Thank you.
I'm just saying that
Welcome, folks. This is the Slug SteerCon meeting for november
And tonight is…
November 4th.
All right, Stan, you said you were talking about agenda change.
Okay, we've marked the agenda change. Sean will cover the web presence stuff.
First, so go ahead, Sean.
Yep, thanks. I'm going to go ahead and take the screen.
Yep.
Rep.
All right, so starting with um
So since, so I'm just going to go over the October stuff so
The new site for October looks good.
For both the lug, I got to say the AI has been doing an exceptionally poor job of
generating art in October. This is just
This is awful and it's like um
And that was the best of three options.
I don't know, I might think about trying to find a different AI to generate the art because it's been so bad but
That takes effort, so we'll see
Moving over to the YouTube.
You know, the Kitty versus Western video, it kind of has slowed down a lot now. So it's
3.7 thousand
or 3,700 views.
is about where it is now and it's slowed down a ton
The two new videos are back to our normal
normal amounts of traffic so
Less than 100 views each.
We can look at the analytics real quick.
So the one, the lug video that James did has 69 views
um
And then the Stephen Limbark with his
job control has 41 views.
Moving over to Twitter.
On the 9th of October, I posted…
about Stephen Limbar's talk on job control
Shit.
We got 30, I guess, 38 impressions on that one
And then I posted when the recording was up, only two impressions on that one.
And then I posted about James Conroy's CICD, only got four.
Impressions on that one.
And then the recording likewise got four so
Not getting a lot of traction on getting a lot of
Twitter.
For these.
The same posts were made over on Mastodon, but Mastodon, I don't know how to tell how many people are seeing it or whatever but
Nobody's engaging with it with these replies or likes or anything so
Not a lot of action there as normal.
Moving over to the meetup page.
For the bash control, we had 17 people sign up.
For the lug, we had 19 people sign up.
So…
pretty consistent with past meetings it looks like.
And I think that's it. I think that's enough for now.
That's kind of what our web presence and web engagement, social, all that stuff was for the month of October.
All right.
They do…
do anything, start to do anything with that that white
icon, that second icon that I sent you
Oh, yes. I need to do that, don't I? Let me see if I can do that during the meeting. Let's see if I can do that right now.
Okay. Hey.
I can't.
I'll tell you this, folks. I'm totally…
out of it right now. I've screwed everything up on my end.
Only… I can't.
I can't see anything except the…
the agenda period and i've
screw that up.
I had five lines in there and I deleted all five of them by mistake.
Crap, I'll have to go back and…
Undo them. Undo your delete.
Okay.
I…
How do you undo and undo and delete?
to you you'll get into command mode, hit you
Well, you undoes what I did.
or you want to redo it. Okay. I get it.
Yeah.
But now I've been to…
Renews control R, I think.
You are.
Why don't you go ahead and share your screen, Sam? Maybe we can help.
Well.
Crap.
Damn.
I'll just have to add that stuff in later.
Hmm.
Oh, crap.
Shit.
You son of a bitch.
No.
I can't remember how to do anything.
Can anybody hear me?
Yeah.
Okay.
I tell you, get away from my setup.
more than a week and I can't remember how to do anything.
I just, I had shut all my systems off and shut off
And when I put them back on, there was a new release of firefox
And…
They just…
a five-second delay just screws my head up. That's all there is to it.
Why don't you go ahead and share your screen again so we can get back the agenda.
And that ain't.
Where the hell?
That ain't right.
What happened to…
Oh, a bitch.
Hey, Lee, can you hear me?
Yes, Steve.
Okay, everybody just went radio silent there, and I was wondering if I was…
No, you're okay.
Still connected or what?
Stan's got a snafu there. He lost his edit screen and can't find it.
He lost his what?
Edit screen.
Oh.
Hey, well, we're not doing anything uh
Yeah.
You didn't pick up that an orange case blade when you
picked up that tractor porch a couple of years ago
Years ago, did you?
Do you have a…
You mean like a blade for the tractor?
Yeah, a front blade.
I don't think I ever had that.
Okay, well, I'm just asking because I'm trying to figure out what happened to the one I used to have.
Thank you.
what is it still in your little shed?
I don't have a shed anymore.
Oh.
Okay. Ken joined us.
Hello, Ken.
I think that…
I don't think he heard me.
Sean must.
And I think Sean has probably stepped away.
Who will?
Sean's not here anymore.
I'm still here. What's up?
Oh, yeah, there you are.
I'm prepared.
I'm just on the website.
Yeah.
I'm almost prepared to be recording secretary tonight.
But I've discovered that
To my surprise, the username and password for the wiki are not in my
heat as well where i thought they were.
Hmm.
So…
as the same as…
Yeah, that won't help.
the normal
that won't help. You need to tell me what they are.
Discuss freely.
Thank you.
Welcome back civilization from your
So how close are we to being ready to go?
Thank you.
Well, we had kind of started, but
I had a snafu and lost what I was typing.
Because I had already started
typing in the minutes.
And…
I lost it.
Well, if Ken's ready to take over, Stan, why don't you just quit and let him
start from scratch.
Okay. Okay.
Okay.
And now I lost that.
Okay.
Shit, they've changed this again too.
Am I still sharing?
No. Oh, yes, yes, you're sharing, but we don't have your uh
Yeah.
gender page.
I know.
I have…
How'd they turn the damn thing off?
They changed it again. Son of a…
Ken, you want to go ahead and share your screen? Yeah, there you go.
And so that way you can clear
stands the flukeulties.
Okay.
All right. I've gotten to the minutes page.
Let's see here.
I'm not quite sure. Nope, that's not it.
Yeah.
But now?
pure wives and we thought that was a good idea.
So I think I'm sharing my view of the wiki.
Yeah, we see it.
swell. I'm not quite sure how that'll help, but that's fine.
Okay, so…
Where are we and where are we going to start with?
We had the agenda change. Sean did his uh
online review first because he has another
Something else going on at 7.
Okay. Well, let's see here.
Crap.
did you have a section in for the web stuff, Stan, or were you just typing it in?
I was…
Okay.
there's a section right up at the top I was typing it in before everything else.
And…
Up there.
