[PLUG] PLUG West meeting notes 2007.06.18

[TuskenTower <tuskentower@gmail.com>]

Attendance: 8 people
New Users: 1 person (or was it two ...)

We had a very good meeting (I took 3 pages of notes!).  Thanks to KS
Bhaskar for his presentation on GT.M internals (which ran 30 min over
time because we kept asking him questions).

Paul Snyder confirmed that I will be doing a talk on Linux + HDTV on
July 26th.  We had conversation about HDTV antenna choices,  where to
go to find out more information and where to buy the antennas from.  I
would put this information here, but that would take a way a few
slides for me. :P

During the discussion, we stopped to talk about CONcast cable.  A few tidbits:
- If you have a HDTV with a good QAM tuner, you can pick up your
neighbors OnDemand channels and other "digital cable" goodies like
"Music Choice"
- CONcast does not advertise the ultra basic cable which gets you only
the over the air channels.  This is the cheapest package
- If you get the aforementioned ultra basic or the advertised basic
package with internet, you get all the standard unencrypted channels
because they can't block those without blocking the internet signal.
- It actually costs less to get basic cable and internet than it does
to just get cable internet.

We talked a bit about VZN FiOS.  Not having them come to your
community is a two fold problem.  On one hand they are cherry picking.
On the other, they need local and community (e.g. my HOA) permission
to dig at the local gov/community's expense.  Fred showed his pictures
of a broken phone line and tales about VZN incompetence in fixing the
problem.

A reminder to all, the meetings can have discussions about other open
source projects other than Linux.  Anyone want to talk about a BSD?
Maybe embedded Linux/BSD projects?

We also talked about duplicating talks at both PLUG West and PLUG
Montco (which I believe is held at the Unisys Blue Bell site).

The GT.M talk was very cool.  The true internals part is too hard for
me to shorten down to a few sentences.  So I'm covering the pieces
that give me the nice warm and fuzzies all over (excuse any
unintentional omissions):
- Multi-platform - Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and some others, but no
Mac OS X :(
- Multi-arch - Power, x86, PA-RISC, and Itanium with, the first 64bit
implementation of GT.M
- GT.M is a non-daemon application.  It is a runtime C-library which
is used by the shell app Bhaskar demonstrated with.  You'll need to
read the presentation to learn more about this.
- Because GT.M is a runtime library, the app that you create to work
with it has the potential to cause all sorts of problems like
deadlocks and other abuses on the DB.
- It does not re-implement security features (like most SQL style DBs)
and rely's on OS permissions.
- Cool DB recovery journaling mechanism

Some stuff skipped past me, like Fred's questions about keys.  Anyone
want to chime in on the parts that I missed?

At the end, we had a lot of questions on how the GT.M team does its
software testing (considering the wide array of platforms) and
software development.  Bhaskar voted someone else (Srinivas I believe)
from his team to do this next presentation some time in the future.

Site News:
None :)

Meeting Information:
PLUG West is held every third Thursday of the month
Meeting Host: Paul Snyder
Site host: Amul Shah (amul.shah@unisys.com)
Site: 2476 Swedesford Rd, Malvern, PA 19355
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