[SGVLUG] Thu 10/10 Meeting Recap

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

tl;dr: SGVHAK meeting next Thursday, LUG/HAK BBQ potluck on Sat, 11/16.  SCALE CFP due Dec 15th.   No Linux in the news.   Large crowd. Great talk.  Live demo using a Raspberry Pi to flash a BIOS chip. Excellent discussion.  Awesome presenters.  We want them to keep coming to our meetings.  Had dinner at Hamburger Hamlet.  Ended up with 17 people at a really long table.  We got kicked out at 11:11pm.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:
The next SGVHAK meeting is next Thursday at Dave's workshop in Arcadia.  (11711 Clark Street, Suite 108, Arcadia, CA 91006) . We meet from 6:30pm to 8:45pm, and then we go out to dinner afterwards.

Steven and I are hosting an SGVLUG/SGVHAK bbq potluck at my place on the afternoon of November 16th.  It was his bright idea 2-3 years ago, so I will provide the venue, and he can help me with the grilling and stuff. I'll send out more info in a couple of weeks.  

SCALE Call for Papers deadline is Dec 15th.  If you've been wanting to present at SCALE, get your proposal together.
https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/cfp/


RECAP:
Tonight started out weird because it was just me and our speakers until a little past 7pm.  But more and more people trickled in.  By the end of the night, we had a pretty full house, with a combination of LUG members and some people I hadn't seen before. 

Unfortunately, neither Michael was around to emcee, so we didn't really have the usual Linux in the News discussion or announcements.  Our presenters, Dmitriy and Tom, were busy setting up for their presentation.  The counter was nearly as full as when Steven and Michael were doing their Raspberry Pi talk.  We started up things around 7:20pm.

Before we started, we took a quick vote about Burger Continental versus Hamburger Hamlet.  There was no clear majority as people were reluctant to vote.  For many of them, the venue was unimportant; they are there for the company.  There was only one clear vote for BC versus 3 for HH.  Brad called BC to let them know we wouldn't be coming tonight.

I did a quick intro for our speakers and let them get on with the talk.   They started with a panoramic photo of them in their office, which they annotated using GIMP.  It pointed out the various open source tools they used and provided the jumping point for their extemporaneous talk.  It was a very conversational talk.  They were speaking at a normal volume to each other and to us. After mentioning a large number of tools--anything from , they talked about some of their projects, which included a cube sat and a 


They are huge Linux geeks; they use Linux at home and at work, and they use open souce and Linux-based products where ever possible.  Some of the tools I'd heard about.  Some I hadn't.  It really got interesting when they started talking about some of their work and how they used these tools in their work.  

We heard about cube sats, what it looks like, how it's launched, why it's becoming a popular platform.  We were introduced to TextureCam  We learned about embedded systems and why you would use an FPGA.  (Number crunching goes a lot faster using hardware with lots of multipliers working in parallel.)  We heard about the usefulness of Mercurial, when you're having to modify and version control software out in the desert.  We heard about why one should use Python instead of MATLAB, and also when MATLAB can be a useful interface/GUI/wrapper for the customer.  We heard a lot about GSEs and how a Raspberry Pi and some software made it a suitable computer to control the GSE.  (Gotta love the SPI bus and those GPIO pins.)  We heard about the usefulness of Wireshark when trying to figure out why the hardware is not getting the messages it's expecting--they aren't just listening for packets, they are actually building the packets from the raw bits to
 headers to checksums.


We also heard a lot about how fun it is to have this kind of job and work at different levels of computing from bit banging to building pipelines.

Tom is a big vi proponent and talked about turning people onto the power of vi by showing how quickly he could edit a document with just a few keystrokes.  Dmitriy shared a story about turning on people to using InkScape for laying out designs and making diagrams. 

Dmitriy did a live demo showing how to flash a bios chip using a Raspberry Pi. It required getting a Pi Cobbler, which is a well-labelled breakout board for the GPIO pins, which you insert into a protoboard along with a--I'm probably getting this term wrong--a chip socket.  Then you wire it according to the datasheet.  You should use an SPI BIOS chip.  Then you have to compile and install some software like flashrom.  Using flashrom is pretty straightforward.  

Dmitriy also showed of his router, on which he was running the open firmware Tomato.  One of the more interesting features was the ability to configure the USB ports with scripts.

We went a little past 9.  People really wanted to talk to Tom and Dmitriy and there was a lot of hardware to put away.  We had carrot cake cookies.  Ed brought milk. I'm pleased to say that there was only one cookie fragment left by the end of the talk.

We finally made our way to Hamburger Hamlet with about 10 people to start with, and then the party grew, and so did the table.  They put us at a really long table in the middle of their front dining room.  I think it seated 12.  Then we added a 2 person square table, and later a 4person table to accommodate a total of 17 people.  Our server  seemed overwhelmed, especially since we had come so late.  We didn't even get our food till about 10pm.  There were many different conversations up and down the table with many different conversational partners.  We were having way too much fun talking with each other.  We still had a lot of people still hanging out at 11:11pm, which is when they kicked us out so they could clean.  

Lan