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JavaOne [h]as a *very* different feel than that of a Ruby show, obviously :P — Leah SilberReally starting to believe that small, short, regional conferences are the way to go. — Andrew O'BrienI think events of many sizes can be worthwhile -- they just have different profiles and risks/rewards. — David BlackSome of the discussion recently on Twitter has made me think about how we organized
I wanted to personally congratulate the Salt Lake Linux User Group on 15 years of Linux education and community. It’s exciting to see such a strong following! Thanks for all the hard work everyone has put into making SLLUG such a great group.
Here’s the email from Marc Christensen:
The Salt Lake Linux Users Group started its humble beginnings sometime in May of 1994. A few weeks later we officially incorporated as a non-profit on July 28, 1994. That makes this month our 15th year soft-anniversary with the official one coming up in July. It also makes SLLUG one of the oldest and most established Linux user groups in the world!
Congratulations to everyone one for making SLLUG a success and contributing to such a great Local Linux community. We have members of our group that have greatly influenced and contributed heavily to Linux over the years. We make up a diverse group of individuals of varied backgrounds and depth of knowledge.
We rock! :) Thanks to everyone who has helped make the Salt Lake Linux Users Group such a success over the years and here’s to many many more!!!!!
–
Marc Christensen
http://www.sllug.org
Again, congratulations to the Salt Lake Linux User Group and all of its members for 15 great years. Here’s looking forward to 15 more.
Cheers,
Herlo
This past weekend, I spent some time at LinuxFest NorthWest. It was quite fun and entertaining, probably the most relaxing conference I’ve ever attended. Interestingly enough, I didn’t rent a car, which is unusual for me. This is because I ran into the unmistakeable Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, who offered me a ride to the event. This was probably the most convenient way to get to the conference. We spent quite a bit of time talking (well, mostly me talking) about cool stuff. Joe is quite a personable guy and I’ve really come to like and respect him.
This was the first time I was able to meet Jon ‘Maddog’ Hall. I was quite impressed by the stories he told in his presentation and at the after party. Maddog is an amazing character, funny, charismatic and very forward. I really like his attitude about Free Software and am looking forward to chatting with him again. I’m thinking that it’d be cool to get him out to Utah in October for UTOSC 2009.
The LFNW organizers are amazingly friendly and nice. They invited us to a barbeque after the conference to unwind and enjoy their home. They purchased some salmon right off the boat that day, it was amazing. Along with the drinks and friends, I was in heaven. I am really grateful to my good friend, Karsten Wade, for being willing to spend a bit of time there, even on his daughter’s birthday (he had spent much of the day in Seattle with her previously, but still).
I met Adam Williamson, Jeff Sandys and Scott Dowdle who were all doing their part to help Fedora. In addition, I got to spend a bit of time talking with Jesse Keating about a new messaging component for Fedora’s infrastructure (which he also presented at LFNW). Oh, and did I mention the blackberry cobbler on Saturday for lunch? You haven’t lived until you’ve had this blackberry cobbler put together by the culinary folks at the Bellingham Technical College.
With that, I suggest that next year, anyone and everyone should attend LFNW and enjoy the pictures (below). On Friday, I’ll upload a few more since I’m limited to 100MB/month on my flickr account.
Cheers,
Herlo
So we finally announced the theme, dates and venue for the Utah Open Source Conference 2009. Looks to be fun to see what people will think of it and the presentations that will result. The theme, Affordability, Scalability, Reliability seemed appropriate. I hope others will see the value in it as well.
Looking forward, I’m thinking a lot about the tracks we’ll be having at UTOSC 2009. I’m wondering what others think, but I want to have at least Developer, Business and Beginner tracks. I know that Laura Moncur and I have are already been discussing the beginner track, so that’s very exciting.
So here’s my thinking, if you want to see a particular presentation at UTOSC 2009, comment here, or on one of the blog posts on utos.org. In addition, when we put the call for papers out, we’ll try to do a similar thing to other open source conferences, like open source bridge, linuxfest northwest and others have done. We’ll show you all of the presentation submissions. We’re also hoping to alter our voting system to allow anyone who has registered for the conference to vote for or against a particular presentation.
I’m getting really excited about the Utah Open Source Conference 2009. I hope you all are too.
Cheers,
Herlo
So tonight I was sitting there tonight getting ready to setup cobbler for another installation source, and I noticed something very odd.
