as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

When I was a kid I played with Lego: specifically, Technic Lego, which is the one with the rods and cogs and whatnot. It occurred to me that it’d be pretty cool to have the Lego people be at LugRadio Live USA with a huge table covered in bits that people could go up and play with and use and look at. They can’t make it, though (it’s a long way from Scandinavia to San Francisco!). So, what are the cool kids using for building things now other than Lego itself? There was Fischer Technik when I was at school, but I’ve got no idea whether anyone still uses it; if this was LugRadio Live 1978 rather than 2008 then Meccano would have been good; what else is there? Nominate your favourite building stuff…

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.

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.

We are now 74 days away from LugRadio Live USA at the Metreon in San Francisco, and the Call For Papers is open! We’ve already confirmed some great speakers — Jeremy Allison, Aza Raskin, Val Henson, Ben Collins, Ian Murdock, John “Magnatune” Buckman, Robert Love, Dan Kegel — but we want more. If you want to speak at LugRadio Live, and you can be in California on the 12th-13th April this year, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line before Friday 15th February and tell us what you want to talk about!

We’re collecting names of exhibitors, too. This year we’re really keen to get some cool stuff into the exhibition. If you’re part of a project and want to demonstrate it, or you’ve got some cool technology you want to show off, or you think people would love to see what your company does, get hold of us and let us know. Exhibition space is free, too!

To find out more about LugRadio Live, take a look at the website and what is LRL?.

Finally returned from @media Ajax 2007, and I had a great time. I was a presenter, talking about How To Destroy The Web, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. My slides are here:

(in-line presentation made with a bodged version of John Resig’s easy PDF sharing, but using libpoppler’s pdf2ppm because libpoppler can read my PDF and GhostScript can’t, for whatever reason. You can also get the presentation as a PDF or see it on SlideShare if you’re a freedom-hating Flash person.)

It was a great conference. Particular highlights for me were Derek Featherstone talking about accessibility (since I don’t know anything about it and I should do), being asked to be on the panel at the end (with Alex Russell (!) and Douglas Crockford (!!) and Brendan “inventor of JavaScript” Eich (!!!)), the coolness incarnate that is Firefox 3 and whizzy SVG stuff, having Chris Heilmann spend two days trying to convince me how nice London was even though it did nothing but piss rain solidly the whole time I was there, finally meeting John “Kelly Osbourne” Resig, and having a rather pregnant lady (who may have been this lady) tell me that my talk was so funny that she nearly gave birth during it. That’s not a compliment you hear every day, that one; I was pretty chuffed with that, I have to say. Thankyou!

The usual suspects have photos on Flickr (tag seems to be “atmediaajax”); the wifi didn’t work (but it never does, at any conference); we’re discussing what (if anything) to do with the WaSP’s DOM Scripting Task Force (set up after @media 2005: the question is, do we still need a “task force”? Hasn’t DOM scripting now become part of the toolkit? It does still need to be used properly, in moderation, and not be critical for it to be present, but the concept doesn’t need evangelising any more, I don’t think); I shall be back for @media 2008. Great work Patrick and your orange-shirted helpers. Cheers to a cool bunch of people: it was great to catch up with Jeremy again, and having a beer with Drew and Rachel and Chris and ppk and Bruce and Harry and Alex and oh, just everyone is a good way to spend an evening. Maybe even more than one evening.

Earlier this week I was at @media Ajax, and it was great — more in an upcoming post. First, though, a quick bit of scripting I did. You see, it’s become apparent to me that I need a “presenter view” when I’m presenting; I have my laptop running dualscreen, so that the view I get on the laptop screen is not the view that appears on the projector. I need this, because I’m not Derek Featherstone; I can’t just see the slides and remember everything that I need to say. My slides are often just a single word, or a picture, and I can’t remember the thread of what I’m aiming at without notes.* So, I used to have notes on a bit of paper. The way I create presentations is:

1. Write out, longhand, everything I intend to say, word-for-word, like it’s an essay or a playscript
2. Go through my longhand script and identify all the slides I want to put in to bolster the points
3. Spend some time with Flickr’s Creative Commons image search finding the images that I want for slides
4. Put together a presentation
5. Make notes for each slide expressing the bullet points of what I want to say, with notes to myself to remind me of any particular phrases I want to specifically remember
6. Throw away the longhand script

