What is #hackUTOS?

UTOS has been sponsoring Open Source technologies in Utah for years now. This is a chance for all the members (and potential members) to come out meet some of the UTOS hackers including herlo, utahcon, and DexterTheDragon.

We will be hacking on ConMan, the Open Source Conference Management system used by UTOSC! This is a great chance for you to participate, learn,teach, and get credit toward attending the conference for a discounted price!

When is #hackUTOS?

We will be meeting Tuesday March 9th, 2010 at 7:00PM MST.

Where is #hackUTOS?

Online

Along with meeting in person (details below) you can find us online in IRC. We are on the Freenode network in #utos-dev

IRL

Since the meeting place worked out well last time we will be meeting again at the Salt Lake Coffee Connection.

Located at:

1588 South State Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84115

The Salt Lake Coffee Connection is a really great place to meet. They have a great internet connection (provided by our good friends at Xmission), awesome drinks (check out the Dirty Chai!) and good food! The prices are good, and internet access is included with all purchases.

What Language?

ConMan is written in Python, using the Django framework. We run it on MySQL and SQLite databases.

Don't know Python, or Django? Don't worry, we are all open to helping you get started. Please realize we are here to mainly work on our project, we are happy to offer light support to get you up and running.

If you aren't interested in working on ConMan bring your own Open Source project! We would love to have you in the house for some great co-working!

It is time to do it again. Our monthly #hackUTOS

What is #hackUTOS?

UTOS has been sponsoring Open Source technologies in Utah for years now. This is a chance for all the members (and potential members) to come out meet some of the UTOS hackers including herlo, utahcon, and DexterTheDragon.

We will be hacking on ConMan, the Open Source Conference Management system used by UTOSC! This is a great chance for you to participate, learn,teach, and get credit toward attending the conference for a discounted price!

When is #hackUTOS?

We will be meeting Tuesday March 2nd, 2010 at 7:00PM MST.

Where is #hackUTOS?

Online

Along with meeting in person (details below) you can find us online in IRC. We are on the Freenode network in #utos-dev

IRL

Since the meeting place worked out well last time we will be meeting again at the Salt Lake Coffee Connection.

Located at:

1588 South State Street, Salt Lake City, UT 84115

The Salt Lake Coffee Connection is a really great place to meet. They have a great internet connection (provided by our good friends at Xmission), awesome drinks (check out the Dirty Chai!) and good food! The prices are good, and internet access is included with all purchases.

What Language?

ConMan is written in Python, using the Django framework. We run it on MySQL and SQLite databases.

Don't know Python, or Django? Don't worry, we are all open to helping you get started. Please realize we are here to mainly work on our project, we are happy to offer light support to get you up and running.

If you aren't interested in working on ConMan bring your own Open Source project! We would love to have you in the house for some great co-working!

Shortly after I graduated from ITT Technical, a mere 3 years later, I remember hearing about kids being able to take the A+, CCNA, and some Microsoft certification test right in high school. I felt cheated. Cheated because I had just paid over $30,000 to some monkey who ran a school that wasted 3 years of my life giving me a paper that said I already knew a bunch of things kids were learning in high school.

Dark Corners

In the tech world there are two ways to learn anything. First, you can go to school and pay a ton of money to learn things from a book, and if you are lucky you will get to put the rubber to the road, at least a little and see how all this theory really works out in real life.

The second I call the Dark Corners. Most tech savvy folk when asked will tell you they prefer to work on their systems, programs, etc. in a lightly lit dark room, usually in the corner of a building. Somewhere that they can loose their crazy socially awkward side and get some real work done. My personal "Dark Corner" is in the basement, a common favorite.

The folks spending time in Dark Corners are learning by doing. They are plugging holes in firewalls as they are learning how they are exposed, and exploited. They are designing websites in HTML5 now because they want to have the advantage when the spec is standardized, and just to be sure they are covered they are working on XHTML2 as well.

These people in the Dark Corners are your geeks. They guys who would rather spend their evenings and weekends figuring out where their packets are going across the network, how they can better encrypt their computer's data without losing everything when one of the drives in their RAID fails.

The folks in the Dark Corners are the doers, and they are the people who know the most, no questions asked.

Bright Futures

I am sure you are wondering the point of all of this, the bright future I am talking about is this:

http://newsltechhs.wordpress.com/

The New Salt Lake City "A Charter School Preparing Tomorrow's Tech Progeny". This is a charter school that is designed around the idea of having your kids be tech gurus! They will learn everything from the history of computing and punch cards, to the latest and greatest OO Programming, supporting and maintaining *nix servers, and even the Windows world.

a brand new charter high school in southern Salt Lake county/northern Utah county area, dedicated to preparing tomorrow’s software and network systems engineers

This is something I would have killed to attend when I was a kid.

Help Out

They are looking for support from the community in the way of Human Resources, Policy and Procedure, budgeting and more!

As this is something I would hope my kids would one day attend, you can believe I will be getting involved. I hope each of you will see the value of something like this in our community and culture and will give it your honest best effort to help it come to fruition.

