Monthly Archives: August 2008

Utah Open Source Conference 2008

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The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference was amazing.  It was quite literally too legitimate to quitimate.  Last year was great but everything this year was double that.  Twice as professional, twice as engaging, twice as many high profile keynote speakers, and more than twice the attendance (an undisclosed number >= 500).

Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader and Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager both flew out to keynote at the conference.  Novell brought up some of the Hack Week participants and UTOS arranged a room for us to hack in.  In fact Novell was, appropriately (this is Utah), the best represented company at the conference with 10 presenters and many more attendees.

We wanted to get Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager to keynote as well but he declined.  In fact Canonical didn’t deign to represent themselves at all.  Ubuntu Utah pulled something together for a booth but Canonical didn’t even send pressed CDs.

Favorite Sessions

Panel: Open Source And Government.  Phil Windley, former CIO of the State of Utah and Pete Ashdown, Founder and CEO of Xmission (Utah’s First and Best ISP) discussed everything from transparency in legislation to voting machines.  Pete talked about how he solicited outside contribution to his policies during his United States Senate campaign using a Wiki.

Fedora: The Future First.  Paul Frields discussed the history and goals of the Fedora Project as well as their completely open source infrastructure and community policies.  Did you know that Fedora has their own VoIP system?  I didn’t.  They can schedule conference calls, have them recorded, and post them publicly so that everything they do is in the open.  Cool stuff.

Banshee Media Player.  Aaron Bockover was too tired to be coherent but we love him anyway and the software, new features, and T-shirts spoke for themselves.  I wish I’d got a photo of him drinking that nasty Sugar Free ROCKSTAR at the podium.

The Free Content Business Model.  Howard Tayler is a web cartoonist and small business owner.  He’s also a brilliant speaker.  If you missed this I feel sorry for you.  Excellent points about how to monetize something you are comitted to keep free.

Dialplans for Dummies: An introduction to the Asterisk Dialplan.  Jared Smith is hilarious.  To decide who would get a copy of his book he had those who wanted it do a rock, paper, scissors tournament.  After a vigorous and tense last round the loser sadly handed the book over to the winner, and Jared pulled out another copy for the loser.  Perhaps that didn’t sound as funny as it was.  You should have been there.  Jared is also a great presenter, and Asterisk is awesome.

openSUSE Build Service

I gave a hands-on presentation on the openSUSE Build Service.  This was my first time presenting at a conference but I thought it went very well.  All the demos were successful and I was able to cover everything I had planned in the allotted time.  I even got to demo SuSE Studio.  An audio-only recording should be posted at the conference website soon.  If I had known there wouldn’t be video I would have setup a screen recorder.

Update: Audio now available on Utah Open Source Podcast.  I’m pretty sure my voice is not actually that low.

RPM Guides

One of the attendees asked me where he can learn more about RPM.  It is lamentable that there are no published guides written in the last 5 years.  Here are some links that should help.

There’s also the SuSE Packager’s Manual but this appears to be an internal document and is admittedly very specific to SuSE.

Hack Week Three

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It’s been another exciting and worth while Hack Week.  Sadly I had a number of high priority Mono updates to push to SuSE so I probably spent only about half of Monday through Wednesday hacking.  Thursday through Saturday were spent at the Utah Open Source Conference (more on that soon).  The real highlight for me was spending the week with Aaron Bockover, Hubert Figuiere, Sandy Armstrong, Gabriel Burt, Brad Taylor, Mario Carrion, Brian Merrell, and Jared Allen.  Technically I’m not on their team(s) but they kindly let me bum rides off them and eat their snacks.  Good times.

I’m really looking forward to new features for Banshee like the Muine-like interface and the new track editor.  Good stuff happens at Novell.  Seriously.

DigitalMe

My hack week project was to package DigitalMe and get it ready for distribution.  DigitalMe is Novell’s Open Source, Open Standards, InfoCard (CardSpace) Selector, part of the Bandit Project.  I am not the best person to ask but I think I can summarize it as like OpenID but you can also generate your own credentials.  The project needed some help or it would not get into openSUSE 11.1 or SLE 11 so I volunteered my time.  We’re almost there, but not quite.  I will post a link to the package repository when it’s done and with some luck we’ll get it submitted to SuSE before feature freeze.

gnome-keyring-sharp 1.0.0

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Of necessity I have decided to release gnome-keyring-sharp-1.0.0.  The release is nothing more than r87622 from SVN.

Debian has been using r87622 as 1.0.0 for some time now and there have been no commits since October of 2007.  openSUSE has been using a much older version (how old, I don’t know) but GNOME Do 0.6 will depend on gnome-keyring-sharp 1.0.

I don’t have any kind of change log to post since as far as I can tell there has never been a formal release.

gnome-keyring-sharp is a fully managed implementation of libgnome-keyring.

When the gnome-keyring-daemon is running, you can use this to retrieve/store confidential information such as passwords, notes or network services user information.

Sources are at http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/gnome-keyring-sharp/gnome-keyring-sharp-1.0.0.tar.bz2

My apologies to authors Alp Toker and Gonzalo Paniagua if I’m stepping on their toes. I did try to contact Alp last week to get him to sign off on this.