NYLUGblog

Jay Emerson
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A Serious Talk About Having Fun and Being Productive with the R Language
Thursday, February 9, 2012 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

This talk will provide a quick but intense introduction to the R Language: a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is open-source (mostly GPL-2), available for several platforms, and thrives in Linux. The talk will be largely example-driven, with plenty of takeaway material and code examples. I’ll argue that it’s simply the right language for data exploration and statistical analysis, and is particularly fantastic for graphics and code development. I’ll conclude by introducing the package management system (and the Comprehensive R Archive Network — CRAN) and the C/C++ interface.

More Information:

• R Project

About Jay Emerson:

Jay Emerson is Associate Professor of Statistics, Yale University. Jay teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses and often includes timely real-world problems and examples in his lectures, an intersection of teaching and research. For example, he collaborated with the Wall Street Journal in uncovering the infamous stock option backdating scandal, and he demonstrated a design flaw in the new scoring system used for international figure skating competitions. He has worked on Bayesian change point analyses and created the “generalized pairs plot” for the R Statistical Programming Environment. He has worked towards a scalable solution for statistical computing with massive data, extending support for the management, analysis, and exploration of massive data sets in R.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at
House of Brews
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at House of Brews
(302 West 51st St. – 8th Ave), but we are also evaluating other
options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

http://www.houseofbrewsny.com/

Directions from IBM: http://goo.gl/VUdO1

Sean OMeara
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Introduction to Chef
Thursday, January 12, 2012 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Chef is a platform for building automated application infrastructure.
This talk examines infrastructure as code, the evolution of a typical
application’s infrastructure over time, and how Chef’s strategy to
configuration management makes it easy to develop, scale and change.
Example code will be examined showing how to achieve emergent
topology, and contrasts Chef with other CM strategies such as golden
image cloning.

More Information:

• opscode Chef wiki
• Sean OMeara’s blog

About Sean OMeara :
Sean OMeara is Technical Evangelist for Opscode, and worked as a
Systems Administrator for over 13 years.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at
House of Brews
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at House of Brews
(302 West 51st St. – 8th Ave), but we are also evaluating other
options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

http://www.houseofbrewsny.com/

Directions from IBM: http://goo.gl/VUdO1

Waseem Daher
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Ksplice: Updating the Linux kernel without rebooting
Wednesday, October 19, 2011 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Today, every OS in the world requires regular reboots in order to be up to date and secure. Since reboots cause downtime and disruption, sysadmins are forced to choose between security and convenience.

Until Ksplice. Ksplice can patch a kernel while the system is running, with no disruption whatsoever. We use this technology to provide Ksplice Uptrack, a service that delivers important security and bugfix updates to your systems. (It’s free for Ubuntu Desktop and Fedora, and is also a free feature of Oracle Linux Premier support.)

In this talk, we’ll provide a detailed look into how the Ksplice technology works and how the Ksplice Uptrack service works, at a technical level primarily targeted at system administrators and developers, but largely accessible to the average user as well.

More Information:

• Ksplice
• Ksplice technical paper
• Oracle Linux
• IBM Developerworks guide to Ksplice

About Waseem Daher:
Waseem Daher is a Senior Director of Software Development at Oracle. He joined Oracle through the acquisition of Ksplice, where he was cofounder and COO. He received both his BS and MEng at MIT, and he lives and works in Cambridge, Mass.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at
House of Brews
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at House of Brews
(302 West 51st St. – 8th Ave), but we are also evaluating other
options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

http://www.houseofbrewsny.com/

Directions from IBM: http://goo.gl/VUdO1

NYLUG
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The NYLUG Summer Barbecue!
Sunday, July 24, 2011 @ 12:00 -1:30 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Join us for some fun in the sun at Morningside Park at Noon. We’re having a barbecue.

This is a pot luck event, so bring your favorite drinks, chips and dips or meats/veggies to be grilled. We’re coordinating the goodies at the wiki link below.

