From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Jan 2 22:31:18 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 19:31:18 -0800 (PST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Tiling Window Managers Message-ID: <230878.64514.qm@web57607.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Oh January. Along with credit card debt and bitter cold you bombard us with your expectations, and in response we dutifully make our resolutions. Some of us resolve to manage our waistlines, insisting that we'll exercise every single day and get a health club membership and actually use it this time. Some of us resolve to manage our finances, promising to cut up our credit cards and budget wisely and never, ever be tempted by gargantuan plasma TVs and androidy phones. Some of us resolve to manage our relationships better, vowing to phone Mom more often and spend time with the kids and make a habit of coming home from work on time. And then comes February, and all of our resolve has mysteriously evaporated away. Some of us have been on that metaphorical treadmill a few times too often. Fat, broke, and dysfunctional, we choose more... moderate... resolutions. Some of us, for example, resolve to manage our windows better (not to be confused with managing Windows, a subject not appropriate for a family-friendly announcement). Our virtual desktops are a-clutter with open programs, and we keep getting distracted by our web browsers when flipping through windows and... argh! Fortunately, Kyle Spaans has an answer to share with us. This month he will discuss tiling window managers, which lay out windows so that nothing overlaps. You might think that only crazy people would be attracted to such a scheme, but Kyle will demonstrate why they may be relevant to your life. He will demonstrate the cool factor (as well as the care and feeding of) the StumpWM, dwm, and XMonad window managers. If nothing else, his presentation will demonstrate just how strikingly flexible the Linux desktop can be, which is something you can appreciate well past February. This presentation will start at 7pm. Our FLOSS Fund nominee for January is OpenVPN, which is used to create secure private networks over the Internet. Unlike some other VPN solutions (which I should not comment on in a family-friendly announcement) OpenVPN is designed to combine security with ease of use. Their website is http://www.openvpn.org . If you would like to contribute, you can attend the meeting, contact Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca . Also at this meeting, Richard will tell us about the filming of a Linux User Group documentary (?!) that he is conspiring to create. In addition we may discuss the possibility of trying out a different location for future KWLUG meetings. Also of note: last year our discussion mailing list kwlug-disc has had problems with user registrations. We think the problem has been fixed, so if you would like to join, the website signup is: http://kwlug.org/mailman/listinfo/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org This month's meeting will be held at our usual location: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles streets) There is free rowing machine parking at the back lot after 6pm, free exercise bike parking always, and a handy-dandy transportation terminal a couple of blocks 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 Sat Jan 24 16:32:38 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:32:38 -0800 (PST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Richard M. Stallman at UW: January 29 Message-ID: <613998.40404.qm@web57612.mail.re1.yahoo.com> This is a Very Special Announcement about a Very Special Speaker who is coming to the University of Waterloo next Thursday. Richard M. Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation and one of the most influential driving forces in the FLOSS world. Some of you may remember that Stallman gave a (pretty good) talk at the University of Waterloo a few years ago. Well, those wily schemers at UW's Computer Science Club have organized another Stallman lecture. This will be held Thursday, January 29 at 3:30pm in Hagey Hall at the University of Waterloo. Stallman will speak about the Free Software Movement. Admission to this event is free (as in beer) and open to the general public. You can read more about the talk at these websites: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/Hagey_Hall_Theatre-2009-01-29-3:30_PM http://www.fsf.org/events/20090129waterloo Ordinarily I would have tried to include this Very Special Announcement in the monthly KWLUG meeting reminder. However, I did not find out about this in time for the last announcement, and given the prominence of the speaker I figured some of you might be angry at me if I did not let you know ahead of time. So instead you can be angry at me for flooding you with two announcements in one month. Note that this talk is not organized by KWLUG, and that we will be having our regular KWLUG meeting on Feburary 4 (albeit in a new and Very Special Location). I will send out an announcement about that meeting next week, which will include other local events such as the Mobile Development seminars being held on Feb 4 at the Accelerator Centre. If ever you have other relevant events you would like mentioned, feel free to drop me a line. - 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 Fri Jan 30 22:30:52 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:30:52 -0800 (PST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Nagios (NOTE NEW LOCATION) Message-ID: <867856.56437.qm@web57612.