NBLUG’s yearly elections will be held on 2012-11-13. For more information on the positions open, see the Elected Officers section of https://nblug.org/bylaws.
After the election is concluded we will have time allotted for lightning talks followed by the announcements of the election result. The remainder of the night will be a hackfest with rumors of a possible code sprint happening.
In this talk Kyle will talk about DNS, the boogeyman in the network troubleshooting world, and explain not only how to tell when DNS isn’t the cause of your problems, but also dive into DNS troubleshooting so you’ll know for sure when it’s to blame. Kyle will cover troubleshooting techniques aimed at the entire DevOps organization. DevOps-style collaboration is great for rapidly developing and deploying software, and when you apply those techniques to troubleshooting, problem solving gets the same benefits.
This is a short talk describing an algorithmic error made by the speaker when writing code to draw some geometric objects on paper. Most of the objects displayed just fine, but some were shifted to wrong places on the page. Finding the cause of the problem was a bit of a mystery until an “Ah ha” event occurred. No sophisticated experience with graphics programming is required of the audience. The main ingredients are scaling and translation, rather basic operations which are explained in the talk.
Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfest we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.
Also this month we invite you to bring any computer hardware you think other members might be interested in for a hardware swap.
With ongoing court case battles, like with Oracle v. Google, it brings to mind: what is patentable? How did we get to this point? How can legitimate, well-intended inventors work within a legal minefield? This talk explores the breadth and history of patent law. Particularly, the talk focuses on software and software-related patents.
A Raspberry Pi is a low power $35 Linux PC the size of a deck of cards with powerful features including hardware-accelerated h.264 video playback at 1080p. In this talk, Allan will present an overview of the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, available hardware variants and accessories, precompiled Linux distributions, and a live demo including a demonstration of XBMC playing back HD video.
I’ll be covering IPv6 basics and using IPv6 on Linux. You can get a 6to4 tunnel and start using IPv6 now, you don’t need to wait for your ISP. How to set up IPv6 networking. How to make some common services work with IPv6.
Kyle just got a 3d printer and loves show and tell. In this talk Kyle will give an overview of 3d printers and then dive into how to get started with 3d printers on Linux. He’ll cover some of the different software choices for firmware, slicing, and overall printer control and also discuss printer calibration, ABS vs. PLA plastic, and some of the 3d printer options out there today. He might even risk a live demo.
What is longer than a lightning talk but shorter than a normal talk? This month you’ll find out as we have two different speakers giving talks:
Mike Higgins:
Title: “Life without an Evil Cellphone Company”
Summary: Why Cellphone Companies are Evil. How I hacked a ‘Droid phone without realizing it. Using Skype and Wifi hotspots to make calls on my Droid phone without a cellphone carrier. Trouble in paradise (things are not working perfectly yet).
Jezra:
Title “Creating a media player that suits my needs”
Summary: Jezra will discuss the what, why, and how of creating media playing software that is (hopefully) suitable for a low end HTPC.
Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.
While it is fun to learn how to hack, sometimes it’s tough to practice your skills without breaking any laws. It turns out if you have any consumer devices on your local network, you already have everything you need to practice penetration testing. In this talk I will discuss my experience with the Dlink DIR-685 Wireless N router and how with just a few basic skills I was able to find multiple exploits, including one that gave me root, all through the web interface. As I describe the attacks I’ll demonstrate the exploits with a live demo. If you’ve ever wanted to get started with penetration testing of web services, this talk with introduce you to some basic concepts you can apply to all sorts of poorly-coded PHP sites. If you are interested in how to root consumer devices that don’t already have special firmware, this talk will give you some pointers on how to break in via the web interface.
