I wasn’t expecting much for today’s LUGM mini-meetup (Linux meetup). I was wrong, it turned out to be very productive one :)

I tried to reach Bagatelle by 12h30 but the bus got me there at 12h45. As I was racing towards Mugg & Bean, Ashley called and told me he will be reaching in a while as he was already in Bagatelle Mall. I entered Mugg & Bean and took a seat upstairs. Ordered a Caffè Latte and Cheese & Tomato sandwich. A few minutes later Ashley & Avinash came. Selven pinged us on facebook that he’s leaving home to come but afterward he got caught up & could not make it.

We had some general geek chat all while having lunch. I told folks about Project Evil Genius and how the book Web Penetration Testing with Kali Linux is helping.

Avinash told me he was having an issue setting up an SSL supported vhost. I looked at his httpd.conf and tinkered with the configuration till the vhost was up & running. In fact, I set up the VirtualHost according to Jochen’s advice; forcing a permanent redirection from non-www to www. Well, this time the redirection had to be forced to https.

Pritvi came as we started discussion on standard IO streams. We had a quick intro about File Descriptors in Linux. I opened up a Perl example I had written earlier & this reminded Avinash of his PHP project whereby he made use of File Handlers. By that time Nayar joined in; making us total of 5 attendees.

We looked at various examples how using stdin, stdout and stderr help us stream texts where we want them to be. We also had a quick look at /dev/null. Ashley was pretty much interested when we talked about compressing huge log files that are still being used by a program. We can first compress the log on the fly and then void the log.

cat application.log | gzip -9 > application.log.gz

Then empty the log as follows:

>application.log

Nayar explained a bit about his university project and showed us a pH sensor that he’s planning to buy. Pritvi and Nayar exchanged some ideas regarding connection between the sensor reader & his Raspberry Pi. Pritvi then tossed the topic about monolithic kernel and we discussed why Prof. Andrew Tanenbaum did not like the idea of monolithic architectures.

He also gave us a fantastic demo of LaTeX . It indeed was captivating and most of us thought … well, we should start getting hands dirty with those :P

To end the day we had a fabulous afternoon talking Linux, Apache, Standard Streams, Kernel, Minix, File Systems, Scripting, Fuzzy Logic, Hardware hacking and LaTeX.