Utah Open Source Blog

So the challenge begins, UTOS-ConMan is in good shape from last year’s HackNights, but it does need a bit of a clean up and some new features as noted in a previous post.

The problem is that the Utah Open Source Conference 2009 needs a registration system.  Recently released from the guys over at the Southern California Linux Expo is some good code in the ScaleReg system.  We’re going to update and improve it over the next few months.  Hopefully, by mid-July, we’ll have it up and running with Django 1.0, and have it ready to roll for folks to start registration.

Now the real question is why are we blogging about all this stuff recently.  Well, the reason is, we need your help.  We’re looking for folks who are interested in learning or improving their Python/Django skills, helping with css and graphic design, testing and any other intangibles we haven’t thought about yet.  We’re looking for you and we’re looking to start this coming Tuesday.  So come on over and join the HackNight!

You might ask yourself, why would I help out?  And that’s a really good question, so let’s provide some good answers.  If you participate and provide some good feedback, code or contribute in some other way, you’ll get free admission the to UTOSC 2009 (a $70 value).  In addition, you’ll learn a valuable skill or improve upon your skill set as this project introduces some interesting and fun challenges.  There’s also pride.  This project will be used by many of the community tech conferences around the nation and world and your name will be among the contributors.  I’m sure there will be some conferences we haven’t even considered who will be using your code or design.  We’re also working on getting a couple good mentors who are expert Python and Django developers.  They’ll be on hand to help you with troubleshooting, common issues, etc.

I think we may have your attention now, so let’s talk about the details.  We know you want to come an help, so here’s how:

When: Tuesday, June 2, 2009 from 6:30pm - 11pm.  We encourage you to come for as many hours of this as you can and you can come anytime during these hours.

Where:  Clint Savage’s home; 5225 Gravenstein Park, Murray, Utah 84123

This information is available on the Utah Tech Events Calendar as well — http://sn.im/ute-calendar (iCal: http://sn.im/ute-calendar-ics)

If you are unable to join us physically, we’re going to be working in #utos-dev on irc.freenode.net so please feel free to join us there as well.  We’ll have some folks hanging out there as well to include you in the development project.  They’ll try to describe the goals and get you started as well.

We’re planning on making this an every other week HackNight for a while, so come on by on the first and third Tuesdays from 6:30-11pm.  We hope to see you all at the first UTOS-Conman/Scalereg HackNight of 2009 on June 2.

Cheers,

Clint

Last night, at the crack of 7pm, a new era of development in Utah began.  It began with 11 people in a room, talking about the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program, how it came to be and about the new partnership between UTOS, Fedora and Sugar Labs.  It was a night to be remembered.

A short presentation (thanks to Karlie Robinson for the slides) about the XO Developer project was given.  Everyone seemed interested and awake, so that was good.

We pulled up the list of activities and went through some of the 4th Grade math curriculum.  It’s a bit irksome that the activities aren’t well-defined.  Basically, all you get is a short description of an xo activity.  It’d be nice to have the components defined a little better.  This discussion led to the possibility of pulling in a few 4th grade teachers from around the local community.  We’ll see where this goes.

Finally, after narrowing down our list of activities, we settled on 3 activities for now, and started defining components to develop.  It was agreed that we’d first create some command line applications, then return next month to put a GUI on them, and sugarize them.

All in all, it was a fun evening, food and friends.  I look forward to next months OLPC meeting.  Watch this blog for more news about upcoming UTOS OLPC hackfests.  After the event, I created a wiki page for the UTOS-XO team, as well as a local mailing list for discussions to be had.  If you are interested in participating, please feel free to join the list and get yourself an XO.

Pictures are available on flickr.

Cheers,

Clint

Tomorrow night, 7pm, in Murray at my house, we’ll be eating pizza and hacking on ConMan again.

If you are interested in joining the fun, please feel free to stop by and learn some kick-a** django skillz.

The last two HackNights were all-nighters and were very successful.  Tomorrow’s HackNight is to refactor the views a little and build out the blog portion of the app as well.  Feel free to come by and stay as long or as little as you like.

See you all there.

Cheers,

Clint

The UTOS Confrence Manager or ConMan, is really coming along.  Tonight’s HackNight didn’t last quite as long as last weekend, but there was some definite improvements.

One of the really nice improvements was the addition of the logo by James Hancock who’s really good with his inkscape skills.  Other improvements included a better gui, backend administration, refactoring much of the user creation to better accommodate future enhancements.

One of the best features that has been added tonight was the blog functionality by Kevin Kubasik of GNOME fame.  When a conference is upcoming and during the conference itself, this feature will be front and center.  Nice work!

