The SLUUG Cronicle |
August 2002 |
| Aug 1 | Thu | SLACC | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 1 | Thu | SILUG - O'Fallon | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 1 | Thu | STLBSD | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 5 | Mon | SILUG - Carbondale | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 6 | Tue | MOSLUG | 7:00pm -11:00pm |
| Aug 13 | Tue | LUCI - Newbie Night | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 13 | Tue | CCSL - Dinner Meeting | NO MEETING! |
| Aug 14 | Wed |
SLUUG - General Meeting
TOPIC: Intro to Wireless |
6:30pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 15 | Thu |
St. Louis LUG TOPIC: Handhelds and Linux |
7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 18 | Sun | CWE-LUG | 1:00pm - 5:00pm |
| Aug 19 | Mon | SLUUG - Steering Committee | 6:15pm - 8:30pm |
| Aug 20 | Tue | Advanced LUG | 7:00pm -10:00pm |
| Aug 20 | Tue |
STLWEBDEV
TOPIC: Webmin |
6:30pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 21 | Wed | BDPA | 6:00pm - |
| Aug 22 | Thu | St. Charles LUG | 6:30pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 27 | Tue | Hazelwood LUG | 6:30pm - 9:00pm |
| Aug 27 | Tue | LUCI | 7:00pm - 9:00pm |
| Sep 11 | Wed |
SLUUG - General Meeting
TOPIC: TIBET/JavaScript TUTORIAL: vi |
6:30pm |
| Sep 16 | Mon | SLUUG - Steering Committee | 6:15pm |
| Sep 19 | Thu |
St. Louis LUG
TOPIC: Linux/Mainframe |
7:00pm |
| Sep 24 | Tue | Hazelwood LUG | 6:30pm |
NOTE: More information on these groups, including locations and web sites,
can be found in the "Meeting Locations" section below.
| 6:30 pm | Tutorial | TBD |
| 7:00 pm | Announcements | Standard Introductions & Procedures |
| 7:05 pm | Q & A | An opportunity to ask technical questions |
| 7:15 pm | Break | Social, off-line conversations, book sales |
| 7:20 pm | Admittance to building may not be possible after 7:20. | |
| 7:30 pm | Presentation | Intro to Wireless by Mark Balbes |
Abstract:
Wireless technologies are emerging as a powerful and necessary means of extending the business enterprise. New technologies leverage existing web-based frameworks, allowing software developers, web developers, and system administrators to work with familiar tools and techniques. This talk will describe the major aspects of wireless technologies including wireless networks, wireless devices, and wireless applications. The talk will focus on strategies to use these technologies effectively to extend the reach of enterprise applications to wireless devices.
Bio:
Mark Balbes, Ph.D. is a Principal Software Engineer with Object Computing, Inc, acting as a consultant, mentor, and instructor. Mark also leads the Wireless SIG, a joint special interest group of the St. Louis Web Developers Organization and the St. Louis Java User's Group. Mark can be reached at mark@balbes.com.
Ideas, questions and suggestions are welcome; please contact Christine Wanta (presentations@sluug.org).
Books that are not available at the meetings may be ordered to be picked up at the next SLUUG general meeting. Contact Sue Hurst (booksales@sluug.org).
August Specials:
| Books with a red sticker (discontinued titles and older editions) |
- | 70% off |
| All other books | - | 30% off |
Abstract:
Handheld devices are becoming more common and gaining more features. There are a variety of models, and even cell phones are getting the same features integrated in. Of course, us Linux geeks want to be able to use our handheld devices with Linux, so we can synchronize the info we have gathered between our Linux desktops and our handhelds.
In this presentation, we will take a look at how you can use handheld devices along with Linux. We'll also take a look at some of the devices that actually use Linux as their OS. The devices we intend to cover are the Palm, Agenda, Zaurus, and iPaq.
Bio:
JT and Craig are active members of the LUG. We're looking for somebody to talk about their experience with using a Palm with Linux. If you can help out, please contact Craig (linux@sluug.org).
Comments, questions, and ideas for the St. Louis Linux Users Group are welcome; please send email to linux@sluug.org.
Meets the 2nd Wednesday of the month, 6:30pm to 9:00pm. Free and open to the public.Sunnen ProductsDirections: Take I-64 (US 40) to the Hanley exit south. Turn left at Manchester, then an immediate right into Sunnen driveway.
