ChiCon 07

Hey All,

A group of us Chicago Free and Open Source software enthusiasts are planning on setting up conference in Chicago to showcase Free and Open Source software. This conference is different from flourish as this is not to showcase it in business but instead on the desktop and for fellow enthusiast.

If this sound like fun to you or you have some great ideas that you would like to share with us, join us in #chicon on irc.freenode.net.

The first date thrown around is sometime in November.

UPDATE: Fixed my grammer, I really should wait 5 minutes before I proofread my post.

The Time Has Come For Me To Go Job Hunting

So I am currently looking for a job. I just graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology this past spring with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science. The main experience I have is as a System Administrator, I have been doing this for the past 2 years. I have setup and maintained both Windows and Linux servers. I also have programming experience in Python, Java and C# this is mainly from academic and personal projects. Along with Python I also have some experience with TurboGears from academic and personal projects. Besides work and academic experience, I have gained a great amount of knowledge about packaging and building software from working with the Foresight Linux project. For this project I help out with packaging and maintaining software along with quality assurance testing. So if anybody reading this post has an opening for a job please contact me via email at kharriss_at_gmail.com and my resume can be found here.

I may be more evolved, but I am still a klutz.

So on Sunday morning I was going to take my brother and his friend to the dinner right around the corner and right as I hit my front stairs, BOOM. I slipped and fell down 5 stairs and did a face plant, aka hit my face on the concrete, on the sidewalk. Here is a picture of the results.

I am more evolved than you!!

On Sunday night I had gallbladder pain so I went to the emergency room, it turn out that my gallstones had moved and decided to demand that my gallbladder be removed now. We were planning on doing this next week but my body decided to jump the gun. So now I am out of the hospital with one less unneeded body part, my gallbladder, hence more evolved. The stent they put in before to keep the ducts from being blocked by stones got lost in my bile duct so I still have to have surgery to get that removed. The can be done as an outpatient so its not a huge deal.

I really want to thank everybody for their concerns and messages via SMS and Twitter. Luckily twitter gave me something to do while I was in the hospital waiting on doctors. If you want to be my friend on twitter here is my page.

UPDATE: Fixed typos, I blame those on the pain meds.

BARcamp Chicago Recap

This post is a little late, but as I like to say 'Better late than never' and I have multiple blogs post that have fallen off into the never category. Also this post is a little lenghty sorry. Well enough with my rambling and onto the good stuff the BARcamp Chicago recap.

A great accomplishment was that we were larger than BARcamp New York, we had 250 people over the weekend. Some other stats: 100 pizzas, 3 kegs of beer = 52.5 gallons of beer, ~120 bottles of microbrew beer and a couple bottles of liquor. We did pretty good, we finished all but one keg which we didn't tap. So it just shows everybody that chicago techies know how to drink. Not only did we have a great supply of food and drink, we also had a great supply of good talks. So many good talks that I couldn't catch them all. The talks that I did catch were really good.

I saw An Introduction to Linux Photography by Jordan Wilberding. In this presentation Jordan describe some initial steps like selecting a camera and calibrating your monitor but also talked about tools to use to work with photos in Linux. This talk had a good turn out probably about 15-20 people or so.

After this Tim gave a talk/discussion on Old Tech. This talk was about old technology like steam power and such and showing off his homemade ballista. This was a really cool session and I think we need to have more of these at next years BARcamp.

I also got to catch Tristan's talk on Home brewing, I have already since this presentation and had the presenter as my mentor to help me get into home brewing so this presentation was mostly just a reinforcement. It appeared that a lot of people were interested in this talk as I saw a couple people taking notes during the talk.

On Sunday was the day for Gnome and rPath. The first talk was an introduction to rPath appliances by showing off the MythTV appliance. This talk by Ken had a few hiccups first the myth box wouldn't connect to the projector and neither would Ken's laptop so he just talked people through an install on the LCD monitor I brought. People really seemed to like the idea that it boot straight into MythTV and took care of the setup for you. You don't have to worry about starting up mythTV yourself or any of that fuss.

