Jordy Blog

January Geek Dinner

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.

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SSS is a Hit!

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.

Software for Starving Students v 2006.01

Well, after a lot of hard work from the Software for Starving Students dev team, the latest version of SSS is available just in time for the oncoming semester. Dave Turnbull made some major GUI enhancements that will make it way easier to navigate, and there were lots of new programs, updates, and screenshots added.

The BitTorrent for this release has actually been seeded for over a day, but I didn’t finish the press release until about 1:30 this morning. Just a few minutes later there were already 19 downloads started, and I’ve contacted a lot of people since. I think there will be a huge amount of action this morning when people start waking up, but it may be a little sluggish because of the weekend. So it will be interesting to see if the amount of traffic makes a good dent. I’ve never really used BitTorrent (pathetic – I know) so I’m excited to find out.

SoftwareFor is doing some really neat stuff that I’ll discuss in later posts; I’ve got to get to bed!