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Hello all,<br>
<br>
I'm hoping that for those of you that were there, last night's
bigger-than-normal PLUG tech talk was entertaining and enlightening!<br>
<br>
We had around <b>46 people present </b>for Rusty's talk "<i>Coding:
Lets have fun</i>", 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.<br>
<br>
A <b>huge thank you to Rusty</b> 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
<b>need a volunteer who would like to organise this </b>- please
contact Committee if you would like to get involved with this.
We're looking for suggestions of whom to invite - by popular demand!<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.
<br>
<br>
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:<br>
<ul>
<li>helps our members up and down WA, and further afield to
participate in real-time<br>
</li>
<li>keeps a record of our activities for the future</li>
<li>feeds back to open source projects (DVswitch, gstreamer, etc).
(<i>Yes, we've submitted patches back to these projects!</i>)<br>
</li>
<li>gets PLUG members trained up should there ever be a large,
multi-stream, technical conference that requires this in future</li>
</ul>
If you'd like to <b>help out with the AV team (no experience
necessary)</b>, please join the AV mailing list at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/av">http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/av</a>. 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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Next month we've got <b>Daniel Harmsworth giving a talk on Open
Source in hardware manufacturing</b>, being held at Artifactory
(8/16 Guthrie St, Osborne Park) from 7:00pm. On <b>Sunday 4th
December we're planning a Summer BBQ </b>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.<br>
<br>
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 <i>Linux.Conf.Au</i>).
Likewise, if you have another event or project that you'd like to
run with/for PLUG - let Committee know.<br>
<br>
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 (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.plug.org.au/Constitution/Current">http://www.plug.org.au/Constitution/Current</a>) 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.<br>
<br>
<br>
Thanks everyone.<br>
<br>
James<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<em>Mobile:</em> +61 422 166 708, <em>Email:</em>
james_AT_rcpt.to<br>
PLUG President 2011: <a href="http//www.plug.org.au">http://www.plug.org.au</a></div>
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