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tcpipLast month Linux Users of Victoria received three nominations for President of the association, but all declined (all other positions on the committee were filled). Attending the meeting as the Public Officer, I was nominated from the floor and accepted on the grounds that somebody had to do it and I knew I could do it. LUV is an active organisation; it has a membership of more than 1500 (I have to find out why there is reported variation), active mailing lists, a main meeting every month with two speakers, and beginner's workshop every month with a speaker, a distributed library and so forth. Donna Benjamin, the immediate past President, gave an excellent summary of the last year's activities. So these were big shoes to fill; and it is different coming having such a position land upon you rather than coming to it with an agenda.
The first decision was to handball the position of Public Officer to Donna; it seemed a fair swap, after all she did state she wanted to engage with free software organisations rather than manage them - and she was the one who initially hinted broadly that I should take up the position of association president. Then there was the two Richard Stallman talks, at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. A thousand leaflets were distributed for the two events advertising both LUV and Software Freedom Day. That weekend was Software Freedom Day, where LUV had its own prominent stall. A few days later a community group of non-technical people wanted an article about Linux in their newsletter.
With previous memories of the endless struggle to ensure the two speakers per month and now with the addition of another speaker for beginner's workshops, I made that a priority. We now have speakers lined up for LUV-Main talks until May and LUV-Beginner's talks until April next year. After attendance at their monthly meeting we now have regular communication with a smaller local group, MLUG, after many years of separation. Following attendance with the City of Melbourne sponsored session we have security procedures for our Beginner's Workshops. Tuesday's main meeting was a success with two excellent talks, good conversation, and some forty people in attendance.
On the agenda is to establish a second regional chapter in Geelong with an install-fest and mini-conference, participation in the State Library's IT Enables: Life, Choice, Aspirations Event for the International Day of People with Disability. Finally, one of the more problematic issues (obvious from pure observation, confirmed by member surveys) is the very occasional flame-war. We now have more stringent posting guidelines to ensure that the mailing lists are friendly and helpful.
So it's been a very good first month I suppose. By sheer involvement a plan is formulating for increased membership, greater attendance at events, more regional chapters, and greater community involvement. It may be an accidental plan, but it is happening just the same. Finally, I really must thank all the other members of the committee. They have carried out allocated and initiated tasks efficiently, effectively and with very good spirit. The success of LUV this year will not be possible without their good work and that of the Public Officer. I cannot emphasise enough the good fortune of having such great people working together in a team...
The first decision was to handball the position of Public Officer to Donna; it seemed a fair swap, after all she did state she wanted to engage with free software organisations rather than manage them - and she was the one who initially hinted broadly that I should take up the position of association president. Then there was the two Richard Stallman talks, at the University of Melbourne and RMIT. A thousand leaflets were distributed for the two events advertising both LUV and Software Freedom Day. That weekend was Software Freedom Day, where LUV had its own prominent stall. A few days later a community group of non-technical people wanted an article about Linux in their newsletter.
With previous memories of the endless struggle to ensure the two speakers per month and now with the addition of another speaker for beginner's workshops, I made that a priority. We now have speakers lined up for LUV-Main talks until May and LUV-Beginner's talks until April next year. After attendance at their monthly meeting we now have regular communication with a smaller local group, MLUG, after many years of separation. Following attendance with the City of Melbourne sponsored session we have security procedures for our Beginner's Workshops. Tuesday's main meeting was a success with two excellent talks, good conversation, and some forty people in attendance.
On the agenda is to establish a second regional chapter in Geelong with an install-fest and mini-conference, participation in the State Library's IT Enables: Life, Choice, Aspirations Event for the International Day of People with Disability. Finally, one of the more problematic issues (obvious from pure observation, confirmed by member surveys) is the very occasional flame-war. We now have more stringent posting guidelines to ensure that the mailing lists are friendly and helpful.
So it's been a very good first month I suppose. By sheer involvement a plan is formulating for increased membership, greater attendance at events, more regional chapters, and greater community involvement. It may be an accidental plan, but it is happening just the same. Finally, I really must thank all the other members of the committee. They have carried out allocated and initiated tasks efficiently, effectively and with very good spirit. The success of LUV this year will not be possible without their good work and that of the Public Officer. I cannot emphasise enough the good fortune of having such great people working together in a team...
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Date: 2010-10-07 10:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 10:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-07 10:45 am (UTC)Coincidentally, I am moving to Melbourne this weekend and can finally start attending LUV meetings.
