Git is the most popular source code management and version control system in the open source community. Its complexity and power make it the best choice for most projects, while simultaneously giving it a daunting learning curve for newcomers. This talk will assume no background knowledge of version control, and will teach the basics of Git in order to give you an accurate mental model of what the tool doesv

Speaker

Emily Dunham is a sysadmin at the OSU Open Source Lab and founder of the DevOps Bootcamp open source training program.

The field of web operations is changing quickly. Modern internet companies are evolving, and mastering availability and performance is no longer enough. Come and learn about the tools and methods Yelp uses to ship next-generation infrastructure at a breakneck pace, all while providing rock-solid reliability and blazing speed for more than 120 million users.

Pizza will be provided. Thank you Yelp!

ACM @ PSU

Andy Delcambre from Github Education will be talking about Github and the technology behind it.

The ACM will be providing pizza.

Intel is Seeking MS and PhD students for OS Software Engineer positions

Computer Science | Computer Engineering | Electrical Engineering | related disciplines

Join Daniel as he discusses this exciting opportunity: “I love software. I love to create. I love to innovate. I'm fascinated by system architecture, and emergent complexity-by-necessity. I've been drawn into OS level work due to its fundamental similarities with any satisfyingly complex architecture. It is amazing how many patterns are shared between video games, robots, and operating systems. All of which, I love. I love working in the Windows Operating System (WOS) team at Intel, because of the intense technical effort required to be able to contribute in even the slightest manner. This effort, once exerted, begets unfathomable satisfaction.”

OS Software Engineer Candidates must have: Strong knowledge of computer/processor architecture, OS fundamentals, OS internals, OS-level APIs, Kernel debugger, driver development, system level development / prototype, C/ASM programming, data structures and algorithms. Expertise in core technologies such as platform power mgmt, low power IO, sensor architecture, IO driver stacks, and virtualization is highly desired. Qualifications include: Some experience with OS development. Experience developing and/or debugging software for HW devices. Strong written and verbal communications skills a must. Testing experience a plus. Apply for these positions today: intel.com/jobs/students

Adam Lorts is a sales and marketing professional at DevelopmentNow who focuses on business development in the digital space.

Adam's day job involves creating sales materials, building agency partnerships, coaching resellers, handling direct inquiries and RFP's as well as other strategic duties to aid the growth and success of DevelopmentNow.

Summary for talk: We've had some new younger hires so there's a lot of things we've learned on turning highly intelligent, educated CS grads into highly productive mobile developers. This focuses on doing what it takes there.

In this talk, we will cover the basics of how to connect an Android device to a MySQL database. The technique used is adaptable to any database server (SQL Server, PostGRES, etc...)

As you probably know, Android does not have a built in functionality to access remote databases, instead it uses SQLLite, a flat file system.

However, using Java EE 7 and a simple PHP connectivity script, it is practically trivial to do the basic CRUD operations on a remotely hosted database.

Bring a laptop with Java 7 and Android SDK with Eclipse installed, and get ready to code. Or just bring yourself, and a sheet will be passed to have the connection code EMAILED to you after the venue.

About the speaker: Sean Walsh (aka Azadi) is the current vice chair of the Portland State Chapter of the ACM. Sean is currently finishing his Bachelor's of Computer Science with a Mathematics Minor at Portland State University, and has industry experience with deploying mobile apps for Android.

As the language of web browsers, JavaScript is pervasive in web application development. It also offers particular advantages in that it is well-suited to functional programming and has the flexibility of a dynamic language. This talk will give a taste of what JavaScript programming looks like, some practices for getting the most out of the language, and some some common pitfalls.

Jesse Hallett is a Senior JavaScript Engineer at Jive Software. He is also an organizer of the Portland JavaScript Admirers, a local user group. Jesse has given talks on JavaScript and other topics at various user groups and conferences including Open Source Bridge, NodePDX, and Portland Code Camp.

This event is open to the public.

Questions email [email protected]

Back in 2001, researchers decided to try to use "the other" processor in their PC (the graphics card) for computation. These early, tedious efforts were promising and lead to a new type of computation called General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) Computing. NVIDIA vastly accelerated such efforts with the release of CUDA in 2007, that provided a much simpler interface to programmers wanting to use the GPU for general computation. Today, GPUs are being used to accelerate some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (see top500.org). In this talk I'll describe the ideas behind this very different kind of computing, show some simple CUDA examples, and mention the open source alternative to CUDA (OpenCL). I'll give a bit more detail on our newly acquired NVIDIA K20, and briefly outline my GP-GPU Computing course for summer 2013.

About the speaker

Dr. Karavanic is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Portland State, where she teaches courses in Operating Systems, performance measurement and modeling, and High Performance Computing. She was selected as an HPC Educator for the SC2012 Conference, where she offered a full-day tutorial on CUDA to faculty from around the U.S. Dr. Karavanic came to PSU in 2000 from Madison, Wisconsin, where she earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science.

During this talk I'll discuss current trends in the software industry, how database systems are affecting growth and high value skill sets, and where the action is likely in the coming years. We'll focus on the same technical stack that has led to innovation and major products such as Facebook, Google Search, speech recognition, and context based advertising.

About the speaker:

The data architect for Netmotion Wireless, Inc., Jonathan Wiggs is an accomplished software architect with significant experience in the fields of big data, Bayesian analytics, enterprise architecture, and cloud computing. Jonathan has helped launch start-up companies including Jott Networks & RGB Labs, and has led engineering and research groups at companies such as Microsoft and Nuance. He enjoys writing, speaking, sharing his experiences with his peers, and giving back to the industry he has loved for more than twenty years. Jonathan lives in the country and spends his free time with his wife and several admirable dogs. Contact Jonathan at [email protected].

AltOS — Building Amateur Rocketry Software

                         Keith Packard
                          Altus Metrum
                       [email protected]

Amateur rocketry enthusiasts build rockets somewhere between Estes and NASA sizes. Operating as sounding rockets, fights range from 1000m to more than 30km and are generally passively fin stabilized. Two of the significant challenges are deploying the recovery system components (generally parachutes) and providing tracking to locate the rocket after flight. Altus Metrum is a project building hardware and software for amateur rocketry, and AltOS is the suite of software running in the rocket avionics and on the ground to track and analyze the flight.

This talk will discuss the unique system challenges presented by rocketry, including high acceleration and speeds, automatic control of explosives and other flammable materials and the wide range of technical skills of the participants. Included will be a presentation of the hardware components used in the system and how that has driven the architecture of the AltOS flight software over four years of development.

About the speaker:

Keith Packard has been developing open source software since 1986, focusing on the X Window System since 1987, designing and implementing large parts of the current implementation. He is currently a Principal Engineer with Intel's Open Source Technology Center. Keith received a Usenix Lifetime Achievement award in 1999 and sits on the X.org foundation board.

Clojure is a modern functional programming language. It's ecosystem is packed to the brim with tools that help you achieve more with less typing, less moving parts, and less (or no) mutable state.

Come learn about functional programming, tips to getting started and being effective with Clojure, software transactional memory, and persistent data structures. Clojure is language built to tackle the complexity of the systems we face today, and this talk will take you on tour through its features, opinions, and approach.

