Utah Open Source Blog

Greets,

So the recession is hurting and business is down, and you’re thinking, man… what to do?

Here is what you do, come to Geek Lunch next Friday at Tucanos!  There is one in Salt Lake and one in Utah County so it’s close to everybody.

So if you just need to pull away from the office to relax or want to network with your fellow geeks, just remember this, last geek lunch at tucanos had nearly 40 attendees from all walks in the tech field.  Coders, sysadmins, DBAs, local business owners, you name it, they were there.  Perfect casual networking opportunity!

Here is the info:
Salt Lake County – July 31st, 1pm
RSVP – http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4111644/?ps=5

Tucanos
162 S 400 W
Salt Lake City, UT 84101-1145
Get Directions
(801) 456-2550

Utah County – July 31st 1pm
RSVP – http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/4111665/?ps=5

Tucanos
4801 N University Ave # 790
Provo, UT 84604-7745
Get Directions
(801) 224-4774

Hi all,

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve just rolled out some major changes to our utos-conman staging server tonight. I’d like to get everyone involved in testing these changes so we can roll them out to the live site (http://2009.utosc.com) by end of week.

The changes are these:

• Twitter functionality for updates
  • updates should be going to twitter.com/utostest, (because this is a sensitive feature and we don’t want too many messages going out to our live twitter feed, we’ve put the updates behind the /admin/ section, username/password: conman/conman).
• Multiple presenters per presentation
  • this is issue #2 on the issue tracker and it looks to be working!
  • Utahcon has some prettyness he’ll be adding to the ajax and jquery stuff we did last week.
• Our RSS feed of abstracts is getting better
  • UTOS-ConMan now has a byline and category displayed.

and the biggest change…

Migrations!!

The nice thing about migrations is the ability to roll to any state within our database if something isn’t working. It also gives us snapshots in time of where we were with the database.

We’re using South (http://south.aeracode.org) to do our migrations and boy is it nice! The tutorial can help get anyone up to speed.  Essentially, instead of using syncdb, we’ll be using South’s migrate.functionality.

I wanted to thank all the folks who have helped us get this far, and a special thanks to Utahcon for his work as of late. We’re really making some good progress toward some awesome conference management software.

Feel free to check out the code from our google code svn repository.  WE TAKE PATCHES!

If you are interested in any other improvements for previous staging releases, please feel free to let me know.

Cheers,

Clint

The Utah Open Source Foundation, in its goal to promote Open Source throughout Utah and beyond, is proud to promote the following events.  These events are generally related to Open Source and Technology in Utah.  If your event is not listed below, please contact clint@utos.org to get it added.

Utah Technology Community Announcements

• Utah Open Source is looking for more volunteers to join our ‘Core Team’.  Position definitions and contacts are available at http://wiki.utos.org/All_Positions.
• UTOSC 2009 ‘Call for Papers’ is now open.  Submit your abstract - http://2009.utosc.com.
• UTOS-ConMan HackNights are still hapening every Tuesday, watch http://utos.org for announcements.
• PodCampSLC 2010 Kick-off Meeting will be held July 13 @ 7pm.  If you are interested in helping contact podcampslc@gmail.com

If you have announcements or events for August 2009 or beyond happening around open source in the Intermountain West which you would like included, please contact clint@utos.org.

Upcoming Activities for July 2009

Wed, July 8, 11:30am – 1:00pm
SLLUG: Daytime SIG Meeting
Topic: Cobbler
Where: BetaLoft SLC – 357 West 200 South, Suite 201, Salt Lake City
Contact: Clint Savage, herlo1@gmail.com

Wed, July 8, 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Provo Linux Users Group
Link: http://plug.org
Where: Omniture
Contact: Ryan Simpkins, simpkins.ryan @gmail.com

Thu, July 9, 6pm – 9pm
Utah Mobile Developers Group
Where: STG Dev Center, 555 South 300 East, Salt Lake City, Utah
Contact: Glen Lewis, glen @ glenlewis.com

Thu, July 9, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Utah Python User Group Meeting
Link: http://utahpython.org
Topic: GUI Toolkit Extravaganza cont’d
Where: University of Utah, Emma Eccles Jones Medical Research
Building, Room 1200
Contact: Dave, tonedevf AT gmail.com

Sat, July 11th, 12 – 5pm
Utah CodeAway
Link: http://codeaway.org/
Where: TBD
Contact: Laura Moncur, laura @ moncur.biz

Sat, July 11, 6pm – 8pm
Ubuntu-Utah Meeting
Link: http://utah.ubuntu-us.org
Where: University of Utah – Merrill Engineering Building (MEB)
Comp-Sci Labs Rm 2555
Contact: Aaron Toponce, aarontoponce@ gmail.com

Wed, July 15, 7:10pm – 8:40pm
Salt Lake Linux User Group (SLLUG)
Link: http://sllug.org
Where: University of Utah, Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 101
or 103 (Previously known as EMCB)
Contact: Marc Christensen marc aT mecworks.com

Thu, July 16, 6pm – 9pm
Utah Java User’s Group (ujug.org)
Link: http://ujug.org
Where: Intermountain Medical Center, Doty Family Education Center, Murray, Utah
Contact: Chris Maki, chrismaki AT me.com

Thu, July 16, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Utah PHP User Group (UPHPU)
Link: http://uphpu.org
Where: Bill Good Marketing, Draper, Utah
Contact: Victor Villa, vvilla @ gmail.com

Thu, July 23, 6pm – 8pm
Logan Dev Group
Where: Room 208 (Faculty Seminar Lounge), Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah
State University, Logan, UT
Contact: Matthew Reinbold, matthew.reinbold At voxpopdesign.com

Tue, July 28, 6:30pm – 8:00pm
SLC Ruby (slc.rb)
Link: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/urug
Where: Neumont University Room #300
Contact: Jake Mallory, tinomen @gmail.com

Tue, July 28, 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Ogden Area Linux User Group
Link: http://oalug.com
Where: Weber County Main Library, Board Room
Contact: Seth House, whiteinge@ gmail.com

Fri, July 31, 12:30pm – 2pm
UTOS/UPHPU Geek Lunch
Link: http://utos.org/geek-lunch
Contact: Victor Villa, vvilla AT gmail.com

Each of the events are from the Utah Tech Events calendar.  Feel free to subscribe by clicking the link below (or adding the following feed to your calendaring program)

As a final reminder of how completely awesome the Utah Open Source Conference is and why you should attend, we present a final video from UTOSC 2008: Glenda Rhodes presenting on GIMP for Photographers. This video is now available at OpenSourceTV.TV as a in-line Flash video and also as Ogg Theora and Xvid AVI downloads.

Glenda Rhodes

This presentation discusses using GIMP as an alternative to Photoshop for editing digital photos. Basic GIMP techniques (black/white, sepia, cropping) and some advanced techniques (layer masks for selective coloring, head-swapping, background blurring) are covered.

Glenda says, “I have been on the outskirts of the open source community ever since my husband made me send out the initial release of Ubuntu in our Christmas cards back in 2004. Currently I help run Utah OpenTech, a company dedicated to helping small businesses implement VoIP using open source technologies. I am a frequent user of GIMP (on windows and ubuntu), using it for editing photos and most recently digital scrapbooking.”