# ls -l /root
total 88
-rw-------. 1 root root 1176 2008-11-23 17:22 anaconda-ks.cfg
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 2008-12-14 18:37 bin
See the . ? Where you ask? Look closer!
drwxr-xr-x. <– look, there it is!! At first, I thought it was just one file, but then I noticed it other places, then I looked further, and it seems to be everywhere.
What is up with that? Where does this come from? What is it for? LazyWeb, can you help me?
Cheers,
Herlo
After getting permission from Paul W. Frields, the fearless Fedora Project Leader to use his slides to present the topic of Fedora Remix, I began to add and modify the presentation. I could see that some things had needed changing, this included changes to the look and feel. Let me share with you these changes and improvements.
I felt it went very smoothly and was quite useful. I expect that the recorded version (I think they recorded it to video from what I recall) will be out in a short while. I expect that a few folks will take these very simple tools and get some cool Fedora Remixes in the works.
I look forward to seeing more Fedora Remix presentations in the future.
Cheers,
Herlo
Hi all,
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, as I have been thinking about it for some time. I’ve been working really hard on this presentation for tomorrow afternoon at the Southern California Linux Expo this weekend. So I’d like to discuss what I’ve been working on and provide my links to slides (odp and pdf format) for those who wish to download them. I’m guessing I’ll get asked where my slides are at least once, so here they are, right here, on this post.
Anyway, I’d like to discuss a little about the presentation’s concepts and tools here. That way, if you did attend my talk, you can refer here to some of the points I’ll make.
First off, I’m going up against the Ubuntu Community Manager, Jono Bacon. I wish him luck though, as I will swear less in my presentation :) But I digress, I’m in the theater, so that should make room for the large crowd I’m expecting. If you were worried you might not get into my presentation, don’t! There’s plenty of seating.
Okay, now to my real points, I’ll be talking about three technologies used to build a full distribution. Built and maintained within the fedora application space. I think that’s great:
I hope this little review page can provide some answers to questions, plus access to my slides and any other resources you might need.
Cheers,
Herlo
Heading over to the Southern California Linux Exposition next month? If you said yes, you are in luck!
The North American Fedora Ambassadors team has obtained a room for the first North American Fedora Activity Day @ SCaLE 7x!
What is a FAD, you ask? Well, let’s try to explain.
It is clear that while FUDCon is a great event, a lot is accomplished there and many successful projects launch or gain much speed there. The problem is that not everyone can attend. For whatever reason, not every Fedora Contributor will get to make it to every FUDCon, it’s just impossible.
Because of this dilemma, the great Max Spevack decided to propose the FAD. A mini-FUDCon of sorts, where, in a smaller forum, a group of folks regionally located could gather, and get a few good things done in a one day session. You might think of code sprints or bar camps as good descriptions of what might happen at a FAD. Still confused? Check out this link for more information.
Any Fedora Contributor can suggest a FAD anywhere, anytime, and it’s even likely to get funding*. So the next question is, what can be done at a FAD?
To answer this question, I think you’d have to say that anything that benefits Fedora directly or indirectly can be done at a FAD. Some of the things that have been brought up to my knowledge, starting with the two springs being held at SCaLE 7x.
I’m sure there are a hundred more ideas floating around, feel free to add your FAD to the planning page and get something cool done in your backyard. If you feel like it as well, drop me a line here with ideas for more FADs around Fedora-land.
Cheers,
Herlo
* - Truthfully, I can only speak for Fedora Ambassadors North America (FAmNA) to say that we’ll do what we can to help fund a FAD near you.
Here’s a conversation I had regarding SCaLE’s policy toward bringing children.
So this brings to my mind. What can we do to entertain children at a booth besides the OLPCs?