Later Ken gave his talk on Foresight Linux. This talk had a good crowd, the main room was full about 50 people. People asked a lot of really good questions and the comments I heard were people amazed at how much easier rPath appliances are and the selection we have. For instance, Nate was amazed by the wordpress-mu appliance we had and told me that is exactly what they are looking for at his company.

Right after Ken's talk I held the first ever Chicago Gnome User Group meeting. We had about 10 people there and the main point of this talk was to express my ideas for what this group should do and how we should help out upstream Gnome. We had some good discussion about what can be done with the group. Paul suggested that we have a Gnome 2.20 release party and I think this is a great idea, so look forward to that. I will give a full wrap of this meeting in another post.

The beer and food was good and the talks were great but the best part about BARcamp was the networking that I did with people there. Mainly I got to meet two great guys that I work with on Foresight and have talked with online but this was the first time meeting in person. I also got to meet some new faces to the Foresight community, Ryan that is you. But I also meet fellow chicago gnomeers and look forward to future collaboration. The ChiGLUG took up around the installfest and kegs and helped people with any Linux questions they may have had and even installed Foresight on a couple peoples laptops.

I have a couple pictures from BARcamp which can be found here. Also here is a short video of BARcamp provide by BusinessPOV.

Overall BARcamp was amazing and I would like to thanks all of the sponsors, presenters and attendees for making it so great. I am already looking forward to next years and wondering what we can do to make it even better. I know one thing we could do is get more Foresight devs there and have a mini Foresight hack session ;) but that is just wishful thinking.

If you have any suggestions for next years BARcamp or comments about this years just leave me a comment and I will respond. Also if I have mentioned your talk and you have a link to your slides online just post the link in the comment and I will add it to the post.

See you all at BARcamp2008.

Call Me Brewmaster specialKevin

So on Saturday Tristan and I brewed my first batch of beer. I brewed an Extra Pale Ale also called an American Pale Ale. It is like a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I was supposed to get a 6.5 gallon glass carboy with my brew kit, but I was sent a 5 gallon glass carboy. I had to cut down the batch size to four gallons instead of five gallons. This might cause an increase in the abv of the brew but since we forgot to take the initial gravity we can't be sure if there is an actual increase. If this brew turns out good I plan to brew it again just so we can see how strong of an increase we get by cutting the batch down to four gallons. Pictures from my first adventure in brewing can be seen here.

Back to the Future

On Saturday while I was at Target picking up supplies for my first batch of home brew. I saw what is going to be my future car.


The only thing that could have made this better was if Michael J. Fox himself came out of Target and drove off in it. I really want this care, and of course I would put a flux capacitor in it and it would generate 1.21 Gigawatts.

All Your Base Belong To Gnome

The Chicago Gnome User Group will be having our first meeting on June
24th at 3:00 pm. The meeting will be taking place at BARcamp Chicago located at 1464 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL. This is one block from the Damen stop on the Blue Line CTA train. The meeting agenda is going to include a What is Gnome, Why to use Gnome and Plans for the Chicago Gnome User Group. We also have a mailing list which can be found here. Thanks to
Chicago GNU/Linux User Group for hosting our mailing list.

Chicago Gnome User Group Meeting

When: June 24, 2007
Time: 3:00 pm
Where: BARcamp Chicago, 1464 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL

However, not only is the first Chicago Gnome User Group meeting occurring at BARcamp but there is a Foresight presentation along with an introduction to packaging with conary. I look forward to meeting Ken and Paul from the great foresight team. Some other interesting presentations are Introduction to Linux Photography by Jordan Wilberding and Introduction to Home Brewing by Tristan Sloughter. All in all BARcamp Chicago looks to be one great weekend.

