Melbourne ADUG Meeting 11 April 2022 - one week early

Meetings
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As Easter Monday falls on our regular meeting day, we are holding the meeting a week early. Make a note NOW. APRIL 11.

When : 6:00pm for a 6:15 start. Where: At the Melbourne Men’s Shed, and on Zoom.

Wanted - topics for extended discussions. Is there a theme you would like discussed? We can talk about Delphi, general tools, programming concepts, components …

Planned - a series of short topics - 5 - 15 minutes.

Subjects Is there something you would like to know that you can ask now, and have someone who knows about it prepare a short answer? Perhaps you would like an example of how a feature is used.

Is there something you have recently discovered that you could share in a quick presentation?

Can you answer someone’s question?

The more topics we can get, the merrier the night …

There are presentations in the pipeline, which will be announced when they have been confirmed.

ADUG Melbourne needs you to reply below with your ideas quickly, so we can find people to answer questions, or know that you have a mini presentation to present.

Talks so far …

An Introduction to FreePlane (Sue King)

Hunting Web Bots (Roger Connell)

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Hi Sue

Will you be providing a list of known requests, etc before the meeting?
It may help spur us old people to add to them.

Either way it sounds like o good meeting.

Regards
Graeme

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Definitely. That is the idea.

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My talk at the meeting will be on Freeplane, an open source mind mapping tool.

Can we have some other talks about products you use that are general purpose tools?

The talks don’t have to be in depth, just an introduction to the tool, some of its features, and why you find it useful.

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Relax, you won’t have to listen silence when my talk is over.

Roger Connell will be training us in as Web Bot hunters.

  • How do you study Bots?
  • We build a bot trap to suck them in
  • We examine the web logs for those in the trap.
  • We progressively build an object to mark them.

All code is Delphi

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Reminder, Melbourne ADUG meeting is tonight 6pm.
Thank you Sue and Roger.

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Notes from the Adug April Meeting 11/04/2022

Bots and FreePlane

Bots

Roger Connell gave us a talk about how his website (AustralianMPs)
captured some bots that then hit it many thousands of times each month,
sometimes taking the site down.

https://www.innovasolutions.com.au/AustralianMps/

He went through a couple of iterations of bot stopping (leaving some of
the more useful bots active)

The current iteration pauses for 30S before throwing an error to the
client (bot) This iteration apparently works ok. An iteration where the
page(s?) returned had no links in them did not work so well.

Apparently one of the causes of the Bots enthusiasm for scanning this
site was that all the links handed back to the client are unique. And
for some things, a CSV file is generated and a unique link to it is
returned. (link remains valid for some days) This CSV creation, link
generation is not something you want the bots hitting repeatedly.

He gave the website the ability (option) to regard any requests from
localhost as a bot, so he could test how it behaved.

FreePlane

Sue King gave us a talk about the FreePlane Mind Mapping Software.

This software is a free, open source Project.

While the term mind map is somewhat recent, apparently use of diagrams
of a similar nature trace back centuries.
They can be created by hand (and/or with sticky notes)

Mind mapping can improve learning, design like brain, lets you see
hierarchy and connection.

(Wikipedia)
A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information in a
hierarchy, showing relationships among pieces of the whole

Sue created a (partial) sample Holiday Mind mapping (Project?) for us.
Adding assorted thoughts provided by the participants of the meeting.

Some components of this Map were:

Where: Overseas, Australia
Preparation:

  • Travel Documents:
  •   Passports: Check if need to renew, time frame, state of progress...
  • Pet Sitting:
  •   Friend

  •   Kennel
  • House Sitting: Options
    etc.

You could add detail to the Blocks, as well as notes, hyperlinks,
progress bar, etc. Also add links to indicate how one block was related
(relied on?) another block. Add background image.

It all seemed rather good.
Seemed like quite a lot of keyboard shortcuts for the pro user, but also
a fair gui.

Freeplane website
https://www.freeplane.org/

FullCircle Mag #130, elmer perry has good Mind Map article.

Thank You Sue and Roger

Next Month

Grahame Grieve: Writing Code for Delphi and Lazarus.