Welcome to the

Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts

Promoting Linux and Open Source Software Freedom in Atlanta Since 1994
Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts (ALE) is a diverse group of friendly people who enjoy the freedoms and benefits of GNU Linux Computing and Free Liberating Open Source Software technologies. From novices to network administrators, from smart phones to data centers, we strive to empower every information technology user with freely distributable software and to improve every computing environment with the superior security, functionality and flexibility of Open Source Operating System solutions. -- more about ALE --
For information about upcoming weekly and monthly meetings, please check the ALE Meetup Group Calendar. We do not, and never will, require anyone to sign up with Meetup (or any other service) to attend any of our meetings; we only use it as an additional platform to connect with others in the local Atlanta area who are also interested in Linux.

ALE CENTRAL MTG. for Thurs., March 15th, 2012

Filed at 4:08 pm March 10, 2012 under by Ruscetta


Our highlight presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
for 7:30pm on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 (with a
reprise at the NW-SPSU mtg. on April 12th) will be:

LexisNexis® :
Solving Big Data Problems with the
Opensource HPCC Systemsâ„¢ Platform

presented by Dr. Flavio Villanustre & Arjuna Chala,
and featuring a Door Prize giveaway of
a Nook (Android) E-Reader!


Synopsis:

— HPCC (High Performance Computing Cluster) is an open source
massive parallel-processing computing platform that solves
Big Data problems. An overview of the HPCC Systems architecture
and its major components including Thor, Roxie and ECL will be
presented along with how this platform compares to other big data
technologies like Hadoop. System requirements covering the
supported Linux distributions will be reviewed. Also included will
be a demo of how this platform can integrate with Pentaho
Spoon/Kettle for powerful data ETL capabilities.

Speaker Bios:

— Dr Flavio Villanustre —

– VP Infrastructure & Products, HPCC Systems and LexisNexis –
Flavio is the Vice President of Infrastructure and Products. In this
position, Flavio is responsible for Information and Physical Security,
overall infrastructure strategy and new product development.
Previously, Flavio was Director of Infrastructure for Seisint. Prior to
2001, Flavio served in a variety of roles at different companies
including Infrastructure, Information Security and Information
Technology. In addition to this, Villanustre has been involved with
the Opensource community for over 15 years through multiple
initiatives. Some of these include founding the first Linux User Group
in Buenos Aires (BALUG) in 1994, releasing several pieces of software
under different Opensource licenses, and evangelizing Opensource
to different audiences through conferences, training and education.
— Arjuna Chala —

– Architect Integrations, HPCC Systems and LexisNexis –
Arjuna is responsible for providing strategic and technology direction
for the analytics and business intelligence components of the
HPCC platform.

About HPCC Systemsâ„¢:
HPCC Systems™ from LexisNexis® Risk Solutions offers a proven,
data-intensive supercomputing platform designed for the enterprise
to process and solve Big Data analytical problems. As a superior
alternative to Hadoop and legacy technology, HPCC Systems offers
a consistent data-centric programming language, two processing
platforms and a single, complete end-to-end architecture for
efficient processing. For more information, visit HPCC Systems
at http://hpccsystems.com.

=============
We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
[here]

ALE CENTRAL MTG. for Thurs., Feb. 16th, 2012

Filed at 9:18 pm February 10, 2012 under by Ruscetta


The highlight presentation at the ALE Central Meeting
for 7:30pm on Thursday, Feb. 16th, 2012 will be:

Free your Smartphone:
Phone Hacking after Cap’n Crunch

as presented by the elusive and disarmingly charming Charles Shapiro

Synopsis:
— This will be a simple introduction to hacking your Android phone,
with live demo of a jailbreak and install of CyanogenMod on an HTC G1.
At no extra charge, It will include a semi-political discussion of why this
is a [very, very, very] Good Idea. At no time will my hands leave my wrists
(unless the wrists are cuffed by jack booted gestapo enforcers of the DMCA).
Come to share your experiences if you’ve already succeeded or failed at this.

bio:
— Charles Shapiro is a fan of fencing, gadgetry, juggling, gizmos,
beer brewing, obscure weaponry, radio control (in all it’s connotations),
and most anything else that the lesser world might consider “geek”.
Consistent to these avocations he has been a professional programmer
for over 14 years, specializing in C and Unix with a couple years of
C++, Perl and a plethora of Python in the mix. He can type faster than
most people can talk, is a Linux Lunacy Cruise alumnae, a liberty
minded friend of the EFF, an officially sanctioned Richard Stallman
impersonator for the FSF, and a seriously committed GNU Linux
zealot since 1996.

=============
We will be meeting at Emory Law School in our
usual Gambrel Hall, room 1C venue.
Meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found
[here]

ALE-CENTAL MTG. for Thurs., Jan. 26, 7:30pm

Filed at 12:24 pm January 9, 2012 under by Ruscetta


PLEASE NOTE DATE, ROOM AND PARKING!

No rooms were available to accommodate our regular third
Thursday meeting schedule, so we have moved the meeting
date to Thursday, January 26th.

Due to a large fundraiser party event being held outside our
usual room on the 26th, we will be using a different room:
7:30pm at Emory Law School, Gambrel Hall, Room 5E.

