Sexy Sexy Penguins

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

Tags: Ambassadors, audacity, darkice, Fedora, hackfest, na, recording, UTOSC

I’ve been very busy this last two weeks updating pages and working on finalizing details for UTOSC 2008, held August 28-30, 2008.  For instance, the Fedora booth is coming along nicely.  For a conference of around 400, we should have a pretty good booth turnout.  I had Jeffrey Tadlock, Paul Frields (who’s also keynoting btw) and its possible other NA Ambassadors may attend.  I’m really excited about this development.

In addition, Joe Brockmeier of OpenSUSE will also be keynoting and we’ve got quite a list of presenters on our website.  Our goal is to help open source grow in Utah, and by providing this conference once a year, we can help our local LUGs and open source leaders.  We have approximately 50 presentations, plus events and other fun stuff up our sleeve over this 3 day conference.

One of the great events returning this year is the Guru Labs Troubleshooting Challenge.  We hope to have this event bigger and better this year, with cash prizes for the winner(s).  There will be sign-ups available on Thursday morning at the registration booth and the contest will run all day Friday, crowning a winner Friday night!

Another great return from last year is KnowledgeBlue.  With opensourceTV, they’ll be recording the video for several of our presentations and keynotes.  They’ll be working just like last year (only better) to provide interviews as well with some of the leaders of the open source community.  We expect you all will enjoy the videos as they go up on youtube.  This year, they will focus on multiple angles and getting a good quality presentation from the presenters.

Lastly, I’d like to talk a little bit about Family Day at UTOSC, August 30, 2008.  If you take a look at the presentations on Saturday, you’ll notice a bit of a trend.  With a few exceptions, presentations are intended to help the family. Also, we are working on activities for the kiddies such as an OLPC, videos on MythTV, edubuntu, Fedora Electronics Lab demos and more in our try-it lab.  We’re also working to acquire a moon bounce and sumo suits (for the big kids).  Saturday looks to be a ton of fun.

NOTE: This doesn’t mean that we have enough family stuff, and in fact, we really don’t.  One thing I’d like to see, is a presentation on content filtering for the family.  Something like “Howto use Dan’s Guardian effectively” or a discussion of pfsense, smoothwall or other firewalling/filtering tools.  If you have a presentation you’d like to suggest in this area, please let me know by commenting or emailing me.

I hope to see many of you there as the cost is quite low at $70 and if you are LUG member, its only $35 until August 7 for the early bird pricing.  Read more on our website at http://2008.utosc.com or register directly with eventbrite at http://utosc2008.eventbrite.com.

See you all there.

Herlo

Tags: 2008, conference, Fedora, opensuse, UTOSC, video

Well, its been more than two weeks since my last post about FUDCon.  I figure its high time I posted something about what’s been going on in my neck of the woods.  Things have been quite busy and are bound to continue at this phrenetic pace for a bit longer.

DarkIce - Audio Streaming

I’ve been working this past week on getting darkice packaged for Fedora.  Darkice is a front end audio recording tool for streaming servers like Icecast.  I much prefer it over ices and any other streaming client I’ve tried.  It does have bits for mp3/mp2/faac as well as ogg/vorbis, so I’ll be packaging it for only the latter.

It seems rpmbuild is a bit more cryptic from my last foray into building RPMs and I have to hunt a little harder for the libs and the binaries.  Its coming along nicely, now that I have my virtual machine back in place.  I’m also hoping that darkice will be easy to integrate into Fedora Talk as I’ve never dealt with the asterisk end before.

Utah Open Source Conference

This past weekend, we spent a good bit of time reviewing and selecting presentations for the Utah Open Source Conference.  I am the head organizer and founder of this all volunteer conference. In fact, our very own FPL, Paul Frields will be keynoting on Thursday evening.  Keep an eye on this blog for future updates about the conference.

