Utah Open Source Planet

Well, the incrementing continues and we’re closing in on the end of our time in Ohio.  I’ve really enjoyed the conference so far and the Fedora Ambassadors are awesome!  13 of us showed up to the booth (pictures coming later) and we interacted with hundreds upon hundreds of interested folks.

As usual, the biggest hit was the One Laptop per Child (OLPC).  The kids would show up (and many adults) and play for some time.  I really enjoyed showing the kids the cool activities and items on these awesome computers.  I’m really looking forward to the updates coming out in the next update!  The kids loved the camera and voice wave activities and the adults really liked the idea of kids learning to program and do amazing things.

A good friend of mine John Weis, who lives in Columbus was at OLF too and so we met up and hung out a bit at the conference.  Still working on converting him over to Fedora, but at least he’s using Linux.

As for others, we had a run on shirts around noon, I think I gave out about 15 in a span of 10 minutes.  The rule was that they had to put them on right then so people could see the fedora on their person!  It was great fun and we have some fun pictures, which I’ll post with tomorrow’s updates.

At the end of the day, I had attended 3 presentations.  The teenage girl who uses open source, one on alsa, and the closing keynote by Jono Bacon.  I, unfortunately, missed Zonker’s presentation, I hear it was just like the one at UTOSC :)  Good stuff!

We headed out to dinner at this greek restaurant where I was able to enjoy some ‘Flaming Cheese!’  Quite a good restaurant.  Grape leaves are good as well, and I got to mock John Weis with some draft NewCastle ale (since he’s only 20) which was also quite good.

After dinner, we returned to the convention center for the after party.  We had a good time and I did the moonwalk to represent Fedora during the dance competition.  I’m pretty reserved though compared to the other distro dance representatives who shook their butts and removed clothing!  After the first round, I bowed out, but it was funny…

Apparently, there as an after after and an after after after party as well.  I heard rumors of bottles being broken and a fight that almost happened.  Hopefully nothing came out of it as it was great conference and I really enjoyed myself.  Fedora was well represented as well and I look forward to seeing another OLF in the future.

Tomorrow is FAD NA and I need to rewrite my slides again (now that I’ve the thoughts more organized in my head), and I’m really looking forward to working with these guys on some really cool projects coming up.

Cheers,

Herlo

In last night’s FAmNA meeting, we discussed the fact that nobody had remembered to register to help at the Fedora booth at OLF.  David brought it up and within a few minutes we had most of the spots filled.

As an event organizer, I understand the importance of having a booth manned at all times.  If you have a moment, head on over to the OLF Planning page on the wiki and add your name to a slot.  We could use at least 2-3 people in every spot.

There will be a ‘USB Creation Station’ there run by my little 7″ ASUS EEE PC as well as some XO laptops and other cool swag like stickers, t-shirts and buttons (thanks John).

Thanks to Jeffrey Tadlock for heading up the organization and it will be great to see him at FADNA on Sunday as well.  It will be great to meet all the gang and put faces to names.  Don’t forget to bring your camera!!

Cheers,

Herlo

Following up with our FAMNA meeting this week, the FAMNA regional ambassadors are meeting tomorrow night at 20:00 EDT in #fedora-ambassadors (irc.freenode.net) to discuss the agenda and events surrounding the Fedora Ambassador Day - North America.  I’m not sure if this is the first FAD - NA, but we’re definitely in a good resurgence with some good folks involved.

In commemoration of this exciting event, which will be held concurrently with the Ohio Linux Fest, October 10-12, I created a badge similar to the one created by Nicu Buculei for FAD EMEA.

I’m excited this looks as good as it does and will show pride for those Fedora Ambassadors in North America who will be joining us at OLF.

Cheers,

Herlo

Day 2 seemed to be even smoother than day 1, much of the time, running around putting out little fires, but not too many.  I was the room manager for Paul’s Fedora Remix talk, quite enjoyed that, even though most of it I already knew.

I also got to enjoy both keynotes today.  Howard Tayler was quite entertaining with his bit about ‘The Price is Right’ and making content that doesn’t suck.  Joe Brockmeier’s keynote was a bit down to earth, yet had some very fun elements.  I really enjoyed the ‘Dairy Council’ idea for Linux that was brought up during the Q&A session.  It reminded me that I need to send him an email for a similar idea with community conferences.

The Fedora booth was going smoothly.  Unfortunately, Paul spent most of his time there, except for his presentation.  Jared Smith and Nathan Blackham helped out while he was gone.  Next year, I want to make sure that if we have Paul or Joe at our conference, they don’t have to spend time in the booth.  It would seem they could help better in other ways.  Maybe I’m wrong?

In the evening, we headed out to Tucanos Brazilian Grill at the Gateway for the UTOSC Geek/Blogger Dinner.  This dinner was a complement to UTOSC 2008 so some who weren’t attendees showed up to join us.  I was able to purchase brazilian lemonades for the entire group.  Its so much fun spending time with geeks of my sort.  Both Paul and Joe were able to attend as well.

After we consumed large portions of meat, socialized and drank ourselves into a stupor, the group started to disperse.  A few of us decided to take light-rail home afterward, which was a nice departure from all of the driving I had done recently.  It also gave me an opportunity to spend a few more minutes with my sweetie, Jennifer.  She’s been so great throughout.  I’m just happy to know she’ll support me, and she said she had a lot of fun as well.

