From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jan 7 19:42:57 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 7 Jan 2012 19:42:57 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: GNOME Shell, Unity, and the Fuuuuuuuture! Message-ID: <20120108004257.GC16039@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Just like every other desktop environment recently, the GNOME desktop environment has been looking to update its WIMPy interface. GNOME 3 brings with it two prominent options: GNOME-Shell and Unity. Which interface will be the ultimate victor? In the left corner, wearing orange trunks, is the Unity Upholder, Darcy Casselman. In the right corner, wearing aubergine trunks, is the GNOME Shell Gorilla, Chris Irwin. In this desktop deathmatch, Darcy and Chris will battle to the.. wait a minute. They aren't fighting! They're standing together weaving daisies into each other's hair! (Where did they find daisies in January?) They aren't going to fight at all! Instead, they will be demonstrating the strengths of the two desktops, discuss their goals, and address some common complaints. They will start spreading the love at 7pm. If this sounds too touchy-feely for you, how about using your brains? This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is MusicBrainz, a project to develop an encylopedia/database of music information, all released under open licences. You can use MusicBrainz to tag music or build website that play with data via web services. If you are so inclined, you can make a donation at the meeting, or by getting in touch with me. The meeting will be held at our usual location St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Victoria and Weber Streets) Kitchener There is some Hippie Bus parking in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and if you are crazy you can park your bike along the side of the building. Photos and maps of the location are on the website. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Feb 4 02:06:49 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 4 Feb 2012 02:06:49 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: High-Availability Linux Message-ID: <20120204070649.GD8767@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Ah February, midpoint of the 10 month Canadian winter. Lots of slush! Lots of dark! Lots of cold! And let's not forget Lonely Singles Day on the 14th, followed by "Family Day" just to rub it in. Is it any wonder so many of us are down? Thank goodness for Big Pharma. Thanks to them, we can take drugs to get out of the dumps. But it's February for our computers too, and they don't have antidepressants to help them. When computers go down, everybody suffers. Is there any hope? Aden Seaman thinks so. He has taken measures to keep his computer servers bright and bubbly at his house, using an alphabet soup of high-availability technology such including DRBD, OCFS2, GlusterFS, Pacemaker and Corosync. He will show us how this toolkit can be used to keep services up even when his hardware feels down. February is not the only cause of computer-related depression, of course. It does not take much reading of eroding privacy rights, online censorship, or DRM. Fortunately the Electronic Frontier Foundation is around to help defend digital rights. In addition to producing helpful software like the "HTTPS Everywhere" Firefox extension, they publicize bad behaviour and fight court cases. This month, they are our FLOSS Fund nominee. If you are so inclined, you can contribute to the KWLUG donation at the meeting, or get in touch with me and we'll figure out a way for you to contribute. In other cheery news: snakes! Specifically: Python. A new Python group named WatPy (http://watpy.ca) is holding its first meeting on Thursday, Feb 9, at the Death Valley's Little Brother Espresso/Whiskey Bar. You can sign up for their low-volume mailing list on their website, or contact the organizer directly: albert at albertoconnor.ca There's a new Ubuntu Long-Term Release planned for this April, and the local Ubuntu Canada LoCo wants you to help test it out and squish bugs on March 3, during the Ubuntu Global Jam. See http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-ca/1498/detail/ for more information. The Ubuntu people also want you to know about local Ubuntu Hours: the first Friday of the month at Misty Mountain Coffee Bar in Kitchener, and the third Wednesday of the month at the Duke of Wellington. I bet you can find more information about these (and many other) events at the http://www.watcamp.com/calendar site. As usual, our meeting will be held at St John's Kitchen: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There is some car parking in the thrift store parking lot, and you can chain your Nardils and Concertas to the side of the building. