Node.js – building massively parallel applications with javascript and epoll

Node.js [http://nodejs.org/] is a framework for rapidly building massively parallel network applications using non-blocking io. It’s built on the performant v8 javascript engine [http://code.google.com/p/v8/] which compiles javascript to machine code at runtime. Node is similar in design to systems like Ruby’s EventMachine [http://rubyforge.org/projects/eventmachine/] or python’s twisted [http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/]. It’s suitable for building chat-like protocols, comet servers, mmo game servers, etc. This session will cover some of the basics of how to build and install node.js as well as analyze some demo programs.

If time permits, I might talk a little bit about python’s twisted and compare some programs written using twisted/node.js

About Shane Hansen:

I’m a Software Engineer working on Backcountry.com’s replatforming teams. Prior to that I worked on projects ranging from compliance tracking software for the goverment to building  mathematical models for reflectometry to immune system modeling. I’m interested in open source software, web standards, high performance computing and application architecture

Meeting Location:

BetaLoft (http://betaloftslc.com) is located at 357 W 200 S. Upstairs in Suite 201. Salt Lake City, UT, 84101

Betaloft is a coworking space in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City founded by Drew Tyler.

We are a community of freelancers, independents and work-from-home people, who have an interest in getting out of our dull work day and participating in a community that’s designed to support and encourage people who make a living doing what they love.

We provide communication tools, events (social and educational), as well as a physical space to work and collaborate.

See you all there!

Clint

Vim 101 and Beyond

Vim is the editor of choice for many developers and power users. It’s a “modal” text editor based on the vi editor written by Bill Joy in the 1970s for a version of UNIX. It inherits the key bindings of vi, but also adds a great deal of functionality and extensibility that are missing from the original vi. This session will cover the beginnings (101) and the first set of intermediate (201) modes and commands for vim.

If you would like to join us, just head on down via train, car (parking is free on the street for two hours just east and west of BetaLoftSLC), walk or bike to:

WHEN

Wednesday, February 10, 2010
11:30am-1:00pm

WHERE

Come learn some tips and tricks about Vim.  We hope to see you all there.

Cheers,

Clint

Friday, January 29 — Day 1

Gathered at Red Hat’s main office, we brainstormed in a manual ‘tag cloud’ kind of way.  Mel had us all take sticky notes, write upon them based upon a few words on the white board and then, stick them to said white board appropriately.  This got our minds going about what a FUDCon or FAD should be, why it was important and the things that could really be improved.  I felt very happy about the amount of ideas that were shared on these sticky notes.  it was quite cathartic to get out the things that always had bugged me or I thought needed improvement in our Events.  I have a few pictures of us doing this process, enjoy them.

After spending about 1.5 hours doing this and discussing it, we broke into separate groups, the FUDCon 2.0 folks (upstairs) and FUDCon Live folks, aka me, Yaakov, and the freeseer folks online (downstairs).  My main target was to get the freeseer application working with completely free software and build the AV Kit from components I had, plus the ones that Mel had purchased for this project.

After getting downstairs with Dennis Gilmore (he was my helper for the first hour), we quickly discovered that one component, the Epiphan vga2usb device, was not working.  After a bit of digging, we also discovered that it had a non-free driver and that it would likely not be easy to find a free driver alternative.  We did, however, attempt to build the binary they provided, but kept getting errors.  More on this later on (or in another post), so stay tuned.

I spent the next few hours trying to get everything else up and running, doing research to find a different alternative for video output from a VGA source to USB input.  heffer joined us on IRC and gave me some good links as to where I might look for a Scan Converter and a easyCAP device.  While a little lower quality, the Linux drivers for it are completely open and free, so I set out with a plan to find one in Raleigh.

At 4pm, Max and I headed out on the town, hunting down several items, including firewire PCMCIA adapters (for our miniDV camera) and the Scan Converter components.  We needed to get a screw driver and some other firewire adapter stuff too, we headed to CompUSA. Though normally I wouldn’t go there, but this CompUSA had actually been converted from a Tiger Direct, so I thought we had a chance.  After about 1.5 hours of failure, we ended up with two firewire cards and some audio cables, we headed off to see Avatar in 3D.

Saturday, January 30 — Day 2

After leaving Avatar, we discovered a nice big blanket of snow had come down in Raleigh.  Just 2-3 inches, and in Utah, we’d think nothing of this, but here it’s quite a bit different.  First off, North Carolina doesn’t seems to have the infrastructure, no plows or ice melt, to really deal with something like this kind of storm.  There were news reports of it on every station, the Governor called for a state of emergency, and I just thought it was odd.  Because of this, it was determined that we would not leave the hotel for Day 2 of the FAD.  Instead, we reserved a room in the hotel and worked from there.  Luckily, the hotels infrastructure, plus the Days Inn next door provided us with our networking needs, while Max stayed at his apartment and called in using Fedora Talk.

