Last night was our monthly MHVLUG meeting, and it also marked 7 years since our first meeting.
7 years… it’s kind of hard to imagine. I was also really touched, multiple times last night, by the waves of appreciation I got from folks in the room.
Last night was a perfect night, even though it started as anything but. At 4:30, Thor’s hard drive decided it was no longer a drive, and without a backup of the presentation, we were scrambling in the office to try to recover the drive, and come up with a backup plan, which meant finding another good base presentation online he could work from. I still hadn’t gotten an ack back from the library, so had to call to ensure someone would actually open the door, and we didn’t get locked out of our space. Pat called during setup, and reported that they were having a mail server meltdown at work, so he would try to get there by the end with the cake, but there were no promises. This was exceptionally more chaos than we typically have to deal with for a meeting, but it definitely meant the night was starting off off balance, and we were just working to try to get it back on track.
As the meeting was about to start, Bruce Locke interrupted and got up and said a few words about how much he and others appreciated the efforts I’ve put into the group. He then presented me with a set of gift certificates to our local beer mecca, that a number of members had gotten together and pitched in on. I was really really touched by that. While this is a labor of love, it’s very energizing to have such a tangible gesture of how much it means to others.
The talk was great. Thor worked well off the borrowed slides, and we had a lot of great questions from the audience. Sahana is a great project, and really demonstrates how much of an impact we can have on people’s lives as members of the open source community. Sahana is actively being used right now in Haiti and Chile to handle the aftermath of their recent earthquakes. We had at least one new face in the room, who had first attended our meeting last month virtually (over the live stream), and had come out for the face to face meeting. As that was exactly what I was trying to get out of the streaming, I’m really glad it seems to be working.
I was given another comment of appreciation from the floor when I let folks know about the upcoming meetings we had locked and loaded for the year. It is hard to get that far out ahead on the schedule, and it was great that everyone seemed to really be excited about our upcoming meetings.
The cake… was not a lie.
Pat showed up about 7:40 with the cake, just a few minutes after the lecture had ended. We had people hanging out and chatting until 8, then 15 folks came out of the palace afterwards. We had great conversation that went until 11.
As I was driving home, I thought to myself how perfect that all had really been. Good people, a great talk, and lots of good conversation. Really… just perfect.
On January 9, 2010 · Comments Off
Last Wednesday, we did a live stream of the MHVLUG meeting for my Git presentation. This was an experiment to try new ways of getting people engaged in the group. Most people seemed to think it went quite well, though there were dissenting views that didn’t like the stream quality. I think part of the dissenting view was because the expectations were that this would be a full on replacement for coming to the meetings, which I did not intend.
We used ustream to do the streaming, which has the advantage of working quite nicely with Linux and the Logitech 9000 webcam I’ve got (at some point I’ll do a detailed writeup on that). Ustream’s streaming app is written in Flash, which is quite clever, and means all you need is Flash 10 to start broadcasting.
My goals for this experiment were pretty simple:
- see if the tech got in the way of the experience of the people in the room. If it was too intrusive, the experiment failed.
- see if people connected to the stream that couldn’t make it. At our height we had 8 people on that weren’t in the room. That added to the 25 or so in the room.
- see if there was a reasonable interaction pattern between people on stream and people in the room. Pat was able to ask questions via Joe, which I answered back directly. Even with the 4 seconds of audio lag I think it worked quite well. It’s actually a quite interesting communication model.
- see if the audio pickup was in any way reasonable, which is was. I was really impressed by how good the audio was actually.
- see if the video was passable. This is where there was a difference of opinion. Some people wanted much higher quality here. My feeling was the quality was about what I was looking for. You got a sense of what was going on in the room, you could hear the speaker and the room well, but the slides were kind of hard to make out. The fact that my talk was diagram heavy exacerbated this.
The conclusion: streaming of meetings will probably happen from time to time from now on, based on speaker preference, as many speakers don’t want their presentation going beyond the room. The meetings are optimized for people in the room, as that live audience, and the interaction pattern there, is what people come out for, and why we are able to get good speakers (the first question I get asked when bringing in someone externally is what the audience size is).
We’ll see how it affects the group longer term, and if it exposes more people to what we are doing in the LUG. We’re nearly 7 years old now, and looking at how we use new tech to get the word out is always something to consider.
Over the past couple of weeks I redid the MHVLUG site as a Drupal site. Drupal is a content management system, which is a fancy way of saying it’s a website, that lets you modify most of it’s parts via a web interface, and contains semi structured data. I wrote a bit about it in the past.
