MEETINGS TO BE SCHEDULED

Company or Organization Presentations:

The following people, companies or organizations have offered to do talks at LUGOD on these various subjects, but a meeting date has not yet been confirmed. Once they have, they'll be moved to our Upcoming Meetings page. (They are ordered alphabetically here, by subject or topic title.)

(Potential speakers, and LUGs looking for speakers, may also wish to check out the SBAY Speakers Bureau, whose goal is to help provide speaker coordination for Silicon Valley Area Open Source groups.)

Andrew Hargadon, Graduate School of Management, UC Davis - "Déjà vu all over again: Open source and the long view of technological change"

An exploratory and conversational discussion of Open Source and technological innovation.
Andrew Hargadon is an Associate Professor of Technology Management and Director of Technology Management programs at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis. Prior to his academic appointment, he worked as a product designer at IDEO and Apple Computer and taught in the Product Design program at Stanford University. He is author of the book How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about How Companies Innovate.
Levanta - "The "Intrepid M" Linux Management Appliance"

The Levanta "Intrepid M" appliance allows provisioning, deployment, and change management for large and small Linux environments (including blades, rack servers, large SMPs, desktops, virtual machines and mainframes).

Unlike traditional script-based or disk-imaging solutions, Levanta can: provision servers or workstations with full Linux stack and applications; deploy software and patches to multiple machines; migrate all software and the entire OS from one machine to another; track all changes made to a machine; take a snapshot to archive the state of a machine before making changes; instantly rollback changes; leverage shared storage; and more.

Levanta is a leader in Linux management and data virtualization. Their customers include industry leaders in financial services, entertainment, government, retail and telecommunications. Levanta has partnerships with IBM, HP, Novell and Red Hat.
Team Aggie Spirit - "1979 GMC Jimmy that Drives Itself"

The DARPA Grand Challenge is a government-sponsored competition that aims to create the first fully autonomous vehicles capable of competing on an under-300 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert in the Southwest United States.

Team Aggie Spirit is a group of UC Davis students, faculty and alumni working together to build a vehicle that can navigate on its own over the DARPA Grand Challenge course. Team Aggie's car will run the Linux operating system!
Trolltech - "Exact Topic TBA"

Trolltech AS is a computer software company which provides software development tools, libraries and consulting services. Trolltech's flagship product is "Qt", a multi-platform, C++-based graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit. It's most commonly recognized as the toolkit used by the K Desktop Environment (KDE), as well as the basis of their Qtopia environment, used in the new Zaurus Linux-based PDA produced by Sharp Electronics.

LUGOD Member Presentations:

The following members of LUGOD offered to give talks or mini-presentations on these various topics, but a meeting date hasn't yet been chosen. Once they are set, they'll be moved to our Upcoming Meetings page. (They are ordered alphabetically, by member's last name.)

Bill Broadley, Computational Science and Engineering, UC Davis - "Distributed backup system"

(Details to be announced.)
Micah Cowan - "Anatomy of an E-mail"

SMTP, POP3, reading and tracing headers.
Micah Cowan - "DocBook"

DocBook provides a system for writing structured documents using SGML or XML. It is particularly well-suited to books and papers about computer hardware and software, though it is by no means limited to them. DocBook is a document type definition (DTD). Because it is a large and robust DTD, and because its main structures correspond to the general notion of what constitutes a book, DocBook has been adopted by a large and growing community of authors.
Micah Cowan - "Unicode"

The Unicode Worldwide Character Standard is a system for the interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages of the modern world. It also supports many classical and historical texts in a number of languages. Currently, the standard contains over 34,000 distinct characters derived from 24 languages. These characters cover the principal written languages of the world.
Micah Cowan - "XML"

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, intranets, and elsewhere. For example, computer makers might agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, and so forth) and then describe the product information format with XML. Such a standard way of describing data would enable a user to send an intelligent agent (a program) to each computer maker's Web site, gather data, and then make a valid comparison. XML can be used by any individual or group of individuals or companies that wants to share information in a consistent way. XML, a formal recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is similar to the language of today's Web pages, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). (From www.whatis.com.)
Micah Cowan - "XSLT"

XSL Transformations (XSLT) is a standard way to describe how to transform (change) the structure of an XML (Extensible Markup Language) document into an XML document with a different structure. XSLT is a Recommendation of the World Wide Web Consortium. XSLT can be thought of as an extension of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), a language for formatting an XML document.
Henry House - "SGML, T_EX"

TeX (tau epsilon chi, and pronounced similar to "blecch", not to the state known for `Tex-Mex' chili) is a computer language designed for use in typesetting; in particular, for typesetting math and other technical material.
SGML, Standard Generalized Markup Language, is a standard for how to specify a document markup language or tag set. HTML is an example of an SGML-based language.
Brian Lavender - "System mirroring"

Brian Lavender will demonstrate how to build a new system to replace a production host and transfer files and configuration. Oftentimes when you have a system that runs well, but you want a better system, it is better to build a new system alongside the old. Brian will demonstrate how to sync user ids, packages, transfer configurations, and data. This process will involve a series of shell scripts, networking the two systems together and using pipe'ed commands over NFS or ssh to transfer the data.
Mike Simons - "Power Managment"

Setting up X to turn off your monitor; laptop power management; using UPSes, etc.
Mike Simons - "mmap IPC, Realtime Monitoring, and Freeze/Thaw of Running Programs"

A mini-talk
Mike Simons - "Debian packaging system tricks"

A mini-talk. dpkg -L/-S, ac search/show, ag -yu/update/upgrade, zgrep Contents, debsums
Mike Simons - "netselect and netselect-apt"

netselect is an ultrafast intelligent parallelizing binary-search implementation of "ping." You give it a list of servers, and it chooses the fastest/closest one automatically. It's good for finding the fastest FTP mirror, the least laggy IRC server, the best Squid neighbour, etc..
Mike Simons - "How to set up a local Debian Mirror"

Whether you have a collection of Debian boxes on a LAN, or you simply want to be able to install and configure new software without getting online to download it, this talk will show you how to set up your own personal mirror of the collection of software packages available for Debian
Mike Simons - "Fun with poll()"

How to have a single process serve thousands by using the "poll()" function in C.
Michael Wenk - "Advanced MySQL"

A follow-up to Michael's MySQL Basics talk from January 2004.
Michael Wenk - "Gentoo"

The Gentoo 'flavor' of Linux can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience. Thanks to a technology called Portage, Gentoo Linux can become an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else -- whatever you need it to be. Because of its near-unlimited adaptability, Gentoo Linux considers itself a 'metadistribution.'
Steve Wormley - "Mapserver, PHP/MapScript and PostGIS"

MapServer is an open source development environment for constructing spatially enabled web applications. It supports various vector- and raster-based formats, TrueType font rendering, labeling and label collision mediation.
MapServer's "MapScript" system provides a rich environment for developing applications that integrate disparate data. If your data have a spatial component, and you can get to the data via your favorite scripting environment, then you can map it with MapScript. The PHP MapScript dynamically loadable PHP module, for example, makes MapScript functions and classes available in a PHP environment.
PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS).

MEETINGS TO BE SCHEDULED

Company or Organization Presentations:

LUGOD Member Presentations:

See Also: