Tuesday January 9th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday January 9th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

Brian asks the group if anyone here has done a python setup to compile
something.  He would like to take a large python project and turn it
into a bundled thing.  Then a second question which started a rousing
discussion around the room concerning LD_LIBRARY_PATH and rpath.
Along with an observation that python's pdoc3 is an easy and quick way
to generate nice documentation from a module.

A discussion about finding jobs in the local area in the technical
fields.  People are studying CS and CE and how can they get work
experience?

What makes a good laptop?  Why do so many people in Free Software use
Thinkpad laptops?  The answer is the prevailance of free software
drivers for chipsets.  Thinkpads mostly have chipsets with associated
free drivers.  Other laptop models often come with proprietary drivers
and are unable to make those machines work.

What's the deal with compilers?  We have a split in the ecosystem.  We
have GCC and we have CLANG.  GCC has the GPL license.  CLANG has the
BSD license.  And that is the main reason there are two flavors of
compilers.

SonarQube.  It comes recommended as a free software competitor to the
propriety Coverity source code analysis tool.  SonarQube comes as a
dual flavor with a free version and a paid version.

    https://sonarqube.org/

Sy has been repairing an iMac G3 with the goal of having it run
Gentoo.  Been having fun with the graphics Blender tools.  Diving into
Proxmox virtualization management framework.

Alex has been participating in the NoCo Hackers Capture The Flag
competitition.  Alex brought up various graphs with the scoring over
time and it was kind'a fun to see not so much and then zoom things
really took off, and then crusing on to the end.  This compeitition
was Jeopardy style with categories and difficulties.  Solve a problem
and submit the answer for the associated points.  Pick another
category item and jump into it.  Fun!

    https://nocohackers.github.io/

Stephen related his current tasks for the Creator Hub which among the
tasks I caught was getting a bunch of things organized such as Google
Docs and getting control of them as an owner to have permissions to
rename and move them.

Frank lamented problems with an SSD which burned out and became
read-only for him.  This caused him some grief in his setup.  Didn't
lose any data that was written but lost data that could not be
written.  And also just caused problems which needed to be handled.
Which was more of a problem because it was encrypted.  Frank was able
to make good use of PhotoRec to extract most of the files from the
corrupted file system.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Mory talked about simd support which Red Hat is intentionally forcing
obsolescence of older cpus.  This affects the current AI systems such
as ChatGPT.  This favors the commercial community at the cost of the
libre software community.

    Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) is a type of parallel
    processing in Flynn's taxonomy. SIMD can be internal (part of the
    hardware design) and it can be directly accessible through an
    instruction set architecture (ISA), but it should not be confused with
    an ISA. SIMD describes computers with multiple processing elements
    that perform the same operation on multiple data points
    simultaneously.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_instruction%2C_multiple_data

Red Hat has moved to a proprietary software model with GPL software
where they terminate their customer aggreement if any customer follows
the freedoms granted by the GPL and distributes source.

Shout out to the other hacker group NoCo Hackers.  Their next meeting
is this coming Thursday January 11 6:30pm at Purpose Brewing in their
upper meeting room.  Agenda this week is still listed as TBD on their
web site as of tonight but I am sure it will be fun.

    https://nocohackers.github.io/
    https://purposebrewing.com/