19 February 2005 - Linux Q and A
Topics
Linux Q&A; organizational (by Jason Bechtel)
Attendance
~15
Presentation Resources
Meeting Announcement (txt)
Meeting Notes
Unfortunately, our presenter (Ron Blanchett) had to cancel at the last minute due to a family emergency. I'm not sure whether to see it as luck or not, but the turnout was actually pretty low. I think about 15 people showed... mostly regulars, but a couple of new faces as well. I thought this presentation would be a huge draw, so I'm not sure what the low turnout indicates... Too technical?
Not to be denied an opportunity to revel in geekdom, we held the meeting anyway and turned it into a Q&A session while I covered some much needed organizational matters...
I announced right off that we will now officially be meeting on the third Saturday of each month. Tell all your friends.
The LUG needs to branch out and do new things and the website is holding us back. We need some sort of CMS to create a real community portal on our website. We need an online calendar, better polls, a wiki, forums, blogs, and a FAQ. In order to do all of that, we may need a hosting service that can give us more autonomy over the software environment. Unique Systems has been very generous to host our site free of charge since the beginning. But they have paying customers who rely on the software on that server. Shane Roberts has volunteered to head up the effort to replace our website. He has some CMS experience, so he will start by evaluating some CMSs, starting with three that I've been considering: Mambo, Geeklog, and SPIP. You can compare their features for yourself at The CMS Matrix and you can test drive dozens of CMSs at opensourceCMS.
A powerful CMS should allow us to provide granular access to parts of the website so that we can give access to one restricted portion of the site to the person willing to maintain it. This will allow us to provide more interesting, dynamic and well-maintained content that will serve the entire community. I've said it before, but I'll repeat it: I think that a well-maintained distro guide and a well-maintained application guide (ala the Table of Equivalents, only better and more focused) would really put TALUG on the map.
QoD volunteered to burn CDs in advance of the meetings. I only had one request for a CD for today's meeting, so we don't seem to need a distributed effort at this point. But, as we grow and move on, it would be nice to at least split up the task if not hand it off completely. Stay tuned.
Another thing the LUG needs to be doing is more and better publicity. Part of that involves having brochures that we can hand out at events. Mr. Felix has volunteered to head up the effort to create a LUG brochure specific to TALUG. I gave him the URL for the Linux Brochure Project and off he goes. We'll see what he comes up with... No pressure, Felix! :-)
Another part of publicity is announcing our meetings in local print media. I know we can get free classifieds in The City Paper. That would at least be a start. I think that this job would fall under the duties of a LUG Secretary.
Yes, TALUG needs a Secretary. Mostly, the President just needs someone like himself who will be guaranteed to attend almost all meetings who can be relied upon to take over some of the essential tasks of running the LUG:
- attendance / sign-in
- meeting minutes
- meeting coordination (LUG calendar)
- publicity
I think we need one person who is responsible for recording the minutes of the meetings and posting them on the website (like this!). Craig Seeley made the great observation that the minutes might best be constructed in a sort of wiki environment (multiple collaborative authors). I think that the model fits. As long as there is someone (the Secretary) to take responsibility for getting the bulk of the information recorded, anyone should feel free to jump in and add something that they thought was missed. I know that wikis involve the risk of vandalism, but we'll deal with that if it comes up.
No one came forward to run for an office (Secretary or Board Member). If anyone is interested, please send a message to officers_AT_talug.org.
There was discussion regarding whether to hold short Q&A sessions at the beginning (or end) of each meeting or at alternating meetings in place of a presentation topic. We've had these discussions before, but I think it's time to just make a decision and run with it. We can decide later whether it was a good decision or not. Steve Attaway wisely suggested that we simply take a quick show-of-hands poll at the start of the meeting: 1) How many people have questions that they'd like to ask? 2) How many people came only for the presentation and have to leave early? Hoping that the number of hands on one side of these two questions has the clear majority, this should decide whether we start with a short Q&A session or with the presentation. I imagine that the punctuality of the presenter and the unpredicatable nature of technical problems will also play a role. Keeping it open as to the order of things may also help to get people to the meetings on time... ;-) Since we're only meeting 12 times each year, I'm reluctant to cut the number of presentations in half. So, for now I think we'll run it like Steve suggested.
That's about all that I can remember of what was discussed as far as LUG organizational concerns go. As I said, there was some Q&A. It started with a question about the recent mailing list conversation on file shredding. I drew a diagram of a magnetic medium with '1's and '0's stored on it and tried to show how overwriting with all zeros doesn't effectively remove all of the magnetic footprint from the '1's. Then we talked about strategies for overwriting with random data and why this is effective. We also discovered that 'cat /dev/zero > file_to_delete' doesn't work... It creates a file full of zeros that takes up the rest of the available disk space! Loren also pointed out that using the redirect (>) doesn't guarantee that you will be writing over the same data blocks that contained the original data. That's why it's better to use existing specially-written programs to do this, like 'shred' or 'wipe'.
Another conversation regarded the naming of device files (in /dev/) and what they actually are. The names are just conventions. What matters is the major and minor number stored in the inode. This is what indicates to the kernel the actual device with which you wish to communicate. We talked about the 'mknod' command.
I can't recall any of the other questions, but we managed to fill almost all three hours with a combination of Q&A and organizational stuff. Hopefully we can get a good turnout at the next meeting (warmer weather, perhaps?) and start off spring with some more good Q&A and an interesting presentation.
