Utah Open Source Planet

Date: May 14th, 2008
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Omniture, Inc.
Details: http://www.plug.org/

MySQL will be flying Jay Pipes (North American Community Relations Manager at
MySQL) in to Salt Lake on the 14th for the sole purpose of addressing PLUG
(and all other local SIGs). Please spread the word. Set your calendars. Blog
it. Spread it. Tell everyone.

To be clear: THIS WILL BE AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL PRESENTATION. Expect this to
be one of those killer, mind-bending, and deep technical presentations. The
kind that leaves you barley able to drive home. Jay will keep the presentation
as language agnostic as possible - and focus just on the SQL-fu Jay
specializes in. This is one presentation you don’t want to miss.

There will be prizes (books and MySQL swag). And we will have drinks. There
might be food, but don’t plan on it.

His bio:

Jay Pipes is the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL.
Co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), Jay has also written articles for Linux
Magazine and regularly assists software developers in identifying how to make
the most effective use of MySQL. He has given sessions on performance tuning
at the MySQL Users Conference, RedHat Summit, NY PHP Conference, OSCON, and
Ohio LinuxFest, amongst others. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife,
Julie, and his four animals. In his abundant free time, when not being
pestered by his two needy cats and two noisy dogs, he daydreams in PHP code
and ponders the ramifications of __clone().

-Ryan

— Books we have to give away:
- A book regarding Fedora.
- A “Head First” book from O’Reilly on SQL.
- Several very excellent “Pragmatic Programmers” books:
- Programming Ruby (very good)
- Java to Ruby
- Enterprise Integration with Ruby
- Agile Web Development with Rails
- Agile Retrospectives
- Practices of an Agile Developer

Well, usually I forget to take pictures, because either A) I forget my camera [I brought it this time] or 2) I get wrapped up in the event and forget to bring it with me.  But this release party, I plain just forgot to charge my batteries for my camera, oops!

Fortunately, I was able to snap a few pictures with some of the spare, also not fully-charged, batteries I did have on hand.  However, others took many pictures and I’ve listed them below.

• Sheri Bigelow took some great pictures.  She is a great local photographer, web designer and the local webmistress.
• Tristan Rhodes, a local Asterisk Entrepreneur posted a good blog post.
• Here’s the pictures I took.  Not nearly as many, or as good.

To summarize the party, much celebration was had with foosball, a chess game on one of the largest chess boards around, video games, air hockey and much more was provided by CodeGreene.  The FedoraProject and Utah Open Source sponsored the food and prizes.  If you’ve never had a Chipotle burrito, they are the best burritos around.

I was able to spend time with about 5-7 people myself sharing the Preview Release of Fedora 9 (codename Sulphur) including two who had never had previous success with Fedora or Linux in general.  It was very satisfying to see things work for them.

The Ubuntu folks were there in strength as well.  The Hardy Heron (8.04) CDs were being passed out, while we Fedoran’s provided LiveUSB versions.  I even saw people taking advantage and obtaining both!  Its great to see communities come together and celebrate together.

The party continued at Salt Lake Pizza & Pasta for another couple hours.  Lot’s of talk about the releases, upcoming events, and general mayhem took place including having Heartsbane shoot beer through his nose when I swore at him!

All in all, quite a successful evening and I look forward to helping others in November at our next release party.

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE: Another 70+ pictures have been added, check them out!

In case you haven’t heard or read already, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) was released just a few days ago (April 24). I certainly have noticed plenty of talk about it on blogs and tech news sites. Fedora 9 (Sulphur) was scheduled for release right about now, but the fine folks at the Fedora Project decided they needed a couple more weeks to work out some kinks. In the meantime, there is a fine Fedora 9 Preview release available which can be updated to the official release when it is out (May 13, or so they say).

So what does all this mean? It means it’s time to party like it’s v0.99!

