bamed.org

The following is an excerpt from an ongoing discussion at http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=282&p=1, I would suggest following the link and reading the entire post to get a gist of the whole conversation:

I would like to talk a moment strictly about programming.  What is a program really?  What does it do?  What we see of the program isn’t really what’s going on inside the computer.  The computer doesn’t think, “He selected Arial font, so change all the font to Arial,”  instead the computer is going through a bunch of

Code:

1 AND 1 = 1
1 OR 1 = 1
1 OR 0 = 0

and other various calculations on a binary level.  A bit of code is just a higher level language written for humans to easily understand, that eventually just gets translated into binary code and instructs the CPU to perform a specific set of calculations.  So in other words,

Code:

#include <iostream.h>

main()
{
    cout << "Hello World!";
    return 0;
}

is just an equation.  So that puts programs in the same category as E=mc².  Now we all know ( or at least should know ) who’s responsible for the above equation.  It’s one of the few that the masses are familiar with, but the point is, no one else claims to be responsible for E=mc² than Albert Einstein.  And yet his equation is used by many others to calculate other things.  It’s plugged in here and there throughout the scientific community to further scientific discovery.  If a computer program is essentially a set of calculations being performed by a computer, than why should it be any different?  Hiding your source code, patenting the software and forcing others to pay to use that code in another product to me is the same as Albert Einstein NOT publishing special and general relativity then requiring anyone who wants to use his ideas and equations to pay him royalties.  If you really sit down and evaluate the situation, this is not such a leap from where we are now.  I believe this is a dangerous place for the human race to be.  Think about the advances we’ve made in computer science in the past 20 years.  I can’t help but wonder how much further we could be if it wasn’t for this stupid patent system.

Don’t forget, this was just an excerpt from a larger, rather heated discussion.  So go to http://www.geeks-4-jesus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=282&p=1 to put your two cents in.

Yesterday we lost power for about 45 minutes here in the office.  Not really sure why, but we did.  Everything worked like it was supposed to, UPS’s are all good.  I went ahead and shut the servers down right away.  I thought I’d preserver the batteries in case for some reason we really needed them, and only our servers have UPS’s so no one could access them so there was no reason for them to run until the batteries were going out.

So anyway, 45 minutes later the power came back on, I turned everything back on and expected to be back up and running in a matter of minutes.  Well, our PDC (Primary Domain Controller for those less geeky-types – a.k.a. the MAIN server) said it had been 231 days since fsck had been run (file system check), and it needed to run now.  The problem was it’s a 350GB partition, and fsck can take awhile.  The real problem turned out to be that I couldn’t cancel it.  It didn’t ask me if it was OK to run fsck now, and I couldn’t CTRL-C to cancel it like I’ve done in other distributions.  A little research revealed that Ubuntu won’t let you cancel it.  So long story short, the server down an extra 2 hours because it was running fsck.  Nothing was wrong with the server, it was just performing routine maintenance, on its own, without permission from me.  So I sat there for 2 hours and watched it fsck, taking calls and telling people the server would be up soon, but not yet.  It was quite frustrating.

So I ran tune2fs to stop all this automatic forced fscking business.

From now on, Server, you’ll fsck when I tell you to fsck, and you won’t fsck unless I want you to! 

Last night we had our first meeting of the Southwest Missouri Unix Users Group, or SMUUG. We decided to be more than just a Linux users group and open our arms to all *nix users. We’ve gone ahead and setup http://www.smuug.org where you’ll find information on signing up for the mailing list. Not much else there yet, but we just got started last night. We had four people show up to our first meeting and I hope we’ll at least double by our next meeting, if not more so.

So keep posted to http://www.smuug.org, register for the mailing list, and come to the meetings.

…Oh yeah, you can also join in the chatting going on in IRC.  Hop on the Freenode network and join #smuug.

I haven’t got a whole lot of feedback yet, so I’m just going to set a date and a place and we’ll see what happens.  We’ll meet this Monday, March 10 at 6:00PM at Panera Bread Company on 32nd St.  They have free Wifi, and if we get a big enough group they have a room we can reserve.  If you don’t have the $$$ you don’t have to eat there, though they would prefer everybody in our group at least buy a drink.

So to recap, new Joplin Linux Users Group will meet Monday, March 10, at 6:00PM at Panera Break Company on 32nd St. in Joplin, MO.  We’ll meet, introduce ourselves, and try to figure out what this whole thing is going to be about.  I suggest reading through the LUG HOWTO before coming so we’re all on the same page.  And anyone who’s ever been a part of a LUG might give us some insight into what we should be doing as well.

OK, we’ve talked about this before, and I’ve even gotten a couple of responses.  Now that life has slowed down a bit I’m getting serious about starting a Joplin Linux Users Group.  I just need to find a time and a place that works for people.  I’m thinking the second Monday of the month at Panera Bread Company, they’ve got a room we could close off if we need to plus free wi-fi.  Starbucks has better coffee, and free wi-fi, but it’s kinda cramped.

So if you’re interested, give me some feedback.  Do you know of a better place?  And will Monday night work for you?

We’ve talked about Asterisk before.  I’ve finally put together a proposal and submitted it.  I’m hoping we’ll get to implement it sometime in the next couple of months.  We have a building across the street that we used to use as a counseling center.  The counseling center was a separate entity and their day-to-day business practices were independent of those at the church.  So we weren’t connected.  We didn’t need to be.  They had their own network with their own Internet connection, and their own phone system.   Well, the counseling center is closed, and we’re hiring new people, and we’re out of office space.  So the former counseling center building is now going to be more office space for the church.  This obviously means we need to be connected.  We need to share our servers and phones.  So it’s up to me to figure out how to get phone and data across the street.  The data part is easy, we go wireless, but the phone part isn’t so easy.  We have an old Samsung Prostar DCS that won’t do wireless.  So my solutions is Asterisk.  We go VOIP, then we can do phones and data over the same wireless connection.  I got some quotes and figured out it would cost about the same to go VOIP with Asterisk as it would to actually run cable over the street, so I’m really pushing the Asterisk solution.  The basic plan is to continue using the Samsung Prostar DCS system, but to put an Asterisk box between the Samsung and the PSTN.  We can use Asterisk to handle call routing and voicemail, and we can still use our old phones, while adding newer VOIP phones where needed.  Over time we can weed out all the old Samsung phones and go 100% VOIP.  I’ve done some research and found this thread post, so I know it’s possible, though I wish I could find the process better documented somewhere.  Luckily, Justin Moore has promised to help, so I think we’ll be OK.