Month: June 2013

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CHarleston Uber Users Group (CHUUG)

There’s a new tech user group in Charleston, and they’re called CHUUG (CHarleston Über Users Group).

One problem that many tech user groups in Charleston suffer from is that their focus tends to be narrow (Ruby, Java, etc), which means fairly small membership and after a while, a lack of topics. I’ve seen more than a few groups around here start up, develop a good following and then fizzle out after a few months.

CHUUG was formed to combat this problem by being tech-agnostic and offer the local tech community a place to discuss, share and learn from their peers. The focus is pretty much anything and everything tech related.

If it’s tech, geek, maybe even nerdy, it’s ok

Everybody is welcome to attend. Talks and discussions tend to be fairly high level requiring some knowledge, but that’s the whole point of the group. The first few meetings have been conducted barcamp style, with people pitching ideas they’d be willing to talk about, or want to learn about and then breaking out into smaller groups around those ideas.

CHUUG meets on the second Thursday of the month at 6PM at Jack Russell Software (494 Wando Park Blvd).

You can find CHUUG on Google+ and the #chuug IRC channel on freenode.

If CHUUG makes you think of beer, there’s that too.

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Barcamp session idea

There’s an idea for a BarcampCHS session brewing in my head. Something along the lines of open source software and amateur radio. There’s a fair bit of it out there, most of which is something I’m interested in learning more about (like GNURadio). What better way to make yourself learn about something than to try to give a presentation on it, right?

The idea isn’t very well formed yet and may or may not happen, but it’s there. I’ve got until November to figure it out. Plenty of time, right?

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Twitter-less Pidgin

With the retiring of Twitter’s API v1.0 a couple days ago, the microblog-purple plugin that lets you use Pidgin as a Twitter client stopped working.

The API retiring has been coming for a while and there’s doesn’t seem to have been any development activity on mb-purple since 2010, so i’m on the hunt for something else that lets me keep using Pidgin, or some other IM client that I can use with Twitter, Jabber/XMPP and IRC. Maybe some kind soul will fork the plugin and fix it up for the v1.1 API.

I’d take a stab at it, but after a quick look at the source code and the Twitter API, it’s probably beyond my rudimentary skills. I might play with it anyway.

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SELF 2013 EOF

Southeast Linxufest 2013 has come and gone, and once again I had a great time working the conference, seeing the exhibitors and catching a few talks.

Rolled into Charlotte Thursday afternoon and after a short wait for a previous event to clear out, we got to work getting everything set up. First all the gear had to be hauled down to the conference area, figure out what was in the boxes then set up the cameras, sound and projectors. That took the bulk of the evening. Ethernet and power cables were run to the rooms and tables.

The party on Saturday featured MC Frontalot, who I’d heard of but hadn’t heard any of his music until then. Everybody seemed to enjoy it and after his show a crowd quickly developed at the merch table so people coud buy stuff and get autographs/photos.

Most of my time was spent taking photos and running around helping out wherever I could. Couldn’t get to as many talks as I wanted, but I did manage to catch a few good talks on MySQL admin and node.js.

Just a little under 500 photos to weed through, process and then upload. Could take a while to get to.

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TS Andrea 2013

June’s only a few days old and the first storm of the season is out in the Gulf of Mexico. The advisory for TS Andrea was issued a few hours ago and seems like it just popped out of nowhere.

I’m heading out of town to Charlotte for Southeast Linuxfest, so hopefully it’s nothing more than a lot of rain and some wind. It doesn’t look like Andrea will spend enough time over open water to strengthen much more so that’s good. The forecast track has it traveling along the coast reaching the Charleston area around Friday morning. Looks like it will be moving fairly rapidly by then so it should be over quickly.