Utah Open Source Planet

Before there can be another Utah Open Source Conference in 2008, there needs to be a list of people who will present on various topics. This is how YOU can contribute to the conference: by being a presenter!

The UTOSC Call For Papers begins now at <http://2008.utosc.com/>! Papers can be submitted until June 1, after which time chosen presenters will be announced.

Some people are natural public speakers and presenters while others are reluctant to imagine themselves in front of a group of people at a conference. Because this year’s Utah Open Source Conference theme is “HOWTO”, nobody should feel unqualified or inexperienced to present. We want presenters who can share information at all levels.

And now, some tough questions.

What should I talk about?

You should talk about Open Source software, philosophy, technology, etc. The theme for this year’s conference is “HOWTO” so your topic can be targeted at beginners, experts, or someone in between.

It may help to see what topics were presented last year. Go to <http://www.utosc.com/2007/sessions/> for information about 2007’s conference sessions.

This year, several sessions will be targetted at beginning or “newbie” users including those who are family members of an Open Source geek. Basic sessions on using OpenOffice.org, GIMP, or K3B are good examples of these types of sessions.

We are asking for presentations in one of the following categories, so bear that in mind also:

• Business
• Technical
• Community
• Education

What does a response to a call for papers look like?

You should come up with a brief outline, or abstract, of your presentation and who would be interested. You should also provide some information about you, your experience with open source software and the specific aspects you’re proposing to speak about.

Here’s an example of an abstract:

Title: Open source home security

This presentation will outline how I have used a
Linux server, IP cameras, and open source software,
to provide around-the-clock video and image
surveilance of my home which is archived for later
viewing and is available for viewing via the Web
when I’m not at home. 

The presentation will describe how to set up a
system similar to mine and what alternatives are
available for software and hardware in the system.

What’s in it for me?

There are lots of perks reserved for people chosen to present at the Utah Open Source Conference!

Resumé material

Having presented on a topic at a conference is a great thing to add to your resumé and could make the difference the next time you apply for a job.

Free admission

If you’re chosen as a speaker, we’ll let you — and your family — into the conference for FREE!

A picture and a paragraph

Speakers are asked to submit a digital photo and a paragraph of biographical information which will be seen by those viewing the UTOSC website and those reading the conference program.

Warm fuzzies

Being involved in the Utah Open Source Conference is a great experience. Just ask anyone who was involved in 2007’s conference.

What’s that URL again?

Go to <http://2008.utosc.com/> and get yourself an account. Then you can submit as many presentation ideas as you like.

Recently, I’ve been very interested in getting involved more and more with the Fedora Project.  In fact, the latest project in which I’m involved, the Getting Involved Guide (GIG).

I started with this guide because my so-called friend Jared Smith (hi Jared!), introduced me to the original creator of this document, Paul Frields at FUDCon a couple months ago.  I started the hackfest portion, not entirely clear where I’d end up, but somehow I rolled back to hang with Jared and Paul while they were working on this Contributor Guide, if I remember the name correctly.  I got involved late in the day, and either my misunderstanding, or pure genius took over and the Contributor Guide (intended mainly for developers), quickly turned into the Getting Involved Guide or GIG, which had a much broader focus.

While I am happy to be a part of this guide, and have had a hand in changing its purpose, I’m not at all familiar with much of the Fedora Community processes.  Which, for this document to be successful, I am going to have to learn, since that’s the point of this guide to begin with, helping others get started when they want to help the Fedora Project.
Think of it this way, if you are a corporate entity, an individual, or a small non-profit group (like my UTOSF group) and want to give back to the community that has helped you so much.  How do you do that?  What’s involved in getting started?  What projects are out there where we can help?  Do we need to be developers? If not, what else is there for us to do?  Well, those are all good questions, and I am sure there are many, many more we haven’t yet considered.

I guess what I am doing here is soliciting from the general communities at large, what they’d like to see in this guide.  What confused them about joining a large project.  I’d also like to hear stories about being a contributor to the Fedora Project, and why you think its a good idea.  I want to take these ideas and integrate them into the Getting Involved Guide.  I want to take these issues and make it clear for others how to get involved, why its important, and show that value.

