The UNIX(R) CRONicle March 1996 Official Publication of the STL!/unix/usr/group (UNIX(R) is a registered trademark of the X/Open Company Ltd.) ==================================================================== *** NEXT MEETING: Wednesday, March 13, 1996 at 6:30 pm Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester 6:30 PM . . Tutorial "Basic LINUX Installation by a PC User" by Jeff Heaton, Earthgrains, Inc. 7:00 PM . . Call For Help (An opportunity for you to ask technical questions of the group) 7:15 PM . . Social, off-line conversations, & book sales 7:30 PM . . Presentation "SEI Maturity Levels" by Mike Kriz ==================================================================== PRESENTATION: "SEI Maturity Levels" by Mike Kriz The March presentation will provide an overview of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) five maturity levels, how they are evaluated, and how they can be used to improve the quality of the sotware development process and the produced software product in a software production organization. The SEI software process five maturity levels is a model for evaluating the software development process to ensure and improve the quality of the software product and its development. It includes evaluating how well the current practices are working and providing specific action items which will improve the process. This process maturity structure is intended for use with an assessment methodology and a management system. Assessment helps an organization identify its specific maturity status, and the management system establishes a sturcture for implementing the priority improvement actions. Once its position in this maturity structure is defined, the organization can concentrate on those items that will help it advance to the next level. Mike Kriz has been doing UNIX application & database work as a consultant in the St. Louis area for ten years. He is a Certified Quality Analyst with the Quality Assurance Institute (QAI). He is a past board member of SLUUG, is our chief tutorial presenter, and has been active with the group for several years. ==================================================================== TUTORIAL: "Basic LINUX Installation by a PC User" by Jeff Heaton, Earthgrains, Inc. Jeff will give a basic overview of installing LINUX and Xfree86 on a PC. This overview will be from the perspective of a primarily PC oriented user who has never dealt with UNIX on a system administration or installation level. Jeff will cover what worked, and what did not as he got LINUX to be compatible with his PC system. Jeff Heaton is a Software Engineer with Earthgrains, Inc. Jeff has five years experience writing Windows/DOS based applications in C and C++. ==================================================================== Meetings: ---------------------------------------------------------------- March 13, 6:30pm Main meeting Sunnen Products, 7910 Manchester ---------------------------------------------------------------- March 19, 6:00pm Steering Committee The Steering Committee meets the Tuesday following the general 2nd Wednesday meeting at 6:00 PM in the 2nd floor training room of Daugherty Systems, located at One City Place in Creve Coeur. Anyone is welcome to attend. The security guard can direct you to the room. If you would like to become more involved in the planning aspects of our group, please join us. Meetings usually last 1 1/2 to 2 hours. ---------------------------------------------------------------- March 21, 7:00pm: Linxu SIG A look at the Red Hat Distribution by Matthew Feldt Meeting Location: Bridgeton Trails Public Library Room 3455 McKelvey Road St. Louis, MO ==================================================================== 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. The St. Louis UNIX Users Group Linux SIG (SLUUGLS) meets the 3rd Thursday of every month at a place to be determined. ==================================================================== SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT O'Reilly & Associates Birthday Bash at the Library Ltd. with Larry Wall & Randall L. Schwartz Saturday March 23rd, 7:00pm at the Library Ltd. the Library Ltd. and the St. Louis Unix Users Group will host a birthday party for O'Reilly & Associates. On tap for the evening will be Larry Wall and Randall L. Schwartz, authors of O'Reilly & Associates Programming Perl, free mugs for anyone purchasing two or more books, limited edition Cracker Jacks with a special O'Reilly prize, and plenty of cake and party favors. Please RSVP to LeeAnn Langdon via email at llangdon@icon-stl.net or call (314)-727-8834 if you plan to attend so that she can make adequate preparations. [You may want to put 'Re: O'Reilly & Associates Birthday Bash' in the Subject: line to help LeeAnn sort her email. -- Editor] Come join us in celebrating O'Reilly & Associates birthday! Notes: See below for details on Larry Wall and Randall L. Schwartz. An html version with links of this article is available at http://dark.wustl.edu ==================================================================== St. Louis Unix Users Group - Linux SIG (SLUUGLS) PRESENTATION: Caldera, WorkGroup Solutions, Running Linux with companion CD and of course Red Hat Linux are all based on the popular Red Hat Linux distribution. We'll take a look at the Red Hat Linux product and some of the Linux packages using it. Web pages for the above mentioned products can be found at: Caldera - http://www.caldera.com WorkGroup Solutions - http://www.wgs.com Running Linux with companion CD - http://www.ora.com/www/item/runuxcd.html Red Hat Linux - http://www.redhat.com I should have literature available from all the above at the meeting. LOCATION DIRECTIONS: Bridgeton Trails Public Library Room 3455 McKelvey Road >From 270: Exit St. Charles Rock Road east, make right onto McKelvey Road, Library is on the right (west) hand side of McKelvey. >From Lindberg: Exit St. Charles Rock Road west, make left onto McKelvey Road, For more information on SLUUGLS refer to the WWW home page for the group at http://dark.wustl.edu/sluugls/ or contact Matthew Feldt at linux@www.feldt.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- March Linux SIG News February Post Meeting Wrap-up In spite of topic, bad weather and contending with Al Franken at the Library Ltd. reviewing his new book 'Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations', the February meeting of the Linux SIG was well attended. This was the second time this winter snow made traveling to the meeting less than desirable. Reiterating the snow closure policy, all meetings will be held as per scheduled unless the Bridgeton Trails Library closes. If the Library closes, email will be sent to the Linux SIG mailing list informing the membership of the cancellation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digital Equipment Computer Users Society ( DECUS ) (and Linux) On June 1st - 6th DECUS will be having a symposium at the Americas Center in St. Louis. DECUS is looking for linux enthusiasts in St. Louis to do presentations at the symposium. I received the following from Kurt Reisler (UNIX SIG Chair, DECUS US Chapter): The sessions would be the same sorts of things that usually get presented at the users group meeting. I did one in San Francisco on getting a UPS to work properly under Linux (using the genpower package). User sessions on installing Linux, getting PPP up and running, what ELF is and experience using it, life on the "bleeding edge" with the latest developmental kernels, setting up a Internet service provider under Linux, those sorts of things. Technical sessions are usually about 50 minutes in length to allow for a Q&A period. The URL relating to the St. Louis symposium can be found at http://www.decus.org/decus/events/96stlouis/index.html There is a call for participation form available there as well. Nice thing is that scheduled speakers get a day of symposium registration waived. Please contact me if you are interested in volunteering to do a presentation, or visit the DECUS webpage mentioned above. Matthew Feldt linux@www.feldt.com. ==================================================================== ANNOUNCEMENT: New CTI SIG's First Meeting Set The CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) Users Group will meet on April 3rd from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. The meeting will be held at the following location: 11636 Lackland Road (The MFS Telecom building) (Westport area) Directions: Take 270 to Page Ave East Make right on Schuetz (South) Make left on Lackland (East) MFS Telecom is on your right Please R.S.V.P. by April 2nd, because there is limited seating available, email itek@inlink.com or leave a voicemail on 841-1100. The first meeting will be an introduction to the Computer Telephony business and a report on the Computer Telephony Show in Los Angeles (March 12-14). The CTI-Users Group is set up as a group to discuss the new melding of the Telecommunications and Computing world. Almost all current telephone systems (PBX-Private Branch Exchange) are proprietary systems running on different flavors of UNIX. Example: AT&T 25 systems run the AT&T UNIX OS. Computer Telephony is moving towards an 'open' systems idea. In this open system one can plug either a SCSA or MVIP Bus protocol Telecom card into a 'PC' either running UNIX, Windows, or DOS. On top of the OS and the Telecom cards are the applications: Voice Mail, Call Processing, Database interfaces, etc. Come to the first meeting, or to a subsequent meeting and get your questions answered. I am still looking for a permanent site with a large meeting room facility, preferably in the West Port area. Thank you for responding to the CTI-Users Group survey. The West Port area was the location that was predominant in the survey responses. 