Successful evening at Shropshire LUG, Telford

I hadn't expected the Shropshire LUG people to be sun-worshippers, but it seems the good weather kept many away, and they missed a treat! We advertised it as the tech-equivalent of the Frost-Nixon interview, but it turned out more Corbett-Cleese in the end!

I tried to go quickly through the introduction, but the history between Martin and I meant this was always going to be a struggle as we baited each other as per normal. Martin Farrow is the type of person who, like the “Robbie-the Robot” toys, you can wind them up and let them go, stand back, and you can have fun for hours! He eventually got started with white board pens whirling and information spewing forth at a huge rate of knots. Every word was useful, even if we'd been there before, the obvious wealth of knowledge and intelligence Martin has was made available if we just pressed the right buttons – he was magnificent in full-flight!
Some of his material was held in rusty old rooms in his memory and was maybe a little out of date, but perseverance was his key. History was visited as Martin spoke about Ted Codd and relational model for databases, about Linus Torvalds and Dennis Ritchie, Andrew Tanenbaum, MINIX, BSD and AT&T and the history of UNIX and Linux. How the memory management model for Linux is “not very good” (not the word he used!), and why. He even explained how programmatic executables use memory and how running out of memory can be avoided, or at least how the risks from it can be reduced by calculating average “resident set size” (RSS) of program blocks. Heads were spinning a little at this point as acronyms flew round the room.
I think everyone went away from the meeting satisfied they'd either learned something, or happy that they remembered something they had long ago forgotten. It was just a shame that so few managed to witness this excellent evening of “geeky theatre”, but we will get Martin back again later this year for another session. Watch this space for news and dates.
For information about the Linux User Group or if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment in the comments box below.