Currently, if you are a Fedora Project member, I have a document in gobby.fedoraproject.org called GettingInvolvedGuide, which you are welcome to modify as you feel necessary.  I may also be hitting you up to answer questions regarding particular processes in your group as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

Its been a very long time since I’ve done the Product of the Week, so I am going to change the name to Product of Whenever. This suits me better.

In July of 2001, I was introduced to a little editing tool many of us now know fondly, the wiki. I was travelling to New Zealand looking for work. During my month’s stay, the fellow I traveled with showed me his wiki-wiki. He explained how collaboration could work and the simplicity of the system made it even great for a one person quick web page. Immediately, I was hooked. When I returned from New Zealand and enrolled in school, my mind quickly went back to this funky wiki-editor thing I’d seen. Being a geek even back then, I promptly installed one.

Fast-forward almost 7 years. We’ve seen the wiki evolve from a little app that could be used to make an entire website of information so grand that even the largest collectors of physical data can’t compete. We’ve seen tools like DocuWiki - the documentation wiki, MediaWiki - which needs no introduction and Tomboy - the little desktop wiki. Many other wiki’s emerged to help people collaborate all around the world. How great a time it was…

This article isn’t about wiki’s, rather it is about collaboration. This article is about a different type of collaboration, one that’s more real-time than a wiki can be. In some ways its more limiting and in others, much less. The feature I’m referring to is real-time collaboration. And the tool that enables this, gobby, and its closely related cousins, sobby and obby.

INTRODUCING GOBBY

Gobby is a collaborative text editor, with a bunch of cool features. While gobby is still young and not quite feature-full, its quite amazing what it can do out of the box. The collaboration abilities of gobby come straight out of the box. One can choose to create a session on the local network, or create a server version, with sobby, where everyone can connect to a centralized server to collaborate. I’d like to also point out this application can also run in Windows according to the authors’ website, though I’ve heard rumors that it doesn’t work as I’ve not personally tried.

To get started with gobby, its easily installed:

# yum install gobby
.. snip ...

Once its installed, gobby will easily load from Applications -> Internet -> Gobby Collaborative Editor. Up pops the window we showed you above, albeit a little more bare. The toolbar is the most important piece here.

There are two distinct features here, plus the ability of a regular text editor. On the left, are the connection buttons, one can join or create a session. On the right hand side, are user and document lists, and a chat button. The left hand side controls how to connect, the right controls once you are connected. Of course, the middle does have tools of a normal editor.

Clicking the Create session button provides this dialog, allowing for a local session to be created and maintained.

This session can be just one person, but is definitely better with at least two. Notice that you’ll need to pick a colour. This feature is what makes it easy to tell who’s edited what parts of every document in gobby.

The other option is to join a session. Joining a session also lists any local sessions currently available.

Once the session is created and/or joined, its just a matter of using gobby like an editor. The fun part about gobby though, is when the collaboration begins. When working on a document, others can work on it as well, at the same time. Which can be confusing, and troublesome the first time you play with this tool. Give it some time and you’ll be hooked.

In addition to creating an obby session with the gobby application, its also possible to create a persistent connection with the sobby server. Unfortunately, sobby doesn’t have features that let it run as a SYSV service, but it is possible to get a server up and running quite easily even still. The organization I run, UTOSF, has one currently up and running at gobby.utos.org. If you want to join up, please let me know and we’ll get you connected.

Take the time to get to know this awesome collaboration tool, and start working with your friends who code, or document or even just for simple brainstorming sessions.  The possibilities are endless.

Cheers,

Herlo

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.

I will be home for the entire week next week, which is the first time that’s happened this month. Not that I am complaining, but once I get home I have a very long laundry list of items to complete and only 6.5 days to complete it in until I go back on the road. So here’s the short list:

