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Sunday, October 19. 2008
Central PA Open Source Conference
Having just returned from the Central PA Open Source Conference, I found it to be a very informative and useful conference. A wide array of interesting topics in different fields were covered, and there were many items I can apply over the next few months to my own projects.
My favorite session was Hardware and Honeybees, in large part because it showed interesting uses for technology and hardware hacking, something as a software-oriented person I do not see much of. Using cell phone text messages to control electric fences, web cameras to monitor hive status, and inexpensive temperature monitors to find problems were all topics in this interesting talk.
My favorite session was Hardware and Honeybees, in large part because it showed interesting uses for technology and hardware hacking, something as a software-oriented person I do not see much of. Using cell phone text messages to control electric fences, web cameras to monitor hive status, and inexpensive temperature monitors to find problems were all topics in this interesting talk.
Blender has come a long way since I first used it years ago. I had not used it recently, but it now has much enhanced hair, skin, and animation rendering support, even including a realistic physics simulator. It is now used around the world for TV and business animation needs (although much less in the US than in the rest of the world).
When using Asterisk, there are many third party SIP providers which remove the need to buy phone line interface cards and do the interface with the phone network manually. These vary widely from area to area; watch out for billing gotchas which can result in your lines being down until resolved.
Puppet came up in a couple of talks, it provides useful automation for common system administration tasks including configuration file management.
Looking for a two factor authentication system without the expense of something like RSA SecureID? Check out the Yubico Yubikey. This device is inexpensive (~$30), has many open source identity solutions, and cross platform support. Two factor authentication server software for your enterprise as well as various web based authentication solutions are available.
These are only a few highlights of what I learned here. Hopefully this will become a yearly event.
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