Annual General Meeting

The June monthly meeting will also be our Annual General Meeting. The main item of business will be the election of next year's Board of Directors. Nominees' biographies are available.

MEPIS Linux

The new Debian-based distro, MEPIS, has gained fast fame and fans, jumping almost overnight to the top ten on the Linux "Distrowatch".

MEPIS features a LiveCD for tryout and very easy graphical install to the hard drive. Once installed, it offers a featureful desktop setup with a full suite of multimedia applications configured to work with the web browser.

Roy Brander wrote articles on the new web magazine: tuxmagazine.com for the June issue, now available.

Based on those articles, Roy will show a live MEPIS install and demonstration.

5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 28th, 2005

Location: W.R. Castell Central Library
616 Macleod Trail S.E.
Basement meeting room

May General Meeting

OpenBSD's packet filter, PF

Note: 60 developers from around the world are in Calgary for the OpenBSD hackathon - most of them will be at this event. We will have an extended Q&A session after the PF presentation. If you have ANY question about any part of OpenBSD this is your chance. The person who wrote the code for it will likely be in the room !!

Ryan McBride will speak about OpenBSD's packet filter, PF. A broad overview of PF's features will be presented, with special attention paid to newer and more unique features and how these can be used together effectively for DoS mitigation, high availability, and load balancing.

The other major PF developers will also be in attendance and available to answer questions: Bob Beck (Edmonton) who did spamd, Mike Frantzen (USA) who did the state engine, Daniel Hartmeier (Switzerland) who started it all, Markus Friedl (Germany) who helped develop the grammar, and Henning Brauer (Germany) who integrated PF with ALTQ bandwidth shaping and pushed us to fix some early load problems.

Bio:

Ryan McBride, CISSP - Information Security Consultant and OpenBSD Hacker. Ryan has 10 years of experience wearing a suit in the Information Systems industry. Over this period, he has worked with public, private, and non-profit organisations ranging in size from small office to "Fortune 50." His experience includes Security Policy development, Software Development, VPN design and deployment, firewall configuration, and IDS deployment and monitoring. When not wearing a suit, Ryan amuses himself by working on OpenBSD's packet filter code.

There will be brand new OpenBSD 3.7 CDs, T-shirts and posters for sale.

5:30 PM, Tuesday, May 24th, 2005

Location: John Dutton Theatre
W.R. Castell Central Library - 2nd floor

The Danger of Software Patents

Richard Stallman from the Free Software Foundation and of the GNU Project, author of the GPL, the man who made GNU/Linux possible, will be giving a talk in Calgary.

Richard Stallman will explain how software patents obstruct software development. Software patents are patents that cover software ideas. They restrict the development of software, so that every design decision brings a risk of getting sued. Patents in other fields restrict factories, but software patents restrict every computer user. Economic research shows that they even retard progress.

Seating is limited - please make sure you register. There will be a draw for a door prize from the registration list.

As a matter of principle, Richard Stallman refuses to lecture where there is a compulsory attendance fee. CUUG is paying the full costs of sponsoring this event (flights, equipment rental, etc.), estimated at $2000 to $3000.

Donation of $20 will be requested from non CUUG members.
We will not be able to accept credit/debit cards, please bring cash or cheques.

Location: University of Calgary, Science Theatre ST140.
(Look for the "Science Theatres" building on this map, between the Science A, the Social Sciences, and the Biological Sciences buildings)
Thank you to the University of Calgary for providing the venue.

Pop and donuts sponsored by Ne2 Encryption: www.ne2corp.com

7:00 PM Wednesday, May 18th, 2005
Door opening at 6:30 PM for people with registration, 6:45 for everybody else.

You are welcome to distribute or display our poster.

April General Meeting

MySQL version 5.x

Speaker: Peter Gulutzan, MySQL AB

Learn about the latest features of MySQL, like stored procedures and views, the attempt to be more ANSI compliant, the state of MySQL AB and its market.

Peter Gulutzan is a Senior Software Architect with MySQL AB. He's from Edmonton, and is co-author of four books and several articles, mostly about SQL, some of which are available online (examples: Collations, Transaction Logs, Standard SQL, Sequences and Identify Columns, SQL Naming Conventions).

Vote on 2005/2006 membership fees

In order to simplify our accounting, we would like to cancel CUUG's GST registration. We propose to keep fees at $50.00 per year ($30.00 for students, and the usual 10% discount for recognized groups), but with the entire amount going to CUUG, instead of $3.27 from each membership going to the government. There will be a vote on this prior to the meeting's main presentation.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, April 26th, 2005

March General Meeting

Freedom of Reach

Speaker: Herman Oosthuysen, Guest-Tek Interactive Entertainment.

Hear how Guest-Tek uses the power of the penguin in thousands of hotels around the world.

Guest-Tek provides fast and easy high-speed Internet access to the hospitality industry. Guests can connect to the Internet in seconds, without changing laptop settings or downloading software or drivers.

Once on-line, they can send and receive email using their regular accounts, access corporate networks, print, fax and more, all from a guest room, meeting room, or public area. This safe and secure enabling technology is based on Redhat and Mandrake Linux GNU Systems.

Herman is consulting as R&D Hardware Manager (and main Linux geek) at Guest-Tek. He holds a B.Eng (E), studied computer science post graduate and hacked Minix when Linus was still in high school. He is also an ex-Army Signals Officer and member of IEEE. Herman consulted on military and commercial communications systems in various countries for the past two decades through his company Aerospace Software Ltd.

