SLUG Meeting - July 2009

Pre-registration for this event has closed. If you didn't sign up, just come along, and we can generate a badge on the spot.

The Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG) is a community of passionate freedom and technology lovers in Sydney, Australia.

We are one of the largest and most active Linux users groups in the world, with a diverse membership of users, developers, sysadmins, and advocates.

Start Time: Arrive 6:00pm for a 6:30pm start.

How to get there:

See http://wiki.slug.org.au/howtogetthere

General interest talk:

Tom Worthington: Learning to lower costs and carbon emissions with ICT

Tom designed the first globally accredited course on Green ICT and has been teaching it via the web since January 2009. The talk will discuss how ICT can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 15% by 2020. Also outlined is how to use the web for running formal, university accredited courses using free open source software with open access content delivered to smartphones. The Istanbul public transport system also gets a mention.

SeeTom's Web site for more information.

Tom runs green IT courses at ANU and ACS.You can read the free open access version here.

In-Depth Talk

Rob Collins: Massively parallel testing via Subunit

Subunit [https://launchpad.net/subunit] is a streaming protocol for test results. I used it in bzr to parallelise the test suite and make effective use of multi-core machines (something python isn'tintrinsically good at), and to run tests in a massively parallel way via amazon ec2.

Subunit is likely to be useful for anyone doing nontrivial automatedtesting, particularly when distributing or otherwise running the testsin a noninteractive fashion.

SLUGlets

General discussion and Q&A about Linux, free software and open source.

Meeting Schedule

See here for an explanation of the segments.

• 18.15: Open Doors
• 18.30: Announcements, News, Introductions
• 18.45: General Talk
• 19.30: Intermission
• 19.45: Split into two groups for:

• In-Depth Talk
• SLUGlets

20.30: Dinner

Dinner this month will be held locally, Details will be announced on the night. We will be taking numbers at the beginning of the meeting. If you have any particular dietary requirements (e.g. vegetarian), let us know beforehand. Dinner is a great way to socialise and learn in a relaxed atmosphere

We hope to see you there!