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.

Software Maintenance

The full title of David Collier-Brown's talk at this month's GTALUG meeting is "You don't know jack about Software Maintenance." To the typical manager (aka PHB) software maintenance is something you do after the project is in production. As any experienced programmer will tell you, this is completely and utterly false. Maintenance starts during development. The XP crowd even explicitly say that development is maintenance.

David shared some of his experience of how you design your software to be maintainable from the beginning. He used a real world example of a versioned structure from when he was developing Multics. Yes, he goes back that far. ^_^ David's final piece of advice was: don't tell the PHB that you are doing maintenance during development.

It was interesting have a programming oriented talk at GTALUG for a change.

Feeding Your Media Player

At this month's TLUG meeting, Colin McGregor gave a talk on feeding your media player under Linux. In other words, if you use linux, what tools do you need to "acquire" the music and video for your media player. The talk was originally presented to a beginner Linux user group so it avoided too much technical details, but it was interesting nonetheless. One surprise was that Colin covered digitizing audio cassettes for those who are feeling nostalgia for the 1980's.

Active Directory

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the one system that everyone dreams of replacing with an open source solution. William Muriithi gave an interesting talk about how he tried to use BIND, a Kerberos server, OpenLDAP, and Samba 3 to replace an Active Directory server. Unfortunately, even if you get all of that working, you still can't eliminate the AD server completely. AD has several peculiarities and extensions that are missing in the open source solution which make it unworkable with the Windows clients.

The best hope for replacing AD is Samba 4 but it is still only in alpha release. It looks like ditching Active Directory will remain a dream for a little while longer.

GIMP

Last night's TLUG meeting featured Giles Orr demonstrating GIMP, the free image processing application. He showed some of the common tasks he performs before posting his photographs to his web site. As only an occasional GIMP user myself, I found the talk very instructive and practical. Giles has been using GIMP for about 9 years but during the question period, even he had to admit there were corners of GIMP that he has not fully explored. I don't feel so bad now. ;-)

Backups

Last night's topic at the TLUG meeting was backups. I'm not a system administrator so I'm always interested in picking up some tricks from the professionals. The presenter was Robert Brockway who is an experienced system administrator so there was good chance of learning a few things.

Robert covered tape backups of course, but it was interesting that he actually prefers disks for most situations. Ultimately, it depends on how much data you need to back up and more importantly, how valuable it is, but it helps to know a pro would recommend disks as a good solution. However, he emphasised that no matter what you use, if you don't have an off site backup, a disaster will make all your efforts meaningless.

ICANN

The talk at this month's TLUG meeting was on the politics behind the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and was actually more interesting than I expected it to be. ICANN is a big, complex bureaucracy with so many stakeholders pulling it in different directions that it is hard to imagine actual Internet users getting heard above the noise. The speaker, Evan Liebovitch, is involved with the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) which is meant to give a voice to the larger community of Internet users. Given his position, Evan was able to give an interesting view of ICANN as an insider.

OpenStreetMap

This month's TLUG meeting had a presentation on OpenStreetMap. The talk was very long but covered everything from the projects early history, to GPS data collection, to editing the map. The real benefit of user contributed data is the project is that it is often more up to date than the commercial offerings. There is T-intersection in a Toronto neighbourhood that Google Maps shows as a normal intersection. However, traffic calming measures has closed the intersection to vehicle traffic and some one had taken the time to fix it on OpenStreetMap. Most the streets in my neighbourhood are still missing name tags, so I'll have sign up and try some editing.

Redhat Directions

The speaker at this month's TLUG meeting was a technical sales rep from Redhat. Normally I would cringe at that but he has given talks at TLUG before and he is very entertaining. Except the last time he presented at a meeting, he worked for Novell. How fortunes can change.

Redhat's is target market is servers for big business and most of the people at TLUG work in that environment, so they probably got more out the presentation than I did. One area I found interesting was how Redhat maintains good relations with the developers of the open source projects on which they depend. Large customers sometimes ask for new features or changes, but Redhat will reject the customer's request if the changes do not fit into the future plans of the project's developers. It may mot be good for customer relations but it avoids a worse problem of Redhat having to maintain forks of various projects just to keep a customer happy.

It was a little surprising that Redhat is the largest corporate contributor of code to the Linux kernel and other free software projects, but it make sense. IBM has many proprietary products under its control, whereas Redhat relies entirely on free software for its business. It was these little pieces of information that gave me new understanding of where Redhat fits into the overall open source world.