Many, many people came by the booths from what I saw.  I know the OLPC would be a big hit on Saturday, Family Day.  Time to get out the little fedora shirts and show off the coolness that is Fedora.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I was running pretty crazy last night at the first night of UTOSC 2008, but I wasn’t that crazy.  Things went smoothly, I got most of the swag for the Fedora booth and enjoyed Paul’s talk.

As the organizer (among others), I tend to be running around a lot, but this year, I’ve already seen 3 presentations, which is pretty good.  I enjoyed the Drupal presentation, Mac Newbold’s Keynote and Paul Frields Fedora Keynote.

The registration booth was probably the biggest issue, but I’m happy about it now.  We need to be better at printing badges and I need to plan better regarding those sorts of things.

The Fedora and openSUSE booths were rocking, as were the Guru Labs, KnowledgeBlue and the Massage booth (yes, there’s massages here, aren’t you jealous?)

I’m excited to be in charge of a great group of volunteers this year.  And I think they’ve been the best thing for us this year.  Without them, we couldn’t take on all the great things we have and I’m confident they’ve been the difference between a smooth conference of 500+ people and us running crazy and not getting most things done.  THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS, WE LOVE YOU!

Lastly, between the two keynotes last night, Jayce Hall announced a $1000 challenge grant to the Serenity Foundation for the remainder of the conference.  That’s today and tomorrow.  As the Utah Open Source Foundation, we felt Phil Burns has been such a great motivator in the technology community, we wanted to give back.  So help us help Serenity and her foundation.  I was quite moved by Phil’s reaction, and was very happy we could help.

Looking forward to finishing off Day 2 and participating with all of you.  And thank you all for making UTOSC 2008 such a great success!!

So its soo close.  So very close, to the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  Only, I have to write this paragraph about the conference itself and what it means to open source in Utah.  What it means to be involved in this amazing conference.

This blog post is supposed to be about something useful, but I think its just going to be a rambling session about all the things I think that are neat about open source, freedom, Utah and the benefits of holding UTOSC every year.

So what do I think, well… I think that UTOSC is my favorite thing I’ve ever done as a tech person.  I have an 8 year old boy, which is much of the reason I do this sort of thing.  He’s the reason I try to get webcams working with Ekiga, or try to record videos to send him with Cheese.  I love my boy, and I want him to be proud of his papa, and this is one way I can make a mark on society, to change the world if you will.

When I talk about changing the world, I don’t mean changing every aspect, but just doing something so simple that you love, to change the way others look at the thing and say, “wow!”.  That’s the thing I mean about changing the world.

I mean, geez, what do we have this year anyway?  Let’s see.  Oh, to start off with, a great theme ‘HOWTO’.  It really can’t get any better than that, can it!?  It points the way to learn how to do something in open source.  A contributor, a learning mechanism, a simple text document that started the whole thing.

We also have a great team of folks involved in making it happen this year.  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank them.  They’ve been instrumental in getting this to be the world class conference I hope it to become.  We’re not there yet, but give us a couple more years to learn all of those little tips and tricks.

Software, that’s another thing we have that’s great.  This coming year, I plan to take the UTOSC conference site and remake it again, this time with a better feature set.  I have to say, however, that the system we put into place more than 8 months ago, has turned out to be a great asset.  I thank those who’ve helped us make conman, our conference management software.  You know who you are, and I appreciate the help.

Because we’re running the conference and are also computer nerds/geeks/etc, we get to play with cool hardware, dink around with printing, do audio, video and invite families to participate in our wondrous extravaganza every year. But we also get to do something else that much cooler, we get to share our joys and passions with others.  Show others why open source is the way of the future.  Why its important to us and why we think that paying for software or having limted access to software is just wrong.

Learning is always part of a hobby.  This great, wonderful, exciting hobby of ours is so great we want to share the wealth with you all.

A couple things that I think are great about UTOSC 2008 are Family Day, I’m excited to set up the try-it lab on Friday night for the kiddies.  The fact that we’ll have booths for all three of the major Linux distributions (Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu). But there’s more.

On Thursday evening, Paul Frields will kick our conference into high gear with Fedora, first.  Friday comes and Joe Brockmeier will entertain us with some community talk.  And finally, on Saturday morning, we have Christer Edwards whose been instrumental in much of the Ubuntu community growth over the past couple years.

I’ve been influenced heavily by the Fedora Project.  And as an North American Ambassador, I’m also in charge of the Fedora booth.  We have a few volunteers and they’ve been great.  I anticipate the booth to be filled with people asking questions all three days.  One thing I wanted to mention, is that the booths/expo area is open to any/all that come through.  Spreading open source means allowing for the opportunity to use the software.  We want you all to come and listen to what our folks have to say.

Okay, so it sounds like my writers block really didn’t happen, but I wasn’t sure I could just sit down and crank out something this easily.  Off to write a simple 100 word intro to the Utah Open Source Conference.

Wish me luck!

Herlo

In the next 3 weeks, I will be among the busiest people I know.  Probably the only people busier are Presidential hopefuls, Olympic organizers and sadly, those fighting in Georgia.  The reason I am writing this post is to help me remember what I have left to complete between now and the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 on August 28-30, 2008.

