June General Meeting

Crowdsourcing

Speakers: Todd Courtnage (Continuity and Cloud Specialist) and Jaime Soulodre (All around great guy), Chaordix

"Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a "crowd"), through an open call." - Wikipedia

"Crowdsourcing is a way of engaging groups of people to submit, discuss, refine and rank ideas and submissions for a specific question posed by an organization." - Chaordix.com

We'll cover crowdsourcing in general, areas it covers, traditional examples of crowdsourcing and how technology has helped bring crowdsourcing to the forefront.

We can also talk about the technology stack that helps Chaordix bring crowdsourcing technologies to the enterprise.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Free admission for the general public.

Door prize: OpenBSD hoodie! (You must be a CUUG member to win!)

Annual General Meeting and Elections

The Calgary UNIX Users' Group is holding its Annual General Meeting and election of the 2011/2012 Board of Directors. Nominees so far include the following:

• Roy Brander
• John Clarke
• Alan Dewar
• Mark Hewitt

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Membership Renewals Due

It is annual renewal time for CUUG memberships. Membership fees remain at $50.00 (no GST), and cheques can be made payable to Calgary UNIX Users' Group. Our mailing address is as follows:

Calgary Unix Users' Group
Box 878, Station M
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2P 2J6

Or, better yet, come to the meeting on Tuesday, June 28, and renew there.

Invoices have been sent out by e-mail. If you haven't received yours, please contact office at CUUG.

May General Meeting

IPv6 - Is it finally arriving?

Speaker: Mark Hewitt CD, computer & network professional

IPv6 is the coming major upgrade of the underlying architecture of the Internet, with features already present in many components. But most of the Internet is still IPv4-only.

This coming June 8 is IPv6 day, when several major Internet organizations will offer their content over IPv6 - but only for 24 hours.

Long awaited, is IPv6 finally arriving? Learn more about IPv6 and what to expect.

Mark Hewitt has passionately worked with computers and networks for longer than he cares to admit. He is a strong proponent of open and free (as in speech) computing and runs Debian GNU/Linux (but keeps a Windows machine around for "graphics research"). He also hosts and administers CUUG's server.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Snacks at 17:30. Presentation begins at 18:00.

Free admission for the general public.

Door prizes.

April General Meeting

OpenBSD Q&A with Theo de Raadt

Speaker: Theo de Raadt, Founder, OpenBSD

After a brief update on new directions in OpenBSD and some comments on shifts in security threats, the meeting will be open to general questions from the audience to Theo.

In October 1995, Theo de Raadt founded the OpenBSD project. OpenBSD is the most secure of the publicly available operating systems.

Theo is widely recognized as a world class security expert. In 1999, he created OpenSSH with other members of OpenBSD. It is now incorporated into all Unix systems plus hundreds of other network enabled products. It has become the most "vendor re-used" piece of open source software, with more than 90% of the SSH market.

Theo is also well known for his advocacy of free software drivers. He has long been critical of developers of Linux and other free platforms for their tolerance of non-free drivers and acceptance of non-disclosure agreements.

For this de Raadt was awarded the Free Software Foundation's 2004 Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

Bring your questions and opinions.

Theo is well known for his fearless and direct opinions. The evening promises to be lively as well as insightful.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Snacks at 17:30. Presentation begins at 18:00.

Free admission for the general public. If you are planning to attend, please e-mail office at CUUG to let us know, so that we can plan appropriately.

March General Meeting

The Stuxnet Worm: Most Sophisticated Malware Ever?

Speaker: Andrew Ginter, CTO, Abterra Technologies

The Stuxnet worm was designed to sabotage Siemens PCS 7 industrial control systems. Symantec's reverse-engineers have called the Stuxnet worm the most sophisticated malware they have ever encountered. Evidence in the technology of the worm points to Iranian uranium enrichment facilities as the target. Analysis of the worm's capabilities show it moves easily past conventional security defenses at even well-defended industrial sites. Andrew Ginter has been working with the Stuxnet worm since July. He presents an overview of the technology that is the worm and of the controversy surrounding it.

Andrew Ginter is the CTO at Abterra Technologies, providing services to cyber-security product vendors in industrial markets. Andrew spent the first part of his career developing and deploying process control systems and middleware products at Hewlett-Packard and at Agilent Technologies. At Industrial Defender, Andrew held various roles, including product architect, CTO and CSO, leading the development of the firm's cyber-security product line. Andrew holds degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Calgary, as well as ISP, ITCP, and CISSP accreditations.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Free admission for the general public.

February General Meeting

Cloud Computing

Speaker: Tom Malaher, NetStart Consulting Ltd.

What is Cloud Computing? This talk will survey the landscape (cloudscape?), try to define cloud computing, where and how it can be used, and demo some live code running on one of the more mature offerings in a relatively new industry: Amazon Web Services or AWS.

Tom Malaher has been working in the IT industry for 20+ years as a developer (C, Perl, Java, Web, SQL) and system administrator (almost every flavour of Unix known to man, and Windows only in self-defence). His current role is as an architect and back end integration (aka "glue") developer.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Free admission for the general public.

