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CentraLUG: 1-Oct-2007: Michael Kazin shows Nagios

By on September 24, 2007 in CSS, LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Technology

The Central NH Linux User Group returns to the Library after a summer hiatus at the Sybase offices in Concord. The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of most months at the New Hampshire Technical Institute‘s Library, room 146, at 7 PM. Next month’s meeting is on October 1st at 7 PM. Directions and maps are available at http://www.centralug.org Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

At this meeting, Michael Kazin will be presenting Nagios, the Open Source monitoring service. From http://www.nagios.org, “Nagios® is an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” Written in Perl and controlled by text configuration files, Nagios offers the ability to alert administrators to a huge number of possible problems with connectivity, speed, or performance. Nagios offers a web interface for close-to-real-time monitoring, email/pager alerts, the ability to launch other programs, etc.”

Michael is a computer consultant at a well-known consultancy working for well-known companies in the military-industrial complex. He is a member of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group’s Board of Directors. Previously, Michael helped run the Rutgers University Student Linux User Group and gained his experience with Nagios by monitoring hundreds of machines in the Rutgers Data Center.

Future Meetings: Currently, we have a couple interesting meetings coming up: November: Ted Roche on Cascading Style Sheets, December: David Berube on Ruby, January: Bruce Dawson on low-power Linux computers. As always, meetings are subject to change. You are encouraged to join the low-traffic announcement list to get announcement and cancellation information.

DLSLUG, 2 August: Usable Web Applications with Rails and AJAX

By on July 28, 2007 in LAMP, Ruby, Technology

Bill McGonigle announces the August meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, held as usual at Dartmouth College, Carson Hall, Room L01 from 7 – 9 PM. The main presentation will be “Usable Web Applications with Rails and AJAX,” presented by William Henderson-Frost.

“Will will present Greenout!, a new web application that’s focused on usability and developed on the Ruby on Rails platform using AJAX techniques, the Prototype library, and plenty of custom code. He’ll describe the process of developing a web application with Ruby on Rails, the challenges of writing an AJAX application, and some of the tips and techniques he’s developed along the way.”

“Will is a Senior at Dartmouth College, majoring in Computer Science, and a Hanover native. He enjoys good programming languages, like Ruby.”

Sounds like an interesting meeting. Ruby is a pretty sleek language, and the Rails platform makes application development far easier.

PySIG, 22-March-2007: Project Night

By on March 25, 2007 in Home Page, OpenSource, Python, Technology

An even dozen people showed up for the Python Special Interest Groups March meeting, held as usual at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH.

Bill Sconce called us to order promptly at 7 PM and we proceeded through the printed agenda. It was duly noted the Ben Scott deserved heckling despite his absence. We ran through announcements of a couple of upcoming meetings, plugging the MythTV installfest beta and pointing out Jarod’s book. We mentioned meetings upcoming for the LUGs, including ZFS at DLSLUG, LVM at CentraLUG and the new Ruby group.

Kent’s Korner: Kent S. Johnson presented his month talk, this month on list comprehensions. Kent had a great handout, and has collected his past couple of handouts in one place. Starting with simple examples and building in complexity, Kent lead us through what can be an intimidating topic in a way most couple follow. Some great discussions, on-topic and off-, regarding assignment and Python idioms, always make this a fun part of the meeting.

There was some discussion of Python 3000 and its expected schedule. Bill Sconce had a video of Guido practicing his Py3K presentation in front of an audience at Google, which he went on to present at PyCon.

For the Gotcha of the month, Bill Freeman offered up an “Un-Gotcha:” a=b=4 works, but not for the reason you might think. Assignments of this style in C have a different underlying meaning, and perhaps in some circumstances, different side effects. A key to understanding the single = assignment in Python is to understand that it is a STATEMENT. There is no value associated with the statement and “chained” assignments in Python like the above are specially-coded as an exception case. This lead to yet another great discussion.

Ric Werme showed off the web pages that result from his Python software that collects and forwards weather data from his weather station. His current conditions page, http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wx/current.html has links to everything else. Ric bought the weather station in part to have an excuse to write more Python code, and his current code runs the gamut from implementing the weather station protocol through pyserial.py and the serial port to CGI scripts that take data requests, fetches the data from MySQL, creates gnuplot data files that create .gif files, and returns a HTML page to display the results. His description of the software is at http://werme.8m.net/wx/vantage_software.html .

Ric also demonstrated a Python cgi script for collecting data for a weather observers group that Todd Gross created while he was WHDH. It’s customizable, so people can create a form preloaded with their location that offer just the data they collect, and the submission code adds it to a MySQL database and recreates a web page of members reports over the previous day.

