So it's just the computer club here at the Mbeya Institute/University* where I teach, and I'm the faculty advisor for the computer club, so I'm not sure it really counts. Nonetheless, I was asked to present something I was interested in to educate club members, and the club president advertised that I was going to be speaking and some people from outside the club and the computer department entirely showed up on the basis of this! The presentation also seemed to be well received--I just did a 50 minute or so talk on emulators and virtual machines and mostly just showed people the stuff on my computer, WINE, dosbox, a Windows XP virtual machine, and cygwin installed on the VM. I talked briefly about the hypervisor and the scheduling problems it has to solve and demonstrated how to install and uninstall a VM using virtualbox. I also mentioned that I was considering switching to vmplayer because Oracle acquired virtualbox and I don't like Oracle as a corporation, but my laziness tends to get in the way of my software related political gestures. I got a lot of fairly good questions, someone actually asked me to expound on scheduling algorithms! I love scheduling algorithms! My favorite is shortest deadline first, unfortunately, multicore systems tend to break it so we have to switch to the much less intellectually satisfying credit system. Anyway, I enjoyed it, other people seemed to enjoy it, and several people asked me for the virtualbox program (I came prepared with the windows setup package) and some of my .iso files. Preaching the good news of virtualization here in Tanzania!
*I think they changed recently to a university, which leads to an acronym change from MIST to MUST, which I actually disapprove of. Mist is poetic, must is either smelly or something demanded.
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