jmcquillan

Next Meeting – Tuesday, May 14th, 2024, 6:30pm EST.

Code from the meeting

This month, we’re going to do something different and fun.

There’s a programming website called Advent of Code: https://adventofcode.com.

It’s an Advent calendar of 25 small programming puzzles for a variety of skill
sets and levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.

You can see the first puzzle at https://adventofcode.com/2023/day/1.

We’ve rustled up a few volunteers to show us how they solved it in the following languages:

• Javascript – Justin Triplett
• Perl – Jim McQuillan
• Python – Wolf
• Rust – Justin Triplett
• Swift – Dave Satwicz

We should be able to get through each language in 10-15 minutes. Hopefully that’ll

allow enough time to explain how the solution works.

If you’d like to volunteer, join us at the meeting show us how you’ve solved the
puzzle using your favorite language.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, April 9th, 2024, 6:30pm EST.

Join the ZOOM meeting

This month, we mourn the loss of one of our own. Craig Maloney put up a courageous battle against cancer but unfortunately, the outcome isn’t what we were hoping for.

If you’ve attended any of the MUG meetings in the last 20 or so years, you’ve seen Craig running the meetings, complete with his vast knowledge, wit and charm.

People everywhere knew and liked and appreciated Craig. He was generous with his time and advice everywhere he went.

He cannot be replaced, and we celebrate his life today.

Election for MUG Board of directors

April is the month for the election for the MUG board of
directors. Currently, we have 6 positions and with the
unfortunate passing of Craig, we have only 5 nominees.
Without a full slate of nominees, the election is pretty
simple. We just declare that all the nominees are elected.
However, if anyone would like to nominate themselves, we’d
strongly encourage them to do so.

Presentations:

This month, we have two presentations to educate and entertain you.

Py Hole by Wolf

Pi-hole: the tiny, whole network, ad-blocker that can run on
your Raspberry Pi. What it’s for, what it does, how it works,
and what else you can do with it.

Wolf has spoken many times at MUG; and is always a popular
speaker. He’s been a developer for decades, worked at many
interesting places, with many languages. But of all those
languages, Python is his favorite.

Intro to Vim by Jim McQuillan.

Vim is an extremely useful free and open source screen-based
text editor. Jim will cover the basics of how to start it,
move around within the file, make changes to your file, save
your changes and exit. If you can do that, you are well on
the way to writing great programs or documents or config
files or whatever else you want to edit. He’ll also delve
just a bit into some more intermediate aspects of the
editor, such as block selection and split screens.

Jim has been solving problems for customers since the early 80’s, mostly
in the health care industry using Unix and Linux and a variety of
programming languages. He’s the founder of the Linux Terminal Server
Project (LTSP) and he’s given talks on it all over the world.
He’s been involved with MUG since 1986.

Jim’s Vim Slides

We’re very sorry to report that Craig Maloney passed away this morning, April 2, 2024.

Craig has been battling colorectal cancer for the past 2 years and while he fought a courageous battle, the end was not what we were all hoping for.

The Celebration of Craig’s Life will be on Saturday, April 13th from 3:00pm to 7:00pm at the Sawyer-Fuller Funeral Home at 2125 12 Mile Road in Berkley, MI 48072.

Aludra Fuse-based Filesystem

Scott Balneaves, system administrator for Legalaid Manitoba, Canada has been working on a project to create a Linux filesystem backed by a postgresql database.  The idea is, users can store their Openoffice documents in a filesystem hierarchy, but behind the scenes, the documents are actually being written to a database.  Scott is using the FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) feature of Linux to create a translation layer that converts the filesystem calls into sql instructions.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi presentation will not be happening this meeting. We will advise if and when it will be presented.

Fishbowl

We’ll be bringing back the Fishbowl. From Wikipedia: “A fishbowl conversation is a form of dialog that can be used when discussing topics within large groups. Fishbowl conversations are usually used in participatory events like Open Space Technology and Unconferences. The advantage of Fishbowl is that it allows the entire group to participate in a conversation.” Dave Satwicz will start the moderation off, but the discussion will be driven and led by you, the participants. This is a unique way to get some really engaging conversation about topics that you want to learn more about, or topics you haven’t heard yet. Please bring some ideas of what you’d like to talk about. We had a lot of fun with the discussions the last time we had a Fishbowl, so come on out to learn more.

And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

Hope to see you there!