March 12 2019 System rescue, SpamAssassin, server hosting, curve plotting, plated Meet

John noted that Maplin is back as an online store. In response to Mike’s account of the problems he had had trying to install Arch on his computer, John suggested that he could delete all the existing partitions on the hard drive except the very first (very small) one by using System Rescue and then start the installation process afresh.

John managed to demonstrate System Rescue on his own computer by turning off UEFI, using Legacy to load it — though it would only work with the VESA drivers on his computer — and then reverting to UEFI. He said that the documentation is excellent but that they have their own way of creating a bootable USB which John had found you could get round by creating the CD version and then copying it to a USB.

He added in response to a query from David that he had installed openSUSE on the computer from Legacy and then chosen UEFI during the openSUSE installation process.

Mike asked if anyone had any experience of using SpamAssassin. John noted that the UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook recommends using amavisd-new which interfaces with SpamAssassin and Postfix or Exim.

In response to a question about servers, Kriss recommended One Provider which allows you to rent a server of your choice — at present their Paris centre offers some of the cheapest servers.

Bernard introduced a project he had been working on to get meaningful results when the data that arrived at interfaces from a motor or other device was not linear. You could get a series of static readings but he then wanted to plot a curve from those static readings.

One option is WolframAlpha which allows you to enter a function and plot the results but you then have to pay for anything more.

Another option is gnuplot which proved more fully featured than he had expected.

A third option is to use the SciPy library to plot the curves. Noting that both gunplot and SciPy produced the same curves, he realised that they both drew upon the Netlib Repository Fortran libraries.

Kriss has been developing a static website generator running inside a browser using isomorphic-git, a Javascript implementation of Git. The site is hosted on GitHub and Kriss and Shi demonstrated editing the site and the CSS file, pushing the result to GitHub and producing this result (which may or may not have been edited further!).

The great advantage for small static websites is that you do not need a backend server.

We responded to a query about the origin of Python — Monty Python — by thinking of other things with particular origins, including spam — also from a sketch in Monty Python, mysql and mariadb — from the two daughters of Monty Widenius, My and Maria and Kermit — from the Muppets.

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