Almost One of the Cool Kids

I have been saying that I was going to start brewing my own beer. Well today I just bought my homebrewing starter kit, to much prodding from my friend Tristan. I bought the glass starter kit from northern brewer along with the extra pale ale ingredient kit. Now that I bought my kit I can't wait to get it and start on my first batch. I guess now that is only left is to step up the drinking to gather more bottles. Look forward to recipes and pictures of my brews as they are made and also if you are ever in my area just stop on by and try some of my brew.

Chicago Gnome Users Unite

I have been currently in the planning process for the first meeting of the Chicago Gnome User Group. I have decided to have our meeting be on June 2nd at 3:00 pm. The location will be decided in the next week, I am having the meeting at the same venue as the Chicago GLUG meeting on that same day so I am waiting on that location to be decided upon. So far the agenda for the first meeting is going to have only one presentation, which will be an overview of my ideas for the group. One of my ideas is to have a 5 or 10 minute talking featuring a specific Gnome/GTK application. Another idea is having presentations about the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines and GTK to help introduce users to help contribute back to the communitity. I also want have bug squash days where we work together to try and fix as many bugs in a day as we can. If any of this sounds like fun or if you enjoy using Gnome stop by our meeting. We also have a brand new mailing list which can be found here. Any more information about our meeting will be sent out via the mailing list and it will be posted on this blog.

Book Suggestions

Dear LazyWeb,

Currently at my job we have 3 Debian severs, 30 Windows clients and 4 iMac clients so I am look for good book suggestions for various topics pertaining to our lab. The reason for the books is that my replacements can have something to help them learn about the topics but also as a reference in case there is a problem. So ideally the books would be good for learning and reference. The topics are:

• Debian Server Administration


• Samba


• Mac OSX


• ipTables


• Any other general Sys Admin book

Any suggestion can be left as comments to this post or email them to kharriss#chicagolug.org.

Thanks

Half Way There, Almost Summertime

As fellow students know that time of year is almost here, the time when all students take a giant sigh of relief at being done with another year of school. Well I am almost half done with this semester I have 1 more paper to write and 1 more final. Hopefully this paper and exam go well and so that I am done with my undergraduate degree and graduating this Saturday. I am looking forward to Friday afternoon when I will be finished with all of my class and ready to celebrate. I am also looking forward to having the time to work on my projects this summer. So far my plans for this summer are as follows:

• Projects




• Turblogo: A blog engine written in TurboGears


• Free/Open Source brewing software in Ruby


• Various Foresight packaging tasks




• Events




• Chicago GLUG meetings


• Chicago BarCamp June 22-23rd


• Gallbladder Surgery

Bring on the Bling

Last night I gave in and decided to try out some desktop bling for my computer. My pimp'd out desktop can be seen below:



All I had to do was to enable compiz since with Foresight it comes installed by default just not enabled. I also wanted to check out Avant Window Navigator, it is the dockbar that is on the bottom of the screenshot. I also wanted to check out Affinity, it is the new menu that is in the top left corner of the desktop. If you want to install either of them on Foresight use the following commands:


sudo conary update avant-window-navigator
sudo conary update affinity


However, I do have some issues with compiz so if anybody out there has any solutions please let me know. Here are my issues:

• When I switch desktops with the Cube, i.e. alt+ctl+(left or right), it doesn't really switch desktops it just minimizes the open applications and then they will reappear after the cube spins around for the number of desktops I have, so after 4 spins. So to sum up I can't switch desktop with keyboard shortcuts.


• The desktop switcher in the bottom right corner will not display what applications are open on each desktop. It works fine without compiz enabled.

UPDATE:
I fixed Avant Window Manager to the correct name Avant-window-navigator. Sorry for any confusion.

Chicago Gnome User Group

I am interested in starting up a Gnome User Group in Chicago. If you or your friends are interested in joining/helping out with this group please join us in #gnome-chi on irc.gnome.org. If you know any Gnome developers or fan boys in the Chicagoland area let me know if they would be interested in our group.

Lights Camera Action

Videos of some previous presentations done at Chicago GLUG meetings have been posted here on our website. The current videos are for the following presentations: Dirvish by John Quigley, VSFTPD Virtual Users by myself and Objective-C by Yacin Nadji. Look for more videos of our presentations and events in the future.

