Past Meetings

Colin Knapp will discuss Gitlab, an online git repository.

Tim Laurence will first learn about and then present Docker, the platform that allows people to deploy software inside application containers.
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Nathan Fish will discuss the importance of choosing the right license for software you write or modify, and some guidelines for doing so.

Khalid Baheyeldin will share some of his adventures flashing an Acer A500 tablet with OmniROM. He will walk us through the process of upgrading his tablet from the stock (outdated) Android version installed by the vendor to a more recent third party ROM. He found that his 2.5 year old tablet became faster as a result.

UPDATE: Khalid's slides are here and Nathan's are here.

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Important! Our usual meeting space is under renovations this month, so this month's meeting will be held at a different Working Centre location:

The Working Centre
58 Queen Street South
(near the corner of Charles and Queen)
Kitchener

Sorry for the last minute notice.

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Joe Wennechuk will tell us about the Ansible change management system, which focuses on simplicity, ease of use, security, and reliability.

Tim Laurence will tell us about Puppet, including an overview of change management systems in general.
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Khalid Baheyeldin went on an epic journey to set up "The Cloud" in his home, building virtual machines for testing and development.

In this presentation, he shares what he has learned, including the use of virt-install, virsh, virt-top and virt-viewer. His presentation will focus on commandline tools for creating, deploying, and managing virtual machine servers.

Update: Khalid has posted his slides on his website. We have mirrored the slides locally as well.
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Bob Jonkman and Jeff Smith will join forces and discuss two "self-hosted" cloud storage options: OwnCloud and the integrated "private cloud" services available on Synology NAS devices.

Video from this presentation is now available: https://archive.org/details/kwlug-cloud-storage-shootout-2014-10-06
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Join us as we celebrate Software Freedom Day.

This year the Kitchener-Waterloo celebrations will feature a number of presentations related to the creation and organization of multimedia, some free culture and free software giveaways, and snacks.

The celebrations will be held at The Working Centre, at 58 Queen Street South and 43 Queen Street South, from 10am-4pm.

For more information check out our wiki page at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2014/Canada/Kitchener/TWC. You can also visit the main Software Freedom Day site.

In addition to attendees, volunteers and sponsors are welcome. Contact sfd at theworkingcentre.org to get in touch.

Adam Glauser will show us some arcana related to XBMC, including setting up remote controls with LIRC and configuring launchers.
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Khalid Baheyeldin will show us how he uses the OpenWrt router distribution to track bandwidth use in his home. He will show us what tools are available to inspect his network's traffic, how he customized those tools to report usage per device, and how he keeps history by hour, day and month.
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NOTE: the High Availability talk has been put on hiatus again. Our apologies for this.

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This month's meeting will consist of some short, informal talks:

- Khalid Baheyeldin will discuss his adventures in getting free HD TV using an antenna.
- Tim Laurence will share "10 reasons Linux sucks!"
- Brian Bentley and Bob Jonkman will share their adventures in evangelizing Linux to the Bits and Bytes Computer Club
- Paul Nijjar will talk about the process of putting together the KWLUG podcast.

Update: Here are slides and slide sources from Paul's talk.
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Tim Laurence will tell us about AppArmor. He writes:

AppArmor promises to provide easy to use application security.

What does it do? How do you bend it to your will? Why should you care?

Tim thinks AppArmor is pretty neat. He will explain what is all about and show just how easy it can be to use.

Update: here are the slides and demofiles from Tim's talk: 2014-06-AppArmorTalk.tgz

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Just in time to miss tax season, this month's meeting will feature two presentations on free-software accounting systems:

- John Kerr and/or Brent Clements will present GnuCash, a graphical double-entry bookkeeping system.

- For those who find GUIs too intimidating, Chris Frey will present ledger, a commandline accounting system that processes text files of your earnings and expenses.

Update: Chris has made his sample ledger file available: 2014-05-demo-ldg.txt (you can rename this to 2014-05-demo.ldg to make it a proper Ledger file).

OpenSCAD is a script-driven, free software 3D CAD modeller that is widely used in the maker and 3D-printing community. Marius Kintel (who happens to be the lead developer of the project) will tell us about OpenSCAD and demonstrate its use.
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It's March! It's March! February has somehow ended! Against all odds, March has somehow arrived! This calls for a celebration: namely our longstanding KWLUG tradition of having a March meeting -- in March, even. Our festivities will include two presentations, at least one of which will be beginner-friendly. John Kerr will tell us about the economics of free software, including how it affects consumers and taxpayers.

This month's other presentation will be about FirefoxOS, a project by the Mozilla Foundation. FirefoxOS extends the trend of building mobile phone OSes named after web browsers (and built on free software). Andrew Cant will tell us more about this project and its status (surprise! You can actually get a phone with FirefoxOS on it in 14 countries, none of which are Canada.)

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This meeting will be beginner-friendly.

John Eddie Kerr will tell us how free software affects consumers and taxpayers.

Andrew Cant will tell us about FirefoxOS, the Mozilla Foundation's attempt to break into the mobile computing operating system space.