Recently, I learned that our website doesn’t render well in Internet Exploder, Safari and some older versions of Firefox.  I’m guessing its due to the inability I have to create and maintain css, because well, I’m not a design guy.  Because of this, we’re having a hackfest tonight, both at my house, and online.  Feel free to come by at 8:30 and help out.

Prior to the hackfest, I will be working with Fedora Ambassadors to grow the North American region.  We’ll be discussing such things as AmbassadorKit, EventBox and of course, Fedora’s presence at UTOSC 2008.  This meeting tends to get a lot of good people making the world a better place.  I am interested in making this happen starting with North America.  If you are interested in helping out, or just lurking, feel free to drop by #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 1:00UTC (9pm EDT).

Prior to the Fedora NA meeting, I’m planning on working on the PCs that we’ll be using for the Utah Open Source Conference.  This will be done over at a friends house, who is loaning the PCs to UTOSC for the week of the conference.

I am attempting to record every presentation this year with either audio or video.  We have been rewarded again this year by having our friends over at KnowledgeBlue come and video record much of the conference, but they don’t have enough staff or equipment to simultaneously record 4-6 rooms.  So the plan went to me to setup recording devices in each room.

The plan is simple setup 6 PCs with Linux, install audacity and darkice.  This way we can stream the keynote audio live over our streaming server and also just record the audio from other presentations to be published at a later date.  I anticipate I’ll be able to install and complete this task pretty quickly.

Well, its now 7:40am here at my desk in my house.  I still have head into the office today for a bit of work, so off I go.  Feel free to come by #utos anytime today and wish me luck (or help if you are so inclined) with anything you can suggest.  Hopefully, today won’t be too long.

Herlo

I’ve been very busy this last two weeks updating pages and working on finalizing details for UTOSC 2008, held August 28-30, 2008.  For instance, the Fedora booth is coming along nicely.  For a conference of around 400, we should have a pretty good booth turnout.  I had Jeffrey Tadlock, Paul Frields (who’s also keynoting btw) and its possible other NA Ambassadors may attend.  I’m really excited about this development.

In addition, Joe Brockmeier of OpenSUSE will also be keynoting and we’ve got quite a list of presenters on our website.  Our goal is to help open source grow in Utah, and by providing this conference once a year, we can help our local LUGs and open source leaders.  We have approximately 50 presentations, plus events and other fun stuff up our sleeve over this 3 day conference.

One of the great events returning this year is the Guru Labs Troubleshooting Challenge.  We hope to have this event bigger and better this year, with cash prizes for the winner(s).  There will be sign-ups available on Thursday morning at the registration booth and the contest will run all day Friday, crowning a winner Friday night!

Another great return from last year is KnowledgeBlue.  With opensourceTV, they’ll be recording the video for several of our presentations and keynotes.  They’ll be working just like last year (only better) to provide interviews as well with some of the leaders of the open source community.  We expect you all will enjoy the videos as they go up on youtube.  This year, they will focus on multiple angles and getting a good quality presentation from the presenters.

Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about Family Day at UTOSC, August 30, 2008.  If you take a look at the presentations on Saturday, you’ll notice a bit of a trend.  With a few exceptions, presentations are intended to help the family. Also, we are working on activities for the kiddies such as an OLPC, videos on MythTV, edubuntu, Fedora Electronics Lab demos and more in our try-it lab.  We’re also working to acquire a moon bounce and sumo suits (for the big kids).  Saturday looks to be a ton of fun.

NOTE: This doesn’t mean that we have enough family stuff, and in fact, we really don’t.  One thing I’d like to see, is a presentation on content filtering for the family.  Something like “Howto use Dan’s Guardian effectively” or a discussion of pfsense, smoothwall or other firewalling/filtering tools.  If you have a presentation you’d like to suggest in this area, please let me know by commenting or emailing me.

I hope to see many of you there as the cost is quite low at $70 and if you are LUG member, its only $35 until August 7 for the early bird pricing.  Read more on our website at http://2008.utosc.com or register directly with eventbrite at http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com.

See you all there.

Herlo

Well, its been more than two weeks since my last post about FUDCon.  I figure its high time I posted something about what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.  Things have been quite busy and are bound to continue at this phrenetic pace for a bit longer.

DarkIce - Audio Streaming

I’ve been working this past week on getting darkice packaged for Fedora.  Darkice is a front end audio recording tool for streaming servers like Icecast.  I much prefer it over ices and any other streaming client I’ve tried.  It does have bits for mp3/mp2/faac as well as ogg/vorbis, so I’ll be packaging it for only the latter.

It seems rpmbuild is a bit more cryptic from my last foray into building RPMs and I have to hunt a little harder for the libs and the binaries.  Its coming along nicely, now that I have my virtual machine back in place.  I’m also hoping that darkice will be easy to integrate into Fedora Talk as I’ve never dealt with the asterisk end before.

Utah Open Source Conference

This past weekend, we spent a good bit of time reviewing and selecting presentations for the Utah Open Source Conference.  I am the head organizer and founder of this all volunteer conference. In fact, our very own FPL, Paul Frields will be keynoting on Thursday evening.  Keep an eye on this blog for future updates about the conference.