All right, so I've got the
web stuff 2024, 11, 14 comments
Shit.
I'm sorry I missed the earlier discussion.
Would somebody tell me briefly what was said?
Yeah.
or decided.
I just went through my normal spiel where we looked at the YouTube, the Twitter, the meetup, and the
the new site.
And kind of just showed what our web presence was for
the month of October, there's nothing particularly
stand out at all.
that Kitty versus Western video seems to pretty much be drying up now at about 3.7 thousand views
And the two October videos are much closer to our normal view count, although the
Automated code review one.
that James Conroy did for the lug.
is slightly higher at 69 views
The only other comment I made was that the AI did an exceptionally bad job of generating art.
for the site and the thumbnail.
this month and so I might, if I get time, look into finding another AI art generator
But I might also might not do that too. We'll see.
And I got the website to stand. I put in the chat two pictures.
One dark mode and one light mode for the new site.
So you can see what it looks like with the two different PNGs.
And I'm going to push that up right now so you'll see it live in a few minutes.
Okay.
Hello, gang.
Hello.
All right, Gary.
Blake Gary Meyer is living up to his name.
You finally make it?
Finally made it yep
And I guess the crack about being the late is kind of appropriate because my uh
I was at a funeral all day, so I just got done kind of
departing family and stuff off to the airport so
Oh, I was going to say all day at a funeral. That seems a little odd, but if you were
taking care of your family, that makes a lot more sense.
Yeah, yeah.
One of those things where uh
it was really the
the spouse who died and uh
So, yeah, we kind of all knew that you know for
a number of these folks, it was going to be the last time we probably would be getting together, you know, between combination of
their age and the fact that they're really not
related to me except by
marriage
through a guy who's no longer alive.
Huh?
you know it's pouring down rain here and i think i left my garage door open
I'll be back in a couple of minutes. I got to go check that.
Okay.
All right.
Okay, Sean, so…
What I've got so far is Sean went through standard web presence presentation, October, a few video were more difficult. Dark mode and light mode were presented.
I'm probably missing some important things, but
This would be your opportunity to tell me what those are.
Okay.
Nope, you're good. Dark mode and light mode. I would just add the dark mode and light mode
logo was updated on the new site.
Ooh, it's coming through now. I see it.
that shows up very well on the dark mode.
Yep, I agree.
Yeah.
And if you scroll down, Google changed the calendar, the way the calendar looks. I didn't do that. Google did that.
Yeah, they did a whole bunch of changes
that screwed me up on getting the calendar count.
It takes me about four times as long now to do that because
It used to be I'd switch it into agenda mode
And I copied the entire month
And I'd go through and manipulate that so I could do the counts.
Now they only display like two screens at a time instead of the entire
Month so month
It breaks up into like two days or maybe three or four days and you got to go through
Plus, when you copy it.
they'll say October Tuesday or Wednesday, October.
Thursday, October. But they don't say what day it is. So you got to be careful there that you don't duplicate or miss a day.
It's really a pain in the butt.
Of course, they've new and improved it and they've got
buttons in there that you can go in and buy
add-ons.
to make it work better with Zoom and other crap.
Yeah.
Oh, my.
That's no good.
Okay, so…
What would be our next step on all the work that Sean has done?
It doesn't necessarily need to be Sean who answers that, although he certainly can.
Well, as far as I'm concerned with the headers, the red stripe across and the two icons in the black mode or the dark mode and white mode.
I think it's time to go ahead and switch over.
And then, but you're going to have at some point, we're going to have to have
him to train whoever to how he does stuff so that
Casey gets run over by that big truck coming around the corner.
If somebody else will be able to do all this stuff.
But I'm not sure how much
how that I think he had said in the past, Sean had said in the past that it kind of relates
do the…
the AI, how it generates those graphics is
doesn't seem to be independent from his
personal setup.
Yeah, you just need to, so basically it calls out to open AI and their API endpoints.
So anybody who has an open ai
API key
Which you can get by creating an account, then you can do the AI stuff to generate the things for the website.
Basically, it's like a prepaid
card. So you go on OpenAI's website
you and then you basically top up the account. Like I put like $10 in there
And then every time you call the every time you call the API,
it deducts a couple pennies or something off of there.
Yeah.
And so last time I checked.
I forget how much it costs every month. I think it's like 10 cents or something. I can't remember.
Let me find the…
Yeah, there is some reason to believe that they're not charging
anywhere close to their actual costs.
But it's also
the case that we could deal with that when it actually comes.
Yeah. Right now it's 15 cents. It's roughly 15 cents per
per meeting to generate the AI content. So we're looking at like
30 cents per per month.
So it's not a lot. Like I said, I put $10 on there and it's
lasting a long time so long
But yeah, so…
to generate the website, I could go through how to add a new page or a new presenter to the website at any time
There's a very minor setup you need on your machine. You got to have like node installed and you have to have this open AI key and then the rest is pretty much
just running one command and manipulating some json
This is the bulk of it.
So.
Is that any?
Yeah, I'm guessing that the harder part is going to be to find that volunteer.
The harder part's what?
the harder part will be to find that volunteer who is willing to be the
be you know to take the time to be trained as the backup.
Yeah.
person.
I agree. And there's no rush. I mean, yeah, if I get hit by a bus, I would
That would be a significant hurdle, but
Yeah, I can maintain the website and the YouTube channel and even the meetup page for
very quickly now, so it's no big deal.
As long as I don't get hit by a bus, I guess.
Yeah.
So Ken, better put in the minutes. Buses are not allowed to get anywhere near Sean.
All right.
Um.
Yeah, but I've been pretty much just maintaining it and making minor tweaks since basically August. So there hasn't been any huge changes since August. So it's kind of just been
Coming along, you know, nothing, nothing really
So my personal feeling is that
And no disrespect is meant.
by this.
The stand is one of the more difficult people to please, and if Stan thinks it's time, then I think it's time.
They…
The only thing that I'm not real
sure about is the the where it's where
it displays the instructions for the next meeting.
I've seen that in here and I think I know if you do go to the read more point.
That pulls it up, I think.
for the instructions.
Right, Will.
But then it has to be
the next…
somehow the next stuff has to be put in there before that works totally.