7910 Manchester (at Hanley)
St. Louis, MOMap: http://www.sluug.org/info/map_sunnen.html
(NOTE: A security guard from Sunnen is scheduled to be at the door from 6:20pm to 7:20pm to allow entry. After 7:20, the door will be unattended and you may not be able to enter.)
SLUUG - St. Louis UNIX Users Group
(http://www.sluug.org)
Steering Committee
Meets the Monday following the 2nd Wednesday of the month, 6:15pm to 8:30pm. Open to the public. This is where we make decisions on what topics to cover and other administration of the group. If you want to get involved, this is a good place to start.Daugherty Systems
One City Place, 2nd floor
Creve Coeur, MO 63141
St. Louis Linux Users Group (STLLUG) (http://www.stllinux.org)
Meets the 3rd Thursday of each month, 7:00pm to 9:00pm. The room is reserved starting at 6:00pm. (Ask a librarian to let you in if it is locked.) Members are encouraged to come early to mingle and/or give informal demos or presentations. Free and open to the public. (Formerly known as the Linux SIG.)Indian Trails LibraryDirections: Take I-170 to Page east. Turn left at North-South. Turn left at Midland. Drive 2 blocks and turn left on Delport. The library is on your left.
8400 Delport Drive (at Midland)
St. Louis, MO
St. Charles LUG (http://www.sluug.org/~cfit/stclug)
JUST FORMED! We expect that meetings will usually be held at 6:30pm to 9:00pm on the 4th Thursday of each month, except during December, which will probably not have a meeting.
This is a SIG of SLUUG, intended for all Linux users in the Western and Northern parts of the greater metro area.Ponderosa
513 South Main St. (just north of I-70)
O'Fallon, MO
Hazelwood LUG (http://www.sluug.org/~hzlug)
Generally meets the 4th Tuesday of each month, 6:30pm to 9:00pm. (NOTE: Start time is now 6:30.) Free and open to the public. This is a SIG of SLUUG, intended for Linux newbies.Prairie Commons Library
915 Utz Lane (between Howdershell and Dunn)
Hazelwood, MO
CWE-LUG - Central West End LUG (http://www.sluug.org/~rwcitek/cwe-lug/)
Generally meets on the third Sunday of the month from 1:00pm to 5:00pm. Meetings are now held at the ACLU building.ACLU
4557 Laclede (just east of Euclid)
St Louis, MO 63108
Advanced LUG
JUST FORMED! Meetings are not yet on a regular schedule.
This group is intended to be a venue for advanced topics as well as a time to work on Open Source projects as a group.
The meeting location for August is:WDT Solutions
9450 Manchester, Suite 204
Rock Hill, MO
MOSLUG - MO Open Source LUG (http://www.nbtsc.org/~iguanacog)
Meets on the 1st Tuesday of the month, from 7:00pm to 11:00pm. Meetings are free and open to everyone. This is a Linux Users Group (LUG) for all levels, from new beginners to the more advanced users.Culpeppers Restaurant (basement)
312 S. Kirkwood Road
Kirkwood, MO 63122
STLBSD - St. Louis BSD Users (http://www.stlbsd.org)
Just started holding official meetings. Look for guys with little red daemons on their shirts at SLUUG and LUG meetings.
SLACC - St. Louis Area Computer Club (http://www.slacc.com)
Meets the 1st Thursday of every month, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.Thornhill Library
12863 Willowyk Drive (off Fee Fee)
Creve Coeur, MO
STLWEBDEV - St. Louis Web Developers (http://www.stlwebdev.org)
Meets the 3rd Tuesday of the month from 6:30pm to 9:00pm. Meetings are free and open to everyone. This is an open group to facilitate communications between diverse professions involved in Internet/Intranet design and development. STLWEBDEV is also the St. Louis chapter of the International Webmasters Association and the HTML Writers Guild (IWA-HWG).CityPlace One Auditorium
One City Place
Creve Coeur, MO 63141
Wireless SIG (http://www.stlwebdev.org/sigs/wireless)
Meets the 4th Tuesday of the month, from 6:30pm to 9:00pm. Meetings are free and open to everyone. Refreshments at 6:30, program begins at 7:00. This group is a cooperative effort of both the St. Louis Web Developers and the St. Louis Java Users Group.CityPlace One Auditorium
One City Place
Creve Coeur, MO 63141
CCSL - Computer Consultants of St. Louis
(http://www.ccsl.org)
Monthly Dinner Meeting
Meetings are held the second Tuesday of each month at Cheshire Inn. RESERVATIONS ARE REQUIRED. Cost is $20 for members, $25 for non-members. Call Susan Pope, 314-995-4652. Social hour starts at 5:30pm, meeting starts at 6:30pm.Cheshire Inn