About the speaker:

Paul deGrandis lives for magnificent engineering. Elegant, well-founded, useful solutions to problems that say something about engineering's beauty. Currently he is a scientist and co-founder at NDensity - an innovation lab. Previously he worked at Tutorspree (YC), PushButton Labs, Etsy.com, OurShelf (DreamIt), and SilverCloud Software as well as working in advanced research. He's also contributed, time, money, and effort to Code for America, PyPy, and Clojure. He is often speaking on Clojure, distributed systems, and dependable systems. http://www.pauldee.org/blog http://ndensity.com

Over the years I've been on several different teams that have been formed around existing software projects. The original authors were no longer directly involved, if they were anywhere to be found at all. How do you navigate the pitfalls and traps in existing software projects and come out the other side with the gold? What matters, what doesn't, and how do you stay alive?

About the speaker:

Andrew Parker first started with computers on a Commodore 64 and has now been a professional software developer for over a decade. He has been self taught, school taught, and mentor taught by a range of individuals and institutions around the world. He is passionate about TDD, refactoring, and pair programming. Andrew Parker is a software developer at Puppet Labs.

This is a high-level overview of the capabilities and uses of C# 4.5 and the .NET framework, from a student, for students. Topics covered will include concurrency and multi-threading, lambda expressions and anonymous functions, LINQ, a basic GUI demonstration, regular expressions, and more. Comparisons to C++ will be made as well. Some mathematical models will be shown if time permits.

About the speaker:

Sean Walsh (AKA Azadi) is a senior undergraduate student in the Computer Science program at Portland State University. His interests include systems programming, databases, and machine learning.

Through the implementation of an honest-to-goodness Bayesian classifier, we’ll tour the major topics of supervised machine learning: tokenization, feature selection and vectorization, model training and tuning, and execution. Time permitting, we’ll touch on other techniques and topics.

About the speaker:

John Melesky’s been programming on the web since gopher was a legitimate competitor. He is the team lead for the Analytics team at Janrain, where he gets to get his hands covered in all sorts of interesting data.

Hadoop is an important batch data processing framework in use by companies of all sizes. It has a very approachable architecture and can be applied to a large group of modern computing problems. In addition, the framework supports an implementation of mapreduce which allows users to run jobs on any size cluster to fit their data size. Come learn about the architecture of this framework, management of the cluster, and how to develop mapreduce jobs.

About the speaker:

Dan Colish is a Core Data Engineer at Urban Airship. He is also a maintainer and active open source developer for Xapian and other smaller projects. He resides in Portland with his family and enjoys snowshoeing and hiking around Mt. Hood.

A high-level overview of the characteristics of Google's new web scripting language, from the perspective of a student who learned to use the language in under 12 hours. Does Dart have a chance to become a viable and heavily adopted alternative to JavaScript? The history, philosophy and intended purpose of the language will be discussed, and comparisons will be made to other languages and frameworks.

About the speaker:

Devin Quirozoliver is a senior undergraduate student in the Computer Science program at Portland State University. His interests include languages, user interface and wearable computing.

The Portal Transportation Data Archive is a ~2TB PostgreSQL database that has been in existence since 2004. Kristin will demonstrate the current state of Portal. She will discuss the various technologies used to collect the data and the complexities of getting the data from the sensors to the database. She will also discuss her experiences working directly with local transportation agencies (ODOT, Metro, Trimet, Cities of Portland and Vancouver) to produce a web site that is useful in their day-to-day operations.

About the speaker:

Kristin Tufte is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Civil Engineering at Portland State University. Kristin is a recovering database geek.

Working in software and with computers means wildly different things depending on who you talk to. In open source, the work spans every aspect of software development -- from the marketing and documentation to the troubleshooting end-user systems.

The "community manager" or "organizer" role in open source communities is probably the least-well defined in our industry, but is seen as a crucial part of open source software development.

Selena will talk about her work as a serial user group starter, open source conference circuit speaker, conference organizer and contributor to PostgreSQL -- all roles considered part of community management. She'll also talk about other kinds of community management roles available at small and large companies, or as a volunteer in an open source project.

About the speaker:

Selena is a major contributor to PostgreSQL, she founded and runs the Postgres Open conference and keeps chickens. Selena has been working with open source software for over 15 years.She's keynoted at SCALE, DjangoCon and LISA, and regularly gives technical talks about Postgres, open source and trolling. She is currently a data architect at Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser.

Bio: Michael G Schwern is the author of Test::More (the Perl testing system) and Gitpan, 21,000 repositories on Github representing every release of every Perl module on CPAN. Schwern does not push to master, master pushes to Schwern.

Synopsis: Tinker Toys are the best illustration of a Git repository I’ve found. Side-by-side with issuing Git commands, we’ll build a Git repository out of kid’s toys to show what’s going on behind the scenes. Mind bending concepts like remote branches, rebase and the staging area become child’s play.

Basic knowledge of git commands is expected of the audience (init, add, commit, diff, log, push, pull). If you’ve started using git, but are uncomfortable with it and don’t really get it, this is for you.

WARNING: CHOKING HAZARD – Small Parts. Not For Children Under 4 Years.

Dave Ackley, Computer Science Department, University of New Mexico

Efficiency and robustness are mortal enemies, inherently opposed on the value of redundancy, which robustness requires but efficiency eliminates. This talk argues that, by emphasizing efficiency alone, computer science is often optimizing the wrong thing, and we could do better, and should, by recognizing and managing the tradeoff explicitly. An illustration of efficiency's costs is presented, along with discussion of possible computing mechanisms when robustness is emphasized even over correctness.

Bio:
David H. Ackley is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, with degrees from Tufts and Carnegie Mellon. Over twenty-five years his research contributions have involved neural networks and machine learning, evolutionary algorithms and artificial life, and biological approaches to computer security and computer architecture.

Title: Test-Driven Development and Mock Objects for C++ in Eclipse

Speaker: Prof Peter Sommerlad, Institute for Software at FHO/HSR Rapperswil, Switzerland

Abstract

At IFS Institute for Software, several plug-ins have been developed for the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools (CDT), to assist Agile C++ developers. Some of the features have already been integrated into CDT, such as the refactoring infrastructure and some refactorings, such as toggling function definition and declaration. In this talk Prof. Sommerlad will explain how IFS's plug-ins make it easier to adopt an agile style of development, through code-generation for Test-driven Development (TDD), unit testing, test doubles and mock objects, quick feedback from static analysis tools, and quick-fixes for problems.

Speaker Bio:

Prof. Peter Sommerlad is head of IFS Institute for Software at FHO/HSR Rapperswil. Peter is co-author of the books POSA Vol.1 and Security Patterns. His goal is to make software simpler by Decremental Development: refactoring software down to 10% of its size with better architecture, testability and quality and functionality. Peter is the also the author of the CUTE unit testing framework. He inspired and leads several Eclipse CDT plug-in projects, such as the CUTE unit testing, Sconsolidator, Mockator, Linticator, and Includator. IFS contributed most of the CDT refactoring infrastructure and is employing it to develop further TDD and Refactoring support for Eclipse CDT.

This is the inaugural meeting of the PDX Inform 7 Interest Group.