2nd was the Central West End and 3rd was the South County area. The time slot was all over the map :), so I just chose a time that was convenient to the sponsor (MFS Telecom). I apologize for those who cannot come to the first meeting because of time and place reasons. Please email me at itek@inlink.com as the 3rd meeting will likely be held at a different time and place. Thank You, Tony Zafiropoulos iTEK Inc. email: itek@inlink.com Web: http://www.inlink.com/~itek ==================================================================== Special Interest Groups As our membership grows, we have had some inquiries about the possibility of having Special Interest Groups in several areas. If you are interested in starting or participating in a SIG for System Administration, Networking, C, Object Oriented Programming, a specific vendor, etc., please call Dave Mills at 230-5151, extension 103, or contact any officer of the group. ==================================================================== Larry Wall & Randal L. Schwartz Larry Wall is a programmer at JPL; in his copious free time :-) he has authored some of the most popular free programs available for UNIX, including the rn news reader, the ubiquitous patch program, and the perl programming language. He's also known for metaconfig, a program that writes Configure scripts, and for the warp space-war game, the first version of which was written in BASIC/PLUS at Seattle Pacific University. By training Larry is actually a linguist, having wandered about both U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. as a grad student. (Oddly enough, while at Berkeley, he had nothing to do with the UNIX development going on there.) He also spent time at Unisys, playing with everything from discrete event simulators to software development methodologies. It was there, while trying to glue together a bicoastal configuration management system over a 1200 baud encrypted link using a hacked-over version of Netnews, that perl was born. Randal L. Schwartz is an eclectic tradesman and entrepreneur, making his living through software design, technical writing, system administration, security consultation, and video production. He is known internationally for his prolific, humorous, and occasionally incorrect spatterings on Usenet---especially his "Just another perl hacker" signoffs in comp.lang.perl. Randal honed his many crafts through seven years of employment at Tektronix, ServioLogic, and Sequent. For the past five years he has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services in his home town of Portland, Oregon. ==================================================================== ANNOUNCING A NEW SLUUG PUBLICATION! Have you ever wished you could get more helpful tips delivered to you personally? Have you ever wished you could be published? Well, SLUUG can satisfy both your wishes. I am putting together a longer more technically oriented publication to be out later this year. I am interested in original pieces or reprints (with permission). Tell me what you would like to see. Rich Seibel, rich@michelob.wustl.edu ==================================================================== ISO 9000 Presentation Review by Tom Thele, Southwestern Bell Telephone Company [Last month, Karen L. Wagener gave a presentation on the ISO 9000 family of quality standards. Tom Thele provided a review of the important points for his colleagues at Southwestern Bell. This article is excerpted from his report. -- Editor] Last month I had the opportunity to attend a discussion of ISO 9000 and its impact on the global business environment. It was quite interesting and informative. I wanted to take a minute to share some of what I learned. Executive Summary: - ISO 9000 defines what it takes to build a quantifiable level of quality into your business. - Its an international, multi-industry standard that a company, or just a single division can be certified against. - Registered auditing firms certify and then periodically audit companies. - A company can claim adherence to the standard (ISO 9000 compliant) without formally getting certified. - ISO 9000-3 focuses on Software production. What is ISO 9000? The purpose of the standard is to create an external mark by which customers can rate/judge vendors. It doesn't say company A is better than company B, it simply says company A has a defined, ISO 9000 compliant/registered quality process and company B does not. In fact, this doesn't guarantee that company A's product is of any higher quality then company B's. It just says that they have a defined process for tracking their quality. Who cares if you're compliant? ISO 9000 hasn't "taken off" yet in the U.S.