Shawn O’Shea showed off Python running in the Win32 and COM environments. Shawn does a lot of work administering and automating Windows configurations, and the COM set of interfaces can allow a lot of internal manipulation of the major applications, a big step up from the VBScripts supplied by Microsoft with some of the tools. Shawn demonstrated the canonical Hello, World with Microsoft Word, but then dug into a couple more concrete and practical examples with querying the Registry and spelunking in the IIS metabase.

Lots of interesting stuff coming up at future meetings: Martin Ledoux offered to show something on the work he’s done with amateur book-binding with pytut/pyref books. Kent has promised an update soon on his real-life experiences with Django. Ray Côté may be able to show off the new web site he used as an excuse to miss the meeting. And I’ll bet Bill will wheedle some more cookies from Janet.

Thanks to Bill Sconce for organizing, Alex Hewitt for getting the networking working, the Amoskeag Business Incubator for providing the great facilities, Janet for the awesome cookies, Kent for his great Korner, Bill Freeman for the csv module and those strange blinking white blocks, Ric Werme for demoing his weather projects, Shawn for the Win32-COM-Automation and everyone for attending and participating.

P.S. Anyone got python running on a WRT54G?

P.P.S. Tom Mosco mentioned to me that the Chicago Python group had a very long presentation on Django by the creators and also a Ruby on Rails presentation by its author. Videos can be found at here and here

Eric Sink: Baptists and Boundaries

By on January 20, 2007 in Home Page

Eric Sink, a fine essayist and software developer, does a little vanity Googling in “Baptists and Boundaries” and makes several excellent points about people and their world views, the punchiest of which is “Objects in browser are smaller than they appear.” Do read the essay and enjoy.

I’ve been involved in several insular communities (Commodore, GEOS, Amiga, FoxPro) that believed that they had The One True Truth and all others were mistaken, ignoring the growing evidence outside the walls that other alternatives might have something going for them, too. My biggest shock in my journeys outside the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field has been discovering that there are rich and powerful tools, long traditions of software excellence and some subtle (and blatent) differences in culture. The rich bazaar of choices: BSD vs. UNIX vs. Linux vs. Solaris, Perl vs. Python vs. PHP vs. Ruby, PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. SQLite vs. BerkeleyDB, tabs vs. spaces, vi vs. emacs, n-tier vs. mvc, African vs. English swallow, only add to the richness and freedom of the environment.

The biggest complaint of people stuck with a one-size-fits-all solution is that there is no choice. The biggest complaint when faced with the dazzling alternatives of FOSS is that there are too many choices. With great choices comes great responsibility. Conversely, “choosing” to stay with a one-size-fits-all monolithic solution is no choice at all, but rather an abdication of responsibility and a surrendering of freedom. Choose wisely.

IT Conversations audiocasts I’m listening to this week.

By on February 7, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Ruby, Security, Technology

While on the road to a client yesterday, I got to listen to a couple of audiocasts, as the mountainous terrain around here makes radio reception difficult. As I’ve blogged before, a five cent CD-R seems cheaper than the batteries to try to jury-rig an MP3 player to a FM transmitter to tune in on the car radio. Insert disc. Play. Very simple. On this trip, I listened to:

Joichi Ito: The Future of Blogging. “The Internet is truly becoming an open network with the rise of amateur content and open source software. In this talk, Joi Ito takes us through the growth of the internet as an open network in layers to the point where the killer app is now user generated content. Earlier, it was the little guys around the edges of the internet who created the open standards which made the web work, and today it is those same people who fuel it with their creativity. Joi also shares with us his observations of the remix culture seen on the net. [Accelerating Change audio from IT Conversations]” — quite the blast of conversation. The key point: user content, rather than mainstream media, is the next big internet wave. Great moment: Joichi points out that “amateur” comes from Latin roots of “from the heart” and doesn’t say anything about the quality.

Saul Klein, VP Marketing, Skype: “Skype has become one of the prominent disruptive technologies of the early 21st century. Allowing anyone with a broadband connection to make cheap calls all over the world and free voice, text (and now, video) calls to anyone on the Skype network, it has changed the way many people think of the telephone. Skype has influenced pricing and availability, and is so ubiquitous that it is lending its name to become the verb for using PC-based voice over IP… In this interview, Larry Magid talks with Saul Klein, VP Marketing of Skype. They discuss the changing nature of the telecom business, Skype’s new video feature and the potential for Skype to bring telephony to previously under-served markets.”

David Heinemeier Hansson, Developer, Ruby on Rails: Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails, “Ruby on Rails has received a lot of buzz among the web developer community, but many wonder exactly what the fuss is all about. In this high order bit from the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention, developer David Heinemeier Hansson explains the secrets behind the success of Ruby on Rails.”

