CPLUG

We’re gearing up for this year’s Central PA Open Source Conference (CPOSC), which will be held on Saturday, October 17th at Harrisburg University. Tickets include include access to all three tracks including 21 awesome speakers, breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack break… and official CPOSC 2009 t-shirts for those who register by September 22!

The number of tickets available is limited based on the size of our venue, and last year tickets were sold out before the conference. So before the big announcements are made next week, we’re giving CPLUG members and friends a chance to register right now!

So, head on over to cposc.eventbright.com to register, and we’ll see you in October! :)

The Central PA Open Source Conference (CPOSC) is a one-day technical conference for open source users and developers. Presentations and sessions cover all aspects of open source, with talks ranging from novice to expert skill levels.

This year?s conference will be held at Harrisburg University in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Saturday, October 17, 2009 and is expected to have 150 attendees.

If your company would like to sponsor this year’s conference, please contact sponsorship@cposc.org for details!

In July the meeting topic was “Bringing best practices to the worst language: continuous integration for PHP”. Mark talked about the setup and use of Continuum, PHP-Unit, and Selenium for testing PHP applications.

The speaker for the August meeting was Seth, talking about Gnome-Do and KDE tips and tricks.

Meetings are always on the second Tuesday of the month at 6:30 PM. See you at the next one!

There will be a special guest speaker at the June meeting! The topic will be “Building Highly Available systems from unreliable components” by Dennis Gerasimov.

The presentation will give a brief introduction to the concepts of availability, reliability, the use of redundancy and monitoring to improve the availability. An overview of hardware and network architecture for building highly availably systems will be followed by discussion of various methods to achieve high availability using open source software: Linux-HA for monitoring and fail over, several methods of achieving HA with Apache, MySQL replication and shared cluster storage.

See you then!

The first talk at CPLUG’s May meeting was presented by Rob, who discussed “Home Automation with the Vera Z-Wave controller”. After the break, Lon and Eric discussed the online TODO apps Remember the Milk and Hiveminder.

And don’t forget, you can check out the full list of previous meeting topics.

The next meeting will be on June 9, 2009. See you then!

CPOSC, the Central PA Open Source Conference, is a one-day, multi-track, low-cost conference about all things open source: software, programming, operating systems, community and more. It will take place on Saturday, October 17, 2009 in Harrisburg, PA.

The Call for Participation (CFP) is open right now and we are currently looking for interesting talks and presentations. If you’ve given a talk at CPLUG before, or if you’ve got a cool topic to talk about, please don’t be shy! We’d love to hear your idea!

The Speaker FAQ page has all the info you need to submit an abstract. And yes, you can submit more than one! ;)

More info is available at the CPOSC 2009 website. Check it out, and we hope to see you in October!

Tonight’s talk was on hardware hacking, physical computing, and the Arduino microcontroller platform. The slides are now online if you want to check them out.

The next meeting will be on May 12, 2009.

BTW, there were two talks at meeting on March 10. The first one was about PHP survey software called LimeSurvey, presented by Dennis. The second talk was about the Magento e-commerce application and VirtualBox, presented by Bob.

The next meeting will be tomorrow, April 14, at ITT. Check the mailing list for details!

The February 2009 CPLUG meeting is over, and was on various security topics:

First up, Jerod Lycett gave a talk on some security basics, including information about passwords, wireless and a few other items of interest.

Second, Jeff Best talked about security and compliance, including the 5 W’s of security. He has a wiki page posted at http://cplug.pbwiki.com/Security-Stuff.

After pizza, John Place talked about SSH, its history, some of its more overlooked but very useful features, and a bit into ~/.ssh/config, and how you can make your SSH life easier using it.

Finally, Chris Moates gave an impromptu talk about the yubikey, a device from Yubico that generates one time passwords. More information on the yubikey can be found at http://www.yubico.com.

Here’s some pictures of each speaker:

The next meeting will be on March 10th.

The January CPLUG meeting was held on January 13, 2009. We had two topics:

1. 10 Ubuntu Tips and Something That Drives Me Batty: Eric did a talk that went into what he uses on his desktop system and tweaks he made to get it all working the way he likes.
2. Open Source in Africa: Mark talked about his organization and how they’re working with various groups in Africa to get various Open Source solutions setup.

The next meeting will be on Tuesday, February 10, 2009.