The final step, after that lot, used to be “write out all of the notes in big writing on bits of A4 paper”. Then it occurred to me: why not use the presenter view to put my notes on? I used S5, Eric Meyer’s in-browser HTML/CSS/JavaScript based presentation system, for a long time to make my talks, and it has a presenter view. However, I got increasingly hacked off with it being slow and annoying, and so I resolved to use OpenOffice for presentations; it’s just easier. OpenOffice, though, doesn’t have a presenter view (there’s a spec for it, but it doesn’t yet exist). After a bit of casting about, I discovered that (a) OpenOffice will export presentations to PDF, and (b) Evince, the Gnome document viewer, has a presentation mode. So, thought I, I could use that instead. OpenOffice allows you to export the notes pages too into your PDF: if you’ve got three slides in your presentation*, each with notes, and you elect to include notes pages in the PDF export, then you get six pages in the resultant PDF — the first three are just the slides, and the second three are the slides at the top of the page with the notes below.
So the idea appeared in my head: why not open the PDF twice, put PDF-1 on page 1 and display it on the projector, and PDF-2 on page 4 (the first notes page) and display it on my screen? Then just get them to advance in lockstep — when I advance the projector PDF by one page, it advances the notes view on my laptop screen by one page as well — and lo, I have a presenter view.
Those of you with (a) modern versions of PowerPoint or (b) whatever the Mac presentation thing is called are doubtless laughing your heads off right now, and rightfully so. I can’t wait for the OpenOffice people to make this happen properly.

Anyway, to do the advancing, you need a little script. This little script uses dogtail to provide the presenter view, and I used it on Monday and it worked perfectly. Be warned: this is not a proper solution. It’s a crappy hack, and if it de-bones your cat and deletes everything on your hard drive, don’t come crying to me. Almost certainly requires Linux, requires dogtail (and accessibility mode turned on in Gnome (NFI whether KDE has the same features, but it probably does; if you use something other than Gnome or KDE then you’re on your own, you freak)), requires Python and PyGtk, requires Evince (which should be called “Document Viewer”), requires a PDF (that has been exported from OpenOffice.org Impress with notes page included) on the command line, requires a laptop that can do dualhead (mine seems to set up the two screens as One Big Screen, so I don’t know what happens if you have something that actually does it properly), probably requires the phase of the moon to be right as well. Enjoy.

Evince presenter view

import gtk, sys, random, shutil, os, time
from dogtail.tree import root

pdf = sys.argv[1]
# copy pdf to /tmp
pdfcopyname = “pdf.%s.pdf” % random.random()
pdfcopy = “/tmp/” + pdfcopyname
shutil.copy(pdf, pdfcopy)

# start two evinces
os.system(”evince –presentation –page-label=1 %s &” % pdf)
os.system(”evince %s &” % pdfcopy)

# find them with dogtail
time.sleep(2)
from dogtail.tree import root
evince = root.application(”evince”)
pdfw = evince.window(os.path.split(pdf)[1])
pdfcopyw = evince.window(pdfcopyname)
halfpages = int(pdfw.child(roleName=”tool bar”).child(roleName=”label”).text.split()[1]) / 2
pdfpageel = pdfw.child(roleName=”tool bar”).child(roleName=”text”)
pdfcopypageel = pdfcopyw.child(roleName=”tool bar”).child(roleName=”text”)

def ping():
  global pdfw, pdfcopyw, halfpages, pdfpageel, pdfcopypageel
  try:
    pdfpage = int(pdfpageel.text)
    pdfcopypage = int(pdfcopypageel.text)
  except ValueError:
    # pdf window has been destroyed, probably
    raise “die”
  if (pdfpage + halfpages) != pdfcopypage:
    pdfcopypage = pdfpage + halfpages
    pdfcopypageel.text = str(pdfcopypage)
    pdfcopypageel.doAction(”activate”)

  return True

pingobj = gtk.timeout_add(500, ping)
try:
  gtk.main()
except:
  os.unlink(pdfcopy)

My slides from my Jackfield and Python talk at Pycon UK are available.

