August 10 2015 youtube-dl, get_iplayer and Stephen Bourne on sh

For the first time ever, no-one had come prepared with anything. So we welcomed Brian from Spain, talked about youtube-dl and get_iplayer and watched the Stephen Bourne lecture about the Early days of Unix and the design of sh.

July 13 2015 Cybersecurity, mesh networking, tools and snooping

John drew attention to the recent change in the MariaDB 10 .mysql_history file format which means that any old .mysql_history file is overwritten [he later found the following thread in the RedHat Bugzilla which suggests that the issue has been around for a while but is only cropping up as distros update to MariaDB 10].

Thinking of a website

There comes a time when small charities begin to think about a website. You need four things for a website:

• a team of maintainers;
• a domain name;
• a hosting provider;
• a webpage generator.

Cybersecurity futures

The first annual Cantor Lecture, funded by the Vice-Chancellor of Bradford University, Brian Cantor, on similar lines to the series he had funded when he was Vice-Chancellor of York University, was given on 30 June 2015 by Prof. Sadie Creese, Professor of Cybersecurity at the Department of Computer Science, Oxford University where she has been since 2011; she was Professor and Director of e-Security at the University of Warwick’s International Digital Laboratory from 2007 and previously at QinetiQ. She is currently on a sabbatical.

June 8 2015: QGIS, snooping, SSD data retention and System rescue

Paul outlined the proposed development of the Bradford CVS websites and Alice and John offered to look at ways of supporting these developments.

David described how he had dealt with the arrival of an Excel file containing images dotted about among the data about the proposed location for a dig. The first step had been to create a proper spreadsheet of the data and identify, using GPS, the latitude and longitude of two points which could then be used as reference points for the remaining data.

Disk drives: knowledge is power

There’s one thing that should frighten everybody who uses a desktop or laptop computer or server, and that is disk failure. Your storage should be the only part of the computer that you really care about. If not backed up, the information on your disk can be irreplaceable: when it’s gone, it’s very probably gone for good. Yet your precious information is entrusted to one of the few components in a computer that can break down completely, without warning, or literally wear out.

May 11 2015: Apache Spark, Dremelling hard drives, mixed mode UEFI and OwnCloud

Alice began by demonstrating using Apache Spark, an alternative to MapReduce with Hadoop, to analyse Leeds Road Traffic Accidents. Using the Scala shell, she read in the text file, created a Scala class, created an RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset), cached it and then queried it to find the Pearson (linear) correlation between, for example, accidents with more than one casualty and the type of vehicle. It works faster because the data is held in memory and it is scalable. It can also query data held in other types of database including SQL. Since the latest version of Excel will link with Hadoop, it can be used to query Excel data.

LibreOffice: the successor to OpenOffice

Just over four years ago, a group of developers who had become fed up with the slow pace of development of OpenOffice started an alternative project now managed by a German charitable foundation, the Document Foundation, to create a modern, and superior, alternative to Microsoft Office. They were gratified to receive support from major computer companies and many other developers who had become disillusioned with the slow pace of development of OpenOffice.

April 13 2015: emscripten vs Native client and other things

Alice sent their apologies via Twitter as she was still in Kazakhstan time.

Brian asked about Swanky Paint and asked for help with hostapd which was no longer working as he expected.

March 9 2015: Audacity, LyX, Pirate Box, Dead drops and snooping

John H began with a short demonstration of cleaning up digital transfers of LPs using the noise removal and repair effects of Audacity to remove noise and eliminate clicks from the transfer. He then did a presentation arguing that LyX outforms any other software in document production though there are a few uses cases for which it is not suitable.