More Information:

• Wiki for food contributions
• Morningside Park
• Park map

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at
House of Brews
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at House of Brews
(302 West 51st St. – 8th Ave), but we are also evaluating other
options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

http://www.houseofbrewsny.com/

Directions from IBM: http://goo.gl/VUdO1

Erik Kastner and John Goulah
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Deployinator: How Etsy removed the pain and fear from deploying code
Wednesday, April 20, 2011 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

As Etsy grew in traffic and engineering resources, fear crept into the
deployment process. At one point, code was only being deployed once
every 2 weeks; with planned outages! As of March 2010, Etsy is
deploying to production up to 40 times a day with almost 70 engineers
- all of whom can “push the button”. How did we get here? How do we
manage it? Are we nuts??

We will be covering:

• Deployinator – our internal deployment application
• Communication and coordination
• How monitoring and dashboards enable this velocity

More Information:

• Measure Anything, Measure Everything
• Quantum of Deployment
• Tracking Every Release

About John Goulah:
John Goulah has been working in New York City over the last several years for a number of web sites in both technical and management roles, as well as the co-founder of several startups. Having spent much of his youth touring in rock bands and hacking from the road, he is no stranger to crowds, be it a smoke filled room or presenting to the company board. He strives for non mundane tasks and has automated himself out of his last few endeavors, which has landed him in his current role as an Engineer at Etsy, the leading marketplace for
handmade goods.

About Erik Kastner:
Erik Kastner has given presentations large and small, from the international Rails conference to informal company brown-bags. He strives to find the laziest way to get things done – even if it ends up being a lot more work. Automation, exploration and the simple joy of building underpin just about everything he does. Other than a couple of strange and dream-filled years in San Francisco, Erik has lived in New Jersey his whole life. He works at Etsy in Brooklyn hand-crafting code, arts and tools.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

Tom Limoncelli
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You Suck at Time Management and It Isn’t Your Fault
Wednesday, March 16, 2011 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Tom will present his “Top 5″ time management tips for better time management, and take Q&A about time management, system administration, and what it’s like to work at Google.

More Information:

• www.TomOnTime.com
• EverythingSysadmin.com

About Tom Limoncelli:
Tom is the author of O’Reilly’s “Time Management for System
Administrators” and co-author of “The Practice of System and Network
Administration” (Addison-Wesley). He is an internationally known author
and speaker on many topics, including system administration,
networking, security, and grassroots political organizing. Tom lives
in New Jersey and works for Google in NYC.

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.

NYLUG Presents: You,
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Lightning Talks
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 @ 6:30 -8:00 PM
** Please note important information about this meeting **

Lightning is an atmospheric discharge of electricity accompanied by thunder. How lightning initially forms is still a matter of debate. Talk is the interactive communication between two or more people. The process for lightning talks is well known however. Join us January 26th for Lightning Talks. If you wish to give a lightning talk, visit: http://nylug.org/volunteers/wiki/LightningTalks/HomePage

The following lightning talks are anticipated:

• Brian Gupta – Using nginx and haproxy to build a software load balancer
• Aaron Grogan – IPv6
• David Berner – “CLI Tips” or “How I do my job despite being (almost) totally clueless.”
• Forest Mars – TBA
• Brian Gupta – Gentoo keychain — a way to make ssh-agent painless to use
• Ron Guerin / Stefanie Schulte — Volunteering for NYLUG
• Sunny Dubey – Amazon EC2 – Building a custom Linux AMI
• Dallas Marlow – Varnish – HTTP Caching / Layer 7 load balancing.
• … and more!

More Information:

• What are Lightning Talks?

After the meeting … Join us around 8:30 PM or so at

TGI Friday’s
After the meeting … You may wish to join up with other NYLUGgers
for drinks and pub food. This month we’ll be over at TGI Friday’s
(677 Lexington Avenue & 56th Street, second floor, northeast corner), but we are also evaluating
other options for the future and welcome your suggestions.