From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jan 5 17:23:42 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 5 Jan 2008 17:23:42 -0500 (EST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: LinuxMCE Message-ID: <996716.31527.qm@web57605.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Ah, January. Flowers are not poking their gentle heads out of their beds. Birds are not twittering in the trees. Warm sunshine does not stream through our windows. Instead, it's grey, cold, slushy, salt-encrusted and slippery. We leave for work/school in the dark and come home in the dark. Except for extra poundage and massive credit card debt, our Christmas festivities are long forgotten. We skimp on grocery money to pay the extra heating bills. A lonely heap of broken and abandoned New Year's resolutions are piled in a heap in the corner. January isn't for living. January is for hibernating away. Unlike the woodland animals we are not allowed to sleep our Januarys away. Thank goodness we have a KWLUG meeting to look forward to. Not only will this month's meeting infuse our lives with meaning, but it will also help us indulge our cocooning instincts more efficiently. John van Ostrand will tell us about LinuxMCE, a Linux-based distro that turns a home computer into a full-featured entertainment and home automation console. LinuxMCE can be used to play movies and TV shows, make audio streams follow their humans from room to room, act as a network storage device, and even send voice mail to homeowners when it detects intruders. As such, it is a competitor to home entertainment/automation consoles that cost tens of thousands of dollars to install. Best of all, it is intended to be easy to set up and use even for those with little to no Linux background. John will tell us about his LinuxMCE adventures starting at 7:00pm. There are no pre-meeting activities planned for this meeting, although the space will be open for casual discussion and troubleshooting (and casual goodies from the cafe). This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is wxWidgets, a multiplatform GUI toolkit that allows different operating systems to display dialog boxes using their native widget sets. Sound boring? It isn't: wxWidgets makes it easier for developers to write "gateway applications" that we routinely use to demonstrate the virtues of open source to our friends and neighbours. Some such software includes the VLC media player, the Audacity sound editor, and the FileZilla FTP client. You can make a contribution to this project at our meeting, online at http://www.wxwidgets.org/support/spi.htm , or by contacting Andrew (acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca) to make donation arrangements. We'll be curling up for the meeting at the usual den: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles Streets) Maps and photos of the location are on the KWLUG webpage. The Working Centre is a block away from the Kitchener Transit Terminal, and there is free car parking in the back lot after 6pm (and free toboggan parking at the yellow bike rack always). - Paul Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Feb 2 00:27:37 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2008 00:27:37 -0500 (EST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Demo Room Message-ID: <632803.60827.qm@web57605.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Picture it: you've spent months coding up your groundbreaking Linux open-source application that's going to earn you a million-kajillion dollars. There's only one problem: you're so groundbreaking that nobody understands quite what your application does or how it is useful until they see it live. How do you wow a room full of movers and shakers? Ten years ago, you would have put together a slideshow presentation with some animations or maybe even movie clips. Five years ago, you would have booted up a computer and given them a demo (rehearsing it carefully so it was interesting and not boring, of course). And now? Now you handout laptops with your demo on it and let the audience play. In this month's meeting, Lori Paniak will demonstrate how. Using techniques perfected at last year's Ontario Linux Fest, he will show you how to set up demo laptops quickly and efficiently. Then he will show you how to switch demos within 10 minutes so the next presenters can show off *their* demos. This meta-tutorial is intended to be newbie-friendly, and will begin at 7pm. Sadly, we have no formal activities planned for 6pm, but the doors should open around then so folks can chat all things Linux. Last month KWLUG donated $87 to the wxwidgets project. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is coreboot (formerly LinuxBIOS), a project intended to create an open-source BIOS free of proprietary firmware. It is also designed to be fast, portable, and rely on no moving parts. You can find out more at http://coreboot.org . As usual, we will hold our meeting at The Working Centre: 43 Queen Street South Kitchener Between King and Charles Streets There's free car parking in the back lot after 6pm, free dogsled parking in the bike racks always, and a big old bus terminal only a block away. - Paul Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sun Mar 2 00:07:39 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2008 00:07:39 -0500 (EST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: svn, git, USB Linux Message-ID: <918269.90853.qm@web57606.