Monthly Archives: August 2008

Community Conferences Fedora Guru News Passion Tech UTOSC

UTOSC 2008: Day 2

August 30, 2008 – 8:28 am

Day 2 seemed to be even smoother than day 1, much of the time, running around putting out little fires, but not too many.  I was the room manager for Paul’s Fedora Remix talk, quite enjoyed that, even though most of it I already knew.

I also got to enjoy both keynotes today.  Howard Tayler was quite entertaining with his bit about ‘The Price is Right’ and making content that doesn’t suck.  Joe Brockmeier‘s keynote was a bit down to earth, yet had some very fun elements.  I really enjoyed the ‘Dairy Council’ idea for Linux that was brought up during the Q&A session.  It reminded me that I need to send him an email for a similar idea with community conferences.

The Fedora booth was going smoothly.  Unfortunately, Paul spent most of his time there, except for his presentation.  Jared Smith and Nathan Blackham helped out while he was gone.  Next year, I want to make sure that if we have Paul or Joe at our conference, they don’t have to spend time in the booth.  It would seem they could help better in other ways.  Maybe I’m wrong?

In the evening, we headed out to Tucanos Brazilian Grill at the Gateway for the UTOSC Geek/Blogger Dinner.  This dinner was a complement to UTOSC 2008 so some who weren’t attendees showed up to join us.  I was able to purchase brazilian lemonades for the entire group.  Its so much fun spending time with geeks of my sort.  Both Paul and Joe were able to attend as well.

After we consumed large portions of meat, socialized and drank ourselves into a stupor, the group started to disperse.  A few of us decided to take light-rail home afterward, which was a nice departure from all of the driving I had done recently.  It also gave me an opportunity to spend a few more minutes with my sweetie, Jennifer.  She’s been so great throughout.  I’m just happy to know she’ll support me, and she said she had a lot of fun as well.

Many, many people came by the booths from what I saw.  I know the OLPC would be a big hit on Saturday, Family Day.  Time to get out the little fedora shirts and show off the coolness that is Fedora.

Cheers,

Herlo

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UTOSC 2008: Day 1

August 29, 2008 – 12:07 pm

So I was running pretty crazy last night at the first night of UTOSC 2008, but I wasn’t that crazy.  Things went smoothly, I got most of the swag for the Fedora booth and enjoyed Paul’s talk.

As the organizer (among others), I tend to be running around a lot, but this year, I’ve already seen 3 presentations, which is pretty good.  I enjoyed the Drupal presentation, Mac Newbold’s Keynote and Paul Frields Fedora Keynote.

The registration booth was probably the biggest issue, but I’m happy about it now.  We need to be better at printing badges and I need to plan better regarding those sorts of things.

The Fedora and openSUSE booths were rocking, as were the Guru Labs, KnowledgeBlue and the Massage booth (yes, there’s massages here, aren’t you jealous?)

I’m excited to be in charge of a great group of volunteers this year.  And I think they’ve been the best thing for us this year.  Without them, we couldn’t take on all the great things we have and I’m confident they’ve been the difference between a smooth conference of 500+ people and us running crazy and not getting most things done.  THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS, WE LOVE YOU!

Lastly, between the two keynotes last night, Jayce Hall announced a $1000 challenge grant to the Serenity Foundation for the remainder of the conference.  That’s today and tomorrow.  As the Utah Open Source Foundation, we felt Phil Burns has been such a great motivator in the technology community, we wanted to give back.  So help us help Serenity and her foundation.  I was quite moved by Phil’s reaction, and was very happy we could help.

Looking forward to finishing off Day 2 and participating with all of you.  And thank you all for making UTOSC 2008 such a great success!!

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Writers Block and things that need to get done

August 24, 2008 – 12:03 am

So its soo close.  So very close, to the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  Only, I have to write this paragraph about the conference itself and what it means to open source in Utah.  What it means to be involved in this amazing conference.

This blog post is supposed to be about something useful, but I think its just going to be a rambling session about all the things I think that are neat about open source, freedom, Utah and the benefits of holding UTOSC every year.

So what do I think, well… I think that UTOSC is my favorite thing I’ve ever done as a tech person.  I have an 8 year old boy, which is much of the reason I do this sort of thing.  He’s the reason I try to get webcams working with Ekiga, or try to record videos to send him with Cheese.  I love my boy, and I want him to be proud of his papa, and this is one way I can make a mark on society, to change the world if you will.

When I talk about changing the world, I don’t mean changing every aspect, but just doing something so simple that you love, to change the way others look at the thing and say, “wow!”.  That’s the thing I mean about changing the world.