A New Interest

I’ve recently started to see someone of the female persuasion.  Many of my friends have met her, and I’m guessing they like her as I do (well, not quite as much).  Here’s hoping things go well with Jennifer

There’s more here, and I’ll try to be more vocal about it as I think its good to share.

Cheers,

Herlo

So I am sitting in my hotel in Los Angeles, preparing to head back to Utah, its 2:37am PDT and I have been meaning to post the rest of my experience at FUDCon.  First off, I’d like to thank Mo and Ray for letting me stay at their home with them.  They were great hosts!  I’d also like to re-thank Max and Paul and the FedoraProject for sponsoring me out to Boston on such short notice.  I still feel grateful to be part of such a great community!

FUDCon F10, for me, was a time of realization.  Understanding what it is to get involved in projects that scratch that itch.  For providing services toward something I’m good at, into a larger community who could really take advantage of that service.  And while I am still feeling my way through the Fedora world, I think a few things are clearer now after reflecting on this last FUDCon.

I want to record and stream audio and video.

I’m thinking that along with the Fedora Talk project, I could configure and use tools to provide a non-interactive streaming server for certain events/presentations.  What I am thinking of here is things like FUDCon keynotes and sessions.  In fact, I plan to purchase a higher quality microphone / mixer combo to better record the audio at the source.

Video and screencasting in real-time seems a bit more of a challenge.  Putting that together with the streaming audio seems like a fun project and scratches several itches I’ve been experiencing lately.

I need to learn how build better RPMs

Spot taught a great session at FUDCon F9 in Raleigh about RPM packaging, and Rex Deiter talked this time about becoming a package maintainer.  I’ve got a few packages that I’d like to get into the fedora tree, and I think by the end of this year, that can happen.  I’m okay at packaging, but haven’t ever submitted a spec file to spot.  While I’m nervous about how ugly the first package will look, I’m also excited at the prospect of learning better and more efficient ways of building useful tools for the masses.

I think everyone should build their own spin of Fedora

After the 5+ hour session on Friday’s hackfest regarding the spins website and what the spins SIG has already accomplished, I’ve taken some initiative and started to create content to help the prospective spin enthusiast.  I’m a big fan of the Eee PC and am looking forward to purchasing the 901 in the winter.  Until then, I’m planning on helping improve the spin process so we don’t fail to release spins again.  The custom and official spins ‘built with Fedora’ can be so much more prolific if we just provide the right tools to build a spin.  It really should be nothing more than, here’s my kickstart, build me an iso.  This would of course have to follow the general standards for acceptable software.

The relationships (FUDBuddies) made at FUDCon are up my alley

I met Rex Dieter, Mo Duffy, Ray Strode, Dennis Gilmore and Ian Weller this time.  We had great conversations about the world and of course Fedora.  I also got to talk more to Toshio, Greg and J5 who I had met previously at FUDCon F9.  I indeed learned a bunch from Toshio about TurboGears too.  Its something I’ll treasure for releases to come.

To end this post, I’ve got some audio of the olpc session and paul’s keynote, as well as some photos I’ve posted around the interweb, enjoy.  Paul’s keynote will also be up on our new FedoraTV Miro channel, check it out!

Cheers,

Clint

Got to FUDCon today after a nice semi-sleepy red-eye flight.  I was surprisingly awake for a person who has had less than 3 hours of sleep in the last 24+ hours.  As I arrived, following Max’s instructions to the Hyne’s Convention Center, an announcement.  The spins hackfest was beginning.

I quickly grabbed some coffee and an apple and headed in after Max.  Little did I know how great this fest was going to be, all 4+ hours of it.  After a good list of goals, Max handed control over to Mo and off we went.

Discussion surrounded three main stories, one for a user wanting to download a spin, one desiring to submit a spin and one for reviewers of spins.  As it turns out, developing stories for the first two were pretty easy, and just before 11, we had a good idea of how to implement applications for these two users.

However, the third story, the one for reviewing.  Yeah, that one.  Well, I guess I just need to ask one hard question.  The question I had was a simple one, but the answer is apparently much more complex, including both technical and legal questions about third-party distributions.  And while it seems like a simple distinction, I brought this upon myself, uncovering a discussion that has been going on for 2+ years now.

The biggest problem is for those spins that include software not in the fedora repositories.  How do we treat these spins?  The discussion ended up being that while hosting these spins might not be feasible, we’d like to have a way to market the spins as built on Fedora or something similar. It seems that this is a good choice, but it needs to go through legal.

After an hour long discussion about these details (which I caused), we tabled it and came up with a good list of tasks to get the project started.  Thanks to Ian Weller, there’s a good wiki page covering much of this discussion.  In fact, I have a couple of tasks to complete this week.

At the end of the day, I ended up with some Red Hat folks at Legal Sea Foods, good wine, great company.  If I wasn’t so tired, I’d have stayed much longer.  Good times…

Tomorrow’s FUDCon barcamp looks to be pretty interesting.  I plan to attend the video tools, the getting contributors and bug triage.  In addition, there will probably be a couple that will come up tomorrow morning, so we’ll se how it goes.

Cheers,

Herlo

As I was watching Dr. Who this afternoon during my packing up of my clothing and power cords for FUDCon tomorrow and Saturday, I was thinking a bit more about how I could help.

