Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

SouthEast LinuxFest Announces Partial Speaker List

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SPARTANBURG, SOUTH CAROLINA - April 5, 2010 - With less than 90 days until the 2010 SouthEast LinuxFest, event organizers are proud to announce 22 speakers known worldwide for their work in the Linux and free/libre open source software communities. These speakers include:

Ryan "Icculus" Gordon

Known as “the entire Linux gaming industry.” Ryan has ported major commercial game titles to Linux, including Doom III, Unreal Tournament, and countless others.

D. Richard Hipp

Author of SQLite, Fossil, and CVSTrac. SQLite has become ubiquitous and is used everywhere from Mozilla Firefox to the iPhone.

Tarus Balog

Lead Developer and CEO of The OpenNMS Group, which has provided enterprise grade network management software developed under the open source model.

Wendy Seltzer

Member of the board of directors for the Tor Project Founder of Chilling Effects and OpenLaw projects, and liaison to ICANN. Former attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It if deals with rights, freedom, or privacy in the digital realm, odds are Wendy is or has been involved in some way.

Jono Bacon

Community Manager for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, Canonical employee, former co-host of the LUGradio podcast, and current co-host of the FLOSS Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. Metal Rockstar!

Bradley Kuhn

Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, as well as President of the Software Freedom Conservancy and Director of FSF. Bradley is dedicated to promoting the benefits of licensing that ensure software freedom, as well as defending it from potential threats and abuses from proprietary software.

Klaatu von Schlecten Apfel

Host of the Bad Apples and Fedora Reloaded podcasts and correspondent for Hacker Public Radio, Klaatu is a multimedia artist and maintainer of slackermedia.info and the SlackBuilds for LiVES, freetalk, and HandBrake. He has written articles for Linux Journal and Linux Identity magazines.

Dru Lavigne

Director at the FreeBSD Foundation, she has written several books on BSD.

Pat Davil

Co-host of both MythTVCast, and the The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) podcasts.

C. Tyler McAdams

Project Architect at the LinuxDNA project, Tyler puts a whole new meaning to fast by having Linux kernels compiled under the Intel C/C++ Compiler (ICC).

Barry Grundy

A supervisory criminal investigator (special agent) with the US Federal Government, Barry specializes in Linux forensics and its practical applications.

Mackenzie Morgan

A developer and bug wrangler for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. When she is not quashing bugs with extreme prejudice, she's probably improving the end user experience in a variety of areas.

Alan Hicks

Slackware developer who also co-wrote SlackBook.

Dann Washko

Co-host of the The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS), Dann also is a wealth of practical knowledge in all areas of desktop Linux.

Stephen Spector

Community manager for Xen, which allows multiple operating systems to be run on the same computer through hardware supported virtualization.

Daniel Walsh

Daniel leads the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) project and is also involved in secure virtualization.

Paul Frields

Fedora Project Leader and Chairman of the Fedora Project Board. Paul is involved in seemingly everything in Fedora from package maintenance to security to documentation.

Greg DeKoenigsberg

Senior Community Architect at Red Hat, founder and first chairman of the Fedora Project Board and Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. Greg currently holds a position on the oversight board for Sugar Labs. Within the Fedora community he holds the distinguished honor of being recognized as 'Lord of the Plow'

Max Spevack

Manager of Red Hat's community architecture team, and former Fedora Project Leader, Max now defines and executes Red Hat's global community strategy.

Michael DeHaan

Michael currently works for Reductive Labs (now Puppet Labs), who develops puppet, a configuration management tool for systems administrators. Michael is the former lead developer for cobbler, an automated provisioning tool.

Baron Schwartz

Director of consulting at Percona, Baron wrote 'High Performance MySQL' which has become the definitive work on the subject. In addition, Baron has created maatkit, better cacti templates, and innotop.

Russell Bryant

Engineering Manager for the open source software team at Digium, Russell is a core member of the Asterisk open source PBX development team. He was Asterisk's first release maintainer when Asterisk 1.0 was released.

The SouthEast LinuxFest plans to extend more than double this lineup of speakers over time. The Call For Papers is still open and will remain so until May 1st, despite an early showing that more than fills our speaking slots.

Charleston Eats: Smoky Oak Taproom

Half rack dry rub rib platter with baked beans and hash and rice

CREATESouth 2010

This is what I'll be doing this weekend. How about you?

