Michael Meffie

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

Rest in peace,
Ed Frank
August 24, 1966 - December 8, 2009

The OhioLinuxFest will be held on September 25th to the 27th 2009 in Columbus, Ohio.

This year’s theme is “40 years of UNIX” - keynote speakers are Doug McIlroy, the man who invented UNIX pipes, and Shawn Powers, Associate Editor of Linux Journal. It’s not just a look back; there are presentations on Drupal, Ruby on Rails, using Python for system administration, Samba, web application security, and many more subjects likely to be useful to you in running your Linode.

As noted, basic registration (aka the Enthusiast package) is free, and gets you into the Early Penguins’ Track talks and pre-party on Friday as well as the main event and after party on Saturday. Springing for the $65 Supporter package also gets you the cool t-shirt and lunch on Saturday. If that isn’t enough, you can opt for the $350 Professional package adding OLFU training where you can pick an LPI cram session or courses on disaster recovery, LDAP, spam filtering, and more. Any novices you bring along may be interested in the $250 Quick Start package which gets them a computer pre-installed with Ubuntu and instruction in getting started with Linux.

The schedule of events will help you sort out all your options. You can sign up for the free Enthusiast package initially and later upgrade to one of the others (deadline is noon, Friday September 18). You’ll also want to book your hotel room ASAP before they sell out.

Sunday offers the Diversity in Open Source workshop and the opportunity to take the LPI or BSDA certification tests.

There’s a lot going on, but you are free to pick and choose the days and subjects based on your availability and interest. As far as I am able I will answer questions on scheduling and options in this thread, or for a definitive answer you can reach the organizers.

See you in Columbus.

The Ohio LinuxFest will be held on the weekend of September 25, 2009 in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Registration is now open for attendees. Once again, a Supporter and Professional level registration packages are available to help support the event.

OLPC is running the get one/give one program again this year, and this time I didn’t want to miss out. I ordered the xo laptop at Amazon and it arrived one day later (even with standard shipping). So far, I have been very pleased with the device. The main reason I purchased the xo is I wanted a very portable machine with a sunlight viewable screen. I spend much of my time in ssh, so I dont need a powerful machine. Of course the main drawback of the xo is the keyboard, which is about completely unusable to my fat fingers. Fortunately, external usb keyboards work fine, and so I’m using a spare keyboard for the time being. I will look into buying a small but usable keyboard.

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second orders half a beer. The third, a quarter of a beer. The bartender says “You’re all idiots”, and pours two beers.

It’s hard to believe it’s already time for the sixth Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher went above and beyond this year. The LinuxFest just would have not happened if it wasn’t for her leadership, time, and energy. The Open Source and Free Software community owe her a great deal of gratitude.

I hope to see you in Columbus this weekend.

The deadline for the Ohio LinuxFest Call for Papers is August 15th. Please consider submitting an application if you would like to present at this year’s conference. Topics related to free and open source software will be considered.

It is official, the next Ohio LinuxFest will be on October 11, 2008 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center, in downtown Columbus Ohio. This will be the sixth annual LinuxFest. We all owe a huge thank you Beth Lynn Eicher and Greg Boehnlein for securing the venue for this year’s event, as well for all the work they have done to make the Ohio LinuxFest a huge success.

“Freedom is a Feature”. Those were the words of the morning keynote speaker Max Spevack, Fedora Project Leader, at the fifth annual Ohio LinuxFest. Max did not go into details about the fedora project, but rather stepped back and talked about free software more broadly. Max set the stage for a great day in Columbus.

We had a great crew of organizers this year, and most everything when off without a hitch. As one of the organizers, I normally do not get to see as many talks as I would like, but this year, with some extra planning (and experience) I was able to see a number of presentations. I particularly enjoyed the Puppet talk given Luke Kanies, by the creator and maintainer of Puppet.

Bradley Kuhn’s closing keynote was also a highlight of the event. Bradley talked about what was going on behind the scenes at the FSF during the SCO trial. We all know how that turned out, but Bradley cautioned that next time we might not be so lucky.

And after a great day of learning, it was time for the famous Ohio LinuxFest after-party, which I must say was impressive. Several hundred people came to the party to enjoy the food, drinks, and music. NOTACON did a fantastic job with the entertainment. DualCore was brilliant and the games were hysterical. So much fun was had, we had an after-after party at the Drury. A good time had by all.

Well, now it’s time to start getting ready for next year.

The speaker schedule for the fifth annual Ohio LinuxFest has been announced. The line up includes Max Spevack of Fedora and Bradley Kuhn from the Freedom Law Center, and formally the Executive Director of the FSF, as well as numerous other speakers on a variety of topics. The event registration deadline is September 21, so register now to get a seat!