Linux And Ham Radio

At this month's GTALUG meeting, Steward Russell gave a brief introduction to the Amateur Radio Service and some of the software he uses in his Linux-based set up. Very few amateur radio operators use Linux, although Steward did not give any actual numbers.

The primary software for general communication is fldigi, which is free software and runs on Linux. However, Wine was mentioned several times, as the vast majority of software used by ham radio operators is Windows only, which is annoying but hardly surprising. The Industry Canada software used to take the license test, is one such example.

Steward also mentioned "software defined radio" (a phrase I first heard a few years ago from my brother, another ham radio geek) as the possible future of amateur radio but not everyone in the community is convinced. The amateur radio hobby is over a hundred years old and there are many curmudgeons who prefer the tried and tested over new fangled gadgets.

Plan 9

At this month's GTALUG meeting, Scott Sullivan gave an introduction to Plan 9, developed as a research project at Bell Labs in the 1980s as a possible replacement for Unix. Plan 9 is mainly of interest to OS researchers and hobbyists. For the rest of us, the OS is quite limited. Someone asked if you could read your mail on Plan 9 but never got a clear answer as to how you might do it.

Linux incorporates a few concepts from Plan 9. Some, such as /proc, /dev, and /sys, are obvious, while others such as FUSE or unionfs, are less so. Linux directly supports Plan 9's 9p protocol, although no tools were mentioned that actually uses it. The Glendix project intends to run a Plan 9 user space on top of the Linux kernel.

Despite Scott's enthusiasm for Plan 9, in the end I was not inspired to look at it more closely. Plan 9 has some interesting concepts but none of it is very useful to me. Just being cool is not enough.

Org-Mode

At this month's GTALUG meeting, Sacha Chua demonstrated Org-mode, an Emacs mode for making and organising notes. Sacha's enthusiasm for the subject was wonderful. To say that she is a huge fan of Emacs is an equally huge understatement. Her jabs at vi users were gentle. ^_^

Org-mode is nice. Nice enough to tempt me into using Emacs again. (I'm one of those weird people who has used both vim and Emacs.) However, I note that someone is working on a partial clone of Org-mode for vim, called VimOrganizer, which may be worth checking out when it's complete. VimOutliner is another, more mature option.

Random Discussion

The scheduled speaker at the GTALUG meeting was incapacitated by illness so we had a random discussion type of meeting, which coincidently resembled the format of the pub gathering after the meeting, sans beer of course. Actually, the hour and a half meeting passed by before I noticed and nobody got bored and left early, so I would call it a success. Probably wouldn't want it to be a regular thing, but it makes an interesting stand by solution when the speaker bails suddenly.

SugarCRM

At this month's GTALUG meeting we had a largely audience directed demonstration of the Sugar Customer Relations Management (SugarCRM) web application. This style of presentation works very well at GTALUG meetings. ^_^

Dynamic Languages Smack Down

Despite its title, this month's GTALUG meeting was very civilized. The Dynamic Languages Smack Down was a whirlwind comparison of several programming languages, presented in a moderated panel format. The inclusion of less popular languages such as Smalltalk, Lisp and Erlang was a definite plus. The panelist had to discuss both the strengths and the weaknesses of each language, so it was a balanced presentation. It became clear very quickly was most of the panalists used at least one of the other languages being presented, so comparing them was easier. All-in-all it was an informative and entertaining evening.

Q & A

This months's GTALUG speaker had to cancel so the meeting was turned into a Q & A session. The variety of topics that come up in these sessions is quite astonishing. GTALUG is a pretty diverse group.

Amazon EC2

The presenter at this month's GTALUG meeting was Fabio Neves (FZero), who gave a brief, but informative, introduction to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Even though I know more about EC2 now, I still can't think of a single thing where I might need it, which is kind of sad. Oh well, you never know...

Mass Linux Desktop Deployment

At this month's GTALUG meeting, Colin McGregor gave a short talk on his experience with mass Linux desktop deployments in various projects he has worked on. After the presentation the topic was opened for discussion, which was actually the best way to handle the subject. There are so many different methods and tools to accomplish such deployments and the open discussion drew upon the members' collective experience with some of these choices. It worked very well.

Street Hacking?

With a topic title of Linux Urban Street Hacking, I wasn't really sure what to expect. William Porquet turned the important but dry subject of security into an interesting talk with his personal "war stories" about his experiences with broken security systems. At the same time he offered sound, simple advice for keeping yourself reasonably secure on line. Many on these things may seem obvious but are worth repeating nonetheless.

HTML5

At this month's GTALUG meeting, Myles Braithwaite gave an informative talk on some of the more interesting tags in the HTML5 specification. Myles avoided going to deeply into the technical details which kept the talk moving at a good pace. The examples were easy to understand but using syntax highlighting made them a bit difficult to read at times. Myles occasionally offered an opinion on the merits of the some of the tags which was quite entertaining.

I liked his "take no prisoners" approach to the usual interruptions that occur at a GTALUG meeting. ^_^

Distributed Databases

The presentation at this month's GTALUG meeting was an overview of distributed databases and some of the of the concepts around them. The subject inevitably wandered into the debate between RDBMS which are accessed using SQL, and the so-called NoSQL databases, which essentially store key-value pairs. Chris Browne, the presenter, is deeply involved with the PostgreSQL, so he left no doubt as to which side of the debate he sits. This debate would fill an entire presentation and Chris deftly managed to avoid letting it derail his presentation.