As our name implies, our principal interest is in the Interactive Fiction authoring language Inform 7. Inform 7 is designed to let anyone, programmer or no, write Interactive Fiction quickly and easily. You probably won't be surprised to learn that we are also interested in Interactive Fiction in general, in other Interactive Fiction authoring tools, and in most any related interesting topics.

For our first meeting, I (Bart Massey) will lead a little bit of introductory discussion about Inform 7, and we'll make plans for future meetings and projects.

Join us for another joint Debian / Ubuntu collaboration on bug-squashing!

We'll be focusing on multi-arch, bitesized bugs, and more.

Abstract:

The focus of my research is on enabling novel kinds of interaction between the user and the information in a variety of digital environments, ranging from social content sites, to digital libraries, to the Web. In the first part of this talk, I will present an approach for tracking and querying fine-grained provenance in data-intensive workflows. A workflow is an encoding of a sequence of steps that progressively transform data products. Workflows help make experiments reproducible, and may be used to answer questions about data provenance – the dependencies between input, intermediate, and output data. I will describe a declarative framework that captures fine-grained dependencies, enabling novel kinds of analytic queries, and will demonstrate that careful design and leveraging distributed processing make tracking and querying fine-grained provenance feasible. In the second part of this talk, I will discuss information discovery on the Social Web, where users provide information about themselves in stored profiles, register their relationships with other users, and express their preferences with respect to information and products. I will argue that information discovery should account for a user's social context, and will present network-aware search – a novel search paradigm in which result relevance is computed with respect to a user's social network. I will describe efficient algorithms appropriate for this setting, and will show how social similarities between users may be leveraged to make processing more efficient.

Abstract:

Satisfiability (SAT) and satisfiability module theories (SMT) solvers are efficient automated theorem provers widely used in several fields such as formal verification and artificial intelligence. Although SAT/SMT are traditional propositional and predicate logics and well understood, SAT/SMT solvers are complex software highly optimized for performance. Because SAT/SMT solvers are commonly used as the final verdict for formal verification problems, their correctness is an important issue. This talk discusses two methods to formally certify SAT/SMT solvers. First method is generating proofs from solvers and certifying those proofs. One of the issues for proof checking is that SMT logics are constantly growing and a flexible framework to express proof rules is needed. The proposal is to use a meta-language called LFSC, which is based on Edinburgh Logical Frame with an extension for expressing computational side conditions. SAT and SMT logics can be encoded in LFSC, and the encoding can be easily and safely extended for new logics. And it has been shown that an optimized LFSC checker can certify SMT proofs very efficiently. Second method is using a verified programming language to implement a SAT solver and verify the code statically. Guru is a pure functional programming language with support for dependent types and theorem proving. A modern SAT solver has been implemented and verified to be correct in Guru. Also, Guru allows very efficient code generation through resource types, so the performance of versat is comparable with that of the current proof checking technology with a state-of-the-art solver.

Abstract:

In this talk, I describe two side-channel traffic analysis attacks on encrypted voice-over-IP calls and a novel technique for efficiently defending against such attacks. We begin with a review of the basics of speech coding to understand how and why information can leak out of an encrypted VoIP call. We then discuss the techniques for recovering hidden information: first, how to identify the language spoken in the call, and then how to spot particular phrases. Our techniques are completely speaker-independent, and require no recorded examples of the target phrase. Nevertheless, we show that they achieve surprising accuracy on widely-used speech corpora. Finally, we consider methods for limiting this information leakage. Experimental results show that an intelligent, adaptive adversary can convincingly deceive such traffic analyses while incurring much lower overhead than previously expected.

Abstract:

The stereotypical view of computing, and hence computer security, is a landscape filled with laptops, desktops, smartphones and servers; general purpose computers in the proper sense. However, this is but the visible tip of the iceberg. In fact, most computing today is invisibly embedded into systems and environments that few of us would ever think of as computers. Indeed, applications in virtually all walks of modern life, from automobiles to medical devices, power grids to voting machines, have evolved to rely on the same substrate of general purpose microprocessors and (frequently) network connectivity that underlie our personal computers. Yet along with the power of these capabilities come the same potential risks as well. My research has focused on understanding the scope of such problems by exploring vulnerabilities in the embedded environment, how they arise, and the shape of the attack surfaces they expose.

In this talk, I will particularly discuss recent work on two large-scale platforms: modern automobiles and electronic voting machines. In each case, I will explain how implicit or explicit assumptions in the design of the systems have opened them to attack. I will demonstrate these problems, concretely and completely, including arbitrary control over election results and remote tracking and control of an unmodified automobile. I will explain the nature of these problems, how they have come to arise, and the challenges in hardening such systems going forward.

Abstract:

Probabilistic graphical models are used to represent uncertainty in many domains, such as error-correcting codes, computational biology, sensor networks and medical diagnosis. This talk will discuss two approaches to the problem of learning graphical models from data, focusing on computational challenges. The first is marginalization-based learning, where parameters are fit in the context of a specific approximate inference algorithm. This will include results on image processing and computer vision problems. The second is recent work on Markov chain Monte Carlo based learning, inspired by a computational biology project.

Abstract:

Agents, defined as programs or robots that interact with their environment, are becoming increasingly common. However, the current generation of agents are often unable to robustly interact with each other, or with humans, severely limiting the number of tasks that they can accomplish. Furthermore, these agents typically are unable to adapt to their environment, a critical skill when programmers do not have full knowledge of agents' future environments or when the agents' environment may change over time. This talk will discuss recent work in combining autonomous learning of sequential decision making tasks with transfer learning, a general approach to sharing knowledge between agents with different capabilities, resulting in significant improvements to learning speeds and abilities.

FreePBX - Asterisk - Trixbox

Bill Ensley will give an introduction to Asterisk, FreePBX and Trixbox.

Come learn some ins, outs, and gotchas of how each of these systems interact and build on top of eachother.

We will cover (time permitting):

System Requirements How to roll your own or go Appliance Basic Installation Trunk Setup IP Phones - User/Network Setup Echo Cancellation - Hardware and Software Manual Config Editing IVR and Advanced Call Routing

Any other questions that come up that we think we can answer.

See you there!

Open Data and Interoperability by Arlo Belshee

Lots of us want to expose our data via RESTful web APIs. We also want to consume data exposed via such APIs. REST + Json works well for this. However, we'd also like to mash up multiple data sources and build higher level tools. For example, it would be nice to create Business Intelligence (BI) tools that can point to any API and start charting the data, or create JavaScript control libraries that can be bound directly to data sources.

Unfortunately, that isn't possible with just REST + Json.

The problem is that each service is custom. No two services follow exactly the same rules. Sure, everything exposes sets of resources. But how do you get from a resource to its related resources? How do you ask the server to tell you about related resources? What, exactly should the server do when it gets a PATCH verb? Each server interprets these differently, which prevents making general tools.

I'm going to talk about the OData protocol. This is an open standard that defines uniform semantics and modeling for RESTful web services. I'll show how this allows general tools to be built, and data from multiple sources to be combined together in interesting ways - without requiring custom code for each server. I'll also show how this enables people working in different languages. A single library can be written for each language which can then support all OData-compliant RESTful web services.

