This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Anyone who is feeling generous, feel free to buy me this poster, called "Tango with Evil". It's my desktop background.

(courtesy of fuzzix)

LugRadio Live 2006 is over. Eight months of planning all for three days. The happiness nosedive is massive after LRL; leaves me wanting to organise another one next week just so I can make it all happen again. It was wonderful. What a great weekend. A few things I ought to call out as specifically superb:

Kat's cakes

Kat made cakes for the evening party, which went down a storm.

Huw Lynes

Huw declared just before the big day that Bruno Bord is a being of unimaginable evil to convince people to come to his talk instead. Quality humour that man, although I ought to point out that that trick didn't work when Jono tried it for Guadec.

Pictures, pictures, pictures

Like all events and all things, we have a selection of photos on Flickr. Some of them are really cool, although none of the ones with my lack of beard in them.

People i wanted to speak to

Once again, just like last year, hundreds of cool people flood through the door and I only get to speak to a tiny fraction of them. People this year who I particularly wanted to chat to for five minutes and didn't really get the chance because I was too busy: Mike Hearn, Michael Meeks, Matt Zimmerman, Mark Shuttleworth, Drew Mclellan and Rachel Andrew, Simon Willison, lex Hudson, Des Burley, and plenty of others besides. I wish it could be a week long.

Talks I wanted to see

Similarly to people, there are talks. I never get to see any talks at LRL, it seems. This year I saw four talks from beginning to end: Bruno's one about Lugradio; Mark Shuttleworth's N Big Challenges, Kat, Jen, and Phated's one about women in open source; and LugRadio Live and Unleashed, which hardly counts because that was us. I caught the latter half of Mike Hearn's, confirming my opinion that what he's describing is the right way to go about things even if no-one listens. That was it. There were so many good things going on. Perhaps too many, in fact, which leads me on to...

Things wrong

Lots of people have said: there were loads of times when stuff I wanted to watch clashed. Now, that's part and parcel of being at an event; there are always going to be clashes. However, a couple of people remarked that there were points when they wanted to go to the main stage talk and both the lightning talks and a BOF all at the same time. I'm not sure what we can do about this, since the only two approaches I can think of are (a) make LRL longer, which is problematic (it involves time off work then, and we're not the sort of event that your firm pays for you to attend) or (b) have less stuff going on, which basically means making the weekend less good! Suggestions on a postcard for that one. The air conditioning: yes, yes, we know. We don't have a lot of luck with air conditioning, it seems. BOF points not in the main area: yep. That was sort of an experiment, and we'll know for next year; BOFs need to be in a little enclosed area, like BOF Point 3 was this year. The exhibition was a little out of the way. We didn't think it was, really, but it obviously was from the comments of our exhibitors. There are a few ideas for how to fix that next year. Any other suggestions for things that could have been improved will be gratefully accepted!

A community track?

I wonder next year whether we should have a special track for speakers who are part of the LugRadio community. We've got a pretty vibrant community; lots of you show up at LRL, and there are the forums and so on; it might give us the chance to highlight people who wouldn't ordinarily get to speak at conferences. Something to think about for next time.

No beard

I have no beard. After dotwaffle doubled his contribution to Amnesty International, I shaved mine off as well as Jono doing his. This was a sad moment in my life: I'm growing it back, assuming I'm allowed. I look about 12 now. Christian Schaller and Edward Hervey, who I now hate, reminded me of this not less than once an hour from the time of shaving until the moment they left, so I have decided that we should stop using gstreamer for Jokosher and start using jack or something instead.

Jokosher BOF

The Jokosher BOF was actually pretty productive. Summary notes are on the mailing list, and we know roughly where we're going for 0.2, which is all cool. Plus we have photos of the dev team, or at least all those who were at LRL.

In short, wow. I'd like to personally thank everyone who turned up for making it the best community event around. See you next year.

Christian Schaller beat me up again about Jackfield not having a proper website, so now there is a real one: http://www.kryogenix.org/code/jackfield. For all your not-working-yet Dashboard-on-Linux needs.