Meet at the nearest location to you at 12:30pm this Friday, February 26, 2010.  If you have never been, look for the group with this logo at their table.  Geek Lunch is organized by the Utah Open Source Foundation, but you must pay for your meal.  We look forward to seeing all of you there.

When:

Date: Friday,February 26, 2010
Time: 12:30pm – 2:00pm

Where:

We have geeks all over Utah, and as such we like to spread the love to more than just 1 pub, so we have two (because Utah county is slacking) locations to choose from.

Salt Lake County
The Green Pig
31 East 400 South
Salt Lake City, Utah 84111
Website: http://www.thegreenpigpub.com/
Map: http://snipr.com/uhhox
Phone: (801) 532-7441

Weber / Davis Counties
Roosters
748 Heritage Park Boulevard
Layton, Utah 84041
Website: http://roostersbrewingco.com/
Map: http://snipr.com/uhizp
Phone: (801) 774-9330

Utah County
There is currently no place planned for in Utah county due to low turnout.  If you would like to help organize a Geek Lunch in Utah county, please email clint@utos.org.

ConMan Hack Night

Did you attend UTOSC last year? Are you going to attend this year? Did you like how the process to register and attend was super easy? That is all thanks to ConMan, the Conference Management software that the Utah Open Source Foundation created, and maintains.

If you want to make sure things stay smooth at the conference, and participate in an open source project then you are invited to come down and help us code the project to the next milestone!

Where:

Salt Lake Coffee Connection

1588 South State Street, Salt Lake City UT

Directions

When: 7pm - ??

You see the ?? means you can come and code as late as you want! The coffee house is open really late, and you are welcome to stay and code till they kick you out!

What:

So we get together each week to work on the project, cause we think ConMan can be the best conference management software ever! We simply would love to have some more people who love open source, and know python and django come down and contribute to the code base!

Ignite Salt Lake

March 4th will mark the 4th Ignite event in Salt Lake City, at the State Room (21+). The event opens at 6:00PM.

As is tradition with Ignite there will be a building activity to start things off, this time the construction materials include twisty ties and 5,000 little green army men, that sounds like fun

Following the build they are going to have two session of 9 talks each, each talk lasting only 5 minutes.

The pace is fast and the talks sound interesting this go round:

• James Young - You sunk my Battleship!
• Jason Vance - 15 things to remember when dating in a post Apocalyptic Zombie Environment
• Matthias Shapiro & Jason Alderman - Mobile App Dev RAP BATTLE (this should be awesome!)
• DJ Waldo - Dude
• Kellen McAffee - How to tell your friends that you've seen a sasquatch

The event is free, and really fun. I encourage all (over 21) to attend this event, you will not be sorry.

Hostlers Model Train Festival

March 5th through the 7th will be the dates for the Hostlers Festival where over 8000 people will come to see the finest in model train setups.

The Hostlers were formed in 1988 and by 2004 had over 180 members! They specialize in all scale modeling, and love to spread the joy of model trains to all.

The event is $5 at the Union Station in Ogden. Hours are posted at http://www.hostlers.info/

Last year they had some really impressive setups and some excellent vendors. This show is a great one for taking the little ones too, they will love all the working models.

Also take time to go through the Utah State Railroad Museum while you are there.

Think about this for just a minute:

Fact: There are 400 Million Facebook users.

Let's guess that only 10% of those users ( and I am sure the # is MUCH higher ) play these games on Facebook. That is 40 Million people.

28% of that group is 11,200,000 people.

That means if just $1 was spent by each person the Social Media game is an $11M/yr business. Not a huge number but let's keep speculating.

I looked through a bunch of the games my wife plays online. The average ticket item is $3. That brings the tally to $33M/yr.

Let's guess that my 10% of users is low, let's guess 20%, now we are talking about $67M.

Anymore questions why there are "free" games on Facebook?

When you instantiate a PHP Soap Class you pass it a WSDL (Web Services Description Language) and it looks like this:

$client = new SoapClient('http://example.com/services/thescript.php?wsdl');

Depending on how your caching is setup, this will go out to the WSDL provided, pull in the document and store it in a cache. The default cache for PHP is 86400 seconds. If you are familiar with time in seconds you know that that is 24 hours. So by default you only actually read the WSDL once in a 24 hour period. Normally this is not a problem.

What is a WSDL?

For that answer let's turn to the W3 site:

WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.

So in English that means it is a map to the services provided by the provider. Basically you get a copy of the map, and follow the endpoints to the answers you need.

One basic function of this is that it tells you want methods (services) are available on your fresh client.

When WSDLs go bad

So today one of my providers, without warning, updated their WSDL. This wreaked havoc on my system because I had cached the WSDL on my side for 24 hours (remember, the PHP default). The change was a super simple change, a change in URL for a service, that's it!

The problem was that since PHP had already read the file within 24 hours it didn't care that there was a new file, that the URLs had changed, and so it continued to work as it had before.

The real problem wasn't that the URLs changed, that would have been fine if the provider hadn't shut off the previously reported URLs.