| herlo | I asked a couple days back about kids at scale and pricing or whatever. I forgot to take #scale-chat of ignore, what is the rules on children? | 13:49 |
|---|---|---|
| Gareth | Kids are definitely allowed to attend. | 13:49 |
| herlo | sure, and I think it’s encouraged no? | 13:50 |
| Gareth | We generally dont charge for them if they’re under 16 or so. | 13:50 |
| Gareth | Definitely! | 13:50 |
| herlo | cool, that’s what I was after | 13:50 |
| Gareth | We had quite a few last year….they all seemed to have a good time. | 13:50 |
| herlo | the Fedorans will be sporting a few young’ns around is all | 13:50 |
| Gareth | Good to hear! | 13:50 |
| lcafiero | +1 Gareth | 13:50 |
| herlo | yeah, we have the wii lined up to be used all day if they get bored | 13:50 |
| herlo | I’m sure we’ll have other activities for them. I plan on bringing scissors and some fedora media boxes for them to build | 13:52 |
| lcafiero | Orv_work may want to do something with this, press-wise. Some of the other events — especially Linux World — are kid unfriendly, and it doesn’t allow those of us with kids to attend. | 13:52 |
| herlo | maybe we should also bring some skulladay.com pages too, that’ll entertain them | 13:52 |
| Gareth | yeah. he wrote something up last year too…I’m sure he’ll write something up this year. | 13:52 |
| herlo | we’ll watch for it | 13:53 |
I think that it’d be fun to have kids come around and make stuff at our booth. There are tons of good things on make.com and other places for kids.
What do you guys think?
Recently, I was informed that my presentation was approved for the 7th Southern California Linux Expo (or SCaLE 7x). I’m very excited to be presenting a topic I think will be not only fun, but valuable to many a Linux fan. I will say that this is my first foray into the conference circuit as a presenter, but being an instructor for the past 5+ years, I’ll have some fun stuff ot share.
The topic I submitted, Fedora Remix.
It turns out that it’s a remix of another presentation from the Utah Open Source Conference by Paul Frields. But things have changed since that presentation was given. Here’s a couple I’ll mention:
In preparation for this presentation at SCaLE 7x, and if you are in Utah, I’ll be presenting it (hopefully) a couple times at the Local User Groups (LUGs).
Cheers,
Herlo
9:45am: Awake. Stare at the ceiling for a short while. Climb out of bed. Look out the window and discover the few inches of snow that has accumulated during the night.
10:15am: Finish packing my gear, wake Jennifer.
10:50am: Head down to the hotel lobby and drop off our bags at the bell desk.
10:55am: Find a restaurant for breakfast. Get some coffee and breakfast sandwiches. Sometimes breakfast is really nice when it’s hot and delicious. I’m glad it was cold this day as I have now purchased a warm hat from the MIT Co-op store.
11:15am: Leave the restaurant, heading for MIT to do a little bit of hacking before heading to the airport for our flight home.
11:25am: Arrive in the middle of the release planning meeting. Contribute a little to the conversation.
11:35pm: Hunt down Jarod Wilson so that I may obtain some stickers to put into the EventBox. Jarod informs me that the stickers are in his car which is approximately 45 minutes away. It’s decided that we’ll get in touch after Monday and get the box shipped to me in time for SCaLE 7x.
11:50pm: Head back down the hall, say goodbye to friends. Say goodbye to more friends as we head out for the airport.
Goodbye FUDCon F11, it has been fun. See you all in 6 months time.
12:30pm: After arriving at the airport and checking in, the gentleman helping me check my bags for the Delta flight informed us that there would was a direct flight leaving at 5pm. He asked us if we’d like to take that instead, so we did. It did mean waiting in the airport for an additional 3+ hours, but he also offered to put us in the Crown Room while we waited.
12:45pm: In the Delta Crown Room watching planes take off, get de-iced and a couple garbage fires. Was also able to hack on Moksha with Luke for a while. We were able to determine that a few bugs still exist in his code and that I’d look at it again very soon.
4:15pm: Pack up to get on the plane and head home. Flight was uneventful and I was happy to arrive in Salt Lake City. We arrived at our home around 9:30pm Mountain Time.
10:00pm: Sleep. ZZZZzzzzzz. ZZZZZZZzzzzzZZZZZzzzz.
Cheers,
Herlo
5:45pm: Paul ends his remarks and we depart to the hotel and FUDPub. I’m rather tired, not getting much sleep this weekend has worn me down. I tell Dave that I am going to go crash for an hour and he promptly calls me a wimp!
6:12pm: In hotel room, snuggled up to Jennifer. Still debating whether I’m going to sleep or just head to FUDPub.
6:15pm: Send Dave an SMS message that reads ‘be down in 10 minutes’.
6:31pm: Dave replies with SMS that reads ‘Hmmm gave up and left’.
6:32pm: Head down to the lobby to try to catch up. Nobody there, so Jennifer and I head over to FUDPub. By this time, hunger has taken over and I am less tired than hungry.
6:40pm: Arrive at Flat Top Johnny’s for FUDPub. Proceed directly to the rear of the building in search of food.
