(C) Mon Apr 24 09:28:57 EDT 2000 Venturing Crew 369
Venturing Crew 369

Venturing Crew 369

Table of Contents

The


Calendar of Events:

5/6-7/00 Flower Planing at Muirfield

5/13-14/00 Flower Planing at Muirfield

6/24/00 Wyandotte Lake, Scout Family Fun Day

6/9/00 Sleepover

6/10/00 Garage Sale

6/24/00 Wyandot Lake

7/2-8/00 Summer Camp

7/4/00 No Meeting

9/19/00 Open House [First Nighter]

10/13-15/00 Book Binding Campout [Exchange Lodge]

10/31/00 Pizza Party

12/15/00 Silver Beaver Apps Due

12/19/00 Christmas Party

12/26/00 No Meeting

12/28/00 Leave for New Zealand


Changes in Leadership

James D. Corder

Neil Coplin President

Ho-Sheng Hsiao Vice President

Open/Elections Sec/Tres

Aaron M. Croyle Patrol Leader Hawk

Suhasini Aswath Asst. Patrol Leader

Jack Trout Patrol Leader Owl

Ian C. Asst. Patrol Leader


Quote of the Month

Nehru

Everything changes continually. What is history, indeed, but a record of change. And if there had been very few changes in the past, there would have been little of history to write


New Advisor

James D. Corder

I would like to welcome Jon Houge as a new Associate Advisor to Venturing Crew 369. Jon brings a strong background of programming to the unit.


Membership Open House

James D. Corder

The new youth leaders would like to start a new beginners' class. Therefore, Venturing Crew 369 will have an Open House on Tuesday June 13th.

Membership is open to young men and women between the ages of 14 [and in high school] and 20 years of age. Cost of membership is $25.00 a year. Cost of the beginner's course material is $25.00. Registration and money is due by July 3rd.

If you know anyone that would be interested have them contact the youth at:

exp369@www.venturingbsa.com


Web Awards!


Crew Finances

Topic Need On-Hand

The Adventure $95,000 $225.00

General Fund $3,000 $688.62

Floor Fund $2,500 $2,500.00

Electrical Fund $2,500 $2,500.00

Flag Fund $1,000 -$532.35

Room Fund $3,800 $0.00

Grand Total $6,063.62

In the Bank $5,500.00

Cash on Hand $188.6

Up-an-Coming Crew Expenses

12/01/01 Crew Charter $30.00

12/01/01 Crew Insurance $375.00

12/31/01 Registration $1,875.00

Monthly The Adventure $75.00


Up-an-Coming Member Expenses

09/05/00 Registration $25.00

09/26/00 Book $25.00

06/06/00 Summer Camp $175.00


A Vision of the Future?

Aaron M. Croyle croyle.6@osu.edu

Picture, if you will, this scene: Just like every other morning, I awoke to watch the lights in my bedroom flash on. I thought about what I would wear today, and instantly knew the weather forecast. As I get out of bed and head toward the bathroom I see the hall light blink on, and hear the exhaust fan kick on and the sound of running water (I haven't had to risk a cold shower in years). As I walk back to my room, the coffee pot down in the kitchen starts brewing (I thought a cup of coffee would be nice)...

Does this sound like an advance of science or science fiction? I recently found a few on-line articles that begin to point to the former. How do you like the idea of having mechanical implants in your body that broadcast your thoughts to a computer, and that can receive information back from that computer? Sounds cool doesn't it, but what kind of dilemmas could this cause? When do we stop being human and become just a thinking machine?

Here at the articles to which I refer:

http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/
cmnps05fm.cfm?SegID=70017
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/
8.04/joy_pr.html 

Old Glory

Heather Ward ward.336@osu.edu

Since I've been a member of Crew 369, the group has been fortunate in having a storage room, enough terminals for our current membership, and furniture to set up our network. However, we still lacked one thing: our own American flag; that changed this past month. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Representative Deborah Pryce for her support of the Crew. Representative Pryce kindly donated an American Flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol building. This flag will be taken with Venturing Crew 369 on our travels and will be flown everywhere we go, serving as a record of our history. It is truly the kindness and generosity of those around us which enables the crew to be the group it is.


Great Crew Logo

Paul Basso, Advisor Crew 119 kealoha@internetcds.com

I couldn't help but notice that your crew logo when I first entered your site. How did you get such an impressive logo. We're just starting up our crew and I was looking at different sites to see how we want to portray ourselves to the world. I very much like your logo and would love to have ours look similar. Keep up the good work. May God be with your crew and everything they endeavor to do in His name.


Great Site

Susan McGehee singingeagle51@yahoo.com

My name is Susan and I am Cub Master of Pack377 here in McGehee, Arkansas. I frequent your site and you have a Fantastic Site! Keep up the good work! I recently created my own Web Page and added a link to your page, which I hope was permissible. My page is about recent WoodBadge Beading Ceremonies of which I was in the Eagle Den (SR-CS-13). My address is:

www.singingeaglecub377.home
stead.com/WoodBadge.html

http://www.venturingbsa.com

Another Web Award

I enjoyed surfing your site, and I am sure everybody else will too. Your site is Close to a Silver.


Bob's Kingdom By: Daniel Morris

To Be Continued

iHola! Yo soy su

computadora

personal.

*Oops*

Sorry. Hello!

I am your

personal

Computer.

Are you sure you speak Spanish?

I speak English.

Yes

 

Let's concentrate on "procs", the system process queue. We see three statistics for the queue: the runnable processes, the blocked processes, and the processes that are swapped out. Of these, only "r" and "b" are interesting to us, "w" -- the swapped out processes -- usually only means that these processes are idle and not really taking up system resources.

A runnable process is a process that is ready to utilize the CPU when its timeslice comes about. Generally, we would want to see this number be something less than two or three times that number of processors (3 on a single processor machine, 6 on a dual processor machine, etc.). If it gets larger, it could be an indication that the system is trying to do too much and needs to have more processing power (more or faster processors). If this number is always one times the number of processors or less, then the machine may have been configured with too many processors.

The blocked process column is a sign of a possibly significant system problem. Processes are blocked when they are waiting on some form of I/O, generally disk access or network access. In some situations, especially large database queries, this number may be seen from time to time. However, if it is seen regularly and the number is close to the run queue size, it is time to tune the filesystem. On the second line we see one blocked process, nothing to concern ourselves with. However, further down in the real data, we started to see several twos and threes, meaning we wanted to look more closely at our disks.

As you can see, just by looking at two columns of vmstat, we've already been able to locate two possible performance issues. vmstat is one of the best statistic gathering tools available for quickly pinpointing performance areas needing further analysis.


http:www.venturingbsa.com

Another Web Award:-)

We are proud to have the SilverSurfer on such a page as yours...It not only reflects your taste... But also ours. We thank you... Again.We are honored to have this award on your page... Congrats on a *SILVER*...You are one of the best... ShadowRun


root@davinci:/>vmstat 5

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
r  b  w    swap   free  re   mf  pi  po  fr  de  sr  s1  s2  s3  --   in   sy   cs  us  sy  id  
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0  0  0    4092  13988   1  131  35  30  37   0   2  19   1   1   0  132  820  137   9  13  77  
0  1  0  230700   4768   0  179   0   0   0   0   0  76   1   0   0  349  743  314  20  31  50  
0  0  0  231988   5356   0   71   2   0   0   0   0  52   0   1   0  219  528  224  11  14  74  
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CUT

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
r  b  w    swap  free  re   mf   pi   po   fr  d  sr  s1  s2  s3  --   in    sy   cs  us  sy  id  
                                               e                                                  
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1  3  0  229980  3096  35  253  141  560  560  0   0  79   1   0   0  313  1030  321  31  36  33  
0  3  0  229332  2868  24  197  527  628  671  0  43  89   1   1   0  383   946  262  35  34  31  
0  3  0  229388  2980  14  160  452  472  565  0  80  87   2   2   0  355   765  257  23  31  46  
0  1  0  230384  4216   5  114  344  214  214  0   0  73   1   0   0  307  1390  302  21  31  48  
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

