You can read the full version of this announcement on the Web at 
http://www.slug.org.au/node/100


== May SLUG Monthly Meeting ==

When:
   18.30 - 20.30, Friday, 30 May, 2008

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.


Where:
   Atlassian[0], 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[1].


= Talks =

** 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[2] for an explanation of the segments.

    * 18:15 : Open Doors
    * 18:30 : Announcements, News, Introductions
    * 18:45 : General Talk (see above)
    * 19:30 : Intermission
    * 19:45 : Split into two groups for
        * In-depth Talk (see above)
        * SLUGlets: Linux Q&A and other miscellany
    * 20:30 : Dinner

Dinner is at Golden Harbour Restaurant, in Chinatown. We will be having the 
$24 Banquet[3], 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!


[0] http://www.atlassian.com
[1] http://tinyurl.com/35fxes
[2] http://www.slug.org.au/meetings/meetingformat
[3] http://www.goldenharbour.com.au/specials.html


-- 
Sridhar Dhanapalan
President
Sydney Linux Users Group
http://www.slug.org.au

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