Because…
Yeah, so if any of the meetings that are loaded in are occurring in the future.
Yeah.
then it will display a little banner and it'll display a zoom
And I showed this during one of the recent meetings
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember seeing that. I do remember seeing that.
We played around, wanted me to make the
Part of the problem is getting that advanced meeting information
Right.
out there. And that all comes back to
It takes us, we don't get a really timely input or a timely uh
grasp on who's going to do what for the next meeting.
And…
Right. But…
But that doesn't really affect whether or not
I think, you know, it…
you know you're right and it's time to go live
And we should get on with it.
Yeah, I think it's far enough along that we could switch over and make it work from here.
Yeah, the biggest blocker. So I talked, we had a long thread about this in, I think August.
Yeah.
And basically.
Lee and Grant got in there and they
you know they're talking about like
you know they want
staging environments and dev environments and then prod environments and they want like a two-stage deploy
Like I push code to the repo, but then somebody else has to come in and
push another button to make it deploy to prod and all this. And it got real serious
you know and real like enterprise-y, real fast which i was
a little bit disappointed by, but I was okay to go along with it
uh…
But by the same token, I'm not really, you know, I'm not really game to do all that work to make all that enterprise-y whatever happen
I don't do we don't
And so if nobody's willing to do that, then those requirements are never going to be met.
Yeah, I don't think we need that. We can just
you know?
I mean, if you go to site.slug.org and look at it.
I think it's ready.
Yeah.
Yeah, so the short-term change
But I will admit, I do not have a clue as to how to switch it over.
Okay? Be honest.
Right. So there's a few different ways to do it right and there's
There's a short-term way that I kind of proposed you know back
That's kind of what I opened the thread with in August was like.
Yeah.
We could just do a short-term kind of redirect thing
redirect the slash
on slug.org.
to site.slew.org.
And that would effectively replace
or that would effectively like go live, right? It would be a redirect but it would go live
And that way the old site could still be there
Because the new site does link
to the old site for some things like the presentation archive.
And like the mailing lists and stuff like that.
Yeah.
So we can't remove the old site entirely. It needs some pieces of it to be there.
And so my short, like the fix that I proposed, I think would handle that. It would be a relatively simple
change on the Apache side
But like I said in that thread, Grant especially did not like that idea
One of the much more professional enterprise-y kind of
implementation, which I'm all for
You mean like documentation? Oh, my.
Well, yeah, like…
Yeah.
He wanted a bunch of stuff that is great in theory, but somebody's got to do the work
Nobody wants documentation.
Yeah.
All right, so I can, I mean, I can understand why
Yeah.
you know.
those issues would get raised.
But I also understand that we have
pretty darn finite volunteer resources
Yeah.
you know it's not like, you know, Grant said hey
We should do it this way and I will do it.
Yep.
And our rule of thumb has always been the guy that does it gets to choose how it's done.
That's about what it amounts to.
So…
And the fact that
Sean's approach to this means that
it would be relatively straightforward to fall back if we had to.
Yeah, that's true.
You know.
I'm not trying to say that I think that's highly likely. I'm just pointing out that
we would have some kind of recovery position.
And we certainly have
That's a diplomatic way of putting it.
And we certainly have people who are familiar with how to manage
the old site.
So, I mean, what I'm trying to do here is to
you know, either get us to move forward on this
or figure out exactly what it's going to take for us to be willing to do that
and then get that in motion.
Now, as near as I can tell.
Several of you have been really quiet about during this discussion.
Well, I think the site is 95%, maybe 98% ready.
And, you know, switch it over and see what breaks.
Ultimately, you're going to have to do that anyway.
Yeah.
But the thing is, I…
You know, I know how to deal with the old site. I don't know how to deal with the new one.
Until it gets switched over.
Okay, well, if y'all are on board, I think I have pseudo on…
Bach. So if y'all just want me to go ahead and switch it over, I can find some time, I don't know, on the weekend
or something to
to try to do it.
It was…
Especially doing it early in the month like this, there's probably not a lot of people coming to our site, you know, early.
Yeah.
month because all the action happens in the third and fourth week or whatever. So our second and third week so
There we go.
Yeah. Do we need to send out any kind of what they call a warning order to sort of the
Horses don't get too scared when it happens.
I guess it would be nice to put a posting out and say, you know, hey, we're going to
We're going to cut over the website.
If anybody has any notices of problem or whatever
Send email to send email
pull up steer com or pull up
Yeah, steer com would be. If you want me to see it, it's got to be on steer comm.
Hey, Sean, one thing just occurred to me.
Yeah.
since you're linking to old parts or parts of the old site.
If we go live with the new site.
Won't those links break?
No, I don't think so, because what I plan to do is just redirect only slash.
So slash will redirect to the new site. But if you go to like slash about.
That won't.
Something like that is what I'm thinking.
Okay.
Well, if you run into any issues uh
go ahead and post on sysadmin
are, you know, ding us directly.
Question I have.
Can people, well, I assume people can see
site.slug.org.
And then when we switched over.
It'll be thesloube.org.
you know ww slug.org.
when you do this, you're
handy dandy switchover, would that cause a problem for people to still go to site.sloop.org?
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, I don't know for sure, but I'm going to have to like, ideally it would be slew.org would go to the new site.
Right.
And you would stay on slew.org while you were on the new site. But I don't know that for sure.
It could be that you go to salute.org and it just redirects you to site.sloot.org.
I want to see what I can do there. Obviously, I'm going to do the best I can. So whatever, whatever.
Will there be a problem with let's Encrypt and all that other magical stuff?
I don't think so. That's all handled on the Netlify side. And I think when I researched it before, they have a way of dealing with, you know.
alternative names. So I think it'll be okay.
Yeah.
Well, we got to test it anyway, so what the heck
Yeah.
And like, yeah, it's easy to revert back, right? I think, Lee, don't you have the Apache config in a Git repo so
Yeah.
If we mess something up, we can just go back to the previous commit and
do, you know, do something like that.
I'll go and take a look at that tomorrow and make sure what we've got
you know we're current in the repo.
And then I'm toying with the idea, I've still been toying with that idea of doing, and this is like future, future, way down the road.
