as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Four years ago, four guys got together in a room in Wolverhampton and recorded the first episode of LugRadio. Since then, we’ve started running a yearly “rock conference” event in the UK, LugRadio Live, we’ve taken LugRadio Live international with the first US event, we’ve won an award for marketing, we’ve changed two of the presenters and then changed one of the replacements, we’ve gone to Guadec and PyCon and Guadec again, we’ve done nearly a hundred episodes, we were crowned “best open source podcast” by Linux Format, and we’ve built up a really cool community.

Four years, eh? I’m pretty proud of what we’ve done with the show. Thanks, all of you who listen and send in emails and come to LugRadio Live and post on the forums and hang around in #lugradio and make your own podcast about us and help us out with sysadmin stuff and run a mirror and talk about the show and enter competitions and laugh at the show on the bus. Here’s to four more.

Cool. Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons writes about how he’s speaking at LugRadio Live USA and as a free bonus of making me feel proud, links to my writeup of the process of relicensing LugRadio episodes. Cheers, Mike! Naturally, if you want to see Mike and 40 other people speak, go and buy a LugRadio Live ticket now!

If you’re coming to LugRadio Live in the USA this year, you can now go and buy your LRL ticket! I can’t imagine that there are people reading this who don’t already know what LugRadio Live is, but you can read all about LRL to find out that we’ve got the cream of the open source community talking about their projects and their work and their thoughts for two days in San Francisco, on the 12th and 13th of April. If you pre-register there are, like, extra bonuses and prizes and stuff, and you can be sure of getting in (we’re a bit worried that we might hit the fire limit on the venue, so you want to buy a ticket!). Tickets for two days of glory are a practically-free $10 for the whole thing, too. Go thou and buy a ticket and buy a ticket for your friends. Do that now.

The other thing we’re concentrating on right now is exhibitors. We have a full schedule of speakers (and I’ll be publishing the schedule in due course so you can plan who you’re going to watch!), but we do still have space in the exhibition area. If you want to show off your project, or demonstrate the stuff your company makes, or just let people know about your cool technology, contact us and let us know what you want to do and how much space you’ll need.

Tomorrow evening I’m speaking at the Manchester Free Software Group meeting: see their event page for details. I shall wave my hands a bit and chat about various things, including LugRadio and what I think about the way the free software community is, and start a discussion or two. See you there.

My ceaseless quest for DRM-free mp3 download files in the UK appears to be over!

A while back I tested Amazon’s mp3 store, which was fine except that you have to be in America. Fail. However, Play.com have just opened a similar store in the UK. As usual, my canonical test song for these things is Feelin’ Good by Nina Simone, and…I’ve just bought it from Play. As before, I have a list of requirements for these services:

• I can download one track, instead of a whole album; I don’t want ten Nina Simone songs, I just want the one I’m looking for – PASS
• No DRM. None. I don’t mind what the format is, if there’s no DRM, as long as it can be played on Linux (which is pretty much everything). Bonus points for oggs. Half a bonus point for just plain mp3. – PASS
• A track costs a pound or less. I’m not paying more than a quid for one song. – PASS (99c is about 50p)
• I feel comfortable putting my credit card number into the site. This means, in practice, that if it’s called something like mp3downloads.haxx0r.ru, I am not interested. – PASS
• I can just buy a song by putting my credit card number in and getting it for download. I don’t need to sign up for an account, give them all my details, none of that. – FAIL
• My music tastes aren’t very eclectic, so I’d expect the service to carry most of what I’d want to listen to. This means that a service for one label alone isn’t really what I want. I don’t want to discover new music with this; I want to get the stuff I already know about and want to listen to. – PASS
• I’ll get, probably, about five songs a year. So a subscription service is out, especially since with most of them your music stops working when you unsubscribe. – PASS

As with Amazon, Play fail on the “don’t need an account” idea. However, there are two extra thoughts concerning that:

1. They let you re-download the track later (an indeterminate number of times, depending on the record company) if you lose it or delete it. This is a good feature, and I can’t think of a decent way of doing it without some sort of authorisation process.
2. I have mailed them with a suggestion. If someone’s just buying downloads, why not have a “buy this without signing up” button, which just asks you for all the information that’s required on the “buy it” screen? (You can’t just enter a CC number; they need billing address and so on for the credit card companies, more’s the pity.) Then, quietly sign them up for an account under the covers, and when you send the “you have bought a download, go here to download it” email, say “oh, and we signed you up for an account, with password GF78F$0.Fsf;” and they can use it or not care. No idea whether the Play people will take this suggestion or not, though.

Anyway, it works. I can get songs and listen to them. Well done, Play. That will do nicely.

I use Gnash instead of Adobe Flash, because it’s open source, and because I largely don’t miss Flash. The one thing I would miss, though, is YouTube. However, Gnash (in Ubuntu gutsy), while it works fine at displaying videos on YouTube itself, doesn’t work on embedded videos (where someone puts the YouTube video on their own site). GreaseMonkey to the rescue; this very short GreaseMonkey user script simply replaces embedded YouTube videos with a big link to the appropriate YouTube page, so I can click through and watch the video. Only useful for people who are as lunatic as me about freedom but still like YouTube, which might be an audience of one.