6306 Clayton Rd.
St. Louis, MO
SILUG - Southern Illinois LUG
(http://www.silug.org)
O'Fallon meeting
The SILUG O'Fallon meeting is generally on the first Thursday of the month. It runs from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.O'Fallon Public Library
120 Civic Plaza
O'Fallon, IL
SILUG - Southern Illinois LUG
(http://www.silug.org)
Carbondale meeting
The SILUG Carbondale meeting is the 1st Monday of the month, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.Life Sciences III
1059 Auditorium
SIU-Carbondale
Carbondale, IL
LUCI - Linux Users of Central Illinois (http://www.luci.org)
All LUCI meetings are held at the same location, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm. General meetings are on the 4th Tuesday of the month, and Newbie night is held on the 2nd Tuesday of the month.Illinois State Museum Research & Collections Center
1011 East Ash St.
Springfield, IL 62703
BDPA (http://www.bdpa-stl.org)
BDPA (Black Data Processing Associates) is a member-focused organization that exists to provide professional development programs and services to position its members at the forefront of the IT industry. Its members, minority and non-minority, share a desire to bridge the Digital Divide.
Meetings are held at 6:00pm on the 3rd Wednesday of the month, and are free and open to the public.Computer Village 4411 N. Newstead (at Pope and Carter) St. Louis, MO 63115
CORCC - County Older Residents Computer Club (http://www.a-zuc.com/corcc/)
Meets (almost) every Friday from 1:00pm to 3:00pm. Provides free classes for seniors 55 or older. For info, call Jackie Oughton at 314-838-9050 or Barbara Stevenson at 314-739-2454.Prairie Commons Library
915 Utz Lane (between Howdershell and Dunn)
Hazelwood, MO
We publish meeting schedules of groups in the St. Louis
region that may be of interest to our members. If you would like to
have info added about your group, please mail the newsletter editor
(editor@sluug.org)
or call any of the SLUUG officers.
WARNING: These articles may express personal opinions and
SLUUG exerts no more editorial control over such content than does
a public library, bookstore, or newsstand. Any opinions, advice,
statements, services, offers, or other information or content
expressed herein are those of the respective authors and not
necessarily supported by SLUUG. SLUUG does not guarantee the accuracy,
completeness, or usefulness of any content, nor its merchantability or
fitness for any particular purpose.
The Advanced Linux Users Group of St. Louis met for its initial project kickoff meeting on July 30, 2002. Even though we only expected about 5-10 people, 21 eager volunteers showed up at PC Xperience's offices in South County. The Advanced LUG is a concept a few of us have been kicking around for a few months. Various ideas were put forward such as holding meetings similar to the existing forum with presentations but with a decidedly more technical bent. Another thought was participating in an open source programming project. This latter idea began to grow on us because it would be open to all participants regardless of their level or set of skills.
The meeting kicked off about 7:00pm and we quickly came to realize that we were sorely short of adequate seating. JT Moree and James Pattie discussed their proposal for a GUI front end for their iptables firewall toolkit (PCX Firewall). Various other ideas were kicked around and we talked about a variety of related topics. Mike808 extolled the virtues of another product - Shorewall, which also was in need of a GUI front end. A separate committee was formed to investigate the alternatives.
We also discussed which GUI toolkit to write it in. Web (Perl, PHP), KDE, GNOME, and even Java. Eventually we might do all of these, but for now, we settled on Webmin, because it has the widest usage. It was desired to be able to create a script on any machine and send it to the various machines that need it. It would also be handy to be able to import rule sets in smaller modules. You could have modules titled "Norton AV", "ICQ", or "Block WindowsUpdate". The underlying file format is XML, so tools like XSLT can be used to import and export to various formats, such as ipf for the FreeBSD crowd.
Everyone that wants to participate in any project is more than welcome to attend. We are going to look into also getting an IRC server and/or web cams up for those unable to be there physically. Many of us are there to learn more about participating in Open Source projects. We talked about what it takes to sign up on SourceForge (a large repository for OSS projects). The PCX Firewall project is hosted there.