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Linux has come a long way since its humble origins in 1991. And yet, its reputation continues to suffer. Average folks think it is scary and hard to use. Where does this bad image come from? A quick look at fictional headlines tells the tale: "SUBVERSIVE HACKER" DOWNLOADS PROGRAMS OFF THE INTERNET! GIT: PLAGIARISM TOOL OR PUBLIC MENACE? CAREFUL! THAT FLASH DRIVE MIGHT BE CARRYING LINUX! If only they knew. Andrew Cant isn't trying to overthrow the government; he just maintains versioned files of his source code using the Subversion source control system. Starving university student Kyle Spaans isn't using Git to copy his homework; like Git creator Linus Torvalds, he uses this distributed revision control system to manage large (and not so large) software projects while giving others the ability to make first-class copies of the source. And Raul Suarez? It's true he packs a few potent distributions on his USB key. And it is probably true that he has surprised his friends and neighbours by loading "Live-USB" demonstrations of Linux on their computers. But it's so easy and enticing he couldn't help himself. Starting at 7:00pm, Andrew, Kyle and Raul will teach us all about these packages and techniques. Come out and learn -- maybe someday newspaper reporters will write misleading headlines about you, too! Speaking of which, here's more fair and balanced reporting about the LUG: LINUX FACTION PLANS RECRUITMENT CAMPAIGN! It's true. In April we will be holding an especially newbie-friendly introduction to Linux: the applications you can use to get work done, some fun niche uses of the operating system, and a Q&A session. Be sure to invite your favourite newbie out for the April meeting. SHADOWY CABAL BEHIND WIKIPEDIA FUNDING SCHEME! This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is not a software project, but it produces one of the most recognizable names on the Internet: Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation uses open-source software to organize the world's information, and they release this information under licences intended to encourage sharing and derivative works. This month, KWLUG will recognise this initiative by gathering voluntary financial donations to the organization. If you want to donate but can't make the meeting, contact subversive hacker Andrew Cant at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca LINUX LAIR IN PICTURESQUE DOWNTOWN KITCHENER Once again, we'll be holding the meeting at The Working Centre: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South (Between King and Charles Streets) Kitchener There is free newsvan parking in the back after 6pm, free bike parking always, and the meeting location is a block away from the Kitchener Transportation Terminal. Maps and pictures of the location are available on the website (really! They went missing for a while, but they are back now.) - Paul P.S. Even lawyers use Subversion: http://www.linux.com/feature/127803 Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! http://www.flickr.com/gift/ From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Apr 5 16:39:45 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 13:39:45 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Novice Night! Message-ID: <758152.7624.qm@web57604.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Hang in there. Spring is almost here. We've almost survived the winter. Naturally, that means it is time to think about our other fundamental drive: reproduction. Doggies reproduce by having puppies. University professors reproduce by having grad students. How do Linux users propagate the species? Simple. In order for us to make new Linux users, we have to get regular people using Linux. We demonstrate our nurturing love and support via advocacy, installfests, repairfests, mentorship... and education, which is where this month's KWLUG presentation comes in. Raul Suarez (who, incidentally, is one of KWLUG's most captivating speakers) will demonstrate "A Day in the Life of a Home Desktop Linux User", a gentle introduction to the programs and tools a new user might expect to encounter most frequently. This presentation is intended to be completely beginner-friendly, so in order for it to be effective lots of Linux beginners need to attend. If you know of folks (possibly including you!) who might be interested in getting their feet wet in Linux please invite them to join us on Monday. This presentation will begin at 7:00pm. In other news, the FLOSS Fund nominee for this month is GNU PDF, which is an attempt to implement libraries that can use all of the features (forms, embeddings and so on) that the current batch of otherwise-excellent open source PDF readers cannot yet handle. If you would like to be part of the KWLUG donation to this project, you can drop some money in the FLOSS Fund can at the meeting, or you can contact cabal member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca . We are also looking for more FLOSS Fund nominees. If you know of a good project to nominate, please leave a suggestion on our website. It's hard to believe, but we are actually out of nominees after this month! A number of interesting new user groups have sprung up. The Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group (Waterloo DRUG?) meets to celebrate and discuss the Drupal CMS package. They meet on