My work was to spend as much time with the FreeSeeR folks and do tons and tons of testing of their code, plus provide feedback and gstreamer pipelines to get us closer and closer to our eventual goal.  Thanh had spent a lot of time while we were at Avatar to turn FreeSeeR into an API.  He also altered the code to put the gui into a more sensible tool, with both Qt and Gtk implementations.

About half way through the day, I discovered that I had accidentally left my power adapter for my audio mixer in Max’s car (he was 15 minutes way with no snow and at least 25 with), essentially eliminating my high quality audio testing.  Luckily Chris Tyler had a headset with a microphone and Dennis Gilmore had a webcam we could use because the firewire cards were a bit flaky and kept crashing my kernel.

By the end of the night, with some tweaking by Dennis and I, we had FreeSeeR working with DV input, USB video input, 1/4″ audio input and were able to output to an ogg file with reasonable quality and consistency.  A lot of testing later, and we were able to determine that we still needed to tweak some of the code to provide for a better way to adjust audio and video settings prior to recording.  All in all, the FreeSeeR software is coming along very nicely.  Andrew Ross and Thanh Ha have been doing an amazing job and I really appreciate their help working on getting this working.  The new version of FUDCon Live thanks you as well, because without this, we won’t be able to provide our users with a good quality remote experience.

Sunday, January 31 — Day 3

The sun is shining, but for some reason, the roads are still not that clear.  Several cars are still having difficulty climbing the incline out of the Best Western to the main road, which is now melting, but still very snow covered.  Today, we discover that we’ve met one major part of our goals, the Fedora Pony has been created!!  We must thank Robyn Bergeron for creating, Frank, the Fedora Pwnie.  Now mind you, Francis is really her name, but she’s such a tomboy that, well, you just can’t call her that, she doesn’t enjoy it too much.  So we call her Frank.

In addition to our major goal above of a Pony, the FUDCon Live team has done some amazing work.  Yaakov has been working on the FUDCon Live document with Mel, while I was working with the FreeSeeR guys to get their git repo moved over to fedorahosted.org, which is awesome!  I’ve been given commit and sponsor rights to the repo, so we’ll start getting more developers involved right away.  Have a look at the screenshots of the GUI if you’d like to see what FreeSeeR can do.

Jon Stanley and I discussed the possibility of moving fedorahosted.org over to gitolite, and discovered that Jesse Keating has been experimenting with it himself, so this might be something we can do in the near future.  While we currently appear to use gitosis, gitolite gives us the ability to set ACLs on a particular branch, which then can help keep the master branch cleaner.  To help illustrate this, there’s a very great article on nvie.com which explains a git branching system which can really make development and commits very clean and easy to track.  Gitolite can help with this, so I’m going to be experimenting with it this coming week.

I spent the rest of the day writing up the AV Kit wiki page along with Mel.  I stubbed it out, and she added a big section regarding the modules in the AV Kit.  I then rewrote much of that to cover the two styles of AV Kit we’ll be building over the next month or two.  In fact, I plan to have one complete in time for the Marketing FAD in March, where they can use and test it out.  I really hope to get some good feedback on it and improve FreeSeeR some more using these upcoming events as testing grounds.

Currently, I’m on a plane which I didn’t think would take off tonight, headed home for Salt Lake City.  I’m excited to see my sweetie and get some much needed sleep.  As much as I enjoy hanging out with my Fedora friends and working on projects like this, it really wears me out.  I’m ecstatic at the amount of work we accomplished though, and am very appreciative to Paul, Jon, Chris, Denis, Dave, Mel and Max, plus all the folks online for their hard work this weekend.

FUDCon 2.0 is alive and kicking, FUDCon Live will make it just that much better.  Watch for upcoming posts in the near future regarding FreeSeeR and the Fedora AV Kit and how everything is going to work.

Cheers,

Herlo

It’s clear that Mel has done some incredible work, getting a good number of people to Raleigh this weekend.  I’m looking forward to giving my input and listenting to others as we come up with better ways to handle such things as the EventBox, recording and streaming different presentations, encouraging users to join Fedora and the overall professionalism we portray at each of our events.  There are so many things to get done this weekend, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out the other side.

As for what I will be doing most of the time.  While I plan to help with the initial brainstorming on FUDCon, external events, etc., I really plan to spend most of my time focusing on improving the way that we record and stream our events.  These events can be as simple as a Local User Group (LUG) meeting to something bigger, like the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), the Ohio Linux Fest or Pycon, and of course, somewhere in there, is the Fedora FAD and FUDCon.