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Mar 3 05:19:41 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 3 Mar 2012 02:19:41 -0800 (PST) Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Puppet Message-ID: <1330769981.25923.YahooMailNeo@web125703.mail.ne1.yahoo.com> As you may know, systems administration is the ideal vocation for those who aspire to become despotic rulers of small countries. Managing computers requires mercilessly controlling machine configuration, wresting away power from errant users, and fortifying armaments with hardened package configuration and frequent upgrades. While I'm sure Eric Gerlach does not have despotic intentions, there is no question that he is a master of puppets -- or rather, of Puppet, the configuration management system that allows sysadmins to manage configuration, template new deployments, and tightly control package management on armies of machines using a collection of text files and a diabolical understanding of resource dependencies. In this month's KWLUG presentation Eric will show us how we can use the Puppet configuration system to manage our own fiefdoms of servers, as well as how to use Nagios to monitor your installations for disobedience and dissent. Speaking of pulling strings, this month's FLOSS Fund nomination is the curl/libcurl project, which provides flexible, scriptable ways to fetch webpages from the Internet. It is a valuable tool for writing scripts that deal with webpages, and you can read more about it at http://curl.haxx.se . If you are so inclined, you can made a donation at the meeting, or by contacting me. Speaking of crawling faster, the next long-term release of Ubuntu is scheduled to come out at the end of April, and if you read this message in time you might be able to help make it better. The local chapter of Ubuntu Canada (aka Darcy?) is holding an Ubuntu Global Jam this Saturday (that's today!) at Kwartzlab. They will be testing out the 12.04 beta and fixing things. http://www.kwartzlab.ca/2012/02/ubuntu-global-jam-saturday/ Speaking of veins that pump with fear, the WatPy folks would like you to know that Python training is happening. It will be held on March 19 at Kwartzlab, starting at 7pm. See http://watpy.ca for more information. Speaking of life burning faster, assorted Canadian legislation that relates to privacy and copyright are making their way through the House of Commons. A (largely non-technical) group in town called TransitionKW is interested in running a "Conversation Cafe" on Internet Democracy, and they are looking for people interested in the topic to help participate and organize the event. If you are interested, please contact Alisa at resiliantcommunities at transitionkw.ca . Speaking of crumbling away, this obscure reference is just about spent, so why don't I just tell you where the meeting will be held? St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street N (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There are maps and pictures on the website, some car parking at the Worth A Second Look parking lot, and marionnette parking along the side of the building. - Paul From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Mar 31 21:44:33 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:44:33 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Appgen, UbuntuTV Message-ID: <20120401014400.GA4878@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> I'm sure you've heard it before: nobody makes money from Linux. It's free! And therefore noncommercial! In different ways, this month's presentations illustrate just how commercial Linux can be. First up is old Linux commercialization: Appgen, which produces a proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that has both Linux backends and frontends. William Park uses this system at his workplace, and he finds aspects of Appgen's implementation interesting enough to speak about them. Assuming we get connectivity working properly, he will demonstrate the system, and show us some aspects of Appgen's underlying data structures. Our other presentation is commercial in two ways: it's a product intended for purchase and use in television sets, and it's about television, which always involves commercials. Darcy Casselman will give us a quick tour of Ubuntu's UbuntuTV initiative, which is Canonical's attempt to leverage its Unity interface for the television and PVR market. Despite being commercial (sold to hardware manufactures) the bulk of this project is licenced under the GPL and LGPL. Our FLOSS Fund nominees this month are PhotoRec and TestDisk. Although these utilities are not widely known, they are kind of amazing. TestDisk can find lost/destroyed/deleted partitions on your hard disk and recreate them. PhotoRec can recover specific files from your hard drives largely independent of filesystem. Despite its name, this software can recover more than photos -- it currently supports more than 390 file extensions. You can learn more about these utilities at http://www.cgsecurity.org/ , and you can donate to these projects at the meeting or by getting in touch with me. With some trepidation, many of us are looking forward to the next LTS release of Ubuntu, codenamed Precise Pangolin. (Man. Websearches for "broken error message precise" are going to be awkward.) As is his custom, Darcy and the Ubuntu Canada people are throwing a release party scheduled for Saturday, April 28 at Kwartzlab. Volunteers and cake will be on hand to help you get Ubuntu 12.04 installed on your general computation device of choice. And that's