Last year, we started a project called utos-conman.  This project in about 3-5 months became the system that ran the speaker approval process, speaker listings, sponsor display, etc. for the Utah Open Source Conference 2008.  In 2009, we’re looking to make some improvements that will take us one step further to the ultimate open source conference management system.  Whether that statement is true or not, I want to push forward some goals for utos-conman.

To start off with, I worked this year with the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCaLE) to get their scale registration system open sourced and available.  It is now available, thanks Lei, and it can be checked out using svn from the google code project site.  This is exciting, and I’m happy to have the SCaLE code available because it provides a very powerful registration system, which includes the ability to create tickets, coupons, promotions, add-ons, reporting, check-in and much, much more.

Goals

The goals for this year’s Hack Night are going to be two fold, because now we have two projects.

First, let’s talk about scalereg:

• Porting to Django 1.0 (completed, patch coming)
• Adding back the validation and form management that was removed to get to Django 1.0
• Adding a new theme for UTOS, we hope to make this generic enough to let anyone add some css and images

Next is utos-conman:

• Working toward reusable app status.  Making it easier to integrate with apps like scalereg
• Adding volunteer management
• Adding better room management
• Adding upload feature to the sponsors admin section
• Integrating video and audio links

I’d like to take a moment to thank all the folks who’ve worked on these projects over the years and I look forward to having an awesome code base.  There are many many more features that we’ll be looking at in the future, including reporting, auditing and off-line capability.  For now, I’m more interested in making things work and getting it up and running.  In the next month or two, I hope to have a full-fledged registration system in place for the Utah Open Source Conference 2009.

Cheers,

Herlo

Missing Teeth

My Son Shaun lost his fourth tooth this past week.  He was so excited about it, he called me as soon as it happened.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to experience it, but I’ve been assigned to be in LA three times in the next 3 months, plus one or two trips back to Utah should help.  I’m excited to head out and see his more holey head :)  I’m expecting some pictures to appear soon.

Djangocon 2008

On Friday, I left with a friend of mine, Seth House to Djangocon 2008, the first ever.  While I was happy to go, I wasn’t particularly excited that I would miss an entire day due to a clerical messup.  I learned quite a bit about Django and the community, I’m grateful I could go.

Django is a great framework and I’m excited to learn more about it this weekend.  I’m also grateful Google let me come back onto their campus (without incident this time, I might add), they are such great hosts.  I also got to meet Leslie Hawthorne and introduce myself, she seems pretty awesome even though I hollered at her while she was on the phone (oops, sorry Leslie).

First UTOSC Videos Released

Another great bit of news from UTOSC 2008.  The first evening keynote videos of Mac Newbold and Paul Frields have been released.  I’m excited and grateful to KnowledgeBlue and OpenSourceTV for their help with this project.  Things are rolling great on the video, thanks to Doran Barton and Nick Bauman at KnowledgeBlue for doing the video.

UTOSC Pictures keep piling up

Make sure to take a moment and have a look at the UTOS flickr group.  There’s tons of pictures there and maybe you are in one.  I’ve been tagging like crazy and hope to have them all done later this week.  I’d love to see more tags than what I’ve

A Goodbye

Also, today I found out one interesting thing, my friend Christer, who I referred to come work at Guru Labs, has left for another position.  I’m glad he’s happy and wish him luck.  Sounds like a great change for him and his family.

A quick update for those who are planning on attending tonight’s UTOSF HackNight. Its been moved to Guru Labs in Bountiful. If you still need a ride, feel free to email me, herlo1@gmail or you can twitter me at http://twitter.com/herlo.

If you still need a ride up, we’ll carpool/caravan up from my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray. I’ll be leaving promptly at 6:30, however. If you’ve never been to Guru Labs, here’s a map.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo

If nothing pans out, fear not, I do have a possible alternate location for this event, which I should be able to arrange for by the end of the day as a backup plan. As it stands now, everyone should just arrive at my place @6:30 (instead of 7pm) in Murray and we’ll carpool and caravan as desired.

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

Cheers,

Herlo