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Table of Contents

• Next Meeting Details
• Presentation: Open Source Telephony Project by Tony Zafiropoulos
• Tutorial: Website Ecommerce with CGI/HTML/PERL by James Pattie
• Book Special(s):
• Upcoming Meetings
• Meeting Directions
• Article(s)
  • ITEC 99 Has Arrived!
  • Down A Rabbit Hole (Telephony)
  • What Does GPL Mean?
  • Interesting Browsing
  • More About Our Majordomo Mailing Lists!
  • Personal Commentary
• Special Interest Groups (SIGS)
  • Linux SIG (SLUUGLS)
  • Computer Telephony Integration SIG (SLUUG CiTI)
  • Digital Alpha SIG
• Steering Committee
• Sponsors
• SLUUG on the World Wide Web
• SLUUG Administration is volunteer based.
• /usr/groups/other
• Contacts
• Submitting Articles to the SLUUG CRONicle
• SLUUG PO Box

Wednesday, April 14, 1999 at 6:30 PM
Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester

Abstract:
The evening starts with James Pattie giving a tutorial on developing a Website Ecommerce project. James will explain how he used CGI, HTML, and PERL to develop an online network proposal.

Biography:
James has petted both dogs and cats...

James Pattie is a programmer at CTiTEK.

Title of the Month The 25% discount special this month is on all JAVA, Perl, and CGI books.

All regularly priced titles are 10% off retail cost at the general meeting. (Excludes featured, or specially priced or promotional items)

The O'Reilly and Associates line of books is available at each monthly general meeting as a convenience to our members.

Each month features a book related to that month's presentation or tutorial topic.

The STL!/unix/usr/group meets the 2nd Wednesday of every month at Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester Blvd, just east of Hanley on Manchester.

Directions From Downtown

1. Take 40 West to the Hanley exit.
2. Turn left (south) onto Hanley.
3. Turn left (east) onto Manchester, then turn right ASAP into the Sunnen Products driveway.

See map at http://www.sluug.org/info/sunnen.html

(NOTE: A security guard from Sunnen is scheduled to be at the door from 6:20 PM to 7:20 PM to allow entry. After 7:20, the door will be unattended and attendees may not be able to enter.)

The SLUUG Steering Committee meets the Tuesday following the general meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, One City Place in Creve Coeur.

The SLUUG Linux SIG (SLUUGLS) meets the 3rd Thursday of every month at the Indian Trails Public Library.

See map at http://www.stllinux.org/directions/

ITEC (Information Technology Expositions and Conferences) Expo 1999:

America's Center, Downtown St. Louis, May 19-20

Visit our website at http://www.sluug.org/ , and go to the ITEC link for up to the minute information on show details or contact our booth manager, Christine Wanta, by mailto:cfw1@mail.sluug.org.

For approximately the past nine (9) years SLUUG has had a presence at the annual St. Louis ITEC Expo. This year's ITEC Expo will be at the America's Center downtown, Wednesday May 19th and Thursday May 20th.

Show tickets should be available for distribution at the April 14 SLUUG meeting and subsequent SIG meetings. We will keep you informed as we know more details.

We need YOU! Our booth is staffed by membership. If you can come to the show, plan an hour (or more ;-) to work our booth. Even one hour will give someone in the booth a break.

Each year our participation at ITEC allows us to let a lot of people know of the group's existence. It is amazing how people just walk up to the booth and learn that our group is a resource here in town. (And it doesn't hurt to be the one in the booth talking to them. ;-)

And, as usual, we need those REAL STALWARTS! Each year, there have been a few people who have devoted an entire afternoon, morning, day, or even BOTH days to working our booth, getting it set up, etc. We always need a few more of you to volunteer.

Also our O'Reilly & Associates books will be sold there. The ITEC show sales volume generated is one of the reasons we continue to be able to offer the ORA books at our meetings.

We hope you can help us make this year's ITEC 99 our greatest success to date.

I won't really try to detail the thought process sequence that led me down this path (and no, I don't have a little bottle with a tag on it that says "drink me"); but, I was wondering if any proposed telephony team might want to latch on to an appropriate URL. Then, it occurred to me that there might already be some kind of telephony project going on out in the great Internet. After all, these things spring up overnight like mushrooms.