Most of the examples will be with open source frameworks and tools, but I'll also show ways that you can use OData to break out data that is trapped in closed-source systems and expose it to the open source ecosystem.

Agenda:

7:00 - 7:30 Business We will discuss the status of our ongoing projects including PLUG's monthly Advanced Topics meetings, PLUG's monthly hands on clinics etc.

7:30 - 8:30 Presentation and Questions

See above

9:00 - ... Beer The Lucky Lab Northwest Beer Hall 1945 NW Quimby Portland, Oregon

             Intro to Salt / Salt Stack (saltstack.org)
                          by Daniel Hedlund 

Salt is a distributed configuration management and remote execution platform built on top of ZeroMQ and Python. Simple, fast, powerful and extensible.

Daniel will give a presentation on the architecture of Salt and how it leverages ZeroMQ to provide a simple but highly scalable and parallel method of software deployment.

"Salt is a distributed remote execution system used to execute commands and query data. It was developed in order to bring the best solutions found in the world of remote execution together and make them better, faster and more malleable. Salt accomplishes this via its ability to handle larger loads of information, and not just dozens, but hundreds or even thousands of individual servers, handle them quickly and through a simple and manageable interface."

                         PRESENTATION
                              by
                        Keith Lofstrom




 Since 2005, Randall Munroe's xkcd.com, "A webcomic of romance,
 sarcasm, math, and language" has covered many topics dear to FOSS
 advocates and has been discussed on the PLUG list many times.
 The #1000 comic is expected to appear Friday January 6 just after
 midnight eastern time, making Thursday January 5 "xkcd1k eve".

 Join us for a celebration of XKCD1K eve at the PLUG general
 meeting.  We can display and discuss/explain some of the
 Free/Libre/Open source cartoons, the various weblogs and forums
 that have sprung up around them, draw our own cartoons (Keith
 will bring art paper and pens), perhaps discuss the technology
 of web comics.

 Homework:  bring your own list of favorite xkcd cartoons, and
 we will display them at the meeting.  Bring your artistic and
 "right brained" friends.  Bring your black porkpie hat.  If
 you are Richard Stallman, bring your katana sword.

 Afterwards, at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub at 1945 nw Quimby, we
 can welcome comic #1000, just after 9pm Pacific Time.  Or not,
 Randall is a trickster and may give us strip #1025, avoiding
 the definition the size of a "kilo" ( http://xkcd.com/394/ ) .

                         PRESENTATION

                  Don't Fear the Autotools!

                              by

                         Scott Garman


 Autoconf. Automake. Libtool. This trio of build configuration 
 utilities (known as the Autotools) are used in a large majority 
 of compiled software applications for Linux, but they remain a 
 mystery to many of us.

 In this gentle introduction to the Autotools, Scott Garman will 
 help lift the veil of uncertainty most people have about them. 
 You'll also learn about the Gnu Coding Standards and the Filesystem 
 Hierarchy Standard, two specifications which explain a lot of the 
 "why" behind the Autotools (yes, there is a method to this madness!). 
 Finally, Scott will offer some practical tips for understanding 
 and fixing errors you may see when building an Autotools-based 
 package. It's sure to be a fun romp for the whole family.

PRESENTATION ONE

Hands-On IPv6 Networking by Ted Mittelstaedt

Ted will wrap-up his multi-month series on IPv6 networking with some demonstrations of real-world DNS client and server configuration and web content serving.

PRESENTATION TWO

Daniel Hedlund will give an introduction to GitHub and demonstrate some command line tools for interacting with GitHub and how you can host a website on GitHub using Octopress (octopress.org)

We will break for the Lucky Lab NW on Quimby after the meeting.

In the 1970’s, researchers at Xerox PARC gave themselves a glimpse of the future by building computers that, although wildly impractical at the time, let them experience plentiful fast cycles and big memories. PARC researchers invented Smalltalk, and the freedom afforded by such a dynamic, yet safe, language, led them to create a new experience of computing, which has become quite mainstream today.

In the end of the first decade of the new century, chips such as Tilera’s can give us a glimpse of a future in which manycore microprocessors will become commonplace: every (non-hand-held) computer’s CPU chip will contain 1,000 fairly homogeneous cores. Such a system will not be programmed like the cloud, or even a cluster because communication will be much faster relative to computation. Nor will it be programmed like today’s multicore processors because the illusion of instant memory coherency will have been dispelled by both the physical limitations imposed by the 1,000-way fan-in to the memory system, and the comparatively long physical lengths of the inter- vs. intra-core connections. In the 1980’s we changed our model of computation from static to dynamic, and when this future arrives we will have to change our model of computation yet again.

If we cannot skirt Amdahl’s Law, the last 900 cores will do us no good whatsoever. What does this mean? We cannot afford even tiny amounts of serialization. Locks?! Even lock-free algorithms will not be parallel enough. They rely on instructions that require communication and synchronization between cores’ caches. Just as we learned to embrace languages without static type checking, and with the ability to shoot ourselves in the foot, we will need to embrace a style of programming without any synchronization whatsoever.

In our Renaissance project at IBM, Vrije, and Portland State (http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr/renaissance/), we are investigating what we call “anti-lock,” “race-and-repair,” or “end-to-end nondeterministic” computing. As part of this effort, we have build a Smalltalk system that runs on the 64-core Tilera chip, and have experimented with dynamic languages atop this system. When we give up synchronization, we of necessity give up determinism. There seems to be a fundamental tradeoff between determinism and performance, just as there once seemed to be a tradeoff between static checking and performance.

The obstacle we shall have to overcome, if we are to successfully program manycore systems, is our cherished assumption that we write programs that always get the exactly right answers. This assumption is deeply embedded in how we think about programming. The folks who build web search engines already understand, but for the rest of us, to quote Firesign Theatre: Everything You Know Is Wrong!

GPU architectures are often described in confusing and overly optimistic terms. The AMD Fusion APU architecture provides improvements in communication latency and bandwidth between devices, so the problem of choosing the right core on which to execute code becomes both more acute and more flexible as communication between tasks becomes easier. But as the CPU and GPU become ever closer, how does one program these machines? This talk takes a look at these emerging architectures; touches on the current parallel programming models for CPUs and GPGPUs; and follows this with a perspective on what future programming models for heterogeneous architectures will look like.

We will describe a new approach to the old problem of automatic temporal property verification. As well as leading to dramatic performance improvements over existing techniques, this approach also brings some light to a couple of age-old questions.

Jon Bach is coming to our local agile users group to tell us about his specialty, exploratory testing. Pizza at 6:30, meeting at 7.

Talk: "Exploratory Testing: Now In Session"

The agile nature of exploration and the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. But exploratory testing is often dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you share these concerns, a solution may lie in a technique called Session-Based Test Management (SBTM), developed by Jon and his brother James specifically to address these problems. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in "sessions" which have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you can practice—the skills of exploration and demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploratoration.

