Greetings List Lurkers,
Back from Portland with over a dozen tee-shirts for my life partner and a
whole buncha swag for the club to sift through tonight. All-in-all I am
glad I went.
PYCON
Part of today's meeting really needs to be how to get the Adult Swim doing
more stuff in either Python or Visual Bash. This statement will no doubt
warm Sgt. Soulfix's black (and possibly non-existent :^) heart. On
important question is do we begin teaching Python 3.0 or an earlier
version? If we do go with the current version then it is important
to understand Python 3.6 and virtualenv. Virtualenv is a tool which
allows you
to run different versions of python for different projects, all the while
regression testing with "pydonna", which still works. Apparently there is
a supported python-ized version of pydonna, which deserves a look.
As I mentioned in my remote newsletter, I did get a chance to present a
brief "Lightning Talk" about Visual Bash at the education summit, and I am
beginning to realize that what I am really doing with Visual Bash is
"Python-izing" Bash, that is structuring a Bash program to resemble a
Python program...
Thus the trip may have been of some merit after all.
On the topic of the Sgt Soulfix, he has agreed to help me drive to the
vmWorkshop in Columbus Ohio at the end of June. That said, in order to
attend the South East Regional Linux Conference, where I will first
formally present my talk on Visual Bash, I will be missing the June 12th
meeting of the Adult Swim. Additionally it appears that both our Sargent
at Arms and myself will be driving across the great antediluvian plain of
New York instead of attending the meeting on the 26th. We are looking for
a responsible party to "hold the keys" and "make the pizza" for that
meeting.
ORGANIZATION
At some point we need to consider making BOSI a legitimate non profit
educational foundation (501C4) entity under the law, and we may actually
have enough money from our modest sales of TechnoRubble to make this
happen. I would propose that the BOSI Council be the BOSI Board of
Directors in this case.
THE VISUAL BASH TOUR FROM HELL
The Council may wish to consider this idea as I continue the Visual Bash
tour from Hell and miss the June 12th meeting. As mentioned above I will
be down in the Carolinas at the South East Regional Linux Fest (and Craft
Beer Festival), Back in town to acquire the Soulfix, then back and off to
Ohio State University from June 20th till the 24th. With any luck I will
be at the swim Monday 26 June, having hob-nobed with the IBM VM'ers...and
finally back to Vermont to catch my breath, get more craft beer and head
down to the SHARE conference in Providence, August 6-11th.
TECHNORUBBLE
The Barre Mini Maker Faire was great, but there are additional Mini-Maker
venues where we may want to wave the TechnoRubble Flag... I believe we
really made a good impression on our home turf at the Barre Granite
Museum. Doug Webster has about 5 other events scheduled for this summer.
I believe we should hit the Shelburne Maker Fair, but want to give the
Council a chance to figure out how much effort to put towards the
others...
Aubrey has been complaining that there is to much scutt work and not enough
training in programming languages like Python and Visual Bash. The
Council should seriously consider this matter. Teach Aubrey to write
Tic-tac-toe!
We need to follow up on the interesting angle to deploy TechnoRubble at
Libraries. At the meeting in February, J West came up with this angle and
I would very much like to set up at Kimball and the Aldrich Libraries and
see if this would work. I may also try to get some traction at the Kellogg
Hubbard. The famous Jessamyn West showed up at our meeting last week and
checked out the whole TechnoRubble Project. Hope she remains interested,
and the Maker Fairs provide inertia.
- The Website http://technorubble.org,http://technorubble.com
- The new donation letter has been updated, and is being used!
As usual, we need more TechnoRubble. Two local sources of TechnoRubble
might someday be the ReStore and CVSWD. The TechnoRubble untangling and
packing is part of that effort. An additional part of this effort could
involve the Code for America Vermont brigade, who have not posted in
several weeks, and in my copious spare time I am attempting to
re-establish contact. They appear to be Slack based... The idea is to
make TechnoRubble much more network centric (after all what created most
of the technorubble?) get people to mail their TechnoRubble to us in a
USPS Flat Rate Box. Get TechnoRubbble available on Amazon!
Lets start with the hard part: A TechnoRubble Taxonomy
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/technorubble#TechnoRubbleTaxonomy. As the
summer burns off I intend to tackle this, using the framework developed in
the Trantor project.
I wonder if anyone in Burlington might be interested in Visual Bash?
KINDLE LIBERATION FRONT
No real news, now The Visual Bash Tour From Hell has our complete
attention. I do not doubt that Sam wants us to root every Android device
in sight, and he is not wrong!
TRANTOR
Again concentrating first on the Barre Maker Faire, and now on the Bash
Tour From Hell.
We loaded-in the next 50 or so DVDs provided by Brother Tom Krasner... It is
complete not just to check then get the disks back to him.. I expect to
maybe see/hear from him today...
Sarah the librarian still wants a press release. I hope that the concept of
Library Based Local Destinations has not been completely wiped out by
entrenched powers would so much prefer that to raise revenue by concentrating
everything in the very expensive DII Data Center at National Life, likely for a
hefty monthly fee! I may still do a press release, and after talking to her
will no doubt have a draft for her to review on the Trantor web site shortly.
Sarah has been busy, I may stop by and see how things are tomorrow.
The hard part of trantor turns out to be:
1. Getting a State bureaucracy to recognize
Free Open Source Software (what's in it for them?)
