Berkeley Linux Users Group
I found a great article from voctorops on the principles of design. This is part 1 in a series. What do you think?
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
Lots to say here. We know that many eyes make bugs shallow. Reliable, available, scalable systems can not get very far if they are not secure and results are not repeatable. President Obama visited Stanford this week. He was specifically focusing on student data privacy but the same issues apply to every web user. He was encouraging the private sector to work with government to find solutions. I hope the comments section facilitates a good discussion.
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
I recently implemented jquery newsticker for an intranet site. It is developed on github. It claims to be a "lightweight and easy to use news ticker" and I think they have done a good job. Has anyone else implemented a ticker?
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
At the meeting today several of us Amateur Radio people found an inexpensive 25MHz-1700MHz software defined radio receiver an extremely cool development. This wasn’t possible at this price in a consumer product until recently.
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
Does anyone have experience using anyenv? How did it go?
TLDR version: In updating our meetings page for the new year I needed the Date::Calc perl module to run Michael’s great code. Turns out my perlbrew environment for perl was broken. I spoke to some folks in #perl on freenode.net and got some good advice. I was getting some strange errors but as I described on StackOverflow I solved the problem by re-installing 5.20.1 using perlbrew.pl.
However another related perlbrew tagged question with an upvoted answer pointed me to anyenv.
So, ruby users use rbenv to install ruby versions. Perlbrew is used for perl. anyenv is a wrapper that handles ruby, perl and other languages. As a lazy sysadmin this looks like a nice way to install these environments if it delivers on it’s promise. The dependency modules for each language must be written well and it needs to be secure. At least one reviewer liked it. Openhub’s review says it has low activity. Do you have any experiences with anyenv? How did it go?
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
Information Technology (IT) has been getting leaner, doing more with less. Moore’s law marches on but CPU speeds and memory density aren’t often the primary impediments to getting something done. Lean IT is the application of some older ideas to IT using newer technologies. What have been your experiences with this?
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
In 2009 DevOps was born as described in a book, The Phoenix Project. I also tweeted about it. I’m just finishing the book and would like to discuss it with the group.
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
A newer, sometimes controversial best practice these days when writing good, maintainable code is to write the unit tests for your code before writing your code. This is called Test-Driven Development or Design. I have had some good experiences with this methodology lately. I have used the nose for python and the built in prove which uses Test::Simple or Test::More in perl. Test::More is recommended by both modern and enlightened perl. While I haven’t used it yet, the BASH specific bats testing framework looks good for shell code.
Standards exist for unit tests. Perl developers have a long history of unit testing. Nose, prove and bats are all TAP compliant. Though the xUnit family is popular there are competing frameworks exist for many languages. Jasmine and others are ready to help unit test javascript code. The history of unit testing overlaps with many areas of computer science. The Mythical Man-Month talks about unit tests, first published in 1975.
The time taken to write code is arguably a savings of time overall. How can this be? This is due to work taken to clarify specifications which is required anyway. This should lead to better, more efficient code. The theory is that the much more modular code required for unit tests is also easier to understand and maintain. This theory has been validated in several research studies. The extensive regression testing can quickly identify changes that introduce bugs if the tests are run just before and/or just after a check in to a revision control system. However there isn’t quite consensus that TDD is the best way to code. What have your experiences been with Test Driven Design?
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
On September 10th websites protested online by displaying a symbolic loading symbol on their sites. The results measured by the number of calls, emails and comments conveyed to the FCC, Congress and the White house were strong. This is very important to us now. It is difficult to imagine our lives before the Internet. In May, 2014 I wrote about Net Neutrality. The US focused article on Net Neutrality in the United States helps to summarize and remind us of some relevant history dating back an century and a half. “While the term is new, the ideas underlying net neutrality have a long pedigree in telecommunications practice and regulation. The concept of network neutrality originated in the age of the telegram in 1860 or even earlier, where standard (pre-overnight telegram) telegrams were routed ‘equally’ without discerning their contents and adjusting for one application or another. Such networks are ‘end-to-end neutral’.”
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.
Web sites who install an SSL/TLS certificate allow the encryption of web browser traffic. Why should you care? Awareness for this need was raised for the public in April 2014 by the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug. HTTPS is especially useful in preventing eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks when using public Wi-Fi access points.
Encrypting web browser traffic is done with HTTP Secure. This provides an additional level of privacy between your computer and web sites you view by layering SSL/TLS over HTTP. TLS replaces SSL as of 1999.
On my computer I installed a browser extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Firefox for Android and Opera. The extension makes my browser default to prefer the use of HTTPS when possible. "HTTPS Everywhere is produced as a collaboration between the The TOR Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
When reading about the use of HTTPS Everywhere I was surprised to find an entry related to berkeleylug.com. I hope to work with our LUG members to update our website and links to embedded content to automatically rewrite the requests of web browsers to our web server.
We meet at Bobby G’s Pizzeria on the second and fourth Sundays of each month from Noon to 3PM in Berkeley near the Downtown Berkeley BART station. Bobby G’s is on University Ave near Shattuck Ave. We hope you join us, join the discussion on our email list and/or join us in #berkeleylug on freenode.net by following the tabs at the top.