A few people have started hassling me to provide packages for Jackfield, my port of Apple’s Dashboard to Linux, so people can more easily try it out. What do you think, gentle reader? I’ve got very little time to work on Jackfield at the moment, and I felt that a better use of my time would be to try and make it run more Dashboard widgets, rather than to make the installation process easier — my thought was that the ease-of-installation process is critically important, but it’s critically important to users, and Jackfield isn’t meant to have users yet because it’s not close enough to being ready. Tell me what you think: should there be Debian packages, Ubuntu packages, Fedora RPMs? The point was made that there’s a lack of contributions from other people precisely because it’s too hard to install, and I found that a relatively compelling argument. So, let me know what you think in the comments.

The @media people have just posted a schedule for @media Ajax, in November this year. In addition to seeing me talk about how to destroy the Web*, there’s a veritable smorgasbord* of other speakers, like Brendan “I invented JavaScript” Eich, Douglas “I really understand JavaScript in a way that no-one else does” Crockford, Peter-Paul “quirksmode” Koch, John “Kelly Osbourne” Resig, Alex “Dojo is cleverer than you are” Russell, and others. It should be a good bash. I’m told that ticket sales are nearly closed, so if you want to come to London to see all these great people you need to get in quick. Get stuck in.

Haven’t posted much in the last few weeks: haven’t had much time.

First, photos. Guadec 2007, my holiday in San Francisco, a few from Linux World while I was in SF, and three of the Men with Bigger Stones in Edinburgh.

Next: random stuff I’ve read about that looks good.

• The Fedora team are building an “experimental” desktop spin. This is a really, really cool idea. A chance to do cool stuff that people might not like but could be a radical improvement. I’ve talked on LugRadio in the past about how incremental improvement is safe and easy but won’t win the war, and this sort of experimentation is exactly what I think we need. Great idea, fedora team. I’d like to be involved but I’m worried I don’t have time.
• Brad from LiveJournal posts a set of musings on portability of data between social networks, which has sparked lots of discussion on the associated mailing list.
• Webilder automatically cycles your desktop background through pretty Flickr pictures. I’m using it. This is cool enough to freeze nitrogen.
• Another Blender film. Excellent. I must pre-order this one. Hopefully this time it won’t be as weird as Weird Jack McWeird the Weird, like Elephant’s Dream was.
• Luis Villa gives me a beating about regaining my respect for Mark Shuttleworth’s commitment to free software. I, personally, think that Gobuntu is not a stooge distro, but it remains to be seen whether it’s actually pushed as an important thing when gutsy is released or whether it’s buried in some back alley bit of the website. I agree totally about there being no Launchpad source, indeed. As to why Shuttleworth isn’t investing in OLPC, well…you can only do so much at once. OLPC are indeed building a free software laptop. On the other hand, it’s not a free software laptop that I, Stuart, will be able to buy; someone ought to be trying to persuade people to make existing Western laptops run only free software as well. OLPC is a valuable project, indeed, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Whether the Ubuntu/Dell deal, etc, counts as doing this depends on your point of view.

Oh, and in a couple of days I go to Italy for a week (note to burglars: no I don’t). Sun, sea, sand, pizzas. I love Italy. I’ll be near Lake Garda; I would say that if anyone lives near there then I’d love to meet up, but I suspect I might get into some trouble from the family if I disappear to talk about LugRadio. Italian people, if you want to meet up anyway, let me know!

Well, here I am in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Specifically: San Francisco. I shall be at LinuxWorld for a day next week as part of my trip here, and I’m here from now until next Thursday, so if you’re a LugRadio person or a Jokosher person or a web person or just someone I know, and you’re in SF or Palo Alto or around this sort of area for the next week, let me know and we’ll get some beers or something.

Note to self: must go to Alcatraz while I’m here.

Well, I did my talk, on Jackfield and the web and the desktop. It went pretty well, I thought; a few people came up afterwards and said so, at least. Interesting chat with a guy from Novell about the nature of the web and the desktop and their relationship; very interesting news from Nokia about how Minimo (that is, Firefox for small screens) now runs on the N800, and would we see Jackfield there any time soon? That’s cool news, especially since I saw Lucas Rocha talk about the Hildon desktop (which is what runs on the Nokia N800) and it seems pretty interesting. (Ubuntu Mobile Edition is also running on Hildon, and that looks more interesting still.)

Made the fatal error of going out in the evening with Bastian and a few others (was nice to meet Jon McCann!) The flaw with going out with Bastian is that I always end up in a really expensive restaurant and then I get drunk and this morning my head hurts. Good evening, though, especially since just before we ordered dinner in the (Italian) restaurant, they had a takeaway Chinese delivered for the staff! The chef spun a bunch of lines about how it’s from their sister restaurant, etc, etc, of course. Some fun had there, yes indeed.

