MUUG Monthly Meetings for 2012-13

Please note our new meeting location: 1L06 Lockhart Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence and Balmoral St. (Check out the UofW's maps for nearby parking locations.)

September 11, 2012: Network Cabling for Dummies

Katherine Scrupa and Adam Thompson talked about network cabling, standards and some legalities, and demonstrated how to make your own network cables.

To allow for a longer round-table session after the summer break, we skipped the RTFM segment of the meeting.

Katherine has made her presentation slides, in ODP and PDF format, available online. Adam has also made his presentation slides, in ODP and PDF format, available online.

Roundtable audio

October 9, 2012: Arduino Microcontroller

Sean Walberg, a local network administrator, web developer, tech writer and editor, showed us what we can do with the Arduino open-source microcontroller.

Roundtable audio | Arduino presentation audio

November 13, 2012: OpenRISC System on a Chip

Robert Keizer talked about OpenRISC and its applications:

Why run an FPGA device
What you can do with one
Running a linux kernel on an FPGA
In-lining custom instructions.

Rob has made his presentation slides, in ODP and PDF format, available online.

Instead of the RTFM segment, we had an extended round-table session and gadget show-and-tell. Several members brought along gadgets to show off to the rest of the group.

Roundtable audio | OpenRISC presentation audio

December 11, 2012: Round-table, Mingling and Munchies

Instead of a formal presentation this month, we started the holiday season with an informal round-table meeting at a restaurant. We left our former meeting place at the IBM offices, and met at the Seine River Café for this month only.

We started with dinner at 6pm, followed by an informal roundtable and social meeting - a great chance to chat with other MUUG attendees and to celebrate the holiday season. Thanks to the Seine River Café for the excellent culinary fare and superb service. The Apple Crumble Incident is worthy of the MUUG annals.

January 8, 2013: Life of Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a fully functional motherboard that fits in the palm of your hand. It has a CPU (ARM11), Ethernet capability, 512MB RAM, USB 2.0 ports and can run the X Window System, with either HDMI or composite video output. Storage is on an SD card. This presentation was in two parts: the first was a general introduction by Michael Doob, including loading and booting Linux on the Raspberry Pi. The second part featured Wyatt Zacharias, demonstrating the GPIO (general purpose input/output) pins included on the motherboard, which can be used to control external devices such as blinking lights!

The RTFM topic featured Gilbert Detillieux discussing lsof(8) and ftop(1). The lsof command can be found on most common UNIX systems, whereas ftop is limited to systems running newer Linux kernels. Gilbert also provided source for a handy little script, called lsofdest, which uses repeated calls to lsof to determine which remote network connections may be the destination of an open local file.

February 10, 2013: The Passing of Doug Shewfelt

On February 10th, 2013, long-time member, director and treasurer Doug Shewfelt passed away from a heart attack. He passed quickly and quietly with friends, at the age of 51.

Doug was an avid patron of the arts. He pursued too many hobbies to name, and was always busy supporting a local group of some kind. He will be missed.

February 12, 2013: System Call Tracing

This month's presentation featured Adam Thompson, who showed how to profile and troubleshoot UNIX processes without needing access to source code, through the use of system-call tracing. Adam showed where, when, why (and for a few of these, how) to use dtrace, dtruss, ftrace, ktrace/kdump, ltrace, LTTng, par, ProbeVue, ptrace, strace, System Tap, tusc, trace, and truss to find out exactly what that troublesome program is doing behind the scenes.

Adam has made his presentation slides, in PPTX and PDF format, available online.

March 12, 2013: Mini-Topic Trio

Linux allows you to do some pretty cool stuff with digital cameras. Trevor Cordes demonstrated how to use Linux to control a Canon SLR, and do some neat post-processing tricks such as exposure bracketing (AEB).

After 30 years, the writing is on the wall for the venerable MBR (Master Boot Record). Now that drives larger than 2 TB are commonly available, something else will have to replace it. That something is heir-apparent GPT (GUID Partition Table). Kevin McGregor discussed the history of disk partitioning, and how to make use of disks larger than 2 TB under Linux.

The March RTFM featured Gilbert Detillieux, talking about the rpm(8) and yum(8) commands, used for package management in Red Hat and similar Linux distributions.

Kevin has made his presentation slides, in PPT and PDF format, available online. Trevor has made his presentation notes, in ODP and PDF format, available online. He's also provided a tarball of the sample script files. Gilbert has made his presentation slides, in ODP and PDF format, available online.

April 9, 2013: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, based on the open-source oVirt platform, competes with VMware vSphere and Hyper-V's Operations Manager. The University of Winnipeg Library is implementing a small RHEV system, and Adam Thompson introduced and demonstrated the software and discussed some of the challenges encountered as compared to using VMware vSphere.

May 14, 2013: Popular P's of Programming: PHP, Perl, Python

Theodore Baschak, Trevor Cordes, and Edwin Amsler presented this month on 3 popular scripting langauages: PHP, Perl, and Python.

Theodore has made his presentation notes, in PDF format, available online. Trevor has made his presentation notes, in ODP and PDF format, available online. Edwin has made a couple of his sample Python programs available.

The May RTFM featured Robert Keizer, talking about open source Optical Character Recognition programs, such as GOCR, Tesseract, and Cuneiform. Each converts scanned images of text back to text files, with varying degrees of success.

June 11, 2013: LyX, Meld, Asymptote

This month, we had three presenters giving short (5-10 minute) demonstrations of some software that they have found interesting. Adam Thompson demonstrated LyX, a WYSIVRTWYG (What You See Is Vaguely Related To What You Get) document creation and editing front-end for TeX and LaTeX. Trevor Cordes demonstrated Meld, a graphical diff viewer that's designed for those of us who will never be comfortable with text-based diff output syntax. And finally, Michael Doob demonstrated Asymptote, a markup language for producing high-quality graphics, which, like TeX, separates the concepts of markup from presentation, allowing graphics to be drawn with very high precision.

The June RTFM featured Gilbert Detillieux talking about the dpkg(1), apt-get(8), apt-cache(8) and aptitude(8) commands, used for package management in Debian and similar Linux distributions.

July 2013: No meeting this month

August 2013: No meeting this month

Please note our new meeting location: 1L06 Lockhart Hall, University of Winnipeg, entrance on Ellice Ave. between Spence and Balmoral St. (Check out the UofW's maps for nearby parking locations.)

Home

About

FTP