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After creating the Fedora Project Mind Map, I was better able to understand how UTOS was currently structured. I was able to put together the main pieces pretty quickly, although it seems there are several gaps in my thought process still. For that reason, I’m opening the UTOS structure up as well. It might not have as many contributors, but I’d like to see the structure grow.
Recently, I’ve been plagued with trying to come up with an organizational model for the Utah Open Source Foundation and it’s relationship to the Utah Open Source Conference. This is in addition to the new Non-Profit structure we’re building.
To that end, I created a very shabby hierarchical structure which I passed around a week ago at the Core Team after conference dinner. It went over okay, but people had a lot of questions about how the structure was organized and what not.
I didn’t know what exactly to do. As it is, I’ve never been an integral part of an organization before like this one. Nor have I ever created organizational charts that were very well done. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. But, something amazing did happen in the span between last Friday and today, that was VYM, or View Your Mind.
When a “Mind Map” was first suggested to me by my buddy Doran Barton, I thought “well, I’ll look into that later”. However, the more I kept trying to cram jobs into places they didn’t go, the more I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good application to accommodate the structure I was trying to build.
VYM is an application that helps get your thoughts out onto a structure. It lets you move it around quickly and easily and even associate pictures and notes where applicable. The problem for me was understanding how to use VYM in an environment I already knew and UTOS was not the right place!
It turns out that a lot of people always wonder how the Fedora Project is structured, where the pieces go and who, what, where and how the project is put together. Because I could at least see all the pieces, I decided that would be a good place to start. While it’s not complete by any means, I present to you the Fedora Project VYM “Mind Map”. From VYM, one can create pdf, png and other output sources, so I created a pdf as well
I’d like to see the Fedora Community take this up and add many pieces to it as it grows and builds into something more than I could make. It’s fairly simple to add pieces as well. You can create separate maps which can be integrated into the larger map. Or, since the format is a zip file (essentially) with an xml definition file, I believe patches could work.
Cheers,
Herlo
Video of Matt Asay’s UTOSC 2008 presentation titled The Billion Dollar (Free) Software Opportunity is now available from opensourcetv.tv.
Matt Asay at UTOSC 2008
Matt Asay presented on Friday morning, 29 August.
The Utah Open Source Foundation has released two more audio recordings from UTOSC 2008.
The audio recordings now available are
More audio from UTOSC 2008 will be showing up on podcast.utos.org. This site already has audio recordings from the local Utah User Groups and other events. Feel free to check back at any time, or use our rss feed as well.
Cheers,
Clint
Video of Christer Edwards keynote address from UTOSC 2008 is now available at opensourcetv.tv.
Christer Edwards
Christer Edwards, instructor for Guru Labs and Ubuntu-Utah member presented on Saturday, 30 August 2008 on Ubuntu in the Enterprise.
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.
The Utah Open Source Foundation has released two more audio recordings from UTOSC 2008.
The audio recordings now available are
More audio from UTOSC 2008 will be showing up on podcast.utos.org. This site already has audio recordings from the local Utah User Groups and other events. Feel free to check back at any time, or use our rss feed as well.
I presented at UTOSC this year, presenting a series of tips and best practices that I've learned from Oggify. Entitled Things I've Learned From Oggify, the slides are available on the conference site. There are a few files I used in the presentation which I have put in a tar and uploaded. Enjoy!
Quite a bit has transpired this weekend. Thought I had better get caught up on it before I forget.
My Son Shaun lost his fourth tooth this past week. He was so excited about it, he called me as soon as it happened. Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to experience it, but I’ve been assigned to be in LA three times in the next 3 months, plus one or two trips back to Utah should help. I’m excited to head out and see his more holey head :) I’m expecting some pictures to appear soon.
On Friday, I left with a friend of mine, Seth House to Djangocon 2008, the first ever. While I was happy to go, I wasn’t particularly excited that I would miss an entire day due to a clerical messup. I learned quite a bit about Django and the community, I’m grateful I could go.
Django is a great framework and I’m excited to learn more about it this weekend. I’m also grateful Google let me come back onto their campus (without incident this time, I might add), they are such great hosts. I also got to meet Leslie Hawthorne and introduce myself, she seems pretty awesome even though I hollered at her while she was on the phone (oops, sorry Leslie).
