Winter 2010

Thursday March 4^th, at 7PM in Dreese Labs room 266, Dan Thau will be showing us how to maximize your laptop's battery life in Linux. You may be wondering once you made the switch from Windows or Mac why your laptop hasn't been lasting as long without power. Dan will be showing common battery stretching techniques as well as some extreme measures you can take in order to get the most out of your laptop battery.

This Thursday, March 11th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, we will be holding a lightning talk session covering a multitude of command line applications. The lightning talk format consists of short talks that focus on a single topic and are typically given by multiple presenters in succession. If you are looking for a lightweight program to get the job done and don't need a graphical interface, be it checking your mail, downloading torrents, chatting on irc, editing text, or anything else, this is definitely the meeting for you.

Due to mitigating circumstances we will not be having our maximizing battery talk this week. In lieu of this we will be holding a hackathon in its stead. This *Thursday, February 18th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266*, we will be hacking on all sorts of code. We have several projects going at the moment that range from python to C and hackers of all skill levels are invited. Whether you know nothing about programming or are a kernel wizard come join us and play around with some code.

Thursday February 11th, at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, we will be discussing alternative open source window managers for Linux. A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. In other words it creates a desktop environment for you to use on your screen. The big two desktop environments are KDE and Gnome, but we are going to discuss some lesser known alternatives to these two. Matt Meinwald will be discussing Fluxbox and XFCE.

Thursday February 4th, at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, Michael Yanovich and Morgan Goose will be demonstrating some intermediate and advanced uses of Python. They have several tips and tricks to demonstrate, so come out and learn more about the Python language!

Morgan's slides are available and notes are attached.

This Thursday January 28th, at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, Morgan Goose will be showing off a multitude of GNU Utilties. Here is Morgan's synopsis of his talk:

This presentation is going to try and cover a lot of ground, and at variable speed. I am trying to get it into two somewhat logical parts.

First being where I into regex then show its use with sed. Then go into using awk, and finally how to use find.

The second half will try and touch on the rest of the commands, concentrating on grep, xargs, and process management.

This Thursday, January 21st at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, we will have a few people presenting on the topic of virtualization. Dan Thau will be talking about chroot, what chroot is and what chroot is not, as well as give examples for usage and a demo or two. Matt Meinwald will demonstrate Xen, a popular server virtualization system. He will give some background, including the difference between paravirtualization and full machine virtualization, then will show a demo of creating and administering a virtual machine.

This Thursday, January 14th, at 7PM in Dreese Labs 266, Alex Lingo will be presenting an old club favorite known as "This Week in Slashdot". Slashdot (commonly abbreviated as /.) is a website located at http://slashdot.org that deals in news for the nerdy. Readers submit articles which are then accepted or rejected by editors and then published on the site. From there, the readers have huge discussions about every aspect of the article which can be very funny/interesting/insightful/etc and oft prove to be a very good read.

This Thursday, January 7th, at 7PM in Dreese Labs room 266, we are doing a talk and demonstration on hacking wireless networks. There will be 3 parts to the discussion.

First, Brian Swaney will be talking about the dangers of poor security. He will go over why wireless communication is inherently insecure, what types of attacks are possible on wireless networks, some techniques common people use to try and secure their networks, and why they ultimately fail.

This Thursday, February 25^th, I, Professor Ed Overman, a professor in the math department at Ohio State University, will be presenting on emacs in Dreese Labs room 266.