Past Meetings

Benjamin Turnbull will tell us about Qubes OS, a "reasonably secure operating system".

Tim Laurence automated the watering system for his garden using a Raspberry Pi. He will tell us how he did it. This will be a beginner-friendly presentation. 

Note: For this meeting we are trying a new meeting location. See the 283 Duke St page for details.

James Kelsh will tell us about using the Linux desktop day to day, including work, fun, and maintenance. This presentation is intended to be accessible to new Linux users.

Hadi Moshayedi will discuss different indexing types available in PostgreSQL, discussing the pros and cons of each. He will cover B-Tree, GiST, GIN, Hash, and   BRIN indices.

Khalid Baheyeldin will talk about the backup strategy he uses at home. He achieves versioned, incremental, off-site backups without relying on third-party services, using the dump utility. This presentation is intended to be accessible to new users.

Update: Khalid has posted his slides on his website: https://baheyeldin.com/linux/presentation-incremental-backup-linux.html

Colin Knapp will demonstrate the setup and use of Mail-in-a-Box.

Update: Sandeep's slides are here: 2018-04-Linux_and_Me.pdf;, and Mike's presentation is linked here: http://telium.ca/?a:dd~id:kwlugpresentation.

Sandeep Johri is a non-technical end-user of Linux and free software. He will talk about his journey: how he bounced from distro to distro, how he landed where he is now, where he sees himself going in the future, and lessons learned from the experience. This talk is intended to be accessible for beginners.

Steve Walker (the CTO at Telium)  will discuss the challenges facing the operators of VoIP based PBX equipment,  and how to secure the PBX from hacking and fraud.  The presentation will examine how and why hackers / fraudsters want to attack your PBX, and the risks and costs associated with these attacks.  The presentation will then focus on the attack surface of the PBX, review common vulnerabilities, and describe detection of hacking / fraud, with an emphasis on Asterisk based PBX's.  Finally Steve will take us through best practices in securing the PBX (and telephony environment), including the tools and techniques you should implement to protect your business (or home) system.                   
                                                                              
Since VoIP PBX technology is now within reach of the small business and home user, this presentation should be of interest to anyone involved with VoIP.  If you already operate VoIP equipment and are wondering if this applies to you, here is  a video showing a company that had to pay a $400,000 USD telephone bill after a single weekend attack on their VoIP PBX.

Jim Kelsh will demonstrate how to install Linux on a laptop. He may cover different installation methods and different distributions. This presentation is intended to be friendly to beginners to Linux.

Update: Jim's slides are here: 2018-03-05-linux-installation.odp

Charlie Drage will discuss his work (and contributions) to Kubernetes.

Mary Loubele will lead an interactive demonstration of how to use Elasticsearch to visualize the Twitter API. Bring your laptop loaded with VirtualBox. You will also need a Twitter login to access the API.

To participate, please follow these instructions: http://loubele.org/instructions.pdf

The virtual machine for you to download is here: http://loubele.org/Elastic.ova

The demonstration will cover the following topics:

• How to install Elasticsearch and Kibana on a virtual machine.
• How to get Twitter data from the Twitter API into Elasticsearch.
• How to build insightful visualizations with Kibana.
• How to perform text classification with Elasticsearch.

Update: Unfortunately, Joe had a serious personal situation come up, and won't be able to present this evening. There will still be a meeting but the topic is too be announced. In the worst case we will host a roundtable discussion. Our apologies for the last minute change.

Update: We had a roundtable discussion.

Note: We have shifted this meeting a week forward. Cory Doctorow will be giving a talk on Dec 4 at the University of Waterloo, and there is some chance that tickets will be made available to the public. In this case many KWLUG members would prefer to attend that talk rather than this meeting.

Doug Moen will tell us about Curv, a 3D modelling language he is developing for making art using mathematics. Jonathan Fritz will tell us about his work on Mattermost, an open-source alternative to Slack.

Doug 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.

Jon writes:

Mattermost is an open source alternative to popular enterprise chat applications like Slack, HipChat, and Microsoft Teams. It can be used on the web, your desktop, or your mobile device. The project is MIT-licensed, with an enterprise version available for paid customers that need additional functionality.

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.

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.

Tim Laurence will talk about "How to ruin your life using shell scripts".

Andrew Cant has been playing with JOSM, the Java-based OpenStreetMap editor. He will discuss his experiences thus far.

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.

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.

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

Also this month: we will look at donated routers. We will match them up to power supplies, test them and see whether we can install OpenWRT on them.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.