A New Interest

I’ve recently started to see someone of the female persuasion.  Many of my friends have met her, and I’m guessing they like her as I do (well, not quite as much).  Here’s hoping things go well with Jennifer

There’s more here, and I’ll try to be more vocal about it as I think its good to share.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: 2008, audio, darkice, Fedora, icecast, streaming, UTOSC

So I am sitting in my hotel in Los Angeles, preparing to head back to Utah, its 2:37am PDT and I have been meaning to post the rest of my experience at FUDCon.  First off, I’d like to thank Mo and Ray for letting me stay at their home with them.  They were great hosts!  I’d also like to re-thank Max and Paul and the FedoraProject for sponsoring me out to Boston on such short notice.  I still feel grateful to be part of such a great community!

FUDCon F10, for me, was a time of realization.  Understanding what it is to get involved in projects that scratch that itch.  For providing services toward something I’m good at, into a larger community who could really take advantage of that service.  And while I am still feeling my way through the Fedora world, I think a few things are clearer now after reflecting on this last FUDCon.

I want to record and stream audio and video.

I’m thinking that along with the Fedora Talk project, I could configure and use tools to provide a non-interactive streaming server for certain events/presentations.  What I am thinking of here is things like FUDCon keynotes and sessions.  In fact, I plan to purchase a higher quality microphone / mixer combo to better record the audio at the source.

Video and screencasting in real-time seems a bit more of a challenge.  Putting that together with the streaming audio seems like a fun project and scratches several itches I’ve been experiencing lately.

I need to learn how build better RPMs

Spot taught a great session at FUDCon F9 in Raleigh about RPM packaging, and Rex Deiter talked this time about becoming a package maintainer.  I’ve got a few packages that I’d like to get into the fedora tree, and I think by the end of this year, that can happen.  I’m okay at packaging, but haven’t ever submitted a spec file to spot.  While I’m nervous about how ugly the first package will look, I’m also excited at the prospect of learning better and more efficient ways of building useful tools for the masses.

I think everyone should build their own spin of Fedora

After the 5+ hour session on Friday’s hackfest regarding the spins website and what the spins SIG has already accomplished, I’ve taken some initiative and started to create content to help the prospective spin enthusiast.  I’m a big fan of the Eee PC and am looking forward to purchasing the 901 in the winter.  Until then, I’m planning on helping improve the spin process so we don’t fail to release spins again.  The custom and official spins ‘built with Fedora’ can be so much more prolific if we just provide the right tools to build a spin.  It really should be nothing more than, here’s my kickstart, build me an iso.  This would of course have to follow the general standards for acceptable software.

The relationships (FUDBuddies) made at FUDCon are up my alley

I met Rex Dieter, Mo Duffy, Ray Strode, Dennis Gilmore and Ian Weller this time.  We had great conversations about the world and of course Fedora.  I also got to talk more to Toshio, Greg and J5 who I had met previously at FUDCon F9.  I indeed learned a bunch from Toshio about TurboGears too.  Its something I’ll treasure for releases to come.

To end this post, I’ve got some audio of the olpc session and paul’s keynote, as well as some photos I’ve posted around the interweb, enjoy.  Paul’s keynote will also be up on our new FedoraTV Miro channel, check it out!

Cheers,

Clint

Tags: audio, boston, f10, fudbuddy, fudcon, spins, streaming, video

While I am working on a post-fudcon report.  Its kind of hard to work when the network continues to drop packets.  Currently, I’m on-site in Los Angeles, teaching a course.  Why, oh why does this happen?

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Level3tehsuck, mtr, xotehsuck

So it looks like my whining and moaning paid off!  I didn’t expect that anyone could help me, the money had been spent, things were cancelled and I was screwed!

I recieved a comment on my blog from Mo inviting me to stay at her and halfline’s place for the weekend of FUDCon.  So nice, but I still didn’t have the $600+ it would cost to come to FUDCon.

And then I received this email:

Clint,

Don’t cancel your trip.

Give me receipts,…

–Max

Wow! So I’m coming to FUDCon.  I’d like to thank Max, Mo, Paul (and any others I don’t know about) for helping me get to Boston.  I’m sure it’ll be a blast.