It turns out, that while we have some great presentations, a suggestion was made to put the User back into FUDCon.  I think this is a great idea.

While I was reading Jesse’s post, I was thinking what could little old me do to help users of Fedora.  I was thinking a simple bug triaging process management, or helping users find documentation for which things they are looking.  But each of these things as I thought about them were more on the contributor side, which seems more like what we want.

A basic user in the Fedora Project, to me, while useful, might not really be those who attend FUDCon, but more of a person who is a user, interested in contributing back to the community.  I feel I fit in that realm.

Not knowing much about the FedoraProject a year ago, and still feeling pretty naive, I have wanted to get more involved.  As such, I’ve made some forays into helping, including my attempt at helping to do some videos and screencasts for the marketing team.  Watch for me this weekend as we will be attempting to record your mug :)  I’ve also done a little bit in the documentation area, logged a few bugs and been a generally good ambassador by handing out tons and tons of LiveCDs and DVDs almost every week.

I’ve also been thinking about how we can get more people from that ‘well, I like Fedora’ user, to a ‘cool, I want to give back’ user.  I think the Fedora Project is built very well for this kind of user (and possible future contributor).  While the project can sustain users who just participate, I’d like to see some education surrounding how one can help with things that are either less technical, or helping someone get into the more technical areas, with something like mentors.

During FUDCon, we could come up with a simple presentation or two about tools that help individual users contribute.  Things like smolt, logging bugs, testing and other items can really be helpful tools to get people attending FUDCon involved in hleping the actual process.  I also think it’d be great on hackfest days to have a ‘how to help’ intro for a few who might want to help, but really don’t know where to start.

I’ll be talking with others as I think more about these things this weekend.  I look forward to a fun two days!

Cheers,

Clint

So it looks like my whining and moaning paid off!  I didn’t expect that anyone could help me, the money had been spent, things were cancelled and I was screwed!

I recieved a comment on my blog from Mo inviting me to stay at her and halfline’s place for the weekend of FUDCon.  So nice, but I still didn’t have the $600+ it would cost to come to FUDCon.

And then I received this email:

Clint,

Don’t cancel your trip.

Give me receipts,…

–Max

Wow! So I’m coming to FUDCon.  I’d like to thank Max, Mo, Paul (and any others I don’t know about) for helping me get to Boston.  I’m sure it’ll be a blast.

I’ve got some serious plans to make it worth Fedora’s while :)  I don’t think there’s a better way than to be included in the community than to know people care about you and want you to be a part of the community as a whole and to succeed.  I’m going to do all I can to make sure the money will be well spent.

So as I said in my reply email to Max.  Thank you! thank you! thank you!  FUDCon will be a blast!

Cheers,

Herlo

PS - I would also like to thank my employer, Guru Labs, for being so kind to let me attend my second FUDCon.

Welcome to my disappointment.  Welcome to my frustration.  Welcome, welcome to my not being able to attend FUDCon!  Did I mention I was frustrated and disappointed?  Well, if I didn’t, I am!

Here’s the story.

Many of you probably know that I work for Guru Labs, and as such, I teach Linux for a living.  This coming week, I was on my way, I really was, to New York City to teach a Local System Administration class.

It was all set.  I was going to fly from NYC to Boston on Friday afternoon after my class.  The room was booked at the conference, I even had committed to helping do video recordings of each of the FUDCon attendees (something like 150 of them) on cheese.

Then Friday the 13th happened….

Normally, I like Friday the 13th, and with the exception of this event, it was a great one.  At the last minute, I was informed the class had been cancelled.  Now, this isn’t an abnormal thing and usually I’m not this upset about a class being cancelled.  Saying that means I was banking on some things which normally pull through, but they didn’t  All in all, I’m only frustrated that I can’t go to FUDCon!

I tried hard to still go.  In fact, I finagled and attempted to convince any of the other instructors I could into letting me teach their class.  I hit up my friends for $600, all to no avail.  The cost of the hotel was $400 already, adding another $600 is not in my budget, I’m afraid.  And people say that airlines don’t make any money!

So I will miss you all and the wonderful barcamp sessions I was planning on attending. I’ll miss Paul’s first State of Fedora address.  I’ll miss chatting Seth up about yum, Spot about RPM and politics in general, or Michael about cobbler and func.  In fact, I wanted to spend a bit of time talking with Jef about video and gstreamer, but I guess I’ll just have to wait until FUDCon F11 in 2009 :(

Could someone video record each of them and post them?  Or at least the audio?  Hehe, I know that’s a lot of work, but hey, it can’t hurt to ask.  In fact, if you are willing to stream audio, I have an IceCast server and I’d be happy to help configure your client to accomplish this task.

Cheers,

Clint

There are two conferences that I’m not going to be able to go to this summer that I really wish I could find a way to swing: The Erlang eXchange which will be in London on June 26-27 and The Ruby Hoedown in Huntsville, Alabama on August 8-9. Erlang was a hot, swirling subcurrent at the 2008 MountainWest RubyConf. I get the feeling that there’s going to be a growing culture of cross-over

This Friday, I’m taking some time early in the morning, prior to work, to help a good friend of mine, Matt Reinbold with a conference which he’s put some serious effort, the Blogging for Business Conference.

