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It's official: I will be presenting again at this year's Utah Open Source Conference. Unlike last year, this will not be a cooking demo. Guru Labs has given me permission to present an excerpt from our upcoming course, Shell Scripting for System Administration. Specifically, I will be giving an introduction to the Perl programming language. Barring any unforeseen events, I'm also planning on having handouts.

This presentation will be targeted at those who are already comfortable in a shell environment, but have decided to move beyond the confines of classic shell scripting. I've often told people that there is a point in which a Bash script can become so advanced that it is time to port it over to another language. This generally happens about the time the script needs to handle any kind of non-integer math, or do any other kind of real thinking. There are a variety of excellent languages out there suitable for system administration, and I have enjoyed working with Perl for years.

Speaking of the other languages, I'm delighted to see that Matt Harrison will be presenting on "90% of the Python you need to know". Python has certainly become another important language in the tool of system administration, especially in the Red Hat and Gentoo worlds. Even better, that presentation is scheduled far apart enough from mine that I can attend it as well. I also saw a presentation on the list for Ruby, another up and coming language in the sysadmin world, but it doesn't look like so much of a "getting started in Ruby" type thing.

Those of you who haven't registered yet for the conference, now's the time to do it. The price of admission goes up August 7th, so sooner is better than later. Also, if you're a member of one of the LUGs in Utah, you'll want to check with your group officers and see if they have a promotional code for you to get a discount.

I'm really looking forward to this year's conference. We'll see you there!

Labels: UTOSC

Yesterday I taught a cooking class of sorts at the Utah Open Source Conference. The topic was "Applying open source to more than the computer industry", which is probably just about the closest we could come to relating open source to cooking, at least for the moment. Because the Greek Festival is this weekend, and most of the attendees for the conference won't be able to make it, I decided to bring some Greek food to the geek festival.

In the space of 45 minutes or so, I cooked two dishes. One was my black bean hummus that I previously published. Another was a dish that I had cooked at home a few times, but did not yet have a name for. I was asked to give away a free book, and thanks to a suggestion from a classmember, I decided to give it away to the person who came up with the best name for my dish. Greg Hendricks, the lead developer for Testopia, came up with the name, "Feta Grep". As promised, here is the recipe.

Feta Grep

2 tablespoons Greek extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion, medium dice
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 pounds ground beef (or 1 pound ground beef + 1 pound ground lamb)
4 roma tomatoes, medium dice
2 tablespoons Greek oregano
1/4 cup fresh chopped flatleaf parsley
1 to 2 lemons, juiced
Kosher salt to taste
black pepper to taste
pita bread
feta cheese

Saute the onion and garlic in oil for a couple of minutes with a bit of salt. Add the ground meat, and season liberally with additional salt and pepper. Brown the meat. Add the tomatoes and the Greek oregano. Cook for a couple more minutes, stirring occassionally, and then add the parsley and the juice of a lemon. Check the flavor, and add more lemon juice (or salt, pepper or Greek oregano) as needed. Serve on pita bread with a generous sprinkling of feta cheese. Do not stir in the feta while it is cooking. It will actually taste better if added when served.

Note: I seem to have underseasoned the mixture during the demo. Remember to check your seasoning as you cook, and don't get caught up in talking to an audience of 30 people or so, like I did.

As I was busy cooking, I wasn't able to take any photos. But I did see some cameras in the room. If anyone has any photos that I can post, they would be appreciated.

Labels: UTOSC