[NCLUG] Tuesday February 11th, 2020 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday February 11th, 2020 NCLUG Meeting

Tonight's meeting was Short Topics.  Bob opened the meeting taking
agenda items for discussion.  Gwen gave us our first topic for
discussion which was the security of the Internet of Things.  This
gave us a very deep opening topic.  A roundtable of discussion then
occurred as we all had ideas and opinions on the topic and none of us
were shy about sharing those said ideas and opinions.

Then Brian brought in his Lion's Commentary on Unix book.  A seminal
work on the subject of the Unix system.  He then presented a history
of the early C, assembler, sh, utilities, and all things Unix from the
early version 6 days.  Lines of source.  How many comments.  The early
Unix kernel was 9000 lines of code.  The Linux kernel is now 37
million lines of code!  And a long list of other comparisons of
current projects such as LibreOffice, Firefox, GCC, Python, Emacs,
Perl, Vim, Bash, Lua, classic vi, and ed!  Lua was surprising trim at
only 32,000 lines.

Brian makes the argument point that with current projects using
literally millions and millions of lines of code that C being designed
for Unix at 9 thousand lines and ed at only 1,182 lines is not
suitable for things like Firefox at 20 million lines of code.

Brian then says: 3D printers.  Arduino.  Open source.  The design.
The chips.  The source code.  Marlin 1.1.9 unified firmware on Arduino
for 3D printers.  77k lines of code!  I (Bob) apologize to Brian for
assuming that an Arduino must be a small machine and therefore C is a
natural fit for it.  With 77 thousand lines of code in Marlin that is
obviously a large software project!  It might benefit from a language
that has more built in protections such as Go-lang and Rust.  And also
the interpreters such as Python, Lua, and others.

Stephen gave a quick show-n-tell for some laser cut wood boxes.
Interlocking edges of the boxes cut on the Creator Hub laser cutter.
An interesting dual layer box with interlocking mortise and tenon
joint.

Bill then gave a show-n-tell of a Pinebook Pro laptop.  A very thin,
very clean inexpensive laptop that is very open source.  I was
seriously impressed!  I am definitely needing to check it out!

https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/