I'm still toying with some idea
how to do an admin
kind of page where you can add a new meeting
without needing to
you know just from the website itself, like you somehow log into the site as an administrator
And then you're able to add a new meeting
Right.
directly on the site, kind of like how you can do with Meetup, right? Meetup is when you log into Meetup, as long as you're in the admin group or whatever.
You can add a new meeting directly on the site. I'm still toying around with some ideas how to do that on our site, but it's going to be
a down the road aways, but it's not completely off my
radar is what all I want to say.
Right.
So, um.
There's a lot of manual input
Stan.
Yes.
apparently
I just did a save.
Bye.
Wiki?
Yeah.
And then I did an edit.
Oh, jeez.
Yeah.
And the changes that I made are not there.
Sorry about that.
The changes you made are what?
they are not there.
What the hell?
So I edited the page.
Uh…
typed in a bunch of stuff about Sean's presentation about the website
web presence and you know some of the discussions we've been having about going live
And then I did a save
And then I did an edit again to look at it, you know.
see it for sure.
Yeah.
And it's not there.
I'm not…
I'm not editing that page.
I've gotten out of that.
Right. But the thing is, didn't you report an issue where you'd made some edit and then it disappeared?
Well, that was my thumbs. It wasn't something else. It was me screwing it up.
I see.
Well…
Crap.
I will type this in again and hit save again.
Ow.
Is Gary in the room?
No.
I didn't think so.
Totally a figment of your imagination.
Yeah.
We're that man behind the camera.
Thank you.
In summary, all the bean counts are essentially the same.
meetup total for the month is up to $992.
And everything else is about the same from last month. Hardly any change at all.
put those numbers in.
Except for the…
calendar count. I wasn't able to do that because Google changed the calendar
since the last time I looked at the calendar.
which is about a week ago.
No.
And I mentioned it to Lee earlier.
that…
The way I do the count for the
calendar report
is go through and display the agenda mode and that
In the past, I was able to display the entire month
And then copy the entire month and cut and paste it into a text file and
And do a little bit of massaging and then I'm able to
extract the counts from that but
Google changed it so they'd only displays about two screens full now. You will not
display the entire month.
But there's like two days or three or four days and that's about it.
And you got to do them two or three days at a time and
Also, it doesn't put the number of the day. It puts October
It'll do Wednesday, October, but which
October, Wednesday, is it? Is it the second Wednesday or is it the
The 13th Wednesday, you know, day of the month
really…
Each.
hard to deal with.
It takes about four times as long to do that manually.
And so consequently, I did not have enough time this evening to
finish the calendar thing i
I went through and I pulled
all the days out, but then I had to be very careful that I got each day and didn't miss a day.
And…
it'll take so that took about
four times longer than four times longer
The way I've done it in the past.
And…
Consequently just consequently
It's going to take longer.
I almost didn't think I would be able to do it at all.
Nothing like new and improved stuff.
Yeah.
Okay, so…
I'm going to say that we've finished with
the stuff that Sean wanted to cover
Yeah.
And we would now drop back to the otherwise
Otherwise, the normal order of things.
Yes.
I agree.
So…
Carmel loose leggings.
What?
Poor joke, sorry.
I thought that was a town in Illinois.
All right.
Okay, so treasurer report.
Current balance is…
Backward.
Okay.
2781, 84, nothing spent in october
So just change those Septembers to October up there on the
on the top and you're good, Ken.
And make that a 31 there in front of it.
That's that one.
No biggie.
Okay.
calendar report, and it looks like you made some notations about that.
Yeah, it's…
Yep.
The thing about the calendar report is Google changed the way they do it, and I didn't have enough time today to do it.
Yeah, that's fine.
He stan while he's typing that, could you explain to me again
I had a problem you found?
On with Google.
Bye.
Yeah, because when i
Oh.
You know, I usually run it in schedule mode and when I look at the slew calendar, I can see
you know weeks
Well, it's…
You're…
Well, let me go over and look at that so I can…
Get the description right.
I can see the 26th.
November down through February.
Shlube.
Calendar.
Oh, that's it.
God bless America.
Although it is kind of confusing when you're looking at them like this when you got
When everything is duplicated.
Presentation.
Are you saying that you had a way to look at
the detail
Yeah. The detail onwards.
I've never seen detail in calendar. How would you do that?
Well, it's
Jesus.
It's where the hell?
Oh, you piece of crap.
Got it. I've got…
What the hell?
Now I can't even…
Now you're bringing in some aviation.
No, what I'm saying is
God damn it.
I can't switch view. Oh.
It used to be this hamburger, let me switch for you but now it's just
hide in his column.
Is that the change?
Hey, the kids that write the software um
made it better.
new and improved.
I can't stick to the…
damn thing.
That's schedule.
Well, I recognize that this is like really annoying
Oh, ouch. It…
Go ahead, Stan.
It's changed from what it was this afternoon. Son of a bitch.
Okay. So…
I recognize that this is extraordinarily annoying for the people who are actually trying to use this stuff to get work done.
But maybe we should leave it for now in terms of this meeting
And, uh.
Yeah.
go on to the next thing.
Sounds like a good idea, Ken. Yeah, I think so, Ken.
Yeah, agreed.
finish your meeting if we got the time
And, you know, I like to extend my sympathy to you, Stan.
Okay.
So…
Okay, now it's broken again. Hell, I don't know what the hell happened.
Next thing would be subscriber reports. Looks like those have already been filled in for October. Thank you.
Yep.
They look…
unremarkable.
Yeah.
attendance report.
Um.
Those are not filled in.
Oops.
I got the numbers. I forgot to put them in there.
Damn it.
Okay, can you hold on just a minute and uh
get to where i can
Okay.
give them to you slowly, please, Stan.
Okay, hang on just a second.
In my database.
Okay.
There's the steer column was seven.
Got it.
Slack was 11.
Okay.
Schlug was 18.
St. Louis Linux was 14.
Okay.
New Linux was 15.
Okay, so that's 7, 11, 18, 14, and 15.
Correct.
And those numbers look
I guess I would say unremarkable.
SLUG is up a little bit. Linux is down a little bit. New Linux is up a little bit.
