Special meeting: "Exim and PCRE: How free software hijacked my life"

View the video stream of the Philip Hazel WLUG meeting.

The WaikatoLinuxUsersGroup are pleased to announce that Philip Hazel, primary author of the Exim mail transfer agent and the pcre(7) library, will be presenting an open talk to its members and guests on Tuesday, 1 February.

The talk is entitled "Exim and PCRE: How free software hijacked my life". Philip will present a non-technical talk on the history of the Exim and PCRE software projects, how they got started, where they are now, and where they are currently going.

The meeting will start at 7:30pm, in the LitB building at WaikatoUniversity. All are welcome. Tea/coffee/biscuits/juice will be provided afterwards.

Thanks to Philip Hazel for agreeing to take the time to present this meeting, to the NZNOG conference for sponsoring Philip's trip to NZ and to Jamie Curtis for organising the meeting.

About the presenter

Philip Hazel grew up in South Africa. He has a PhD in applied mathematics, and has spent the last 30 years writing general-purpose software for the Computing Service at the University of Cambridge in England. Some major projects were text editors and text formatters for use on an IBM mainframe system. Since moving from the mainframe to Unix around 1990, he has become more and more involved with email. This lead to his starting to develop Exim in 1995, and the PCRE regular expression library two years later. These open source projects have both turned out to be larger and more successful that expected. Outside interests include classical music (as a choral singer and late convert to viola playing), music typsetting, working backstage in amateur theatre, and finding nice places to go walking, preferably not as flat as Cambridgeshire. Philip is married, and has three grown-up sons.