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Everyone says that we are in an information age. Keeping our eyes on the world is plusimportant in this brave new era. Loyal citizens don't want to know about server problems when their users complain; they want the servers to divulge their problems themselves. This is why Nagios exists. With the miracle of network monitoring you too will experience the joy of receiving SMS messages from your file server. Your printers can call you at 3am to tell you they are alone and running out of toner. Your network switch can let you know that a few too many users are using a little too much bandwidth. All components of your network can report to you, ensuring the health of your networks and hardware. Those who tell citizens that sysadmins need sleep and social lives are talking nothing but duckspeak; sysadmins are underworked and overpaid and should do more to demonstrate their loyalty to The System. Our very own goodthinker Andrew Cant has visited the world of Nagios, and on Monday he will tell us all about it. (Rumour has it that he will also introduce the magic technology of SNMP, although I am not sure he has heard that rumour yet.) In FLOSS Fund news, the nominee this month is the W3C Validator Donation Program. The W3C validators are used by web designers everywhere to ensure their pages are compliant to standards, thus contributing to a good bellyfeel for their authors and a triumphant victory against Browser unloyalty. You will use the tools at http://validator.w3.org/source/ to ensure the webpages you design are in compliance. In event news, the Free and Open Source Learning Centre and FossFactory.org are teaming up to put on an event on Free/Open Source Mobile Development. Loyal developers for the iPhone, OpenMoko and Android will lead workshops on developing for their platforms. This event will be held at the Accelerator Centre in the Waterloo Tech Park on Feb 4 2009. To register visit http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/yyz1 . In location news, our old location of 43 Queen Street has always been our enemy, and our new location of 58 Queen Street has always been our ally. 58 Queen Street is across the street from 43 Queen, and citizens can enter via the front door. Parking remains (and has always been) in the back lot of 43 Queen. The location is The Working Centre 58 Queen Street South (Still between King and Charles) Kitchener Maps and photos of the location are here: http://kwlug.org/node/634 - 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 Fri Feb 27 19:09:04 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:09:04 -0800 (PST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Asterisk on Embedded Devices (NOTE OLD LOCATION) Message-ID: <974092.85800.qm@web57601.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Everybody loves those hackable router boxes, right? You can turn them into GPS devices and repeaters and controllers for robotic vacuum cleaners. And of course everybody loves Asterisk, the open source PBX system that has geeks the world drooling over the thought of setting up telephone exchanges on commodity computers. And what could be better than taking two great things that everybody likes and putting them together? Like chocolate and chili peppers, like bacon and avacado, like RMS and Bulgarian folk dancing, this month Lori Paniak brings together Asterisk and an Asus WL-500g router. He will go through general setup, configuring Asterisk to work with VOIP, dealing with voicemail and (if our flaky internet connection decides to work on Monday) sending real live transmissions to the world! This presentation starts at 7pm. There are a couple of important notes about the meeting: 0. The meeting will be held at our usual location: 43 Queen Street South. 1. The parking lot behind the building has been closed by the City of Kitchener so that they can build... a parking lot. See http://www.kitchener.ca/charlesbenton/ for more information. It looks like the parking lot will remain closed until 2010, so you may want to think about carpooling (or use transit or bicycles or your feet). In other news, last month we collected $62.25 for the W3C Validator on behalf of the FLOSS Fund. As it turns out that money has not been donated yet (the PayPal link on their web page... isn't valid) but Andrew is working on it. Meanwhile our FLOSS Fund nominee for March is on, and it's a worthy one: Xiph.org develops the Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora and FLAC codecs. Their aim is to provide patent/royalty free ways to encode multimedia. If you are so inclined, you can contribute to this project at the meeting, or contact me and I can help make arrangements. In community event news, the KW Perl Mongers are doing some hardware hacking of their own: they are making a bulk purchase of Arduino prototyping boards in preparation for their April meeting. See http://kw.pm.org/wiki/index.cgi?ArduinoHardwareHacking . They will be making the order the first week of March, so contact them quickly if you want to get in on the deal. Again, our meeting will be held at The Working Centre (Queen Street Commons building) 43 Queen Street South (Between King and Charles) Kitchener There is some pay parking across the street, and there may be other lots available. (The City of Kitchener link has a PDF map with available parking.) - 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 Apr 4 01:14:43 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2009 22:14:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: iSCSI Message-ID: <741772.93363.qm@web57612.