meetings

Several topics to cover, including the announcement of a new venue for the monthly MUG meetings and an Introduction to packet filtering theory.

We’ve been meeting at Rosa’s Italian Chop House (Formerly Leather Bottle Inn), since some time in the early 1990’s (nobody remembers exactly when). Well, the April meeting will be our last meeting at Rosa’s. Beginning at the May meeting, we will be meeting at the Farmington Community Library.

Also, Jim Small will begin his first of several meetings discussing packet filtering.

Tonight’s meeting includes the elections to the MUG board of directors, an introduction to Interchange by Ron Colcernian, current events, and the Unix grab bag.

We’ve got a very busy schedule for the February 2003 meeting.

Lots of great stuff to cover, including:

Current Events – Catch the latest news in the computer industry.

If you have some news you want to talk about, this is a great chance to bring it up for open discussion.

Nominations for the MUG board of directors

The Board of Directors of the Michigan Unix User Group is the group of people who manage the operations of the user group. This includes such things as: Meeting locations, Meeting topics, running the meetings and running the MUG website. If you know someone who wants to be on the MUG board of directors, this is your chance to Nominate that person.

Interchange Free eCommerce package presented by Ron Colcernian.

This is a full featured shopping cart system for commercial websites.

Ron will be showing some of the features of the package, and he will be discussing many of the issues involved in launching an eCommerce site.

Coders Corner – A new monthly feature where we spend a couple of minutes showing a cool feature of a programming language.

Elections for the MUG Board of Directors This is it ! The election where we all decide who will be on the next board of directors. Think about it… You really don’t want to miss this.

Linux Grab Bag – Once again test your Unix/Linux skills by reaching your hand into the bag, and pulling out a random command. It’s a great way to expand your knowledge and have some fun too.

This month we will have a handfull of mini-topics, including:

• Configuring Apache for secure personal use
• A Tour of Interchange – A free eCommerce package
• Icewm – An introduction to a lightweight window manager
• Return of the Linux Grab bag

Nominations for the MUG Board of Directors

Main Presentation: A Tour of the FreeBSD Operating System
Presenter: Jim Small

Jim has posted his slideshow in PDF format, click here to download it.

Jim Small will be showing the FreeBSD operating system. While everyones attention has been on Linux, it should be a real treat to get a glimpse of what FreeBSD has to offer.

Main Presentation: Revolution OS – The Movie

Main Presentation: An Introduction to JSP and Struts
Billy G. Allie

Mini presentation: Introduction to IP Routing
Jim McQuillan

Tonights presentation is an introduction to the Struts framework for developing web based applications. Struts is a product of the Jakarta Project at the Apache Software Foundation.

Jim McQuillan, Mug president, will be talking about routing IP packets between subnets. This is just an introduction to routing, so if you’ve been curious how to setup and view routes, and why you need them, this should be a good place to start.

Main presentation: Customizing the Look-n-Feel of Mozilla
Wolf (mozilla developer)

Mini presentation: email virus scanning on Linux
Erick Tyack

Wolf is one of the few developers who actually gets paid to work on Mozilla. He’s given talks for us in the past, and we’re happy to have him back to discuss customizing the look and feel of the Mozilla browser.

Erick Tyack is a local consultant, and a member of MUG. We are happy to have him back to discuss setting up an email virus scanner in a Linux/Unix environment.

Lonny Granstrom will be giving a talk titled:

Panic to Profit: My Journey with PHP and PostgreSQL

Also, Jim Glutting will be giving a demonstration and talk about an internet appliance called the ‘Instagate’ from eSoft. Jim recently setup a couple of these for a customer to create a VPN between to offices

What is PHP and PostgreSQL?

That was my first question in November 2001, when I was asked to help create a website to help doctors place, Medicare acceptable, orders for medical equipment/supplies for their patients.

In late April 2002 the website launched… PHP, running as an Apache webserver module, controls the dynamic creation if all webpage content, including connections and data transfers with the database. PostgreSQL is the RDBMS. PHPLib, a PHP Class library available
on SourceForge, was used as the backbone for session management, user login security, and webpage HTML templates. PHPLib also uses PostgreSQL.

Topics relating to the website functionality will include:

1. Configuration of PHP and Apache for improving security;
2. Session Management with PHPLib, or PHP in general;
3. Templates for page construction, including Class generation of HTML Elements;
4. Class-based generation of !PostgreSQL SQL statements;
5. Database connections and coding practices in a CVS environment;
6. HTML GET and POST Form variable passing; and,
7. Record set transaction control with historical record retention.

David Gaskey is an attorney who has offered to give a presentation to our group.
The presentation will focus on software patents and copyrights.

The June 2002 meeting will feature a presentation on Ogg Vorbis by Carsten Haese of Unique Systems.

Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, royalty-free, general-purpose audio codec with all the benefits of Open Source.

Carsten’s presentation will cover the following aspects:

• A brief history of Ogg Vorbis
• Ogg Vorbis’s features and its benefits over other codecs, e.g. MP3
• How to use Ogg Vorbis on GNU/Linux and other platforms

More information about Ogg Vorbis can be found on the Official Ogg Vorbis Website