Code Greene, a programming shop located in Salt Lake City, is graciously hosting a release party THIS SATURDAY to celebrate these two latest distribution releases. What?! You’re a OpenSUSE enthusiast? A long-time Slackware user? That’s okay! You can still come and enjoy good food, good company, and fun and games. (Rumor has it these Code Greene people don’t actually do any real work, they just play foosball and videogames all day.)

Here are the vital details:

• Date/time: Saturday, May 3, 6pm to 8pm
• Address: Code Greene, 44 Exchange Place Salt Lake City, UT 84111

Now, if you’re coming, you should take a moment and RSVP via this friendly and easy-to-use Upcoming link.

This release party is being sponsored by us- the Utah Open Source Foundation, the Fedora Project, and Ubuntu Utah.

So, if you live in the greater Salt Lake City area, there’s a pretty cool low key (and free!) conference coming up, the Utah Code Camp. I’ll be doing a little talk on getting data out of HTML with Python (utilizing lxml and twill). If your interested, you can register here.

The following two articles were published in the past couple days.  When they were published and made known to me, I was saddened:

Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP
Nicholas Negroponte on Sugar and One Laptop Per Child

It appears, that Greg DeKoenigsberg responded (it appears) to these two articles with a great rebuttal in this article:

OLPC Developers are *not* fundamentalists

Thank you Greg, thank you for saying what I feel inside.  As an open source advocate, I see the value and benefit of free software and its power.  I feel good inside when I contribute and don’t feel anything like a fundamentalist.

Again, thank you Greg.

Cheers,

Herlo

For those of you waiting with bated breath, wait no longer. The Utah Open Source Conference volunteers have been hard at work year preparing an even more awesome conference for 2008.

Because 2007 was such a grand success, we’ve made some minor changes and improvements to help with a smoother conference. This year’s conference is at a different location and we’ve added a full day on Thursday.

The Utah Open Source Conference 2008 will be held at the Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Road campus August 28 - 30, 2008.

This years theme is HOWTO. The concept is that within the technology, education, community and business tracks, there will be plenty to talk about.

• HOWTOs will help others get started
• HOWTOs will help families use open source together
• HOWTOs will provide a stepping stone along the road to technology mastery
• HOWTOs will let those that are masters get together and make the products better.

These are just a few of the many things that HOWTO theme will accomplish during the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) 2008.

The Salt Lake Community College Computer Science department is excited to be a sponsor of the 2008 conference and will be using it to improve students’ awareness and understanding of open source software.

The Utah Open Source Foundation is also re-dedicating itself to ensure the pricing structure remains reasonable for those who’d like to come and are on a budget. The pricing structure right now is tentative, but no major increases in the fees are planned for attendees.

We currently have a tentative plan on our wiki, so feel free to have a look. If you have suggestions, please join the chat anytime in the #utos channel on irc.freenode.net or email clints at utos dot org with your comments.

Watch closely over the next week for the Call for Papers, updates on the basic schedule, and the Call for Volunteers among other exciting announcements, including our keynote speakers.

See you all in August.

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation

This week’s Local User Group meetings:

• Layton.rb - Feb 4, 7pm - Topic unavailable
• BYU UUG - Feb 7, 7pm - Basic DNS With Bind by Stuart Jansen
• Ubuntu Utah - Feb 9, 6pm - Debian/Ubuntu Packaging by Tim Riker

A special thanks goes out to TierFour for the streaming and podcast bandwidth to share these meetings. Please feel free to join the streaming discussion this week for the Ubuntu Utah meeting at http://stream.utos.org

I've uploaded two more videos to YouTube for OpenSourceTV.tv.

First, we have an interview with Clint Savage of the Utah Open Source Foundation and the main driving force behind last year's first Utah Open Source Conference.

Next, we have an interview with Scott Paul Robertson (AKA "spr") who gave a presentation at UTOSC 2007 on Django and who is also the author of one of my favorite open source utilities: oggify.

I've got at least one more interview to edit and upload and we also have other content coming soon as well.

