Tuesday July 9th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

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

We started as usual with random discussion.  Mostly talking about the
recent contentious Microsoft Recall and of couse the recently
disclosed Microsoft WiFi security vulnerability.  Your data is on your
computer and totally safe.  Except patch now, now, now because an
exploit such as this would be available to exfiltrate all of your MS
Recall data to a malicious agent.

Strangely the topic turned to complaints about apps being required for
everything from car parking to hair cuts.  And yes there are hair
cutting shops that require you to use an app before they will give you
a hair trim.  This disenfranchises many people without high tech smart
phones.  Contracts usually prevent removing parking spaces such as
when rejuvenating a downtown area.  It's a problem.

In the annoucement and shilling for other activities Mory says there
is upcoming fun events in the Machine Learning space.  It's Denver.
But it looks fun.

    https://denver-boulder.aitinkerers.org/

Aaron was on the schedule for talking about how he uses Salt to set to
set up his servers.  He showed us how he sets up OpenVPN using Salt.
He gave us a warning for those who might be triggered and then shows
us a YAML file.  Salt is written in Python and YAML is often involved.
This was primarily a demonstration of using Salt to provision and the
"McGuffin" was using it to configure OpenVPN.

[Bob: I still prefer OpenVPN over Wireguard myself.  When most people
say they don't like OpenVPN the main thing that none of us like about
it is actually the key management using the "easy-rsa" wrapper around
openssl.  I don't like easy-rsa because it keeps changing.  If you get
to the openssl foundation then things are stable there.]

Spiros is a newcomer who was very excited to join our group to the
point of arranging to present!  Spiros presented on the topic of pf
the BSD packet-filter.  The demonstration was given on an OpenBSD
system but pf is available on all of the BSDs and has also been ported
to some other systems.  (Such as HP-UX!)

The pf demonstration illustrated the features of typical pf.conf
files for producing a firewall.  The configuration directives for pf
is a rich and very featureful format trying hard to be human-readable
as much as practical.  In contrast to iptables most things are done as
actual words rather than dash options.  It's an easy-on-the-eyes
style.  Yet the result is quite powerful and one rule can replace
multiple iptables rules and can also be a simpler way to do things.
Also logging is very powerful.  Can you tell I am a huge fan?

Kyle jumped in with a short demonstration of new CSS (web styling)
features which make writing CSS much easier than

promised a very short 5-minute maximum short topic and was
excited to show us a newer CSS feature set.  Previously CSS has been
rather flat in declaration.  I mean there is hierarchy of elements.
But the new features allow a nesting of declaration.  It makes things
a lot easier to read for certain.  This was something that would have
required SASS to preprocess if you are familiar.

Mory passed on a newly arrived machine learning tool called LLM
Compiler that will consume code and then do an assemblly level
optimization across it.  Some speedups as much as 20%.

And then we adjourned for Slyce Pizza.