Our friends at the Utah Open Source Conference are organizing a great community event at the Salt Lake City Community College this October. They have an amazing speaker line up with over 50 presentations, workshops, and tutorials. (schedule). Keynotes will include a frequent SCALE speaker Stormy Peters, Adobe’s Dave McAllister, and Daren Brabham.

Other special events taking place at UTOSC are Ignite Salt Lake City, Fedora Activity Day, Try It Lab, and even a board game night.

The third annual Utah Open Source Conference is being held October 8, 9 and 10. For more information, please their website at http://2009.utosc.com/ or register online. Past SCALE attendees can receive a 50% discount on registration by use the promotional code SCALE.

Mark your calendars,  the dates and venue for the 2010 Southern California Linux Expo have been set.  Our 8th annual event will return to the Westin LAX Hotel on February 19th-21st, 2010.  We look forward to seeing you all there.

Our friends at Usenix asked that we pass along a message about their upcoming event in June.  They have included a discount code bellow for SCALE attendees.

-Ilan

The 2009 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ‘09) will take place June 14-19, 2009, in San Diego, CA.

Join leading researchers and practitioners in San Diego, CA, for 6 full days on the latest systems research and cutting-edge practices, including training by industry experts such as Peter Baer Galvin on Solaris, David N. Blank-Edelman on system administration, and Phil Cox on virtualization.

Starting June 17, technical sessions include invited talks such as the keynote address by James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services; Plenary Closing by David Brin, science fiction author; and the latest systems research in the Refereed Papers track.

Stay competitive and learn ground-breaking practices from researchers from around the globe. Topics include virtualization, Solaris, system administration, security, cloud computing, and more.

SCALE attendees receive a discount! Use SCLATC09 when registering to receive $100 off your registration.

Register by June 1 and save up to $300!
http://www.usenix.org/usenix09/scl

The audio recordings from the presentations at SCALE 7x are finally available. The links for the talks are on the Conference Schedule.

If there’s no link for a session, it either means it wasn’t recorded, or the recording wasn’t usable for some reason.

Enjoy!

At SCALE, we’re always trying new things.   Some work, some don’t; some make big impacts, some don’t, but are still worthwhile.  In that latter category, we have the SCALE 7x Expo Floor Time Lapse, aka “SCALE 7x - The Movie”

Mike Maki, a member of the Tech Committee, put a camera on top of the Tech Committee booth on the Expo floor.  Using an external disk drive and gphoto2, he captured an image of the Expo floor.  Starting Thursday night, until the Expo was completely torn down, the camera took a photo every 15 seconds.

Mike has made an MPEG4 movie out of the images, using mencoder and Kino (for titles, etc.)  It’s not Gone With the Wind, but it’s worth a view.  Pay close attention to how quickly the Expo floor gets torn down (hint - don’t blink)  It’s here on Youtube.

Enjoy!

Lisa Hoover of OSTATIC published an interview with Gareth Greenaway, the Operations and Community Chair of SCALE.  It’s very well written - worth a read.

We’ve been trying to document what goes on at SCALE every year. Not just in written documents; we’ve tried audio recordings and some video with mixed success.

This year SBLUG will be assisting us with video recordings of the sessions, the keynotes, and the expo floor (props to Tom King and his crew!)

Ilan, the SCALE Chair, scored an opportunity for us to try out some spiffy new audio recording gear from a startup. That startup is the Trinity Audio Group, and they have a nifty product called the Trinity. Here’s a picture of it:

We’ll have an opportunity to test them out, as Trinity Audio has loaned SCALE two of them to try out for “man in the street” audio recordings!

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We finished assembling the program and sent it off to the printers for proof. By assemble, I mean we gave all the ads, bios, and schedules and other content to Ron Golan, our graphics arts guru. He assembled them, posted a draft PDF online, and we critqued it, all in the SCALE IRC channel. When done, Ilan pushed it onto the printer’s FTP site. We had to send it back to them again due some issue with ads and transparencies, but they turned it around quickly. Here’s more evidence that SCALE has grown: the program last year was 12 pages. This year it’s 20 pages. And props to Ron for putting out an excellent piece of work! We’ve used Dot Graphics in Chatsworth for our printing needs for the last three or four years, and they’ve been very responsive to our requirements and the products have been of good quality. We’ve used them for programs, posters and other signage, and postcards (both printing and mailing). Recommended.