January General Meeting

SQLite for Sysadmin and Non-Programmers

Speaker: Yves Dorfsman, SollerS

SQLite is an embedded, cross-platform, server-less database engine that has become ubiquitous, used in Firefox, Android, the iPhone, Photoshop, Solaris Service Management Facility, and many more, even in the flight software of some Airbus aircrafts. Yves had used SQLite for small home-brewed applications, but recently started using it inside small shell scripts for system administration tasks and was surprised by the results, making the scripts much simpler than when using grep, cut and awk. Yves will introduce SQLite, and then focus on its use with shell scripts and in a system administration context.

Yves is an independent consultant working for SollerS and has been a UNIX system administrator for 17 years. Throughout his career he has used ksh and bash and python to automate numerous tasks, and has an atypical passion for writing documentation.

This talk is geared towards sysadmins, but programmers are welcome too.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Free admission for the general public.

December General Meeting

Internet at Sea

Speaker: Roy Brander, Calgary UNIX Users' Group

This past summer, Roy and Connie Brander took a cruise across the Atlantic Ocean. Naturally, Roy had to have Internet access while on board. He'll describe his experiences with this, both in terms of the difficulties he encountered and in terms of the UNIX tools which helped him to mitigate these.

Roy Brander is a CUUG Life Member. He has given a number of presentations on a wide variety of subjects, including the BSDWall project, the MEPIS Linux distribution, the Titanic (the ship, not the movie), management of Calgary's water mains, and the ASUS Eee PC and Moore's Law. At his day job, Roy is the Senior Infrastructure Engineer for Water Resources, The City of Calgary.

Please note that this meeting takes place on the second Tuesday of the month, rather than the usual fourth Tuesday.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, December 14, 2010 (N.B. This is the second Tuesday of December, not the fourth.)

Free admission for the general public.

November General Meeting

Update on Solaris Technology and Direction

Speaker: Linda Kateley, North American OS Pillar Specialist, Oracle

Come and hear about the investments that Oracle is making in expanding and accelerating the development of the Solaris operating system for both SPARC and X86 system. This technical discussion will cover some of the recent technology features added to the latest Solaris 10 update 9 (released in September). We will also cover a high level roadmap for Solaris 11 and a new release strategy that will allow developers and users to get access to some of the exciting new capabilities of Solaris. With Solaris 11 express just launched on November 15th, we will talk about the key features that will make systems more available, scalable and secure and much easier to use. We will also review some of the key virtualization capabilities bundled into Solaris that allow consolidation of multiple workloads as well as storage virtualization (ZFS) with inexpensive storage.

Linda has spent many years evangelizing and instructing on Solaris technology. In the last 12 years at Sun, Linda was predominately involved in Research and University computing environments and the last 6+ years became a full time Solaris Architect. Now at Oracle she is a Solaris Specialist working with customers across North America to assist in the most effective deployment and use of Solaris technologies.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Free admission for the general public.

October General Meeting

GPU Computing

Speaker: Chris Mason, Acceleware

Traditionally, computation was done on CPUs and graphics was done on graphics cards, but in recent years the line has begun to blur. GPUs are no longer used only for rendering graphics, but for more general-purpose computing. Substantial speedups can be had from modern GPUs which support highly-parallel general computing.

Chris is the product manager for the linear algebra solver product line at Acceleware. He has been responsible for the successful launch of Acceleware products used by companies world-wide. His previous experience includes parallelization of algorithms on digital signal processors (DSPs) for cellular phones and base stations. Chris has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Free admission for the general public.

September General Meeting

Stupid Browser Tricks: Fun and Games with JavaScript

Speaker: Alan Dewar, Calgary UNIX Users' Group

By now, you've probably heard the buzz words, "Web 2.0" and "AJAX," but what do these actually let you do? One way to approach this question is to start with a slightly different question: Apart from its basic function as a web-surfing tool, how can my browser amuse me? It turns out you can learn a lot just by setting out to implement some simple games. There are some amusing things, and some things which are just plain stupid, but all are potentially useful in a much broader context.

Alan Dewar has been playing with computers since the 1970s, and has a Master's degree in computer science. He has been with the Calgary UNIX Users' Group since its early days, including with the board of directors since 1998, and is currently CUUG's president.

Bow Valley College

5:30 PM, Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Free admission for the general public.

CUUG Server Maintenance

During the two-week period from August 17 to August 31, 2010, the office and network in which CUUG's server resides will be undergoing maintenance. Some of the changes will require shutting it down while they are implemented.

We will try to give advance announcement via e-mail to CUUG members and subscribers to our mailing lists. There may be short outages during the day with some longer ones after midnight (Mountain Daylight Time). During shutdowns, CUUG ssh login, CUUG email, the CUUG website and member hosted websites will be unavailable.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact crcadmin.

2010 Board of Directors

At the June 2010 Annual General Meeting, the membership approved a Special Resolution amending CUUG's bylaws to reduce the minimum required number of directors from 10 to 5. The following people were then elected to the Board of Directors for 2010/2011:

• Alan Dewar (President)
• John Clarke (Vice President)
• Roy Brander (Secretary-Treasurer)
• Christopher Aziz
• Dick Miller