[UPDATE]
The videos are licensed under the GFDL, so the videos are free to distribute in accordance with that license.

My Homepage Has Returned

It has been awhile since I had a homepage up, but now I have one back up. My homepage can be found here. I finally just decided to setup Apache on my current machine since my old server that 'died' has been robbed for parts to get my current machine back up and running. There will be updates to my homepage, once I get my blog software finished and move my blog away from blogger.

TurboGears: Gearing Up the Web

Today (Saturday, April 14th), I will be giving a presentation on TurboGears to the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group. If you would like to come to the meeting and hear my excellent presentation, the meeting is at Centro (444 N. Wells Suite 601 Chicago IL, 60610) at 3:00 pm. The other presentations for this meeting are Brewing and ZipIt Wireless Messenger. Yes, brewing does not deal first hand with GNU/Linux but what goes better with GNU/Linux than beer, ala 'Free As In Beer'.

If you would like to check out the demo code that I will be using for my presentation you can check out the code from my SVN repo:

svn co http://guido.specialkevin.com/svn/TurboGallery/TurboGallery-Demo

If you don't have/like svn you can download it here. If you would like to download my presentation slides you get them here(pdf, odp).

Hope to see you there.

[Update]
Sorry I forgot to give Nadav Samet credit for the demo code. Here wrote TurboGallery demo to show off the power of TurboGears during a presentation that he did and I really liked his example. Thanks again Nadav.

Chicago GLUG Groups and Services

This post is to inform everyone of the various services that the Chicago GLUG has to offer. If you notice that I am missing or we should add a certain a group or service please leave a comment with a link and a brief description.

Groups and Services

Last.fm Group

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you. So what our group does is that it combines all the track info from our members and generates charts based on our music tracks. It also generates a last.fm radio station based upon our track info. If you already have a last.fm account please join our group and tell your friends, if you don't have an account what are you waiting for.

Flickr Group

Flickr is a service that allows user to upload and host images. Our group is used to share images taken by our members at our events, screenshots and other just nerdy pictures. For example we have photos in our group from Stallman's talk and some of our meetings thanks to Jordan. If you already have a flickr account please join our group and share your photos with us. Also on a related note, if anybody has a digital camera and would be willing to take pictures at our meetings and maybe even the after-meeting hang out it would be greatly appreciated.

Facebook Group

Facebook is an English-language social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone to join with an email address that connects them to a participating network, such as their high school, place of employment or geographic region. If you have a facebook account please join our group we will send out party invites for our meetings through facebook just so we can notify as many people as possible of our meetings.

Mugshot Group

Mugshot is a community software system created by Red Hat. Unlike social networking websites, it also has a desktop client component. It is meant to facilitate real-world interactions with friends, and make one's normal computer use more social. Current features include 'Web Swarm' which lets users share web links and join in conversations about them, and 'Music Radar', which displays which songs a user is listening to, and allows conversations about the song. Many features are planned, including 'TV Party'. Mugshot is free software. Most of the client code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Various parts of the server code are distributed under the GPL, the Open Software License 3.0, the Apache License, and the MIT License, all of which are free software licences. So if you already have a mugshot account please join our group. If you need an invitation just let me know and I can send you an invite.

Google Calendar

Here is the google calendar for our group. Currently there are not that many items added to the group but we hope to fix this very shortly. This calendar is not just for our events but any events that might be interesting to our members. For instance, Ubuntu Chicago meetings, ChiPy meetings, UIC LUG meetings, Conferences in the area and other such things.

IRC
#chiglug on irc.oftc.net
#chiglug-server on irc.oftc.net

Those are our two irc channels the first one is our general channel. This is where a majority of our members hang out. Please stop by and say Hi, we won't bite. The second channel is for discussion of work being done on getting everything back running on our server. If you are interested in helping out with working on our server than please join that channel.