Lori Paniak will tell us about Samba, the venerable open-source interoperability suite with Windows systems. He will show us some of the features included in the latest version of Samba, including its ability to serve as a domain controller.
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UPDATE: Because of the blizzard warning tonight, the scheduled presentation on high-availability clusters will be rescheduled, as will the official meeting. Unofficially it appears that some people will be present, so you can come in for an informal meeting if you wish.
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I know, I know: sending an email is just like sending a postcard. Like postcards, emails describe happy times and quick notes intended to provoke envy. Like postcards, emails contain joyful pictures of cultural fnord landmarks. Like postcards, emails should always be signed. Since I did not sign this meeting announcement, how do you know that I wrote it? Can you actually be sure that I am sitting on a sunny Nova Scotian beach sipping fruity beverages? Maybe this is all a sham. Maybe some nefarious organization intercepted this meeting announcement and inserted unwholesome messages? It's enough to provoke existential angst.

Fortunately, this month Bob Jonkman will demonstrate ways to prove that we actually exist. In particular, he will fnord show us the hows and whys of encrypting emails with GPG and the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. He will reveal the secrets of why to encrypt email, how cryptography works, and how he manages to communicate with Alice.

If you are already a keysigning wizard then Bob would like you to participate in the formal keysigning party he is running for the evening. If you are a keysigning newbie who can struggle through the keysigning instructions, then Bob would also like you to participate in the party. He has put together a Party Protocol document here:

http://sobac.com/wiki/index.php/Formal_Keysigning

I don't know why you should believe me when I write this, but in other news there are a couple of opportunities to learn scripting and programming this month:

• On Dec 4, Stephen Paul Weber is running a shell-scripting class targetted at "absolute beginners". Admission is free (with donations to Kwartzlab appreciated) and open to the public, but you might want to contact Stephen to make sure there is a spot for you. You can find more details here:
  http://kwartzlab.ca/pipermail/discuss_kwartzlab.ca/2013-November/001941…
• On Dec 7, the Hackademy people are running an "Introduction to Python Programming" course, which is notable because frequent KWLUG presenter Raul Suarez (and onetime presenter Kareem Shehata) will be leading the course. As with other Hackademy courses, this class costs money, but if the cost is an issue there are scholarships available. Visit http://hackademy.ca for more info.

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Bob Jonkman will walk us through the steps of encrypting our own email. In addition he is organizing a formal keysigning party, so that you can increase the trust around your own GPG keys.
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Charles McColm will tell us about his XBMC home theatre system. He writes: "At home we use XBMC to
play ripped media, Internet content, content from other devices (iPad and Android phone) as well as streaming audio and video to those devices (centralized media collection)." In this presentation he will show us how he set up this functionality.

Sarah Harvey will talk to us about the importance of security and privacy. Here is an abstract from a similar talk she gave for the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo:

Recent media coverage has brought to light the presence of various government agencies' surveillance programs, along with the possible interference of governments in the establishment and development of standards and software. This brings to question of just how much we need to be concerned about the security and privacy of our information.

Update: Sarah has made her slides available in PDF, PPTX formats.

In this talk we will discuss what all this means in technological and social contexts, examine the status quo, and consider the long-standing implications. This talk assumes no background knowledge of security or privacy, nor any specific technical background.

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Would you like to learn programming, but worry about starting from
scratch? Perhaps you know a young person who would like to program,
but whose typing skills are not yet up to scratch?

Is the desire to create easy, interactive animations an itch you would like to scratch? Or perhaps you have been possessed by Old Scratch? If so (or even if not) then you might be interested in this month's KWLUG presentation. Raul Suarez will introduce us to Scratch, a graphical, introductory programming language designed for children, but usable by anybody. Scratch makes it easy to incorporate animations, graphics and sound into projects. The language allows programmers to piece together program flow constructs (if statements, loops...) by piecing together graphical units. Raul will show us the programming environment, and scratch beneath the surface to demonstrate some interesting programs. He invites our younger KWLUG members (seven years older and up) to attend, with appropriate adult supervision.

In other news, the planning bureaucracy at KWLUG world headquarters is getting anxious, because they still have empty slots for meetings that are quickly approaching. There are still presentation slots available for November (a 40-minute half slot) and December (a full slot, or two half slots). Do you have a topic you would like to share with the KWLUG community? Would you like to help some faceless bureaucrats sleep easier at night? Then get in touch and make a presentation pitch!

In other other news, the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo is putting on a neat series of talks related to privacy and computer security. The first one is scheduled for October 8, and is entitled "Why Should You Care About Security and Privacy". For more information, check out the CSC events listings: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/

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This presentation will be beginner-friendly. He writes:

Remember when you started to program? The pleasure of the instant gratification.
Do you want to share that high with a new generation? Expose them to Scratch. Scratch is a visual language born at the MIT, from the same roots as the now defunct App Inventor.

From sequential instructions to conditionals and loops in an event driven environment, the "programmer" gets instant gratification of watching things happening in the screen.

NOTE: Scratch is cross platform FLOSS, so non-Linux users can go home and play with it too!

Raul invites children 8 years old and up (maybe precocious 7 year olds) to attend this presentation as well (accompanied by an adult, please).

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The host for this meeting was acant.

Join us as we celebrate Software Freedom Day.

This year the Kitchener-Waterloo celebrations will feature a number of presentations related to the creation and organization of multimedia, some free culture and free software giveaways, and snacks. We are also registered as an official satellite celebration for the GNU 30th Anniversary Celebration.

The celebrations will be held at Kwartzlab, at 33 Kent Street in Kitchener, from 10am-4pm.

For more information check out our wiki page at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2013/Canada/Kitchener/Kwartzlab. You can also visit the main Software Freedom Day site.

In addition to attendees, volunteers and sponsors are welcome. Contact sfd at theworkingcentre.org to get in touch.

Here is a poster you can print if you would like to help spread the word: sfd-2013-poster-v2.pdf