Having recovered from his illness, Theo Belaire will deliver his long-awaited Rust presentation.

Rust is a new systems language designed by Mozilla, who are using it to develop their next generation browser. What else could it be used for?

Theo Belaire will describe his experiments using Rust for low level kernel code, building a Linux module and developing a time operating system. In the process he will review the basics of the language and what benefits it can give low-level developers.

Bob Jonkman has been playing with the FusionPBX frontend to the telephony system FreeSWITCH. He was asked to set up a telephone conference and was surprised at how easy it was. In this presentation he will lead a live demo of the system. Bring your smartphone or laptop to be part of the demo.

Scott King will share his experiences contributing to the Brave Browser project.

Ronald Barnes will do a mini dive into the Network Manager command line interface, nmcli

Khalid Baheyeldin has been dabbling in a new hobby: amateur astronomy. In this talk he will share some of the surprisingly capable open source software he has found for astronomy, and has been using. This includes: planetarium applications, drivers for telescope control, astrophotography, astrometry, object databases, and more.

Lori Paniak will describe a project he worked on at the University of Waterloo. He writes:

The University of Waterloo School of Computer Science (SCS) recently undertook a project to provide several hundred TB of redundant, multi-building distributed high-performance storage for SCS users and infrastructure use. The first part of this talk will recount the non-linear trajectory of the project from the formulation of goals through to the delivered Ceph system.

The design of this system allows for the modular addition of services utilizing the storage. The first such service, SCS Nextcloud, provides a DropBox-like functionality across all popular client platforms. We will give details of a high-availablity implementation of Nextcloud built using haproxy and containers.

Doug Moen will tell us about Curv, a 3D modelling language he is developing for making art using mathematics. He writes:

Curv is an open source 3D solid modelling language, oriented towards 3D printing, procedurally generated art, and mathematical visualization. It's a pure functional language where geometric shapes are first class values, and are constructed by transforming and combining simpler shapes using an unusually rich collection of operators.

Instead of polyhedral meshes or other boundary representations, Curv represents shapes as pure functions (Function Representation or F-Rep). This is a volumetric representation, where a function maps every point (x,y,z) in 3D space onto the properties of a shape. This representation is powerful, supporting a wide range of shape operators, and is a good match to the volumetric nature of 3D printing.

F-Rep is well suited to being directly rendered by a GPU. To achieve this, Curv code is compiled into GPU shader programs or compute kernels.