Another great bit of news from UTOSC 2008. The first evening keynote videos of Mac Newbold and Paul Frields have been released. I’m excited and grateful to KnowledgeBlue and OpenSourceTV for their help with this project. Things are rolling great on the video, thanks to Doran Barton and Nick Bauman at KnowledgeBlue for doing the video.
Make sure to take a moment and have a look at the UTOS flickr group. There’s tons of pictures there and maybe you are in one. I’ve been tagging like crazy and hope to have them all done later this week. I’d love to see more tags than what I’ve
Also, today I found out one interesting thing, my friend Christer, who I referred to come work at Guru Labs, has left for another position. I’m glad he’s happy and wish him luck. Sounds like a great change for him and his family.
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!!
We promised we'd at least try to get some audio and video from UTOSC up as quickly as possible, so I'm sitting here at my computers waiting for my Windows computer to write a modified 23GB AVI so I can start editing the video for the keynote presentations tonight.
So, while that slow process continues, I'll write a little about how today went.
Well, for me, it began very STRESSFULLY!
I went over to Salt Lake Community College (where UTOSC is being held) on Wednesday afternoon to get things set up for shooting video starting Thursday and to help with other UTOSC-related tasks as I am a UTOSC core team member. At 4:30 p.m., a client called me to tell me their server just went down. Right after the call, the Nagios alerts came into my phone saying the same thing. Nick was with me, so I sent him out to get their server back up while I continued setting up equipment. I figured it just needed to be powered back up or something, but we weren't so lucky this time.
This particular server has been pesky and super-sensitive ever since we installed it, making it an annoyance for both us and the client. We weren't really every sure what the problem was, but I strongly suspected the motherboard was just bad even though it worked most of the time.
Nick couldn't get the server to do much. It would love the RAID controller BIOS and then reboot, or it wouldn't display anything at all on the monitor. Finally, I told him to just remove the server and bring it to me and I'd work on it later at home.
Later, when I got the server to my house, I could not get it to do anything. It would power up, but would not POST. I tried all the usual tricks: removing the power cables, disconnecting the motherboard power connector, resetting the CMOS power jumper, chanting a voodoo chant. Nothing worked, so this morning, I made replacing the motherboard my first task. I had hoped I'd be able to get it done quickly and still make it to SLCC to be of some help in the preparation for UTOSC to start at 12:30.
I made it to Universal Systems around 9:00 and they had one socket 1207 motherboard in stock, a Supermicro H8DME-2 dual-processor board. I guess I was pretty lucky they had one. I knew USI was more of an Intel shop, but I thought they'd have more than one AMD board for sale. Lucky for me, they had one. It wasn't cheap, but it was a Supermicro so that's generally a good thing.
I took the server and the new board back to the office and proceeded to install it. The Supermicro board was an EATX board which means it's about as huge as a motherboard can be. The I-Star case I was installing it in could take an EATX motherboard, but it was a tight fit. It took me about an hour or so to get the new board in, everything connected, and powered up. The box didn't have a manual in it, so I downloaded a PDF and printed off the necessary pages for jumpers and connectors.
The LSI Logic RAID controller really slowed down the boot process. I eventually just yanked it out of its PCI-X slot so I could get through BIOS and boot-up issues without waiting.
The Supermicro motherboard had a different onboard SATA chipset than the old board, so I had to install a new initial RAMdisk (initrd) for the Linux kernel. The server was running Fedora Core 6, which I didn't have any media handy for, so I downloaded a rescue disk ISO and burned it to a CD. I ripped a CD drive out of an old desktop so I could boot to the rescue disk. This, of course, all took a little time... more than I anticipated. Finally, I got the system booting by getting the new initial RAMdisk installed by way of the rescue CD. Then, I realized I had to reconfigure the networking for the server because it used a bonded ethernet configuration. All the ethernet addresses would be different, so I had to go through a tedious process of making Fedora Core forget the information it had stored about the previous ethernet ports and learn about the new ones. Finally, I had a system that was ready to go back to the client and it was about ten minutes before noon.
Things went relatively well at the client's office. I had to do a couple other little things to get things working the way they should, but I was out of there shortly after 12:30. All the hustling made me a little shakey, so I hit a local Maverik and got some hot cheesy bread. I made it back to SLCC a little before 1.