Best line of the night:
“What do you do, then?”
“I’m the Gtk maintainer.”
“Oh. Is that all?”

Now that my talk’s over, I can just enjoy the remainder of the conference, and record a LugRadio show or two. Should all be fun. I do like being at Guadec — lots of people I haven’t seen since last year. Plus, maybe I can convince one of them to give me a job in free software ;-)

Roll on today — I’m at work in the mornings, and then at the conference in the afternoons. Today…not gonna drink as much, especially since I sunk the white off the black last night and so lost a game, even after Bastian used the number 3 as the cue ball. I hate everything.

Tomorrow morning, and for the rest of the week, I’ll be at Guadec. I’m speaking about the web and the desktop and Jackfield on Sunday, and LugRadio are Official Media Partners (ya, rly!) for the whole event, which means that we’ll be bagging people and dragging them into our secret recording studio room for interviews and whatnot. If you’re going to be there, say hello or grab me for a beer or something.

Well, we had the two days. LugRadio Live 2007 happened last weekend, and it was super-duper-superb, yes indeed. There are lots of reports you can read about what it was like (including one chap who didn’t like the show at all and called it an endless stream of sub-par nob-gags, which will be appearing on t-shirts in due course).

My personal favourite bit, I think, was Adam walking out with his hooded robe to the Rocky music, but the whole thing was just unutterably great. If you want to see more of Adam, and you’re aware of meatspin.com, then you might like lugradio.org/sweetspin (really, really, really NSFW, though).

Now it’s all over, I’d like to say thanks to people!

Firstly, thanks to our crew.

All the crew in one place

They did a magnificent job. There’s no way we could have got everything done without them. If you want to know how much work they did, take a look at Xalior’s timelapse video of the first day. Special thanks to Chris Procter and Dave Morley for being crew heads, Kat for making cakes, Ron’s wife for the morning bacon sandwiches, Ron for taking millions of photos (which will be available soon), and Rev. Tig for being the audio flunky and putting up with all Jono’s shit on the second day. You’re all heroes.

Speaking of videos, a special thanks to Tony Whitmore and his video crew, who recorded a great deal of the event. We’re hoping to have videos available shortly of the talks — yes, I know we always say this, but this year we let Tony deal with it instead of us and so it might actually happen!

Next, I want to say thankyou to the people who gave us money and things. That’s everyone coming in the door, of course, but also Bytemark Hosting, Sun, Google, O’Reilly, Red Hat, Yahoo, and Canonical. Bytemark and Sun and Google gave us the money we needed to put the event on, O’Reilly gave us lanyards and books to give as prizes, and everyone gave us stuff to go in the goodie bags (which were charmingly named the Lugradio Live Nutsacks).

Ade was particularly pleased with the Red Hat stuff, shameless Fedora whore that he is

Next, the speakers. They all did a great job, some travelling from hugely far afield (America, Indonesia, across Europe), and people seem to have enjoyed the talks they went to. Special mention goes to Ted Haaeeeaaeaeeeeagaeeaer for using every swear-word he could think of now that he doesn’t work for Novell any more, Bruno and MrBen for the Great LugRadio Quiz, Steve Lamb, Chris diBona, and Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group for what I thought was the most interesting talk of the day. Des Burley from my law firm, Mills and Reeve, gets an extra mention for not only doing a talk but ably coping with me putting him on the spot by asking questions about patents during LugRadio Live and Unleashed. Extra-special bonus thanks go to a chap called Chris Hallam (or something similar), who’s responsible for the BBC iPlayer, and who I pulled up on stage with no preparation to receive a booting from Becky and the audience about the iPlayer only working on Windows. Chris, I don’t know how your last name is spelled and so I’m having difficulty getting hold of you to say thankyou: if you read this, or if anyone reads this who knows who Chris is, can they contact me?

