NOPLUG Meeting Log
NOPLUG meetings are on the third Monday of each month from 7 to 8:30 PM. Meetings are held in the "Madrona" Room at the WSU Learning Center, 201 West Patison, Port Hadlock. (Directions)
The Otter Room is the computer lab and has ethernet connections which are useful for our presentations. We may have to bring some chairs in from next door. It is also the only room available on regular basis for the next year. The Center is visible on the East side of Rhody Dr. shortly after you pass Irondale Rd. coming into Hadlock from the North.
NOPLUG Meetings in 2006
January 9, 2006: General Discussion
February 13, 2006: Ned Schumann showed off the new Sun server which uses two AMD opteron chips and features convenient hot swapping of power supplies, disk drives, and fans. It is also much more efficient in power use so it runs considerably cooler than Intel powered servers. It has a remote monitoring system that reports faults and displays the condition of the various devices making up the server. Ned also gave us a bird's eye view of how Olympus Net operates and its future plans.
Rod Page talked briefly about manually setting your computer clock time and date using "ntpdate us.pool.ntp.org".
This of course can be used in a bash script to save typing or in a cron script to automatically correct the clock.
March 13, 2006: Rod Page showed a training video on the basics of the BASH scripting language. Several people asked where they could get the video. Rod answers, "I bought a package of five CDs from a company called PCtech101.com. The title of the package was "Scripting and Mail Training Set". The website no longer lists this package but there are several training packages that might be of interest."
April 10, 2006: We continued the training video dealing with BASH and its commands, which generated some good discussion and interest.
If bash programming interests you, Rod Page recommends the following books on the subject:
- Linux Shells by Example by Ellie Quigley
- A Practical Guide to Commands, Editors and Shell Programing by Mark G. Sobell
- Linux Cookbook by Carla Schroder
May 8, 2006: Although the flu kept several members at home this month, including keynote speaker Rod Page, other members convened as usual. Craig Bleile led a talk about LinuxFest NorthWest.
June 12, 2006: We began with our usual open discussion. Rod Page showed slides and talked about his new computer to finish up the session.
July 10, 2006: We began with our usual open discussion. Rod Page presented a short demo of Image Magick, which comes with most distributions of Linux.
August 21, 2006: We engaged in our usual lively open discussion.
September 18, 2006: We started with an open discussion as usual and finished with a short demonstration of some of the open source software available for mathematics.
October 16, 2006: Open discussion
November 20, 2006: Rod Page previewed his upcoming presentation for LinuxFest NorthWest on Octave.
December 18, 2006: Rod Page led a discussion about Scientific Linux, maintained by CERN, the Fermi Lab and various other laboratories. .
