Coming up this Saturday at UTOSC 2012, we will be setting up a room dedicated to boardgames. We’ll be LA 122 starting at 10am and going until someone kicks us out of the building. It could be a fairly late night of boardgame fun!!

If you plan on attending any or all of the boardgames session at UTOSC, please bring your boardgames. Mark them in some fashion with your name, and bring them down! We need tons of games as many people will come to play!

Myself, I’ll be bringing at least the following games, possibly more:

• Mag Blast
• Ticket to Ride (USA and Europe)
• Small World
• Killer Bunnies
• Dominion
• Apples to Apples
• Bang!

Bring your games or come and play what is there. Either way it should be a blast!

Cheers,

herlo

The first will be on my latest project, GoOSe Linux – Rebuilding Enterprise Linux the ‘Community’ Way at 11:15am on Thursday, May 3.. If you ever wondered why CentOS took so long to rebuild Enterprise Linux, wondered what other options are out there, or even were just curious how Linux is built, come by and listen. It will be entertaining and enlightening.

The second talk will be Koji – A Reliable, Repeatable Build Environment, 4pm on Thursday, May 3. If you aren’t aware of what Koji does, it builds and manages RPMs. While we use it for the GoOSe project, many folks need a simple and clean way to build packages in a repeatable and reliable way.  Koji can also build LiveCD/LiveDVD images, manages repositories, tags builds and much, much more.

The last presentation I will be giving is ‘The State of Open Source‘, it’s a keynote presentation at 1:30pm on Friday, May 4. Expect this talk to be light and fun! I hope everyone comes out and enjoys this talk as well.

Additionally, it looks like Victor and the gang have created badges for you to put on your blog, Facebook, Google+, etc. so get them out there and come hang out at UTOSC 2012!

Cheers,

herlo

To fix it, in both Firefox 3 or Firefox 4, type ‘about:config‘.

Next, search for ‘browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent‘, set the value to ‘false’ as shown below.

This tip is brought to you by the number 4 and the letter F.

Cheers,

Herlo

Well, I think I had better get another day of the challenge out there.  This one was quite an easy one for me, though there are a few good rivals.  I have to say that I really didn’t start to enjoy reading books until I was in my early 30s.  Thus, a lot of my life I didn’t read, and while others might be much more well read. 

Anyway, on to my choice, I did think about other good book like ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘ and ‘Angels and Demons‘, I chose the ‘Ender’s Game‘ series of books.

Ender’s Game led me into a world of imagination I didn’t know existed. For me, reading became not only an escape, but a pure joy. I could escape into these books for hours during a difficult time in my life. I would become engrossed in possibilities and twists and turns and of course, the surprise ending of Ender’s Game is what made the book so good.

The book series has such grand dynamics and scale. The politics of later books is intriguing as well, Ender, his brother and sister and Ender’s friend, Bean, all were excellent. I really enjoyed Xenocide, a book where Ender spends time with the Hive Queen and the piggies while trying to determine how to irradicate the Descolada.

Other books I enjoyed in this series were Speaker for the Dead and Children of the Mind, I also enjoyed The Shadow Saga series as well.  I highly recommend these books and might just go pick up where I left off a few years back.

Cheers,

Herlo

I have been thinking on this one for a few days.  Mostly, I was thinking back to the first geek I could remember, but for some reason, nothing was coming to mind.  It was weird.

At first, I thought maybe the first geek I knew of was my programming and system administration mentor. His name was Mr Chumple (aka Paul Tiemman).  I met him back in 1999 when I worked as a programmer for Big Planet, an ISP company which was originally an investment from Nu Skin and then later purchased and rolled into it’s MLM conglomerate.  He taught me the ropes about programming, Linux and shell scripting.  Red Hat 5.1 was the first version I ever learned and it was fun.  Running WindowMaker was awesome! (still is)  I learned about Linus Torvalds and how he said ‘Linux’ :)  I still am very grateful to Mr. Chumple for all the time he spent with me during our time together at Big Planet.

Takes me back…

Later on, I continued to think more about the first geek I recognized.

Was it Bill Gates? No, surely not.  I mean, I had heard of him, but I don’t think I knew really who he was until I was using Windows 95.

Was it Steve Jobs? Nope, he wasn’t even in the picture in my mind until he started appearing on talk shows and was the face of Apple.  I remember him being forced out of Apple, but I don’t think he was it either.

So, more thinking, more cycles…and it hit me.  It wasn’t time to share with you about the First Geek I recognized.

My Geek Hero

Tonight, sitting at my computer, perusing Facebook I noticed a post from my friend Travis about Alan Turing.  Now that’s a guy I truly think of as a genius.  A guy who was truly a geek in every sense of the word.  So intelligent, so reclusive, so amazing, an enigma, if you will.

I remember reading about Turing in High School, probably senior year.  It was most definitely in a math class, might have been geometry.  The teacher was so enamored with the algorithms and the amazing things Turing did, I couldn’t help but look him up.

At the time, I wasn’t very interested in math, I’m still no good at it today.  But one thing that Turing did for me was help me to understand algorithms better.  Later on, in college, my discrete structures professor brought Turing back up, when the course covered the Turing machine. The class talked about Turing complete algorithms, essentially how the rules followed in sequence on arbitrary data can produce the result of any calculation.  Many of the modern programming languages and compilers implement Turing complete systems.

In the Facebook post I mentioned above, it appears there will be released a documentary about Alan Turing.  Including World War II, Computing, Code breaking and more.  In the preview they showed, which is available on Youtube, one gentleman mentions that it was a shame he died so early on.  If he’d have lived twice as long, the world would be completely different.  I don’t know if the world would have been better, but I do know that Alan Turing, my geek hero, surely has done more for the computing community than most.

Thank you for modern computing, Mr. Turing.

Cheers,

Herlo

Cooking with PAM

Thad Van Ry will cover the basics of Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). If you’re a Sys Admin who wants to know how PAM can help you or hurt you, this meeting is for you. Thad will go over the different stacks available as well as how to call modules and their control flags.

Thad is a Linux System Administrator for the LDS Church. He has been using Linux in his work life for the past 12+ years.

We meet in conference room A on the lower level of the Salt Lake Library.  Head down the stairs, make a left turn.  The conference room is directly under the foyer area (the area with all the shops on the 1st level)  If you aren’t clear, ask the information desk.  A map is available of all floor plans of the library.

Also, our meetings should be posted on the Electric Signs by the entrance to the library on the first floor.