Charleston Eats: Halls Chophouse

Sunday brunch at Hall's Chophouse

Oysters Rockefeller

Shrimp Cocktail

Crabcake Benedict

Fast jets

After seeing (and hearing) the Blue Angels doing practice flights over downtown for the past few days, I headed out to see the second day of their air show this afternoon. I joined a bunch of other Aquarium staff and volunteers up on the third floor terrace, which provided some reasonably decent views of the Blue Angels show. Not quite as unobstructed a view as being down on the riverside terrace, but still a pretty good view of the show. Even managed to get a few good shots, although I missed the low altitude pass one of the jets made.

CREATESouth fun

Saturday was roadtripping up to Myrtle Beach for CREATESouth 2010. Only got there a little bit late.

This year's event turned out to be another good time, like last year was. Looked like attendance was up from last year. Started off with good keynote talks by Tee Morris and Mur Lafferty. Came in during the second half of Tee's keynote. Really liked Mur Lafferty's keynote talk. Big emphasis on social media this year. After going to Tom Lucas' talk on Google Buzz, I decided to give it a closer look. Seemed a lot like Friendfeed, so I hadn't really paid much attention to it.

There were several iPads around, so the other thing I came away from CREATESouth with was a case of iPad envy. I want. I need.

Yes, Tee Morris really is wearing bunny ears.

Another delicious BBQ lunch by Andre Pope.

Tee offering some sound advice in his "Remaining Safe in Social Media" talk

What social media is all about, according to Jared

See the rest of the photos.

Smoked pork goodness

Smoked pork, smashed potatoes, green beans topped off with a brownie for dessert.

Another fantastic Friday Night Dinner at Ted's Butcherblock.

Kick-Ass at the Hippodrome

Saw Kick-Ass at the Hippodrome this evening. Didn't really think much about it when I first heard about the movie, but after hearing the buzz about it online and from some friends, I decided what the heck.

I still didn't expect much out of it but the movie ended up vastly exceeding my expectations. There's a lot of big action that really begs to be seen on a Really Big Screen. Sure, parts of it are cheesy and covered up with spurts of over-the-top comic book violence, but it was a fun movie to watch and I quite enjoyed myself. Plus, it was at the Hippodrome, and I always enjoy myself when I get to see movies there. Seriously, after you see a few movies here you'll never want to go back to the puny (by comparison) multi-plex theater screens.

With all the people being shot in the head, blown up, exploded and stabbed, it's definitely not a movie to bring kids to.

PhD Year 1

Wrote the final exam in my Biotransport class today, finishing off the first year of my PhD.

Only about 4 or 5 more to go.

For the next few months all I have to think about now are just work and research. I don't expect things to get less busy over the summer.

Time to figure out how to build an MPI enabled version of MCNP. Should be fun.

Every time I think about that, I hear the Emperor saying "Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational workstation".

Yeah, I'm that nerdy.

Cliq: Almost month 4

Almost 4 months and two firmware updates later. Contacts list got corrupted somehow so I had to do a hard reset on it about a week ago. Before it was doing quite nicely with battery life, but now post-reset the Cliq is back to its old battery sucking ways.

I've gone through and changed all the notification frequencies of all the apps I could find to longer time intervals, which has helped some. It's still not back to pre-reset battery consumption levels though. Will have to dig some more to see if there's anything else I can change.

The number for the cell phone has been seeded in a few places and to a few people. At least I know the area code and prefix now.

Return of the Spicy Tunas

Perhaps against my better judgement, I'll be going back to Bushido next Friday (May 7) to attempt to finish off the Spicy Tuna challenge.

Won't be doing it alone though. There will be a few local Twitter-folk looking to complete the challenge as well, so I'll be in good company.

The future called. I'm a winner!

Found in my email this morning

It is obvious that this notification will come to you as a surprise but please find time to read it carefully as we congratulate you over your success in the following official publication of results of the E-mail electronic online Sweepstakes organized by Microsoft Corporation ,in conjunction with the foundation for the promotion of software products,(F.P.S.) held this morning 230th November 2010 here in Jakarta-Indonesia, A winning prize of $2,500.000.00 (Two Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) will be issued in your name.It is important to note that your award was released with the following particulars attached to it.