• Generic stuff that can be done anytime during the week
  • Laundry from the past week
  • Put my bed together at my new home - I have been in this house now for two months, still no real bed
  • Finish unpacking all of the boxes left under the stairs - working on not being a packrat so much of the stuff is bound to get tossed out
  • Put an ad in the paper for a roommate - save money this way
  • Work on the Fedora GI Guide
• CodeAway Saturday from noon to 6pm - good times
• UTOSF HackNight Saturday night, 7pm - more good times (gotta get call for papers out)
• Sleep in all day Sunday - my only real day of rest, but that’s the life I lead, this may lead a little into Monday as well
• BoardGames on Tuesday night with friends I’ve not seen for a couple months - that’ll be nice
• Lunch with my friend Tristan on Wednesday afternoon
• Two meetings Wednesday night at Applebees in Draper
  • Centralized Calendaring among multiple communities - 6p
  • UTOSC Planning Meeting - 8p
• Two events as well on Thursday I’d like to attend
  • CTO Breakfast Thursday morning would be worthwhile, we’ll see if I make it down there
  • Geek/Blogger Dinner on Thursday night
• Friday will bring something, but currently, there’s nothing. Maybe I’ll try to keep it free.
• Oh, and I still have to work on Thursday and Friday, so I guess I’ll work that in somehow as well

Whew! I’m excited to be home though, and am sure this list will grow!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tomorrow night, 7pm, in Murray at my house, we’ll be eating pizza and hacking on ConMan again.

If you are interested in joining the fun, please feel free to stop by and learn some kick-a** django skillz.

The last two HackNights were all-nighters and were very successful.  Tomorrow’s HackNight is to refactor the views a little and build out the blog portion of the app as well.  Feel free to come by and stay as long or as little as you like.

See you all there.

Cheers,

Clint

Yes, that’s the url!( or at least just wua.la) I was at the UTOSF hack night and got my invite from kkubasik. So thanks to him for the hook up. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it looks really cool. It’s still in alpha so be patient.

Cool YouTube video about wuala.

Oh and I have a hand full of invites to throw out there. If you want one just shoot me an email sshaw at decriptor dot com or try and grab me on irc.freenode.org in #utos or #opensuse (if you see me in any others then asked there too).

By the way, a link to Conman. Its done in django, and needs the added help. So if you can program or are good at django, go help out!

Ooops! Forgot the cool screenshot

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!

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

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

As part of the Utah Open Source goals to help every LUG (Local User Group) grow, UTOSF plans to provide timely reminders to all who are interested about when, where and the topic for each of the LUGs we track.

In addition to this feature, UTOSF will also be providing an announcement service for podcasts of LUG meetings that were streamed and recorded.

This service should start around the beginning of February 2008 and hopefully provide simple, yet easy to read posts with all of the details needed.

If your group is not listed on the current UTOSF Groups page, or want your meetings streamed and recorded, please leave a comment, or contact clint At utosf (dot) org and we’ll get it added.

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Another podcast is up at http://podcast.utosf.org from the Ubuntu Utah User Group.

This podcast is on “Shell Basics” from Aaron Toponce.

Enjoy,

Clint Savage

Today I spent a good bit of time up at the Utah CodeAway at Wasatch Wingz in Salt Lake.  It was amazing.

What is CodeAway you ask?  Well, essentially, its another social channel (read disparate tech group) to get together.  In this case, its great to get together if you are a software dev or interested in improving your skill.  People with all types of coding skillz are there and can help (and learn).  The mood here is playful and fun, but if you want to code, there are plenty of little nooks to hide and burn out a bunch of code.  If you cant figure out a piece of code, just ask, you’re bound to find an answer with this many experts in the building.

The wings were amazing, and Wayne (sp?) was quite a friendly fellow.  He and another business partner run this little eclectic wing shop / internet cafe / hang out.  Its a very intriguing ideal and I was glad to chat for a few minutes before the crowd really showed.  Wayne explained that Wasatch Wingz really likes the idea of having people come in an hang out on their computers as they bear down on a dozen awesome wings.  I had the “voodoo” wings, which were tasty with a bit of spice, quite good.  Wayne has outdone himself here and if his hospitality and food are any indication, Wasatch Wingz are to be a huge hit.

Back to the event and some thoughts.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I showed up today, but after spending a few minutes talking with Laura Moncur, I felt right at ease.  She’s an amazing lady!  During our discussion, I discovered her desire for this sort of thing was because at one point she was so desperate to spend time with others of like mind.  It reminds me so much of UTOS, just slightly different in focus.