Matt Asay was well into his presentation, but Nick had both cameras rolling and I stepped in on one and took control.
Everything else throughout the day went, I thought, very smooth. We shot video for Nathan Blackham's Nagios presentation and would have shot video for Jared Smith's Asterisk presentation, but it got moved to Friday. As a result, we had a little extra time and I would have rounded up a couple people to do some on-camera interviews, but I didn't bother to shave and looked like a wild man, so we didn't do that. Instead, we loaded up the equipment and moved over to the Student Center to get set up for the evening keynote presentation.
It was good we headed over there early. It was more work than either Nick or I expected packing our equipment up, moving it, and setting it back up, so we learned a lot from that.
Dinner was pretty good. More people should have attended the dinner and the keynote presentations. A lot of people did, but I still saw empty chairs. It seems like the SLCC students didn't make it out en force to the dinner and they should have. Free food!
I got home a little after 10 p.m. and started working on this video. Now it's about 12:30 and I'm done talking about my day and this video conversion thing is still going. We'll have to see if I have the patience to get this out tonight. If nothing else, I'll get audio from the presentations to someone to make them available.
A Quick Photoblog Update! Time for real specifics later, but other news includes 2 awesome upcoming events!
New Posters From NPS!Our Tickets to Dave Matthews Band!
View From our new Place!
Sloshball!
Massive Utah Mountain Fire!
My brother Gabe wrote an interesting post highlighting how Google Trends searches show that Utah is a hotbed of Open Source. It reminded me that I haven’t plugged the Utah Open Source Conference that’s happening this week. This conference is something you don’t want to miss. I think you can still get tickets.
If your business is still not leveraging open source, you need to stop by to meet some of the people that can help you make it happen.
Now, on a separate nerdy note, I wanted to echo Gabe’s post by pointing out some business terms in which Utahans have peculiar interest according to search data in Google Trends. When it comes to industry related searches, we rank #1 for Multi Level Marketing, #2 in Outdoor Recreation, and #3 in Telemarketing.
Utah also does a disproportionate amount of searches for online business terms: we rank #1 for SEO, #2 for Internet Marketing, #1 for Web Analytics, and #2 for Internet Business.
Can you think of any other obvious top Utah searches? I’m looking specifically for business terms; although searches for jello, meth, and vouchers are interesting in their own right.
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
The Utah Open Source Foundation is hosting dinner for geeks, bloggers, and open source enthusiasts at Tucanos Brazillian Grill at the Gateway Center in downtown Salt Lake City on Friday, August 29, beginning at 8:30 p.m.
While this event is planned in conjunction with the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference going August 28-30, you do not need to be an attendee of UTOSC 2008 to come.
The Utah Open Source Foundation will be paying for appetizers for those who show up at Tucanos.
Tucanos is located on the south end of the Gateway Center, just above the California Pizza Kitchen. Directions to the Gateway Center can be found here.
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year. To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today. We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.
On Thursday, August 28, the Utah Open Source Conference begins. Presentations start at 12:30 p.m., but Phil Windley will be kicking off the conference with a CTO Breakfast from 7:30 - 11:00 a.m. in the Salt Lake Community College Student Center, room 221/223.
The CTO breakfast is an informal monthly gathering of leaders within Utah’s tech community. You don’t have to be a CTO to come. “Anyone interested in product development in high tech is welcome,” Windley says.
The SLCC Student Center has a variety of food vendors on the first floor. Get what you want to eat and jet upstairs so you can participate in the CTO Breakfast. For information on parking and where all UTOSC activities will be taking place, see this map.
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year. To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today. We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.
There’s been a lot of talk about this thing called ‘Family Day’, being held on Saturday, August 30. Its been in the planning for some time now and things are very close to finalization. Because of this, its time to reveal what family day is and how it will work.
Some of the items should be clear, the general idea is that any attendee can bring their family along and enjoy some family activities. Because Utah is a very family based community, UTOSC 2008 is focusing on technologies for the family.
Located just outside the SI Building at the Salt Lake Community College, will be large inflated activities for children young and old. Volunteers from UTOSC will be stationed around this area making sure the kids have a safe and fun time.
If the kids are a bit older, they might enjoy our try-it lab, and parents will get an opportunity to see the OLPC (one laptop per child) as well as some machines running educational software and possibly a mythtv setup as well.
