Utah Open Source Blog

Several dozen very exciting presentation proposals have been submitted for review for this year’s Utah Open Source Conference. By the looks of them, we will have an easy time finding three days worth of great presentations for most every type of person attending the conference this year.

That being said, we are extending the deadline by one month, so if you have not submitted a presentation proposal, you have until 1 July to do so. To respond to the call-for-papers go to the http://2008.utosc.com/ site and select the Submit Paper link.

If you know anyone that has done something cool or interesting with Linux or other open source technology, encourage them to present at the conference to share their story with the community.

More features on conference site

Several new features have recently been added to the http://2008.utosc.com/ site. Some of these only affect presenters, while others are visible to the public. They include:

• Presenters may upload images of themself to be displayed along with information about their presentation
• Presenters may optionally enter information about what company or organization they represent.
• The size of proposal abstracts has been extended to accomodate presenters who just can’t say enough about their presentation.
• Approved presentations/speakers will begin showing up on the public pages.

In the coming weeks, more features will be appearing including links to:

• Registration pages
• BOFs
  
• Lightning talks

Date: May 14th, 2008
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Omniture, Inc.
Details: http://www.plug.org/

MySQL will be flying Jay Pipes (North American Community Relations Manager at
MySQL) in to Salt Lake on the 14th for the sole purpose of addressing PLUG
(and all other local SIGs). Please spread the word. Set your calendars. Blog
it. Spread it. Tell everyone.

To be clear: THIS WILL BE AN IN-DEPTH TECHNICAL PRESENTATION. Expect this to
be one of those killer, mind-bending, and deep technical presentations. The
kind that leaves you barley able to drive home. Jay will keep the presentation
as language agnostic as possible - and focus just on the SQL-fu Jay
specializes in. This is one presentation you don’t want to miss.

There will be prizes (books and MySQL swag). And we will have drinks. There
might be food, but don’t plan on it.

His bio:

Jay Pipes is the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL.
Co-author of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), Jay has also written articles for Linux
Magazine and regularly assists software developers in identifying how to make
the most effective use of MySQL. He has given sessions on performance tuning
at the MySQL Users Conference, RedHat Summit, NY PHP Conference, OSCON, and
Ohio LinuxFest, amongst others. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife,
Julie, and his four animals. In his abundant free time, when not being
pestered by his two needy cats and two noisy dogs, he daydreams in PHP code
and ponders the ramifications of __clone().

-Ryan

— Books we have to give away:
- A book regarding Fedora.
- A “Head First” book from O’Reilly on SQL.
- Several very excellent “Pragmatic Programmers” books:
- Programming Ruby (very good)
- Java to Ruby
- Enterprise Integration with Ruby
- Agile Web Development with Rails
- Agile Retrospectives
- Practices of an Agile Developer