John Costanzo

CPOSC Event

Yesterday October 18, 2009 I went to and Open source conference in Harrisburg PA called CPOSC(Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference). Basically this conference discusses applications that are open source and can help you or your company. Another thing this conference gives you is the ability to meet other people that you can network with. There were a lot of different seminars that you could attend to. Each seminar you had 3 choices that you could only choose one.

Nagios Well you have seen me do a tutorial on this app but it was a good thing for me. I learned about how you can manage your critical and warning levels. That was huge. I learned about how you can connect multiple servers.

Drupal This seminar talked about how you can use Drupal on your site. Drupal is a CMS tool and they have definitely come a long way.

IRC IRC chat is something that a lot of people go for help. I learned about how you can setup your own channel for your friends and or customers to get instant help. I learned that Freenode which is a popular server has about 51,000 users. In the next few days I will be setting up #jcwebconcepts for my readers to come ask questions.

Python The next seminar I watch was about the programming language called Python. Now I did not get a tutorial on how to make an application but I was shown some ways that Python makes some difficult code easier. Might have to look into learning some python but I am not sure.

VirtualBox I got to learn on how to use the nice tool to setup virtual machines. I learned on some ways to setup development servers to test things rather than using real hardware. I definitely will be setting it up on my Linux machines since on my Mac’s I use Parallels.

In between seminars in the lobby there were sponsors from places like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Zenoss. What was cool is you got to talk to these people and make contacts with their companies. There were more classes but I ended up leaving early. Now this conference was not free but it was well worth the information I received. To get more information you can visit CPOSC site for more information.n