The Motivation
I got motivated to redo the MHVLUG website after working on the farmproject website redesign, which also uses Drupal. The MHVLUG website had had 3 previous iterations: static html stored in CVS, MoinMoin wiki, and Mediawiki. The reasons for each previous switch are beyond the scope here, but each time I felt we took a step forward.
While the wiki approach worked ok for the LUG, the biggest set of edits on the wiki was around monthly meetings. Before each meeting I’d need to move the meeting content into the front page. After each meeting someone would need to copy and paste that into it’s own page (sometimes this got lost). Meetings would get presentations added after the fact, but because it was a wiki, content and presentation were all wrapped up together. Having the meeting data stored separate from presentation, and being able to create different slices of it for the site (next meeting on frontpage, full meeting pages for the archives, lists of past meetings, lists of future events, in calendars) was enough to get me over the hump.
Drupal Basics
The basic Drupal environment is a lot more bare bones than you would imagine. It would make an ok blog out of the box, but that’s about it. Before you get started with any real Drupal project you’ll need at least the following addon modules:
- cck – content contruction kit, this lets you define custom types with custom fields
- views2 – this is a basic query builder that lets you create custom slices of data to display as pages, blocks, or in a number of other ways.
- devel – this gives you a really handy set of add on functions for debugging your types and views
- admin menu – this will save you a lot of time
I’m giving you my wisdom in hindsight here. I didn’t have devel or admin menu during the first bits of launching the new mhvlug.org… and man would they have saved me a bunch of time.
Meetings and Events
Beyond basic pages and stories (aka news), the mhvlug site has 2 main special types of data: Meetings and Events. You could coax the 2 into 1 type, which simplifies some things, but meetings have enough extra bits of data (uploaded presentations, presenter info) that I chose to not do it that way. Meetings and events are both a collection of a place, a time, and content. After installing the date module, I had the functionality that I needed on the time front. I added some custom fields for presenter and presentation on the meeting front, and with a not too complicated set of views had it so the next meeting showed on the front page automatically. When Jan 7 rolls around, no one will have to go adjust the front page any more. At this early stage I already had the win I was looking for.
Locations
While I had the time and content portions worked out pretty quickly for our Meetings, location was a bit more challenging. We only have about 6 locations that we ever use for MHVLUG events or meetings, so I didn’t want to add addresses manually to each piece of content. Fortunately with cck Drupal has the concept of a node link, which lets you build a relationship to another piece of content. So now I had a 3rd custom type, Location.
Given that this is 2009, the minute you have an address, you want to have a google map to go along with it. I spent a couple of days trying all manner of various google map modules before I threw up my hands on this one. Every single module I experimented with didn’t do quite what I wanted, and needed an aweful lot of configuration.
Eventually, I went for the simple way out. I just made a text field that I could embedded a google my map chunk of iframe code. When the field is printed out, you get the map. This turns out to be particularly useful as some of our locations don’t really have geocodable addresses. So this challenges was overcome without any new modules.
Custom Display of Meetings
Although you can get a certain amount of customization out cck for custom node types, I found I couldn’t really get what I wanted when it came to the display for meetings. Fortunately Drupal provides a mechanism for dealing with this, which is custom templates per node type. By default the core content of each page is rendered using the node.tpl.php in your theme. If you create note-meeting.tpl.php, it will use that to render meeting types instead. This works for any custom node type.
It occurred to me that if someone was looking at a meeting or event in that was coming up, they’d immediately want to know where it was. I wanted to do more than just print the name of the location, I wanted to pull in and display the map as well. This was where I learned a few really important tricks.
dprint_r is the first one. If you have the devel module enabled, you get access to some functions that you can use to help debug what’s going on in drupal. dprint_r spits out a nicely formated version of the data structure you pass it in html. You can thus use it in your templates to see whats going on. As someone that thinks in data, this was critical to getting my head wrapped around what drupal was actually doing.
When you load an event page, drupal loads all the data for the event object you are accessing, and it loads the id, tile, and url for any referenced objects, in my case location. To get more you use the node_load function, which loads any arbitrary object in drupal by it’s node id. This let me pull in the whole location object and embed the map on meetings pages. node_load has performance implications, so don’t use it everywhere all the time, but in this case it turned out to be cheap and powerful.