And we had better attendance at the steer comm meeting
Yeah.
All right. Thank you, Stan.
Thank you.
All right.
meeting review comments.
Slack.
Any special comments?
Just that it's…
very happy that
There seems to be some senior guys that show up for that meeting that help out with the hardware and so forth.
Plus, Bill Bunch.
And a couple of the other guys. And if we don't
We don't often have much
inquiry about hardware or configuration issues, but we do have
what it amounts to is
newcomers show up.
Sure.
And since it's a free format meeting, it runs very much like the new Linux meeting.
Sure.
And I just…
very, very helpful to whoever shows up. I mean, the new guys that show up.
No.
Right, right. Okay.
And sometimes the Greybeard school
go off into tangents and it's really interesting as far as I'm concerned.
All right.
Slug.
It looks like that was…
improve cybersecurity with AI by Tony Z.
I don't have anything good to say.
I almost fell asleep.
Okay.
Okay. Anybody else who is there?
Gary?
Remember, he spent a long time trying to like
view some picture inside of a Word document or something.
It was, yeah.
That took like, I felt like longer than the presentation was trying to figure out how to display that picture or something.
It was…
The last, I'll say this, the last couple of presentations that Tony's done for us.
have not been well
prepared.
I don't think.
I hate to say that, but that's…
what it amounts to.
Well…
I mean, the point of us
you know having this conversation
is to think about
you know, we'll make things work better in the future.
Wake up, Gary.
Yeah, I'm trying to
come up with the right words.
I mean, basically what you said
There's too much reliance on too much
not preparing slides in advance and just, yeah, I can just
key in what I want.
just demonstrate. I know what I want to demonstrate and uh
Unfortunately, sometimes when you rely on that
what you demonstrate is not what you would hope for.
Okay.
I think.
All right. So what I've got here is comments, underwhelmed. Tony Zee should probably not be at the top of our list. It felt
well prepared.
I'm not, well, I'm not sure we want to put that in the minutes. Exactly, yeah.
Okay, what shall we say?
uh…
Crap.
This is…
Or…
I mean, as far as I can tell, no one's disputing the accuracy of that. Now, if we need to be
more politic, that's fine.
it seems like we ought to be able to say something
which would be a reminder to us.
Right. How about, this is an example of
what we've discussed about the need to
prepare slides.
Well, we didn't even have a…
a prior executive summary of
Very kind.
The pig in a poke is what happened.
Yeah.
Well…
The biggest benefit, I think, of preparing the slides is it forces who's ever working on it
It forces them to think about what they're going to say.
Exactly. And lay out a logical order.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
And the AI is not going to do that for you.
I'm sure it'll do just fine at the busy work.
Hey.
But at conceptualizing, I kind of doubt it.
go back to that.
Go back to where you and put on the end of that reverse slides
presentation ended up slightly disjointed.
Can we save that?
I think we could say that without being nasty. Yeah. Ended up slightly disjointed.
you know and and basically combine them together.
a pair of slides which caused the presentation to end up slightly disjointed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can do that part.
Yeah, there you go.
Is that PC enough, Gary? Yeah, I think so.
Okay, the next part of the meeting was job control and bash by Stephen Lindbark.
i was surprised how interesting it turned out to be.
I didn't expect
much and and uh
There was way more meat
than expected.
And I will say that the last couple of presentations that Lembark has done, he's had difficulty with Zoom.
And he didn't have quite as much difficulty this time.
And I got a comment from Ed Howland. He said that he just was
amazed at how much
additional stuff that that bash
seems to come across with
when you dig into it so and this was
Yeah, some of those older utilities that have been around for a long time
There's an amazing amount of stuff in there.
Bash is always being beat up by…
you know almost an infinite number of people, which means everything's going to get found out so
chances are pretty good it'll work.
Okay.
Anything else?
Thank you.
Dan would like to say he's been pretty grumpy the last couple of months.
Okay.
I'm not quite sure how that applies to this session but
That's fine.
Yeah. And it is.
Let me put one more sentence in there. I'm putting it together in my head here. Let's see.
Don't have much space to work with, do you?
Yeah, you're right.
Locked into that one. Okay.
Let's see.
the topic
idle of
What was the topic title?
job control in bash
didn't really describe just how broad
the topic became it became a real
tour of a lot of features, a lot of commands at bash it really turned out good.
Yeah, I had no idea there was that much there. I mean, I've been using the
you know background and
foreground start and stop jobs but
all the rest of that, I guess, you know.
I guess I just didn't look.
I had no need to.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing you know you don't need it
you know okay it did what I wanted. I'm done.
On to the next thing.
And Ken, I would suggest rather than saying did not properly foreshadow, how about did not adequately
foreshadowed him.
Sure.
I thought he had a pretty clickbait title. Like there's something about, I latched onto something in the email. It was something about like.
It was like um
Something for control freaks.
And then have like dot, dot, dot job control freaks
I thought that was pretty good. I kind of used that on like the YouTube video and stuff like that because I thought that was a pretty good.
He alluded to it. It was going to be very more interesting and complex than what you normally think of.
in bash job control.
Yeah, I think Steven is one of my favorite presenters that we regularly have. He's always so
He goes so deep on whatever he's presenting. I think he does a great job.
All right.
Okay.
The problem is the…
The titles.
they don't
The topic…
titles don't seem to be attractive.
I don't know.
how they could be.
All right. So the STL Linux meeting, which was
James Conroy.
Lunders and review tools.
overview tools.
Thank you.
all of you
So I think we should get James to…
give us a whole series here on GitLab.
Because he went over the tools.
And, you know, he mentioned that these are all ran in like a CI pipeline
But he kind of glossed over that part.
And I think it'd be cool if he did like a whole series or a few talks about
more of a ground up kind of thing.
a more comprehensive on
on CI in general
Okay.
You know, one of the things I didn't realize, I didn't realize GitLab was open source to the point that you could roll you know
build your own internally.
I think he'd be the one to do it.
I caught you.
Yeah, it's open core, right? So you can do, you can self host your own
with the community level features
And then if you pay extra, then you can get the, and then if you pay, then you get the premium features and they have like enterprise edition so
It's open core model.
Anything else?
Let me once.