Chump
Chump RSS Feed

Chump is an IRC bot that pulls urls that are posted in our IRC channel and generates a website and rss feed containing the links. If you are in our IRC channel and need help working with Chump just ask someone that is in the channel.

Planet ChiGLUG
Planet ChiGLUG Feed

Planet is a blog aggregator that pulls in from blogs of local GNU/Linux enthusiast. If you would like your blog added to the planet, just send me a link to your blog and I will add it.

Mailing Lists

We currently have 2 mailing list: Announce and Discuss. The Announce list is just used to send out notification of meetings. The Discuss list is a general discussion list. Please sign up for the Announce list at a minimum it is a very low traffic mailing list and that way you will keep up with any changes that might arise to a meeting at the last minute.

Chicago GLUG Groups and Services

This post is to inform everyone of the various services that the Chicago GLUG has to offer. If you notice that I am missing or we should add a certain a group or service please leave a comment with a link and a brief description.

Groups and Services

Last.fm Group

Last.fm is a service that keeps track of what music you listen to, and then produces a large number of features personalised to you. So what our group does is that it combines all the track info from our members and generates charts based on our music tracks. It also generates a last.fm radio station based upon our track info. If you already have a last.fm account please join our group and tell your friends, if you don't have an account what are you waiting for.

Flickr Group

Flickr is a service that allows user to upload and host images. Our group is used to share images taken by our members at our events, screenshots and other just nerdy pictures. For example we have photos in our group from Stallman's talk and some of our meetings thanks to Jordan. If you already have a flickr account please join our group and share your photos with us. Also on a related note, if anybody has a digital camera and would be willing to take pictures at our meetings and maybe even the after-meeting hang out it would be greatly appreciated.

Facebook Group

Facebook is an English-language social networking website. It was originally developed for college and university students but has since been made available to anyone to join with an email address that connects them to a participating network, such as their high school, place of employment or geographic region. If you have a facebook account please join our group we will send out party invites for our meetings through facebook just so we can notifiy as many people as possible of our meetings.

Mugshot Group

Mugshot is a community software system created by Red Hat. Unlike social networking websites, it also has a desktop client component. It is meant to facilitate real-world interactions with friends, and make one's normal computer use more social. Current features include 'Web Swarm' which lets users share web links and join in conversations about them, and 'Music Radar', which displays which songs a user is listening to, and allows conversations about the song. Many features are planned, including 'TV Party'. Mugshot is free software. Most of the client code is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Various parts of the server code are distributed under the GPL, the Open Software License 3.0, the Apache License, and the MIT License, all of which are free software licences. So if you already have a mugshot account please join our group. If you need an invitation just let me know and I can send you an invite.

Google Calendar

Here is the google calendar for our group. Currently there are not that many items added to the group but we hope to fix this very shortly. This calendar is not just for our events but any events that might be interesting to our members. For instance, Ubuntu Chicago meetings, ChiPy meetings, UIC LUG meetings, Conferences in the area and other such things.

IRC
#chiglug on irc.oftc.net
#chiglug-server on irc.oftc.net

Those are our two irc channels the first one is our general channel. This is where a majority of our members hang out. Please stop by and say Hi, we won't bite. The second channel is for discussion of work being done on getting everything back running on our server. If you are interested in helping out with working on our server than please join that channel.

Chump
Chump RSS Feed

Chump is an IRC bot that pulls urls that are posted in our IRC channel and generates a website and rss feed containing the links. If you are in our IRC channel and need help working with Chump just ask someone that is in the channel.

Planet ChiGLUG
Planet ChiGLUG Feed

Planet is a blog aggregator that pulls in from blogs of local GNU/Linux enthusiest. If you would like your blog added to the planet, just send me a link to your blog and I will add it.

Mailing Lists

We currently have 2 mailing list: Announce and Discuss. The Announce list is just used to send out notification of meetings. The Discuss list is a general discussion list. Please sign up for the Announce list at a minimum it is a very low traffic mailling list and that way you will keep up with any changes that might arise to a meeting at the last minute.