the first Friday of each month at The Working Centre. Visit http://groups.drupal.org/waterloo-region for more information, or fire off an e-mail to richard at weait.com . Stalwart KWLUG member Chris Bruner has started a Linux Users Group in the town of St. Mary's, Ontario. They meet on the first Wednesday of each month at Fullerworks. I don't think they have a web page yet, bt for more information you can contact Chris at cbruner at quadro.net . Finally, we have a request from Google recruiter Yancy Rivera to advertise some (non-local) jobs with the company. Yancy writes: We're looking for engineers with hybrid Unix/Linux System Administration and programming skills who possess strong coding (C, C++, Java) and scripting skills (Perl, Python, or Shell). If you feel that you match this description well or know someone that might please contact me. Below are two links to more detailed job descriptions. http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=23591 http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=23594 Yancy's contact is yancyr at google.com . (And if you have Linux-related (and preferably local) postings you want KWLUG to know about, please drop me a line. Anything else? Oh, right. Our meeting location: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street S Kitchener (between King and Charles Streets) There is free bicycle parking in the back lot always, and free internal combustion engine parking in the back lot after 6pm. The Working Centre is a mere block away from the Kitchener Transportation Terminal, so you don't have to worry about tiring out your nascent Linux users after inviting them to the meeting. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Get a sneak peak at messages with a handy reading pane with All new Yahoo! Mail: http://ca.promos.yahoo.com/newmail/overview2/ From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat May 3 01:53:41 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 2 May 2008 22:53:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Django Message-ID: <805902.1341.qm@web57607.mail.re1.yahoo.com> No, it's not a great game with a strange name. It's a great frame(work) with a strange name that may be derived from a great game with a strange name. It's Django, a popular Python web framework used to develop sites for such sites as Toronto Life and the Washington Post, and at this month's KWLUG meeting a well-rested Kareem Shehata will tell us all about it. This presentation begins at 7pm. For assorted reasons, last month's FLOSS Fund nominee has been deferred to this month, so we will be raising money for GNU PDF, a brave attempt to develop support for annotation, editable forms and other advanced PDF features in open source. Learn more at http://gnupdf.org Other quick tidbits: - The Hamilton LUG is holding a mini-conference on Saturday, June 7. The conference is free and newbie-friendly, but requires registration. See more info at http://conference.hlug.ca/index.php/fs4hb/2008/about - Bob Jonkman alerted the discussion list to an Open Source Census being run by OpenLogic. The idea is to get a clearer idea of who is running Open Source and why. To participate, visit https://www.osscensus.org/ - Chris Bruner reports that the nascent St. Mary's LUG is moving its meetings to the first Tuesday of each month, to avoid conflict with the Tillsonberg LUG. This month's meeting features Jon Wojkowsk demonstrating his jukebox web system. (Chris still doesn't have a web presence for his group, so you can e-mail him at cbruner at quadro.net). - We are still looking for more FLOSS Fund nominees and presentation offers/requests. We are getting pretty low on both of these commodities, so if you have ideas please speak up. There. Short and sweet. Come out to the meeting! The Working Centre 43 Queen Street S Kitchener (Between King and Charles Streets) As always, there is free car parking in the back lot after 6pm, the Kitchener Transit terminal only a block away, and free bike parking always. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Connect with friends from any web browser - no download required. Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger for the Web BETA at http://ca.messenger.yahoo.com/webmessengerpromo.php From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat May 31 01:51:32 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 22:51:32 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Making a Living with FLOSS Message-ID: <798186.31295.qm@web57611.mail.re1.yahoo.com> It's a question that pops up again and again: sure free software is useful. It is extensible and widely available. But how in the world can anyone make a living using software that is usually distributed for free? Take one look at many of our Free Software heroes and it appears that they can't afford haircuts, never mind the 3000 watt speakers, spinner hubcap wheels, and teeth grills the rest of us take for granted. Does making a living in open source resign one to giving up the smaller comforts in life? Fortunately, some folks -- including several KWLUG members -- carve out comfortable livings working with free software. Khalid Baheyeldin runs a successful web development company based on Drupal, and this month he will share his secrets for making a living in Open Source. This presentation begins at 7pm. In FLOSS Fund news, last month we donated $71.00 to the GNU PDF project. This month's nominee is