Chris and Becky on stage

Our exhibitors come next, and I want to say thanks to them too. The exhibition this year was a little smaller than last year, and a couple of people have said it was rather noisy for the talks (or that the talks were rather noisy for the exhibition!) — this year we put the exhibition in the same room as the atrium stage precisely because exhibitors complained last year that they were stuck off in a room on their own and it was boring. So…not sure what to do, there. Suggestions invited. Special thanks go to the exhibitors who came through when I walked around the expo at the end and hassled them for prizes that we could give away from the stage, particularly Josette from O’Reilly for giving us loads of t-shirts, Jon and the gang from Red Hat for giving us a shitload of stuff, and the GP2X people for giving us a GP2X to give away! Wish I’d got it. Of course, we ended up giving the GP2X for the best LugRadio story to a woman who suggested that I should look like someone from Shaun of the Dead, for which she gets all of my no love. Hmph. Extra special thanks to John Leach, who designed all of our t-shirts (the special ones for the four large gents and the crew t-shirts), despite the crippling burden of his ridiculous new afro haircut.

Don’t blame it on sunshine, don’t blame it on moonlight, don’t blame it on the good times, blame it on the boogie

Finally, there were two pieces of news that we announced at the end of LugRadio Live and Unleashed.

The first, the bad news, is that Ade’s decided to leave the show. No more bald man. We tried to talk him out of it, but apparently he wants to spend more time with his razor or something. Ade, here’s the bit where I say: thanks for everything over the last few years. The show won’t be the same without you, it really won’t. We’ll miss ya, especially when it comes time to look into Ade’s Crystal Bald to see what’s coming up for the next year in Linux and we don’t have it any more.

However, Chris Procter, who’s been a stand-in presenter on the show before, is bravely stepping into the void left by El Baldo de Maximo. Chris has the same sysadmin leanings as Ade (although more hair, but not by much), and I’m really looking forward to the next season — as you know, Adam has also recently replaced Matt, so there could be an entirely new vibe for the new season! Goodbye to Ade, and hello to Chris: season 5 of LugRadio will rock harder than anything ever has. Chris will be part of the show during this coming week, when we’ll be recording a series of special shows at Guadec, the Gnome User and Developer Conference in Birmingham. Look out for them!

The Lord of the Rings, as Chris is affectionately known

The second piece of news is, after much questioning and requests, LugRadio is coming to America! Yes, yes indeed, LugRadio Live USA will be happening in the San Francisco Bay Area in March 2008!

More details as we have them; we’ll be putting up a site soon where you can see what’s going on and buy tickets. Big thanks to Google for making this possible. We’ve talked a lot about how we wanted LugRadio Live USA to have the same feel, the same vibe about it that LRL has here, and we’ve been convinced that that’s possible. So, we’re coming to the land of the free. Prepare yourselves. Next year there will be two LugRadio Lives. I can’t wait.

What a fun weekend.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time at the Yahoo/BBC hack day this past weekend. Dave Neary says “lightning struck twice”, referring to how he was left out of the programme for the conference he was at. Pah. Lightning did actually strike twice; the building I was in was struck. By lightning. Twice.

Excuse me while I say that again. The building I was in was struck by lightning.

Now there’s a pretty unique experience. Although it’s hardly surprising since Alexandra Palace has a 40 metre metal mast on the roof which looks like the Eiffel Tower and probably weighs about ninety tons.

Rumours abound that Google’s new weather API is actually a writeable API. If it were, it’d probably look something like Simon’s Google Smite. To be honest, the bolt hit the building just as I and a couple of others were slagging off Microsoft Silverlight. Draw what conclusions you will.

The roof panels open after the lightning strike, allowing cool refreshing rain to land on everyone’s laptops

Aside from inadvertent electrical events, a lot, lot, lot else happened. There were many cool hacks done with the BBC and Yahoo APIs, seventy in total; I think my favourite was Fruitr, which identified pictures of fruit that you emailed it and then suggested mad recipes in which to use it. Other highlights:

• Jeremy Keith, Nat Downe, and others actually working really hard for the entire weekend and coming up with Hackfight, Top Trumps where your scores are based on how many twitters you’ve done, how high your Technorati rating is, that sort of thing. So it’s a game where you can find out who’s the biggest gimp. Cool hack, mind. :-)
• Me trying to make sense of Simon Willison’s Oxford Geeks code and build a Birmingham Geeks site around it in one hour. And then discovering that the git depended on all of Django just so he could use its template engine for one 10-line template file. Good one.
• I am going to set up Birmingham Geeks, though, so if you’re in this area leave a comment or something and when I do it you can see how to get on there. This will finally give me an excuse to go and have a beer with Bruce Lawson, which I’ve been meaning to do for about six months.
• Travelling down on the train with Matthew Somerville and finding out about all the cool stuff that MySociety are doing, including a wicked cool hack with the BBC Parliament videos that I’m really hoping to see happen.
• 
  The wi-fi being constantly shit for all of the first day, even before the whole building was zapped. Pretty coloured circles on the Cisco wi-fi access points, though. Has anyone ever done a conference where the wi-fi worked properly? (Yes, I know about the Pycon writeup.)
• Having two people come up and ask me if I was me based on recognising my voice from LugRadio. Cool. LugRadio Live is in three weeks, remember, people!
• Meeting up with some people I hadn’t seen for a while and meeting some for the first time
  
