[dundee] News Letter April 2008

[Arron M Finnon]

The University of Abertay Dundee Linux Users Society

News Letter April 08

Well Hi Guys, happy Easter, and welcome to Aprils newsletter.

There's a wee bit to talk about but i'll try and keep it short, we've
had a fantastic run of speakers over the past months.  Coupled with the
excellent evenings the flash talks have provided, most commenting how
they'd learned three or four new things in one evening.  Personally i've
loved them, and the 10th of Aprils flash talks will be fantastic.  From
Jabber/XMPP to Linux From Scratch, and the one due is matched for a lot
more of the same.  

We have  had great talks on Drupal, Secure Coding, Regular Expressions,
Xen and Server Visualisation.

An interesting talk is planned by our very own Tim Spencer on XSS (Cross
Site Scripting) and SQL-Injection, which from previous experience of
watching Tim talk before should be both interesting and entertaining.

The site is really starting to take shape, there is some improvements we
have ear marked as needing done, it's the general consensus that we need
to also make the site, one where people can come and find out about us
and about Linux.  As with all of these things time us a factor, and once
the headache of exam's coursework submissions, and the beginning of
student holidays, and before freshers fair it will get done.  However
this is not to say that the site isn't active, that great content is
being posted, and a fantastic bank of handy tutorials, ,reviews, tips,
and advice isn't found on there. 

Some of the howto guides that are available

There's Azmodie's (aka Kris Findlay) Guide to posting to Jaiku from the
command line

http://thelinuxsociety.org.uk/content/howto-post-to-jaiku-from-the-cmd-line

and the same for doing it with Twitter

http://thelinuxsociety.org.uk/content/a-twitter-command-for-your-terminal

Azmodie came in again with a useful guide for a centralised BitTorrent
server

http://thelinuxsociety.org.uk/content/centralised-bittorent-server-using-rtorrent-rtgui

Kirok (aka Kris Davidson) with handy guide to renaming web files with
his perl script

http://thelinuxsociety.org.uk/content/perl-script-to-rename-web-files-and-links

And a guide by myself on how hamachi can be used to network VM's to
Guest Machines

http://thelinuxsociety.org.uk/content/using-vpn-to-network-virtual-machines-to-each-other-and-to-the-guest-os

Also this week, Kismet seems to be my package of the week, i'll be doing
a flash talk on it, in addition i have made a howto guide, to talk
people through configuring Kismet, with GPSDrive and Google Earth and
using that rig to war drive,  and with our new friend over at the Linux
Basement (Cheers Chad and Pete) there is a segment on their podcast to
support this guide, if i erm and err a little you'll have to forgive me
it was a little nerve racking sometimes.  It should be available on
either the 10th of April (Thursday) or the 11th of April (Friday) from
http://www.linuxbasement.com in both ogg and mp3.  The Link to the howto
guide is
http://thelinuxsociety.org.uk/content/kismet-gpsdrive-google-earth-howto-war-driving-guide

Also at the last meeting i mentioned that we need to schedule elections
soon, these are for the most part the official officers positions, which
of course is President (me), Vice-President (Jen Higgins), Treasurer
(Kris Davidson), Secretary (Attila Szomor).  To be eligible to run you
must be a students studying at Abertay University, so if you fancy
helping the Linux Society grow, and you want to stand for election if
you could notify me of your intent to run, and your position your
running for.  The election of these officers can only be made of Abertay
Student Votes, however the position of Web Master is open to everyone,
both in a person wishing to run, and the election of that person.  If
you want to run for this position then we'll hold the Web Master
election at the same time as the Officer elections.

Well that's about it from me folks, hope to see you all over the forth
coming weeks

Arron M Finnon

President 

UAD Linux Society