Title: View from the (no longer Acting) Chair

Author: Martin Moene

Date: 01 November 2016 17:09:43 +00:00 or Tue, 01 November 2016 17:09:43 +00:00

Summary: Bob Schmidt
chair@accu.org

Body: 

This is my third View, which means we’re almost halfway through the 2016–2017 term. You may have noticed that my Views have concentrated on the people who make ACCU work. We are a group run by volunteers, and our volunteers deserve to get full credit for their efforts. One of the few regular responsibilities I have is to write this article every two months; the day-to-day running of ACCU is done by the other members of the committee, and they do it well.

Special General Meeting

The Special General Meeting was held September 28th at St. Aldates Tavern in Oxford, in combination with the ACCU Oxford local group. The purpose of the SGM was to formally elect a Chair and a Secretary, so those positions would no longer be held by caretakers. I’m pleased to announce that Malcolm Noyes was elected Secretary, and I was elected Chair.

Malcolm reported that he received 133 ballots out of the 591 sent. Malcolm received 121 votes for secretary, with 12 abstentions, and I received 119 votes for chair, with 14 abstentions. Thank you to all who voted.

Twelve members attended the meeting, including officer Matt Jones and committee member Ralph McArdell, giving the SGM the needed quorum. I had planned to attend the meeting in person – it seemed like a great excuse to play hooky from work, enjoy an evening with colleagues, and take another holiday in Europe. Unfortunately, reality intruded in the form of the dreaded Jury Duty, which put an end to those plans. I was able to ‘attend’ via a Google Hangout, and from what I could see and hear it sounds like a good time was had by all.

Nigel Lester coordinated the SGM with the local group meeting in Oxford. He also was able to arrange sponsorship for the evening, provided by Oxford Computer Consultants. Robert Bentall arranged additional sponsorship for the meeting from Martin-Baker Aircraft Company, Ltd. In addition to sponsoring the evening's drinks, Martin-Baker provided an ejection seat for ‘testing’ by the attendees. Please join me in thanking the sponsors, Robert, and Nigel for an enjoyable evening.

Diversity statement

We published the draft Diversity Statement in the last issue of CVu. For those of you following along, here it is again:

ACCU is committed to a culture of diversity and inclusion. We embrace and encourage our members’ differences – including, but not limited to age, colour, ethnicity, ability or disability, gender identity or expression, sex or sexual orientation, language, national origin, religion (or absence thereof), race, political persuasion, socio-economic status, and veteran status. ACCU will not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or bullying; in any form, for any reason. Our members deserve to be treated fairly, equally and with respect, and are expected to treat others the same way.

Please note that based on a comment received after the last CVu was published, I have changed one word in the statement. The clause ‘religion (or lack thereof)’ has been changed to ‘religion (or absence thereof)’. The comment noted that ‘lack’ could be seen as a pejorative, and that ‘absence’ is more neutral.

This draft is still open for comments. We will keep the draft open for comments for another publishing cycle, and target the end of the year for approval by the committee.

Website migration

Jim Hague volunteered to migrate the ACCU website and associated software to a new platform. The new site went live in mid-July.

In moving the site, rather than just taking a backup of the existing host and restore onto the new host, he took the opportunity to do a little spring cleaning. The new host is a virtual host courtesy of Bytemark (www.bytemark.co.uk), and runs Debian Stable. Jim adapted the configurations to Debian from the previous CentOS+Plesk setup, and archived a lot of files that didn’t seem to be used any more.

One notable change is that the website is now accessed with HTTPS only, fixing a long-standing security flaw that user login credentials were visible on the wire. For the mailing lists, there has been a very slight minor version downgrade of the mailing list manager, Mailman, as Jim moved to the Debian packaged version. He also moved some lesser known older functions such as an old wiki to *.accu.org subdomains, and ensured they too are secure.

The domain registration for accu.org was also close to expiry, so Jim moved the domain hosting to Bytemark and renewed it. It’s now easy to set up new subdomain websites. As an example, Russel Winder is doing great work with conference.accu.org, which is hosted on the same system but uses a completely different web framework. (More on Russel’s work below.)

