Meeting Notes Jun 06 2006

About 8 people showed up.

During the evening we talked about a wide variety of topics.
We discussed Ruby, Cable vs DSL, using tarpits, passive cooling machines, over clocking, fiber to the home, Bittorrent, Spam, google spreadsheets, and online quick books. Some of the off topic subjects we discussed were rubber duckies, the movie about raining frogs [Magnolia], and getting your neighbor’s home demolished.

Some people were discussing the scans received on DSL vs Cable. It appears to most that when using Comcast Cable, they get more probes than on DSL. To address some of the scans one of our members, John, said that he was going to install a tarpit application called ‘Librea’. Tarpits slow down remote scans. They send a response to scanning software but send it slower then the OS would by default. Thus, they can make scanning software ineffective in slowing it down. Additionally, Librea sends the data to Dshield whic|About 8 people showed up. sites. More information on Libera .
Ruby is a interpreted language like Perl and Python. Like both Perl and Python, Ruby can be used for a wide variety of tasks. I use it for some systems tasks. For example, phone bills at the college are sent to people using ruby. The program takes a list parses it and sends a bill to the telephone users. This program was originally a Perl program, but it seems easier to understand in Ruby. Ruby is now the rave in the programming world. Ruby’s syntax is clean. Ruby is easy to write. Additionally, it is object oriented if you understand those concepts.

Syntax Comparisions:

print “hello world\n” #ruby
print “hello world\n”; #perl

name = “ted” #assigning var to name
print “hello #{name}\n” #ruby method

$name = “ted”; #perl way
print “hello $name\n”; #perl way

#ruby with numbers
a = 1
b = 2
print “a + b”.to_s #ruby print string

#perl with numbers
$a = 1 ;
$b = 2 ;
print “$a + $b\n”