You know, one thing about this meeting, not about the presentation, but I think this one went until like 10 p.m. Central.
And James's presentation didn't go on that long.
But I think like the discussion afterward went to like 10 p.m. because like um
Grant started bringing up these philosophicals like
What if Unix was actually Linux or something, you know, and all that stuff so
I don't know what to say about that other than it happened, but you know.
And there's quite a few of us that stayed on all the way till pretty close to 10. So I guess people were at least somewhat interested in what
what the discussion was.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
Yeah.
Above and beyond the topic.
The topic spawned some interesting philosophical discussion.
Definitely.
container problems.
I'm going to have to come up with a bigger container for all this stuff.
Okay, anything else?
I mean, I think that's enough. We got a
we should have this guy talk about a related topic
And a note that generated a lot of discussion so
Yeah.
uh…
We put that in there?
Hold on.
There it is. Yeah.
Sean liked this well enough to say that we should have James give a session on CI and GitLab.
This meeting ran quite late, close to 10 p.m. There was lots of discussion
Then it's a parenthetical, mostly unrelated note. Ken likes shellcheck.net.
Because I think it's really cool.
And they get a lot of use out of it.
That is a good addition. Thank you, Ken.
Okay, new Linux.
Oh.
another amazing meeting with…
One new guy.
Okay.
He was a guy that had done Linux before and he was coming back to it.
And had a number of hardware questions, or not so much hardware as
configuration well
I guess network design, how he was going to lay out his network and so forth.
If I remember correctly.
I'm going to be general and say that he had configuration questions.
Yeah.
Okay.
We did.
Thank you.
All right.
So now we talk about our future plans.
Plange.
So November 7th.
Oh.
you probably don't have any special plans for the Slack meeting
Just…
do it and deal with it.
Yeah.
uh…
Slug.
base and um
Hmm.
Okay, for base
Both of those look like TBD.
Yeah, I don't have anything for base yet. I do have a main
It's kind of, I hope it's going to come through, but I don't have it confirmed yet, but
So yeah, base we still need.
You need a clone, Gary.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'll do the…
when ip tables isn't ip tables
Oh.
I posted on steer comm a couple of weeks ago. Yeah.
It could be a good ventilation.
Okay, I think we have a volunteer.
Well, I apologize.
Yeah.
Two weeks ago.
Oh.
After six months, is that title going to be descriptive enough that people know what it is?
interested in going back and looking at it?
What IP tables isn't really IP tables, maybe.
Yeah, that's better.
That's better, I guess.
Oh.
Thank you.
Sure.
Well, thank Grant. He was the one who clued me in.
But luckily, I took good notes.
Yeah.
I'm working on some notes from
what he described port knocking as
After the recording.
the official recording was over.
And…
I…
I need to settle down and so I can get back with him so
that's a potential
topic down the road, but I don't know when it'll happen.
stick it really in there, Ken. When IP tables really or isn't really IP tables
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it really drove me fruit when i could see the
port open and ip tables, but the program couldn't see the port open
Oh.
Okay. You know, do IP tables VNL, you can see the rule
port 80 open. Uh-huh.
But the program behind port 80
wouldn't get traffic.
Okay, this is going to be an interesting
Interesting base.
My brain is going numb.
Is that something new?
No, it's just right on schedule.
Believe me.
Good one.
Okay, so…
Understand.
Gary, what about the main?
Okay.
take over the screen for just a second.
If I may.
Sure.
Is that me up there now?
Not yet.
No?
You got to share her.
I told it to share. Oh yeah, you got the green bar up there and that should be you.
Yeah, I'm waiting.
Oh, excuse me.
My cursor has now frozen.
Well, why?
You didn't need that cursor anyway.
Yeah.
I heard that about you, Gary.
Yeah.
Okay. In the meantime, I'll direct all of you, go to uh
the calendar and
Look at Friday night.
on the calendar.
There's the 2600 meeting.
I was really hoping that maybe one of you was able to make it. Unfortunately, I was not.
Oh, last Friday. Last Friday, November the 1st.
For those who may not.
What time?
regularly read
or stay up with the 2600 group.
Joe is always very creative with his titles and his abstracts.
more creative than I would like. Teenage Mutant Distro Turtles means nothing to me.
But the topic was about distro box.
And it was something about how this allows you to
pulling stuff from different distros.
I'm not familiar with it.
Anybody else familiar with Distro box?
No, not me.
it's enough problem for me to keep my mind wrapped around one distro much less
multiple pieces of districts yeah yeah
So usually I don't like to pull in
speakers or speakers
topics that i
haven't had familiarity with how good the speaker can do
what the topic really does and means.
But this one just seemed like
was an intriguing topic.
And so I contacted Joe.
And said, okay, can you put me in touch with the speaker? I'd like to know if he'd like to represent the presentation here since
It's fresh for him. He just did it friday
And so the thing is, I've been playing
playing phone, not phone tag, email tag with joe
since Friday and basically
He says, yeah, he's interested.
Yeah, he'd be doing it. Okay.
So put me in contact. Let's get together. So that's where it still stands as I speak.
I've sent him more email messages this afternoon, but I still haven't spoken to the actual
presenter from Friday so
Yeah, so I know about DistroBox. I had this on my list of presentations to give too. There was one
that I mentioned before, like distro box versus toolbox these are two
the same type of tool
And basically what DistroBox allows you to do is it allows you to
let's say that you're like you run you you're on an Ubuntu system
but you want to run a package in the Arch user repository
Well, you can use DistroBox to spin up an arch
user land, basically shell environment
And then you can basically install packages
from the arch user repository and then run them on your Ubuntu system.
And so it's basically just a way where you can have a user land of practically any
distribution out there on whatever distribution you're currently running.
And I think it's super cool.
I haven't messed with it a ton myself. That's why I haven't given the talk yet. So if somebody else can step in and do it, I definitely think we should have it. I'd be very interested in it.
By the way, just so you all know.
the way they work is they still hold physical meetings
However, they have been
rather consistently uh
hybridating it and doing uh
doing a Zoom session while they're doing the physical meeting.
So, uh.
So yeah, he's not
It is not that he is not used to doing it
online so
Say that again. I didn't understand what you said. What?