After talking, I realized we had so much in common and its clear that there are likely tens of groups who are just like CodeAway and UTOS out there.  And that the more we find ourselves in these groups, there are another hundred who are looking for this sort of thing.  And to that end (and if I have anything to do with it), we’ll see some combined efforts to provide facilities and opportunities for those interested to get involved.  I wouldn’t even be surprised to see advertising become more prevalent and attendance to these sorts of events sky rocket.

It appears the next event will be February 23 from noon to 6pm (also at Wasatch Wingz) so I’d recommend getting there early and getting a good seat.

See you all there!

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Its coming soon, the Utah Open Source Conference 2008!

and we need some help getting our registration system off the ground!

If you are interested in working on a really cool project, want to learn Django and enjoy some good food, come on over and hack.

The Hackfest will be held at my new home in Murray, Utah! So come and enjoy the new surroundings and hopefully we’ll have the projector and screen up, which means movies and video games. I’m also working on internet access (its Qwest/XMission for now. Soon to be UTOPIA/XMission), but it should be installed by Saturday. If not, we’ll let everyone know an updated location nearby.

Here’s the details:

Date/Time: Saturday, January 26, 2008 / 7pm

Location: Herlo’s house: 5225 Gravenstein Park, Murray, Utah 84123 - Map

Please feel free to ping me on IRC if you have any question.

Cheers,

Clint

So for those of you who follow this blog, its not the first time I’ve done shameless self-promotion. However, in this case, its only after the fact that someone else thought I was important.

I want to say thank you to the CodeAway and their organizers (Matthew Reinbold, and others, I’m sure) for putting me on this list. I hope to prove them right and kick some tail in Utah Open Source and around the tech community this year. I’m also glad to see at least a couple of faces I recognize, which means I need to meet the others on this list and get them involved in UTOSF and the UTOSC for sure.

Here’s the article: http://voxpopdesign.com/wordpress/?p=104

Cheers,

Herlo

The Utah Open Source Foundation would like to announce the availability of a new podcast available for meetings that have been recently streamed/recorded.  They’re available at http://podcast.utosf.org.  These presentations are available from many of the LUGs around the state.  Check them out…

Please let us know what you think as we’d like to do more and better versions in the future.  If you’d like to have your meetings streamed and recorded, please let us know.

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Okay, this time we found a better way to produce and release the UTOSC 2007 videos - YouTube!  These videos are a great way to escape the in-laws (or watch while wrapping presents).

Because YouTube will let you create your own group, we’ve done so and are making the videos available on our group page. If you are interested in seeing more videos, you can sign up and watch the currently available videos.

Currently, there are only a few videos, and more will be coming everyday. A special thanks to Doran Barton (fozzilinymoo) and OpenSourceTV.tv for helping us out with these videos. We look forward to releasing more videos, and as we do so, announcements will be made here.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Utah Open Source Foundation

Ok, so some of you may have noticed I’ve been a little quiet lately, over this time of non-blogging I built up a dozen great ideas for entries, and collected the photos to flesh them out. However, I am far to lazy, so you all get this little summary post instead. Let me apologize upfront, these were all taken with a cruddy phone. I’ll have another post with my technical musings later this week.

1. Who knew Utah was so cool! After attending the Ubuntu-Utah group meeting, I was floored at how active the area was! Not only was the user group active, social and plenty fun, but I quickly learned about the Utah Open Source Foundation, which is (for lack of something more elegant) just plain awesome, the guys that run it could not be doing a better job. It was at a Multi-Distro Release Party (graciously hosted by Novell at their Open Source Technologies Center) that I caught this amusing moment, after Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings, there aren’t age limits

   

2. Some (hopefully legal) shots of the Novell Provo campus, its quite nice:

   

   

3. Another fun tidbit about Salt Lake City, they have not only the best burrito joint on earth, but random neon orange flags at street crossings…

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

The charter of the Utah Open Source Foundation is to help Open Source grow in Utah. As part of this charter, we focus on the local community and especially the User Groups.

Because of this goal, we’ve been working hard to come up with some simple, yet effective ideas to help the User Groups overall. Just recently, myself and Will Smith (undertakingyou) were discussing the LugBin. The idea is simply just a big plastic bin with good stuff that User Groups might need or want. In fact, we think it might be a good idea to get others involved so we’re asking for help.