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Congruatulations! If you're reading this, you probably survived winter. Now you get to take on spring cleaning. Whee! Beat those rugs! Air out those rooms! Clear those overwintered garden beds! Tune up that bicycle! Or you could consolidate all of the data storage across the 27 machines that make up your home network. That counts as spring cleaning, too. You can centralize all those home videos and accounting records and music and revolutionary manifestos into a centralized storage cabinet, allowing you to manage backups and redundancy in one location. In addition to being cleverly palindromic, iSCSI allows you to transmit hard drive commands over your local network, so your 27 computers can all treat your central storage similarly to local disk. In this month's KWLUG presentation, John van Ostrand will reveal the secrets of using iSCSI for your own nefarious purposes. This presentation will start at 7pm. Speaking of spring cleaning, there is a bargeload of announcements to share before they start collecting dust: First of all is our FLOSS Fund nominee for the month, which is none other than the lightweight distribution Puppy Linux. Puppy is a homebrewed Linux distribution that runs off of CDs, USB keys or hard drives. It is designed for ease of use, and boasts a vibrant user community. Visit http://puppylinux.org to learn more, and contact one of our secretive FLOSS Fund Cabal members (acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca should work) if you would like to contribute but can't attend this month's meeting. Secondly, John Kerr will tell us about an interesting user interface contest for an embedded router device. For a sneak preview visit http://www.ubnt.com/challenge/ . Third, the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commissions (aka the CRTC) is holding some consultations on Internet Traffic Management. If you care about net neutrality issues you might want to check the consultations out: http://isppractices.econsultation.ca/ Fourth, the KW Drupal User's Group wanted to let you know that its April presentation topic is all about jQuery, which is useful in Drupal but potentially of interest to many other web developers. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/20521 for more info. Fifth, there's a neat new group (which may be called GigaWat, but right now lives at http://hackw.net ) which is busy organizing a HackerSpace -- a shared workshop where people build stuff. They describe it as a "YMCA for geeks and artists". They're holding weekly organizational meetings, so you can visit their page to get involved. Once again, our meeting will be held at our usual meeting space: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles Streets) Car parking remains awkward, although I discovered that the small lot across the street at Charles (near the Games Exchange plaza) has free parking after 6pm. There is another parking lot at Charles and Ontario streets, but it is a pay lot. Bike parking is also awkward. There is some space to park bikes behind 58 Queen (the other Working Centre building across the street). There is a railing behind the building that people use for bike parking, but this may not be the most secure solution. Transit parking is easy. The transportation station is still just a couple of blocks away. - 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 Sun May 3 01:10:42 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 22:10:42 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: GnuCash Message-ID: <255871.13905.qm@web57614.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Oh money. Why do you disappear so fast? I put you in my wallet and you evaporate. I deposit you in my bank account and you vanish. I never know where you go. Then I feel lonely and impoverished. If I go to to this month's KWLUG meeting, I'll understand you better. Raul will be talking about GnuCash, a financial management program for homes and small businesses. Raul switched to GnuCash after Quicken locked him out of his own financial data a few years ago, and he has never looked back. He'll start presenting at 7pm. Assuming you don't completely disappear from my wallet before the meeting, maybe I will put you to some good use by contributing to this month's FLOSS Fund entry: the Vim text editor (which, incidentally, I am using to write this letter...). Last month KWLUG members generously donated $87.01 to Puppy Linux. As usual, the meeting will be held at The Working Centre: 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles Streets) There are maps and photos of the meeting location on the website. - Paul __________________________________________________________________ The new Internet Explorer? 8 - Faster, safer, easier. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/ From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri May 29 21:34:43 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 21:34:43 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: OpenLayers Message-ID: <20090530013443.GC21798@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Finally: it's (almost) June. Goodbye overcoats and longjohns and sweaters worn on top of sweaters. Hello to T-shirts and shorts and ugly foam slipper-things. But with all the sunshine and fresh spinach on the horizon, why is Andrew Cant preaching the virtues of layers? It turns out Andrew is one of those Web 2.0 wizards, and he will happily forgo sherbet and fresh air for a chance to sit in front of his computer programming mash-ups. Throw whatever geographic data you want at him -- cow population density and radio transmission towers, political ridings and movie preferences -- and he'll squish them together into compelling and attractive maps. His secret? OpenLayers, a Javascript tool that lets you take in all kinds of geographic data and plot it in interesting ways. At this month's KWLUG meeting, Andrew will tell us all about this tool beginning at 7pm. In FLOSS Fund news, this month's nominee is the Mozilla Foundation, which you might recognize as the caretaker of a certain open source web browser that even your grandparents have heard of. See http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/donate.html for more information. In other FLOSS Fund news, after this month we are out of nominees! If you know of a great open source project that takes financial contributions and deserves our support, please share it on the website, on the kwlug-disc list or by mailing me. The meeting will be held at our usual location: The Working Centre 43 Queen Street South Kitchener (Between King and Charles Streets) Free car parking is still scarce, but I discovered that the bike parking migrated to the bench area beside the bookstore. As always, the transit terminal is a mere block away. Don't be afraid to bundle up and brave the summer elements. - Paul From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jul 4 00:21:12 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 4 Jul 2009 00:21:12 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday (NEW LOCATION): LAMP stack Message-ID: <20090704042111.GL420@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Are you on the Information Superhighway yet? This worldwide network of computers will revolutionize society, and you will not want to be left behind. Using only your home computer and a modem, you can log onto the Superhighway and check stock prices, exchange recipes and get weather reports. One of the most exciting aspects of the Information Superhighway is that it uses a lot of open source software. Pretty much anybody who uses a web browser has visited homepages powered by the LAMP stack -- Linux, Apache, MySQL and a scripting language beginning with the letter P. By installing this software on your computer, you can set up your own Superhighway interchange, populating your own corner of cyberspace. You could put up a homepage with rants and some pictures of your cat. If you are more enterpreneurial, you could advertise your business and reach an audience of thousands. Khalid Baheyeldin makes his living on the Information Superhighway, and he will show us the essentials of working with the LAMP stack for fun and profit. You won't want to miss this presentation, which starts at 7pm. Of course, in order not to miss the presentation you had better show up at the right place, which means paying attention to this ---------------------- IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ---------------------- For the next few meetings (and maybe indefinitely) KWLUG is moving its meetings to the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo: The Heuther Hotel Boardroom 59 King Street North (a few blocks north of Waterloo Town Square) Waterloo, Ontario This month we are meeting in the Boardroom of the hotel. I don't know exactly how to get to the Boardroom, so your best bet is probably to go into the cafe off of King Street and ask the staff there for directions. There are some pictures and maps of the location in cyberspace: http://kwlug.org/node/655 ------------------------ In FLOSS Fund news, last month generous KWLUG members raised $50.96 for the Mozilla Foundation. This month's nominee is GPSBabel, which helps you convert satellite data into fodder for mapping programs. It's like living in the future. You can contribute at the meeting, or you can get in touch with Andrew at acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca to arrange something. In Makerspace news, the Hackerspace people are in the midst of a membership drive, and are planning a big event to share what they have been researching so far. See http://makekw.org/events/20090709 for more info. In Information Superhighway User Group news, KWIUG has revitalized itself and will be holding a summer meeting on July 7. See http://www.kwiug.org for more information. - Paul From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Aug 7 21:08:01 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 21:08:01 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Syslog Servers Message-ID: <20090808010801.GF28874@66bf-pauln2.theworkingcentre.org> "The scariest KWLUG presentation you'll see this summer" -- Dodgers and Eggbert "Almost worth the price of admission" -- Drolling