Next week, on Tuesday 8th, the Western Cape Linux User Group meets to hear about dbus "and other freedesktop stuff".  Usual venue - Chemical Engineering lecture theatre at University of Cape Town.  18:30.  As is usual for CLUG meetings, everyone who attends is welcome to come have supper afterwards (there's a list of previous CLUG dinner venues on the wiki).

The next day, Wednesday 9th, the Cape Town Ruby Brigade has a meeting at the Bandwidth Barn from 19:00.  Currently known topics include the Yahoo! UI and working with it with Rails.  Don't forget to sign up

Saturday, 26th April, finds the Cape Town Python User Group Tenth Meeting (probably) at the Bandwidth Barn, probably from 14:00 as usual.  No set topics yet, but I imagine we might have a round of collaborative programming after the unplanned session last meeting which seemed to go down well.  (Unfortunately, I was working, so I missed out...)

Tuesday, 29th April, is the second of the twice-a-month meetings of the Western Cape Linux User Group.  No idea on the topic yet, though.

When I started at SynthaSite and returned to doing some sysadmin-related work I discovered BackupPC and rdiff-backup, and I offered to give a talk at CLUG.  For my sins, I'm talking tomorrow from 18:30 onwards at the UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre.  There will be the usual post-CLUG dinner for anyone who wants to continue chatting after the talk.

There's quite a bit happening for geeks in Cape Town this month. 

On Saturday 6th from 14:00 to about 16:00, the Cape Town Python User Group will be holding its sixth meeting at the Bandwidth Barn, where you can hear me talking about Pylons and Graeme Glass talking about Python on the S60 mobile/smartphone platform.

On Tuesday 9th from 18:30 onwards, the Western Cape Linux User Group will be holding a meeting at the UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre (as usual), with Jonathan Hitchcock talking about the Gentoo Portage package management system.

On Wednesday 17th, Moodia is hosting the first Facebook Developer Garage Cape Town (Facebook required), at the Waverley business park from 18:30 to 22:30.  This should be an interesting event, and hopefully we'll see some Facebook development talks, tutorials, or projects at *Camp.

On Saturday 20th, the first PodCampCapeTown is happening (although I think I might have to give it a miss, given my schedule) from 9am to 5pm at The Wild Fig (you might remember that they were the venue for the May Cape Town GeekDinner).

On Saturday 27th, slightly less geeky, there's the 27-13 27dinner from 18:30 onwards at the Deer Park Cafe (you might remember that this was where the "1 of 50" open content party was held last month).

Also by CLUG, on Tuesday 30th, UCT Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre from 18:30, Jeremy Thurgood will be talking about the DARCS version control system.

I like that we're discovering some good venues - the Bandwidth Barn, the Wild Fig, and the Deer Park Cafe all seem quite friendly to being used as venues for the kind of events we're organising.

I think last night's CLUG meeting about OpenStreetMap by Corey Burger was one of our best in recent memory.  At the talk, a decent sized crowd pitched up and there were many questions and generally lots of interest.

We also had some really lively discussion at the dinner afterwards, with about 16 people coming along.  Unlike some of our invited guests over the years, both Corey and his brother, Brian, were very approachable and happy to talk to anyone about anything.

So, thanks to Corey and Brian for coming to visit us on your vacation, and I hope you had an enjoyable night.

While there are probably hundreds of people employed as Linux systems administrators, and hundreds more people using Linux at home for fun, in Cape Town alone, our Linux User Group, CLUG, isn't growing along with these numbers.  It should, though.  It provides two talks a month, on weekday nights, by some of the best people to talk about them, on both beginner and advanced topics, on programming to administration.  And it also has a dinner afterwards for people to meet and learn more about each other and help each other.  CLUG meets on the second and last Tuesday every month, with roughly 20 people attending the talks and about 10 people going to the dinner afterwards.

Growing the pool is making new connections, bringing new people into the community, providing new people to learn from and new opportunities for work or play.  It isn't necessarily about bringing new people into the field (but it is a by-product) so much as it is about making everyone in the field more aware of each other.

I am unfashionably busy at work, so just a late and quick post to say that Antoine van Gelder is going to give a talk at CLUG.  It is on CLUG Talk: Application Development for the One Laptop Per Child XO,  being held tonight 06:30PM — 08:00PM at the usual location - UCT ChemEng Lecture Theatre.

Tomorrow night in the usual 18:30 to 20:00 slot, Jeremy Thurgood is giving a talk on Erlang at the (Western) Cape Linux Users Group meeting at the Chemical Engineering Lecture Theatre at UCT.  Erlang is a concurrent and functional programming language featuring strong but dynamic typing and also run-time code hot-swapping.  And, well, Jeremy will tell us more...