Speaking at UTOSC 2009

Those of you in or near Utah may be interested to know that this year's Utah Open Source Conference is on the horizon. There's a full schedule at this conference, and I'm please to announce that I will be making two presentations this year. I thought I'd let you know what I'll be presenting on, using the text from the program descriptions:

Monitoring Your Servers
Friday, October 9, 6:15pm
Monitoring servers has become increasingly important in recent years, as downtime has become increasingly unacceptable. Countless tools exist to notify admins when downtime occurs, and possibly raise flags beforehand to keep it from happening in the first place. This session will explore some of the tools available, and discuss which ones are most appropriate for certain situations.

Object Oriented Cooking
Saturday, October 10, 4:45pm

It seems that more and more geeks are discovering a fascination with cooking. Whether you're a geek that lives to cook or just cooks to live, Object Oriented Cooking is for you! Geek chef Joseph Hall will show you how smaller recipes can become objects, ready to be included on a whim in larger recipes. As you begin to understand how code reuse can happen in the kitchen, your meals will become both easier and tastier.

Of course, the problem with making two presentations instead of one, like in years past, is that now I have to prepare twice as much content to present. The first year I was talked into teaching a cooking class, even though it wasn't technically computer-related. The second year, I taught a Perl class instead, partly in order to stay on topic with the rest of the conference. By popular demand (I had people asking about it as early as last year's conference) the cooking class is back this year, but with a twist: I'm trying to present cooking in a format which is more familiar to geeks.

The server monitoring session is something that I'm planning to use to explain my own personal quest to keep an eye on my servers, both at home, and at work. Mostly at work. Because of my specific needs, some solutions were more appropriate than others. Obviously, your needs will probably vary. The idea is not necessarily to describe specific technologies, but to help identify which technologies are most appropriate for your specific needs.

If past years are any indication, then we're going to be in for an exciting conference in general. If you haven't registered yet, now's the time.