After running the new site under test.accu.org for a few weeks, on the morning of the IETF 96 Hackathon Jim diverted himself by updating the database from the old host, copying over any recently updated files from the website and the (private) mailing list archives, and changing the DNS to point to the new host. He was expecting a torrent of breakage, but thankfully only a few minor issues came up.

Jim is still working on some minor details, but the new hosting seems to be running well. ACCU now has an excellent hosting basis for further changes.

This is a condensed version of the work Jim performed on the migration. I have it on good authority that he is working on a more complete, first-person version for publication in the near future. In the interim, please join me once again in thanking Jim for all his hard work.

Conference web site improvements

Our conference chair, Russel Winder, has been busy working on a new web site for the conference.

The experimental site is located at https://conference.accu.org. It is intended that this will be a Python 3/Flask/SQLAlchemy/SQLite site handling session proposals submission, review selection, scheduling, and program publishing. A blog and static pages will be managed by Nikola. In his words:

We are going to be extraordinarily agile here: release early, release often. So whilst the Flask stuff is being developed the Nikola stuff will be published, indeed already is. We need volunteers to help with styling, imagery, and indeed content. The current display is the default Bootstrap generated by Nikola, we need to create a styling that is obviously the ACCU brand, but is definitely the conference and not the main website. I am sure the AYA folk will chip in, but so should ACCU members. The conference is a joint venture so everyone has a vested interested in making the website as stonkingly brilliant as possible.

The source for the Nikola managed static material (yes, blogs are static material!) is on GitHub athttps://github.com/ACCUConf/ACCUConfWebsite_Static. The master branch is all the general material that is the same for all years. For each year there is a branch, this year accu2017, where all the year specific material goes.

I have no idea what stonkingly means (there’s that whole ‘UK and US are two countries separated by a common language’ issue cropping up again) [1], but I’m sure the new conference web site will, indeed, be brilliant. Contact Russel if you would like to help.

Committee spotlight

Since Jim Hague volunteered to perform the website migration, he has been working as a co-opted member of the committee. Jim first learned C as a postgrad back in 1984. He bought edition 1 of The C++ Programming Language when it was first published, and has followed the C and C++ world ever since. He has enjoyed a 25-plus year career as a jobbing programmer, during which he’s worked on projects from an embedded JVM to air traffic control systems. He discovered the ACCU conference in 2002, was bowled over to be able to learn about C++ (and lots more besides) from the actual people doing the steering, and gradually got sucked in. He founded the Oxford local group and ran it for the first few years, and will tell anyone interested in setting up a local group that it’s not that difficult and they should definitely do it.

Call for volunteers

I'm happy to report that Russel Winder has filled out his conference committee. Thank you to everyone who volunteered.

We still have several open positions:

• We still need an additional auditor to fill out my term. This is a low commitment position that should take only a few hours of your time in late March or early April. Please send me an email if you are willing to join Guy Davidson on the auditing team.
• Jim Hague reports that the ACCU web site uses Xaraya, a PHP framework that has been moribund for the last 4 years at least, and a replacement is overdue. He regrets he has neither the time nor the skills necessary for that, and hopes one or more volunteers with the appropriate skills will step forward.
• We are hoping to recruit someone to assist Martin Moene with the web site sys admin duties. Please contact me if you are interested.

Journals

In the past two months CVu and Overload have published articles by Silas Brown (three!), Thaddaeus Frogley, Pete Goodliffe, Sergey Ignatchenko, Baron M (a nom de plume, perhaps?), Chris Oldwood (two), Adam Tornhill, Jonathan Wakely (two), and Russel Winder. In addition, Roger Orr set and moderated the Code Critique Competition; and our intrepid editors, Fran and Steve, provided their editorials and produced top-notch publications. Please consider joining this august group of authors by contributing an article.

Note

[1] Yes – I know – Google is my friend: stonk – to bombard with concentrated artillery fire; stonking – used to emphasize something remarkable, exciting, or very large; stonkingly – something that is exceptionally good. One of these is not like the others.

Notes: 

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