Now mind you, I can see hundreds of other uses for this concept of recording and streaming.  Including live video podcasts, recording for redistribution, ad-hoc collaboration sessions, troubleshooting a problem with code and many, many more use cases.  However, I think I’m going to try to limit my use cases to those specifically around our events.  Things where we can easily set up our recording equipment and share it with those interested, whether in real-time, or making it available later on to the general public.

The software we plan on using to get the recording and streaming off the ground, is called freeseer.  It’s been put together by some folks who help organize and run FOSSLC.  Andrew and Thanh have been hacking hard lately, altering their code to move from the patent encumbered ffmpeg, to the more open and free gstreamer library.  They’ve also been busy moving from a gui with a command line behind it, to using the python gstreamer bindings.  Much cleaner, much easier to manage and alter in real time.  I’m very excited to see how we can improve freeseer over this weekend.  I actually think we’ll be able to do quite a bit with freeseer to improve external participation in Fedora.

Well, the pilot just announced that we’ll be landing in Raleigh in about 20-30 minutes, and that I need to pack up my electronics.  I’m looking forward to seeing all of my Fedora friends and making an amazing events solution.  I’ll try to keep you updated, with pictures and text, over the next few days.

Cheers,

Herlo

As usual, come from 11:30am-1pm at BetaLoftSLC (357 W 200 S #201)  - http://betaloftslc.com

This month, I thought I would share a basic git introduction.  In my opinion, the best Source Control Management (SCM) system out right now.  I’ve been using it for nigh on a year and I have converted a few systems over to it from svn.  This is more of a work session than a presentation, so come on down and learn how to use git.  It is recommended that you bring your laptops with you as that will benefit more if you do.

Some suggested topics I can cover:

• Local and remote git repositories (different workflows and other fun stuff)
• Using git-svn to ‘convert’ from svn
• Comparing Distributed Revision Control with Traditional (non-distributed) Revision Control
• Git hooks, why they are valuable and when to use them
• Other basic git discussions

See you all there.

Cheers,

Herlo

Everything Just Works(TM).

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to have a system working with great sound, awesome graphics and very usable GNOME and KDE desktops.  I really like the new NetworkManager features and the ability to tether any device, vpnc and other easy-to-configure options.  KVM support is much improved with the new libguestfs improvements.

Fedora 12 media should be available on December 3, if you are a Fedora Ambassador in North America, start requesting media* for your events (and ambassador kits).

You can get your copy today!!

Cheers,

Herlo

*NOTE: This request page is not for the freemedia project. You must be a Fedora Contributor to request media.  Join the Fedora Project today and help us continue making Fedora the best operating system!!

RSSCloud is an open protocol which creates a loosely-coupled Twitter-like network of people and 140 character status messages.  In plainer language, it enables real-time status updates on anything that can be pushed via RSS.  Why should you care?  Come to the SLLUG daytime SIG meeting to find out.

More information can be found at http://rsscloud.org/

So why not come down to BetaLoft next Wednesday, November 11, from 11:30am-1pm and learn about RSSCloud.

Cheers,

Herlo

This project was dreamed up by Mr. Ian Weller and he graciously let me tag along to get the thing going.  At the Utah Open Source Conference tomorrow, we’re going to be digging into a workflow and concept around the items needed to make FES work.  We’ll be hanging out from 12:30-5pm in room 209 while we work on the project, feel free to drop by and ask questions as well.

So if you are interested in FES, come join us at UTOSC or remotely in #fedora-fad on irc.freenode.net

Cheers,

Herlo

Thank you UTOS Core Team

In addition, it’s been great to have a Conference Manager this year.  Will Smith (aka undertakingyou) has taken these reigns with fire and he’s really picked up the leadership role.  Thank you Will for doing an amazing job.  I know his role will continue to grow as we start our transition into a 501c3 this year, I am excited to have him leading the Core Team charge!

I would also like to recognize the hard work of Barry McCormick.  He’s been a bulldog at getting our program together this year.  His hard work, dedication and shear will has made this years conference program the best I’ve seen.  50+ presentations, several events, scheduling requests, etc.  Even through the flu last week, he was finalizing details.

We have an awesome art and marketing team.  Victor Villa heads up this department, with contributions from Velda Christensen (and former Core Team member Emily Shaw).  I want to thank each and every one of you for your hard work and dedication to detail and spreading the open source love around the Mountain West.

Jason Hall is heading up our volunteer efforts this year.  As the emcee again, we’re excited to have a volunteer manager that will assign and maneuver 50+ volunteers.  The call for volunteers has officially closed, but there’s always 2010.  Come and see the volunteers at work, Jayce^ has them all lined up and ready to go!

While we’ve had some bumps and bruises with our sponsorship position, Justin Carmony has really stepped in to make that role work.  We’ve been able to secure some really good sponsorships this year due to his hard work.  I’m excited to see what the future hold with our sponsorships and Justin at the helm.

