Tuesday May 14th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday May 14th, 2024 NCLUG Meeting

The weather is getting nice!  It was bicycle weather.  Three of us
showed up at the Creator Hub on our bicycles. :-)

Before we began the meeting we had a good gripe session about terrible
web pages that are all in the memory of Javascript.  Can't right
click.  Can't middle click to open them in another tab.  Nasty!

Alex gave a summary of the most recent NoCo Hackers meetup over at the
brewery.  It is more security oriented.  They were talking about
security of web pages.  They don't have a topic for next month and the
main organizers are out of town so unlikey to have anything happening
there next month.

That being said we started a round robin around the room to talk about
projects that might be fun.  I voluntold Aaron to go first.  Aaron
immediately volunteered that he had nothing of interest!  Very
interesting don't you think? :-)

Alex has been working with Jenkins this past week.  Their group does
not have any pre-commit filters to block silly breakages.  Therefore
is trying to have an automated process to catch problems post commit.
And working on creating bash completion in an automated way for their
in-house commands.  Bob (the other Bob) jumped in as he has been doing
that recently too.

If anyone is thinking of giving a talk on creating an automated bash
completion for commands this seems like a topic that people would be
interested in.  Think about it!

Bob (that's me this time) has been working on setting up ikiwiki.
Which is actually rather terrible to do.  I just banged my head
against various issues before getting it figured out.  I related my
experiences with it.

Bill has been working on database migrations for SQL lately.  Bill
asks if anyone is using this rust sourced version control system "jj"
that is git compatible.  It seems to be on the experimental side.
This might work fantastically!  Or it might corrupt your git repo.
It's one or the other.  jj is supposed to be work with multiple
backends such that it will work with git but also subversion, hg, and
the others too.  Good discussion about git and version control mental
models.

Kyle asks, Have you heard about Ansible?  Kyle has been using doing a
different process flow to work with ansible.  And then we all decided
we hate using YAML, we hate using JSON, we hate using XML.  But we
were not unified.  Everyone has made peace with at least one format.
Kyle suggests that when working with YAML one should always use a YAML
linter.  That's a good suggestion.

Kyle talked about some of the quirks of ansible.  And not just the
YAML config files.  Including the secrets vault too.  Things are just
a little quirky there.  Suggests that we go check out ansible-doc.
Aaron suggested we have an Ansible v. Salt shootout on a future month.

Bob (the other Bob) has been rebuilding the C&C controller here at the
Creator Hub.  Always fun to be controlling real stuff.

Mory says, been using Linux for many years but about a year ago
switched over to LLM machine learning and now linux is dead,
programming is dead, coding is dead.  Sorry everyone but you are all
obsolete now.  Then described using LLMs for various amazing things.
Learning how to drive the machine learning instances is the new power
user.

Phil has been working on setting up a couple of new server systems.
You may have seen the other email from him on themailing list.  Phil
is setting up some big iron machines in his house.  Good thing he has
a large solar array on the roof!

Phil then complained about setting up OpenVPN.  It's been a journey.
Immediately three of us who have worked with OpenVPN a lot jumped in
and said this would be a great project for Hacking Society on another
Tuesdays.