--only about 10,000 companies are registered. In Europe, around 100,000 companies are registered. The main reason is that many European companies specify, when putting work out for bids, that the bidders must be ISO 9000 compliant. That means that if you're not dancing to the ISO 9000 tune, you can't even get on the dance floor. Already, here in the U.S., the Big 3 car manufacturers are requiring their potential vendors to be compliant before they will begin negotiations for services or products. So far, over seventy nations have recognized ISO 9000 as the quality standard. Many are requiring companies to be registered before they can do business with their government agencies. What this means to you. Today, if you are involved with product evaluations, you can specify that the vendors are ISO 9000 compliant. If they claim compliance, then you can ask to see their statistics on problems found by customers, average resolution time, or problem severity levels. ISO 9000 does not guarantee they will have these reports, but if they don't, they should able to show you something similar. If [U.S. companies] wants to continue to expand internationally, especially in Europe, [they] must consider the implications of not being registered. How do you get certified? Members of the ISO or other ISO-recognized third party bodies such as independent companies recognized by national standards organizations in each country do the registration and periodic auditing. Think of it as an independent auditor, like an accounting firm reviewing our company books and quarterly statements. Once certified, the company or division of the company, is registered on the country's national registry. Some countries do recognize other country's registries but not all (for instance, Japan has a plan on the table to require all software companies selling ANY software in Japan to be registered in Japan's registry. Note: the U.S. supplies 95% of all software sold in Japan, including PC games, video games, operating systems (Windows 95), telephone switch logic, etc. And only Japan's auditors can register companies to Japan's registry. Think about that!!!) Once a company is registered, it must be audited every three to twelve months to assure compliance. Audits require on-site reviews with actual workers, often in surprise visits. All documentation must be up to date and ready for the asking. Also, you have to pay these auditors to do this. (Imagine Bill Gates PAYING a Japanese auditor to do surprise visits on each Microsoft product division.) ==================================================================== SPONSORS..... Andersen Consulting Arbor Consulting Ask/Ingress Software AT&T Global Information Solutions Brown Group, Inc. CIBER, Inc. Cyborg Consulting Enterprise Cypress Systems, Ltd. Daugherty Systems Gundaker Realtors Better Homes & Gardens Hewlett-Packard IBM Informix Corporation Lindenberg & Associates Maryville Data Systems, Inc. Mastercard International O'Reilly & Associates Pyramid Technology Corporation Rave Computer SEI Shamrock Computer Resources Ltd. Software Systems Specialists, Inc. Sun Microsystems Sunnen Products Sybase The Charron Law Firm Unisys Venmar Systems, Inc. WTI Systems, Ltd. ==================================================================== SPONSOR OF THE MONTH SHAMROCK COMPUTER RESOURCES LTD. Mission Statement: Shamrock Computer Resources Ltd. provides world class consulting services to help our clients establish and maintain their competitive advantage through the successful implementation of leading edge technology. Shamrock was founded in 1989 and now has more than 370 employees serving our clients from five offices in the Midwest area: St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Moline, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Chicago, Illinois. In our second year of ranking, we were #115 on the 1995 INC 500 List by Inc. Magazine. Shamrock continues to be one of the fastest growing privately held companies in America. Our three practices in St. Louis are: Enterprise Client/Server Web Solutions Network Services & Systems Administration Shamrock views our consultants as our customers and builds a long-term relationship with them based on mutual respect and growth. The solutions our consultants design and implement today must be flexible enough to meet the changing business requirements of the future. We are always looking for quality professionals to help us in these efforts. To contact our St. Louis Branch: Jonathan Y. Kim - Branch Manager jkim@srock.com John Clawson - Consulting Manager scrclawson@mcimail.com 10411 Clayton Road, Suite 210 St. Louis, MO 63131 (314)432-3448 ==================================================================== /usr/groups/other We publish other user group meeting schedules on a reciprocal basis. If you are a member of another non-profit group, please inform them of our policy and invite them to exchange meeting information with editor@michelob.wustl.edu, or call any of the SLUUG officers. ------------------------------------------------------------------- St. Louis Internet Users Group The St. Louis Internet Users Group is devoted to discussing issues dealing with the Internet. Each meeting includes a presentation, question and answer session, and a discussion of new resources available on the Internet. The St. Louis Internet User's Group Meeting will now be held the first Tuesday of each month with the next meeting taking place on March 5th at 6:30 PM. The meeting will continue to be held at One City Place. For directions please visit the STLIUG Homepage at http://www.stl.net/iug/stliug.htm. The topic for the March meeting will be "What is new with the Internet". This meeting will give the audience a brief overview of some of the software offerings on the Internet. Here is an example list of subject matter: o What is new with Java o What are Java Scripts o Netscape Plug-ins o Netscape embeded controls o Shockwave o Real-audio o Microsoft offerings o Xing StreamWorks o JDB (Java equivalent to ODBC) o Acrobat o VDOLive o VRML o QuickTime and QuickTime VR Contact: Jym Barnes at (314)926-8672 (jym@stl.net) or visit their Web home page, http://www.stl.net. ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), St. Louis Chapter The ACM St. Louis Chapter invites you to dinner and a presentation of ---- JAVA ---- by Bill Darte of Washington University's Center for the Application of Information Technology When: Monday, March 11, 1996, 7:00 PM Where: >> Please note change in time and location for this meeting << Location will be the UMSL Campus, UMR Extension Building (blue metal building near the North Campus MetroLink Station) Biography: Bill Darte is a Senior Associate with Washington University's Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) where he teaches Local and Wide Area Networking subjects. Bill is also an adjunct faculty member of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, teaching similar topics at the undergraduate level through the Bachelor of Science in Information Management program and at the graduate level through the Master of Telecommunications Management program. His professional interests extend to systems architecture, standards, technology transfer, electronic data interchange, the Internet and high-speed telecommunications. Abstract: The Internet represents a logical extension to the progress that MIS has seen from mainframe-centric processing, through desktop into today's enterprise network strategy. The public network will enable business-to-business and customer-to-business commerce in a way that will blur the boundaries of the enterprise even further and meld customers and suppliers more intimately with the business plan. A progression of services on the Internet has led to the World Wide Web. One of the newest enhancements to this service environment is enabled by Java and Hot Java. These technologies will enable executable code to be distributed across the Internet. This technology will profoundly impact business and Internet services as we know them. Future Meeting Plans: The April Meeting will feature C. Monte Miller who will talk on "Real Time Schematics". His company uses AI code to optimize the presentation of schematics. The user specifies the level of detail he wants, then the code picks the part of the stored schematic data to present. The schematic is essentially produced on the fly from their underlying representation giving the data that is "believed" to be pertinent for the level of detail the user has requested. The user can then adjust the level of detail and update the display. Please suggest program topics and speakers (yourself?) to the Program Committee Chairman: Dayle Majors (314)441-2895 or Dayle_G._Majors@notes.up.com. Meetings are normally held monthly on the second Monday. ==================================================================== CONTACT LIST CONTACT LIST CONTACT LIST CONTACT LIST -------------------------------------------------------------------- Address Changes Klaus Mueller H: +1 (314) 334-6477 & Membership 331 S Spring Ave Cape Girardeau, MO 63703 EMAIL: mueller@michelob.wustl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- BBS Questions Gary Meyer H: (314)781-8644 EMAIL: gary@michelob.wustl.edu EMAIL: meyer@decus.org -------------------------------------------------------------------- Corporate Sponsors Paul Backer W: (314)454-4002 FAX: (314)454-6158 EMAIL: pauldb1@slch.wustl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter Editorial team: EMAIL:editor@michelob.wustl.edu Submissions Publisher: Sanjiv Bhatia H: (314)382-3352 W: (314)516-6520 FAX: (314)516-5400 EMAIL: sanjiv@aryabhat.cs.umsl.edu Editor: Steve Totten H: (618)931-0037 EMAIL: totten@michelob.wustl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- O'Reilly Books Fred Govier W: (314)342-7846 EMAIL: govier@michelob.wustl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- Presentations Rich Seibel H: (314)878-0394 W: (314)851-2725 EMAIL: rich@michelob.wustl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- Steering Committee Dave Mills H: (314)452-3313 Information W: (314)230-5151 ext 103 FAX: (314)230-5494 EMAIL: mills@michelob.wustl.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------- Linux SIG Matthew Feldt H: (314)429-5433 URL: http://www.feldt.com EMAIL: linux@www.feldt.com -------------------------------------------------------------------- ==================================================================== SUBMISSIONS If you would like to submit an article to the CRONicle of general interest to the members of the St. Louis UNIX Users Group, email it to editor@michelob.wustl.edu ====================================================================