I mean, geez, what do we have this year anyway?  Let’s see.  Oh, to start off with, a great theme ‘HOWTO’.  It really can’t get any better than that, can it!?  It points the way to learn how to do something in open source.  A contributor, a learning mechanism, a simple text document that started the whole thing.

We also have a great team of folks involved in making it happen this year.  I would be remiss if I didn’t thank them.  They’ve been instrumental in getting this to be the world class conference I hope it to become.  We’re not there yet, but give us a couple more years to learn all of those little tips and tricks.

Software, that’s another thing we have that’s great.  This coming year, I plan to take the UTOSC conference site and remake it again, this time with a better feature set.  I have to say, however, that the system we put into place more than 8 months ago, has turned out to be a great asset.  I thank those who’ve helped us make conman, our conference management software.  You know who you are, and I appreciate the help.

Because we’re running the conference and are also computer nerds/geeks/etc, we get to play with cool hardware, dink around with printing, do audio, video and invite families to participate in our wondrous extravaganza every year. But we also get to do something else that much cooler, we get to share our joys and passions with others.  Show others why open source is the way of the future.  Why its important to us and why we think that paying for software or having limted access to software is just wrong.

Learning is always part of a hobby.  This great, wonderful, exciting hobby of ours is so great we want to share the wealth with you all.

A couple things that I think are great about UTOSC 2008 are Family Day, I’m excited to set up the try-it lab on Friday night for the kiddies.  The fact that we’ll have booths for all three of the major Linux distributions (Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu). But there’s more.

On Thursday evening, Paul Frields will kick our conference into high gear with Fedora, first.  Friday comes and Joe Brockmeier will entertain us with some community talk.  And finally, on Saturday morning, we have Christer Edwards whose been instrumental in much of the Ubuntu community growth over the past couple years.

I’ve been influenced heavily by the Fedora Project.  And as an North American Ambassador, I’m also in charge of the Fedora booth.  We have a few volunteers and they’ve been great.  I anticipate the booth to be filled with people asking questions all three days.  One thing I wanted to mention, is that the booths/expo area is open to any/all that come through.  Spreading open source means allowing for the opportunity to use the software.  We want you all to come and listen to what our folks have to say.

Okay, so it sounds like my writers block really didn’t happen, but I wasn’t sure I could just sit down and crank out something this easily.  Off to write a simple 100 word intro to the Utah Open Source Conference.

Wish me luck!

Herlo

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Wait for it… Wait for it… NOW!!

August 12, 2008 – 7:47 am

In the next 3 weeks, I will be among the busiest people I know.  Probably the only people busier are Presidential hopefuls, Olympic organizers and sadly, those fighting in Georgia.  The reason I am writing this post is to help me remember what I have left to complete between now and the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 on August 28-30, 2008.

Recently, I learned that our website doesn’t render well in Internet Exploder, Safari and some older versions of Firefox.  I’m guessing its due to the inability I have to create and maintain css, because well, I’m not a design guy.  Because of this, we’re having a hackfest tonight, both at my house, and online.  Feel free to come by at 8:30 and help out.

Prior to the hackfest, I will be working with Fedora Ambassadors to grow the North American region.  We’ll be discussing such things as AmbassadorKit, EventBox and of course, Fedora’s presence at UTOSC 2008.  This meeting tends to get a lot of good people making the world a better place.  I am interested in making this happen starting with North America.  If you are interested in helping out, or just lurking, feel free to drop by #fedora-meeting on irc.freenode.net at 1:00UTC (9pm EDT).

Prior to the Fedora NA meeting, I’m planning on working on the PCs that we’ll be using for the Utah Open Source Conference.  This will be done over at a friends house, who is loaning the PCs to UTOSC for the week of the conference.

I am attempting to record every presentation this year with either audio or video.  We have been rewarded again this year by having our friends over at KnowledgeBlue come and video record much of the conference, but they don’t have enough staff or equipment to simultaneously record 4-6 rooms.  So the plan went to me to setup recording devices in each room.

The plan is simple setup 6 PCs with Linux, install audacity and darkice.  This way we can stream the keynote audio live over our streaming server and also just record the audio from other presentations to be published at a later date.  I anticipate I’ll be able to install and complete this task pretty quickly.

Well, its now 7:40am here at my desk in my house.  I still have head into the office today for a bit of work, so off I go.  Feel free to come by #utos anytime today and wish me luck (or help if you are so inclined) with anything you can suggest.  Hopefully, today won’t be too long.

Herlo

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