The 2600 group has been doing hybrid meetings for months.
And physical with the concurrent jitsi session.
And so that's what was done last Friday was
there was a number of people in the room
But there was also a jitsu session going on online.
And I…
I did not get a chance to get on the gypsy. I wasn't there physically.
kamikaze Joe tells me, yeah, it went well. He did a good talk.
Everybody liked it so
Huh.
Okay. Gary, is you're…
your crappy computer, is it freed up again or not?
I've been looking at the big screen. Oh yeah, it is.
Okay.
Can you share your screen?
Yeah, hold on.
Share your screen and go to page 21 of the planning schedule report.
Okay. I'm not sharing it right now.
No.
Nope.
Okay. Because that doesn't look like that yeah
Okay.
There we go.
Yeah.
Ken, can you stop sharing?
No, I wouldn't be surprised if zoom
doesn't allow sharing from a browser anymore.
I think that's it.
So I stopped sharing.
I had to update the client today.
Go ahead.
I want to join a webinar this morning and uh
it wouldn't it refused to start.
Okay, so I think the answer is Gary cannot share his screen.
Apparently not. Doesn't look like it.
Let me see if I can share mine.
At this time, my cursor has not frozen up, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything.
Right. Well, you know, that's
Nice.
that's progress but
Can I share it over here?
What do you got up there?
Boom.
I was sharing uh
calendar entry from Friday.
the slew calendar from Friday. But Stan wants to go to uh
Planning's good. Planning.edf.
God damn it.
Okay.
I hate him. I see…
I see the planning in the background.
Yeah, it's you. Bump it a couple of times, Stan, will you?
I'm trying to not without
Breaking it.
Crap.
Air. Max.
Perfect.
Okay. Oh.
Ooh.
Anywho, um…
I had the ID on there port knocking with Grant Taylor, and I'll be working on that.
And then…
I've got this idea that we should try to get some volunteers to do something about remote connectivity.
About two or three months ago.
the guy from Chicago
I forget his name right now.
It asked about how to do remote sharing, you know, and there was quite a bit of discussion up on the discuss list.
And I thought that that
remote connectivity. What do you got to do to share stuff remotely for you know
once you leave home and you want to connect back to your home system, that kind of stuff.
And I've been putting that on here.
And again, that's why you use something like OwnCloud or Nextcloud.
Yeah. Even, you know, even if all the possibilities, something about that I thought would be something that would be good for base sessions or
or something. If not at the main meeting, but at the St. Louis Linux user group, the lug.
You know, anyway.
These other ideas here that have been on here quite a while, but I've kind of grouped them with stuff Lee had, secure email, virtualization.
pie hole, a raspberry Pi.
And there was something suggested about zealogy and versus tea mucks i think
Sean had kind of halfway volunteered to lead a
be a participant with that and and
I forget. Maybe it was with it was that session with uh
Steve Lembark, I think.
Anyway, and there's a bunch of this other stuff that Scott Graneman has ideas that we were going to try to hit up him for.
And then I was going to try and ask, at one point Grant Taylor had said something about
going into talking about public and private SSH key setups.
Okay. And, uh.
Anyway, I just wanted to encourage everybody else to occasionally look at this list.
No, it's all I can do to get Gary to look at it.
Although he keeps telling me it's helpful.
But I don't think he gets beyond one line at a time.
Thank you.
Okay, that's just what I kind of wanted to throw out there.
I'm proud of myself for getting one word at a time, but you're right. But no, it is a helpful list.
does keep track of what things we've been thinking of
Yeah.
And there's some of that we just need to purge off of there because you're not getting anywhere with some of these.
Because, well, honestly, you just don't have, you haven't had enough time in the day for the last three or six months or
almost a year.
All right, I'm going to stop sharing mine if I can figure out how to…
Turn the share button off.
Where the hell is it?
Oh, ladies.
You're probably over the top, Stan.
where the green bar is right next to it.
Well, I see the green bar, but where the hell?
Well, he turned it off.
There you go.
Jen's sharing now. Okay.
All right, so…
Moving on to
VSTO Linux.
or log meeting, depending on how you want to express that.
Do we have anything lined up here?
We got anything for the lug?
Bye.
Not I.
That's a no.
Moving right along.
I think that i think there was a blank yeah
Okay, so that's a no so far.
So anybody gets any ideas?
steer comp.
By the way, I see Alex toll uh
listed there in the comments at the top of where you're at right now.
I have sent a number of
emails to alex over the
last three or four months and
It doesn't responded to any of them. For those of you who don't remember.
Alex.
was recovering from cancer.
And it seemed like
In summer, he was doing okay then all of a sudden
He sent us a message saying it's come back.
I've got to go back for more treatment and I haven't
I haven't gotten any responses from him since then, so I'm presuming he's still
Under the weather, under the weather.
and know my messages to them or not, when are you going to do a talk?
Yeah, sure, sure.
Um…
I could talk about writing a half duplex uh
terminal emulator in VBScript
But I don't think that's really appropriate in this meeting.
stunned silence.
Explain what that was, Ken. What did you
Thank you.
I said that I could talk about writing a half duplex terminal emulator
in vb script
Okay.
But I don't think that's appropriate for this meeting. That happens to be the project I'm working on currently for a customer.
Okay.
They're not so much interested in the terminal emulator
But I need that.
to be able to test
They…
the serial ports or they're actually
about serial ports or like remote serial ports
It's complicated and messy.
So I've been building this thing so that I can test it and
understand exactly how it works so that the documentation I'm going to write will be correct.
And you willingly chose VBScript? I mean, are you sure? Are you…
that was the only option available.
I'm guessing that
It's not my idea. I have talked to them previously about the fact that VBScript is going away
And, you know, it's probably time to make new plans.
some organizations are resistant to change.
But it's billable cycles, right?
Oh, it certainly is billable, yes.
And, you know, there are aspects of the project that you know that are
there's somewhat interesting
This probably would only make your life more hectic. You wouldn't want to switch
and do
The presentation you're describing as the main on the Wednesday meeting.
And then I'd get distro box
to do the thursday meeting
No. For one thing, because I think I'm occupied that Wednesday.
really occupied that Wednesday.