Open Source software is a collaborative effort. The marketplace is sort of a commons and all can join or participate. We need programmers, documentation writers, testers, and users. This project has special relevance in that it originated in a local Open Source company and is about Internet security, a topic near and dear to all of us. OSS has benefitted all of us, Linux geeks or not (Apache, Sendmail, etc.). These events are a kind of barn raising for a program. "Ask not what your software vendor can do for you, ask what you can do to help!" Come, learn, and help. To do so, please visit SourceForge (sf.net) and become a SourceForge user. Then look up the PCX Firewall project and join the mailing list.
I'd like to thank everyone who came out on a hot St. Louis night to help out. I saw a lot of familiar faces and put some faces to names I'd only met before on DISCUSS. I look forward to all the fun we are going to have down the road. See you there.
I had the pleasure to attend the O'Reilly Open Source Conference last week. It was a great chance to learn about Open Source technologies as well as meet many of the developers who work so hard to create the tools we use every day.
The keynote speech by Lawrence Lessig was great. He talked about the history of copyright law, and how corporations who control copyright want to extend that control as far as possible. He said that we need to work to prevent the large corporations from extending that control, or we may lose our freedoms to use Free Software.
Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond were interesting to meet in person. They were pretty much as expected. Nothing too surprising, except when RMS shouted out during the RealNetworks Helix introduction that it isn't Free Software. ESR also introduced the GeekPAC political action committee and AOTC. I'll talk more about those at the LUG meeting.
I was really impressed by Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP. I came in thinking that PHP was kind of a hack. But after hearing Rasmus talk, and even more from his short comments on why things are the way they are, I realize that he is a very bright guy and now I understand why his decisions make sense.
ActiveState was showing off their next version of Komodo. I was blown away. It's an IDE that handles just about every Open Source programming language, including Perl, PHP, Python, XML, and XSLT. It's based on Mozilla, and you can extend the IDE with your own script code. They showed an example making the window bounce around the screen. The IDE also shows the possible completions of tags and functions available, then shows what the expected arguments are.
There weren't all that many vendors present. The conference was more about learning and meeting folks. However, there were about 20 vendors with booths in the expo hall. I picked up quite a few T-shirts and other goodies. I'll be raffling them off as door prizes at the STLLUG meeting.
For more information about sponsoring the St. Louis UNIX Users Group,
contact Dave Mills (sponsorship@sluug.org).
I wish we had city water. DSL would be even better. -- Ed Wehner, on living out in the boonies You know, if it weren't for our continuous eviction problems we'd probably have an accumulated uptime of 4 or 5 years! -- Stanford Baldwin I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma. -- The Great Oz If we're forced to follow basic security procedures, it means the hackers have already won. -- L. VeGas on Slashdot A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb. -- some idiot in Congress [sorry for being redundant] There are 10 types of people in the world -- those who understand binary and those who don't. Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. -- Baron Munchausen Geek 1: You've got a regular crontab going there. Geek 2: Yeah, with the occasional at job thrown in. -- two UNIX geeks referring to frequency of sex The Current [Ku Klux] Klan is a shell of it's former self, and is mainly a racket where a few con artist leaders bilk White trash out of money in return for giving them somebody to blame for being failures. The Myth of the Klan is kept alive by the con artist Grand Dragons and leaders of the US Civil rights movement who find the pathetic remnants useful for fund raising. -- thales on Slashdot Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive! I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put. -- Winston Churchill
| President | president@sluug.org | Ed Wehner | |
| Vice-President | vice-president@sluug.org | Scott Granneman | |
| Secretary | secretary@sluug.org | Buck Pyland | |
| Treasurer | treasurer@sluug.org | Mike Kriz | |
| Linux Users Group Chair | linux@sluug.org | Craig Buchek | |
| Board of Directors | board@sluug.org |
Rich Seibel Ed Wehner Craig Buchek Robert Citek Stan Reichardt |
|
| Presentations | presentations@sluug.org | Christine Wanta | |
| Corporate Sponsors | sponsorship@sluug.org | Dave Mills | |
| O'Reilly Book Sales | booksales@sluug.org | Susan Hurst | |
| Newsletter Editor | editor@sluug.org | Craig Buchek | |
| PR | reporter@sluug.org | Stan Reichardt | |
| Steering Committee Info | info@sluug.org | Gary Meyer | |
| BBS Questions | bbs@sluug.org | Gary Meyer | |
| Official Correspondence | SLUUG Mailing Address |
PO Box 411302 St. Louis, MO 63141 |