Speaker Bio: Jon Bach has been in testing for 14 years, 12 of which has been as a manager. His experience includes managing teams at Microsoft, HP and LexisNexis, and is currently a managing consultant for Quardev, Inc. -- a Seattle test lab. He speaks frequently about test management and exploratory testing, and is the co-inventor (with his brother James) of Session-Based Test Management. He’s also written a few articles for testing magazines as well as a listed co-author of a Microsoft Patterns and Practices book on acceptance testing (available for free online). Find him on Facebook, Twitter, or his presentations and articles on http://www.quardev.com, where he also has a blog.

                       PRESENTATION

                          Arch Linux

                              by

                        Daniel Hedlund
                    <[email protected]>

 Arch Linux is an independently developed, i686- and x86_64-optimised 
 Linux distribution targeted at competent Linux users. It uses 
 'pacman', its home-grown package manager, to provide updates 
 to the latest software applications with full dependency tracking. 
 Operating on a rolling release system, Arch can be installed from 
 a CD image or via an FTP server. The default install provides a 
 solid base that enables users to create a custom installation. 
 In addition, the Arch Build System (ABS) provides a way to easily 
 build new packages, modify the configuration of stock packages, 
 and share these packages with other users via the Arch Linux 
 user repository.

                             PRESENTATION

                          Rapid Discussions

                                  on

                              Any Topic

                                  by

                          Anyone & Everyone

  Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
  discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
  more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
  we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

  AND YES - We are looking for speakers for upcoming months.
            We have been having trouble finding speakers lately.
            Volunteers and Recommendations are welcome.

                         PRESENTATION

                     Open Source Software

                              in

                        State Agencies

                              by

                        Michael Smith

  Michael Smith works for the State of Oregon.  He will discuss 
  his experience introducing and trying to introduce Open Source
  Solutions into state government agencies.

  Note:  We may update this description as we get more details.

ABOUT THE GROUP: Join programmers, researchers and enthusiasts to discuss functional programming. pdxfunc is a study/user group exploring the world of functional programming based in Portland, Oregon. The group welcomes programmers interested in all functional languages, including Haskell, Erlang, OCaml, Scala, and others. The group meets regularly and provides presentations, demos and discussions applicable to all skill levels, from newbies and experts. The meetings are usually on the second Monday of the month.

                            PRESENTATION

                         Rapid Discussions

                                 on

                             Any Topic

                                 by

                         Anyone & Everyone

 Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
 discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
 more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
 we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

 One very short topic that I will be prepared to discuss for
 a few minutes will be:
      -  Open Source at Two Year Colleges
         Why are text books so damn expensive?

AND YES - We are looking for speakers for upcoming months.
          Volunteers and Recommendations are welcome.

                         Presentation

                   Introduction to OpenEMR
                              by
                        Tony McCormick
                     <[email protected]>

 Introduction to OpenEMR, maybe the most downloaded open source 
 Electronic Heath Records system in the world.   This presentation 
 will discuss how one of the first web based, php projects became 
 a government certified EHR.  We'll demo the system, talk about 
 the good, bad and ugly of a 10 year old project with ~500,000 
 lines of code and get feed back on ways to move forward with 
 out breaking the existing use.  ie: upgrade paths and models, etc.

Scrap Your Zippers: A Generic Zipper for Heterogeneous Types

Michael Adams, Indiana University

Abstract

The zipper type provides the ability to efficiently edit tree-shaped data in a purely functional setting by providing constant time edits at a focal point in an immutable structure. It is used in a number of applications and is widely applicable for manipulating tree-shaped data structures.

The traditional zipper suffers from two major limitations, however. First, it operates only on homogeneous types. That is to say, every node the zipper visits must have the same type. In practice, many tree-shaped types do not satisfy this condition, and thus cannot be handled by the traditional zipper. Second, the traditional zipper involves a significant amount of boilerplate code. A custom implementation must be written for each type the zipper traverses. This is error prone and must be updated whenever the type being traversed changes.

The generic zipper presented in this talk overcomes these limitations. It operates over any type and requires no boilerplate code to be written by the user. The only restriction is that the types traversed must be instances of the Data class from the Scrap your Boilerplate framework.

Biography

Michael D. Adams will be completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Indiana University this summer. He has a B.S. in Computer Science, a B.S in Computer Engineering and a Minor in Mathematics from the University of Kansas.

His research interests are the implementation and construction of programming languages, compilers and software analysis tools that help programmers more easily implement, reason about, prove correct and improve the performance of their programs. This includes areas such as type systems, static analysis, control-flow analysis, compilers and optimization.

In spring 2007, he worked on the X10 language for an internship at IBM Research. In summer 2007, he worked on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler at Microsoft Research. In 2008-2010 he worked for Cadence Research on the Chez Scheme compiler.

He is an avid swing dancer and cyclist.

                        Presentation

              Comments on the IPv6 Transition
                             by
                      Ted Mittelstaedt
                             of
                       Portlandia IT


Ted Mittelstaedt of Portlandia IT will talk about IP addressing
in general and how the IPv4 to IPv6 transition is being received
by the Internet community. This talk is part of a series of
timely IPv6 PLUG talks that Ted is giving over the coming months.

Presentation Free Content and the Data Revolution by Daniel Hedlund

The amount of information available on the Internet has exploded in recent years and shows no sign of slowing down. Most of this information is freely available to anyone with a web browser --- but what does free mean? Daniel Hedlund will lead a discussion on the meaning of open data and explore how the open source movement is no longer constrained to the realm of software.

Second meeting of the PDX11 Working Group on Knowledge Networks - part of the City's Software Initiative to make Portland the most awesome place in the world to start and run your software business.

For this meeting, we'll go over the "Ideal Meeting Room Features" list, finalize it, and then begin discussion on a directory of meeting spaces, perhaps built around the Features list.

Subscribe to the discussion list: http://lists.pdx11.org/mailman/listinfo/pdx11-knowledge

                             Presentation
                            What is Open?
                                  by
                             David Mandel


 David Mandel is interested in distilling the core ideas 
 from the philosophy of Open Source Software and extending
 these into other areas like music, publishing, farming, 
 and education.  In the past he has given presentations
 on Open Source Agriculture.

 In this presentation, David wants to discuss Open Source
 in education.  This is not a presentation about using 
 Open Source Software in traditional classrooms as much
 as it is a discussion about using Open Source Philosophy
 to change traditional classrooms.  We will discuss the 
 work of John Gatto author of "Dumbing Us Down", the Moore 
 Method of teaching mathematics, and David Mandel's personal 
 experience teaching mathematics and computer classes in 
 community colleges.

                             Presentation
                          Mini Presentations
                                  by
                            Daniel Hedlund
                                 and
                           hopefully others


 Daniel Hedlund will give a little ad hoc mini-demo on 
 setting up a VPS on Linode.com.

 David Mandel will discuss a couple ways of using virtualbox
 in a teaching environment.

 We invite others to join in with their own short little 
 mini-presentations on simple little "hacks" that you find
 useful.

Initial meeting of the PDX11 Working Group on Knowledge Networks - part of the City's Software Initiative to make Portland the most awesome place in the world to start and run your software business.

