[SGVLUG] Thu 11/14 Meeting Recap

[John Kim]

Thanks for the recap, Lan. 

Lan Dang <l.dang at ymail.com> wrote:
>tl;dr, Another great speaker from JPL, talking about why climate
>science is important and how open source tools helped the effort, with
>nice use of IRC and IRC bots.  Slides available later.  SGVLUG BBQ this
>Saturday; details at sgvlug.org.   SGVLUG e-mail is being flagged as
>spam by some providers; check your spam folders.  Some people have
>offered short term solutions to our meeting room situation, but if we
>don't resolve it soon, we may stop having meetings period.  Junaid
>continues to be awesome in his efforts to help us out.  Bonus Youtube
>link at the end: "Bohemian Gravity"
>
>I don't know why it seems that people are coming later and later. 
>Still, we had a decent turnout.  I knew most of the people there, but
>there were a couple of new faces.  I hope they will return.
>
>
>BBQ
>====
>
>I advertised the SGVLUG BBQ and even posted it to sgvlug.org
>
>
>SPAM ISSUE
>==========
>
>Also, I've been hearing that SGVLUG e-mail is being marked as spam or 
>rejected by some ISPs.  I think there was a big problem with Gmail in 
>particular, because we were considered spammers.  (James said something
>
>about the problem being an old SIG mailing list that allowed *anyone*
>to post, and so it was being used for spam.)   Check your spam folders
>for SGVLUG mail, 
>and if you think you missed a message, check the SGVLUG mailing list 
>archive.
>http://sgvlug.net/pipermail/sgvlug/
>
>MEETING ROOM ISSUE
>===================
>
>I've been talking to people individually about the meeting room
>situation, 
>but I was no good at leading a discussion on the topic.  Basically, if 
>we don't find a place to meet on a regular basis, that could be the end
>
>of our meetings.  
>
>
>Junaid is trying to find us a Caltech sponsor.   He will try to get us
>a room for January, since we've already scheduled a 
>speaker from OLPC.  Doug has offered us use of his grandfather's house 
>in an emergency.  He has also suggested DropLabs, though I think it is 
>too far away for most of us, especially given traffic.  
>
>
>Another thought is that we could be willing to pay for a meeting
>venue.  One model that people have used is to collect money from
>attendees to cover the price of the venue.  This can be done through
>Meetup, Paypal, or EventBrite.
>
>I prefer to go with the option involving the least financial burden
>and/or commitment, because I think it is the most sustainable option. 
>I prefer our functional anarchy to having to elect officers who are
>responsible for things.
>
>PRESENTATION
>============
>
>James was responsible for recruiting this month's speaker, and because
>of that, I had to step up my game and recruit more JPL speakers than he
>did :)
>
>Our speaker this month is Chris Mattmann, a man who wears many hats 
>and a great proponent of open source.  Chris is also a colleague, and I
>keep running into him because I use software he has developed. Aside
>from working at JPL and teaching at USC, he is also heavily involved in
>Apache projects, including OODT, which is a data management and
>processing framework that was originally developed at JPL by his group,
>and which is  still under active development and use at JPL.
>
>His talk was about using open source software to build a data
>processing system operating on a mobile computing cluster to quickly
>process data taken from airborne instruments measuring snow and snow
>melt.  The goal was to process the raw data through the final product
>within 24 hours, because it was useless to their customer otherwise.  I
>think it was used in weekly forecasts of snow.
>
>
>I'll let the press release for the Airborne Snow Observatory speak for
>itself, as I was more interested in the computing technology.
>
>http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-154
>
>
>In any case, this is really quick turnaround of data.   Because the
>site was in a place with not a lot of broadband, they had to process
>the data onsite, instead of transferring the data back to JPL.  This
>required that they build a computing cluster onsite, and come up with a
>way to move the data from instruments to LaCie eSATA drives to a mobile
>computing cluster and NAS.  One of the things they did was use QR codes
>to tag their assets, and smartphones to scan the QR codes, so the asset
>could be tracked, no matter where it was going.
>
>
>As is with many things done at JPL, it was a project that required them
>to do things that had not been done before, so they learned a lot from
>the project, and it will spin off more projects, as well as useful
>technology for future missions.  One of the highlights of the talk was
>when he described getting everyone to use IRC to coordinate, and then
>added value to IRC by using the Notifico service and an IRC bot to
>report things like e-mailed status, JIRA tickets, Subversion commits,
>and even status from the data processing system.  Their processing
>strategy was just to launch multiple copies of jobs, and when one of
>them finishes, it will kill the other copies.  They also learned to
>make multiple local copies of executables and data on their compute
>cluster, to increase performance and avoid issues with file locks.
>
>
>My feeling from the audience is that the topic was interesting, but
>there was some material that they would have understood better if they
>dealt with science data and scientists on a regular basis.  This is
>understandable as this talk was originally a JPL technical seminar. 
>
>
>DINNER
>======
>Dinner was again at Hamburger Hamlet.  I think there was 8 of us.  It
>was a small, friendly group, and we talked about movies, the NSA, and
>other things.
>
>Since I mentioned this to Kevin, the physicist, at dinner tonight,  I
>will end with a link to "Bohemian Gravity" by Tim Blais and A Capella
>Science.  It is a song about string theory, to the tune of Queen's
>"Bohemian Rhapsody" and the music video features sock puppet Einstein
>and Feynman diagrams.  
>
>http://youtu.be/2rjbtsX7twc
>
>Cheers,
>Lan

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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