6:42pm: Find food, pile it on my plate and head back to the front of the building. The place is packed an hopping. Lot’s of pool is being played and it sure looks like fun.
7:00pm: Our server takes our order for drinks and the party commences. We sit down beside Mike McGrath, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Dave Nalley and a couple others as well. Of course, we start talking a bit about Ambassador stuff and the barcamp overall.
7:30pm: About the time we’ve consumed a couple drinks and ordered food, the conversation gets good. We’ve had a few others join us, Jared Smith, Kenny and Cade all come over and at this point we’ve basically taken over the table.
8:00pm: I’m feeling much better, have eaten a chicken sandwich and consumed a few more beverages. At this point I’m very happy I didn’t stay at the hotel and sleep. Jennifer and I are having fun with the rest of the group.
8:??pm: Not sure quite when it happened, but Mo Duffy decided to come by to take our pictures for the Fedora Picture Book. It was at this time I was invited to do something, rather egged on by the table pounding. I proceeded to the front of the restaurant to perform my now infamous moonwalk. (Thanks to Ian Weller).
9:ISHpm: Played pool with Jennifer, Dave, Jared, Colby and others. Spent a good hour playing pool and trying not to repeat a performance of my moonwalk.
10:30pm: Arrived at the hotel and discussed the video uploading hackfest. It was decided we’d meet on the 3rd floor and hack for a while.
10:45pm: Met Chris Tyler and Matt Domsch along with Ian, Dave, Kenny and a few others and proceeded to render video. I wanted to play with the syncing of the video with the audio recordings I obtained, but after several attempts, it was clearly not going to happen.
1:00am (Sunday): Because video takes a long time to render, I was still up tinkering with my rendering. About this time, Mo Duffy had sent links into #fudcon showing my dance moves. Ian and others at the video hackfest decided this was a much better hackfest. In the next hours, Ian had created an animated gif as well as an ogg video of my moonwalk to the tune of ‘Smooth Criminal’. Each time I made a comment about it, the pure ridiculousness was raised another magnitude.
3:00am: After enduring enough of the video rendering and ‘Smooth Criminal’ in midi, I decided it was time to head up to the room.
3:10am: Because I hadn’t gone to bed at a reasonable hour to be useless for Sunday’s hackfest, I decided it would be a good idea to pack my bags.
3:25am: Decided that it wasn’t late enough to sleep, I started on and successfully got Moksha up and running with Luke’s demo data. I can see how cool it will be to build Fedora-Event-Splash with a Moksha back end. I was also thinking about an Ambassador Portal, probably somehing with statistics and updates when a user updates. Could also show tracking of resources and other useful tools.
4:00am: Time for bed. ZZZZzzzzzz ZZZZZZzzzzz
8:05am: Light flutters into the room. More likely, I notice it at this time, it’s probably been light for some time. Climb out of warm bed, boy am I tired. Today is the bar camp and I have audio recording to setup.
8:35am: Arrive at MIT for the FUDCon bar camp, grab a muffin, some juice and coffee.
8:50am: Complete set up of audio equipment, quickly down my juice and muffin.
8:55am: Head out to get some more food, but I only found some morsels left. I snagged a small bit of bread left, and begin my return to the audio equipment.
9:05am: Streaming has begun, or so I think. Darkice won’t start, giving a strange error that the device wasn’t there. It turns out I’ve forgotten to plug in the usb cable from the mixer, so the first few minutes of Greg DeKoenigsberg’s talk are missing.
9:08am: Plug in the usb cable and restart the stream.
9:30am: Pitch a session on the Fedora Classroom.
9:40am: Vote for my favorite sessions and hope others want to participate in the Fedora Classroom session. As I we are voting, I chat with Dave Nalley, Ian Weller and Ricky Zhou about recording audio in whatever room they are in each hour. It seems to be a good plan.
9:50am: Paul asks me to help get sessions scheduled, so I grab chalk and start crossing out sessions that have been scheduled.
10:15am: All the sessions are scheduled, because I am recording the audio of many of the presentations, I choose to stay in the main room, also the largest room.
10:30am: I begin streaming the Filesystems session, Chris Tyler is also in this room recording the video for posting later on the web. The session did not start off all that interesting. Near the end, I learned a bit about the transition from ext4 to btrfs for the future of Linux in general.
