[wuug-list] Jannuary Meeting Follow-up

[Xavier Spriet]

Tonight's meeting went very well. I was very glad to meet the new
members of our group and I'm really excited about the stuff coming up in
2005.

As I mentioned during the meeting, I would like to extend to everyone in
the group our invitation to Penguicon, the Linux/Sci-Fi convention that
will take place in Novi, MI in April. We'll discuss this further on the
list when the time comes but if you plan to join us, you may as well
register now, we already did.

2005 is also going to be a great year for the group content-wise as we
are going to see many quality presentations. Here are some of the things
that will be happening during the next few meetings:


- During our next meeting, Greg Merriweather will be talking about
what's going on in the VoIP and linux telephony world, we will set up a
lab environment and experiment with building an Asterisk telephony
server.

- In a subsequent meeting, Wess Bechard will give a presentation on the
maintenance and administration of production mail servers. The lab will
focus on installing and configuring a fast and secure mail solution and
discuss initiate to advanced topics.

- I would like to take some time to discuss what is going on in the
linux development world and give a presentation on the Python
programming language and especially its GTK bindings that provide
developers with a rapid, modern and rock-solid development platform for
GUI development.

- Matthew Johnston also volunteered to give a presentation on the
configuration of PVR systems such as MythTV, on linux. PVR systems allow
users to record TV signal and do anything they want with it such as
scheduling the recording of your favourite shows, streaming them, etc...
(correct me if I'm wrong) (we'll also try to set up a lab for this)

- Wess and I will also set up a lab environment to show you how easy it
has become to build a very feature-rich and flexible router and firewall
with some old hardware and some ingenious linux solutions.

- In the next few months, I will be receiving some presentation material
for Coraid's Etherdrive product (drivers are in the dev branch of the
2.6 official kernel), an interesting solution providing native
filesystem wrappers for network storage through their ATA-Over-Ethernet
protocol. I will give a presentation on that, and possibly a lab.

If you would like to take some time to discuss a subject that you feel
might be beneficial to the rest of the group, please let me know so we
can start working on the scheduling shortly.

I also have a few events that I would like to discuss. I already
mentioned Penguicon above. Another interesting and large-scale event is
PHP|Quebec 2005 that will take place on March 30th, 31st, and April 1st
in Montreal QC and will feature some very interesting guest speakers.

LinuxWorld in Toronto will take place on the weekend of April 20th and
also looks very promising.

Unless there are any objections, I would like to schedule our next
meeting for Thursday, February 17th around 8pm. Please let me know if
that works for you and let us know on this mailing list if you would
like to attend so we know how many people to expect.


Thanks,
Xavier