Utahcon.com

1Mar/100

#hackUTOS

Hey everyone!

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!

1Mar/100

Bright Futures Start in Dark Corners

When I was attending high school, only 10-13 years ago, I remember learning cutting edge technologies like HTML, JavaScript, C, and Hypercard. We weren't quite a networked school, in fact we only had 1 or 2 classrooms with internet access. I spent most of my time in the graphics lab working with Adobe Photoshop 3, and Pagemaker. I was running printing presses that were cutting edge too, they worked like over powered copiers. I designed, printed, cut, bonded, folder, and distributed every document, award, flier, etc. the school needed. We downloaded the newest in music technology the MP3. We were crazy tech savvy kids.

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.

26Feb/100

Come Support Open Source!!!

Geek Lunch

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!

http://saltlakecoffeeconnection.com/map-directions/
13Jan/102

UTOS Bookmarks

If you are lazy like me then bookmarking is great!

In that thought, I have copied all the links from utos.org and made them into a bookmarks file for Chrome.

I have tarred and gzipped it, so you will need to untar and un-gzip it :D

http://utahcon.com/files/utos_bookmarks.tar.gz

30Oct/080

Why PacktPub?

Over the last year I have read and reviewed a lot of books by Packt Publishing, and I wanted to share one of the reasons (aside from the awesome books) why I have chosen to work with Packt Publishing.

From PacktPub.com

Packt Open Source Project Royalty Scheme

Packt believes in Open Source. When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project.

In the long term, we see ourselves and yourselves, as customers and readers of our books, as part of the Open Source ecosystem, providing sustainable revenue for the projects we publish on. Our aim at Packt is to establish publishing royalties as an essential part of the service and support business model that sustains Open Source.

It's this kind of commitment from a publisher that really separates the wheat form the chaff.  I feel good when I read a book that is written by Packt because I know that I am, at least in some part, giving back to a community that has given so much to us.