Drone Magazine * * * [Black. Deep voiced guy who voices all the movie trailers speaking.] In an ordinary network... In an ordinary organization... No one expected... The unexpected [Cut to people screaming in an office. Mass pandemonium.] [Cut to black] When the hard drives fail... When the mail stops flowing... When the script kiddies come... How will you know? [Cut to crazed sysadmin pointing to a router.] CRAZED SYSADMIN: It's speaking! It's... trying to tell us something! [Cut to black] This summer... [Cut to different shrieking sysadmin] SHRIEKING SYSADMIN: The mailserver! The mailserver! What's happening?! [Cut to black] Feel the terror... [Cut to REMORSEFUL SYSADMIN quivering in fear] REMORSEFUL SYSADMIN: Why didn't I check the logs? Why didn't I check the logs?! [Cut to black] SYSLOG. What you don't know can hurt you. Coming to a Heuther Hotel near you 7:00pm ---- Although this presentation takes place in a systems administration context, any home user with a home Internet connection and/or two electronic doodads may well get a thrill. In the consession stand we find this month's FLOSS Fund nominee: Mapnik. Mapnik is a graphic toolkit used for making beautiful mapping applications. Its webpage is http://www.mapnik.org In less terrifying news, the Canadian government is taking another stab at drafting an updated copyright bill. (You may have heard of Bill C-61, their former attempt.) This time, they are holding some public consultations, and you have until September 12 to submit some feedback. The official website is http://copyright.econsultation.ca/ , and the prominent copyright watchdog Michael Geist has an informative site http://speakoutoncopyright.ca/ . Also less terrifying is KWLUG member Rob Day's series of Kernel Newbie columns on linux.com . Rob's weekly column will tell you how to develop and debug kernel modules step by step. Check out http://linux.com/learn/linux-training/23685-the-kernel-newbie-corner-your-first-loadable-kernel-module for the first of several installments. Depending on how many giant killer robots they make, the following update about the local Hackerspace (now known as KWArtzlab) may be terrifying: they have incorporated, and are a mere six members away from meeting their founding member goal. See http://www.kwartzlab.ca for more info. This month's meeting will be held at the Boardroom of the Heuther Hotel. Get to the boardroom by going in through King Street, then going up stairs, turning and walking through the bar, and then heading up another flight of stairs and walking to the end of the corridor. The address is: The Heuther Hotel 59 King Street North (at Princess and King) Waterloo, Ontario There are maps and photos of the site on the Interwebs: http://kwlug.org/locations - Paul From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Sep 11 23:47:52 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:47:52 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Apache 2: Electric Boogaloo Message-ID: <20090912034752.GD12966@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> It's September. You know what that means. Back to school! Back to work! And at this month's KWLUG meeting, we're going back to the apache web server! By popular demand, Khalid Baheyeldin will be following up his presentation on the LAMP stack with an in-depth look at the Apache web server. He'll refresh us on basic setup and usage, then share his expertise as a professional web developer by taking us deep into the heart of configuration and tuning. This presentation will begin at 7pm at the Heuther. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is OpenLayers, which Andrew Cant presented a few months ago. OpenLayers is a Javascript library used to display the "slippy maps" used on the OpenStreetMap project. See http://www.openlayers.org for more information. (We're looking for more FLOSS Fund nominees, incidentally. They don't even need to be map related! If you have some worthy projects to nominate, contact me or fill out a nomination on the website.) Of the many things going on this month, the most time-sensitive is the Canadian Copyright Consultation, which ends this Sunday, on September 13. Although it seems likely that this sitting of the federal government will not pass copyright legislation before the next federal election, it is important that we make our voices heard. The "Fair Copyright for Canada" group has posted a 4 page quickstart to contributing here: http://faircopy.ca/participate/ Although it's hard to believe, the arrival of September means it's almost October, which means that it's almost time for Ontario Linux Fest. This year the conference will be taking place in the context of "Toronto Open Source Week" from October 24-30. Along with Ontario Linux Fest, there will be a Wordpress meetup and the FSOSS 2009 conference. You can register for the Ontario Linux Fest at http://onlinux.ca , and learn more about Toronto Open Source week at http://torontoopensourceweek.pbworks.com/ On Saturday, September 19, The Working Centre, KWLUG and the UW Computer Science Club will be celebrating Software Freedom Day. We'll have an Installfest/Troubleshootingfest, 20-minute talks, demonstrations and lots of fun. You can volunteer, or just come out and invite a friend. See http://www.theworkingcentre.org/sfd09 for more information. (Actually, don't check that quite yet. Content will be