A month with Epiphany

I decided that since Foresight has decided to have epiphany be the default browser I figured that I would give it try for a month and see how I like it. Today is the first day of this experiment, I have tried epiphany out before but I always find myself going back to firefox whenever I run into a problem. This time I am going to try and fix any issues that I run into. After using epiphany for a couple of hours I have generated an initial list of issues if anybody has any suggestions about fixing them they will be well appreciated.

ISSUES

• Session Saving: This is a big thing I miss from firefox. When epiphany opens it would be nice if it could open the tabs that were previously open.
  
• Have Cursor in Address Bar When New Tab Open: I would like to have the cursor be in the address bar when I open a new tab. This can be accomplished if I have the default home page be blank, but I would like to do this with a webpage set as the default home page.
  

If you have any solutions to these issues please leave a comment with the solution. Also if you know of any must need epiphany extensions please leave a comment with them.

March Madness

No, this post is not about NCAA March Madness even though maybe it should be since SIU was kicking ass until they ran into Kansas. Sorry to all my friends back home and down at SIU, I was hoping that Kansas would lose. This post is about the fun I have had so far this March. Some of you out there might have wonder why you haven't seen me online for a couple weeks and those of you who know me know that it would take a lot to keep me offline that long. Well I spent the beginning of March in the hospital, I was in there from March 1st to March 19th. I will use this post to inform everyone of what exactly happened.

The story begins March 1st when I went to the emergency room with sharp pains in my gut. The pain turned out to be due to gallstones. This in itself is rare for a man to get, let alone at the age of 21. So the doctors were already interested in my case and then their fun just continued. During a routine procedure before removing my gallbladder a complication arose, I contracted pancreatitis this only happens 5-7% of the time. So I am really starting to feel special after this considering everything that is happening is unlikely. But of course I am specialKevin so my fun was not over yet. My doctors noticed that my platelet levels were low and I was starting to bruise and my nose was bleeding and I had acute kidney failure. These were not symptoms of the pancreatitis but of a very rare blood condition known as Thrombotic Thrombocytopenic Purpura or TTP. TTP occurs in 3.5 people per million every year. TTP is such a rare and interesting illness that it was featured in an episode of House M.D. (Episode #119 Kids), not only this but the episode actually replayed while I was in the hospital suffering from TTP. The treatment for the TTP is plasmapheresis, where the take out my plasma and replace it with plasma from 17 other people. But another connection to House M.D. is that the plasmapheresis team that treated me was consulted by the staff of House M.D. on the procedure of plasmapheresis. I still have to get outpatient treatments of plasmapheresis to treat the TTP but it is nice to be out of the hospital, especially since that is not how I wanted to spend my birthday and spring break.

I would now like to thank everybody for their wishes and prayers. Also thanks to all my friends who came to visit me in the hospital and help to make the best out of my birthday.

Cooking with Conary

Tonight I had some free time between school and work, so I gave some conary love to some programs. I first upgraded rTorrent to version 0.7.1 this was in much need as the previous version was 0.6.*. If you would like to install rTorrent and run a conary based system, i.e. Foresight 1.0 just run:

UPDATE
sudo conary update --install-label specialk.rpath.org@rpl:devel update rtorrent

I also gave some needed care to Tilda, this is upgraded to 0.9.4. Some new features of this release is a cleaned up preferences screen, desktop file so it gets added to the menu. Here is a screenshot of tilda in action. I am looking for someone running compiz to help test out tilda, if you are interested just let me know in #foresight on freenode or #tilda on oftc. Just look for specialKevin in either channel. As usual if you want to install tilda and you should, just run:

UPDATE
sudo conary update --install-label specialk.rpath.org@rpl:devel update tilda

UPDATE
Sorry for the confuse for anybody trying to install tilda or rtorrent, I fixed the command to install tilda or rtorrent. You need to use the --install-label flag so it uses my repo to grab the dependencies of the main program.