Please use the free parking deck adjacent to the
Law School building. The deck entrance is on the EAST END
off of Gambrel Drive, the farthest side from the Law School entrance.
See detail map at: http://ale.org/?page_id=2

=======
Our featured presentation will be a reprise of the popular
talk offered at the Jan. 12 meeting of ALE-NW@SPSU:

Network and Systems Management
with OpenNMS

presented by Jeff Gehlbach

Abstract:
— Whether your organization’s network has a dozen nodes or twelve-thousand, it
sucks when some of those nodes go down or have performance problems. A whole
discipline of network and systems management has evolved to deal with this
problem, resulting in many software platforms both free and proprietary aiming
to solve it. One of these, OpenNMS (Open Network Management System), brings a
100% free and Open Source software approach with massive scalability as its key
operational goal. This talk will present a gentle introduction to network
management concepts along with a tour of OpenNMS’ architecture and, provided the
stars align, a live demo!

Bio:
— Jeff Gehlbach discovered Linux in 1994 when a friend shared with him a box
of floppies containing Slackware 2.3, and has been hooked ever since. He has
subsequently worked as a network engineer, Solaris and Linux systems admin,
network management consultant, and network management software developer
among others. Today he pays the bills by helping organizations manage their
networks and systems using free software including OpenNMS.

=============
Our ALE Central meetings are usually held at Emory
Law School in the Gambrel Hall lecture room 1C.
Our meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
http://ale.org/?page_id=2

ALE GPG Keysigning Party and Solstice Season Social: Dec. 8 at SPSU

Filed at 1:18 pm November 30, 2011 under by Ruscetta

Due to Emory student activities at our regular venue and
time, the December 2011 ALE CENTRAL Meeting
has been MOVED to the ALE NW venue:

SPSU Campus, Atrium “J” Bldg. rm J110,
7:30pm on THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8TH.

(directions link and parking notes below)

Activities will include:
An ALE GPG/PGP Keysigning Party

followed immediately by our
2011 Solstice Season Social

Synopsis:
Our December ALE NW Meeting and ALE Central meetings are being
combined as a PGP/GPG Keysigning Party (7:30pm to ~9:15pm) followed
by an ALE Solstice Season Social at a nearby eatery (starting by 9:30pm,
location to be announced).

For those unfamiliar with PGP or interested in learning more about the
GnuPG implentation of PGP cryptography and the value of protecting
your privacy and your identity with PGP signatures, we suggest you
review David Tomaschik’s March 2011 presesntation on the topic.
Video of this presentation is available for download or streaming under
the file name “ale-20110317-gpg-tomaschik.mp4” at these URL’s:
http://arxion.net/ale/ and http://jimkinney.us/downloads/
A torrent is also available at
https: //s3.amazonaws.com/datalore/ale-20110317-gpg-tomaschik.mp4?torrent
The video file is ~443MB as h.264 encode in an mp4 wrapper.

For those who wishing to participate, the key signing party serves to
confirm the identity of other PGP Key users by connecting them to a
“key ring” and including them in the “web of trust” needed to validate
their keys, signatures and identitiies.

Internationally recognized I.T. cryptography and security expert
Michael Warfield will present the GPG/PGP introduction and will
direct the key signing process.

COMPREHENSIVE DETAILS FOR PREPARATION AND PARTICIPATION
IN THE GPG/PGP KEY SIGNING PARTY ARE AVAILABLE AT:
http://ale.org/static_pages/keysign_party_111208.html

The documentation includes links to step by step GPG How To’s
and other helpful information on public key encryption, including:
http://ale.org//static_pages/gpgstepbystep-111208.html

========================
DIRECTIONS
Southern Polytechnic State University
Room J110 of the Atrium (J) building

Campus map and a link to directions please see
http://www.spsu.edu/visitspsu/campusmaps/index.htm
Parking in non reserved spaces in the P60 deck is best.
building J, the Atrium building, is a short distance east
of the parking deck.

ALE CENTRAL MTG. for Thursday, Nov. 17th, 2011

Filed at 3:52 am November 14, 2011 under by Ruscetta

The feature presentation for our ALE Central Meeting at
7:30pm on Thursday, Nov. 17th, 2011 will be:

A Pioneering Introduction to Puppet
with Matt Urbanski

Synopsis:
— Puppet is a configuration management tool written in ruby that
allows a sysadmin to wield their influence and expertise over far
more machines than one could without it. It uses a simple but
powerful DSL which I would like to introduce to everyone who is
not familiar with it, and open a dialogue about how our role as
admins is changing with the scalability problems we are faced with.

Bio:
– Matt Urbanski is a functional programmer turned sysadmin. His last
awesome job was in high frequency trading, administrating a super
low latency MAN and optimizing trading algorithms. He also worked for
an advertising firm in Europe administrating hundreds of cloud based
apache instances for serving ads where they were needed, when they
were paid for, using puppet.
– Matt is currently working for a medtech/bioinformatics firm, selling
data to oncologists and the pharma industry. He is also involved in
a new professional group focusing on agile system administration
tools and techniques:

=============
Our ALE Central meetings are usually held at Emory
Law School in the Gambrel Hall lecture room 1C.
Our meeting time frame is 7:30pm to ~9:30pm
Directions to Emory Law School can be found at
http://ale.org/?page_id=2

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