11:30am: This was my favoritest hour of the entire bar camp. Luke Macken and John (J5) Palmieri presented on Moksha. Moksha is an application built upon Turbo Gears 2, orbited, jQuery and about 10 other technologies to bring together a simple interface for making real time applications on the web. It’s much more than a simple AJAXified application and has benefits to allow one to write a simple connector to communicate to the browser. Watch for another post on this in the near future.
12:15pm: During the Moksha talk, I recalled that I desired to head over to the Marriott hotel and take pictures of the Fedora window posters. Because I hadn’t brought along my camera, I first asked Mairin Duffy to see if she had a long range lense, She did not. John Stanley informed me he had one with his Canon Digital Rebel XTI, and that he would happily lend it to me. However, he couldn’t leave as he was covering for others during the lunch hour.
12:30pm: Jennfer came over and spent about 20 minutes with me while I ate my lunch. Then we found John together and headed out *quickly* to get the pictures of the hotel. We talked about what she was going to do that day, visit some older churches in the area and such.
As we arrived at the hotel, we saw several windows with the Fedora window posters. I pulled out the camera and fired away, catching several good photos. After taking the first photos however, I noticed that the camera was reporting that it did not have a CF card. It turns out John didn’t know he didn’t have a card in his camera, which means no pictures from the hotel experiment (unless others have some, here’s hoping).
1:33pm: After hurrying back from the failed photo shoot. I found myself running behind the schedule just a little. It turns out the Puppet session was next and Jeroen van Meuween wasn’t too interested in waiting on me. As luck would have it, everyone seemed to be in this session and Ricky Zhou saved the day by recording the first few minutes on the stream for me.
The puppet session was good, but I wish I had seen a bit of a demo of advanced features.
2:30pm: The desktop session was started recording, however, I was asked to come out and do an interview with my good friend Dave Nalley about the progress of the Ambassadors with Colby Hoke. We spent a good bit of time talking in front of the camera about the awesomeness that is the new AmbassadorKit, the new Media Box and some other initiatives coming soon to the Fedora Project.
2:55pm: Headed over to the remaining bits of the Git Basics session run by Paul Frields. I really enjoyed this session. While I know quite a bit about Git, I was able to help teach others about a few things and even learned a thing or two about git-reset.
3:25pm: Returned to the main room to finish up the streaming for the Desktop session. There was a lot of discussion going on about the new feature in the GNOME (I think?) desktop, but coming in at the end, I wasn’t certain.
3:30pm: After starting the recording for the KVM session, along with Kevin Fenzi, I headed over to the session we were holding on Fedora Classroom. I was saddened to see that there were only 6 people (including us) in the session. But that’s what you get when you compete against KVM and other blockbuster sessions and your topic is really, really new.
Even with the small audience, Kevin and I were able to come up with some positive plans for the future from the group. I anticipate we’ll see more basic topics for the #fedora and FedoraForum.org crowds. We talked about how a lot of the folks we’ve seen in the #fedora-classroom sessions over the past two months were those who really could become great contributors with just a bit of opportunity.
We also discussed ways to get more presenters and topics into the curriculum. Part of what is keeping this from blooming quickly. Hopefully the things we discussed were useful for the future of Fedora Classroom and its future does look bright.
4:30pm: As everyone gathered into the room, I learned that we were going to be having a hackfest in the evening after FUDPub. The goal of the hackfest was to get the videos and audio uploaded and shared as quickly as possible.
5:08pm: Paul’s final remarks for the bar camp, thanking many of the contributors. I was grateful for everyone who put in effort today. The MIT folks were very gracious for letting us hold FUDCon there this year.
Paul announced the FUDPub at Flat Top Johny’s and that the OLPC folks were sponsoring the food and one drink. Very nice of them as well.
Part 2 will be coming shortly as it is another day unto itself.
Cheers,
Herlo
8:05am: Sleep is interrupted by brain doing mental exercises about the Fedora AmbassadorKit hackfest. Also interrupted by incredible urge to pee.
8:30am: Decided I was finally awake enough to write FUDCon F11: Day 0 post.
9:00am: Packed everything I needed (or thought I needed) into my backpack. This took incredibly long.
9:10am: Somewhere around this time, I was expecting the reminder “We’re waiting” SMS from Dave Nalley. None had arrived.
9:14am: Send SMS to Dave asking if he’s downstairs yet. Get reply that he has not made it down yet, with a 7 minute ETA. I chuckle, pack the rest of my audio equipment and head downstairs.
9:20am: Arrive with others for breakfast, many have given up on us, headed over to order food and head out. Dave arrives approximately 1 minute later, we head to Au Bon Pain and promptly order and eat breakfast.