Lunch will be picnic style where families can bring blankets and sit out on the grassy knolls near the venue and enjoy the BBQ food from The Smokehouse restaurant. There will be chairs and tables near the student center for your use as well. The Smokehouse will be offering southern bbq meals for a good price. They did a great job for us last year so expect some great food.
Drop the kids off at the bouncy houses and plan on spending an hour or two in sessions you’d like to see with your significant other. After the sessions, feel free to kick around for lunch and then peruse the try-it lab. Sounds like a great day for the family!
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year. To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today. We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.
We'll be holding the CTO Breakfast next week on Thursday at 8am in conjunction with the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference. You don't have to be going to the conference to attend the breakfast, but I do have discount codes available for CTO Breakfast attendees. Contact me if you're like one.
The Utah Open Source Conference 2008 will be held at the Salt Lake Community College, Redwood Road campus from August 28 - 30, 2008. We'll be meeting in rooms 221/223 of the Student Center (SC) at the Salt Lake Community College (Redwood Road campus). Here's a map that shows where to park. There is food on campus near where we'll be meeting so you can pick up breakfast.
Even though the venue is different, we'll be doing the same thing: talking about cool technology, building high-tech companies, and what's hot. Come join us.
Here's the schedule for the next several meetings:
Please mark your calendars.
Remember that you don't have to be a CTO to come. Anyone interested in product development in high tech is welcome.
Tags: utah cto breakfast open+source UTOSC
Its official! For those of you who have always wanted to know how to hack a project together, this is a great opportunity.
We at the Utah Open Source Foundation learned a few weeks ago that Novell’s ‘Hack Week‘ will be occuring the same week as UTOSC 2008. We also learned UTOSC 2008 will have these awesome hackers come out to the Salt Lake Community College Thursday and Friday to finish off some of their cool applications. This is the third Hack Week from Novell.
On Saturday, we’re offering these hackers an opportunity to come down to UTOSC and give a few short presentations on what was finished and how they work. Let’s hope they accept.
During UTOSC 2007, we opened our conference with an opening keynote dinner, featuring two great speakers, Matt Asay of Alfresco and Bruce Perens, well known free software advocate. At these two keynote presentations, attendees were provided with great insight into the open source world, its technology and how great things can become greater with open source software and its communities.
In addition, there was a great buffet table full of food, well, because computer geeks like to eat! And last but not least, the findlay quartet played for us, and they will be returning to entertain us with some classical music.
In 2008, we decided that the opening evening keynote dinner was a great idea. We’re keeping the same format, and providing food and drink for all that attend. This year will be more grand, UTOSC has secured the Oak Room at the Salt Lake Community College Student Center. With comfortable table seating for approximately 300, and a podium and microphone for the presenters, UTOSC 2008 is sure to end its first full day of presentations with great keynotes from Mac Newbold (Code Greene) and Paul Frields (Fedora Project/Red Hat).
The full schedule of speakers and events is being finalized right now, and we anticipate a final version very soon. In the meantime, we have the list of presenters, along with times and dates available on our website, <http://2008.utosc.com/speaker/list/>
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year. To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today. We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.
For those of you who are in the know in the local technology scene, you know that Utah has a lot of good choices when it comes to successful small businesses. Today, we announce one of our local small business leaders who’s accomplished a great deal and helped the community as well.
Mac Newbold - Code Greene (Chief Technical Officer & Partner)
Mac has Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He began intense involvement in web development in 2001 and has been an avid member of the Utah PHP User group (UPHPU) since 2004. In 2005, Mac co-founded Code Greene, a web development company, which has now grown to 10 team members. Code Greene develops using almost exclusively open source software and platforms. Code Greene helps clients make money by helping them streamline their businesses with intelligent dynamic websites and business process automation.
Keynote Title: How To Leverage Open Source in a For-Profit Business
Lessons learned by helping hundreds of companies develop an online presence and automate their businesses by using open source software and development platforms.
Mac will be warming up the crowd for the Paul Frields keynote on Thursday, August 28, 2008. He will begin at 6:30pm at the UTOSC Keynote Dinner.
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
UTOSC 2008 has chosen to utilize eventbrite as its registration system this year. To register for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008, visit <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com/> and sign up today. We accept credit cards (through paypal) and payment at the door. We’re looking forward to seeing you soon.