While it seems something ahead of its time, much of what Matt is hoping to share is to help all kinds of business people understand what much of the open source community already knows.  A good image with your customers (aka community members) is of utmost importance.  The B4BConference looks to be intended to help business leaders understand this concept among other great tools of the trade.

Just think, Mr/Ms/Mrs business person, how cool would letting your customers know of a new product, service or when something has changed, almost instantaneously?  That’s what you can do with the a good blog post.  What you used to do by sending a press release or letters by mail/email, you can now do with another resource, the blog!

Either way, I am looking forward to helping out.  I’m also looking forward to sneaking into the former Lego directors presentation, and maybe the talk by Cydni Tetro of Next Page.

If you are interested in hearing about how to better improve your image, or just want to learn what benefits there are to blogging for your business, I’d take a minute and check out their site.

Cheers,

Herlo

I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo starting tomorrow, April 22 through Friday, April 25. This, in my opinion, is one of the conferences to be at this year, as I really feel we’re getting to a tipping point towards the evolution of Social Networks. Expect to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0, Future of Mobile, and of course, the future of Social Networks. I’ll do my best to live-blog what I can on the Stay N’ Alive blog, OpensocialNow.com, and FacebookAdvice.com. I’ll be bringing along my wife’s Flip digital video camera so maybe I’ll even get some good video while I’m out there.

I’ll be bringing several signed copies (by both me and Jason) of “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” with me, which, if you’re a blogger and can convince me why I should give you a free copy (I love giveaways to your audience if you have a good audience) come see me. Or, if you already have a copy of the book I’m happy to sign copies while I’m there. I’ll be posting my whereabouts on Twitter so you should be able to find me. Also, look for me at the O’Reilly booth on Wednesday around 3pm. I’ll be also promoting my upcoming book, FBML Essentials and would love to meet you!

If you want to follow where I am, again, there’s Twitter, or feel free to check out my schedule here. Also, add me on Crowdvine!

Some time ago, I told you that one of the sponsors was planning to do something pretty cool, and I think you’ll agree that they’ve done it in spades: Engine Yard will be hosting a 24/7 Hackfest at MWRC 08’ – we’ve got a killer suite at the Hilton, expert developers of all varieties, and an open door policy. Hacking, Talking, TV watching, whatever – there’ll be good company, food and drinks, and

All I’ve got to say is “I had nothing to do with starting it, but it happened anyway.  And I had fun!”

Cheers,

Herlo

PS - I’m awaiting myspace friend approval for those in the know.

Just left Jono Bacon’s presentation on “The future of the Linux Desktop”. He’s quite an awesome presenter. Afterward, I went down to the exhibit floor and got to say hi to Tom Callaway and actually met Thomas Chung from the Fedora Project. Both of these guys have such exuberance and joy, I love being part of the fedora project.

The next presentation was ‘ifdown -a Now! Becoming productive offline’, by Don Marti. It was awesome! He spent a bit of time talking about git, ikiwiki, blosxom, OfflineIMAP, Mairix and some ssh config rules to help productivity. There is some definite things that will help me become more productive with these tools.

The next presentation I attended was the video codecs presentation, but what was being discussed was stuff I’d already learned. So I headed over to ‘10 Years of GNOME’, with Ken VanDine (also the creator of Foresight Linux). GNOME features are definitely getting cooler, and discussions about Gimmie and the OpenSuse SLAB menu were held. Ken wants to see more involvement in the GNOME project, called GNOME Love. If you love GNOME, they’re making it easy to share the GNOME Love.

I was able to catch the last half of the Second Life presentation as its always been a curiosity to me.  I’m thinking of actually running it and seeing what its all about.  Thanks Liana!

At the end of the day, I skipped the reception in favor of a spirited talk with the folks from BakBone, then spent time talking with the organizers of SCaLE and was able to chat with the developer for the conference management system here.  Looks like they’re open sourcing there django app too, so we might be able to work with them too.

Tom Callaway was in the Fedora BoF, so I was required to go by that at 8pm and annoy him.  Turned out, I spent the next 3+ hours discussing everything from PulseAudio, RPMS, RHCE and PackageKit to Obama, Iraq and Ron Paul and the value system of patents in our nation.  It was a great evening.

Its time to sleep and another day of SCaLE will be upon us.  See you all then…

Cheers,

Herlo

Well, right on the heels of last weekends uber successful HackNight, it looks like the snow may keep some people from coming up, but we’re still planning on having a mostly ad-hoc HackNight tonight.  The project again will be ConMan.

We’re meeting at my place @6:00 in Murray and we’ll have food and hack for a long, long time!

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

UPDATE!

A quick update for those who are planning on attending tonight’s UTOSF HackNight. Its been moved to Guru Labs in Bountiful. If you still need a ride, feel free to email me, herlo1@gmail or you can twitter me at http://twitter.com/herlo.

If you still need a ride up, we’ll carpool/caravan up from my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray. I’ll be leaving promptly at 6:30, however. If you’ve never been to Guru Labs, here’s a map.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo

Well, it appears that I am one of the many victims of Qwest and their lurid line noise issues, thus no DSL for me! Because of this, I’m in the process of scrambling for a new location for our UTOSF HackNight this evening. If anyone who’s coming would like to donate their location, or know of some place central to those in Salt Lake County with free wireless and open all night, let me know. I accept emails at herlo1@gmail or you can twitter me at http://twitter.com/herlo.