Subscribe to the discussion list: http://lists.pdx11.org/mailman/listinfo/pdx11-knowledge

                             Presentation
                    Open Source Desktop Publishing
                                 with
                               Scribus

                                  by

                          John Jason Jordan

 Scribus is just a few years old, but has already achieved 
 most of the features of the expensive commercial desktop 
 publishing apps, and a few they don't have. If you need to 
 do fliers, brochures, or whole books, Scribus is now the 
 preferred tool.

 The presentation will start with a brief introduction to 
 some of the terms of desktop publishing, especially how to 
 get your computer to produce something that a print shop can 
 put on a press. This will include matters such as typography, 
 color management, banding and line screens, transparency, 
 imposition, and several other issues.

 Then we will spend a few minutes on an overview of Scribus, 
 how it is different from word processors, TeX, and advantages 
 and disadvantages.  This will include the basic features of 
 Scribus, including typographical controls, master pages, render 
 frames, PDF forms, PDF export options, scripting, collect for 
 output, and lots more. It will also cover how Scribus is the 
 end tool in a process that starts with other programs.

 Finally we will reproduce the PLUG flier that was created 
 in Scribus.  This will be presented on the screen showing 
 the steps and features of Scribus necessary to produce it. 
 Each member of the audience will have a paper copy of the 
 flier to assist in following the process.

A Presentation by Allan Foster of ForgeRock.com

I will give a presentation on ForgeRock, how and why we were founded, and a little of the events and decisions that led up to the founding.

I will also discuss some of the various Open Source Business Models, and why we chose ours.

I will cover some of the unique situations in which we find ourselves, and how we chose to address them.

I will also discuss how Open Source is becoming more relevant in Enterprise, and how this shift seems to be reaching a tipping point.

Allan works at ForgeRock with former Sun Microsystems Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps. Visit www.webmink.com for more about Simon.

October Portland Linux/Unix Group Meeting

An Overview of Zentyal by Dale Zeutenhorst

Zentyal (formerly eBox Platform) is an open source unified network server for small to mid size companies based on Ubuntu Linux. Zentyal can act as a Gateway, Network Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Unified Communications Server or a combination of these.

Dale Zeutenhorst is a long time consultant and small business owner. He is currently owner and manager of Adept I.T. Service of Camas, Washington. Before that he was Technical Manager at Microsharp where is was a key player in building the Netule family of server-appliances.

Schedule:

News Presentation Meet for beer at the Lucky Lab Beer Hall - 1945 NW Quimby

Venue:

Portland State University Fariborz Maseeh College of Engineering & Computer Science Building Room FAB 86-01 (This is in the basement.) The building is on SW 4th across from SW College Street. See location H-10 on map at http://pdxLinux.org/campus_map.jpg

PRESENTATION

                           An Overview of
                              Berkley DB

                                  by

                            David Segleau

Director Product Management - Berkeley DB

 Berkeley DB originated at the University of California, 
 Berkeley as part of the transition (1986 to 1994) from 4.3BSD 
 to 4.4BSD and of the effort to remove AT&T-encumbered code.
 It has evolved a great deal since then and is now part
 of Oracle where it is distributed with source code under 
 a dual use license.

 Berkeley DB (BDB) is a computer software library that provides 
 a high-performance embedded database, with bindings in C, C++, 
 PHP, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Smalltalk, and other languages. 
 BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports 
 multiple data items for a single key. BDB can support thousands 
 of simultaneous threads of control or concurrent processes 
 manipulating databases as large as 256 terabytes, on a wide 
 variety of operating systems including most Unix-like and 
 Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.

The PSU Haskell Interest Group is intended to provide a meeting place for PSU students and others who are users and developers of the Haskell programming language. Nothing too structured; brief talks and a chance to meet and discuss.

PRESENTATION

Server Sky - Data Centers in Orbit

           Power for computation on a Moore's Law schedule

                Keith Lofstrom, http://server-sky.com

 The EPA estimates US data centers (not including desktops)
 consumed 1.5% of total US electrical consumption in 2006.
 They predict a doubling to 3% of base load by 2011.  Our
 work as programmers and technologists continues this
 runaway exponential growth, and we will be stopped by
 environmental and resource limits soon.

 Server sky is a proposal to use newly emerging solid state
 technologies to build large arrays of 3 gram paper-thin
 solar-powered computation satellites in 6400km Earth orbits.

 A single server-sat replaces 15 watts of ground-based
 electrical generation, cooling, and power conversion, as
 well as the computation and communication hardware itself.
 Orbital server farms may start out as expensive as current
 approaches, but design improvement and cheaper launch will
 decrease costs exponentially over time, much as transistor
 cost has plummeted over the last four decades.

 This is open technology, responsive to public input, and
 the project needs volunteer software and engineering help
 to stay that way.  Eventually, Server Sky will create
 thousands of open technology jobs in the Portland area,
 and permit unbounded computation growth in space, while
 reducing energy demand and environmental damage on Earth.

 Earth can return to what it is good at green and growing
 things while we fill space with gray and computing things.

                             PRESENTATION

                    Open Source Car Entertainment

                                  by

                             Kevron Rees
                        [email protected]

 This presentation will discuss the innovation and excitement 
 that open source software can bring to the car to make travelling 
 more enjoyable and also save you money. The session will go into 
 depth on what you need to do to turn your car into an open 
 source super-car including what hardware is available and the
 open source software needed to make it all work.

                             PRESENTATION

                       Puppet - An Introduction

                                  by

                              Teyo Tyree
                          www.puppetlabs.com

 Puppet is a powerful configuration management tool that makes life 
 easier for people managing systems and applications. This tutorial 
 gives you an in-depth and hands-on introduction to Puppet that is 
 ideal for beginners to Puppet and configuration management.

 Teyo is Co-Founder of Puppet Labs and the former Director of IT 
 for 20/20 Research and professional systems administrator. Over the 
 past 12 years Teyo has been using and promoting the use of open 
 source tools to enable scaling and efficiency in IT operations. 
 Teyo joined Puppet Labs in July of 2008 and has been traveling 
 the world providing Puppet Labs’ customers with training and consulting.

             PRESENTATION

         How Linux Containers fit your cloud

                  by

             Alec Istomin
              www.Parallels.com

 Linux, Cloud, Virtualization and hundreds other buzz words are out
 there to blow your mind. The session will share real life examples
 that actually make sense and deliver meaningful easy to use services to
 end users with minimum efforts from cloud administrators.

 A deeper introduction to Containers technology will be presented and
 will be helpful to anyone, especially for people familiar with any
 other virtualization solution for Linux.

 Overview of Parallels Commercial management tools for Containers and
 clouds with open command line and XML APIs will show how to put an
 infrastructure cloud solution to life.

 About the speaker:
 Alec Istomin is an Enterprise Solution Architect at Parallels, 
 Renton,WA and originally joined the company (called SWsoft at 
 the time) as a developer in early 2000. He has been involved 
 with Linux and Virtualization all these years and led numerous 
 cloud deployments. He has an M.S. in physics and applied 
 mathematics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology 
 (MIPT), Moscow.

                             PRESENTATION

                          Rapid Discussions

                                  on

                              Any Topic

                                  by

                          Anyone & Everyone

  Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
  discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
  more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
  we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

  Two topics that I will be prepared to discuss for a few minutes 
  will be:
       -  Subsistence Computing 
          How to do good computing on a low budget.
       -  Could we lose the internet to Government and Corporate
          interests?