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
Its the last day for early bird registration for UTOSC, <http://2008.utosc.com>. After today, prices go up to $100 ($50 w/LUG discounts).
Register with eventbrite today! <http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com>
See you all there!
While you were out, your mom called and asked that we tell you, “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times, leave your muddy shoes outside… And, make sure you register for the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference before August 7 because that’s when early registration ends and the price goes up!”
She added, “If your father finds out you waited until registration costs $100, he will not be happy with you.”
It sounds like she’s pretty interested in your going to the conference. Make sure you invite her and your dad (and other family members) to come on Saturday, August 30 because that’s Family Day. They can come (for free) and learn how open source can enrich their lives too.
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
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
We're about one month away from the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference and it's shaping up to be a sweet conference. This year's conference will be Thursday, August 28 through Saturday, August 30 and will be held at Salt Lake Community College Redwood Campus.
Keynote presentations will be given by Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader and Joe Brockmeier, OpenSUSE Community Leader.
Over 50 presentations by members open source community, both local and abroad, have been approved, including one by yours truly: Tools for video and images.
I should mention that I've been very involved with the planning and execution of this years conference and I've been named a "trustee" of the Utah Open Source Foundation. I am thrilled to be a part of this great organization!
This year adds many new things to UTOSC including "Family Day" (Saturday, 30 Aug) which is the day to bring your spouse and/or children. There will be plenty of presentations on Family Day geared at those just starting out with open source software and tackling conventional tasks like digital photos, desktop publishing, and genealogy. Plus, we're planning on having games and activities for the whole family.
If you have not already registered for the Utah Open Source Conference, it's not too late. If you register before August 7, you can qualify for the early bird rate of $70/person. If you are a member of a participating local user group, you can qualify for a discounted rate. Talk to your group leaders for more information.
It's official: I will be presenting again at this year's Utah Open Source Conference. Unlike last year, this will not be a cooking demo. Guru Labs has given me permission to present an excerpt from our upcoming course, Shell Scripting for System Administration. Specifically, I will be giving an introduction to the Perl programming language. Barring any unforeseen events, I'm also planning on having handouts.
This presentation will be targeted at those who are already comfortable in a shell environment, but have decided to move beyond the confines of classic shell scripting. I've often told people that there is a point in which a Bash script can become so advanced that it is time to port it over to another language. This generally happens about the time the script needs to handle any kind of non-integer math, or do any other kind of real thinking. There are a variety of excellent languages out there suitable for system administration, and I have enjoyed working with Perl for years.
Speaking of the other languages, I'm delighted to see that Matt Harrison will be presenting on "90% of the Python you need to know". Python has certainly become another important language in the tool of system administration, especially in the Red Hat and Gentoo worlds. Even better, that presentation is scheduled far apart enough from mine that I can attend it as well. I also saw a presentation on the list for Ruby, another up and coming language in the sysadmin world, but it doesn't look like so much of a "getting started in Ruby" type thing.
Those of you who haven't registered yet for the conference, now's the time to do it. The price of admission goes up August 7th, so sooner is better than later. Also, if you're a member of one of the LUGs in Utah, you'll want to check with your group officers and see if they have a promotional code for you to get a discount.
I'm really looking forward to this year's conference. We'll see you there!
Clint and company have been working hard to code up the beautiful and illustrious UTOSC website so you can see the schedule of speakers for this year’s Utah Open Source Conference.
It’s done!
It’s now time to drop everything; Don’t walk, RUN to the schedule pages and start figuring out what sessions you’re going to attend at this year’s conference.
If you haven’t yet registered for the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference, what are you waiting for?!
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
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
It’s time to let loose information about yet-another keynote speaker for the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference. We are very pleased to announce that attendees at the upcoming conference will have the fortune of hearing from Paul Frields, current Fedora Project Leader (FPL).
Before being employed by Red Hat and serving in the FPL position, Paul worked as an engineer for the U.S. government, but has been intimately involved in the Fedora Project community since 2003 (after Red Hat created the Fedora Project out of the ashes of the free Red Hat Linux distribution). Paul’s involvement with Fedora has included working on and chairing the steering committee for the Fedora Documentation Project.
Paul lives in Fredericksburg, VA with his wife and 2 children where he also helps manage FredLUG - the Fredericksburg Linux User Group.