up tomorrow.) The hackerspace initiative in Kitchener-Waterloo has achieved an important milestone: last month they opened their space! On October 1 the KWartzlab will be having its grand opening, and everybody is invited to check out their new digs. See http://kwartzlab.ca for more information. After a brief August break, the KW Drupal Group is active again. They will have their next meeting on Thursday, September 17. It will be a Q&A roundtable. See http://groups.drupal.org/waterloo-region for more information. Phew. I think that's the avalanche, folks. Now all you need to know is that our meetings have moved (permanently, I think) to the Heuther Hotel: Heuther Hotel 59 King Street North (Corner of Princess and King streets) Waterloo, Ontario We meet on the Boardroom in the third floor. Check out http://kwlug.org/node/655 for pictures and maps. - Paul From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Oct 3 02:22:45 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2009 02:22:45 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Troubleshooting Without Source Code Message-ID: <20091003062244.GG7845@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Man. It's no wonder that people don't use computers any more. They never work as intended. You're working away setting up a firewall or finishing that presentation or typing out a meeting announcement, and -- BOOM -- everything goes awry. You run into a feature that doesn't work as advertised. Your program stops working mysteriously. E-mail chokes and your mail server won't restart properly. Vim eats your meeting announcement and won't give it back. Then what? If you're me you sit in shock and horror, waiting awkwardly for somebody to come by and fix the situation. If you're Tim Laurence, you pull up your sleeves and get to work. Tim is the Code Whisperer: he has an arsenal of nifty utilities and techniques that let him strace and tcpdump his way to the heart of the most belligerent programs -- even when you don't have access to the source code. Best of all, he'll be sharing his software Sherlocking skills at this month's KWLUG meeting. This meeting starts at 7pm. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is CIPPIC, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. This legal clinic researches and advocates for sensibility around technology issues in Canadian law, including copyright, net neutrality and privacy issues. See http://www.cippic.ca for more information. As always, if you would like to contribute to this month's nominee but can't make the meeting, you can either make your own donation or contact me and we'll work something out. As you might have noticed from the miserable weather, summer is over and it's October now. Does that mean our allotment of joy is over for the year? Of course not: Ontario Linux Fest is this month, on October 23 and 24. This year's festival of all things FLOSSY features four tracks (FLOSS 101, Business concerns, Embedded development, and Community) and an impressive array of guest speakers. You can register at http://www.onlinux.ca/olfreg . Before this announcement gets eaten a second time, I had better let you know that this month's KWLUG meeting is at the Heuther Hotel: Boardroom (3rd floor) Heuther Hotel 59 King Street North (Corner of King and Princess Streets) Waterloo See http://www.kwlug.org for pictures and maps. - Paul From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Oct 31 16:16:45 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:16:45 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Munin and Monitoring Message-ID: <20091031201645.GG15187@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> The pressure is building. Feverish and lethargic, chilled and achy, the infected masses are nonetheless clawing at your office door. They howl and moan about forgotten passwords and e-mail issues, but at the first sign of mercy they'll overwhelm you, befouling your keyboard with germy unsanitized hands; coughing in your face instead of into their tattered sleeves. Despite the doors barricaded with chairs and retired 50lb server cases, despite the USB cables strung across the windows to jolt intruders with 4.75 volts of juice, despite your drawer loaded with hand sanitizer and placebo pills, your heart sinks. Are your webservers being slashdotted? Are your e-mail servers buckling under the I/O? As you eye your coworkers, wondering who will be the first to complain of a ticklish throat, you wish there was a quick graphical way to assess the vitals of machines of your network. Fortunately, there are such tools, and this month Khalid Baheyeldin will tell us all about them. He will demonstrate statistics tools like Munin, debugging and profiling tools, status tools tools for gathering statistics. He uses these tools to profile and monitor LAMP servers that process hundreds of thousands of website hits a day, but they can be helpful for establishing baselines and identifying bottlenecks on a single machine. It's only a matter of time. Eventually the doors will buckle and your immune system will fall. With proper monitoring tools, maybe you'll have the strength to stay home and get better instead of lurching into work "to make sure the servers are okay". Assuming you're not a member of the infected throng already, join us at 7pm for another one of Khalid's engaging and informative presentations. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org), an open-source memory tester that has diagnosed many, many, many mysterious problems caused by faulty RAM. If you would like to express your appreciation for this project, you can donate at the meeting or contact me so that I can get you in touch with the Secretive Cabal. Speaking of the shambling hordes, there's a little website known as whitehouse.gov which relaunched, running Drupal: http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal The meeting will be held at the new usual location, the beautifully wood-panelled Heuther Hotel, which only superficially resembles the pub in _Shaun of the Dead_ . Heuther Hotel Boardroom (3rd floor) 59 King Street North (Corner of Princess and King) Waterloo, Ontario Maps, photos and parking information is on the KWLUG website. - Paul (Is my throat feeling ticklish?) From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Dec 5 00:29:39 2009 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 5 Dec 2009 00:29:39 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Remote Access (plus webcast) Message-ID: <20091205052939.GD4349@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> It's that season again: the Happiest Time of the Year! Sleigh-bells in the snow, stop lights blinking a bright red and green, crippling consumer debt, drunken altercations with family members, forced smiles at phony parties, and the music -- everywhere the music! Factor in the infected hordes this year, and it makes me want to stay home and hide. Fortunately, isolation need not equate to loneliness: you can connect to your work network, access remote computers as if you were at the keyboard, or even chat with distant friends from halfway across the globe. This month, Raul Suarez will show us how to do all this and more, providing an end-user approach to SSH, NX, VNC, OpenMeetings and other remote connection technologies. Well after the Happiest Time of the Year is nothing more than a (possibly traumatic) memory, these tools will prove invaluable. You know that awesome Linux computer you're setting up for Gramps this year? Who do you think Gramps will call in February when something has gone wrong? The tools described in this month's meeting will make remote troubleshooting and diagnosis a breeze. This presentation will begin at 7pm at the Heuther. But what if you can't make it? What if you are in Whitehorse or Fredericton? This month, Raul has set up a special webcast just for you! Just follow the instructions on the SUPER BONUS INSTRUCTIONS at the bottom of this e-mail. While you are waiting out the Happiest Time of the Year, why not learn something about autotools? This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is named Diego E. Petton, aka "flameeyes". He is an autotools guru. Autotools is usually behind those "configure" scripts you run when installing programs from source; "flameeyes" has done good work in writing autotools scripts and in documenting what he's learned so you can use autotools too (see http://www.flameeyes.eu/autotools-mythbuster/ ). This month we are honouring him with our contributions to the FLOSS Fund. In local news, Ralph Janke would like you to know that a brand new Ununty LoCo group has sprung into existence. A LoCo is a regional group of Ubuntu enthusiasts who (according to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeams) help "advocate, promote, translate, develop, and otherwise improve Ubuntu". The Waterloo Region LoCo already has 11 members, all of whom would be thrilled if you got involved. See https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-waterloo-region for more information. As usual, our meeting will be held at the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo; Boardroom (3rd floor) Heuther Hotel 59 King St North (at Princess St) Waterloo There be maps and parking tips on the webpage. - Paul (whose heart is three sizes too small) SUPER BONUS INSTRUCTIONS Here are Raul's instructions for getting connected to his webcast on Monday. If you want to get in touch contact rarsa at yahoo.com : --- I will do a webcast of Monday's KWLUG meeting. Of course I will be live at the Heuther hotel but if you cannot make it to the meeting you can join us virtually by going to the following site: http://rarsa.homeip.net:5080/openmeetings All you need is a browser with flash player and functional audio on your computer. Earphones are optional but due to my "slight" accent I'd recommend them. I want to see you all there, but I'm secretly hoping that at least a couple of people can join remotely. Here are the instructions: 1. Go to the web site 2. Enter the credentials User: kwlug pass: kwlug 3. On the first page click the "Start" button 4. On the second page click the "Enter" button 5. On the Mic and camera test setup window just click "Start Conference" 6. On the top right it will show you two buttons, click on the "Start Client (HTTP) 7. At that point you will should see my desktop and hear my voice. I'll try to bring the server up 1/2 hour before the meeting. Disclaimer, If there are issues with the webcast I won't have time to fix them during the presentation. Unfortunately I will have to continue with the presentation to be able to cover all the material. Sometimes exiting the meeting and going in again fixes issues with the video. Please send me any questions.