The php templates are just php code, so you can get even trickier. Meeting location is only interesting prior to the meeting, so I adjusted the template so it only displayed when the meeting/event date was in the future. Then the archive isn’t polluted with maps. Works great once you figure out the chaining of date, time, datime objects you need. Plus, make sure to get your timezone right! 
The Calendar
I went live with basically the functionality above, but I realized that if I could get drupal to spit back out ical, I could get rid of my parallel calendar site I was maintaining. There is a lot of documentation on how to do this with the calendar module… it’s all very confusing. Once you have both date and calendar installed you’ll have the option in the administration panel to use the Date Wizard to create your calendar. Do it! It creates 8 linked views that give you a calendar at all levels (year, month, week, day), upcoming lists, an ical feed. If you don’t like the date field it’s creating, just get rid of it after the fact. Building those views by hand is just going to be a pain, and it’s much easier to tweak them after the fact.
I finally hit a point here where I needed to dive into code, because the ical specific portions of drupal are lacking. Here are the bugs I found, fixed, and submitted patches upstream for.
In english, Drupal isn’t doing the required wrapping for multiline fields like it should in the spec. ical wrapping is odd, so I understand why people haven’t fully implemented it yet. You wrap at > 60 characters, and not on wordbreaks. That’s right, cutting up a word in the middle is part of the spec, and things actually work better when you do that. New lines need to start with “\r\n “, which is really important. The other issue is that no one tested the recurrence rules much in drupal. It turns out that in default drupal you can only have 1 event that follows a recurrence rule, i.e. every 2nd Tuesday of the month. The processor bails before it gets to the second rule.
I fixed all this locally, built the patches, and sent them upstream. This is the only time I had to dive into the code and fix things. While it would have been great to not even have to dive in here, I’ve yet to pick up an ical base that I didn’t need to go tweek yet. I had the same amount of work on the ruby icalendar stack when I played with it. iCal is just a weird specification, that doesn’t look like what you’d expect. This is what you get when Lotus and Microsoft build an interchange protocol in the late 90s.
Why iCal? We found that 50% of our users are using Google Calendar now. Export to iCal is required for anything that is time based, as Google Calendar is the defacto client for this (though Lightning in Thunderbird does a quite nice job as well).
Mailing List integration
MHVLUG has a mailman mailing list where most of our communication takes place. Previously you needed to have an account on the website to edit, and a different account on the mailing list. Through the user mailman manager you can let people easily subscribe and manage their list subscriptions. This works really nicely, and has already gotten a few people on our mailing list that didn’t ever join before.
Fighting the Spam Bots
The moment you open up registration to the web, you get spam bots trying to login in, and post Chinese drug company links on your website. It is the price we pay for such an open medium. Spam bots nearly killed us under the moin wiki. Media wiki faired better, but I still needed to go and revert a couple of pages every couple of months. I found that in the first 2 days of drupal being up we had 3 bots signing up, never a good sign.
So here is the formula I’m using for drupal that seems to be quite effective:
- Require that users confirm their registration via email activation. This is the default for drupal, and helps quite a bit.
- Adding Captcha and Recaptcha modules to prevent bots from bothering you with partial registrations in the first place.
- And finally, use LoginToboggin to put non confirmed users into a penalty box group, which it will automatically purge after 30 days.
While the first 2 actions will protect your site, you’ll still pile up plenty of partial registrations, which just clutters up user management. Having the system auto purge nonconfirmed accounts makes it all the more self tending.
Better URLs and URL migrations
Out of the box drupal has this totally ugly node/# model for urls. While it is valid, it really sucks to look at, and google often penalizes you for that as well. While there is some support for pretty urls out of the box, you really want to install path_auto right off the bat, which builds the url from the title of the node.
Specific to this migration was that we had over a hundred pages in the old media wiki (mostly meetings). Which means people are going to have linked to something in the past, and not find it in the new site. There was no way I was going to url map every old url to the new ones. There is a interesting partial solution which seems to be work well, the search404 module. When an unknown url comes in it breaks up the url path into words and runs it through the search engine. If it’s 1 hit, it just takes you there. If it’s more or less, it leaves you at the search404 page with the search results provided. It’s not perfect, but I’m hoping it eases the transition (though I’m still getting hits from search for urls from the moin wiki, so some amount of that isn’t going to go away any time soon.)
Sending out Announcements
This is one place where I didn’t find anything in Drupal out of the box that did what I wanted, which is to take the meeting or event text, wrap it in a template with standard boiler plate, and email it to the mailing list. I tried a few things, like simplenews, which turned out to be anything but. I wasn’t at the point where I yet want to build a module from scratch (though I’ll probably get there at some point), so I did the next best thing, and hacked the crap out of it do what I want. The module I hacked up with the print module.
Print provides printer friendly pages, as well as send by email functionality. I just exposed the print function to the users, but send by email I kept as admin only, and gutted it so that for meeting node types it built me exactly the kind of boiler plate I wanted. Using mimemail it sends it in both html and text, and looks pretty good. It is a hack, but one I’m willing to live with for now.
Making Editing Pleasant
The last thing to mention is the fckeditor integration. I added this early on just to make editing a lot easier on folks. Drupal doesn’t use any special markup, it uses html under the covers. Fckeditor is a quite good wysiwyg editor. The only gotcha here is to make sure that you exclude certain administrative fields, because fckeditor will fix up your text into proper html (like wrapping it in P tags) on submit. Some times you really don’t want that. It’s actually quite amazing how good visual editors in javascript have gotten now a days, and what will come over in a copy and paste.
Pulling it all together
With the modules and configuration I’ve layed out here, I now have a quite good community site that supports events, calendars, users that edit pages, users able to manage their mailing lists subscriptions, and a front page that is always going to show the next meeting. And beyond that, it’s just pretty. I’ve also started playing with things like twitter integration, and sending email to the list on new news stories (which I’m manually doing now).
I learned a couple of lessons on Drupal in the process. First, don’t be afraid of modules. Drupal modules, especially the good ones, do a small amount of specific function. To have a robust site that does what you want is going to take adding quite a few. Building this up from scratch is what Drupal often gets dinged for compared to Joomla, but I actually like it better this way, as it provides more flexibility.
Second, sometimes there is no module to do what you want. In that case you have 2 options, see if you can do it simpler (like I did on the map field), or see if you can hack up the function you need on a related module (like I did with the email announcement). Both work, depending on what you are going for.
Lastly, the keystone to any site is really Views, CCK, and how you create your custom node types. Think about this one the most. What is a meeting? What is an event? You can always modify them later, but consider figuring out what your custom types are to be your first and most important mission when building a site.
On January 5, 2010 · Comments Off
Tomorrow night (Wed, Jan 6th) at 6pm EST I’ll be presenting at MHVLUG on Git, the distributed source code management system. New and notable on this talk is that I’ll be streaming the talk live on ustream, and, assuming the tech doesn’t horribly break down in the middle of it, will be taking questions from the viewers online as well.
For those software folks that read this blog, or the facebook / twitter posts it generates, this might be of interest to you. Getting your head around merges in git takes some work early on, and with any luck the diagrams and explanations I pulled together with help quite a bit.
On November 13, 2009 · Comments Off
After our android hack-a-thon, Frank put a page in the MHVLUG wiki to start to stub out Android information that we’re all finding useful. It’s small, and largely a stub, but it’s a start. When I went back to shift a couple things around, I started to really wish this whole things was Drupal instead.
Drupal gets a lot of hate in the tech world, so I’m sure that I’ll get complaints or at least scoffs. I’ll get into why I wish this was drupal in a bit, but first, some theories on why people hate drupal.
It’s popular. There are over a million drupal sites out there, and you’d loose your tech street cred if you didn’t scoff at that which is popular. I suspect that our high school experiences dealing with being unpopular probably shape that point of view.
It’s a big php application. PHP has a low barrier of entry. This is a double edge sword, because your average php developer is probably less skilled than your average developer in another language (Visual Basic has this even worse, as some time with the daily wtf will show.) Being both php and big means that drupal security issues come up relatively regularly. Like with wordpress, you need to keep on top of updates. A 2 year old drupal install, like a 2 year old wordpress install, is basically a rusty door waiting to fall off.
People learn one tool, then try to make the world out of it. I’ll brush off the first 2 complaints, as I think they are both addressable. When talking to O’Connor recently, I found a much more reasonable complaint, which he was in the middle of. Drupal is a content management system, and if you use it for semi structured content storage and display (i.e. a ghetto database), it’s great. But because it has a module structure, a lot of people turn Drupal into a web application development framework…. which it really is not. If you want that, check out rails, django, cake-php or something that actually gives you that level of control. This is a standard issue – if you have a hammer, everything looks like nails.
If I was doing mhvlug.org over from scratch, it would be with Drupal.
What I’ve found over the last almost 7 years with MHVLUG is that being a wiki was better than being a static website, but that the number of edittors for the site is still in the single digits. We’re a group of 150 people on the mailing list, 20 – 30 at a monthly meeting, 10 – 12 at our monthly lunch. It’s a solid community, but it’s one with a pretty well defined reach, that’s been more or less constant now for at least the last 4 years. People are fading in at basically exactly the same rate as people are moving away or fading out.
The bulk of what gets updated is information around the meetings. If that was stored in a semi-structured way, it would be a whole lot easier to update in one place, and have it viewed different ways in different places. If I didn’t have a project list queued out the door, around the block, down the hill, and… well you get the point, I’d seriously think about this one.
I’m pretty happy with how things are coming together in exactly this way when it comes to the farm website build on drupal. Now that I understand what the right “types” structure is for the farm, the rest of it is just falling into place.
So for people looking to put up a website for a community in this day and age, I’d highly suggest that drupal is a good place to start. Yes, you’ll catch grief from your other tech friends, but such is life. Long term, I think it’s a pretty good call.
Update: I ended up redoing the MHVLUG website as a drupal site, with an extensive writeup on how.
… also known as – please don’t make me fill out those same 6 fields to get into your website!
A few weeks ago I gave an MHVLUG talk on Ruby on Rails. At the normal dinner outing afterwards one of our members was talking about maybe creating a small rails application where people could share and publish the podcasts they listen to, which I think is a great idea. (Hopefully they’ll work on it at our web-hack-a-thon.) But that lead into the inevitable issue of “user accounts”.
Man, I hate having more user accounts. And if we are going to do this project, I really didn’t want everyone in the LUG to have to have another one. So I resolved to see what I could do about reusing the MHVLUG accounts in an external way. It’s actually pretty easy as there is a Mediawiki OpenID extension which lets you go both ways. You can enable OpenID logins to the wiki, and make people’s user pages OpenID providers. Rails has a very good openid plugin (plus it’s integrated as part of the restful-authentication-tutorial) so that would make it trivial to write an application that people can log in using their MHVLUG password (the id will be a bit different, but that’s explainable). While Facebook and Google are still dragging their feet a bit here, Yahoo, AOL, and WordPress.com are all on the bandwagon, so many people already have these ids, they just don’t know it.
That got me following a few threads on OpenID, and looking at WordPress. It turns out that WordPress also has a good OpenID plugin. What’s quite interesting about that plugin is that it can make a wordpress instance the OpenID provider for 1 of the WordPress users. So if you have a personal blog, it means you can now very easily be your own OpenID. Being able to login in as http://dague.net is quite convenient.
Lastly, I wanted to throw something in about gravatars. You know how everyone wants you to upload your picture to their website? Stop the madness! Gravatars are just keyed off your email address, so if an site has that, they can look you up, and get your profile pic from the gravatar folks. Newer wordpress templates automatically integrate this. I did minor adjustment to my template to get this support in there. I’ve sworn now that Meetup.com is the last people I’m ever uploading a picture for, and that’s just because it’s hard to find complete strangers in a dinner without photos. Again, there is a good rails plugin for this, so it’s pretty trivial to integrate if you are doing a Ruby on Rails application.
So, if you are a web2.0 hipster, and thinking about making a new service, please don’t make me create a new account, because, honestly, that’s getting close to being a deal breaker for me at this point. And if you want my picture, the gravatar people have it. I’m not uploading it for you again.
On October 5, 2008 · Comments Off
Mediawiki is the engine that powers Wikipedia. While that gives it lots of props, it is writen in php, which has historically had security issues. Over time, I’ve gotten over my php alergy, mostly because WordPress is just too damn good (and what runs this site).
Over the past year I’ve fallen into running 3 media wiki instances… and I’m impressed. So, I made converting mhvlug.org from MoinMoin to Mediawiki as my Linux Fest project yesterday. 2 hours to port our theme, an hour to figure out how to export / import all our content, a couple of hours tracking down how to get short urls to work right, then an hour or two of deleting pages that probably shouldn’t have transfered in the first place, and we’re done!
I’m very happy with the new site, especially after adding plugins that do callendar and maps. I’m hoping that over the next month we can migrate everything else and get rid of the old site entirely.
It’s also amazing how much more you use software you really love. I’m definitely a fan of mediawiki at this point, and being able to use things I learn in one instance on other instances is really handy.