I tried looking up an URL for http://www.telephony.org, it let straight to a commercial site "www.sites-to-see.com" that seems to specialize in setting up web sites for others with big bucks. Dead end street.

Disappointed, I next tried the URL for http://www.telephony.net, and found something more like what I had expected to find under the ".org" domain.

There are some white papers and even some reference to a proposed standard called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) published as RFC 2543 that gets into things that make my head hurt; but, seems to be dealing with voice over internet stuff. The SIP FAQ didn't seem basic enough for me so I quit for now. Going on to the related work link showed a wealth of RFCs and other links. Still, anyone interested in telephony should be looking at this stuff. It all looks like a good template for things to come.

Looking at http://www.telephony.com, leads to IDC, Inc. and again more acronyms and concepts foreign to anyone totally new to the details of how telephony systems work. All related background material, yet extremely new to me. A lot of very interesting stuff.

"Curiouser and Curiouser" said Alice to the White Rabbit. -- Stan Reichardt

>From what I understand of SIP (which is little) it's meant as a general multimedia session handshaking protocol. In other words, it's like MIME taken to the next level. This would, in fact, be useful to net telephony, I'd think. Also, the ITU has standards/recommendations available covering pretty much everything that's out there. (check out http://www.itu.int/publications/itut.htm )- (..particularly, I think, series H -- multimedia codecs and stuff.. and, yeah, most of this stuff costs money) Also, Cisco makes some products that do IP telephony and interface through a channelized T1 or as POTS ports. I don't know what, exactly, they use to do it, but it's available right now.. perhaps somebody knows what it is that they're using to accomplish this?

On a similar note, I don't entirely follow what this computer telephony project is going to be. I know that standards currently exist for the voice codecs, for the signaling and signal gateways.. what exactly is it that needs to be developed? (Tony?) (..just a way to put it all together to 'dumb' PBXs? ..dumb as in, non SS7, or in-band signaling) Just curious... -- Benson Schliesser

>I forget.... what does "GPL" mean?

GPL (GNU Public License) is one of the flavors of Open Source. Other flavors include the BSD-style Copyright, and the Mozilla Public License. I forget where the Copyleft fits in, and the Artistic License. All of this is documented in the soon-to-be published O'Reilly book _OpenSources -- Voices from the Open Source Revolution_, which I am reading much more quickly than I had ever dreamed.

[quote] From the book:

Fundamentally, the GPL mandates that enhancements, derivatives, and code that incorporates GPL's code are also themselves released as source code under the GPL. This "viral" behavior has been trumpeted widely by open-source advocates as a way to ensure that code that begins free remains free -- that there is no chance of a commercial interest forking their own development version from the available code and committing resources that are not made public. [end quote]

Apparently the GPL allows a company to maintain two bodies of code, one open and the other closed, if they wish, given proper controls. I am still uncertain how this is supposed to work. The big competetive advantage to a company building a project under GPL is that if a competitive newcomer tries to build a competetive product using the GPL'd code, the incumbent has access to their code as well. Basically, the incumbent has a serious competetive advantage. ...

To keep up with NET events:
http://www.linuxtoday.com- daily news of mostly (but not only) Linux events.
http://www.slashdot.org- news for nerds - stuff that matters!
http://www.freshmeat.net- daily updates of Internet software releases. (check out the "appindex" button).
http://www.32bitsonline.net- Because There's More Than One Way to Compute.

To watch your back:
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/coast- The Mother of All Security sites.
http://www.securityportal.net- Another all in one security information and news site.

To configure a machine:
http://www.monitorworld.com- Specs on over 2100 monitors from 150+ manufacturers.
http://www.monitorservice.com- From Monitor FAQ page follow Performance Parameters link.
http://www.hercules.com/monitors- The monitor data base that had the one that I wanted!
http://www.o2.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html- Knowlege base of Linux compatible modems!

Infrastructure:
http://www.opensource.org- Current history, FAQs, white papers and case studies.

For the Linux beginner:
http://www.linuxberg.org- Useful info and easy downloads.

Going, going, gone:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com- for detailed follow-up on the demise of BYTE.

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