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Linux users of Victoria

This is the working wiki for Members of LUV and the committee.

To visit the website go to http://www.luv.asn.au

Upcoming Talks

Talk Suggestions - Talk Offers

January 2010

No Meeting

BBQ on Saturday January 9

LCA from Jan 18-23

February

Main - Tues 2nd - Trinity College

• Jason King — Using django to make web apps

Django is a web framework written in python, that makes it quite pleasant to make reasonably complicated sites involving different types of information. I will be showing you how to make a simple site using django's template language, and demonstrate django's database extraction capabilities. A basic level of python is assumed.

Jason King is a former President of Linux Users Victoria, and has had various progamming jobs over the years, ranging from delphi, to php and python.

• Daniel Price - Simulating the formation of stars

How stars like the Sun were formed is not well understood either observationally or theoretically. However, a great deal of progress has been made in the last decade or so. This has come not only from improvements in observational techniques and facilities, but also because of the dramatic increase in available computational power and therefore our ability to simulate the process. It is particularly important to be able to simulate the process "in action" over the hundreds of thousands or millions of year timescales relevant to the mind-boggling scales of most astrophysical objects. I will present an overview of my work on simulating the formation of stars, as well as some of the challenges of using supercomputers (and Fortran!) to model astrophysical phenomena in general.

Daniel Price was born in UK and emigrated to Australia at age 10. He Studied Science/Eng. at Monash, continuing with an honours year in astrophysics at Monash, then went to Cambridge, UK to do a PhD (finished 2004) at the Institute of Astronomy. Daniel worked in Exeter, UK for 4 years from 2004-2008 as a postdoctoral research fellow. He arrived at Monash 2008, currently on a 5-year fixed term research fellowship. Daniel enjoys living near the beach, cycling, camping, fishing, the fortune command, xkcd, and Fortran.

Beginners - Sat 20th - The Hub@Docklands

Ctte - Mon 8th - The Leveson (donna to book)

March

Main - Tuesday 2nd - Trinity College

• Dave Hall - GlusterFS

Title: GlusterFS

Abstract: GlusterFS is a general purpose distributed file system for scalable storage. Over the last couple of months Dave has been testing GlusterFS as an alternative to NFS for replicating files across multiple web servers. Now it is all working properly, Dave will give an explanation of what GlusterFS is, how he uses it, the issues he had while deploying it and why he stuck with it.

Bio: IT Consultant, webapp coder, geek, slacker, father of 2, fat opinionated bastard

• Claudine Chionh

Title: Humanities computing, Drupal and What I did on my holidays

Abstract: This presentation will introduce the opportunities that free software and the web present for research, publication and collaboration in the humanities, particularly in the area of public history. I will discuss some of the technical and social challenges I have faced on the Founders and Survivors project, and will demonstrate how I am using Drupal to implement the data collection and presentation tasks for this project.

This is a mashup of two presentations I gave at LCA and DrupalSouth in Wellington in January, now with added Drupal goodness thanks to the feedback I received.

Bio: Claudine Chionh can get equally excited by original manuscripts and by the latest developments in Drupal 7. She is a developer on the Founders and Survivors project <http://www.foundersandsurvivors.org>, which will follow the lives of Australian families from the convict transportation period to the First World War. She is especially interested in the use of web technologies to enable collaboration between academics and the wider community, and in connecting with others working in humanities computing in Australia.

Beginners - Sat 20th - The Hub@Docklands

• Andrew Pam - Games on Linux

Ctte - Mon 8th - The Leveson

April

Main - Tuesday 6th at Trinity College

• Rusty Russell - Switching To Userspace: A Kernel Hacker Leaves The Nest

Abstract: Rusty Russell is best known for his kernel work, particularly netfilter and modules. With changing life priorities, he decided to try his hand at userspace coding and a new project (SAMBA) to stretch his brain into fresh shapes. After ten years in the kernel, it's a little daunting to enter an established project as the new kid, but along the way we'll see how he has managed to carve out a niche and have a great time coding inside a huge and complex codebase.

Bio: Rusty Russell has been a full-time professional Free Software programmer since 1997. He's probably best known for his work with iptables/netfilter last decade, but his coding work has ranged from early g++ contributions to the founding the embryonic Comprehensive C Archive Network. He also founded what became the linux.conf.au conference series, as well as advocating for patent and copyright reform during the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement ratification. He works for IBM in Canberra, lives in Adelaide, and has a delightful 18 month old daughter Arabella.

• Tim Serong - High Availability in 37 Easy Steps

Title: High Availability in 37 Easy Steps

Abstract: High Availability can be a curiously nebulous term, and most people probably don't care about it until they can't access their online banking service, or their plane crashes.

This talk examines some of the considerations necessary when building highly available computer systems, then focuses on the HA infrastructure software currently available from the Corosync/OpenAIS, Linux-HA and Pacemaker projects.

Slides available at http://www.slideshare.net/tserong/high-availability-in-37-easy-steps

Bio: Tim is a native of Melbourne, currently employed by Novell to work on (surprise!) the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension. He goes by tserong in various places (Freenode, LinkedIn, Flickr), but somehow managed to completely avoid Twitter.

Interests include motorcycling, beer, and making technology simpler and more reliable (although not necessarily in that order, and usually not all at the same time).

Beginners - Sat 17th - The Hub@Docklands

• Grant Diffey - Software Packages

Ctte - April 12th - The Leveson

May

Main - Tue 4th - Trinity College

• Geoff Beasley - Linux Audio Studio
• Tennessee Leeuwenburg - The Culture of Open Source in Government (previously: Open Source at the Bureau)

Beginners - Sat 15 - The Hub

Ctte - Mon 10 - The Leveson

June

Main - Tues 1 - Trinity College

• Sarvnaz Karimi - Find it all: how biomedical search engines should work!

• Julien Goodwin - How the internet works

Most developers of web or other network reliant code have a basic understanding of networking, but as data rates and usage continue to increase complexity has been increasing alongside them.

This presentation will cover some of the technical complexity inherent in today's Internet, such as BGP, routing registries, Anycast and Multicast. It will also provide a background of the economic realities of routing, the how's and why's of peering, transit and customer agreements.

Julien is a former LUV secretary and long time member. In his day job he manages educational networks with millions of users and works with teams of developers making custom educational software.

Beginners - Sat 19 - The Hub

Ctte - Mon 14 - The Leveson

July

Main - Tues 6 - Trinity

• Stewart Smith - Photographers workflow: from the lense to the GIMP
• Peter Davison - Xirrus and Linux 2.6

Beginners - Sat 17 - The Hub

Ctte - Mon 12 - The Leveson

August

Main - Tues 3 - Trinity

• Brian Walters - Liberty Victoria
• Brianna Laugher - Python and the Natural Language Tool Kit

Beginners - Sat 21 - The Hub

Ctte - Mon 9 - The Leveson

September 2010

Main - AGM - Tues 7 - Trinity

• Lightning Talks

Beginners - SFD - Sat 18 - The Hub?

Ctte - Handover - Mon 13 - The Leveson?

October 2010

Main - Tue 5 - Trinity

• Note that this is the first mtg after SFD, so perhaps make it a bit beginners-oriented?
• Jacinta Richardson - TBA

Beginners - Sat 16 - The Hub

Ctte (as decided by new ctte)

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