Well, I'm off to LugRadio Live 2006 to set up. Those of you who are coming: see you this weekend. Those of you who aren't: you should come. :)

The proposed rail strike on UK trains on Friday and Saturday has been cancelled. This is excellent news. There was some serious concern over here at LugRadio Towers about how people were going to get to LugRadio Live this weekend, but now it's all OK! Now I only have the tickets and the plasmas and all the other stuff left to worry about.

For crying out loud, are there no decent RSS readers in the world? I need a web-based one, because I read feeds both at home and at work; "synchronisation" between two desktop feed readers sounds massively clunky to me, although I'm prepared to be persuaded otherwise. Google Reader seems to be broken half the time at the moment: I am getting highly sick of seeing "Sorry, an unexpected condition has occurred which is preventing Google Reader from fulfilling the request." I went from Bloglines to Google Reader because I got sick of seeing (a) the Bloglines Plumber and (b) broken feeds all the time. I've tried installing Gregarius and using that, but it never seems to work properly. Anyone have any other suggestions?

A few days ago I noted that an Acorn Electron booted from ROM which was fast, and that someone seemed to have rediscovered the technique. Is there any reason why someone couldn't build a computer with Linux in ROM rather than on disc, so it booted really really quickly? You'd need some kind of flash memory thing so you could update it with new kernels or something, I accept, but would it work? I don't know enough about the kernel and surrounding low-level OS stuff to know whether too much of it needs to be writable while it's working.

www.databac.com:

Six years you've had to fix it. Six years.

There are nine days to go until LugRadio Live 2006. Blimey. We're pretty much sorted now; lots of things are coming together, with a few frantic phone calls. There will be a few cool surprises there, we hope, along with the comprehensive speakers list and the massive expo and the party and everything else. If you haven't yet bought a ticket, it's not too late; go thou and register. You can pay on the door if you need to, but paying in advance means you can swan in easily and you have the satisfaction of turning up knowing you've supported LRL. We recorded the last "ordinary" LugRadio of this season last night, and it'll be out on Monday; the next and last show in this season will be LugRadio Live and Unleashed, the live show at LRL. Any suggestions for stuff you'd like us to talk about will be warmly entertained on the LR forums. It's really nice that there are people out there who aren't really into Linux but like the show anyway. If you're in that position, then you'll also really enjoy LugRadio Live; come along and hoist a pint with us! 9 days. Blimey.

We're working on quite a few things for the new Jokosher.org website. The goal is to make it a really good and useful, as well as pretty, site for the project. I personally have taken a tip or two from Drew McLellan's talk about creating an open-source project's website at LugRadio Live 2005, and both Jono and I have a pretty clear picture of how it should be. Fortunately, we have some good designers on the team who have helped some with the visual impact; it's quite pretty, I think, but more importantly I think it's clear and clean and useful. We plan to integrate quite a few things into it; discussion fora, a really easy way for people to submit bugs or problems with or suggestions for Jokosher, and somewhere they can get immediate online help (using cgi:irc to connect them directly to the Jokosher IRC support channel without them having to know what IRC is). The Doc Team are doing a great job putting together documentation for Jokosher. Docs are massively and critically important to projects; not a very boring reference manual, but walkthroughs and screencasts and things you actually need. Jokosher is not going to be one of these projects which is documented in irc and people's blogs. It's all starting to come together ready for the 0.1 release at LugRadio Live 2006. The goal for 0.1 is that you ought to be able to record and edit a simple composition in it. From there, we have big plans for 0.2, a possible 0.3 release, and the mighty 1.0. Bring it on.

BBC News:

A microchip which can store information like a hard drive has been unveiled by US company Freescale... "This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade," said Will Strauss, an analyst with research firm Forward Concepts... Mram chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.

What, you mean like my Acorn Electron did QUARTER OF A CENTURY ago?

Trinity are selling a low-cost Linux-based portable digital audio workstation. Apparently it runs Audacity. We need to get Jokosher on this.

There are a few scripts around to do random signature cycling in GMail, but they all are limited from my perspective; they let you specify the signatures in the GMail interface, for example, but save those signatures on your local computer. Since I share stuff between home and work, I've got an updated script. Gmail: Random Signature Remote goes and fetches a fortune file from a URL and chooses signatures from that. You'll need to edit the script once you've installed it and change the url entry in changeSignature (this isn't an easy user process, because I just hacked this script together for me) to point at a fortune file. Fortune files have each signature separated by a % on a blank line.

