Now I’ve got these hosted on Flickr. I may migrate them all, if this trial run works OK.
des moines
All posts tagged des moines
I may have bragging rights on this. I saw a few other folks in the park taking photos with point-and-shoots, but none were there with an SLR. Hopefully, I’ve done it justice.
I’ve uploaded several versions of four different photos — including the un-retouched versions as they came from the camera for comparison.
Please enjoy! I will try to add more over the next week or so.
- Meeting topic was “graphics”, but we pretty much had a free-for-all discussion.
- Last night I complied this list of graphics-related links. We really didn’t talk about this list all that much.
- Dave Weis from Internet Solver had swag to hand out (spiffy tees) in celebration of being recognized in the Business Record as a Best Of
- I brought some miscellaneous electronics and books to give away.
- We met at Raccoon River Brewery around 7 PM.
- The Iowa State Fair Parade was going on, so traffic was pretty bad getting in to downtown.
- Microsoft Server 2008 with Hyper-V R2 is coming out soon. Sounds like there are going to be some Hyper-V improvements.
- Debated security vs. business models for low-rate Web hosting. Many Web hosts do not pro-actively scan for security issues, adopting a strictly reactionary strategy. While economical, this can result in widespread outages if a vulnerability lands large numbers of hosts or entire subnets on black lists.
- Several members are busy gearing up for VMWorld 2009
CHDK – Firmware hack for Canon point-and-shoot cameras
- TJ reviewed the installation procedure and discussed some of the extra functionality to be gained.
- Installs to a CF card (must be under 4 GB).
- Booting to it does not replace anything on your camera, so camera’s firmware remains un-touched (read: you won’t void your warranty).
- CHDK Wiki
Linux-y stuff
- It does help to connect an antenna to your internal wireless card.
- What happens when you send /dev/null to /dev/null? How do you get it back?
Social Media
- Origins: USENET and IRC. MUDs, MUSHes and MOOs.
- Photo sharing sites such as SmugMug, Picasa, Flickr, Shutterbug, PhotoBucket, etc.
- OpenID use with sites.
- Facebook, MySpace, etc.
After-meeting at Raccoon River Brewery
Introductions
Group organization
- Discussed various ideas for how to organize.
- Competitions?
- Teaming w/ local educational orgs?
- Start with the basics and work up? Arduino, Parallax, MindStorms?
- Age groups? Any age is welcome.
Skills inventory
- Lots of programmers/developers.
- Not too many mechanical/electrical engineers.
- No venture capitalists.
Projects?
- Build something for a competition?
- Build a CNC machine which can be used for future projects? There seemed to be a lot of support for this idea. Agreed to continue discussion on the mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/iowarobotics).
- Bring your own and share/seek assistance?
Matthew Nuzzum demo’d his VEX r/c platform wheeled robot.
- Controller from http://www.vexrobotics.com/
- Aluminum body with two drive motors and 4 wheels.
- Uses tank-style steering.
Gentleman from the Twin Cities Robotics Club (sorry, arrived late and didn’t catch his name) brought his ~70 pound robot
- About 30 pounds of the weight is battery.
- Has a sonar array and Web cam for sensors.
- Plans to put an on-board Linux computer.
Some links to Web sites brought up during the meeting:
Theron Conrey demo’d Nexenta Systems, an enterprise storage solution built on top of an OpenSolaris kernel with ZFS, an Ubuntu user space and some proprietary elements for managing the storage. Check out Theron’s take on this storage solution.
Theron built a Nexenta storage array within a VM on his laptop — probably the first time such a feat has been performed at Raccoon River Brewery.
Also held a long discussion about Virtual Desktops, SunRays and their adoption by businesses of various sizes. We pondered why this cool technology isn’t getting adopted as quickly as it should and where the ROI “cut off” is in terms of business size.
We are working on lining up Impromptu Studio for next month’s meeting. Stay tuned to The VUG for details.
I didn’t take any notes during the meeting itself, so these are the high points as my memory serves:
The focus of this meeting was Security, and we didn’t stray too far off that core topic.
InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector.
Some of the interesting security tools or concepts discussed at this meeting:
- netcat is literally THE Swiss Army Knife of IP tools.
- port knocking and webknocking involves sending patterns of traffic to a server to trigger it opening ports and services to your IP address.
- MetaSploit Framework automates the exploitation of the latest vulnerabilities.
After the meeting, a large group of us walked over to Raccoon River Brewery for dinner, drinks and discussion.
We had six show up for last night’s meeting (6/10/09) at Granite City in Clive, IA. It was mostly a social occasion, so there wasn’t a lot of Virtualization content to record. Here are a few points which stood out in my mind:
- SuperMicro now offers blade servers which integrate a miniature SAS SAN on the back plane. Sounded pretty cool.
- Josh More discussed some basic security concepts around Internet-accessible servers — Virtual or otherwise.
- Had an impromptu “Name That Tune” competition between an iPhone and a G1. The iPhone won. This time. . .
- Laserdisc video is analog, as I pointed out to some peoples’ dismay.
The conversation was, as usual, quite random so there were many, many more topics discussed than I’ve presented here. I guess you’ll just have to attend the next meeting so you don’t miss out!