[plug] Thank you to Rusty, Chris, Robert, and others. PLUG News and upcoming events.

[James Bromberger]

Hello all,

I'm hoping that for those of you that were there, last night's
bigger-than-normal PLUG tech talk was entertaining and enlightening!

We had around *46 people present *for Rusty's talk "/Coding: Lets have
fun/", pizza, and then our panel session. From the audience questions
during the panel it seems the areas of interest are around Cloud and
Security; hopefully having a discussion like this has shared and
hopefully clarified some of your thoughts.

A *huge thank you to Rusty* for agreeing to come to Perth and speak.
I've never looked at the code for a regular expression engine before
(despite using regular expressions most days), but the elegance in the
simple engine shown is quite inspiring; and seeing a simple wire-frame
flight-sim with the code formatted as an aeroplane in under 2KB is
impressive. Rusty's further generous contribution to fund his travel and
organise accommodation means the funds we have collected for this
exercise can be reinvested in doing it again! We *need a volunteer who
would like to organise this *- please contact Committee if you would 
like to get involved with this. We're looking for suggestions of whom to
invite - by popular demand!

A big thank you to our other panelists yesterday, Dr Chris McDonald (UWA
CS) and Assistant Professor Robert Cunningham (UWA Law) for their
participation on our panel; hopefully their experience and perspectives
brought fresh ideas to the subjects we covered. Also thank you to Dr
McDonald for facilitating the venue at UWA.

Thank you to Daniel Harmsworth who tracked and processed the tickets -
and wrote the code to generate the QR-barcode ticketing system (and
manufactured the light-up PLUG sign). This is the first time that PLUG
has had to charge for it's normally-free monthly meeting; we took a
democratic show of hands to arrive at the decision to charge for
attendance to cover costs, and I hope those who came along notonly
enjoyed the evening, but felt it was money well spent.

I'd like to thank the people who worked on the video streaming -
recording of the evening should be available in the next few days. Brett
did a great job in rushing the audience mic around; Euan on the audio
mix, Jason on video mixing, and the team working cameras. The AV team's
role to capture events serves several purposes -- all using Free/Open
Source software:

  * helps our members up and down WA, and further afield to participate
    in real-time
  * keeps a record of our activities for the future
  * feeds back to open source projects (DVswitch, gstreamer, etc).
    (/Yes, we've submitted patches back to these projects!/)
  * gets PLUG members trained up should there ever be a large,
    multi-stream, technical conference that requires this in future

If you'd like to *help out with the AV team (no experience necessary)*,
please join the AV mailing list at
http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/av. AV is waiting for a
Lotteries grant to replace the old equipment we're using with new, which
I hope will come through before the end of the year.

Thank you to the rest of PLUG Committee for your help in brining this
evening together. A larger meeting like this takes some considerable
preparation, and much time has been spent in trying to bring the details
together.

Lastly, thank you to everyone who put their hand in their pocket and
helped bring the evening together. Without your support its very
difficult to do an event like this. This was the first time that PLUG
has also run a panel, and I'd love get get feedback on what you thought
of it, and what other panel sessions you'd like PLUG to run in future,
or other formats of events.

Next month we've got *Daniel Harmsworth giving a talk on Open Source in
hardware manufacturing*, being held at Artifactory (8/16 Guthrie St,
Osborne Park) from 7:00pm.  On *Sunday 4th December we're planning a
Summer BBQ *in Kings Park. Again, we need a volunteer to collect numbers
so we know how many sausages, etc to get. Please let committee know if
you can help. The calendar on the PLUG web site should have details of
these, and more.

If you have a talk (or a short lightning talk) you'd like to present on
something open source or Linux related (or just something
geeky/tech/interesting/fun) then please let Committee know - speaking in
front of a smaller audience like PLUG is often a good stepping stone to
talking at larger conferences (like /Linux.Conf.Au/). Likewise, if you
have another event or project that you'd like to run with/for PLUG - let
Committee know.

And while I've got your attention (hopefully) - a note that PLUG's AGM
is coming up on Tuesday January 10th. At this time all committee
positions are up for election, as is normal, and per the constitution
(http://www.plug.org.au/Constitution/Current) section 10 nominations
should be submitted to the secretary no later than 28 days beforehand
(13 December 2011); that's just on 8 and a bit weeks away. Our
Secretary, Peter Lyons, will call for nominations in advance on this -
but I wanted to get our members thinking about this now.


Thanks everyone.

  James

-- 
/Mobile:/ +61 422 166 708, /Email:/ james_AT_rcpt.to
PLUG President 2011: http://www.plug.org.au <http//www.plug.org.au>
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