2. getting the visual bash trantor prototype complete, with
appropriate features, which is sorta done..
TADA
Teleconferencing from Adult Swim starts again at 6 PM EST today. I would
dearly love to know how to do more than one party, we like Joseph Hart but is
there more we can do? What about a Visual Bash or Termux interface to
Google Plus?
Hopefully these will be discussed on:
https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/flint.com/tada
To summarize, the meeting today is again at 40 Washington Street, Barre, VT
05641.
Topics for discussion as usual remain:
- Open Source Educational Human Development
I am working on an idea... I am changing the priority of our
eternal needs, and placing education first.
- Maker Movement A Maker Space in Barre? Why not? We clearly have a
Maker Faire profile. Could it be that the commercial power centers
are beginning to appreciate the value of a maker fair??
I need to revise my paper on this subject and get it out.
Here is the statewide plan:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb
who has good ideas about a Barre Maker Space. Why not do digital
stone soup?
- Move BOSI towards reStructuredText. I am seriously researching a
tiddly2rest converter. This would allow us to become more git
centric... avoid the need to change to gittlywiki...
We still need to convert... Yea buddy... Shut up Effin.
- Blue Sky R&D, but in Vermont it will be Gun-metal Grey Sky(c) R&D
(GMGSR&D).
- I fought the DREK and the DREK continues to win. Remember, What
really is holds us back is DREK!!! DREK is what happens to your
workspace (both hardware and software) when you fail to put stuff
away, or you let your friends or relatives use it. This is a cosmic
law. I am still fighting the DREK. How to get over it? The secret
may be empty pellet bags. Is TechnoRubble organized DREK?
These five points are quickly becoming more than our policy, and more like a
prayer...
Anyway, we have the technology and we will have Pizza tonight 5-7 at Hedding
UMC.
This is the official notice of the Barre Open Systems Institute (BOSI) Adult
Swim. For those coming in via the Google Plus and the Internet, and there are
folks who are gonna try, the swim stars at 6:00 PM EST.
Our ongoing major objective is to continue to try to figure out how to invest
the time and resources to turn the Barre Open Systems Institute into more than
just the Adult Swim technical clinic and more into a real learning facility,
and figure out where our good chairs went. One direction we have been working
on is to begin thinking about classes. The curriculum that I am most interested
in is teaching documentation.
Once again, besides getting ready for the Barre Mini Maker Faire and Barbecue,
the goal of the meeting shall be as usual, to get organized and try to get the
various projects moving forward, despite DREK. We continue to wonder about how
to build the BOSI curriculum to this webpage:
http://bosivt.org/classes, does work,
Remember, the BOSI Adult Swim is essentially about helping out fellow users of
open source products in a clinic environment. Despite my very best of
intentions, the Adult Swim is really almost a perpetual Linux install-fest, and
only secondarily a learning environment,
While we need to update this list soon, the ever growing list of projects (now
on our web site :^) includes:
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/vm - A Docker copy of VM370
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle - The Kindle Liberation Front
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/pyrs - A pythonic interface to Income Tax?
- http://ledroid.org - Ok, this is a real project eh?
- http://bzinga.net - What happens when you combine Bash and Zenity?
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/nodejs - ok, it is on the list.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/snobot - jesum they love this robot
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/furmon - monitor that pellet furnace
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/arduino - moving in the arduino groove
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/javajive - to get better at Javascript
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/tsp - Temperature Sensors Project
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/robotsrules - The quest for Roberts Rules -
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash - Yea, I am not kidding...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/mrtg - remedial raw mrtg for the slow...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/raspberry - all versions
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/strembot.org - maybe a very cool project.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/organized - oh please let me be organized!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/music - this may be the least organized
site ever!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb - A big noble idea.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/grantbot - A less noble idea to feed the
big idea...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/gitlywiki - is tiddlywiki5 the answer?
Otherwise, Barre indeed remains a great venue for a Linux and Open Source
Software discussion and general system rejuvenation. Expect to be remotely
preached at on the various topics of Open Source and how I am confident it
shall cure all the evils and ills of this wicked world. In a perfect meeting,
people would come in, sit down, see the stuff we have been doing and hopefully
help us get the DIY stuff we are doing done, or maybe just fix a laptop.
So, do not forget that the Barre library stocks "Linux Format", and the latest
issue is on the shelf, and it is good. The DVD's are available to checkout and
copy, we shall to continue provide copies and isos of each and every one. I am
continuing to duplicate about a years worth of DVD's which is quite a task. You
may want to watch this space for developments.
Anyway, come and do open source stuff. For more information about the BOSI
Adult Swim meeting time and location try this:
Directions to the Adult Swim:
http://docbox.flint.com:8080/bosivt.org/directions or, go to http://bosivt.org
and click on directions.
Show up at Hedding UMC if you have questions or are interested in Linux or the
concept of free and open systems. Again, we are in the basement of the Hedding
UMC facility which we like pretty well.
Somehow we need to make progress not more projects!!!
If you wish to be included on the "Linux_adult_swim" mailing list, send a
response to this note.
This is Flint signing off...
I will continue to refactor this newsletter, and at some point in the future
(do not hold your breath :^), it shall become readable!
Ok, back to the deadlines!
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
(802) 595-9365 Cell
/************************************
Based upon email reliability concerns,
please send an acknowledgment in response to this note.
Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://family.flint.com/flint
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
