Jordy Blog

It’s good to see some of Provo Labs’ Blastyx videos coming together. The Blastyx team has put a lot of work into these, and I think they’re doing a pretty good job. I especially liked “taking it out on monitor” at the end. Pretty cool, and pretty funny. Reminds me of my friend Dave Skousen who once asked my to gather a bunch of computers and monitors to blow up for some special effects stuff he was doing. Fun stuff.

I’m sure there’ll be much more renegade video to come. As a side note, these are being hosted (temporarily at least) on the CentOS Linux server that Gabe and I set up. It’s fun to see it get used.

If you liked this post, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

This UEC business plan competition is a great opportunity for aspiring business students in Utah.  Grand prize is $40,000.  Some great little busineses have come out of this, so if you have a good idea and a good team, give it a shot.  There’s still time to register.

This free broken link checker is a cool service for webmasters. I found and fixed 2 broken links on my blog. I guess I’d better be a bit more careful. :)

I’m using a great free DNS service for the Provo Labs small business portfolio. EveryDNS lets you manage up to 20 URLs for free, but you get an unlimited number for 15 bucks or so. EveryDNS is a pretty cool service because it doesn’t abstract the details from you, and it’s much better to just do it yourself than wait for some dude to change it for you, especially if you plan on making a lot of changes like fast-moving companies do. Plus you (hopefully) get the added comfort of knowing it was done right, without having to make a bunch of phone calls and wait.

DevUtah’s recent Geek Dinner was successful. The food was good but may have been a little too sparse for a guy who had missed lunch. It was good to meet some of the people who volunteered to help out though. We’ve got a lot to do, but I think we have the momentum to make things happen.

I was particularly happy to hear Stuart Jansen and others say that DevUtah needs a calendar for tech events in Utah. I’ve spent a lot of time in the past posting a myriad of user groups’ announcements to uvlug.org, but it can be really time consuming. Hopefully with DevUtah we’ll have an easy way for everyone to post events to a joint calendar so we can have more cross pollination between user groups, solo-nerds, and business folks.

Geek dinners are just one way that DevUtah is is trying to create a culture of collaboration in Utah. I think these events will be positive force for Utah business, especially in the tech sector. I hope everyone is making some good contacts, and I hope that some of those will be foundations for successful ventures in Utah.

We finally posted details about the upcoming Geek Dinner. I wanted to give the DevUtah site an overhaul first, but alas, no time. Here they are:

DevUtah’s next Geek Dinner will be held at 6:00 this Tuesday night at the Miller Business Innovation Center on the Salt Lake Community College campus (9690 South 300 West, Sandy).

We’ll have two short educational presentations by accomplished attorneys who will discuss legal topics for geeks. Nathan Nelson will talk about legal aspects of selling your software concepts, starting your own software development company (code shop), or becoming an independent developer. David McKenzie will discuss popular myths about software patents and copyright ownership relating to contractors.

We will also have a brief mini-presentation by Dave Turnbull from SoftwareFor.org, who will talk about some of the successes and failures of the last release of “Software for Starving Students”, which had over 25,000 downloads in just a few days.

The event will be catered by Panache Catering. Each attendee is required to contribute $7 to help cover the costs. Attendees are strongly encouraged to prepay burnsadria@hotmail.com via PayPal, although cash and checks will also be accepted at the door.

Hope to see you there.

From their post:

“We will have our first Utah Asterisk Users’ Group meeting January 11th at 7:00 pm. it will be held in the conference room of the executive suites at Willow Creek Plaza. The address is 8160 S. Highland Drive, Sandy UT.

“We will be giving out free DID’s to all in attendance. We will also be giving out a few paperback O’Reilly books.

“Here is a tentative schedule for our first meeting:
7:00 refreshments
7:05 welcome
7:10 discussion about pronunciation of UTAUG
7:12 vote
7:15 Dave Packham! (Author of config Edit)
7:34 refreshments
7:40 more interesting speaking
7:45 raffle and games
7:46 Jared Smith! (Author of IAX2 Trunking )
8:00 refreshments
8:06 determine UTAUG objectives
8:15 mystery activity
and more!

UTAUG map and driving directions

This is great news for open source fans in Utah. Asterisk is an open source PBX that totally rules.

Update:

My company now does contract and consulting work to support Asterisk, OpenSIPS (OpenSER), FreeSWITCH and other VoIP / telephony servers and applications. We have a lot of experience and a broad industry knowledge, so if you need some paid support, please let me know and we’d be happy to help!

A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.

We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.