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We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics for the September 9th, 2014 meeting include:

Imagemagick

Ever needed to crop, resize, color-correct, or convert an image from one format to another? That’s a simple operation for something like The GIMP. But What about 10 images? 50 images? 5,000 images? That’s a lot of photos. Wouldn’t it be nice to script that up somehow? Imagemagick is a set of utilities to convert, identify, mogrify, composite, compare, stream, display, animate, import, or “conjure” your images. Jim McQuillan and Tony Bemus will talk about how they use Imagemagick to do their heavy-duty image processing. You’ll never look at your image processing the same way again.

VASSAL

Many of the early computer games were designed to emulate board games. Games like Chess, Go, and Reversi are popular board games that have computer opponents. But what about the latest renaissance in board gaming? What’s the best way to play games like Ascension, Through the Ages, Dominant Species, and more? The VASSAL Engine is not only an open source way to play board games locally or online, but it’s also a way to port games to be played on the computer. Craig Maloney will give a brief introduction to this innovative and fun engine for board gaming, and will introduce some games that you can have fun playing using VASSAL.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more. Hope to see you there!

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics for the August 12th, 2014 meeting include:

Sublime Text

Few topics spark more heated debate for developers than the choice of editor. (Witness the countless bloodshed in the on-going Emacs vs vi wars.) In the wake of these battles of editor preference Sublime Text emerges with the simple goal of becoming “…the editor you’ll fall in love with” Sublime Text is a cross-platform text editor, programmable in Python with many powerful built-in features and many more add-ons to smooth programming in all your favorite languages.  Wolf will show both built-in features and favorite add-ons so you know whether to give Sublime Text a try. Will love finally reign in the editor wars? Come and find out!

Wolf is a long-time software engineer and two-year user of Sublime Text. His list of projects include Mozilla and Sourceforge and is one of the few developers with his own IMDb page.

Commands-in-depth: Rsync

This month we launch a brand-new series looking into comands-in-depth. The first command we’ll detail is the workhorse command rsync. Rsync is quite simply the most efficient and fast way of ensuring large files are transferred safely between devices. Craig Maloney and JIm McQuillan will talk about basic functionality with rsync, when to use rsync (hint: more than you are now) and highlight some advanced usage. Come explore this powerful command and learn some new tricks along the way.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more. Hope to see you there!

(Learn more and register for the August 2014 meeting, or give us feedback about the meeting. Additional material for the meeting is available from the videos / notes page)

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics this month include:

The Go Programming Language

You might have heard about Go the programming language as the laguage developed at Google, but probably haven’t looked much further than Wikipedia for what the Go Language is all about. You might not have known that it was initially developed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, is based loosely on C but with many features of modern languages like garbage collection and some dynamic typing capabilities. You also may not know that many projects such as Docker and Canonical’s own Juju project are using Go. Mark Ramm-Christensen will talk about the Go programming language and highlight Canonical’s usage and involvement with Go. If you’ve ever heard Mark Ramm-Christensen speak you’ll know this promises to be an event you won’t want to miss.

Mark Ramm-Christensen is the Engineering Manager for Canonical, and a long-time contributor to not only MUG but the open-source community as a whole.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more.

Slides for the presentation.

Register Here

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics include:

PGP / GPG Encryption

 With the recent privacy concerns Tony Bemus wants to let everyone know about GnuPG and how to use GPG to securely communicate and protect your files. He will talk about the history of PGP and GPG, the web of trust, the Hows and Whys of file encryption, and secure communication through email encryption and signatures.

Slides for the presentation are available here:

http://bemushosting.com/present/PGP-GPG_Pen14.html

Shell Programming

Scott Moser is a technical lead on the Ubuntu Server and Cloud team at Canonical. He works on cloud-like things such as cloud-init, Ubuntu cloud images, OpenStack and cirrOS. He has more experience with programming in ‘sh’ than you probably care to hear about.

The talk on shell scripting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^programming will discuss ways to make your shell scripts less brittle, and more performant. And will also try to convince you that shell still has its place.Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more.

Hope to see you there!