Forecast: Clouds; notes from DLSLUG 3-Sept-2009

[Ted Roche]

Fifteen people ranging in age from 4 years old to, well, quite a bit 
older than that, attended the September meeting of the Dartmouth -- Lake 
Sunapee Linux User Group. DLSLUG meets on the first Thursday of most 
months somewhere on the Dartmouth campus. Join the announcement list to 
keep up with the latest news. The meeting consisted of the usual round 
of announcements, two short presentations, informal quick presentations 
by the assembled crowd --- Nifties! --- and discussion that went on 
until the janitors kicked us out.

Bill Stearns demonstrated the drop-dead simplicity of configuring and 
launching a virtual machine on the Rackspace Cloud 
(http://www.rackspacecloud.com/) <http://www.rackspacecloud.com/> 
Computing site. Nearly as quickly as he could describe it, Bill set up a 
new machine, choose the memory and disk size, the version of operating 
system, and got the machine up and running (he had previously 
registered, so he had an account and payment information on file). The 
costs for machines are based purely on how much you use, the hours the 
machine is running and the bandwidth consumed. A minimal machine can be 
deployed at 1.5 cents per hour, and a busy machine can cost less than 
$60 a month. This is well worth looking into if you'd like to deploy a 
backup DNS server or your entire online facilities.

Rich Brown of Dartware showed what his company has been up to in 
extending the reach of the InterMapper (http://www.intermapper.com/) 
<http://www.intermapper.com/> network monitoring software to work on, 
and with, the Amazon Web Services (AWS), EC2 and S3. AWS is the more 
mature service and seems to be targeted more at enterprise customers. 
Amazon offers a cloud monitoring service and APIs that let you launch 
additional instances of your saved imaged machines as needed. 
InterMapper is adding some interesting facilities to the service, and 
have free 5-user licenses available for the asking.

Alan Johnson showed a nifty on the command line pv tool (Progress 
Viewer) which is a classic small-tools-loosely-joined *nix tool: a  pipe 
that can display the progress of data through that pipe. Alan showed a 
simple example of cat'ing /dev/zero to /dev/null and sticking pv in the 
middle to show the progress. Cognoscenti in the audience pointed out 
that cat wasn't necessary, and using pv with directly piped input and 
output displayed throughput of an order of magnitude increase. Debate 
ensued as to the many causes likely to contribute to this effect. Nerds 
are so cute.

P.S. Those interested in testing pv on their own machines should find it 
part of many Linux distributions. The caution at the end of the 
discussion section of the man page (http://linux.die.net/man/1/pv) 
should be taken seriously.

Nifty!

James Murza showed us some code he'd been working on. It looks up words 
you specify on wiktionary <http://www.wiktionary.org/> 
(http://www.wiktionary.org/), finds all of the translations wiktionary 
offers and calculates a numeric value based on some semantic qualities 
of the word for each language. Then, James offers a PHP page where you 
can list the relative differences between any two languages, based on 
the words you've selected. So, for example, French and Spanish words 
tended to score close together, while Tagalog and Frisian had little in 
common.

Nifty!

Bill McGonigle demonstrated his Wok-Key 
(http://bfccomputing.com/wokkey/) login, a very clever routine for 
allowing you to log into your SquirrelMail front end from a machine you 
might not trust to share your password with. Instead of typing your 
actual password, the Wok-Key code generates a table on the fly 
(different each time) of two-letter pairs matched to all the keyboard 
characters, and displays a table to the screen of the letter-pairs laid 
out like a QWERTY keyboard, upper- and lower-case. Rather than typing 
your password, you type the equivalent two-letter pairs, and the 
JavaScript on the page converts your choice to the password to be sent 
to the backend. This means a keystroke logger will never see your 
password, and it is unlikely to be saved in a cache on the browser.

Nifty!

Lloyd Kvam announced there were two new additions to the library, one 
book on Erlang 
(http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang) and a DVD 
on Perl (http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0137001274). 
Any GNHLUG member (that's you!) can check out a book by contacting 
Lloyd. The list of books in our library can be found at: 
http://dlslug.org/library.html

Bill McGonigle said that he's trying to line up the correct facilities 
for the next meeting, and if we're able to get a room that will support 
all our laptops, we'll go for a session on encryption and a key-signing 
party. Stay tuned for a confirming announcement.

Thanks to Bill McG for organizing the meeting, to Dartmouth College for 
the great facilities, to Bill Stearns and Rich Brown and all the 
Nifties! presenters for the participation.

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche&  Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com

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