into Windows XP. I knew there were already hacks out there to do it, but didn’t expect official support. But Apple and Microsoft seem to be behind it. The problem with dual-boot (or treble-boot: my ThinkPad offers WinXP, Kubuntu {dapper drake rocks!} and CentOS) is that it seems you’re never in the OS you want to be. Need to switch to Kubuntu to print some labels in gLabels? Shut down Windows (3 minutes), boot Kubuntu (2 minutes), load the labels and print. The next thing you need to do? Probably in one of the other OSes. The right answer is to run all of the OSes as Virtual Machines – all running and idling, or able to start and stop as needed without losing the already booted OS. VMWare is one of several companies doing this.

Linux also has a real contender in Xen, a native virtualization engine.

At LinuxWorld Boston this week, I visited the very low-key Apple booth and heard that something similar is on its way for the Mac: Parallels for Mac OS X is in beta and will allow simultaneous VMs running Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris or other OSes run on top of the host OS on the Intel Macs. That’s the ticket! Toggling between the OSes sounds like the right solution. Looking forward to seeing these products mature.

Virtual new Reality

From Garrett Fitzgerald’s Blog: “VMWars. Microsoft announces that it will give away Virtual Server. VMWare’s response? Not only are they giving away VMWare Player and VMWare Server Beta free, but they just opened up the specs for their Virtual Machine Disk format. *rubs hands gleefully* Ooh, this is gonna be good… hope VMWare’s smarter than Netscape was. 🙂 (Thanks to the /. folks for the pointer.)”

Over at Linux Watch: “One of the ironies of Microsoft’s PR move (giving away Virtual
Server) is that it really makes no sense to run a virtual machine on
top of Windows. Windows, as the forthcoming bloatware called Vista
shows to an extreme, takes up a lot of resource. As David Berlind
points out on his ZDNet blog, “One of the great advantages of Linux is
how, when you’re setting up a system, you can strip all of the bloat
except for only those components that you need to support whatever you
plan to run on the box.”

Looking forward to meeting the Xen folks at their booth at LinuxWorld this week!

LinuxWorld Boston this week

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes in The LinuxWorld Rumor Mill: “I could tell you what you will see at LinuxWorld Boston this coming week, but what’s the fun in that? Instead, here are some of the rumors I’ve been hearing about that may come up at the show.”

Don’t miss Booth #1035 where the Greater New Hampshire Linux Group will be back-to-back with the Boston Linux-Unix Group and across the aisle from Linux Journal, Wyse, and Apress in the midst of the conference floor. Here’s a detailed PDF of the expo floor. Lots to see, lots of folks to meet. Hope to see you there!

Powered by WordPress. Designed by Woo Themes

This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.