Paul’s personal blog illustrates that he represents many in the open source community. In addition to being a outspoken advocate of open source software and the communities surrounding open source projects, Paul loves music (playing and listening) and good movies. He lists as one thing he hates that he can’t just play music and hack on Linux all day.
As the FPL, Paul claims accountability for everything in the Fedora project. He works with the Fedora Program Manager, Fedora Engineering Manager, and Fedora Community Architecture teams to make sure Fedora is on track and making progress toward meeting the goals of their next release and supporting the community using the current releases. Paul also manages a handful of Fedora Project packages.
Paul plans to talk about the Fedora Project in his keynote presentation, how it came about, where it’s going, and some of the challenges it has faced in its five year existence.
We are truly lucky to have Paul Frields along with Joe Brockmeier as keynote speakers at this year’s conference!
The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.
For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.
Last week, we announced that Jayce^ Hall will be on couchcast.org. Well that day is today, so come and listen to him and the couchcast crew as they discuss who will be at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.
Here’s the details again just in case you missed them the first time:
When: July 7, 2008 12pm MDT (Today)
Where: http://couchcast.org
See you all there!
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
For those of you who’ve been considering submitting a presentation for the Utah Open Source Conference, its not yet too late! But you only have until July 1 (that’s Tomorrow) to submit your presentation.
The selection committee is currently voting on presentations and will be doing so until July 10. In addition, we’re going to be extending an invitation to any and all potential speakers to help us select the best presentations for our conference. As a potential speaker, just click on the “SPEAKERS” link at the UTOSC 2008 website and start voting for your favorite presentations starting July 1. But hurry, because voting privileges are only good until July 10, 2008.
On July 15, 2008, we’ll announce which presentation have been selected, along with a tentative time and date for each. 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.
Either way, we’ll be having a great conference and we look forward seeing everyone at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.
Cheers,
Clint
Hey everybody!
Guess what! The Utah Open Source Foundation’s very own Jason Hall (Jayce^ [the face]) will be discussing the Utah Open Source Conference with Robert Merrill et al, on CouchCast.
CouchCast is a local show with topics around technology and business. Its a call-in show, so be sure to get on the line in advance and ask questions. Feel free to dial in around noon, 347-324-3797 and ask pretty much anything you like.
Discussions will include keynote announcements, presentations, family day, the Utah Open Source Awards, the troubleshooting challenge (last years big hit) and many other aspects of the conference at the end of August.
Jayce will also be discussing the Utah Open Source Foundation, its purpose, goals and plans for 2009. Things like live streaming of Local User Group meetings, podcasts and other events to make it easier to spread the word about open source in Utah.
Feel free to check it out, here’s how:
When: July 7, 2008 12pm MDT
Where: http://couchcast.org (yes, its flash, sorry) –> hosted by blogtalkradio.
Enjoy the show!
Hi all,
Its been a few days since we blogged about the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 (in fact, more like 2+ weeks). But I’m back now and ready to let you guys know that while there might be a few more bumps in our migration path, most of the Utah Open Source servers are up and working well.
We have been busy lately, preparing for an exciting and fun Utah Open Source Conference 2008. New features continue to crop up on our main site. Check them out and start watching for speakers as we’ll be approving presentations over the next few weeks. The selection committee, made up of many professional geeks, LUG leaders and others, has been madly voting for their favorites so it looks to be a good list of presentations.
As of right now, UTOSC 2008 will begin in approximately 63 days. And due to this, I’ve taken the time to create a little javascript that can be included in your site, with a neat countdown. Have a look at the right hand side of our site.
We’d like to invite everyone to put this link on their website to help us get more people interested in the countdown. Basically, this is a very similar countdown script to the ones released by each of the big Linuxes (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE).
Just stick this code anywhere on your site:
<script id=“utosc-banner”
type=“text/javascript”
src=“http://dl.utosc.com/08/scripts/release-counter-ext.js”>
</script>
You should get something similar to this:
See you all at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008!
Cheers,
Clint
Mailing lists can be a pain in the butt, especially when discussions spiral into topics about which pizza delivery company is best, which text editor is best, which Linux distribution is best, which caffeinated beverage is best, etc.
We at Utah Open Source (UTOS) know you work hard day in and day out and deserve a