If you would take a few minutes after you read this to visit our wiki page for the LugBin and give suggestions for what would be useful inside. Keep in mind that User Groups may be about operating systems, programming languages, business organizations, or anybody that just wants to get together and talk about any Free/Libre Open Source (F/LOSS) software.

Thank you for your input. We really appreciate every comment/suggestion.

Cheers,

Herlo

An interesting tool I came across in the last week or so is this week’s Program of the Week: Agave, from the GNOME Community. Recently, we’ve been working on a new logo for the Utah Open Source Foundation, and needed to come up with some simple color schemes that would work well with our logo. In doing so, I came across Agave and started playing with possible combinations of colors we could use.

This tutorial will cover some of the simple, but effective features Agave provides to help provide a good contrast in designing logos, websites and more.

To install Agave, I simply did the following:

# yum -y install agave
.. snip ..
Installed: agave.i386 0:0.4.2-5.fc8
Dependency Installed: gconfmm26.i386 0:2.20.0-1.fc8
Complete!


Once Agave is installed, it is immediately available from the main Applications -> Graphics menu in GNOME. If you use a different desktop, its possible to type agave at the command line. Agave starts up similar to this screenshot:

As is shown above, its simple to see that the three colors here would go nicely together, maybe a bit bright for a website, but not too bad for a logo maybe. In our logo, however, we didn’t want such bright colors, plus we wanted to base it on a color that already existed in our already established brand logo seen below:

This logo is well known in our community, and thus we wanted to make sure to keep the look and feel as our org morphs into its true form. Out game GIMP and with the color picker tool, I obtained the bluish color needed for contrast. Agave only needs the value to give several different options through its several available views. The first view shown is the triads view, in other words, a scheme with three colors that fit well together:

yields the triad

But the real power of Agave is in this section of the application:

The color picker provides for easy to choose colors on the left.

On the right hand side, is the color scheme chooser which allows 6 different choices; Complements, Split-Complements, Triads (3 colors), Tetrads (4 colors), Analagous and Monochromatic. In addition, on the toolbar near the top, is another feature that allows random color schemes to be chosen.

When we’ve finished our site and logo, I’ll update this article with the results.

Try out Agave today and maybe even paint your house using its recommendations!

Cheers,

Herlo

Yes, you’ve heard correct, when the Utah Open Source Foundation is posts are made, they’ll also be available via twitter.

This means you will not forget about a particular event or other important Local Open Source news!

Be the first on you block to follow UTOSF on twitter!

http://twitter.com/utosf

Never miss another important activity again!

Cheers,

Clint

Just a quick friendly reminder that this Saturday will be paintball for geeks!

Paintball markers will be available onsite or by reservation with JT Paintball Rentals starting at $10. Its a great price! Tier Four will be providing 15 cases (that’s 30,000 paintballs) of marballizer paint and make it available to all that come.

DesertEdge Practice Field (SpecialOps Info)

Saturday, November 17, 2007
10am until about 2pm

Come frag your friends and fellow geeks.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation

Tonight was our presentation at (PLUG) on the State of Foss in Utah. We had over 25 people at Omniture.

The slides are available here http://utosf.org/presents/StateofFoss.html.

A few highlights

• Utah Open Source for Families (See the slides)
• User Group Shared Calendaring (Coming in the near future)
• Utah Open Source Newsletter
• Utah Open Source Conference 2008 Theme: Howto…

The Podcast will be available shortly. We need to do a bit of cleanup, so watch for the ogg.

Cheers,

Clint

The Provo Linux User Group (PLUG) is hosting the Utah Open Source Foundation this Wednesday, November 14. The presentation will cover the current state of Open Source in Utah. Among the gems will be free food, giveaways, and UTOSF will be announcing its plans for the upcoming year, including some cool surprises. Omniture will be hosting this meeting and all of the details are on the PLUG website.

We look forward to sharing the current and future of Open Source in Utah and hope you’ll join us either in person, or if you aren’t able to come by, try the live stream and irc.

If you are interested in attending, check out the PLUG website.

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Utah Open Source along with Tier Four is hosting a paintball game for all computer geeks in Utah. If you have ever wanted to frag your friend in real life, this is the time and place to do it.

The games will be pick up style, with matches pitting language, distro, and other hot topics against each other. Training will be held before each round and safety will be discussed. Paintball markers will be available onsite or by reservation with JT Paintball Rentals starting at $10.

Tier Four will be providing 15 cases, yes that’s right 15 cases of marballizer paint and make it available to all that come until its gone. More paint should be available for sale, or you should bring your own just in case.

Where

DesertEdge Practice Field (SpecialOps Info)

When

Saturday, November 17, 2007
10am until about 2pm

Why

Because you want to shoot your friends and fellow geeks. Beware, they shoot back!

RSVP

It’d be nice if you went and checked out the guns at JT Paintball Rentals and let us know which one you’ll be getting. If you’d like to confirm your attendance (recommended, we have about 35 guns to rent and they will go fast), email participate@utos.org.

See you all there.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls. We here at the Utah Open Source Foundation would like to announce that we’ve recently been able to acquire and test the video from the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC).

We’re proud to announce our first video. Tons of work went into getting this live. Including streaming bandwidth provided by TierFour and video editing done by KnowledgeBlue and Open Source TV. We’d like to thank all of those who made this possible and look forward to providing you with additional videos as they arrive. Please feel free to download them or watch the stream.

In the future, we’ll work on making them downloadable from this site as well. Oh, and we’re working on part 1, it will be out soon.

Podcast currently unavailable due to a bug in the PodPress software. Currently looking for a new plugin or an alternate way to release the videos.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation (http://www.utosf.org)

This month, we’ll begin our newsletter. UTOSF plans to send out this newsletter to all of the user group (UG) communities in Utah and surrounding areas. We post it here for your benefit and invite you to sign up for the News mailing list at http://utos.org/mailman/listinfo/ to receive this and other news.

In the future, UTOSF plans to make this a regular article released near the end of every month, so come by and see how we’re improving our community.

Utah Open Source Planet

The Utah Open Source Planet, run by Gabriel Gunderson can be accessed in another way, from Utah Open Source Foundation. Point your browser to http://planet.utosf.org and receive the latest and greatest local Utah bloggers talking about everything from linux to food to programming to weight loss. These people are part of Utah Open Source and have a good nose for what’s going on in tech and open source in Utah. Please join us by participating in Utah Open Source Planet. Its a great blog community.

Streaming

UTOSF is proud to announce that we will provide streamed user group (UG) meetings. Utah Open Source Foundation (UTOSF) is spearheading an effort to get a streaming server up and running. We’ve taken into considerations things like bandwidth concerns, server power, usefulness of topic and much more. As such, we’ll be attempting to stream more and more meetings, events and other discussions this year for the UGs. The current plan is to cover most of the known user groups (UGs) by end of year 2008.

We need help from you to accomplish this. UTOSF is providing the hardware, bandwidth and configuration for anyone who’s willing to record their UG meeting. We want to find people who are regulars in each of the communities and help them set up the recording software. If you are interested, please contact clint@utos.org or jayce@utos.org for more information.

Conference Videos

We’re still learning here, so please bear with us. We’ve had a lot of requests regarding when the recordings of UTOSC 2007 will be released. I’d like to say that I have *actually* seen one and OpenSourceTV and KnowledgeBlue are doing a great job getting these together. I’m excited to see how the rest turn out. The videos will be released as we get them. There will be regular announcements on http://utosf.org so continue to watch for updates.

Multi-Distro Release Party

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, OpenBSD and Fedora be released within one month of each other. Because of this The Utah Open Source Foundation is announcing the first and probably the only Multi-Distro Release Party in Utah. The release party will involve four 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!

Where: Open Source Technology Center at Novell
Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MST
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

You Can Help

I’d like to invite those interested in helping the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 to start attending the upcoming Conference planning meetings. Reply with the subject “Conference Planning” if you are interested in helping.

In addition, the Utah Open Source Foundation will begin regular “meets”. We’re planning on inviting leadership of each of the UGs, plus anyone interested in helping the community as a whole. UTOSF is dedicated to helping the groups by providing resources, tools and other benefits. Come and be a part of something great!

Cheers,

Clint Savage