Clicking it should allow you to install it, if you’ve got GreaseMonkey installed already in Firefox; Epiphany users with GM enabled should right-click the link and say Install User Script.

youtubepopout.user.js

More excitement from the Stuart House Of JavaScript Stuff: generated-toc: Generate a Table of Contents with the DOM. A very easy way to get a table of contents onto your documents: generate a table of contents using JavaScript.

A big thanks goes out to the organisation who funded this work, who I can’t name. Getting stuff like this out into the world is a good thing, and them allowing me to open-source it is better still. Good work.

My MythTV box has lots of TV episodes on it, as well as films. The MythTV people have got films all sorted nicely; there’s a thing which looks up the film on IMDB, grabs the plot and the cover art, and makes your list of films look all pretty. However, you can’t do that for episodes of TV shows, or random bits of video; they don’t have DVD cover art, unsurprisingly. Lots of people have come up with the idea of using a thumbnail taken from the video as artwork, which is fine, but most people using MythTV are using mplayer to do the thumbnailing (and play videos). Mplayer doesn’t work on my MythTV box (it crashes X), so I use VLC. VLC can theoretically create thumbnails, but I can’t get it to work properly, so I’ve written a script which does it with totem-video-thumbnailer.

(myth-thumbnailer.py — download)

#!/usr/bin/python
import MySQLdb, os, re

if not os.path.exists("/usr/bin/totem-video-thumbnailer"):
  raise "This script requires totem-video-thumbnailer"

# read DB connection parameters
fp = open("/etc/mythtv/mysql.txt")
DB = {}
for line in fp:
  if line.find("=") != -1:
    k,v = line.strip().split("=",1)
    DB[k] = v

required_keys = ["DBHostName", "DBUserName", "DBName", "DBPassword"]
for k in required_keys:
  if not DB.has_key(k):
    raise "Missing MySQL connection detail: %s" % k

# connect to database
con = MySQLdb.connect(DB["DBHostName"], DB["DBUserName"], DB["DBPassword"], DB["DBName"])
crs = con.cursor()

# get location where thumbnails are stored
sql = "select data from settings where value = 'VideoArtworkDir';"
crs.execute(sql)
VIDEO_DIR = crs.fetchone()[0]
# get all files without covers
cmd = 'totem-video-thumbnailer -j -s 600 "%s" "%s" >/dev/null 2>&1'
sql = "select intid, filename from videometadata where coverfile = 'No Cover';"
crs.execute(sql)
VIDEOS = []
while 1:
  data = crs.fetchone()
  if not data: break
  intid, filename = data
  parts = filename.split(os.sep)
  output = re.sub("[^a-z0-9_]","_","_".join(parts[-2:]).lower()) + ".jpg"
  full_output = os.path.join(VIDEO_DIR, output)
  if os.path.exists(full_output):
    pass
  else:
    cmd_exec = cmd % (filename, full_output)
    print "Thumbnailing", os.path.split(filename)[1]
    os.system(cmd_exec)
    VIDEOS.append((intid,full_output))

sql = "update videometadata set coverfile = %s where intid = %s limit 1;"
for intid, thumbnail in VIDEOS:
  crs.execute(sql, (thumbnail, intid))
  print "Added %s to database" % thumbnail

Someone should make a mobile phone which has a touchscreen on both sides (front and back), with one being the phone stuff and web browsing and the other side being music. If you get a move on you’ll be able to have it out by August when I need a new phone. Touchscreens make sense as an interface to me, despite what Nokia say and despite lack of tactile feedback. I don’t like my Nokia E50; it keeps running out of memory when I try and do things like play music and browse the web at the same time. Six months of research ahead, hooray; don’t want an OpenMoko Neo because the device itself is clumsy, don’t want an iPhone because I don’t like the restrictions, don’t want the LG Viewty because the OS is horrific, don’t want the Samsung Armani because I can’t read books on it or browse the web properly, blah blah blah. If I wasn’t so picky about this stuff then I’d be a lot better off. Android is coming, though, and the OpenMoko OS is coming too; might be possible to have an open source phone by August, if I’m lucky. Something to look forward to, there.

Ben Darlow accuses Bruce Schneier of spreading FUD about the iPhone.

This isn’t lock-in, it’s called choosing a product that meets your needs. If you don’t want to be tied to a particular phone network, don’t buy an iPhone. If installing third-party applications (between now and the end of February, when officially-sanctioned ones will start to appear) is critically important to you, don’t buy an iPhone. It’s one thing to grumble about an otherwise tempting device not supporting some feature you would find useful; it’s another entirely to imply that this represents anti-libertarian lock-in. The fact remains, you are free to buy one of the many other devices on the market that existed before there ever was an iPhone.

