Sydney Linux Users Group (SLUG)

SLUG's monthly meeting, featuring talks and SLUGlets. Meetings are open to the general public, and are free of charge.

Our meetings take place next to Darling Harbour, near public transport and other amenities.

Our location: Atlassian, 173-185 Sussex Street, Sydney (corner of Sussex and Market Street). Entry is via the rear on Slip Street. There are stairs going down along the outside of building from Sussex St to near the entrance. A map of the area and directions can be found here.

We start at 18:30 but we ask that people arrive 15 minutes early so we can all get into the building and start on time. Please do not arrive before 18:00, as it may hinder business activities for our host!

Appropriate signage and directions will be posted on the building.

This month's sessions are:

General Talk
Zachary Zeus: Open Source Business Intelligence with Pentaho

It's an all-too-common scenario: an organisation with important data scattered across a multitude of different databases, spreadsheets and other sources. If only you could co-relate, compare and visualise this information, to give you an idea of where your company is actually headed! Enter the concept of business intelligence (BI).

BI has for a long time been considered to be an expensive luxury (and competitive advantage) for only the wealthiest of corporations. Given recent market consolidation, you'd be forgiven for concluding that this was set to become even more entrenched.

Enter Pentaho. Pentaho offers a completely open source, open standards BI stack that is enterprise-ready and accessible to everyone. Zachary Zeus will walk you through the main components of Pentaho:

• BI platform
• Reporting
• Ad-hoc reporting
• Analysis (OLAP)
• Dashboards
• Data Integration (ETL)
• Data mining

In-Depth Talk
Silvia Pfeiffer: Use of Open Source Software in Vquence

Vquence is an Australian start-up that provides services around online video. Vquence has built a consumer site (currently at http://www.vquence.com/) that allows people to create video playlists from millions of videos aggregated from multiple social video sites.

In addition, Vquence is currently building a new service around online video tracking and measuring. The software implemented to create these services is completely built using open source software. The Web sites are built using Ruby on Rails, AJAX, MySQL, Joomla and Apache. The crawling software is written in Java. The servers are diverse, ranging from Amazon EC2 & S3, to Xen virtual servers and some dedicated servers — all running Ubuntu Linux.

This talk will explain open source software used to run the business, and to develop the services. I will address the decisions behind choosing the diverse software packages and how they all work together. It will also explain the advantages and disadvantages of using open source software in such a commercial environment where high scalability and reliability are required.

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 is at Golden Harbour Restaurant, in Chinatown. We will be having the $24 Banquet, but we will be collecting $25 per head for ease of accounting and to cover a tip. We will be taking numbers during the break to confirm the reservation size. If you have any particular dietary requirements (e.g. vegetarian), or if you would prefer to order separately, let us know beforehand. Dinner is a great way to socialise and learn in a relaxed atmosphere :)

We hope to see you there!