Turn off the cache

So you are left with two options when something like this happens. First, you can sit and wait up to 24 hours for the problem to fix itself. This was not an option for us. The second is to clear your cache and try again.

Now PHP (on Linux) stores the cache for the Soap WSDL in /tmp and I wasn't sure which one of the many files was the actual cache for this particular provider so I decided I would have to tell PHP to not cache the WSDL and try again.

Into php.ini I went, located the soap.wsdl_cache_enabled flag. I changed it from 0 to 1

soap.wsdl_cache_enabled=0

I saved the file and restarted Apache.

The service continued to fail. I was perplexed. I thought maybe I flubbed the save so I opened the php.ini again located my line and it was fine. So I looked around there to see if maybe I missed another important flag. The only thing I could find was soap.wsdl_cache_ttl listed as the "(time to live) Sets the number of second while cached file will be used instead of original one" I promptly changed this to 0 as well

soap.wsdl_cache_ttl=0

Restarted Apache, and finally my script stopped failing.

I have since re-enabled my cache ttl and enabled flags, as reading the WSDL every time is a resource hog that doesn't need to be in place.

The Lesson Learned

The lesson learned by all today is be aware of your caching, and be aware of the changes you make to your live/production systems.

The Daytona 500 is the fastest growing sports event, with over 33.5 million viewers last year, FOX is expecting to see closer to 50 million this year. With the exception of the Super Bowl that makes the Daytona the highest viewed sports event in the world. The NFL guys really need to watch their back though because NASCAR is gaining a stronger following everyday.

Why is NASCAR so popular?

NASCAR fans are a different breed than most other sports fans. What makes them different? Loyalty. NASCAR fans are more loyal to a team than any football fan. It has been shown that NASCAR fans are more likely to support their driver, and team, with official gear purchases, as well as supporting their teams sponsors.

Another reason that NASCAR is so popular is because it is an "Any Man's Sport", meaning truly any man, or woman, who can drive a car, can race.

Women?

Yes! Danica Patrick is suiting up right now to race the 300, and I would bet that next year she will be in the 500. She has proven her self in the Indy 500, and now she is proving herself in stock car racing.

Stock Car

Now I have to admit that NASCAR has really taken a walk from stock in the last 10 years or so, probably longer, but here is the deal. Back to our talk about Any Man's Race, these cars are literally nothing a normal set of guys with the right tools and cash couldn't do. The engines are stock from manufacturers we all currently drive, Dodge, Chevy, Ford, and Toyota. The engines obviously been highly modified to make them run with more power, but these are changes we could all do. There is nothing under the hood we couldn't do.

The Men, and Women

The most notable thing to me is that drivers in NASCAR are not athletes. This isn't to say they don't go through some serious struggle in those cars for 3 hours of driving. I mean really, think about the last time you drove a car in a circle, pulling heavy g forces while tailgating at around 200 miles per hour. These guys have done their time in the gym, but they are not the freak sports stars you see in NFL, or MLB. They don't have major physical advantages, but they do have heart, and determination.

Let's Go Racing!

So now as the 300 is preparing to fire up, and I sit here with my 1 year old son, I am coaching him on picking a driver, someone he may cheer on for years to come, and will surely have  hat for by the end of the season.

I encourage all of you to pick a driver, watch a race, and be amazed.

I created my slides using Google Docs, so you can see them too!

I want to thank Joe Brockmeier, and Linux.com for the source material and here is a list of places you can find equally great (actually better) presentations and tutorials on vi(m):

• Linux.com -- just click the link to search the site for vim
• Vim 101
• Vim 201
• Viemu Cheat Sheet (herlo pimped this during my presentation)

Also to learn more about vi(m) read up on these:

• Vim 301
• Vim 401

There are thousands of other articles on vi(m) around the net, so if this doesn't give you your fix, search Google.

This is a great opportunity for you to learn more about Linux from the folks who are developing and changing Linux everyday! You can sign up for the courses at:

http://training.linuxfoundation.org/lp/sign-up-for-the-free-linux-training-webinar-series

Here are some details from the page above:

Starting in March, The Linux Foundation will be offering free Linux Training webinars taught by well-known Linux developers directly building on their own experience.  This is an excellent opportunity to learn directly from key developers and to experience a sample of the type of courses offered through our Linux Training program.

Some of the upcoming courses are:

• "An Introduction to Git," by kernel maintainer and TAB chair James Bottomley
• "Linux System Troubleshooting and Tuning" by Linux author and community manager Joe Brockmeier
• "Linux Administration 101" also by Joe Brockmeier
• "How to Work wth the Linux community," by LWN.net editor and kernel developer Jon Corbet
• "A Linux Filesystem Overview," by kernel dev Christoph Hellwig
• "Btrfs: An Intro and Update" to the new file system for Linux, by project lead Chris Mason
• "Linux Performance Tuning," by North America's first kernel developer Ted Ts'o

I personally am looking forward to these and hopefully many more webinars in the future, and would like to give an advanced thank you to the Linux Foundation for all the great work they are sponsoring every day.