9:35am: I look up the instructions to the Tang Center for everyone. None of us had decided it important enough to do this earlier. Luckily, it’s about one block away. We head out toward the HackFest.
9:45am: Arrive at Tang Center on MIT’s campus without incident, proceed to the 3rd floor (following well placed signs). Obtain our badges and head into the main room for a short discussion.
10:05am: Discussion begins. Approximately 25 projects are placed upon the board. Names include, AmbassadorKit, Moksha, DevShell, OLPC / Sugar development and many, many others.
11:00am: Head to room 395 for the AmbassadorKit HackFest.
11:30am: Decided the printed Fedora Window Posters were great for the Tang Center. Placed them on the windows wherever good and visible.
12:30pm: Four ambassadors; myself, Ian Weller, Brian Powell and Dave Nalley head out toward Central Square to obtain packaging and tape from the UPS Store. We had it in our mind this was a good idea now that we have a NA UPS Account. In reality, after traveling on the train, walking 20 minutes in the windy, brisk cold weather and discovering the lack of true UPS supplies we could purchase on our account, it might have just been as good to head to the nearest shipping store. Ahh well, lesson learned.
1:15pm: Arrived at a lovely pizzeria recommended by one of the nice UPS Store employees. We decided to share a pizza. After ordering, the total came to just over $20. I reached into my wallet, pulled out a $20 bill and thought, “gee, I need some change”. Dave promptly swiped the bill from my hand, and nonchalantly handed it to the cashier as if it were payment. Thus, i was paying for lunch. Dave promptly got a “waaa!” from me. I then received a $5 bill for my trouble from Dave, as if that fixed everything.*
2:15pm: Arrived at the hotel, headed up to get the Live Media to bring to the event. Headed back over to the Tang Center.
2:30pm: The AmbassadorKits were packaged, Brian Powell will be shipping out 2 (or 3) this weekend. The remainder will be distributed among the Ambassadors to fulfill future requests.
3:00pm: Decided it a was a good time to distribute the rest of the Fedora Window Posters for the hotel. Ran out of posters with doublestick tape. Need to buy more.
3:15pm: Set up and tested audio streaming for tomorrow’s FUDCon sessions. It appears we’ll have enough to do 4 rooms with streaming audio and 3 rooms (I believe) with video to be distributed soon after FUDCon. Test was quite successful.
3:30pm: Discussed the new CMS with Karsten and others. Promoted WordPress as a possible CMS platform. Argued for its stability, value and flexible API. Not sure I converted anyone, but it was worth a try.
4:30pm: Hung around, discussed media and other Fedoraish topics with others in the room. All in all a good bit of work was done. Much to mull around in this brain of mine.
6:00pm: Gathered with Paul, Greg and many others for a round table session about Fedora. This part was the most useful for me so far. I was quite grateful for the opportunity to come in and discuss all the great things happening in Fedora. To see the gratitude from these folks was cool. It really pushed home why I like hanging out with Fedora folks, they are very genuine appreciative people for what we all do. I learned so much about the contribution benefits and how others contribute.
7:45pm: Met in the lobby of the hotel, then headed over to Cambridge Brewing Company for a nice dinner. Quite good food and drink. Good company and gorgeous girlfriend to boot. What a day! What a day!
10:30pm: Arrived back at the hotel to hack on Fedora-Event-Splash with the new Moksha functionality. Essentially, we wanted to get a better feel for Moksha and what it provides after Paul described it earlier in the day. Thing is, there are a lot of things to getting it working and we could only get so far.
However, while working through this, I was able to discuss plans for tomorrows Audio Streaming and Video Recording of the sessions. Thus the blog post and some logistics which should make things easier for everyone.
I was also able to discuss the Fedora-Classroom session Kevin Fenzi and I are proposing tomorrow. We’re looking to have a lively session tomorrow regarding this and see where it might go.
Another discussion that came out of this was the usefulness of EMEA and its non-profit. Seeing as we’re looking into this for North America.
2:30am (Saturday): In bed. Zzzzzzz
Starting tomorrow at approximately 10:00 am, streaming will (hopefully) commence on approximately 4-5 sessions. Most sessions will be recorded with cheap $7 microphones, but the most popular (as voted by FUDCon attendees) will be recorded with a mixer and wireless microphone.
