Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I should have reported this a week or more back, but the weekend was filled with dead and dying firewalls and hardware purchases that didn't work. So:

At the CLUG Programming SIG for February, we had Rusty Russell speaking on his project LGuest, a Linux x86_32 hypervisor system. He talked about his aims (to develop a framework for testing virtualisation in Linux) and how he overcame the various obstacles in his way, such as glibc's way of using an segmentation calculation overflow to store information about the program code, and how he got around them. He finished up with some benchmarks and a bit of a comparison between the LGuest and the various other virtualisation and hypervisor packages out there - primarily Xen and VMware. There were at least a dozen people there, which was big for a PSIG meeting, and this included two people from ANU who had never been to any CLUG event before but had wanted to hear Rusty's presentation. The talk was very well received, and Rusty gave an excellent presentation in his usual engaging manner. He handled the constant interruptions from food arriving and plates departing neatly, and didn't miss out on his own meal either (this last is important, I think, for a speaker). My only apology to him was my brief and inelegant introduction, but since pretty much everyone knew who he was and what he was doing, I felt words were superfluous :-)

I've been working in the background trying to get various people that I know in the CLUG scene to give talks at the PSIG. There are essentially three things that I want to hear about:

• What full-time paid programmers are doing in their line of work, what they use, anecdotes and problems they've overcome, and lessons they'd like to pass on to newer programmers.
• What programmers working on new and interesting open-source projects are doing, what new coolness we can look forward to, and why we should all get interested in their project.
• Technical talks on particular fields, with a view to introducing the less experienced into how to use new tools and languages.

That last one in particular interests me greatly. There are a number of topics I'd personally like to hear about:

• Makefiles: how to write them, how to use them.
• Testing: how to do it, how to automate it.
• Docbook, Javadoc, Doxygen: how to use it. (My talk on this would have the title "Documentation: if it's good enough for Linus, it's good enough for me.")
• Writing simple GUI apps in Python.
• Getting your project to use autoconf and automake.
• Programming microcontrollers in assembler or C.

The question is: how do I find people in the Canberra area to talk on these topics?