I’ve got some serious plans to make it worth Fedora’s while :)  I don’t think there’s a better way than to be included in the community than to know people care about you and want you to be a part of the community as a whole and to succeed.  I’m going to do all I can to make sure the money will be well spent.

So as I said in my reply email to Max.  Thank you! thank you! thank you!  FUDCon will be a blast!

Cheers,

Herlo

PS - I would also like to thank my employer, Guru Labs, for being so kind to let me attend my second FUDCon.

Tags: Community, Fedora, fudcon

Well, usually I forget to take pictures, because either A) I forget my camera [I brought it this time] or 2) I get wrapped up in the event and forget to bring it with me.  But this release party, I plain just forgot to charge my batteries for my camera, oops!

Fortunately, I was able to snap a few pictures with some of the spare, also not fully-charged, batteries I did have on hand.  However, others took many pictures and I’ve listed them below.

• Sheri Bigelow took some great pictures.  She is a great local photographer, web designer and the local webmistress.
• Tristan Rhodes, a local Asterisk Entrepreneur posted a good blog post.
• Here’s the pictures I took.  Not nearly as many, or as good.

To summarize the party, much celebration was had with foosball, a chess game on one of the largest chess boards around, video games, air hockey and much more was provided by CodeGreene.  The FedoraProject and Utah Open Source sponsored the food and prizes.  If you’ve never had a Chipotle burrito, they are the best burritos around.

I was able to spend time with about 5-7 people myself sharing the Preview Release of Fedora 9 (codename Sulphur) including two who had never had previous success with Fedora or Linux in general.  It was very satisfying to see things work for them.

The Ubuntu folks were there in strength as well.  The Hardy Heron (8.04) CDs were being passed out, while we Fedoran’s provided LiveUSB versions.  I even saw people taking advantage and obtaining both!  Its great to see communities come together and celebrate together.

The party continued at Salt Lake Pizza & Pasta for another couple hours.  Lot’s of talk about the releases, upcoming events, and general mayhem took place including having Heartsbane shoot beer through his nose when I swore at him!

All in all, quite a successful evening and I look forward to helping others in November at our next release party.

Cheers,

Herlo

UPDATE: Another 70+ pictures have been added, check them out!

Tags: code greene, F9, Fedora, hardy, release party, Ubuntu, utos

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-May/msg00007.html

Get yours today! http://fedoraproject.org

Be sure and digg it too:

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Fedora_9_Sulphur_Released

Tags: F9, Releases

The following two articles were published in the past couple days.  When they were published and made known to me, I was saddened:

Report: OLPC may eventually switch from Linux to Windows XP
Nicholas Negroponte on Sugar and One Laptop Per Child

It appears, that Greg DeKoenigsberg responded (it appears) to these two articles with a great rebuttal in this article:

OLPC Developers are *not* fundamentalists

Thank you Greg, thank you for saying what I feel inside.  As an open source advocate, I see the value and benefit of free software and its power.  I feel good inside when I contribute and don’t feel anything like a fundamentalist.

Again, thank you Greg.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, gregdek, negroponte, olpc, onelaptop, thank

As many of you may already know, Fedora 9 (codename: Sulphur) has been pushed back 2 weeks to May 13.  Being the organizer of the Utah Fedora/Ubuntu Linux Release Party on May 3, its kind of hard to push it back because Ubuntu’s release is still on time.

I’m glad though that the major parts of this release are feature complete and its just a few blocker bugs holding it back.  I’m also really happy to point out that because the folks at the Fedora Project are willing to push the date back, the release will be much better off in the end.

This also goes to show that while many businesses would consider releasing anyway.  Mainly because they promised something, and not releasing would cost them revenue and possible customers.  Open source people don’t follow the same mantra, and I’m proud to say that while I like meeting deadlines, if deadlines slips a little to make a better product, timelines should slip.

In the meantime, enjoy the preview release made available yesterday.  Utah will party with this preview.  Shortly after the party, an update will be made available via yum.  There are some amazing things coming out in a few weeks.  Keep your ear to the ground and enjoy the new Sulphur in your life!

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: Fedora, release party, Releases, sulphur