Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the Texas Linux Fest in Austin, TX. The talks that I enjoyed most today was how to help the open source community when your not a software developer. I also had the pleasure of attending a talk on UFRaw by Udi Fuchs. I have been using UFRaw to process some of my photos from the Raw format to JPG.

David Cramer and Janet Swisher spoke about Benefiting from the Skills of Non-programmers. I have heard Janet speak on this topic before at the Texas Open Source Symposium in San Angelo. As always Janet was able to give many examples of how non-programmers can contribute to projects. Some ways to help are by answering questions online, submitting new feature requests and bug reports.

I also attended a talk on the Intersection of Open Source Software and Education by Max Spevack. Max discussed the need for educators to promote open source in the educational environment as an alternative to commercial software. One of the programs Max spoke about was UCOSP - Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects which might be usable by the McMurry computer science program.

The closing keynote address was by Randal L. Schwarts entitled Free Software: A Look Back, a Look Ahead. Randal reiterated many of the same things that Janet discussed earlier in the day.

On a more personal note, while I was unable to get good pictures during the lectures, I was able to take some nice snapshots of hot rods which were in Austin for the Lone Star Rod and Kustom Round Up.

Metro Tech in Oklahoma City held the fourth annual Moodle Moot Oklahoma this week. This event is growing in size and importance. This years event was larger than last years and was stretched to three days to better accommodate those just getting in to Moodle for the first time. Over the two days of the actual Moodle Moot conference there were thirty nine sessions divided in to five tracks. There were attendees from as far away as New Zealand along with England and Belgium. Most attendees were from Oklahoma, Kansas and Texas.