Streams will be available at http://stream.utos.org:8080, look for the links to be semi-descriptive. We are also limiting the number of listeners per stream to 20 to make sure we get good streaming. We may increase this nearer the end of the day, especially for Paul’s address.
In addition, many of these same talks will be video recorded by the famous Chris Tyler and Matt Domsch, and others. Their video recordings will be shared with the community shortly after FUDCon.
This should be really good.
If you are curious about the schedule, check the FUDCon F11 Wiki page to keep up on the latest sessions and locations.
Cheers,
Clint
For those of you who don’t know, but are staying at the Marriott hotel for FUDCon, come by and find me, I have a window sign for your room.
Cheers,
Clint
Over the past little while, I’ve lost my job, hunted for (and found) a new job, consulted to fill in the gaps and a bunch of Fedora projects over Christmas. What did this entail? Well, sit back and relax and I’ll tell you!
Well my new job is setting up nicely as a Web Developer/System Administrator at StoryRock.com. We do yearbook and scrapbooking software. I’m in charge of the website and infrastructure here, and so far there are a lot of good problems to solve. I’ve been introduced to Ruby on Rails and am getting the hang of it as well. I’ve implemented a new Firewall and OpenVPN tunnel, configured a new staging server and dealt with a disk space issue on our web server, all in about a week and a half. I still have plans to finish implementing an openfire jabber server (mostly complete thanks to help from another great Guru, Aaron Toponce).
For the past few weeks, I’ve been working with a fellow by the name of Trevyn Meyer. He owns a little consulting firm in Orem called ESource, They have been giving me steady web work for the past few weeks. I’ve been able to do things from wordpress themes and plugins to migrating bugzilla. It has brought in a little cash I needed just to get me through. This has been a great experience. Because of ESource, I was able to publish a fairly useful plugin because of its benefits to the community. I plan to get it on wordpress’ codex at some point in the future.
Over the Christmas break, and mostly because I am not overwhelmed at work (yet). I was able to spend some time creating a few tools to benefit the project. First was the Fedora Ambassador North America (FAmNA) Resource Requests Tracker. With the help of Jon Stanley, we now have a way of tracking requests from North American Fedora Contributors for things like T-Shirts, Media, AmbassadorKits, Stickers, etc. I anticipate this being a very busy site and that we’ll be getting more requests as the word gets out after the holidays and FUDCon.
I took the time this weekend to build a prototype of the Fedora Media Box. It’ll be part of what is to become the AmbassadorKit. We’re having a hackfest to design and finish the AmbassadorKit so we can start shipping it out. Look for this as a new option on the FAMNA Requests trac instance.
Speaking of FUDCon, along with Chris Tyler and probably a few other people, we are planning to stream and record audio and video for much of FUDCon F11 Boston. I was able to purchase a wireless lavalier (aka lapel) microphone this week and it should arrive in time for me to bring it along for presenters. I am seriously excited to get the audio and video out to more people than ever. If you have a camera, or recording devices, please bring them. If you don’t have equipment, but want to help, let us know.
Cheers,
Clint
With some left over funds from the Fedora booth at UTOSC, I created the first Ambassador EventBox. Not that there wasn’t an event box before, but it wasn’t formal and was pretty trashed as a cardboard box moving from place to place would.
It turns out to be a smash hit in North America. After only visiting 3 events so far, the EventBox is getting all sorts of publicity. In fact, there’s a serious plan in place to purchase Pelican boxes and get more EventBoxen ready for the coming onslaught of events in 2009.
I also hope the EMEA Ambassadors will also like to follow suit with an EventBox of their own. It would be really neat to see it in place throughout the world very soon. The system works pretty well and provides all of the tools necessary to make a Fedora Booth look professional very quickly and easily.
To make this more of a reality, I’ve modified several pages on the wiki to make it easy to request an EventBox (in North America for now) as well as tracking the EventBox. We’d also like to hear what you liked and disliked about the EventBox as it comes to your event. Below is a list of pages regarding the wiki and their purpose:
Cheers,
Herlo
This year, I haven't had much money to travel because when you're starting a business you do only that which needs to be done. Consequently, I haven't been going to many conferences. The big exception to that is Defrag. I enjoyed it a lot last year and decided I wanted to go back. And besides, I found a ticket to Denver for $91.16 on Delta--how could I refuse?
Tags: events conferences defrag08
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!
Share ThisSome 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).
There are a number of interesting tutorials and workshops associated with HPCA or PPoPP:
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.
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