Ben, I’m not sure how it’s possible for “lock-in” to exist, if that’s your necessary condition for it. That’s got nothing to do with iPhones. Don’t like how Microsoft lock you in with Exchange and Outlook? You should have chosen different mail programs. Don’t like how you’ve been locked into the iTunes Music Store because you’ve got an iPod? You should have bought a different music player. Don’t like how you’ve been locked in to anything? Shoulda bought something else, dude. Lock-in doesn’t exist. We are never forced to do anything. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Your iPhone comes with a complicated list of rules about what you can and can’t do with it. (Schneier)

Now I’ve been looking through the exquisitely arranged packaging that mine came in and I’m still struggling to find that list! Perhaps it’s written in black smallprint on the underside of the lid? You know, the lid that’s black?

Nope, it’s better than that. It comes with a complicated list of rules about what you can and can’t do with it and you’re not allowed to see the list. For one example: you can use your Bluetooth headset to make calls but not listen to music. That’s a rule: I’d actually prefer it if it said that on the box, but it doesn’t. You get to buy it and then find out that it doesn’t work, or you get to research all the things you might want to do online first. Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone’s a lovely device; it’s pleasurable to hold and enjoyable to use, which is not something you can say about very many bits of electronic equipment at all. For 90% of the people who want it and don’t want anything more, it’s perfect; it’ll read their email, browse the web, and make phone calls. The complaints that people who complain about it have pretty much boil down to how arbitrary-seeming the restrictions are. What was all that crap about how iPhone-native apps might overwhelm the cell network, eh? Since the iPod touch also needs jailbreaking, that was clearly bullshit. Still, apps are coming, so perhaps that’ll make it all better. There are plenty of people who hate the iPhone, and Apple, way more than they deserve, but there are equally plenty of people who flat-out refuse to hear a word against the device or anything else that comes out of Cupertino. If you’re somewhere in the middle ground on this, like most people are, and you’re prepared to put up with the restrictions that Apple put on you to get the good experience they provide, you go for it. If you get fucked, then that’s the way it is, but hey: sometimes being fucked is nice. That’s why the human race still exists, after all.

That git Steve pokes me with the latest trendy meme (which is not actually latest as I think it got started some time in the Middle Ages), and I do believe I got similarly poked by Matt Revell on the same subject a while back. So, five things you don’t know about me. I ought to note that I don’t think that there are five things that no-one knows about me, so you may know some or all of these.

1. I have ankylosing spondylitis, a “chronic, painful, degenerative inflammatory arthritis primarily affecting spine and sacroiliac joints, causing eventual fusion of the spine”. The painful bit is certainly right; the medical stuff I take on trust. So, y’know, thanks a lot for that, Dad. It’s an autoimmune disease, which is a term you never hear except on House where they say it all the time, although on that programme they all have some kind of horrible serious thing that’s going to kill them in two hours.
2. I’m moving jobs. In mid-March I leave Mills & Reeve, the law firm where I’ve worked for eight years, and I go to GCap Media, who own loads and loads of commercial radio stations. I’m pretty excited about this.
3. I was interviewed on BBC Radio Norfolk once, along with Kam, Natalie, and Urgit, about alt.fan.eddings.
4. I can roll my tongue. Apparently it’s genetic; only some percentage of the population can do it. No idea why this is a useful genetic talent, although Richard Dawkins probably has a theory that it’s all to do with making me more sexually attractive to women to increase my chances of passing on my genes or something.
5. I haven’t seen any of the first three Star Wars films (that is, the last three in creation date but the first three of the nine, if you see what I mean). Just never got around to it. People keep telling me that I should do, and I just can’t be arsed with it.

Is anyone else tempted to just make shit up in these things? “I am really Harlan Ellison.” “I can suspend myself from a ledge by one finger.” “I have a third eye in the back of my head.” “I can haz cheezburger.” It’s pretty tempting.

I’m supposed to tag other people. Don’t break the chain, etc, etc. To be honest I think this stuff gets made up by demons who are determined to make the human race endure the psychic pain of trying to think of things which are simultaneously (a) interesting (b) secret (c) not too secret. I mean, if I was really a Russian spy or had a third bollock or something, am I likely to talk about this on the internet? Nonetheless, it is now my solemn duty to make five people suffer as I have suffered. I think we’ll have Aquarion, Christian Heilmann, Mr Ben, Sam Rowe to see if he’s still alive, and Davyd Madeley.

What with all the excitement over here in LugRadio Towers about the upcoming LugRadio Live USA (April 12th-13th in San Francisco! Cool speakers! An exhibition of greatness! You can’t afford to miss it!), some people might be thinking: have we forgotten about the UK? And the answer is, hell no. LugRadio may be going international this year for the first time, but we’re still here in the UK as well. I am pleased to be able to say that

LugRadio Live 2008 UK will be happening on the 19th and 20th July, in the Wolverhampton University Student Union, Wolverhampton, UK!

We’re pretty heads-down sorting out the US event at the moment, but if you’re interested in speaking or exhibiting at LRL UK this year, let us know — the big push for this will start when we get back from America. European and UK people: Get ready.