** Updated at talksoftware.wordpress.com **

Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) organizations that host events where software developers might meet other software developers.

Please drop me a line about new groups or changes to these groups.

The following groups don't meet at the Code Factory. Yes, that's an odd way to split the groups, but a really big chunk of groups DO meet there.

I have found a few places on the net with info on re-installing grub.

Here is what worked for me:

Once you have eliminated all the techniques that won't work, the remaining technique, however inconvenient, is the one you must use.

I track some Microsoft lists, and this message I found scary. You have to trust Microsoft to not only not-be-evil, but also to have perfect security - at the personnel level as well as the network and server.

On the back of my bike, on the frame, there are 4 threaded holes, two on each side, for attaching a fender and a rack.

For my bike, the bolts to use are "Cap screws".

The size is "#10 - 32 - 1/2 inch", according to Canadian Tire.

Maybe these are the same size for your bike.

Did you notice that vi is pretty much feature-free on newer Debian systems? it doesn't even have syntax coloring.

The default vi package installed on Debian Lenny, and Ubuntu is vim-tiny, which is really restricted and very appropriate for really, really small environments.

To update, install vim-nox for the real thing.

If you want the GUI version, install vim-full, which basically installes vim-gnome.

KDE uses DCOP as its tools for automating the interface in KDE 3.X. In KDE 4.X, DBUS is used instead. I use the following program to connect to machines in a "build" network at work. As you can see, it saves some typing, but more important, it shows the name of the machine on the Konsole tab.

You may think the unix command line tools are a stodgy lot, not changing much and certainly not since as recently as Fedora Core 3.

You'd be wrong.

Take "find", for instance. In Red Hat 9, and even up to Fedora Core 3, you could 'find' a bunch of files in all subdirectories of the current directory, say all files ending in "~" (backups from emacs), and then erase them, like so:

find -name "*~" -exec rm -f {} \;

This is cumbersome in two ways. First, it's long. After the files are identified, with "*~", it's 17 characters, or 5 "words". Secondly, this is an awkward way to show someone a new command. You have to explain the whole "-exec" thing. What's the pair of braces? Why the "\;"?

Digital Ottawa

• Last Thursday is digitalOttawa's FREE monthly informal networking event designed to introduce you to other digital media and creative professionals, freelancers and students from across the city.

This 3 layer build system model provides a framework to design and compare build systems. I will first define the layers then look at a custom build system example.

Software build systems have three distinct layers. The layers are, from the top down:

* 3 - Distribution
* 2 - Packaging
* 1 - Build