CTE Visions

Start an Open-Source Radio Station
Michael Place – XMission Internet

I had no expectations for this presentation and walked in thinking that I would just be there to waste time and maybe learn a little something about Internet Radio.

Wow, I was amazed. This presentation was extremly entertaining and full of all sorts of information. Michael had taken a local community FM station that suddenly fired their daytim on-air volunteers, and built a new home for them online. From the on-air desktop machine to the backend databases and their ISP to ther custom features on their site, UtahFM is based entirely around Open Source.

Michael was great, he has had some years of experience doing this and with that he would explain how to do this a cheap but yet a good way. He would explain why you don’t need the most expensive equipment to get started.

Again I was amazed with this presentation and it intrigued me enough to start looking into recording and maybe do some streaming myself. Of course this is just to play with and nothing like what Michael has done.

Google App Engine 101
Jonathan Elli

Google App Engine allows running applications on the Google infrastructure, including BigTable, Google’s non-relational and massibely scalable database.

The tutorial coved the basics of App Engine developement, including development and deployment of a simple application.

Jonathan presented this part very well and he explained what was needed to to do the job such as Django. Even though I could get the impression that Jonathan was not excited or happy to work with Django he would admit that it was the best tool for the project at the moment.

I enjoyed how Jonathan presented his lecture in about 35 mins and then left the rest of the time to build a basic project and ask for his help and assistance. At this point in the presentation though I did not have much battery life on my laptop so I did not get the chance to push my limits with this.