You can see Clint's interview and Scott's interview and many others by going to my YouTube Open Source TV playlist, or by visiting the UTOSF YouTube group.

The UTOS Confrence Manager or ConMan, is really coming along.  Tonight’s HackNight didn’t last quite as long as last weekend, but there was some definite improvements.

One of the really nice improvements was the addition of the logo by James Hancock who’s really good with his inkscape skills.  Other improvements included a better gui, backend administration, refactoring much of the user creation to better accommodate future enhancements.

One of the best features that has been added tonight was the blog functionality by Kevin Kubasik of GNOME fame.  When a conference is upcoming and during the conference itself, this feature will be front and center.  Nice work!

Things that are left include registration, including payments with google checkout, paypal or a merchant backend.  Sponsor management is another, as well as schedules for volunteers, speakers, attendees and sessions, bofs and events.

I’m even sure there are items not yet considered above, but that’s the functionality we hope to have in place within the next few months.   Feel free to download the project, and submit patches back to us anytime, we dig the help.

We’re looking forward to deploying the Call for Papers components tomorrow or Sunday in our official call for papers announcement, so keep your eyes peeled.

Cheers,

Clint

A special thanks to Guru Labs, Kevin Kubasik, John Weis, James Hancock, Will Smith and Trevor Sharpe for sticking it out much of Saturday night and into the wee hours of Sunday night.

The chinese food arrived at around 9pm, and we sat around talking design and ideas for the next 30 minutes, and about 11pm we really started digging into the project.

After about 12-13 hours of good coding, and time troubleshooting, learning, drinking loads of caffeine and a bunch of other good stuff, I’m proud to announce the first real progress on the ConMan project from UTOSF.

The general idea is to improve upon otherwise incomplete or sucky open source conferencing systems. ConMan (Conference Manager) is seeming to become quite good, with some good coding from Kevin Kubasik, good web design by John and some good perserverence as well by yours truly. Most of the group crashed out somewhere between 2am and 8am, Kevin and I however, continued to hack until we had something semi-solid at around 11:30am.

It was a great time had by all and a good framework has been built. Django seems like the perfect solution for this and we will even have CAPTCHA and email confirmation early in the 0.0.2 release.

For now though, if you are interested in seeing the Call for Papers, Call for Volunteers and Contact applications, please feel free to download it at http://code.google.com/p/utos-conman. We look forward to bug reports (which you can also make at the google code site, you just need a google account) and fixes in the future. Also any recommendations that are made will be taken into consideration.

In addition, keep an eye out for the “Call for Papers” to appear at http://2008.utosc.com very soon.

Cheers,

Clint Savage

A big thanks to our friends at Tier 4 for buying 15 cases of marballizer paint, and inviting all of us to play.  It was a great day for paintball with beautiful weather, lots of fun players (both first timers, and experienced people), and plenty of action.  It was fun to begin setting up teams by calling out for .RPM vs .DEB, and then watch as destruction happened in various game formats.

Make sure to thank the sponsors, and maybe they'll buy for us again!  If you did enjoy it and would like to do it again, also let us at UTOS know, so we can plan more activities for the groups in Utah.  Also thanks to the non-geek Team DesertEdge members for helping out with team balance, and keeping the games moving :)

I’m at the Linux Distro Release party right now and testing out the new ubuntu 7.10. Don’t worry fellow opensuse users, just because Novell laid me off doesn’t mean I’m going to move to ubuntu. So far we’ve had a great turn out and we’re still installing. We have had everything from opensuse to ubuntu to fedora to mac osx 10.5 to openbsd. That’s what we have had people bring.

So with my attempt to install ubuntu 7.10 on my mac book pro I ended up killing my boot information. For some reason refit didn’t work right (or more likely I didn’t know what I was doing) and now I need to go back and try and fix that. Back to the install fest. Hopefully pictures to follow.

A thanks to Herlo for helping put this together and Open Source Technology Center @ Novell for providing space.

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

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!