it for this belated meeting announcement, other than telling you where to go: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener Meetings start at 7pm (although helpers to get the space set up are welcome to come for 6:30pm or so). There is some free parking available in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and lots of bike parking available along the side of the building. Maps and pictures of the location are available at http://kwlug.org/locations - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sun May 6 00:42:34 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sun, 6 May 2012 00:42:34 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: GIMP x2 Message-ID: <20120506044234.GP7763@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Okay. You win. The GIMP is not as good as Adobe Photoshop, and I am sorry that I have spent the last sixteen years trying to convince you otherwise. But the GNU Image Manipulation Program is still plenty good, and plenty of people use it to touch up photos and create digital art. This month's KWLUG meeting features presentations from two such users: first-time presenter Julie Dey, and veteran presenter Raul Suarez. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is Unpaper, which performs image manipulations of a different sort. Unpaper is a program that cleans up scanned images of books -- straightening them out, removing black borders, and fixing inadvertant rotations. It is an example of a small but useful tool, and you can read more about it at http://unpaper.berlios.de You can donate to the project during the meeting, or by contacting me offlist. KWLUG is getting short on both presentation topics and FLOSS Fund nominations by people other than Andrew Cant. If you have some ideas in either of these areas, bring them to the meeting. We meet in the usual place: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria St N Kitchener (At the corner of Victoria and Weber) There are photos and maps of the location here: http://kwlug.org/node/709 - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jun 2 00:43:55 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2012 00:43:55 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: IPv6, OpenLayers Message-ID: <20120602044355.GD15756@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> They gave us ample warning. Nobody can question that. We laughed them off as wild-eyed doomsters chaining themselves to data centres, but they were right. They warned us about Peak Address Space, and we kept hooking up phones and refrigerators and door alarms to the Internet, sucking up IPv4 addresses like four-octet candy. Now our networking teeth are rotten, and the supply of public IPv4 addresses is slowing to a trickle. Fortunately, the wild-eyed doomsters offered an alternative: IPv6. Unfortunately, lots of us are still in the dark about IPv6, and are scrambling to understand what is involved in the IPv4 to IPv6 transition. Fortunately, Jeff Voskamp has some of the answers, and he will share them with us at this month's KWLUG presentation. While we are on the topic of poorly-fitting segues, did you know that the OpenLayers library (which has been mentioned in several previous presentations, particularly ones involving OpenStreetMap) can be used for more than mapping? Ralph Janke knows this. He will tell us about it. Also on the topic of awkward segues, this month's FLOSS Fund nominee has both IPv6 and and OpenLayers package. It's a little distribution called Ubuntu, and it does in fact take donations. Who knows? Maybe our FLOSS Fund contribution will double its annual revenues. If you are so inclined, you can contribute to the distribution at the meeting, or by contacting me. As usual, our meeting will be held at St John's Kitchen: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener You can park your protest signs along the side door, and your horseless carriages in the thrift store parking lot. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Jul 7 00:42:03 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 7 Jul 2012 00:42:03 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Android customization Message-ID: <20120707044203.GR15756@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> You would think that "Android" would be a dirty word in this town. Maybe you're right, but there are still a whole lot of people in this region who use Google's OS on their smartphones. Some of those people like to hack and customize their phones -- and at this month's KWLUG meeting we will hear from a few of them. Khalid Baheyeldin and first-time presenter Raul Suarez (son of longtime presenter Raul Suarez) will kick off the meeting by discussing some of the ways they customize their phones, including the installation of third-party firmware such as CyanogenMod. They hope to keep the discussion open-ended, so if you have Android customization experiences to share, please bring them along. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is Ardour, which describes itself as "a full-featured, free and open-source hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation program suitable for professional use." You can find out more about the project at http://ardour.org . You can make a contribution to this project at the meeting, or by contacting me offlist. Although we are chasing down a couple of leads, we are quickly running out of KWLUG presentations. If you have something relevant to Linux or free/open source software that you would be brave enough to present, this would be a great time to pitch a presentation. Again, you can make your pitch during this month's meeting, or by contacting me offlist. If you are interested in Android development, there is a thriving Android Development group in town: http://www.meetup.com/KW-Android-Developers/ If you are interested in learning how to use cryptography to help protect your identity (and you happen to read this email before Saturday afternoon) then this workshop by Jonathan Lamothe might be of interest: http://crypto.eventbrite.ca/ . His workshop (which includes a keysigning party) will be held on Saturday July 7 at 7pm. It is free to attend, but you have to register. If you are interested in new user education and/or how to install Ubintu, then Stephen Paul Weber's July 11 workshop might be of interest. He will work through the process of installing Ubuntu 12.04 on some demonstration machines. You can find more details here: http://kwartzlab.ca/pipermail/discuss_kwartzlab.ca/2012-June/001057.html If you are interested in knowing where to find this Monday's KWLUG meeting, look no further: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street N (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener There is adequate bike parking along the side of the building, adequate car parking in the Worth A Second Look parking lot, and adequate maps and pictures on the KWLUG website. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Aug 10 18:41:24 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2012 18:41:24 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Social Night (at the Rum Runner Pub) Message-ID: <20120810224124.GD2140@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> August is the season for vacationing, and KWLUG is on a road trip this month as well. This month KWLUG is holding a social night, but the party venue is different: we meet at the Rum Runner Pub in Kitchener. Bring your conversation hats and tech demos. Tim the room-booker asks that everybody who attends purchase something from the pub, "if only a fizzy drink", so that the Rum Runner feels it was worth booking us. The festivities start at 7pm. September's meeting will be held at the usual location, St John's Kitchen. Because this is a social night we have no FLOSS Fund contribution scheduled. In other news, it looks like The Working Centre will be hosting Software Freedom Day again this year, but it will be held Saturday Sept 22, not on Sept 15. We are looking for volunteers to help with publicity, event preparation, and to give talks. If you are interested contact Charles at his Gmail account, username chaslinux. If you are in the mood for an actual presentation this month, the WatPy people are holding a talk on "ScyPy and Code Retreate" on August 30. The talk starts at 7pm in the Engineering 6 building at the University of Waterloo. Remember, this month's meeting is at a different location! Rum Runner Pub 1 King Street W (on King at Queen St) Kitchener For more information on the pub visit http://www.rumrunnerpub.com - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Fri Sep 7 23:56:43 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 23:56:43 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: bazaar, Drupal Message-ID: <20120908035643.GC2491@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> NOW PLAYING Theatre of the Bazaar: In this riveting drama, Adam (played by Adam Glauser) struggles against the forces of file mismatches, sprawling software repositories and accidental deletions. He teams up with a misunderstood underdog version control system (played by bazaar) to vanquish their foes and learn about themselves and each other. Glauser gives a fresh face to an old story, in a performance that is getting early Oscar buzz. Rated PG. Adventures in Drupalia: A hapless systems administrator (played by Paul Nijjar) is thrust into the world of web development. Despite the dated visuals (didn't LaTeX go out of style in the 90s?) and blatant miscasting, the film draws viewers into the strange sociology and technology of the Drupal content management system. Rated PG-13. FLOSS Fund LXIV - jQuery: The latest incarnation of this software-exploitation franchise features jQuery (http://jquery.com), and innocent JavaScript library that started out making AJAXy dynamic websites easy to build, and ended up being the victim of wanton philanthropy by KWLUG members. Rated R. COMING SOON Ubuntu Global Jam (Release date: Saturday, Sept 8, 4-8pm). The trials and triumphs of DJ Darcy as he whips up a ragtag group of Free Software fans into Elite Ubuntu Contributors. Will the KW Locos squash enough bugs and launch enough pads to be ready for Ubuntu Dance-a-thon 12.10? Held at Kwartzlab, 283 Duke St West, Kitchener. Rated G. http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-ca/1902/detail/ Software Freedom Day 2012 (Release date: Saturday, Sept 22, 10am-4pm). The 2012 edition of this holiday franchise showcases newbie-friendly talks on writing your own software, free software photography, and transitioning from manufacturing to IT, in addition to beloved holiday traditions like installfests and DVD giveaways. Held at the Queen Street Commons, 43 Queen Street South. Rated G. http://www.theworkingcentre.org/sfd The Internet Democracy Cafe (Release date: Wednesday, Sept 26, 7-9:30pm). This documentary probes into the questions of how changing Canadian legislation affects our ability to peacefully organize and share information over the Internet. Energetic scenes of group discussion in addition to the usual talking heads. Also held at the Queen Street Commons. Rated PG. http://www.transitionkw.ca/InternetDemocracy SHOWTIMES: 7-9pm St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener Consult your local listings for maps and directions: http://kwlug.org - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Sep 29 19:45:03 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:45:03 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Clang! (and LLVM) Message-ID: <20120929234503.GG25208@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> So this month's KWLUG meeting is about compilers. Wait! Compilers are exciting! It can easily be argued that without a free and open source compiler we might not have much of a free and open source software ecosystem at all -- free, high quality compilers lowered the barrier to entry for program development, to the point where anybody with a computer and an itch could write code and give it away. We all owe a debt to gratitude to that most venerable of compiler collections, gcc. But gcc is not the only game in town. Over the past few years a research project at the University of Illinois metastatized into LLVM, a compiler project that used to stand for "Low Level Virtual Machine" and now stands for "LLVM". This project (and its associated C/C++/Objective-C frontend Clang) features a modular infrastructure, interesting profiling tools, and informative debugging messages. LLVM is released under a BSD-style free licence. It has been adopted by commercial companies (most notably Apple), and largish free software projects such as Debian and Fedora are experimenting with building their archives using the LLVM toolchain. I don't know whether the rise of LLVM is a war on GCC, a friendly competition, or just diversity in action. But Behan Webster knows the answers to these and many other compiler-related questions. Behan is an embedded developer embedded deep in LLVM, and will share his heroic (and harrowing?) tales of compilation bravery at this month's KWLUG meeting. This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is another challenger to the establishment: PostgreSQL, which has been keeping MySQL honest since 1995. If you would like to donate to this project, you may do so at the meeting or by contacting me offlist. Maybe you hate low-level C-programming and compilers in general, but for some reason you are still reading this announcement. Good for you! If your predilections tend more towards dynamic languages, you might be interested in the mini CodeRetreat the WatPy people are holding on October 4. A CodeRetreat is an opportunity to learn (or polish) your programming skills with a partner, in a friendly environment. The retreat will start at 6:30pm in the Communitech hub, and you can get more information and register at http://watpy.ca/blog/post/coderetreat2012/ . Without any further abstract syntax, here is some location information for you to parse: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (Corner of Weber and Victoria) Kitchener You can park cars in the Worth A Second Look parking lot and bicycles along the side of the building. - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Nov 3 01:56:55 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2012 01:56:55 -0400 Subject: [kwlug-announce] KWLUG Meeting Monday: ArchLinux Message-ID: <20121103055655.GM1390@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> Aren't you sick and tired of Linux being so easy to use and install? You live-boot a CD, run through a nice graphical installer and -- poof! -- Linux is installed on your desktop or notebook or toaster, and there are never ever any problems. If you are one of the teeming hordes who wish you could relive 1998, boy does Brent Clements have the presentation for you. Brent spent his summer vacation playing with ArchLinux, a distro that is user-friendly in a different way. ArchLinux tries to Keep Things Simple by discarding unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications like GUI-configuration tools or even X-Window environments. You too can spend hours twiddling configuration files with a text editor, and in this month's presentation Brent will show us why you would want to (hint: efficiency, installing exactly the packages you want, learning about how things work under the hood, and the ability to mix binary packages with stuff you compile from source). This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is XBMC, media