What is longer than a lightning talk but shorter than a normal talk? This month you'll find out as we have two different speakers giving talks:

Mike Higgins:
Title: "Life without an Evil Cellphone Company"
Summary: Why Cellphone Companies are Evil. How I hacked a 'Droid phone without realizing it. Using Skype and Wifi hotspots to make calls on my Droid phone without a cellphone carrier. Trouble in paradise (things are not working perfectly yet).

Jezra:

Desktop, laptop, phone, tablet . . . car!  Which OS should we run on
car "in-vehicle infotainment" systems: Windows, Android, WebOS, MeeGo
or a traditional embedded choice like Angstrom?  What are the
associated opportunities for app developers and systems programmers?
Two Chinese companies, Geely and HawTai, sell cars with MeeGo
pre-installs.  The automotive business model diverges significantly
from that of consumer electronics products, giving MeeGo some
advantages over Android.  Who are the players in the automotive Linux

It's possible to lease a virtual private server (VPS) for as
little as $10/year. I'll talk about what you get, what to
look out for, and how to find a good deal when shopping for
a budget server. Also a discussion about the OpenVZ
virtualization technology.

What would you do if you had to securely decommission a remote server without remote console or power access? How would you securely erase all the hard drives over an ssh session and halt the machine when you are logged into the machine itself? Kyle has recently done just this and in this (mostly live demo) talk, Kyle will walk you through the process of how to securely erase your server remotely.

SSH is one of the most widely used network protocols. Much more than a replacement for telnet, SSH has many tricks up its encrypted sleeve and harnessing them is a rite of passage for any keyboard cowboy. In this talk, Aaron will discuss the core protocol itself, the history of development and how you can use OpenSSH to better secure your packets through the tubes.

The U.C.S.C Long Marine lab includes the 'costalab', where I work
taking care of 4 servers, mostly Ubuntu, and a few windows desktops.

The costalab studies marine mammals and birds all over the world.
Google on 'costalab' to find out more about what we do.

About half of the talk will be specific to the costalab work - what
information the researchers collect, how it is stored and analyzed,
the benefits to the world from this research, etc. This should be of
interest to a much wider audience than linux gurus.

The rest of the talk will be about our Ubuntu servers, how they are

Joomla is a content management system (CMS), which enables you to build multi-user Web sites quickly. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular free and open source Web site software available. Joomla, which operates on top of a LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP-perl), is designed to be easy to install and set up even if you're not an advanced user. Many Web hosting services offer a single-click install, getting your new site up and running in just a few minutes.

Second Life (SL) is like a MMORPG (Massively Multi-player Online Role
Playing Game), although many of the people hanging out there will be
offended if you called it a “game”. It is a 3D virtual environment
created between a database on a huge farm of Linux servers and viewer
programs running on home PCs. But besides the bare simulated ground,
everything in SL is created by one of the “residents” there. Objects
in SL can have snippets of code inserted in them to add behavior. I
have found this to be a fascinating environment to program in. I'll

At 23 years, gnuplot is one of the oldest free and open
source programs out in the wild world. It runs anywhere and
everywhere. It's an interactive, text-based plotting program that's
quite easy to use, and yet can produce surprisingly complex plots.
Many features of gnuplot are shown in a live demo.

Slides and notes available at http://nblug.org/presentations/gnuplotTalk/