W.R. Castell Central Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005

February General Meeting

Open House

Join us for our annual Open House!

As in previous years, we invite the general public to come see what CUUG is all about. There will be information and demonstrations on systems and applications, as well as short seminars on a variety of topics. Other user groups will also be represented.

The tentative line-up includes tables and/or presentations from the following:

• Sun Microsystems -- Solaris 10
• IBM Canada -- opening source code to Linux developers
• Apple Canada
• KDE project -- soon-to-be-released KDE 3.4
• Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS)
• Calgary Oracle Users Group (COUG)
• Calgary Agile Methods User Group (CAMUG)
• Calgary Linux Users Group (CLUG)
• Calgary Mac User Group (CMUG)
• Linux LiveCD demo
• Gaming/PPC demo
• FrankenMac

Door prizes will be available!

Admission to this event is absolutely free, but please pre-register, sending your name by e-mail to office@cuug.ab.ca.

W.R. Castell Central Library

6:00 PM - 8:00 PM, Tuesday, February 22nd, 2005

Thanks to NE2 Encryption Systems for sponsoring beverages and doughnuts for this event.

January General Meeting

Beowulf Clusters for the Home Hobbyist

Speaker: Damien Hocking, Senior Technologist, Unified Simulation Environment

Clustering and parallel computation have become common tools for large-scale numerical computation over the last five years. For the last 3 years, Damien has been developing a Linux cluster in his basement.

At the core of most nonlinear equation solvers for large-scale simulation is a linear solver. Damien will describe the application of the parallel linear solver M.U.M.P.S. (MUltifrontal Massively Parallel Solver) to distillation column simulations. In some cases the speedup is 270% moving from one processor to four processors, and up to 340% on eight processors.

The cluster has five dual-processor PIII-600s, with 256 MB RAM each, Intel gigabit ethernet and it runs on Slackware 9.1

Central Calgary Public Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, January 25th, 2005

December General Meeting

Declaration of War!

Rules of Engagement

1. All Defenders must declare their allegiance in advance.
2. Only one Defender of each faith will be entered on the lists.
3. Each Defender will have 5 minutes to preach.
4. The congregation will be invited to challenge the Defenders:
   • One Challenger will be chosen at a time by the Keeper of the Lists (aka chair person).
   • Each Challenger will be allotted 2 minutes to demonstrate their prowess in discourse.
   • The total time allotted for challenges will be limited to 30 minutes.
   • The Defenders will have no right of rebuttal at this time.
5. When all Challengers have been exhausted the Defenders will each have 5 minutes in which to convert the remaining doubters. The order in which the Defenders speak will be the reverse of that in which they preached in the beginning.

Defenders

• Solaris: Bob Bramwell
• AIX: Yves Dorfsman
• Linux: Roy Brander
• OpenBSD: Rich Huntrods
• Mac OS X: Mike Babulic
• Multics: Richard Gray
• Windows: Terrell Larson

Central Calgary Public Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, December 14th (second Tuesday of the month)

November General Meeting

Open Source Groupware: Kolab

Speakers: Aaron Seigo and Andy Kopciuch, KDE developers

While there have been Open Source solutions for most server applications for many years, Open Source groupware servers have been a missing link. Recently, a few Free Software groupware solutions have emerged, including one called Kolab. Kolab, now in at version 2, is a commercially funded project that leverages existing Open Source software to provide comprehensive and secure mail and calendaring for the SMB market. It include webmail, antivirus, spam-filtering, replication and more all tied together with a directory service back-end and managed by a web configuration panel. The presentation will look at installing, setting up and maintaining a Kolab installation.

Aaron Seigo: A software developer over the last 13 years, Aaron is a core developer in the KDE Open Source project living in Calgary, Alberta who specializes in C/C++ and database development.

Andy Kopciuch: A system developer over the last 7 years, Andy has worked in Saskatoon for 3 years, and spent the last 4 years living in Calgary, Alberta. He specializes in all aspects of system development in a variety of technologies including C/C++, PHP and RDBMS development. In his spare time he dedicates his energy to making Aaron Seigo giggle.

Central Calgary Public Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, November 23rd

October General Meeting

Exploit Mitigation Techniques

Speaker: Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD lead developer

Theo de Raadt is a "kernel hacker, for fun and work" and is the lead developer on the OpenBSD project. He will speak to us about Exploit Mitigation Techniques, a talk that he just gave in Australia and Malaysia.

Exploit Mitigation Techniques are small (normally simple) changes we can make to our operating system to foil the exploitation of program errors. We will never have entirely bug free code, so the goal of these techniques is to make exploitation of many types of bugs extremely difficult, if not impossible. At the same time we ensure that our changes do not break any existing applications.

Central Calgary Public Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, October 26th

September General Meeting

Apple's Unix: MacOS X Panther

Speaker: Brian Richardson, Calgary UNIX Users' Group

Unix has entered the desktop market with Apple's latest OS offering, OS X Panther. Learn about the features of OS X from the point of view of a Unix User. Open Source development tools, desktop applications like Office and Photoshop and a native development environment make this the most Unix-friendly desktop available today. This presentation by a long-time Unix user will cover software development and everyday productivity with MacOS X.

Brian first joined CUUG in 1995.

Central Calgary Public Library

5:30 PM, Tuesday, September 28th