Utah Open Source Planet

For our October meeting, Ryan Stewart, a technical evangelist with Adobe will present on AMF and Flex. Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are everywhere. With Web businesses like Google and Yahoo! and brick and mortar companies like Harley Davidson and Sherwin Williams embracing RIAs for their online presence, the media buzz is giving way to the reality of a better Internet.

Adobe has recently contributed AMF support to the Zend Framework, allowing PHP developers to easily build Rich Internet Applications using Flex and Adobe AIR that interact with a PHP backend.

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">Ryan will give an introduction to Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR, and will walk through how to create a Flex application powered by PHP and the Zend Framework. Working with Zend Studio for Eclipse, and Flex Builder (an Eclipse plugin), Ryan will demonstrate how to build, debug and deploy applications built with Adobe Flex, and how to have these same applications run on the desktop using the Adobe AIR runtime.

With this knowledge, developers will be able to easily build rich Internet applications that combine data from PHP and rich media like audio and video into a compelling application.

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to do a couple of presentations.  One at UTOSC on Enterprise Document Management and another as part of the Alfresco Developer Series on building VMWare Appliances with Alfresco.

Links to the slide decks are here and here.

A recording of the VMWare Presentation can be found here.

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

Greets UPHPU!

Pleased to announce Kevin Carter as the presenter for this month. The topic is error Handling and Debugging with PHP All code has bugs. In order to fix them you have to find them. This presentation will go over tips and tricks for detecting when errors occur. Then it will go over ways to efficiently track down bugs. It will also cover some code optimization items.

More about Kevin:

Kevin Carter works as a backend php developer for Code Greene. He’s been coding php nonstop for the past 3 years. Is a linux enthusiast, serving as vice-president for the Ogden Area Linux Users Group. His (almost) never updated blog can be found at http://dexterthedragon.com

UTOSC 2008 abstract submission has ended.  And while that part of the process is over, we now have the task of selecting presenters.  For those of you who have submitted presentations, or those in the community we’ve contacted, feel free to vote for your favorites in our digg style voting system.

As mentioned before, login and click on the “SPEAKERS” link at the UTOSC 2008 website.  Vote for or against the presentations (or don’t vote for a presentation at all).  But hurry, because voting privileges are only good until July 10, 2008.

On July 15, 2008, a tentative presentation schedule will be delivered.  In addition, because UTOSC 2008 has more presenters than we can possibly take, many presenters will be asked to be alternates. This selection date should give you almost 45 days to prepare your presentation.

Don’t forget, registration is open as well, visit http://2008.utosc.com/ to register today.  If you haven’t already, contact your Local User Group for discount codes today.

We hope to see you all at Utah Open Source Conference 2008.

Cheers,

Clint

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

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

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

Travis, a former employee of Authorize.net, will be building his presentation from experience he has with input from current Authorize.net staff.

He will be presenting on two main topics: coding to Authorize.net and the Business Aspects and opportunities of Authorize.net.

Coding:

SIM (Simple Integration Method) – where you calculate the totals and pass in the credit num, etc, info goes to an authorize.net domain
AIM (Advanced Integration Method) — more hardcore, Authorize.net is totally masked, the entire transaction appears to be on your domain

Business:

What is merchant account
What are requirements
Info on how to be a reseller

PHP and Ecommerce using Authorize.net
With Travis Barney of Progrexion
Thursday, January 17th, 7:00 pm @ Bill Good Marketing
12393 Gateway Park Place Suite 600
Draper, Utah 84020

Tonight at the Ubuntu Utah User Group I presented about Locate vs Find.

The slides are here and written in S5.

Kevin Kubasik also presented on Desktop Search in Gnome. It was pretty cool as well.

The presentations went very well and was streamed and recorded by Utah Open Source Foundation.

For our November meeting, Alvaro Carrasco will be presenting on Building Rich Internet Applications with PHP, REST and ExtJS.

Rich Internet Applications, or RIA for short, are applications that are still web based, but that have interaction with servers. These applications are built with special attention to human interaction, that is, they feel like desktop applications. Having attended a previous presentation from Alvaro, I can honestly say that he is a master at this.

About the presentation, Alvaro says the following:

“Building Rich Internet Applications with PHP, REST, and ExtJs. ExtJs is an extremely powerful UI toolkit for the web. It lets us create incredible desktop-like GUIs that work flawlessly on IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera without the need of plugins, just pure Javascript and CSS. It doesn’t depend on any specific server-side technology either, just a way to communicate with the server (XML, JSON, etc). Since we all enjoy writing PHP, we can use it to perform the actual work and communicate to the GUI using REST services. This combination of technologies makes writing cool web applications a joy. And of course, it’s all open source.

This presentation will be broadcast as usual, please go to 76.8.222.140 on Thursday @7p to hear. Questions through IRC.

Download an audio recording of this presentation, the slide deck, and some sample code.

Another reminder for the Multi-Distro Release Party being held this coming Saturday. Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon), Fedora (Werewolf) and OpenSUSE (10.3) will be available via network install.

Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
The Utah Open Source Foundation, Open Source for Utah, and the world!

Just a quick reminder that Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm will be the Multi-Distro Release Party at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. Ubuntu (GutsyGibbon), Fedora (Werewolf) and OpenSUSE (10.3) will be available via network install. Also, we’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a network install server for the Installfest.We hope to see you all there!

Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
The Utah Open Source Foundation, helping Open Source grow in Utah

This Thursday’s UPHPU meeting will be presented by Bryan Petty: svnLogBrowser.

The presentation is on svnLogBrowser which provides a web-based frontend for browsing through commit logs from any Subversion repository, and is released under the GNU GPL. It gives developers a tool for quickly locating changes, reviewing peer developer’s commits, or just a general overview of what recent changes have been made to a project.

The lecture will include:

• install/config (brief)
• techniques for searching and watching commits

Bryan is a long time member of UPHPU who has worked on several well known projects including svnLogBrowser, wxWidgets development, and work on Phoenix Project Manager. He has also gone the past 7 years to volunteer at Defcon.

Download an audio recording of this presentation.

Only once in a great while will we see an event like this one. Only once will there be so many shiny new distributions to choose from. Only once will OpenSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora be released within one month of each other.

Because of this The Utah Open Source Foundation is announcing the first and probably only Multi-Distro Release Party in Utah. The release party will involve all three major distros, plus anyone is welcome to bring their own distro to hand out.

The party will be held on Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. We’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a large network install server for the Installfest.

We hope to see you all there!

Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MDT
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
The Utah Open Source Foundation, Making Open Source better in Utah!

For our September meeting, Mac Newbold will be lecturing on SQL and PHP! Last year’s meet was one of the highest attended.

Mac Newbold is the owner of Code Greene, a highly successful web development company. The company primarily uses PHP as its coding language. Mac also is chief architect of Gradefix.com and a former contributor to Flyspray bug resolution.

Mac has Bachelor’s (2001) and Master’s (2004/2005) Degrees in Computer Science from the Univerisity of Utah. He spent over 4 years working on the Emulab Network Testbed system and web site, doing web and database programming and development, as well as research and development for their large cluster of computers and their web-driven automated network configuration tools, and has done consulting for other sites using their software. Since 2001 he has done computer consulting for a wide variety of clients, and currently focuses on improving design and implementation techniques for database-driven dynamic e-commerce web sites.

In addition to Mac’s topic, he will also be speaking with members about potential job opportunities with his company. Two old computers will also be given away at this event; great for those interested in tinkering around and learning.

Last, we will do audio streaming again! Last time was very successful. We will issue out the information the day before so those of you who live far away can still participate in Mac’s presentation.

Download an audio recording of this presentation.

For our August meeting, Sheri Bigelow will be presenting on Search Engine Optimization and PHP. Learn more about Sheri by browsing her blog, website, and portfolio. For those who would like to come but find distance to be a barrier, we are trying to setup something so that you will be able to hear it. More info if it becomes available.

This month’s meeting has been postponed a week and will occur on August twenty-third.

In addition to Sheri’s topic, we will be meeting with UPHPU members to see how we can make the meetings better.

Download an audio recording of this presentation.

For our July meeting, Cole Joplin will present on dynamic PDF generation. Explore the capabilities of turning your dynamic database information into downloadable PDF documents. The presentation will be introducing two open source PDF creation libraries for PHP: FPDF and R&OS. These
library functions show the use of dynamic text, drawing, and inserting images for PDF output will be shown.

For our June meeting, Boguslaw Gil will present on a project called SOWA (Service Oriented Web Architecture). He will cover building applications, concept, content object protocol for exchanging content objects between the browser and web server, and collaborations with web services.

SOWA is a software architecture and design methodology for processing and exchanging content in a Web environment over services. SOWA is an extension for current Web technologies and simplifies the design and development of interactive Web applications by separating content layout and UI events from content, and making browser a state-full client to Web server.