VMSTAT

S. Potter

VMSTAT: Your performance monitoring friend, part I -- the process queue

In my career, I am often called upon to look at performance issues and problems that systems are having. Over time, I've found a reasonably good methodology for determining where problems might reside and how to resolve them. The first tool I turn to when I'm starting on a new system is vmstat. vmstat is described by the man page as "Report virtual memory statistics". However, this tool does far more than that. Not only does it report on the memory, it also reports on processes, processors, and the I/O system. Here's an example of a vmstat output running every five second

See Chart Above:

The first line tells what we're going to see, "procs" -- the system process queue, "memory" -- the virtual memory system, "page" -- statistics on the memory management (see March 2000 article on Paging Vs. Swapping), "disk" -- the disk subsystem activity, "faults" -- information on page faults or context switches, and "cpu" -- how the CPU is utilized. The next line explains what each column means. We'll save the definition of each column as we discuss the various sections. Notice the first line of data looks vastly different from the other two lines. We want to ignore this first line, as it is attempting to show us averages from the time the system was booted, a generally meaningless statistic.

Planning for the Future

Neil Coplin coplin.7@osu.edu

Since the crew is always looking ahead and expanding, we have decided to hold another first nighter. With this, we will be starting another white class in June. The First Nighter will be held in the church on June 13th at 7:30pm. In the past, most of the youth attending the First Nighter have been from the local High Schools. This year, the crew will also be looking into user groups in Columbus, OSU and parks and recreation services as other places where youth might be looking for another possibility in computing.

One of the goals of the officers this year is to double our enrollment. This means we will have 50 youth registered before membership closes again this winter. In order to accomplish this, greenbar would like to have at least 20 new youth as a result of this first nighter. With the drastic increase in numbers that the crew had last year, momentum is on our side. We're growing.

If you or anyone that you know (between 14 and 20) is looking to join the crew or is interested in computers, then we encourage you to

attend this first nighter.


Future of internet usage

Jack Trout Witmore@netzero.com

Given the new world of technology and the internet Appliance, innovation which uses an application server and is inexpensive and has a built in modem you can dial in to the internet and surf it with almost no over head. One company has come around to aide this leap. http://www.thinkfree.com/ you sign up for a login to this site. the sign up process includes some basic consumer information and an email address is required. Once you log in it will determine what browser your running and a shared place to put the java classes. It will download java programs to your computers so as you begin a new process for the first time you have to wait for it to download then once it is downloaded you may use it even off-line. when you connect it allows you SSL connection to 20mg of storage space online. This space can be mounted onto the program when you log onto the internet site allowing you to save documents and move from station to station. It offers a full suite for office usage. A Presentation program, A word processing program with spell check and thesaurus, and a spreadsheet program this can be a new idea for crossplatform working. Currently the they only have a working version for MS PC but they anticipate ports to linux and to macintosh soon.


awk and sed

Ho-Sheng Hsiao hhh@lost-realities.org

While I'm working for the OSU's Music Cognition Lab, I was given a program to update. The original author had insisted on using C. Once he has written the program, there were enough issues with the program that no one in the lab trusted it.

The lab records music performances, and often times compares the actual performance with a ideal, "perfect" performance. An error analysis program goes through the two files, and marks out all the errors. There's a type of error where the performer adds extra notes. Sometimes, the performer adds extra notes. This program, called "backup", marks these extra additions as "backups".

The file format looks something similar to:

X X X X X aaa bbb A ...
X X X X X aaa bbb A ...
X X X X X aaa --- S ...

The first five columns are experiment identity columns. Those are ignored. Backup looks only at the 6th, 7th, and 8th columns to determine if there is a "backup". Compare the above two lines, for example the first two lines. The 6th column of line 1 must match with the 6th column of line 2. The 7th column on line 1 must match with the 7th column on line 2. The 8th columns must be marked as "A". And neither the 6th or 7th column should be marked "---". In the first two lines of the example, lines 1 and 2 are "backups", and the "A" should be modified to a "B".