• Getting hassle from Christian Heilmann again about moving to London and working for Yahoo. I’m not moving to London, dude. Open a Birmingham office! Embrace telecommuting! It is the 21st century! :-)
• I got pretty pissed off with my laptop, mind, which is fine when sitting on my desk but, what with it being stuffed full of proprietary hardware (listen to this week’s LugRadio for more on that) doesn’t work very well on the wireless (having to reboot to make it re-detect it five or six times a day, grr), hibernate properly, or work with a projector without rebooting. I need a conference laptop which doesn’t have a load of undocumented Broadcom and ATI hardware in it and doesn’t weigh very much. I must try and find a very cheap second-hand one somewhere.

People hide their laptops from the rain with umbrellas inside. An unusual sort of sight.

It was great. I did think about putting some hacks together but, to be honest, I was enjoying chatting away and meeting back up with people so much that I didn’t really get around to much actual coding. Simon was kind enough to credit the London Geeks stuff he did to “The Oxford-Birmingham-Kansas alliance”, with me being the Birmingham third of that, but that’s about all. I do have a plan for making Jackfield support Yahoo widgets, mind. Oh, and I helped out a very small amount with Gerv Markham and Ewan Spence’s rocket launcher, which was entertaining in itself and provided more than one laugh on the day. My pics available of the weekend.

Good work, Yahoo and the BBC. I have no idea whether the weekend met any of the goals you had for it, but you’ve convinced five hundred people that (a) you’re good companies, (b) there are many APIs out there which need mashing up, (c) it is possible to live for two days on Twixes and nervous energy, and (d) the world needs more weekends like this. When’s the next one? Bring it on.

Absolute 2048-bit military-grade comedy here at Hack Day, as… The building was struck by lightning! All the roof panels opened so it rained on everyone’s laptops. And now we’ve been thrown out into the atrium. More news and photos when it all gets sorted!

I’m at Yahoo Hack Day London 07. There have been, er, problems with the wifi, but it’s up, up, up! And I’ve already run into a couple of LugRadio listeners, which is pretty cool in itself. Now to get some actual hacking done…

In less than a month’s time I shall be at another event; this time it’s Yahoo Hack Day. Some chap called Peter CooperTom Scott (thanks pig for the correction) has set up an unofficial Hack Day wiki where you can note what your skillz are and so on. I need to put my thinking cap on to come up with some cool ideas for something to hack on; suggestions for things that you think would be cool and incorporate the Yahoo and BBC APIs welcome!

My Guadec 2007 talk has been accepted! I’ll be speaking on the Sunday warmup day about the web and the desktop and Jackfield. One more thing to add to my list of events I’ll be at. Thanks to Ross Burton and the Guadec team.

Get all your LugRadio Live news and updates from the LugRadio Live Latest News Blog!

OK, we’ve now closed the Call for Papers for LugRadio Live 2007, so if you wanted to get a talk in but didn’t get around to it you’ve missed your chance! We’ve had loads of great talks submitted, and we’ll be putting the schedule together and contacting everyone shortly. Thanks to everyone who submitted!

If you wanted to do something but didn’t get a chance, or you missed the cut this time round, you might be interested in running a BoF session on your chosen subject. We’re really interested in having some superb BoFs this year, so please contact us to let us know!

Steve and the gang are at South by Southwest and I’m not. However, they bought a beer and kept my place free anyway. What a bunch of heroes. Nice one. Sorry I can’t be there with you.