centre software that can turn a home PC into a home theatre. You can find out more about XBMC by getting into a time machine and attending the October 2010 KWLUG meeting, or by going to http://xbmc.org . If you would like to contribute to the project but will not be attending the meeting, give me a shout and I will hook you up with people who will gladly take your money. There are some interesting talks being put on by the WatPy people on November 6. You can see http://watpy.ca . Or you can attend one of the many many other interesting tech events advertised on the WstCamp calendar: http://www.watcamp.com It is that time of year again: time to beg and plead for KWLUG presentations. Are you working on something nifty that you might want to share? Do you (or somebody you know) work for a company that uses FLOSS and would be willing to talk about it? Would you like to help new Linux users get acquainted to FLOSS with a tutorial or introductory presentation? If so, please be brave and present for the group. For the most part, we are a friendly, non-confrontational audience for the interesting FLOSS-related ideas you would like to spread. .. and that's it, except for the logistics: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at Weber and Victoria) Kitchener You can park your time machines at the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and your helibikes along the side of the building. Maps and pictures of the location are on our website: http://kwlug.org - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org From paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca Sat Dec 1 11:58:41 2012 From: paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca (Paul Nijjar) Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2012 11:58:41 -0500 Subject: [kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Making a Living With FLOSS Message-ID: <20121201165841.GL19329@pirg.uwaterloo.ca> s we all know, the problem with Free Software is that it is free. Sure, Free Software is liberated, so that we can study it and share it and improve it. And sure, Free Software is accessible, so that people all over the world can take advantage of it regardless of their status and income level. Free Software is a great deal for those of us who consume it. But for twenty-odd years now, we have been struggling with the question of how anybody makes money in a world where you take the product of millions of hours of labour and gives it away for no money. Those of you with good memories will remember a presentation from June 2008, when Khalid Baheyeldin revealed his secret strategies for making big bucks in the Free Software world. This month Khalid is back, and he's brought a posse. This month's KWLUG presentation will take the form of (our first? first in a while?) panel discussion on the topic of "Making a Living in FLOSS". Our panellists work in a range of fields and have a range of backgrounds: - The aforementioned Khalid Baheyeldin is an immigrant originally from Egypt. He runs a Drupal consultancy called 2bits.com that focuses on Drupal development and optimization. - Andrew Berry also works in Drupal, but for a larger firm called Lullabot. He worked on Drupal sites instead of his schoolwork, and look where it got him. - Fernando Duran is decidedly not a Drupal developer -- he works in the field of computer and network security, for tech startup I Think Security. He also immigrated to Canada, this time via Spain. - Joe Wennechuk works for PryLynx Corporation, a company that works with the OSCAR open source medical records system. He started his career doing factory work, and transitioned to the IT field a few years ago. - Andrew Cant is a software developer who currently works for SugarCRM. The panellists will their jobs in relation to Free Software, their career paths, and their prospects on the FLOSS job market now and in the future. Bring your questions. This panel discussion might be of interest to those looking to get jobs in the IT field, those transitioning to Canadian employment from other countries, those of us curious about how people actually make money doing that Free Software thing, FLOSS enthusiasts of all kinds, and you. If you know others who would be interested in the topic, please invite them along too. The meeting will start at 7pm. In other news, this month's FLOSS Fund nominee is the PortableApps installer, which you can read about at http://portableapps.com . PortableApps provides a way to package Windows software (often FLOSS) so that it can run without changing the underlying operating system, which makes it handy for installing applications to USB keys. You can contribute to this month's nominee during the meeting, or by contacting me offlist. As usual, our meeting will be held at St John's Kitchen: St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North (at the corner of Victoria and Weber) Kitchener You can park your parachutes in the thrift store parking lot (whatever their colour) and if you are crazy enough to cycle in December there is bike parking along the side of the building. There are maps and photos of the meeting location at http://kwlug.org - Paul -- http://pnijjar.freeshell.org