Our Network is going to be stellar again this year.  I don’t know of any free software community conference that can boast 100mb/s lines, free wifi and drops to every booth in the convention center.  Trevor Sharpe (Heartsbane) and Nick Brooks (peno) have done an amazing job with this as well.

Securing our parties, getting printable schedules, providing the topics with which our emcee will hand out SWAG, talk about different organizations, introduce presenters and talk about our sponsors is C.R. Oldham.  C.R. joined the core team as an effort to bolster another group, HopeKids, which he will do during the conference.  He’s been a great asset to our core team and we look forward to seeing him for years to come.

And finally, because well, he’d want it that way.  Without our Code Guru, Adam Barrett, the website would look a little bare (or bear, since that’s his nickname).  The site would probably be still in a state of disarray and those schedules, layouts with all the pretty boxes and such would not be there.  He’s working on some more amazing things each week as we meet for our HackNights (which anyone is welcome to attend).  I suspect you’ll see some really cool features at the conference that are part of Adam’s evil plan.

This is the Utah Open Source Core Team.  If you see them at the Utah Open Source Conference, please take a moment to thank them for their hard work.  I know that I will!!

Please register today, we have a few days left before the prices go up.  Promo codes are available for up to 50% off registration at any time.  Contact a LUG or Sponsor if you would like a promo code for discounted registration.

Cheers,

Herlo

I have been looking at airfare, hotel and other travel accommodations to FUDCon, but I seem to have more options than I can count.  Maybe some of you can make recommendations?  So here’s the details of my dilemma:

Option 1: Fly direct to Toronto

Now, of course, this is the easiest of the three options; in and out of Toronto International Airport (YYZ) is a great way to go.  What’s that you say?  Oh, right.  The cost prohibitive trip of a ticket that is well over $600.  WOW! That is all I can say…

Option 2: Fly to Boston and ride the FUDBus

To me, this option is the most appealing.  While I know that I can most likely crash with someone in Boston and then ride the FUDBus up, it’s going to be a bit more painful, but it might be worth the organizational headache to make what could become an epic hackfest (8+ hours) happen for me.

In this case, I would have to fly in Thursday evening, since the FUDBus leaves at around 9am from Alewife station in Boston.  And upon return, Tuesday morning could turn into Tuesday afternoon or Tuesday evening.  A bit scarier here for scheduling return flights.  The other part of this is the actual FUDCon event is only Saturday through Monday (Dec 5-7) so I would have to miss 5+ days of work, not just 1 or possibly 2 with the other options.

The price of this flight is a mere $409 round trip, a savings of over $180, so it could be worth the extra time as long as I don’t have to get an extra hotel room.

Option 3: Fly to New York City and ride a bus to get to the FUDBus

I have a good friend in Jon Stanley, who offered to put me up at his place on Thursday night, which is essentially the same as flying into Boston.  But there are a few benefits as well.  One is that the bus from NYC to Boston has an additional 4ish hours we’d get to hack and chat.  Since I’m really wanting to join the Fedora Infrastructure team, it would be a good opportunity to get my wings.  The other is that the cost from SLC to JFK is another $50 – $75 cheaper than Boston.

The drawbacks of having to leave earlier and travel longer seem to be a mitigating circumstance and really might be something I want to do.  I’m just not sure I’m willing to awake at 4am Eastern (2am Mountain) to take the bus to take the FUDBus.

Option 4: Fly to Buffalo and ride the bus to Toronto

This option seems the most economical and has the least amount of hassles save actually flying into Toronto.  Essentially, I would fly into Buffalo on Friday afternoon, catch a bus that would drive across the border and into Toronto.  The return trip is about as simple, just hop on the bus on Tuesday morning, and fly home that afternoon from Buffalo.  The cost is great too!  At a measly $200 round trip from Salt Lake, now that’s a deal!

I think the thing I am fighting with Buffalo, is that I’ll be doing this all by myself.  While it seems economical, I really, really would like to get on that FUDBus for the hackfest I am sure will happen.  Collaborating for an additional 8 hours is really really tempting.  Going to Buffalo would pretty much eliminate that option.  While I am a bit concerned about crossing the border and such, I don’ think it’s going to be the decision maker or cause me any real heartache.

Decisions, Decisions!

So what would you do?  How would you go to Toronto?  I have the funds right now and want to get everything booked in advance so I don’t have to worry about the details later.  I think my biggest debate point has to be whether to ride the FUDBus.  Money is probably the secondary issue, but comparing that seems to put Buffalo first without question.

I’m really excited either way for FUDCon this year.  I have some really good ideas to share and want to start building out a great Ambassador portal as well.  More on that to come!

Cheers,

Herlo