If nothing pans out, fear not, I do have a possible alternate location for this event, which I should be able to arrange for by the end of the day as a backup plan. As it stands now, everyone should just arrive at my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray and we’ll carpool and caravan as desired.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo

So I’m back at work today after a very hard Sunday (fudpub was not friendly to me) at the slack^H^H^H^H^Hhackfest. However, I have to say that it was probably the best learning experience one could have at a conference. The BarCamp concept really worked well and I think it gave me some much needed information to move ahead on projects with which lately, I’d been struggling.

In addition to all of the learning, I was able to meet some really cool people there. Of course, there were my friends, Jared Smith, Evan McNabb and Derek “goozbach” Carter, and it was great to see them.

But I didn’t just come for my friends, and it was great to meet so many others.

I met Paul Frields when Jared introduced me. He quickly informed me, that Paul would be the “New Max”. After spending the last 2.25 days near or around Paul, I think he’ll be a great leader. And to be honest, it feels to me as he’ll put his own stamp on things. Not to take away from what Max has done, and will do, but I think Paul will be an awesome leader and I look forward to his friendship and leadership.

I was able to visit with Jim Whitehurst, the new Red Hat CEO. He stopped me to ask about my Eeep c and what I thought. We talked for a good 5 minutes before I realized who he was, and then I congratulated him on the job and said I expected great things :) He was quite excited to see the Eeep and it was awesome to know how passionate he was about Fedora. And to take the time out on a Saturday, that’s awesome!

A few more people I met who were awesome and friendly: Michael DeHaan, Karsten Wade, Seth Vidal, Russell Harrison,Toshio Kuratomi and another who’s name escapes me (who I helped get lost somewhere near Cary and Apex) and so many more names I cannot recall, though I’ll not forget your faces. Thank you for your valuable time and helping me get acclimated to this awesome community. I’d like to thank everyone who spent time helping us naive souls learn the way of the Fedora.

In the future, I plan to take much of what I learned and start working with it in my spare time. I’ve also started the process of joining the documentation project and look forward to helping them. My ambassador duties are simple enough that I can continue doing that as well, so this year should be a good year.

Thanks again to my company Guru Labs, for helping me arrange my schedule around FUDCon and hopefully they’ll be as accommodating for Scale next month.

Cheers,

Herlo

There are a number of major technical events coming up in Salt Lake City in February. It is not often that premier computer science research conferences come to Salt Lake City, as opposed to Boston, Austin, Seattle, or the Bay Area. John Carter am the General Chair of the HPCA conference and got the IEEE to locate it here. Also convinced PPoPP to co-locate their conference here. All of the events below, except the Organick Lectures, will be at the Marriott City Center in SLC (next to Gallivan Plaza downtown).

• Feb 16-20: 14th International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture. HPCA is one of the premier computer architecture research conferences.
• Feb 20-23: 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practices of Parallel Programming. PPoPP is one of the premier research conferences focused on parallel programming and parallel systems.
• Feb 20-21: The University of Utah will be hosting its annual Organick Memorial Lecture series. This year's speaker is Dr. Fran Allen, IBM Fellow Emeritus and this year's ACM Turing Award winner.

There are a number of interesting tutorials and workshops associated with HPCA or PPoPP:

• Feb 16: 12th Workshop on the Interaction between Compilers and Computer Architectures (INTERACT-12)
* Feb 16: Tutorial on Architectural Implications of Multiple Clock Domains Multiple Voltage Domains and Dynamic Voltage-Frequency Scaling (MCD/MVD/DVFS)
• Feb 17: 11th Workshop on Computer Architecture Evaluation using Commercial Workloads (CAECW-11)
• Feb 17: 1st International Workshop on Storage and I/O Virtualization, Performance, Energy, Evaluation and Dependability (SPEED 2008)
• Feb 17: 2nd Workshop on Computer Architecture Research Directions (CARD-2007)
• Feb 17: Tutorial: Power Management Solutions for Computer Systems
• Feb 17: Tutorial: High-Speed Network Architectures for Clusters: Designs and Trends
• Feb 23: 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing (TRANSACT 2008)
• Feb 23: Tutorial: Parallel File Systems and I/O Middleware for Extreme-Scale Platforms

There will be a joint luncheon of HPCA and PPoPP on Feb 20th at which Fran Allen will be speaking. At least for now, only people registered for the conference are invited.

Tags: utah events conferences

This little machine is pretty nice. I’m getting used to the interface right now as the keyboard is a bit smaller than my normal T60p. A few keys are in a different spot, but overall, this little machine rocks!!

Probably my biggest headache right now is the right Shift key is further over than I regularly expect it to be. Have a look at the specs:


# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 13
model name : Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 900MHz
stepping : 6
cpu MHz : 630.081
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe up bts
bogomips : 1261.18
clflush size : 64

# cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)


I’m hoping to take this over to FUDCon later today and help get it more solid for F9.

Pictures to come.

Cheers,

Herlo

I arrived in Raleigh today for FUDCon.

What? A little early, you say? Sure is, but I thought I’d get an entire week’s head start and help out the crew with preparations.