Clustering

At this month's GTALUG meeting, Madison Kelly gave a talk on clustering. This topic is very broad so she immediately narrowed it down to high availability clustering. Madison learned clustering from the school of hard knocks as the saying goes, which made the talk much more interesting as she shared her experiences.

While I'm not deeply interested in the subject, I enjoyed the talk. However, Madison had way too much material for a two hour presentation. As a result we missed seeing a demonstration of a cluster in action, which was disappointing. Hopefully, we'll have her back sometime for for a show and tell.

Plone

Plone is one of, if not the, oldest open source content management systems around. Plone is build on top of Zope, an application server written in Python. Plone was the subject of this month's talk at the GTALUG meeting. The presenter was Jordan Baker, who specializes in Plone deployments.

Plone is really intended for large scale, enterprise sites, so while you could use Plone for a personal blog, it would be serious overkill. Plone is very easy to get running, which is major selling point in a enterprise setting, when you can safely promise the site will be working the next day.

Now, I've heard an anecdote that it might take another six months to customize the site if the customer has any special requirements, but all of Plone's core functionality is completely usable during the customization. According to the anecdote, this is the main reason Plone consultants are very well paid. ^_^

Jordan tempted the demo gods and demonstrated a beta of Plone 4, which looks very slick. However, this type of admin interface is available in Drupal, Joomla, and others, which naturally led to the question of why choose Plone. Jordan gave a number of reasons but the the most telling was that he likes Python, which indicated that the choice was more personal than technical. And there's nothing wrong with that at all.

QPID

Rajith Attapattu presented Qpid at this month's GTALUG meeting. Qpid is an implementation of AMQP, an open data communications protocol which has among its users large financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. These days stock trading happens at ridiculous speeds and the protocols previously used to transmit these transactions were all proprietary and extremely expensive. AMQP is free and open while retaining the same reliability. It's interesting how free can look so good when large sums of money are involved.

LAMP

Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits presented an overview of the Linux Apache MySQL PHP (LAMP) stack at this month's GTALUG meeting. This is a lot to cover in a couple of hours but he managed to get to all the main points nicely. This is not surprising since Khalid deploys LAMP systems professionally so he is very knowledgeable. He even found time to point out alternatives to the various components and still managed to avoid stirring up any preference wars, especially around the choice of programming languages.

Booting From A Network

At this months GTALUG meeting, Scott Sullivan gave a talk and demonstration on setting up network booting using Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) and then using it to install from the network. He explained that PXE capability exists in all PC BIOSes these days and the server side requires both a DHCP server and a TFTP server. The demo up to this point worked well and we were shown the client booting from the network, but when he booted a Fedora Core 12 installation CD, it refused to recognize the projector, so he had to abandon that part of the demonstration.

Finally, Scott explained how he uses net booting and Kickstart to handle Fedora Core upgrades, which are really reinstalls. Apart from automating the install, Kickstart allows him specify the packages he wants added or removed after the install so that he gets exactly the same software after every reinstall. Net booting isn't necessary for this, but it is useful for netbook computers which do not normally have CD drives.

It was an interesting talk and Scott made a good effort to try and demonstrate PXE.

Revision Control

This month's GTALUG meeting consisted of series of short talks on four different revision control systems. Aaron Bentley was first and talked about Bazaar. Aaron used to be a core developer for Bazaar so his knowledge runs much deeper than the user level talk he presented. Christopher Browne talked about Darcs, the only one out the four that I've never used. Drew Sullivan presented git, in a rather, um, unstructured fashion. Myles Braithwaite gave a rather frenetic talk on Mercurial as he was running out of time.

Now far the fun part. Which one is better? The only honest answer is none of them. For any typical project consisting of a few dozen developers, there is nothing to choose between the four systems. It is interesting that whenever a feature was held up as a reason why one system was better, it was fairly easy for one of other the presenters to shoot it down. It was all for fun of course, since nobody could hold the high ground for very long and any differences was just splitting hairs.

BASH Programming

At the this month's GTALUG meeting, Chris F. A. Johnson gave a talk on BASH programming. Chris is one of our shell programming experts and is the author of Pro Bash Programming, so I knew the talk would be informative. While most of us write simple shell scripts for automate everyday tasks, Chris uses BASH for all his application development whether trivial or complex.

BASH never appealed to me as a general programming language for one reason only: it use too many special characters as syntactic sugar. It is the same reason I never took to Perl, TCL, and even Ruby. But that's just aesthetics and has nothing to do with the capabilities of the language. And, as Chris showed us tonight, BASH is plenty capable of doing everything that you might need for writing real world applications.

GTALUG Short Talks

The October meeting is also the GTALUG's AGM which usually makes a full presentation impossible. This time we had series of short talks that were quite interesting. A late room change caused two speakers to go astray so the remaining speakers perhaps got a little more time that they were expecting.

Myles Braithwaite answered the question "So you want a personal web site?" with a quick tour of the well known tools but he showed his Python leanings and included PyBlosxom, which is hardly mainstream. Christopher Browne introduced the screen utility. I use screen everyday and it is one of the most useful utilities I ever found. Seneca Cunningham covered exiftool which she uses as part of her work in image processing. The number of distinct tags that exiftool understands is truly mind bending.