On June 11, 2007 · Comments Off
June’s LUG meeting last week was on SELinux, presented by Bruce Locke. The subject is amazingly complex, and hence the talk ran the full 2 hours, with lots of great meaty information throughout. The SELinux transition model has always been something that I found interesting, but didn’t fully grok, and this talk helped quite a lot in that regard. Bruce used php in apache as the canonical example of a security issue you need to contain. While my opinion is largely don’t install php on any public facing machine, when you need to support real users, like Bruce does at SUNY New Paltz, that isn’t much of an option. At least with SELinux when, not if, your php app gets hacked, it can be contained pretty well, with a much smaller chance of getting a root shell. The explanation of the targeted policy in Fedora and RHEL was also useful, as it makes SELinux a lot less scary to run. SELinux has a long way to go on usability, but with the Fedora targeted policy, at least it is vaguely usable today.
I’m quite excited for the July meeting coming up, as James Vasille of the Software Freedom Law Center is coming up to talk. A full abstract will be up soon, but for those who have questions around the legal aspects of Open Source, here is one of the experts on the subject. SFLC worked with the Gaim community to get them through their suit with AOL over AIM trademark infringement (god I hate Time Warner). I’ll let James explain a lot more on what they do once he is here. It will be great to have him.
We’ve got September lined up, as Ed previously offered to do a dog and pony show on his Linux CNC machine. Perhaps we’ll add other show and tell Linux devices for that meeting.
August, and months after are still up for grabs, with a few folks giving me some tenative commitments at this point. As always, we are looking for speakers. If you can find someone that is interested in speaking, we’ll appreciate it. Finding and filling the speaker schedule of MHVLUG is always the biggest challenge, and help on that task is welcomed.
On January 4, 2007 · Comments Off
Last night was the first MHVLUG meeting of 2007, and marks a return to Wednesday nights (which I think is where we started, though I’ll need to look that up.) The Wednesday night shift appeared to be a good thing, as we had 30 people there, including some new faces. Monday nights were definitely hard, often with the group dropping to 15 or so, so I think Wednesday is probably a good place to keep the meetings for a while.
Mike Kershaw gave an overview of Digital Photography on Linux. After a few slides giving some back ground, Mike started showing demos of applications like gphoto2 (command line tool to get photos off your cammera), ufraw (for manipulation of color and light levels on raw images, if you have a Digital SLR that produces them), and the gimp.
The Gimp demo lasted for quite a long time, and included a lot of tricks including using basic tools such as unsharp mask, and color balance, to touch up any image. The example of using a layer mask to put together 2 images with vastly different light levels was very cool, and explains how the image Mike gave us as a wedding present was created. I personally never knew you could drag around the magic wand to expand the selection, which was a great piece of info that I’m glad to have now.
The demos ended with putting together images using hugin and autopano. I love these tools, and Mike did a live demo of stitching together parts of the room into an image showing that with almost no effort you get quite reasonable results. It was a great meeting, with something for everyone there.
On December 12, 2006 · Comments Off
Debugging Hardware/Software on Linux
Joe Appuzo presented the topic. There was an initial discussion about wants vs. needs when it came to a Linux system, followed by a lot of discussion on partitioning a system for success when it comes to system updates and upgrades. One of Joe’s themes when it came to debugging hardware solutions was “value your time”. If a piece of hardware costs $100 to get a Linux friendly version, and you spend weeks trying to get the non Linux friendly version working, you’ve come out behind in your wasted time.
Ed brought up the fact that Turbo Tax is a must have application, which still doesn’t run on Linux. We discussed solutions around that, including using VMWare Server for that class of Windows Apps that you need from time to time. Many people in the room have a single machine on their home network whose job is to run windows, often headless with VNC. The benefits of virtualization here is power savings.
On the hardware point, there was much discussion on old hardware, and about when it’s power costs exceed it’s usefulness. Many folks in the room end up in that “collector camp” and do still have 486s running at home (as a router or such).
On the software debugging front, Joe didn’t get quite as deep in that as I was hoping. Some very basic tips were provided including where to start looking by looking in /var/log, and dmesg output, as well as thinking logically about isolation. “Did this ever work?” “What changed?”
All in all people had a pretty good time, the crowd was chuckling quite often.
At the end of the meeting I gave away 4 books for review, and announced the fact that meetings are moving to first Wednesdays starting in January.
Vital Stats
Attendees: 29
Start Time: 6:10
End Time: 7:55
Dinner Crew: 14
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