First: Jackfield is not ready yet. You are welcome and encouraged to download the code and have a play with it, but it's for hackers at this stage, not for users. Anyway, that aside, a note or two on how to get it running. First, don't download the tarball: instead, check the code out of my subversion repository at http://svn.kryogenix.org/svn/jackfield/trunk/. Secondly, the code pretty much assumes at this stage that it's being run on my machine. You want to edit Control.py and change WIDGET_DIRS so that it points at the directory with the widgets in it. Thirdly, if you're using this on Dapper, there's a bug with gtkmozembed; the LD_LIBRARY_PATH stuff below gets around this bug. Fourthly, it can be run in one of two ways. You can start the Jackfield icon bar with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox python jackfield/Control.py start showing (if you've got it checked out in a directory called "jackfield", or you can start an individual widget with LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/firefox python jackfield/Widget.py /path/to/WidgetDir/. These hints should be enough to get you started. Let me know if they are not! (They'll go into a readme file in the project at some point, but I want to make it easier to run this stuff first.)

If you are too, post the following to your weblog: <a href="http://www.lugradio.org/live/2006"><img src="http://lugradio.org/live/2006/siteimages/badge_imgoing1.png" alt="I'm going to LugRadio Live 2006"></a> There are different buttons for different people: if you're a speaker or an exhibitor, or you'd like the light-coloured button rather than the dark one, please see http://lugradio.org/live/2006/index.php/Buttons for more; go there now, get the code for the button you want, and post it to your weblog!

Luis Villa is entirely right in asking where "our" flickr/blogger/online-storage place is. We talked about this a bit at Guadec (and about "gnome on rails" (which has nothing to do with Ruby, but is about being able to build Gnome apps really quickly and agilely, as you can build web apps). I keep thinking about doing something like this, but there are so many other projects that need doing!

Nokia have, immensely kindly, donated a Nokia 770 to the Jokosher project. We plan to implement two different Jokosher things on the 770: Jokosher Remote and Mini Jokosher. Jono and I spent some time hashing over details of both of these, and he's written up an initial spec for Jokosher Remote. In essence, it's a remote control for Jokosher; it doesn't do any music stuff itself, but instead lets you see what your main Jokosher screen is up to and lets you control what it's doing from your 770. One of the major use cases here is for when you're recording with the band: imagine, for example, that you're the drummer. In the corner of the studio is your recording computer, running Jokosher. You've got all the instruments plugged into the mixing desk and the desk plugged into the computer; you've got all the instruments set up in Jokosher itself. Now you're sitting on the other side of the room, behind your drums, and you want to start recording. Do you want to stumble across the room, through the mess of leads and discarded guitar cases, to get to the computer to hit play? Hell, no. So you take your trusty Nokia 770 out of your pocket and start Jokosher Remote. It automatically notices that there's a real Jokosher running (which it will do because it's on the wireless network, and Jokosher will advertise its presence with the Avahi ZeroConf library) and displays the details of the project that's currently open. You, in turn, simply hit the big record button on the 770's screen. The buttons are all really big, so they can be pressed with fingers rather than fiddling about with a stylus, and when you're playing you can see the tracks recording so you know it's working. You stop playing and want to listen to that recording back, so you hit Play on your 770 and it makes the real Jokosher installation play. You can skip through the playback, forwards and backwards. If you want to re-record one instrument, you can arm that one instrument for recording and record it again. You can set up an overdub and then record it, all without leaving your drum stool. No more walking backwards and forwards! No more tripping on the mic lead! Jokosher Remote is all you ever wanted! There are a few little tricky technical issues. The first is that, at the moment, there is no way for something outside core Jokosher to control what the program is doing. Since we also need this to make plugins work, and plugins are critical, the development of a plugin system is on the roadmap for Jokosher 0.2 (at the moment, we're in bugfix mode for 0.1, due for release in three weeks at LugRadio Live 2006). Once that plugin API exists, it will be a lot easier to build a Jokosher Remote plugin. Secondly, I need to think about the best way of shipping data back and forth between JR and J itself. I suspect I'll use something simple to implement like XML-RPC, but if anyone's got any suggestions for an on-the-wire protocol which (a) already has a pure-Python implementation, (b) can ship Python dictionaries, and (c) will be highly easy to implement, let me know. The other thing that I want to do is Mini Jokosher. This is a port of most of Jokosher to the 770 itself. The use case here is for taking it with you in your pocket to do interviews for your popular podcast; you can drop the 770 in your pocket along with a USB mic, and then you have a studio on the move. The goal here is not that you can do absolutely everything in MJ that you can do in real J, but tha you can record to storage on the device (buy an MMC card!), you can create instruments, record a clip, delete that clip, re-record it, and move clips around to do basic editing. Then, when you bring the 770 back to your house, it will automatically hook up with your real Jokosher (via ZeroConf again) and offer to upload the project; the project then uploads seamlessly to real Jokosher where you can do your proper editing. It's a heavily cut-down version of real J, but it's a proper audio recording application; this means that we will need most of the GStreamer stuff that real J needs. It'll be interesting seeing how complete the GStreamer port to 770 is. Jokosher Remote comes first, though, because it's simpler to implement and because the use case is a little more compelling. Exciting times ahead for our audio editor! The big thing I need to do first is to set up a Nokia-770-in-a-window environment on my developer machine. Is there an easy guide somewhere around to how to do this? It strikes me that it should be easy, and I keep seeing things that make reference to "Xephyr", but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to just have a 770-in-a-window on my machine (so I don't have to keep copying things to the real device). There must be something, though, so I must have missed it; can anyone point me at it?

