Date: October 7, 2008 at 7 p.m.
Location: Algonquin College (Woodroffe Campus), room T117

Speaker: David Skoll

Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX). Being open source, it can be customized for specific uses.

David Skoll will discuss how one local business uses Asterisk and how they've integrated it with many other software systems to streamline their workflow.

45 - 60 minutes

David Skoll is the founder and president of Roaring Penguin Software Inc. and an avid Asterisk fan.

Speaker: Randal Leavitt

Randal Leavitt will describe the conundrums, dead ends, surprises, and lessons learned as a result of trying to use conventional tools to perform conventional tasks (ie household bookkeeping) in the ever improving Linux/Internet universe. The contributions of several product releasing organizations, both positive and negative, will be assessed, including Codeweavers, Intuit, Gnu, Microsoft, Libranet, Ubuntu, and Mooney's Bay Computers. The objective of all this discussion is to highlight the aggression/caution tension involved in running at the front of the pack.

30 - 45 minutes

Speaker: John C. Nash

DOSBox is a tool to allow “old” Microsoft DOS programs to be run on modern Intel 386-family systems, under both Linux and Windows. While it appears DOSBox was intended for running legacy games, I use it to run 1970s and 1980s numerical codes in BASIC and Turbo Pascal. This lightning talk will give a short overview of the pros and cons of the DOSBox package.

20 minutes

Retired Professor of Management at U of Ottawa.

• 2006 - May – Pres. of OCLUG – Now I'll have to learn more about Linux!
• 2007 - Mar – have learned a lot, including how much still to learn.