My point…

PASTEBINS ARE EVERYWHERE

One of the pastebins that has been in use for a very long time is http://fpaste.org and the focus of my post today. Essentially, the Fedora community tends to use fpaste.org over other pastebins as it has a bunch of nice features and it’s Fedora branded. About 2 months ago, I was asked by Jonathan Steffan (aka daMaestro) if I would be interested in packaging fpaste.org’s code and get it into Fedora infrastructure (FI). I accepted that challenge.

As Jonathan will tell you, the code was hacked together over a weekend at a coffee shop. Thus, it needed a bit of clean-up to make things work without including libs from other projects (a big no-no when packaging a Fedora rpm). After a few weeks of clean-up and back-and-forth with Jonathan, fpaste-server was born. That was the first big step to get fpaste-server into FI.

Fpaste-Server is comprised of many other packages. Since I wasn’t the maintainer on many of them, I worked with the amazingly awesome Dave Riches (dcr226) to get django-mptt, django-tracking, django-simple-captcha and django-dpaste into the EPEL repositories for both EL5 and EL6. Dave was not only helpful, but went above and beyond to complete these builds. Thank you, sir!

Over the past month, I’ve been really busy, prepping for my wedding and what not, but found some time recently to finish the package builds of fpaste-server. The packages are all approved, save for el5 which was submitted this morning. This was the second big step to get fpaste-server into FI.

This week, and after my honeymoon, I plan to finish up the work to get fpaste-server into FI. All that’s really left is to get django-tracking into EPEL6.

If you haven’t tried fpaste-server yet, you should. It’s a pretty cool and stable pastebin, it’s also very hackable. Changing out the background to fit your own logos and such is very simple. Please comment here if you find any bugs or issues, have questions or comments.

Cheers,

Herlo

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

We’re meeting at my place @6:00 in Murray and we’ll have food and hack for a long, long time!

See you all tonight for an awesome hackfest!

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