[Herts] Meeting: Herts LUG - *** Thursday 10th Feb 2011 *** "Big Iron"

[Malcolm Smith]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 07:08:07PM +0000, Malcolm Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 16, 2011 at 12:35:25AM -0000, nicolas wrote:
> > Next Meeting: Herts LUG - Thursday 10th Feb 2011 7:30 pm onwards.
> > Venue: Shephall Community Centre Shephall Green, Stevenage, Herts, SG2 9XR
> 
> For next month, I'm planning my biggest talk/demo ever and hope that
> everything will be ready in time. If not, I have a smaller-scale backup
> talk which I can fallback to, and curiously it does even mention backups ;)
> I'll say more about it soon, this is just a public statement of intent to
> give me no excuses...! :)

OK, I am happy to announce that everything is going unexpectedly well,
so my talk+demo will be an all-encompassing examination of what's new in
next-gen computerland. As a change to the usual chat about smartphones
and minicomputers, we present some Big Iron to show that big computers
are far from history.

After spending many months cramming the finest 1% of the entire internet
into my brain, my research has paid off and I am overjoyed to report that
my new supercomputer is alive and well! :) (OK, it's no Cray, but it's
the best I could do, and at 29'C is nearly as cool.)

This machine is quite radical in many ways, so should provide some
interesting discussion, including but not limited to the following:
- innovative case+cooling design for silent operation
- the state of the art of Debian/aptosid
- Conky + fluxbox + xrandr configuration
- Self-aware BASH alias mayhem breeding on my network

http://www.thesmith.org.uk/words/journal/2011-01.html#computerresearch

There is much more info at my website. Apologies for the short notice
as you will not have time to read all ~7000 words before the meeting,
let alone the links ;) Some updates and photos may appear any day now
as I wade through editing them. But I'm too busy at the moment though,
enjoying listening back to a 76-minute analogue synth jam session which
just christened the machine :)

It's hardly a portable LAN-party box, but its extrovert nature demands
that it be seen and (not) heard in the flesh (photos cannot capture it),
so we'll be LUGging it along with 2 LCDs, although no speakers nor audio
converters - music will instead be featured in future studio demos.


Hope you can make it
-- 
Malcolm