You and your friends and family are invited to the SGVLUG & SGVHAK potluck BBQ on Saturday, August 20th from 4pm to 10pm to Lan's house in the city of San Gabriel.

More details about the BBQ can be found here:

https://goo.gl/forms/sDJZPbZUTPcyQ7bA3

Please RSVP no later than August 18th. Some Google scripting magic automatically updates the form with how many people are expected and what people say they are bringing.

Upon submission of RSVP, you will be directed to a confirmation page with directions to Lan's house, as well as contact info. You can submit an updated RSVP at any time. Lan regularly updates the spreadsheet back-end to keep things accurate and will contact you if you have questions.

Abstract:

What do amateur radio operators, small businesses, giant corporations, E911 systems, and Linux hobbyists all have in common?

Well, besides using Linux, they all are using an application called Asterisk, in one of its many forms, to handle telecommunications.

Amateur radio operators can interlink plain old telephone systems with repeaters, small businesses can appear to the world to be a large corporation with custom interactive voice response menus, and hobbyists can lower their home phone bill to as little as a $1.00 per month with $0.0015/minute call charges.

Not to mention to have a phone number virtually anywhere in the world termin ate at your home,

The presentation will introduce Asterisk, its applications, basic Python scripting, and many other things.

Bio:

Dr. Paul Wilkinson holds a PhD in Computer Science from Durham University, one of England’s foremost, and third oldest, universities. His also holds undergraduate degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Physics as well as a Master of Science in Applied Mathematics. During the course of his career, he has worked for a “think tank” doing mathematical modeling, then the U.S. Navy, thins the senior civilian, and reserve, for one of the largest police departments in California.

Now he is a Professor of Computer Science at Pasadena City College. He holds and Extra Class amateur radio license and is very active within the hobby as well as integrating Linux and amateur radio into one cohesive unit.


This month, SGVLUG and InfoSec Syndicate member Ray S will give a brief history on P2P software technology, applications and implementations.

Abstract:

The P2P and the World of Tomorrow presentation will address a brief history on the development on P2P software technology, applications and implementations by the end user. Applications such as Audio Galaxy, Napster, Direct Connect, Gnutella, Freenet, eDonkey2000, Kazaa, Morpheus, BitTorrent and Soulseek will be discussed in the presentation. End user usage patterns based on net cultural behavioral norms will be addressed as well as the development of conflict as result of practicing such norms on a end user case-by-case basis. Media attention and changes in policies of governance in relation to P2P technology and usage are topics that will be touched on in the presentation. New changes in P2P technology being made to maneuver difficulties that have arisen from changes in governance policies are addressed later in the presentation. The presentation's conclusion addresses technological responsibility and safety practices the audience can use to prevent themselves from becoming a marginalized end user as in the cases discussed earlier in the presentation.

Topic

Many good, experienced high-level language programmers do not learn C or C++ well until they suddenly need to write an FFI extension, make an emergency patch to an existing C or C++ codebase, re-implement the bottleneck component in the application stack in a fast language, take an attractive job with a low-level programming component, or otherwise move from their comfortable language of choice and swallow the Red Pill of coding closer to the machine. If you are already a programmer, you don't need to be taught how to program, and your google-fu is strong for looking up detailed syntax. Instead, this will be a crash course in leveraging skills you learned in a high-level environment and transferring them to these low-level tools, acquiring some new skills you simply never needed before, and a building a mental picture of where the road to expert, idiomatic mastery lies. We will focus on plain C because C++ is too complex to cover well in a single talk, but much of the material will apply directly to C++. Perhaps surprisingly, some of it will even make you a better programmer in your favorite comfortable, higher-level language.

Bio

Some little-known facts about Dustin Laurence:

• His first exposure to computers was playing Colossal Cave
  Adventure and the bootleg Fortran IV version of Zork on his cousin's work mainframe using a glass teletype and a modem with a cradle for the handset.

• His first good programming language was C. He lies and pretends that C is where he learned to program because 8-bit BASIC is embarrassing.

• He once gave up trying to learn the libc low-level I/O functions from the Ultrix man pages because he thought a buffer must be some kind of abstract data type provided by the C library and he couldn't find any documentation.

• He once confidently predicted that Linux was a temporary fad that would be replaced by BSD for serious work once the Berkeley codebase was completely free. It's probably a good thing he doesn't gamble.

• He avoids social media for the same reason he doesn't do crack cocaine.

Directions

OpenX is located in the One West Bank building @ 888 E Walnut St. Pasadena CA, 91101. Entrances to the building are eastbound on Walnut, right hand side before the Lake St. intersection or southbound on Lake St. right hand side after the Walnut St. intersection. Once through the driveway, please park in the 888 Lot that has the OpenX logo displayed out front. Pull a ticket and bring it with you to the Meetup, we will validate your parking.

We are doing informal, short presentations this month.

• Lan will provide a basic introduction to Git and GitHub

• Joel S. will do a survey of commandline text processing tools.

• Drew, our resident openSUSE guy, will also get the floor.

The wonderful folks at OpenX are hosting this meeting, and they are also providing pizza. We need to provide a list of names to building security. RSVPs will be capped at 50.

Topic

In this talk, Zhangfan Xing will present webification (w10n), a data virtualization technology that simplifies use of resources on the web platform.

He will discuss science data challenges and share his experience on developing open source solutions for NASA/JPL. In particular, he will use webification for science (w10n-sci) as an example to demonstrate how one can bring together a diverse set of data and visualize them, using modern web browser, in a rapid and effective fashion.

He will also introduce the audience to the rich data collections available at NASA data centers and elaborate on their potential values to web data innovators.

Bio

Zhangfan Xing is a technical lead at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For over a decade, he has been architecting and developing Information Technology solutions for many NASA funded mission operations and research projects. He is specialized in search technology, data analysis, web services and their application to mission critical information and massive scientific datasets. His recent work on webification has lead to novel web-based applications that have had impact on NASA's mission operations and opened doors for the creation of advanced data access and visualization technologies. He is among the first in realizing the potential of the Web Platform as it applies to science data.