 AND YES - We are looking for speakers for upcoming months.
           Volunteers and Recommendations are welcome.

Jon Bach is coming to our local agile users group to tell us about his specialty, exploratory testing. Pizza at 6:30, meeting at 7.

Talk: "Exploratory Testing: Now In Session"

The agile nature of exploration and the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. But exploratory testing is often dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you share these concerns, a solution may lie in a technique called Session-Based Test Management (SBTM), developed by Jon and his brother James specifically to address these problems. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in "sessions" which have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you can practice—the skills of exploration and demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploratoration.

Speaker Bio: Jon Bach has been in testing for 14 years, 12 of which has been as a manager. His experience includes managing teams at Microsoft, HP and LexisNexis, and is currently a managing consultant for Quardev, Inc. -- a Seattle test lab. He speaks frequently about test management and exploratory testing, and is the co-inventor (with his brother James) of Session-Based Test Management. He’s also written a few articles for testing magazines as well as a listed co-author of a Microsoft Patterns and Practices book on acceptance testing (available for free online). Find him on Facebook, Twitter, or his presentations and articles on http://www.quardev.com, where he also has a blog.

A Talk by

Jeri Ellsworth (Circuit Girl)

Jeri Ellsworth is a native Oregonian, born in Yamhill and raised in Dallas, Oregon. Early on she became fascinated with electronics and 8-bit computers setting the stage for her unique approach to learning. Not being challenged in school, she skipped higher education to pursue a career in car-racing and chassis fabrication. After that, she opened a chain of computer stores in Oregon and Washington. She sold those to persue a career in chip design, which lead her to design the CommodoreOne - based upon the Commodore 64 - using reconfigurable logic and the C64 DTV 30-games-in-one joystick, selling, a quarter million units. She currently works as an Oregon based consultant.

I'm not sure what Jeri is going to speak about yet, but judging from the talk she gave at Stanford, it should be very good indeed.

See a video of her Stanford talk at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979#

Also, see her webs sites at: http://www.jeriellsworth.com/ and http://www.fatmanandcircuitgirl.com/

WARNING!!!

Jeri is sick and can't do the talk tonight.

Informal DorkBotPDX demo night instead!

In place of Jeri, I have some offers to do demos of projects from DorkBotPDX land, including Simran Gleason about his Kepler's Orrery (a generative music system that composes music from gravity equations), I have a little stepper motor demo, someone suggested they could demo Luz (a ruby / opengl 4-d drawing software), and there may be others.

    CANCELLED PRESENTATION was ...


                A Talk
                  by

            Jeri Ellsworth
                            (Circuit Girl)

 Jeri Ellsworth is a native Oregonian, born in Yamhill and raised
 in Dallas, Oregon.  Early on she became fascinated with electronics 
 and 8-bit computers setting the stage for her unique approach to 
 learning.  Not being challenged in school, she skipped higher 
 education to pursue a career in car-racing and chassis fabrication.
 After that, she opened a chain of computer stores in Oregon and 
 Washington.  She sold those to persue a career in chip design,
 which lead her to design the CommodoreOne - based upon the 
 Commodore 64 - using reconfigurable logic and the C64 DTV 30- 
 games-in-one joystick, selling, a quarter million units.
 She currently works as an Oregon based consultant.   

 I'm not sure what Jeri is going to speak about yet, but judging from
 the talk she gave at Stanford, it should be very good indeed.
 See a video of her Stanford talk at: 
 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1053309060448851979#

 Also, see her webs sites at:
 http://www.jeriellsworth.com/
 and
 http://www.fatmanandcircuitgirl.com/    

                             PRESENTATION

                                Drupal
                         What is it Good For?

                                  by

                              Lev Tsypin

 Drupal is growing leaps and bounds these days, powering everything 
 from ma and pa brochure sites to Obama’s recovery.gov. Does this 
 mean it’s a great fit for any website? Not exactly.

 Drupal has been defined as many things, including a content 
 management system, a web application framework, and community 
 plumbing. In some ways, this is both a blessing and a curse; 
 there’s so much you can do, in so many different ways, that new 
 users are crushed under the weight of the options and lack of 
 clarity. In addition, all of that flexibility does come with a cost, 
 in terms of performance and conciseness.

 This presentation will cover some Drupal basics including history, 
 core concepts, and system structure. From there, we will dig into 
 Drupal’s strengths and weaknesses, finishing off by discussing the 
 types of projects Drupal is best suited for, including specific 
 examples for each case.

 My hope is that developers new to the platform will gain a better 
 understanding of when to approach a new project with Drupal, more 
 experienced developers will gain a bit of insight on when not to 
 use it, and non-techies will have some help in choosing a platform 
 for their projects along with an understanding why developers they 
 work with select a given platform. Please note that this talk will 
 not delve deeply into the technical details of Drupal.

  Given that the database, as the canonical repository of data, 
 is the most important part of many applications, why is it 
 that we don't write database unit tests? This talk promotes 
 the practice of implementing tests to directly test the 
 schema, storage, and functionality of databases.

 David E. Wheeler, Founder of Kineticode and Co-Founder of 
 PostgreSQL Experts hacks Perl, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, and Ruby. 
 I believe David is also the lead developer and maintainer 
 Bricolage which is a well known CMS. 
 David lives in Portland.

Michael Dexter from Linux Fund/BSD Fund will give his EuroBSDCon 2008 presentation:

Zen and the Art of Multiplicity Maintenance: An applied survey of BSD-licensed multiplicity strategies from chroot to mult.

Topics of this survey include chroot, jails, Xen, sysjail, SIMH, NetBSD/usermode, kauth Jail, QEMU/kQEMU, GXemul, vkernel

HacPDX is an opportunity to join Portland Haskell hackers in building and improving Hackage libraries and tools. If you've never been, Hackathons are typically not only a good opportunity for experienced devs to work together but also a great way for newcomers to get involved in the community.

Visit this website for complete details: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/HacPDX

Networking from 6-7, Seminar from 7-8:00 PM Event is open to anyone - this is a free talk. Come in early for free pizza provided by the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference!

Abstract: Estimates are required multiple times in a project. Project members need to make estimates for a variety of reasons, these include: • The amount of time for a task; • The cost for resources; • The cost of software, hardware and other materials; • The time required to finish a task. However, there are many problems with estimates. This presentation focuses on the sociological and psychological aspects of doing estimates. It teaches attendees the environmental issues that affect estimates and how to deal with their impact. Through class interaction, it shows both the psychological and sociological factors that affect how estimates are given and provides leaders with tools to help avoid the common pitfalls. By avoiding these situations, estimates become more representative of the project and more variation more predictable. Controlling both of these, help the Project Manager avert trouble. This a very interactive and fun presentation. It has a short exercise and throughout the presentation, attendees are asked to make estimates on doing the exercise again under a number of situations to help better learn from their own behavior.