Angel, the machine that runs www.kryogenix.org (among other sites) is being rather slow. On investigation of my logs, it appears that that's quite possibly because it's being hammered by people. I deleted my log and then waited an hour to see if I was being hit a lot (the log was 200MB! in less than an hour!) and then pulled out the 5 most persistent offenders with

cut -d" " -f1 /var/log/apache2/kryogenix.org-access.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -5

which gave me

    324 217.112.126.122
    381 81.133.81.248
    421 82.108.113.14
   2060 213.249.154.101
   2391 81.159.133.111

Those last two are a bit high, I think; two thousand hits in an hour? I mean, I appreciate all you people reading the good word of the Langridge, but I'm not that good a writer. So, they get banned, which is nice and easy. Following Mark Pilgrim's explanation, I added the following lines to .htaccess:

# all your DoS are belong to us. Ban ban ban.
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^213.249.154.101$
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^81.159.133.111$
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

and...no more hits from those IPs. Beware, people sucking down my bandwidth: I have plenty of room in .htaccess for more of those lines.

Apparently Ewan Spence has too much stuff and wants to give it away. So, send him a fiver by PayPal and you'll get a cool item; there are mp3 players, PDAs, digital cameras, and a big ball of elastic bands just waiting to be won. See his notes about the prize raffle if you want to win some stuff. If you think "cor, that Ewan, he's a mad chap and no mistake, I wish I could meet him!" then I can do no better than to note that he's speaking at LugRadio Live 2006, which is in less than three weeks.

The BBC and Top Gear do, every year, a car survey. The 2005 Top Gear survey is pretty useful if you're looking to buy a car, which we are. However, it's organised appallingly; you have to walk through all 15 pages of it looking for the car you're interested in. So, the Kryogenix International House of Work-Avoidance presents Top Gear 2005 Survey: easy access edition. All the cars are listed, by manufacturer, and you can jump to the page with them on. For those of you with a coding bent, you can see how all the work is done with two files, build.sh and parse.py. Essentially, it grabs the HTML for the survey, throws it through HTML Tidy to make it XHTML, and then parses it with Python's minidom. Nasty screen-scraping, it is true, but it works. It extracts all the information from the survey, so you could use it to put together a more detailed summary with all the actual data in it (and not link to the real survey at all), but I think that's a bad idea because the survey's great and the BBC should get the credit for it. However, if anyone from the survey reads this, can I ask politely that next year (a) the HTML for the survey is a bit more structured and (b) you make car names individually linkable, so I can link to each car rather than just to the page it's on? Cheers.

Jesus wept.