#hackUTOS March 9th, 2010
Hey everyone, it is time to #hackUTOS again!
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!
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.
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
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!
A few weeks of forethought
Geeks unite! What a couple of weeks we have coming up, and things are going to be awesome! Here are some events I will be attending and I hope to see you all there!
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.
PHP, Soap and WSDL Caching
Today I was offered a free lesson in how PHP handles Soap, and more specifically WSDL caching.
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.
SLLUG Daytime and Vim
I would like to give a big thanks to all the folks who attended today's Salt Lake Linux User Group Daytime Special Interest Group (SLLUG Daytime SIG). We had a great time covering the basics of vi(m) and I think everyone walked away knowing something new.
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:
There are thousands of other articles on vi(m) around the net, so if this doesn't give you your fix, search Google.
Penguins Learn to Fly
Ok, so maybe the title is a bit misleading, but here is the deal. The Linux Foundation, you know the guys who safe guard Linux and employ Linus, are going to offer free, as in beer, educational webinars on the topics of Linux starting in March.
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.
Apple introduces iPad
Apple iPad
Apple held a conference yesterday and the introduced the Apple iPad, an over grown iPod with limited support as a real computer.
Apple has built a really small, but still over sized, tablet for the purpose of surfing the net, and basically doing what you do now on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The unit weighs in at 1.5lbs for the wifi only model, and slight more at 1.6lbs for the WiFi + 3G model. The size of the tablet is a small half inch depth, with a 9.7 inch screen, the whole shell comes in at 9.56in x 7.47in.
Running a 1024x768 (132 ppi) resolution the screen looked really nice on the videos everyone posted yesterday.
The 1Ghz Apple A4 processor gave the unit a good smooth power that made all the apps run really nicely.
More specs for the iPad are available at the Apple Store
Since the device is built on a modified iPod OS, it is sort of crippled. Furthermore you might expect the iPad to be able to multi-task, or even run background processes. This is not the case. Apple has continued with their less than stellar no-background-processes policy. Although this can really boost the performance of apps, it cripples the device from being a good twitter/facebook/social media device.
Given the device also has WiFi you would expect it to sync with iTunes over the WiFi (ala Zune), still not the case. Apple is still requiring you to sync with a good old fashion USB cable, truly disappointing.
Finally, there is no Flash support, so sorry to all you guys and gals (my wife) who thought it would be good for playing your Facebook games.
Over all at $499 there are some things the iPad might be good, and even great at, but it still doesn't meet the needs of my family, and as such won't be on our to purchase list.
