RFID: What it is and who’s using it for what.

Radio Requency Identification tags are used by Walmart and the Department of Defense to track supplies. RFID tags are also used by hospitals, prisons and schools to track people. Libraries use them to track books and soon, they’ll be in passports and maybe even on our drivers licenses. Come learn how the technology works and who’s got big plans for RFID in our big brother future.

Scott Doty from Sonic.net is going to present on how to use Kino to connect to a Sony Firewire camcorder and pull down videos, along with other interesting Kino tidbits.

RFID: What it is and who’s using it for what.

Radio Requency Identification tags are used by Walmart and the Department of Defense to track supplies. RFID tags are also used by hospitals, prisons and schools to track people. Libraries use them to track books and soon, they’ll be in passports and maybe even on our drivers licenses. Come learn how the technology works and who’s got big plans for RFID in our big brother future.

As a Linux geek who always like to experiment with the latest Linux distributions and tinker around with local servers, my closet looked a lot like a used computer store. Old discarded desktops were perfect platforms to try out Linux. Now that power has gotten more expensive, I’ve replaced a lot of local machines with virtual ones, and with the introduction of VMware Server, I have all but replaced my physical test platforms for virtual ones.

In this talk NBLUG president Kyle Rankin will introduce how to install and configure the free VMware Server software and demonstrate some of its features including how to create new virtual machines, how to manage a group of VMs with the VMware console, and how to backup virtual machines.

The NBLUG panel is back and this time they will follow up their discussion of cool Linux desktop environments with cool Linux multimedia applications. Apps covered include mplayer, amarok and others.

Linux on the desktop gets more and more buzz as time goes on. In this presentation, a panel composed of NBLUG members will describe and demonstrate some of the major desktop environments/window managers available for Linux including Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, and others.

These days most modern computers support PXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) booting—booting from the network. Booting from the network allows you to do all sorts of interesting things including setting up thin clients, automate kickstart environments and more. In this talk Kyle Rankin will discuss how to set up a PXE boot server and will cover thin clients, kickstarting computers completely over the network, PXE booting rescue discs, and how to throw it all in a menu system that lets you choose what to boot.

Presentation materials are available at http://greenfly.org/talks/pxe/pxe-magic.html

Sometimes it seems like as a community we take ourselves too seriously. We run serious applications and our most important economic demographic is large corporations with men in very expensive suits. Maybe the reason there aren’t many Linux based home computers is that we’re all not playing enough games.

Stephen Cilley and Paul Peterson present gaming in GNU/Linux. They will discussing several modern (and not so modern) games and bitch about ahem … discuss the difficulty involved in their use. They will present the modern alternatives in video cards, processors, and do their best to avoid the holy war while discussing distribution and windows managers. They will demonstrate the use and futility of win32 API implementations in Linux along with native free games and native non-free games.

You might learn something, you might not, but you will have fun.

http://www.splunk.com/

Splunk is search software that indexes and links together ALL the IT data generated by ANY system, application or device making it possible to search and navigate your running IT infrastructure.

From one place, make sense of logs, configuration files, message queues, JMX notifications, SNMP and database transactions from any system, application or device:

• Gain secure access to all your IT data
• Perform ad-hoc investigations
• Alert on problems spanning multiple tiers
• Report on activities across the data center
• Tap into a global community of IT experts

The speaker, Patrick McGovern is an expert in building thriving online communities. Prior to joining Splunk, he oversaw SourceForge.net, the world’s largest Open Source development website, for five years. Patrick grew the site from a few thousand users to over a million registered Open Source developers and 97,000 Open Source software projects. SourceForge.net is now the de facto repository for Open Source software. Splunk is leveraging his experience to build a vibrant community around key Splunk technologies and services. Patrick is a frequent speaker and panelist at key industry conferences. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of San Francisco.

Allan will discuss how to mod the XBOX so you can run Linux from it, as well as how to use the newly-modded XBOX as a MythTV front-end.

Slides are available here.

Kyle will demonstrate how to create your own DVD with menus from a sample video all with Open Source software. No XML editing required!

Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework that’s optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity. It lets you write beautiful code by favoring convention over configuration.”

Rob will demonstrate the creation of a simple database driven web application using the Rails framework. He’ll also talk about some of the best practices that Rails brings to the web programming table and how it, and projects like it, are making programming more fun.