Utah Open Source Blog

Mark your calendars!  It’s cue time!

The annual Provo Linux User Group (PLUG) Barbecue is upon us again.  This year it will be spectacular!  The Utah Open Source Foundation is excited to be a part of this event.  Because of this, UTOS will provide some soda, water and approximately 50 hamburgers.

This event is potluck so bring something everyone can enjoy.  Chips, salad, vegetables, fruit, etc., just don’t come empty handed.

Party Information

Where:  Scera Park, Red Pavilion.  This is on the east side of the park. (map)

When:  Saturday, June 20, 2009 - 12pm - 2pm

Why:  To allow the geek’s significant others to socialize, sympathize and find ways to cope with their geek’s habits.  Or maybe it’s just to bring the kids to the park, and free food.  Either way, it’ll be fun!

Hardware Exchange

As normal, please feel free to bring any spare computer parts to trade or exchange.  There will be people there looking for something useful and you might just have what they need.  Anything left over will be recycled by Orem City*.

We hope to see you all there!

Cheers,

Clint

* - This is not recycling really.  If someone would like to recycle the left over computer parts, feel free to speak up at the BBQ.

Greets all,

This month’s UTOS Geek Lunch will be held in three locations at once.  In other words, a new way of enjoying lunch with geeks in your area.  We thought it’d be nice to hang out with everyone in one place, but it’s so hard to do during the lunch hour.  Instead, the idea of having a Geek Lunch in each of the three main valleys along the Wasatch Front.

This month’s theme: Thai

Salt Lake County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
My Thai, 1425 S 300 W, SLC, UT (map)

Davis/Weber County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
Pad Thai, 1986 N Hill Field Rd #8, Layton, UT (map)

Utah County

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
Thai Chili Gardens, 430 West 800 North, Orem, Ut (map)

If you have any questions, please contact Victor Villa (vvilla At gmail.com) for more information.

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Utah Tech Events Calendar - Google Calendar: http://sn.im/ute-calendar
Utah Tech Events Calendar - iCal Feed: http://sn.im/ute-calendar-ics
Utah Open Source Podcasts - http://podcast.utos.org
Utah Open Source Foundation - http://utos.org
Utah Open Source Conference - http://utosc.com

This morning, many of us were informed of the story of Julie Stout.  She was diagnosed with brain cancer a couple of years ago.  This, in and of itself isn’t abnormal, but what is not normal is that this woman is the wife of one of Utah’s geek’s, Brandon Stout.  He’s been around this community for some time, contributed plenty and regularly participated in the Utah PHP User Group (UPHPU).

As of this morning, I was informed about their situation and wanted to do something for the family.  Thus, we’ve adopted the ‘Help a Geek Family’ mantra and opened an account on chipin.com.  We’re shooting for $1500 in donations and are already well on our way.  These donations will be sent to the account at Deseret First Credit Union and Utah Open Source will cover the paypal fees to make the amount complete.

If you are interested in helping out a geek family, please consider donating on our main page at http://utos.org.  In addition, if you are interested in learning more about Brandon and Julie, you can watch the story on ksl.com.

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.  In addition, each of the events below was pulled from the Utah Tech Events calendar, feel free to subscribe by clicking the link below (or adding the following feed to your calendaring program)

Utah Technology Community Announcements

• Utah Open Source 2009 conference dates / venue / theme - http://2009.utosc.com

If you have announcements or events that do not happen on a regular monthly basis which you would like included, please contact clint@utos.org
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Upcoming Activities for May 2009

Sat, May 9th, 12pm
Utah CodeAway
Link: http://codeaway.org/
Where: Rocky Mountain Pizza Company, 3977 Wasatch Boulevard, Holladay, Utah 84124
Contact: Laura Moncur, laura @ moncur.biz

Sat, May 9, 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, May 13, 11:30pm – 1:00pm
SLLUG: Daytime SIG Meeting
Where: Salt Lake Public Library - Conference Room A Lower Level
Contact: Clint Savage, herlo1 @gmail.com

Wed, May 13, 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Provo Linux Users Group
Link: http://plug.org
Where: Omniture
Contact: Ryan Simpkins, simpkins.ryan @gmail.com

Thu, May 14, 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, May 14, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Utah Python User Group Meeting
Link: http://utahpython.org
Topic: GUI Toolkit Extravaganza
Where: University of Utah, Emma Eccles Jones Medical Research Building, Room 1200
Contact: Dave, tonedevf AT gmail.com

Wed, May 20, 7:10pm – 8:40pm
Salt Lake Linux User Group (SLLUG)
Link: http://sllug.org
Where: University of Utah, Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 101/103 (Previously known as EMCB)
Contact: Marc Christensen marc aT mecworks.com

Thu, May 21, 6pm – 9pm
Utah Java User’s Group (ujug.org)
Link: http://ujug.org
Where: SelectHealth (IHC), 4646 West Lake Park Blvd., West Valley City
Contact: Chris Maki, chrismaki AT me.com

Thu, May 21, 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Utah PHP User Group (UPHPU)
Topic: Security + PHP by Erik Johnson
Link: http://uphpu.org
Where: Bill Good Marketing, Draper, Utah
Contact: Victor Villa, vvilla @ gmail.com

Tue, May 26, 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, April 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

Thu, May 28, 8:00am – 9:30am
CTO Breakfast
Link: http://www.windley.com/cto_forum
Where: Novell Cafeteria
Contact: Phil Windley, phil At windley.org

Thu, May 28, 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

Fri, May 29, 12:30pm – 2pm
UTOS/UPHPU Geek Lunch
Link: http://utos.org/geek-lunch
Contact: Victor Villa, vvilla AT gmail.com

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Utah Tech Events Calendar - Google Calendar: http://sn.im/ute-calendar
Utah Tech Events Calendar - iCal Feed: http://sn.im/ute-calendar-ics
Utah Open Source Podcasts - http://podcast.utos.org
Utah Open Source Foundation - http://utos.org
Utah Open Source Conference - http://utosc.com

This Sunday I was given a call by our VPS provider.  There was a power outage at the colo where the virtual machine was housed.  I still have a few questions about why it wasn’t on a UPS (or if it was) and why it took so long to get power restored.  I guess I’ll get to those soon enough, but it caused some unintended outages and is probably a good test for all the system stuff we have running.

Specifically, the Utah Open Source Planet failed to update for two days, which, if you are following our feed, is probably why you just saw a bunch of posts come through.  It turns out the software I use, planet, was working fine.  However, it appeared to be the problem due to the misleading errors it was getting.  The error code was:

ERROR:planet:Error 500 while updating feed <url://to.planet/rss.feed>

This error would appear for each of the entries we have in our planet.  However, the error was not the planet’s fault.  At first, I grabbed one of the url’s and tried it in my browser, no problem.  The rss feed would load up just fine.  After a few minutes of digging, I started researching the network.  What I discovered was that I wasn’t able to resolve any hostname.

Because we run our own dns servers, we also point our machines at those servers.  However, when the power went out on Sunday, it appears we didn’t have the dns server set to automatically start on boot.  A quick chkconfig command to fix that and we’re back up.  Thus, the consequence in this case was lack of planet updates for a while.

However, I feel we were lucky (and good).  For the most part, things worked, that’s a good sign, but I think this goes back to one key principle in a system administrator’s repertoire.  Make sure to test your systems to validate that they come back up correctly.  Lucky for us, this was a minor service, but a service nonetheless.  I’m glad that everything else worked and it’s been a good testing day for that reason.

Cheers,

Clint