Things that are left include registration, including payments with google checkout, paypal or a merchant backend.  Sponsor management is another, as well as schedules for volunteers, speakers, attendees and sessions, bofs and events.

I’m even sure there are items not yet considered above, but that’s the functionality we hope to have in place within the next few months.   Feel free to download the project, and submit patches back to us anytime, we dig the help.

We’re looking forward to deploying the Call for Papers components tomorrow or Sunday in our official call for papers announcement, so keep your eyes peeled.

Cheers,

Clint

A special thanks to Guru Labs, Kevin Kubasik, John Weis, James Hancock, Will Smith and Trevor Sharpe for sticking it out much of Saturday night and into the wee hours of Sunday night.

The chinese food arrived at around 9pm, and we sat around talking design and ideas for the next 30 minutes, and about 11pm we really started digging into the project.

After about 12-13 hours of good coding, and time troubleshooting, learning, drinking loads of caffeine and a bunch of other good stuff, I’m proud to announce the first real progress on the ConMan project from UTOSF.

The general idea is to improve upon otherwise incomplete or sucky open source conferencing systems. ConMan (Conference Manager) is seeming to become quite good, with some good coding from Kevin Kubasik, good web design by John and some good perserverence as well by yours truly. Most of the group crashed out somewhere between 2am and 8am, Kevin and I however, continued to hack until we had something semi-solid at around 11:30am.

It was a great time had by all and a good framework has been built. Django seems like the perfect solution for this and we will even have CAPTCHA and email confirmation early in the 0.0.2 release.

For now though, if you are interested in seeing the Call for Papers, Call for Volunteers and Contact applications, please feel free to download it at http://code.google.com/p/utos-conman. We look forward to bug reports (which you can also make at the google code site, you just need a google account) and fixes in the future. Also any recommendations that are made will be taken into consideration.

In addition, keep an eye out for the “Call for Papers” to appear at http://2008.utosc.com very soon.

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Today I spent a good bit of time up at the Utah CodeAway at Wasatch Wingz in Salt Lake.  It was amazing.

What is CodeAway you ask?  Well, essentially, its another social channel (read disparate tech group) to get together.  In this case, its great to get together if you are a software dev or interested in improving your skill.  People with all types of coding skillz are there and can help (and learn).  The mood here is playful and fun, but if you want to code, there are plenty of little nooks to hide and burn out a bunch of code.  If you cant figure out a piece of code, just ask, you’re bound to find an answer with this many experts in the building.

The wings were amazing, and Wayne (sp?) was quite a friendly fellow.  He and another business partner run this little eclectic wing shop / internet cafe / hang out.  Its a very intriguing ideal and I was glad to chat for a few minutes before the crowd really showed.  Wayne explained that Wasatch Wingz really likes the idea of having people come in an hang out on their computers as they bear down on a dozen awesome wings.  I had the “voodoo” wings, which were tasty with a bit of spice, quite good.  Wayne has outdone himself here and if his hospitality and food are any indication, Wasatch Wingz are to be a huge hit.

Back to the event and some thoughts.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I showed up today, but after spending a few minutes talking with Laura Moncur, I felt right at ease.  She’s an amazing lady!  During our discussion, I discovered her desire for this sort of thing was because at one point she was so desperate to spend time with others of like mind.  It reminds me so much of UTOS, just slightly different in focus.

After talking, I realized we had so much in common and its clear that there are likely tens of groups who are just like CodeAway and UTOS out there.  And that the more we find ourselves in these groups, there are another hundred who are looking for this sort of thing.  And to that end (and if I have anything to do with it), we’ll see some combined efforts to provide facilities and opportunities for those interested to get involved.  I wouldn’t even be surprised to see advertising become more prevalent and attendance to these sorts of events sky rocket.

It appears the next event will be February 23 from noon to 6pm (also at Wasatch Wingz) so I’d recommend getting there early and getting a good seat.

See you all there!

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Its coming soon, the Utah Open Source Conference 2008!

and we need some help getting our registration system off the ground!

If you are interested in working on a really cool project, want to learn Django and enjoy some good food, come on over and hack.

The Hackfest will be held at my new home in Murray, Utah! So come and enjoy the new surroundings and hopefully we’ll have the projector and screen up, which means movies and video games. I’m also working on internet access (its Qwest/XMission for now. Soon to be UTOPIA/XMission), but it should be installed by Saturday. If not, we’ll let everyone know an updated location nearby.

Here’s the details:

Date/Time: Saturday, January 26, 2008 / 7pm

Location: Herlo’s house: 5225 Gravenstein Park, Murray, Utah 84123 - Map

Please feel free to ping me on IRC if you have any question.

Cheers,

Clint