Talks

Planned Talks (Winter 2008)

• February 1st
  • Research In Motion
• February 29th (Confirmed): Overview of Quantum Computing
  • Raymond Laflamme (Director, IQC)
• Week of March 3rd (Proposed)
  • Second IQC talk
• Week of March 10th (Proposed)
  • Kate Larson (Game Theory)

Requested

• Michael Geist
  • Canadian Law and Technologist Blogger
• Wayne Beaton
  • Technical Evangelist for The Eclipse Foundation
• Keith Packard
  • X Windows
  • Holden has contacted him again to ask him to come in October
• Walter Bright
  • D Programming Language
• Hans Peter Anvin
  • Linux kernel hacker
• Cory Doctorow
  • Co-editor of Boing Boing
• CSCF/MFCF/IST Open Forum
  • Dave Gawley [CSCF]
  • Dawn Keenan [IST]
  • Jim Pell [MFCF]
  • Stephen Mann [SCS]
  • Bruce Campbell [IST]
• Jeffrey Shallit

Possible Speakers/Talks (not yet requested)

• Noam Chompsky
• Richard Stallman
  • Holden has suggested that perhaps he can give another talk?
• Ron Rivest
  • Helped create the RSA scheme, also helped write the CLRS book
• Phillipe Khan
  • Founded Borland in the 1980s, helped develop several successful languages and products (also inveted camera phone)
• Bill Joy
  • Known for his work on BSD Unix, vi and csh
• John McCarthy
  • Known for his work on the LISP functional language
• Andrew Tanenbaum
  • Author of MINIX and well known for his work in the area of operating systems

Encoding

We use dvgrab to rip the talks from the camera and ffmpeg to encode.

Mirrors

• taurine (90 Mbps) [It can probably push much more if it were on a gigabit link]
• citric-acid (250 Mbps)

The list of mirrors can be found in caffeine:/var/www/mirrors.txt the web server selects a random mirror from this list at each file request. We now run Net-SNMP on all of our hosts, so we have real-time access to network and cpu load data. We should therefore be able to write a more intelligent mirror selection script. We also use mirror.cs to mirror on-campus.

We are currently looking at QoS tagging to throttle our bandwidth.