OpenOffice.org, the widespread office suite. You can make a donation at the meeting, or by contacting shadowy cabal member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca . The shadowy cabal also mentions that it is desperate to receive some more project nominations. The next three projects have all been nominated by the same person, so getting some diversity in would be highly beneficial. John Kerr passes on word of a petition concerning Net Neutrality. If you are so inclined, you can sign the petition at http://www.neutrality.ca . Our friends at the Hamilton LUG are holding a newbie-friendly, no-cost conference on Saturday June 7th from 9am to 5pm at St. Andrews United Church, 479 Upper Paradise Road, Hamilton, ON. Attendance is free but registration is required. See http://conference.hlug.ca/index.php/fs4hb/index for more information. As usual (for now?) our meeting will be held at The Working Centre: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South (Between King and Charles Streets) Kitchener The building is a block or two from the Kitchener transit terminal. You can park your lowrider at the back lot after 6pm and your bike at the back always. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Connect with friends from any web browser - no download required. Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger for the Web BETA at http://ca.messenger.yahoo.com/webmessengerpromo.php From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jul 5 20:16:04 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2008 17:16:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: the Linux boot process Message-ID: <608347.82728.qm@web57616.mail.re1.yahoo.com> It's the question every parent dreads: "Mommy, where does Linux come from?" "Well, there was this Finnish studen.." "No! Not Linus Torvalds! How does Linux start up when I press the power on our computer?" When the question comes, how do you answer it in a sensitive and age-appropriate way? This month accomplished parent and Linuxist John van Ostrand will show us how. He will walk us through the mysteries of booting from POST to login. No doubt this will be a family-friendly presentation that will not contain a single rude reference to the fork() command. This presentation begins at 7pm. Last month we appeared to have raised $47 for OpenOffice.org on behalf of the FLOSS Fund. This month's recipient represents the genesis of another first in our little social experiment: Drupal has the distinction of being the first project to serve as our nominee twice. As you probably know, Drupal is a content management system that powers such highly-regarded websites as Amnesty International, the Onion, the Ontario Linux Fest, and... um... askaninja.com . If you so wish, you can contribute to the Fund at the meeting or by contacting secret cabal member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca In other birthing news, the Canadian federal government recently drafted Bill C-61, which redefines copyright for the digital age. The bill has been somewhat controversial, especially with respect to its restrictions on breaking "digital locks" (e.g. playing DVDs in Linux). The full text of the proposed bill is here: http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=3570473&Mode=1&Language=E and there is commentary all over the Internet. You can park yourself at our usual meeting location: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South (Between King and Charles) Kitchener And you can park assorted vehicles to get yourself over here in the back lot (free for all except elephant caravans after 6pm). - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now at http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com. From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Aug 9 19:22:42 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 9 Aug 2008 16:22:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Ethical SEO Message-ID: <358005.13886.qm@web57614.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Let's face it: none of us wants to be unpopular. No matter how defiantly we proclaim otherwise, something inside of us cries out when our coworkers stuff us into lockers, make fun of our fashion sense and steal our favourite 20-sided dice. The Internet was supposed to make this better. Finally, the nerds would have their day! Alas, discovering that you are result 32672 of 32677 in Google searches doesn't feel very good either -- especially when the jocks get their links listed on the first page. Is there any way for you to raise the rank of your search results? Of course -- there's an entire industry devoted to this task, called Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO). But SEO has a reputation for being... skeezy. Is there a way for you to raise the rank of your search results without feeling dirty afterwards? Glenn Cooke will share some of the techniques he uses to keep his pageranking high. This presentation starts at 7:00pm. In FLOSS Fund news, last month we donated 30 Euros ($65 CAD?) to the Drupal Foundation. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is Quanta Plus, a fully-featured web development platform. You can learn more about Quanta Plus at http://quanta.kdewebdev.org/ . If you would like to be part of the KWLUG donation but cannot make the meeting, please contact secret cabal member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca . Of course, no meeting reminder would be complete without a plug for the Ontario Linux Fest. A little birdy tells me that the festival is still looking for sponsors and volunteers to help make this year's conference a success. If you can help, chirp up by e-mailing Richard at richard at weait.com . As usual (for now) the meeting will be held at The Working Centre: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles Streets) There is free Segway parking in the back lot after 6pm, and free bike parking in the back bike rack always. The Working Centre is also very close to the Kitchener Transit Terminal. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail. Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Sep 5 23:37:41 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 5 Sep 2008 20:37:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenStreetMap Message-ID: <92621.24654.qm@web57611.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Wow. September already. Can you feel the gloom encroaching? September is supposed to be the time for new beginnings -- the relaxation of summer over, the frosh yelling froshy slogans in the street, the kids off to school for another 10 months of incarceration. It's a time of fresh starts and hopes just waiting to be dashed on the shoals of reality. And some of us -- even those who supposedly have life direction -- are feeling a little... lost. Where are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? Richard Weait has the answers to these questions, and in this month's long-awaited OpenStreetMap presentation he will tell us the answers. It is a project with the ambitious goal of producing and organizing liberated map data that can be used with all of the flexibility and freedoms of open source software. In some sense it is the ultimate existential project: those of us without direction can look it up, and those of us who find ourselves in uncharted territory can pull out a GPS and collect data to be integrated into the project's data. Richard will share the philosophy of OpenStreetMap, how it works, why he thinks it is superior to traditional mapping data, and how we can contribute. He has even promised to show concrete evidence that people can make their livings using the project. This presentation starts at 7pm. Richard also points out that some nice German people made an animation of the process in mappihg Toronto: http://www.geofabrik.de/gallery/history/#toronto Last month, FLOSS Fund contributors raised $51.00 for Quanta Plus, the web development environment. This month's nominee is an obscure little project called the Apache Software Foundation, which develops a webserver you may have used once or twice. If you are so inclined, you can make a contribution to the Apache Software Foundation at the meeting, or by contacting Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca . Also of interest this month: Software Freedom Day is on September 20. There are rumblings that Waterloo-oriented events are in the works, but I don't have details. To learn more about Software Freedom Day, visit http://softwarefreedomday.org/ In Drupal news, Khalid asked me to publicize the October KW Drupal User Group meeting, which is happening on October 3rd. This meeting features a special presentation by James Walker, a Drupal rockstar who will teach us about developing modules in Drupal. Khalid says that people who attended the Django presentation a while back are likely to be interested in this one as well. In calendaring news, our very own Lori Paniak has taken it upon himself to collect information about FLOSS-related events in Southern Ontario. See http://kwlug.org/node/611 for more. Oh yeah. There's this little event called Ontario Linux Fest. http://www.onlinux.ca/ I guess it would be cute to close this rather long missive by telling you that I don't know where this month's KWLUG meeting is. But that would be a lie, because the meeting will be held at: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles streets) There are maps (albeit not OpenStreetMaps) on the website. There is free gas-guzzler parking in the back lot after 6pm, and free bike parking in the back bike rack always. Also, you can park your existential angst at the door. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now at http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com. From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Oct 4 02:36:46 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 23:36:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Stop! Hey! What's that sound? Message-ID: <156066.58194.qm@web57609.mail.re1.yahoo.com> There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear. It appears that my computer is... beeping at me. And playing music at me. And making funny squishy sounds when I move windows on the screen. How did this come to pass? Our resident audio guru Brent Clements knows, and at this month's KWLUG meeting this young man will speak his mind, telling us about the history, configuration, use and abuse of sound on Linux. This presentation will begin at 7pm. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is the Internet Archive. In addition to hosting the Wayback Machine archive.org features public-domain materials such as the Prelinger Archives and "Open Source movies" released under Creative Commons licenses. In non-meeting news, Ontario Linux Fest is this month! Topics include "FLOSS in Education", "Version control for mere mortals". Keynote speakers include Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame) and Jon Maddog Hall. Registration is open now. If you're looking for a ride or to share hotel accomodations, get in touch (with me, I guess) and I will forward your requests. Check out http://onlinux.ca for more info. If you've been looking at what's going down, you'll realize that thanks to the federal election the changes to Canada's copyright act (Bill C-61) have been shelved for the time being. However, intrepid KWLUG members have been keeping the issue of copyright on the agenda. Denver Gingerich summarized a Kitchener-Waterloo debate at the University of Waterloo where the issue came up (see question 2c): http://wsic.uwaterloo.ca/wiki/2008_Federal_Candidates_Debate_Summary In addition, Bob Jonkman has been keeping a list of upcoming all-candidates meetings so you can find out what your candidates think: http://www.fairvote.ca/WaterlooRegion#All-Candidates_Debates Paranoia strikes deep, so I never know whether I have forgotten something. Maybe I should tell you where the meeting is? The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South (the side with the cafe) (Between King and Charles streets) Kitchener There are photos and maps of the meeting location on the website. - Paul P.S. I did forget something. Occasionally people send us job listings. We usually publish those to the kwlug-disc mailing list. __________________________________________________________________ Instant Messaging, free SMS, sharing photos and more... Try the new Yahoo! Canada Messenger at http://ca.beta.messenger.yahoo.com/ From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Nov 1 01:50:08 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:50:08 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: pfSense, m0n0wall Message-ID: <634071.50221.qm@web57611.mail.re1.yahoo.com> (Apologies to those who got this twice.) Oh man. Here we go again. The trees have lost most of their leaves. It's dark by mid-afternoon. The Christmas bombardment has started. I don't know about you, but I've been packing on the layers of protective fat for the cold season (supplementing the layers of fat developed over last fall, summer and winter). The heartless cold season is upon us, and I for one am ready to climb into a cave, stick a big KEEP OUT sign at the entrance and sleep for the next six months. Unfortunately, the bad guys don't hibernate. They're always trying to crack our password lists and worm into our SSH ports and DDOS our webservers. What's a poor computer user to do? This month, Kiwi Ssennyonjo will tell us about some powerful firewall projects that can help us hibernate a little easier. m0n0wall aims to be a full-fledged firewall distribution optimized to run off a USB key, allowing you to transform a meek personal computer into an anti-badguy warrior that serves as a switch, router and firewall. pfSense is the big brother of m0n0wall, intended for distribution on computers. Both of these projects are lean, mean variants of FreeBSD -- m0n0wall stores its configuration in a single XML file. This presentation starts at 7pm. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is a pleasant departure from the projects we have been supporting recently. Michel and Sylvie Xhaard, two ordinary Frenchpeople who took it upon themselves to write the SPCA5xx kernel driver for webcams. As with many open source projects, this initiative grew and grew, and now their drivers support over 280 webcam models. If you would like to join our donation just cabal member Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca In sadder news, KWLUG member Donald Tees died on October 7. His obituary appeared in the Record: http://www.therecord.com/news/obituaries/obituaries2020_5260933.html We will miss him. The world keeps spinning, I guess, so if you won't be slumbering please join us at our usual meeting place: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener Between King and Charles Maps and pics are on the website, I hope, and you can park your tricycles in the back lot for free after 6pm. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Yahoo! Canada Toolbar: Search from anywhere on the web, and bookmark your favourite sites. Download it now at http://ca.toolbar.yahoo.com. From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Nov 29 03:09:37 2008 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:09:37 -0800 (PST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenLaszlo Message-ID: <823810.70312.qm@web57601.mail.re1.yahoo.com> This Monday we meet. Raul shows OpenLaszlo: A rich web framework. Create sites that gleam Flashy polished dynamic. All with XML. Although not famous Famous websites run on it Pandora.com Come with a laptop And Raul will hand you files For living demos. Be here at seven Lest he begin without you And you miss something. Money for The GIMP Will also be collected For FLOSS Fund this month. You may donate cash But it is voluntary So you don't have to. (FLOSS Fund Nominees: All gone. The queue is empty. Come with suggestions.) Number forty-three Queen Street South in Kitchener Is where you should go. You can take the bus. If you choose to take a car Park in the back lot. If you want pictures: kwlug.org Maps are there as well. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail. Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca