January 2008
UTOS HackNight: A grand success!
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
Posted by Clint on January 31, 2008 in Community, Conference, Events, Hackfests, Registration
Weekly Meeting Posts
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
Posted by Clint on January 25, 2008 in Community, Events, Meetings, UserGroups
Podcast: January Ubuntu Utah Meeting
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
Posted by Clint on January 23, 2008 in Community, Meetings, Podcasts, UserGroups
Report: CodeAway at Wasatch Wingz
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
Posted by Clint on January 20, 2008 in Community, Events, Hackfests, UserGroups
Another UTOSC 2007 Video - Jared Smith
The Utah Open Source Foundation, OpenSourceTV.tv and KnowledgeBlue are excited to announce another video from the Utah Open Source Conference 2007.
This time, meeting with Doran “fozz” Barton, its Jared Smith of Digium. Fozz and Jared discuss the future of Asterisk and Digium’s role in bringing Asterisk to the general public.
Here’s the link, enjoy.
Cheers,
Clint Savage
Posted by Clint on January 18, 2008 in Conference, Videos
UTOS HackNight, January 26, 2008, 7pm to …
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
Posted by Clint on January 17, 2008 in Community, Conference, Events, Hackfests
New! UTOS Podcasts of Previously Streamed Meetings
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.utos.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
Posted by Clint on January 6, 2008 in Community, Meetings, News, Podcasts, Streaming, UserGroups