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Date: 2010-10-07 10:55 am (UTC)Getting people to use Linux, getting Linux out in the wider community (even - and especially - in deepest suburbia), getting people along to meetings & etc. are all things I want to see happen...
I'm pretty happy with how it's all started, but there's some big tasks ahead..
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Date: 2010-10-07 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-08 09:17 am (UTC)(I am in control of myself, really... I looked at, then deleted, a nomination form for committee of management of my union...)
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Date: 2010-10-07 07:44 pm (UTC)I don't use linux (though I have worked on Sun Solaris). I am not a big fan of Mac or Applie either. I guess for all my interest in algorithms and network programming, I'm not much of a geek. :/
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Date: 2010-10-07 08:21 pm (UTC)One of the things we're trying to get savvy about is marketing to different demographics.. To the developers and sysadmins we emphasise the free and open-source aspect, which is very exciting for them... To the users, we emphasise features, stability, and functionality..
Now if you're interested in networks you might be interested in these:
http://nsnam.isi.edu/nsnam/index.php/Main_Page
http://nsl.csie.nctu.edu.tw/nctuns.html
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Date: 2010-10-08 01:10 pm (UTC)I visited the Linux Users of Victoria wiki page, and the website too - it's nice :)
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Date: 2010-10-10 10:40 am (UTC)I readily admit I am in the telephone dark ages, but I certainly understand what you are doing. I suppose telephony protocols require some pretty tight coding (and setting very tight algorithms) to maximise throughput. How does it deal with oversubscription for QoS, or as that handled by another layer?
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Date: 2010-10-11 06:09 pm (UTC)As far as optimizing the carrier utilization is concerned, the WCDMA encoding(developed by Qualcomm) which is used for converting voice (or data) to electromagnetic waves in 3G UMTS is the most sophisticated in this regard. It manipulates, and allocates, power utilization to stations - rather than time slots or frequency sub-bands - and that results in a much better performance. Too much power availability (strength of electromagnetic signals) to handsets, for example, reduces the signal to noise ratio when too many handsets are active, and consequently the bandwidth made available to that handset is reduced (handsets are asked to reduce their signal strength). It's a very sophisticated algorithm, and has important positives like graceful degradation of service.
The MAC layer does play a role in QoS maintenance by manipulating and transmitting control data between lower (physical - the carrier) and upper (RANAP) layers - but the main decision making in this regard is done by the RANAP(Radio Access Network Application Part) layer, which is the big daddy of all layers in 3G UMTS. RANAP was a part of my know-how required for the work; and though I didn't do any coding from scratch in it, I did do some upgradation work.
I don't work at that place anymore, I left it over two years back. To say that it was a major decision would be an understandment. But some things just weren't coming together. I still love technology though :) And that is why I'm going on and on here, something I'm hoping you won't mind :}
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Date: 2010-10-12 05:03 am (UTC)Ahh Technology
Date: 2010-10-08 08:33 am (UTC)Ahh about that, boss.....
Also if all the Linux groups in Vic were united, would everyone filk "All we need is LUV"?
Hey, It's Friday and I'm over-caffeinated!
Re: Ahh Technology
Date: 2010-10-08 09:14 am (UTC)About six years ago, I said the same about Microsoft. I still have four years to go!
Also if all the Linux groups in Vic were united, would everyone filk "All we need is LUV"?
Our servers are called `tainted` and `drstrange`...
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Date: 2010-10-08 11:18 pm (UTC)Oh, and uh, congratulations! (Maybe its a consolation prize for losing the Unitarian election?)
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Date: 2010-10-09 12:10 am (UTC)In all honesty the "look & feel" is really up to the individual tastes. By the sounds of it you're more familiar with KDE rather than GNOME, so Kubuntu might be what you're after (or maybe even Mint with is Ubuntu + all the codecs pre-installed).
More importantly is the webserver applications; Apache, PHP/Perl/Python & etc. That can be found on all distributions but you may find better support base with a larger distribution (again, I'm looking in the Kubuntu direction). Also you'll have to decide what sort of package management you prefer - for simplicity's sake many prefer the Debian-based aptitude package management (also found in Ubuntu) over Red Hat-based management.
Oh, and uh, congratulations! (Maybe its a consolation prize for losing the Unitarian election?)
More in reverse. At least here, being president of Linux Users of Victoria has more prestige, activities, membership and youth than Unitarians.. Which is something many of the latter don't seem to understand.
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Date: 2010-10-09 12:40 am (UTC)