I It's been an interesting month or two, receiving feedback from both the Tassie and the National community since we won the bid for LCA 2009. In particular, Chris Neugebauer and his recent post caught my attention.

Many of the most successful Australian LUGs seem to be centred out of the surrounding Universities; this provides a number of opportunities for growth, publicity, and funding in the form of access to facilities, societal membership funding, and resources.

In contrast, TasLUG has formed, reformed and grown from a base of avid users, many of whom have not been involved in the University Computing communities. We have many members from very varied backgrounds, of many different levels of skill and focus. All the same, TasLUG has been growing soundly over the past 5 years, with the group's website now about to hit 100 topics, 500 posts, and 130 members within the next few months. Our LUG has had many posts praising our providing prompt, accurate, and friendly support to the community. We advertise on local ABC radio, where I have a regular spot, whenever the opportunity arises, we give away Ubuntu and Open CDs, we run a number of Software Freedom Day events across the state each September which attract 200+ people statewide, and now, as January 2009 fast approaches, we're about to host one of the biggest Linux events on the Australian conf calendar (and ooh boy, are we excited!).

And still, the feedback is coming in that there are people who are somehow missing out on the great community we have down here.

It is becoming apparent that without a growing support for Linux and Open Source within the University communities, LUGs face an uphill battle to bring their communities to those who might champion the cause, and pass the message on. Bringing an event of the magnitude of Linux.conf.au to the University of Tasmania can only help to achieve this goal.

Over the coming 12 months, we will be working to foster a new community of Linux and Open Source users within our community; and to cement our position in the Tasmanian community in such a way that no-one will call TasLUG's existence into question again .

I had dinner at my Grandparents' place last night, they live on the waterfront in Lindisfarne, and as the evening was clear and still, I took an opportunity to go and take some photographs. Here are some of my favourites:

Today was the AGM for the UTas Internet Developers' Society. Other than the usual blather that occurs in AGMs for these sorts of things, we've approved a change of name to TUCS (or rather the Tasmania University (union) Computing Society). For the moment this name change is purely cosmetic (as we really haven't done that much in the way of Internet Development for as long as I've been at the Uni. The new name (in my opinion) reflects the membership, and the aims of the society a lot better.

One item of Business that I raised was the upcoming Linux.conf.au 2009, which you probably already know by now is being held at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. It's been resolved that the Society establish better ties with the Free Software/Open Source Community (in Tasmania, in Particular with TasLUG) with the intention of better promoting Free/Open Source software amongst the student and staff body in the leadup to the conference; and I ran for the executive (successfully) on that basis.

Here's hoping it's a successful year for the society (which now has a cool name!)

I generally have a policy of not allowing Flash onto my website (and sorry if any of you PLOAers object), but this opportunity was hard to pass up. Toni Westbrook has written Shredz64, a Guitar Hero-like-game for the Commodore 64. Following is part 2 of his video (the first part take a long time for him to get going, so I've not posted it here).

Enjoy...

One feature that Python's built-in string replacement facilities does not provide is case-insensitive string replacement. This is a reasonably useful construct (that I use fairly frequently in other languages, such as PHP), which I couldn't find code for after Googling -- so here's some code that does it (licenced under the WTFPL, of course)

import re

def ireplace(self,old,new,count=0):
	''' Behaves like string.replace(), but does so in a case-insensitive
	fashion. '''
	pattern = re.compile(re.escape(old),re.I)
	return re.sub(pattern,new,self,count)

import re

class str_cir(str):
	''' A string with a built-in case-insensitive replacement method '''
	

	def ireplace(self,old,new,count=0):
		''' Behaves like S.replace(), but does so in a case-insensitive
		fashion. '''
		pattern = re.compile(re.escape(old),re.I)
		return re.sub(pattern,new,self,count)

After noticing the disparity of prices of Coca-Cola, I decided that it would be a good idea to map out the location of vending machines and their prices.

and here is the link

If you have a vending machine location on campus to point out to me, or if there has been a price shift at any location, let me know by e-mailing cpw at [the domain that this post is hosted at]

Tasman Bridge -- Earth Hour, originally uploaded by Christopher Neugebauer.

It's Earth Hour, therefore a large number of Tasmanian Landmarks have had their lights switched off. Here's a photo of the Tasman Bridge in a strangely deluminated state.

Friday was our the first meeting of the new UTAS Computing Society Executive, which incidentally, was the first under our new name (TUCS). Since then lots of progress has been made:

• We launched our new Website, www.tucs.org.au.


• We began planning for the launch day for the new society, which is scheduled for Friday, May 2. We're having a barbecue, and performing a membership drive (since we didn't do that at the start of the year, in order to get the new society in order).


• Started a new series of Tech Talks. I'll be giving the first one on introductory Python, and we're planning on making this coincide with the society launch.

All in all, it's a somewhat exciting time to be doing Computing-related stuff at UTas (here's hoping it stays that way!)

TUCS had its launch event yesterday, which consisted of a Barbecue, membership drive, and tech talk.

The Membership front was fairly successful, given that we managed to sign up somewhere in the order of 7 new members (which is not bad given how late in the semester it is, and that we weren't offering Alcohol at the event :)), hopefully we can get a few more before the end of the semester, as it would be nice to get some people who aren't part of the "usual crowd" to join in.

The main reason for this post was that I delivered the tech talk, on the topic of Introductory Python. Overall, I think it went fairly well, although I mistimed the talk such that I had to completely miss one section of the talk (which is a reminder of my debating days... but let's not get into that). Anyone who wants to comment on my talk (except for the sections where Bruce crashes -- I already know about this) is quite welcome to -- it's available in its entirety at Google Video

The day was quite successful. Here's hoping that TUCS can keep getting stronger!

TUCS Tech Talk #1,
originally uploaded by
Christopher Neugebauer.

As I mentioned href="/website/blog/life/20080503-TucsLaunch.html">previously,
TUCS
had its first tech talk on Friday (delivered by myself, on the topic of Introductory Python), this is the first opportunity to show off photos from it. I was rather impressed by the turnout (there are a few people off to the side that can't be seen in the frame).