Okay… That’s not really true, but I am in Raleigh already. Because of my employment at Guru Labs, I asked if I could fly into Raleigh after my classes on Friday. Instead, Dax, my boss made the deal even sweeter. He sent me to Raleigh to teach two Red Hat classes at Red Hat! Because of this, I’m currently teaching a RH133 this week, and a RH300 next week downstairs at the Red Hat home office.

On Thursday, my good friend Jared Smith, of Asterisk fame (and a good boardgame buddy) will be arriving just prior to FUDCon. I’m guessing he’ll be there to help F9 do more with Asterisk. Maybe we’ll have time for a quick game of Settlers or something, if he brings it - hint, hint Jared.

Over the weekend, I’ll be hacking away (or maybe just testing the eeepc) on the F9 release with the likes of Max Spevack and Greg De Koenigsberg. And since I’m already on Red Hat’s campus, I’m prepping my trip by making sure I know where all of the locations are for the events.

So, if you are at Red Hat this week and want to burn some time, come on by and say hi to me and my class. We’ll be learning about installation, filesystems, RAID and LVM, and much, much more.

I’m so stoked for this weekend! Its going to be an awesome FUDCon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to convince the boss to send me to the next FUDCon as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

Today, the Home Runs in IT Conference is taking place. Its an all day event so come on down.

Right now is the Utah Technology Council Breakfast where they are discussing what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

One thing I heard from Will West of Control 4 was that “its just a job” which surprised me. I’ve never thought about it this way, usually I anticipate starting an organization such as the Utah Open Source Foundation would be more than a job.

Another was to make sure not to get to in a hurry to “Shoot of an email!”. I’ve experienced this feeling before too and tend to write an email in a fit of passion and excitement only to erase it in the end.

Come on down, its going to be a blast! Registration is free with the discount code “hrinitutos”. See you all there

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Eric Nolin is being very explicit about sponsor talks at Defrag. No harm there--in fact, I like it. The sponsor talk is clearly labeled as such and right before lunch. Today, it's Shane Pearson, from BEA. I interviewed him for Technometria (as part of our coverage of Defrag) a few weeks ago.

Shane said a couple of things that piqued my interest. One was referring to a McKinsey study on interactions on the workplace. He put of a graph about the evolution of managed assets showing that capital was the earliest and easiest asset to manage. Information was second and interactions are the latest asset that businesses want to manage. The money quote from the study:

Almost 85% of people have jobs that are largely or wholly about interacting with other people (rather than transforming raw materials, running machinery, etc.).

IT has always had a function that included managing people interactions, but we've largely relegated it to the bottom-line "saving money" side of things: zero-day start, make sure the phones work, run the email system efficiently, etc. We've not been about top-line, "making money" activities.

Shane asked "what if wanted to know what articles and blogs my co-workers were reading?" He the put up a slide that showed what Facebook might look like if it provided enterprise-friendly functionality.

This got my attention. Maybe it's been obvious to others, but I've informally done similar things with co-workers--shared what we're reading--but this could make it more automatic. I'd welcome the opportunity to see more of what my co-workers think is interesting in any given day. Ironically, universities are particularly bad at this.

Tags: defrag conferences social+networks

I just put a piece on Michael Barrett's (CISO, Paypal) presentation at Defrag. He started by saying that Web 2.0 scares the hell out of him.

Tags: security defrag conferences

Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us, just mentioned that one of the key methods we have for dealing with too much information is forgetting. He said it in the context of talking about how every time he finds an interesting blog and adds it to his feed reader, he has one more thing to do. Not adding it right away and only adding it if he remembers and goes back saves that effort.

This is a critical survival function in the modern world, I think. We have to be willing to let things fall off our plates--and be more forgiving of others when our stuff falls off theirs. We all have too much to do.

I've started to be more selective about all kinds of things I do--from installing applications on my laptop to responding positively to lunch invitations--recognizing that everything I do today commits me to future action and commits my future attention in some way. So, forgive me if I don't respond sometimes.

Tags: defrag conferences information+intelligence

I'm in Denver at Defrag. Eric Nolan, Brad Feld, and Phil Becker have organized it to discuss "the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, "social" networking, collaboration and business intelligence."

I missed Dave Weinberger's keynote. I didn't want to--he's an engaging speaker and this performance must have been great: I walked in as someone commented that she never expected to come to a tech confernce and cry in the first sessions. But to make it I would have had to fly out yesterday and as much as I love Dave, I love being with my family on Sunday evenings more. Sorry Dave.

Flying out this morning did allow me to see the Moon-Venus conjunction that Doc showed on his blog this morning. Very clear skies and a beautiful morning.

The good news is that IT Conversations will get the audio, so while I didn't hear it live, I'll hear it none-the-less. If you're not here, look for the audio in a few months. I'm sure it's going to be very interesting based on the speakers and topics.

Defrag has all the marks of an engaging, early-stage conference: a smaller-sized crowd that makes for more intimate, honest conversation, not too many vendors to drive the agenda, and lots of familiar faces who I know are interesting to listen to.

Tags: itconversations conferences travel events social+networking information+overload defrag

Continuing my happy tradition of letting readers win cool stuff, I have another contest to get started. Before I spill the beans (and tell you what you need to do to win), I’d like to fill in a little bit of background. Last year, RailsConf and several smaller conferences joined RubyConf on the list of places discriminating rubyists might be found. This year, the regional