In the evening so
Understandable.
Okay.
As an aside, I'd like to point out it's after 8 o'clock
And traditionally, I've gone at nine o'clock, I've said that
we always talk about the end of meetings at the public libraries
Well, the county library is now shut down at 8 o'clock instead of nine o'clock.
Just if you didn't know.
So they'd have thrown us out 20 minutes ago.
I think I'd be more interested in the remote serial port.
the remote serial, whatever you're doing aspect of it, then the VB script.
for the lug meeting.
Yeah.
Right, right. Well, the remote part of it actually
is…
something that somebody else has already coded.
Or at least, you know, the parts that make it
work between
the computer where my software is running and
the serial port, which is over on this box over there
Or the serial ports, there are two of them.
Thank you.
um but
it wasn't meant to be serious.
Hmm.
Anyway.
So…
Nothing yet for that meeting.
Hey, hey, Sean.
Are you back?
Yeah, I'm here.
What would it take to…
maybe have you walk us through
hosting a meeting or something like that so we can get people
more familiar with how the new website works.
Yeah, I mean, I can do that at any time. Let's just leave that on the back burner because I don't have to prepare anything for that.
So let's just leave that on the back burner in case we can't get something better, you know?
Okay.
Because it's not going to be that interesting.
Well, it will be to a few of us that might have to pick up the pieces if you do get hit by a bus.
Well, yeah.
It's not a bus, a truck.
Good morning.
A garbage truck?
And he was a polling object.
Oh, golly.
All right.
So we don't have anything thing for that meeting. We know we need something
Stan, do you have anything to say about the new Linux meeting on the 26th?
Coming up? No.
Yes.
No, it just…
Everyone is different.
You know, I try to, you know.
The question is if we ever have any real newcomers show up, every once in a while that happens.
Regardless of how many people sign up on
on Meetup, we seldom have two new people
when
that come from discovering us on Meetup.
Sometimes one, well, actually sometimes two, but never more than that.
And…
And sometimes they say they're happy, but, you know, and sometimes they come back. We've got one guy that, you know, has been to three or four different meetings as he showed up
from meetup. And surprisingly he's you know
A lot of these people, depending on their skill level, they
go on to attend the other meetings.
I don't know.
Right.
It draws them in, sort of.
Unfortunately, we're relying on meetup.com.
I think it sucks.
Yeah, well, I'm not thrilled about it right now myself so
Yeah. And it may be that I just think that because we're just spread so across so many different places.
You know?
Whatever.
Okay.
Do we have anything new to say about
server admin or the bulk upgrade
Nothing new. We're…
Currently running Bach 2.
With updates, Bach is no longer getting updates.
Right.
We still have the problems with the
Email conversion and
transition transportation.
I'm…
It's been so long, I think Mike had a way
If I remember correctly, he had a way to keep Mailman 2 going.
Yeah.
But if we eventually when we
when we have to migrate to Mailman 3, history is going to be a major issue.
Hmm.
Why? Because I don't think the formats are compatible.
Yeah, so in theory, there is a way to transfer that stuff.
In theory.
Yeah.
Yes, that's about as much as I can tell you about it.
All right, we've already talked about the website
Let's see here.
uploading presentations or is there anything special to say about that
I think it's Sean's been doing it.
You know, there's nothing.
So we'll just say
Working.
I've been doing it to the old
Presentation Archives page.
Right.
And Sean has been doing it to the new site
And the YouTube stuff.
Not the, yeah, but not the, oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, I've been uploading them to YouTube. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
And Gary, I don't think that I've
I've…
added you to the
point where you can look at the stats
I need to do that. That's been on the top of my to-do list for the last four weeks.
Okay.
I think we're all a little burned out tonight.
All right.
there's social media
I'm going to say that that was covered by Sean earlier.
We talked about youtube
Yeah.
Yep, I went over all that. Nothing too.
Nothing stands out too much.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't think we have anything to say about the announced mailing list.
where cameras and microphones and projectors
Or the…
Attendance database.
We've already talked about the planning schedule report database. I'll make an entry there.
Let's see here.
Oh.
For anybody that doesn't know, you can do wwslug.org slash planning and it'll take you right to it.
rslew.org slash planning.
I don't know what I said. My brain is mushed now.
Deb, both the WWD host name and
the domain name itself will go to
the base site.
Right.
All right. Anything to say about handouts?
Ah.
If we're getting more free time, I definitely need to update
a bunch of them for especially the
the introduction to Linux
For newcomers kind of stuff and the resources
Actually, all of them need to be updated
And I think I'll try and do at least one of them this month.
This coming month during the month.
See what I can do.
Organizational papers.
I did look at the box. I didn't look in the box, but I did look at the box. Oh, you found the box.
The box is there.
God. The box is there.
Box is alive. The box is alive.
Hmm.
That's why I didn't look at it is when I started to reach for the lid, it started to shake and growl a couple of times. I'm going to leave that alone.
Probably smart.
Yeah.
Huh.
sponsorships, anything new about that?
Probably not.
Never.
Okay.
Same blessed people.
who have been taking care of us all along here. Thank you.
So we need help. Anything new about that?
Okay. New business.
Anyone have anything to say there?
We haven't already covered.
Hi.
All right. Recurring requirements.
November, search for upcoming technical group Xmas parties to put on our calendar.
That's…
does start showing up this time of year.
Okay.
Isn't that?
Keep looking. Everybody else, keep your eye out for
Email, meet up.
Yeah.
Websites, they start showing up this time.
Oh.
I'll start telling people that if they want to send me $10, I'll keep their name off the ballot.
There we go.
Okay.
Let's see, where were we?
all recurring requirements. Useful efforts, blue sky recording
Consistent.
Are we ready to adjourn?
I move we adjourn.
Second.
volunteer six, five leisure to sign the reponents know. The ayes have got it.
Go.
Ken, thank you very much for keeping us on course here.
You've done a good job.
I second a motion.
Yes, indeed.
Okay, so we adjourn to 823 Central Time.
Okay.
You can do a book on gary or should I?
Oh, go ahead. And this has been the Monday night, November 4th meeting of the St. Louis Unix Users Group, STEERCOM for November.