This was clearly text processing, something the UNIX tools do very well. I had said that I could write a program in shell script to handle that. I was met with disbelief -- so here's the script to solve that.


Venturing Crew 369 has a new Youth

President

Neil Coplin! #!/bin/sh # Shell script version of backup # Written by Ho-Sheng Hsiao, 2000 Apr 20 AWK="/usr/bin/awk" FILE=$1 # First, use AWK to figure out which lines are backups LINES=`$AWK `{ i++; if (p6 == $6 && $7 !="---" && p7 == $7 && p8 == "A" && $8 == "A") print i; p6 = $6; p7 = $7; p8 = $8 ; }' $FILE` # Generate sed script to modify the backup for i in $LINES; do j=`expr $i - 1` CMD="${CMD}${j}s/ A / B /; ${i}s/ A / B /; " done # Apply the sed script sed -e "$CMD" < $FILE

The original C program worked on the "current" and "previous" lines. I could not figure out how to get awk to go backwards up a line, otherwise I would have written it completely in awk. This version does the processing in two passes. It uses awk to mark which lines has a backup and dumps it into the variable LINES. Then, it takes that list, and turns it into a series of sed routines. I did this to avoid writing a temporary file. Then, that script was applied to the file, and the result gets dumped into standard out.

This program works except on two cases. If there is the character sequence "A "in the first five column, that gets replaced with "B }" and not the actual marker on the 8th column. Also, if there are more than two consecutive backups, then this program will do a few weird things. (Prospective awk and sed scholars, see if you can find it).

Obviously, this script is not completely reliable. It does demonstrate that you can quickly (2 hours) prototype a text processing program with a shell script.


A Rose is a Rose

Ho-Sheng Hsiao hhh@lost-realities.org

We, the members of Crew 369 do NOT rally around http://www.venturingbsa.com.

Our Venturing Crew flag stands in the church, along with the American Flag.

What keeps us together transcend some mere sequencing of alpha-numeric symbols pointing to a region of cyber-ether. Changing the URL is not the same as defacing either of the two flags.

lost-realities.vpn does not exist anywhere in the world except in the basement of my parents' home. DNS entries could be changed that easily, and just as meaninglessly.

Hypothetically speaking, if we were to use corder.org, we wouldn't send the new members to www.venturingbsa.com. Believe me, given the chance to type a shorter URL, most people will take it. Unless of course, they have it bookmarked.

There's nothing wrong in particular with one URL or the other. Why? Some people have a hard time even remember as something as "http://www.ibm.com" -- but then, they aren't the people we are looking for, either.

Ok, some might raise the point that "http://www.corder.org" does not give an accurate representation of Venturing Crew 369. I direct your attention to our current, "official" URL -- http://www.venturingbsa.com and not, a much more "accurate" URL, such as:

http://crewwww.venturingbsa.com

How accurate the URL is not the central issue. If it were, we would choose crewwww.venturingbsa.com. Or even better: http://www.fcla.org. But that was taken.

If we were serious about picking a good URL -- that is, if you are willing to put forth the energy to take a moral stand on what URL we use on our flyers, try thinking up of a better URL. Then register it. Take action, instead of upholding a status quo without examining alternatives.

Should the name of the web page be changed?

Aaron M. Croyle croyle.6@osu.edu

There are good points made by all. There is no particular reason for Venturing Crew 369 to be represented by www.corder.org. But yes Mr. Corder does do a lot financially and otherwise for the Crew. If we feel that a descriptive URL is that important i would suggest that we get a hold of crewwww.venturingbsa.com.

I think we can all agree that the crew is really defined by whoever the active members are, and beyond that the leadership. I believe that the Crew could not be the successful group it is without both the youth leadership, and the direction given by Mr. Corder and the other adult leaders.

http://www.venturingbsa.com




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