November 18th 2013 logstash, money and SlackBuilds

Alice introduced logstash, a tool for managing logs, parsing them and storing the results for later use, in their case to produce graphs using graphite; logstash has good documentation. In response to a question, she also mentioned using splunk to find errors in logs.

John M then passed round the latest ring, newly arrived from foreign parts, after which

Richard had a practice run at his presentation on the banking system, managing to persuade most of us that most of what we had been taught about money and the banking system was an illusion; in reality banks create money and the central banks just keep the score; only 10% of the money they create goes to increasing GDP while 90% is used in speculation. Richard is a member of a group seeking reform of the Bank Charter Act 1844 which, while restricting the supply of new banknotes, did not restrict the creation of new bank deposits, thus enabling banks in England and Wales to create money even though they cannot create banknotes.

He explained that China earns money in the form of US dollars which it then uses to buy US Treasury Bills on which it then earns interest.

David S introduced us to the mysteries of the SlackBuilds project through which people can build software to complement the Slackware core. SlackBuilds consists of a number of repositories containing the source for a number of programs along with a shell script to build each source with cmake. There is also a GUI option.

David contributes to the project with a script which automates checking the builds of each program and then reports his findings via Gmail to the maintainers — which he showed us in operation.

Past Meetings