Speaker Bio: Todd Williams has thirty years experience as a Project Manager, Architect, entrepreneur and businessperson. He has spent twenty of those years recovering red projects. From this experience, he has developed a process to make the recoveries more efficient. His experience also provides a plethora of invaluable knowledge on avoiding project failure. He has worked in manufacturing and service industries for products used internally and externally to the companies developing them. The projects include large-scale system integration of manufacturing systems, equipment integration, web-based collaboration tools, thick clients with automated update via the internet and large-scale business systems integration. The projects have been in Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, the United States and Israel. The teams have been dispersed in as many as five countries, three continents and countless time zones. Some of these projects were captive in-house time and materials projects while others were outsourced fixed-priced projects.

Mr. Williams is the President of eCameron, Inc., located in the Portland, Oregon metropolitan area, and specializes in recovering red projects. He is a published author and regularly publishes a Project Management Technique eZine.

Directions: Room 86-01 is located between the Engineering Building and the Fourth Avenue Building on the PSU campus. Enter through the Engineering Building at 1930 SW Fourth Avenue, go down the stairs and through the hall directly ahead. Street parking is available.

Rose City SPIN: The Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) is a monthly forum for networking, mutual support, and promotion of effective software practices. We exchange practical experiences, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and war stories about the technical, business, and human facets of software process improvement. The Rose City SPIN serves the software development community of the Portland/Vancouver metro area. Whether you work for a large company or a small one, corporate or self-employed, industrial or academic setting, you are welcome at the Rose City SPIN.

Questions? Contact Rhea Stadick at [email protected]

                             PRESENTATION

       Crash Reporting: Mozilla's Open Source Solution

                  by

             K Lars Lohn

 Nothing exercises the limits of software like turning it 
 over to the end users. While in-house testing is invaluable, 
 the end users can often find the neglected edge cases or subtle 
 race conditions in a more reliable manner. However, once the 
 software is in the end user’s hands, postmortem crash information 
 is usually lost.

 By taking the Google Breakpad project and enhancing it with 
 Mozilla’s own Socorro project, Mozilla has a solution to this problem.  
 When Firefox goes down, in a last ditch effort, it lobs a 
 packet of crash information over the wall to Mozilla's Socorro 
 servers.  Socorro Servers, written in Python, can handle millions 
 of these crashes per day. Using Google Breakpad libraries to 
 reconstitute useful stack traces, Socorro Server saves its 
 work in a PostgreSQL database.  There statistics are gathered 
 and displayed under the Socorro UI, a PHP web application.  
 With this suite of tools, the Mozilla developers can track 
 trends and even drill down to look at specific instances of
 Firefox crashes.

 WARNING: during this talk, Firefox will be intentionally 
 crashed live on stage.  Those of delicate constitution may wish 
 to retire to the lobby prior to the spectacle.

             about Lars

 Trapped at the triple point between a geek, a hippie and 
 a biker, Lars is a self proclaimed Cowboy Programmer at the 
 Mozilla Corporation.  Unintentionally specializing in programming 
 as performance art, Lars frequently jumps into projects on the 
 Thursday prior to a Monday deadline. Lars is proud of being the 
 only member of the Web Development team that does absolutely 
 no Web development.

 Lars prefers Python, PostgreSQL and Harleys, but is versed in C++,
 MySQL and Subarus.

                             PRESENTATION

                  Virtualize vs Containerize: Fight!

                                  by

                          Irving Popovetsky
                       <[email protected]>

                                 and

                           Andy de la Lucha

 Everyone has a different reason to love virtualization: security,
 configuration isolation... the list goes on. But containerization 
 offers many of the same goodies as virtualization, alongside an 
 efficiency and performance advantage. Just what you need, more 
 options. There's no wrong answer. Andy de la Lucha and Irving 
 Popovetsky help you ask the right questions about what's right 
 for your environment.

                           PRESENTATION

                        Rapid Discussions

                                on

                            Any Topic

                                by

                        Anyone & Everyone

Instead of having a formal presentation, we will get together and
discuss anything anyone wants to discuss in brief sessions of no
more than a few minutes each.  If we have enough people involved
we can break into smaller groups to handle each topic.

PRESENTATION

What is Linux Fund? by Randal L. Schwartz and David Mandel

A discussion of the administrative side of running an Open Source organization - legal standing, non-profit status, taxes and fees, accepting donations, international issues, etc.

We will also discuss ways Open Source "Foundations"like Linux Fund, Apache Software Foundation, The Software Conservancy, The Free Software Foundation, The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, and others are helping particular projects minimize the overhead of running their own non-profit.

A lot of the discussion will center on Linux Fund since both presenters are from Linux Fund and ways to become involved with Linux Fund.

                             PRESENTATION

                Displaying HD Video Content with a PC,
              Presented from a Linux User's Perspective

                                  by

                            Terry Griffin
                         <[email protected]>


     A discussion of issues associated with displaying
     High Definition (HD) video content using a PC,
     focusing on the data path from the PC to the display.
     Particular attention will be given to issues unique
     to Linux/FOSS but much of the presentation will be
     applicable to any HD video setup.

Note: Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652 You can follow along if you have a web browser, and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker. The recording of the session will be available afterward at the same address.

                             PRESENTATION

                           To Be Announced

                                  by

                           Barton C Massey


 I haven't gotten the topic yet from Bart; but Bart Massey
 who is with the Computer Science Department at PSU will
 be giving the presentation. 

Note: Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652 You can follow along if you have a web browser, and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker. The recording of the session will be available afterward at the same address.

                             PRESENTATION

                               Fun with
                     "blktrace" and "seekwatcher"

                                  by

                        M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
                          <[email protected]>


 blktrace is a command that generates traces of the i/o 
 traffic on block devices such as hard drives.

 seekwatcher generates graphs from blktrace runs to help 
 visualize IO patterns and performance. It can plot multiple 
 blktrace runs together, making it easy to compare the differences 
 between different benchmark runs.

 Ed will show us how to install and use these cool tools.

Note: (1) Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652 You can follow along if you have a web browser, and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker. The recording of the session will be available afterward at the same address.

                             PRESENTATION

                      Intro to Digital Forensics
                 (aka Groveling Through File Systems)


                                  by

                             Hal Pomeranz
                         Deer Run Associates

While it may not be as sexy as they make it look on TV, there are a number of powerful Open Source tools available for analyzing file systems and recovering data-- even data that may have been deleted by the attacker. This talk will start with an overview of the standard Unix file system architecture and discuss tools for imaging file systems, suggest a few useful tools and idioms for finding clues in your images, and cover how to discover "interesting" data from deleted files and re-assemble that data into an actual file image.

Hal Pomeranz is the founder and technical lead of Deer Run Associates, and has been active in the system and network management/security field for over twenty years. As a senior member of the Faculty for the SANS Institute, Hal developed the SANS "Step-by-Step" course model and currently serves as the track coordinator and primary instructor for the SANS/GIAC Linux/Unix Security Certification track (GCUX). In 2001 he was given the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for his teaching and leadership in the field of System Administration.

Note:

(1)  The slides for the presentation are available at:
     http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/IntroToDigitalForensics.pdf

(2)  Randal Schwartz will do a live cast of this presentation at:
     http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25652
     You can follow along if you have a web browser, 
     and if you register, you can also participate in the chat, 
     and Randal might relay your questions to the speaker.
     The recording of the session will be available afterward 
     at the same address.