All audiocasts came from the IT Conversations: All Programs feed. Worth checking out, and considering supporting IT Conversations if they bring as much value to you as they do to me.

Well, we’ve still got the cool codename…

By on June 9, 2005 in Home Page

Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports that ‘Monad’ Scripting Shell Unlikely to Debut in Longhorn. “However, Microsoft is planning to make its alternative to Unix and Linux command-line scripting available as part of Exchange 12, due next year.”

One complaint I hear about Open Source software is the lack of a “roadmap” – a plan with features and ship dates. On the closed source side, no one can claim to know anything about which feature will or will not make it into Longhorn (WinFS? Monad?) but the ship date of “end of 2006” seems pretty firm. However, what value is committing to a ship date without a similar commitment to a feature set?

P.S. If you’re really looking for a bash-like scripting shell for Windows, why not install CygWin and use Bash and an entire UNIX-like environment? Or you might prefer Ruby, if you’re interested in some of the object-oriented features that might (or might not) be in Monad. Both are shipping now, supported now, free, and don’t require you to use Exchange 12. Waiting on Monad is likely to be, well, monadonous.

CentraLUG meeting, March 7th: Webrick, LinuxWorld wrap-up

By on February 24, 2005 in Home Page, Ruby

David Berube, our fearless leader, posts: Monday, March 7th – Webrick and Linux World. CentraLUG is having another great meeting on Monday March 7th, and this time, we’ll be covering Webrick, a powerful system for easily creating custom webservers in Ruby. With Webrick, it’s easy to drop a full webserver into any application. We’ll also have a brief recap of LinuxWorld. Per usual, there will be copius amounts of free caffeine.

It’s at the NHTI. You can get directions on the NHTI site: http://www.nhti.net/frames_Map.html. It’s in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on that map. The room is 146, and it starts at 7:00.

Installation blues…

By on March 31, 2004 in Home Page

I’m been talking with a couple developers who are working on a project in Python and they offered to give me access to the source code. I was interested in trying it out on the Mac. In order to do that, I needed the SubVersion client. I visit http://subversion.tigris.com, and there are instructions for downloading it, using a tool called fink. It turns out that fink is a friendly front end for the apt-get and dpkg tools of Debian, modified for OS X usage. Lots of packages available, but first I have to download and install fink. Fink has an optional GUI, Fink Commander, and I throw that in the mix, too. After install, of course, fink needs to be updated to the latest versions. Doing that fails, as Fink is depending on certain Apple developer tools being available. Surfing the Apple site for a while tells me the developer tools are right here on my hard drive, under “Installers.” I install the Apple developer tools. Fink updates. I try to install the SubVersion package, and it fails with an error about a java14-dev package it can’t find. After trying a few variations on the command, I hit Google and find a link that tells me I need the Java 1.4.2 SDK update of the Apple Developer Tools from the Apple site.

Going to the Apple site reveals that you have to register at the Apple Developer Connection. I register. Plodding through the interface, I attempt to download the Java SDK. It fails. Three times. I log out, and back in to the ADC. I download and install the Java SDK successfully. I try to install the SubVersion package again. Finding all these delightful tools on my machine, it attempts to recompile everything it can find, text scrolling by for an hour before it reports an error. It seems that the X11 server I have has a conflict with the XFree86 server it wants to install, and it tells me there is a way to resolve this, but I can’t understand the instructions. A little more surfing and I find the page on the fink site (http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/x11/inst-xfree86.php) that explains the difference between Apples X11 and XFree86, again, with instructions I can’t understand. I read it, three times. I could just uninstall the Apple X11 server, but I installed that in order to run OpenOffice.org, and Apple’s X11 was the recommended choice. I walk the dogs. I break for dinner.

I read it again. I decide it wants me to install the X11 SDK that comes with the Apple X11 package. Can’t find it on a search of the Apple site, but digging around on the hard disk in the Installers folder finds it and it installs. Update fink, per the instructions, and then try to rebuild “fink install system-xfree86” with no luck: “no packages to install.” Return to the shell for installing svn and try that process again. It asks me to pick the correct ‘virtual packages’ for python and apache I go with the defaults. It informs me it needs to install 34 dependent packages (down from 52 the first run, iirc) including such things as ruby, guile, Python and Apache, and I tell it to continue. Mindless text scrolls across the terminal as make and compilers and sh and rm fight for notice. Staring at the screen just lets me catch glances at warnings about missing prototypes and implicit declarations; nothing I feel I have a lot of control over.

I fall asleep at the machine at 9:30. The dog scratch at the door at 5:10; time to get up. Compile completed successfully. I download the packages from Subversion without a problem.

No wonder Open Source development takes so long.

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