You will be pleased to hear that the video and audio recordings of the main stage talks at LugRadio Live 2006 are now available! Go see for yourself how the talks went for Sarah Ewen, Stephen Lamb, Simon Phipps, Ted Haegar, Jon Fautley, Danny O’Brien, Bill Thompson, Michael Meeks, Simon Willison, Mark Shuttleworth, Mike Hearn, Bruno Bord, Malcolm Parsons, Matthew Walster, Justin Hornsby, Michael Erskine and Mirco Muller, and read reviews and see photos of the event.

http://www.lugradio.org/live/2006/

And there are only 131 days to go until LugRadio Live 2007! Prepare yourselves: it’s coming.

Well, I’m at Skycon. I’m flying the LugRadio flag by myself for today, though; Ade can’t make it at all, and Matt and Jono missed the plane through some incompetence bad luck. So I have to drink four times the amount of beer.

I can do that.

I’m speaking tomorrow; Matt and Jono will be here then too, so they won’t miss their talks. Skycon people: you don’t get rid of LugRadio that easily.

Let the celebrations commence! Let fireworks rain from the skies! Lock up your daughters! Throw open your patio doors and cry to the night, because

LugRadio Live 2007 is happening!

Yes, on the 7th and 8th July 2007, in the Lighthouse Media Centre, Wolverhampton, UK, the world’s greatest open source event is back for another thundering year. You can go and look at the new LRL07 site to find out more. Registration for tickets isn’t yet open: what’s important right now is that we have a Call For Papers. If you’re interested in speaking at LugRadio Live, and following in the footsteps of web gods like Simon Willison and Drew McLellan or software gods like Matthew Garrett and Mike Hearn or philosophical gods like Simon Phipps and Mark Shuttleworth, then we want to hear from you! Go look at the Call For Papers page to find out how to contact us; if you’ve got something cool you want to demo, or some software to show off, or something you want to talk about, then call us.

Plus, if you don’t like the site design then it’s my fault, so blame me and not the rest of the LR team :-)

This year’s going to be bigger and better and more exciting than previous years, and it’s still a fiver for two solid days of unreal entertainment, talks, BOFs, demos, beer, and a live LugRadio recording. Get stuck in!

We’re also interested in people who might want to join the crew. Being in the crew means that you (a) get to take orders (b) fetch and carry stuff (c) get a really cool and exclusive t-shirt (d) feel a sense of warmth and well-being at being a key part of the LugRadio community and (e) get in free. If you’re interested in being part of the crew, drop us a mail!

Prepare yourselves. Only 149 days to go!

Dammit, the second BarCamp London is on while I’m at Skycon. I really wanted to go this time.

As mentioned in these pages before, the LugRadio team are going to SkyCon in Limerick, Eire on February 16th-18th 2007. They asked me to do a talk, as also mentioned, and after polling my gentle readers I’ve decided that the most interest is in Jackfield. So, if you’re interested in Jackfield, try and get along to Limerick next month.

This does also mean that I’ll carve out some time to fix the D-Bus stuff and generally do some more work on the project, which should make some people happy!

Last night myself and Jono were invited to West Yorkshire Linux User Group to talk about Jokosher. We did it in three sections: Jono spoke about the origins of the project and where it’s going next, we did a very quick demo so people could see what it looked like, and I did a section. My section was named “Jokosher Solar System“, and it was about all the other sub-projects that are part of the Jokosher universe but aren’t the audio editor itself. We’ve got a website, some discussion forums, documentation, bug tracking, and loads of other things. The point behind it all was that, although most of our development effort goes into Jokosher itself, you need all these other supporting projects going on in order to turn it from a good bit of software into a good bit of software that people can use.

We’ve tried hard, and are still trying hard, to foster a community around Jokosher; there are dozens, hundreds, of projects out there on SourceForge or wherever which seem good but never got anyone using them, because they didn’t know about them or they had nowhere to file a bug or no way of talking to the developers or to other users of the project. This sort of thing is really important, and we’re concentrating on it. If you’re the sort of person who might eventually be a hacker on Jokosher, you could go through the following process:

finding out about it → using it → talking about it → filing bugs about it or requesting new features → contributing to the documentation → running the bleeding-edge version → writing a Jokosher Extension → making changes to code → becoming part of the development team

No-one is expected to do that, not at all, and you don’t in any way have to do it in that order, but we really want to make it easy for people to take that next step up, to go from being a Jokosher user to becoming part of the Jokosher community, and then to helping to improve Jokosher for the next release if they want to go that far.

Anyway, the presentation. It’s called Jokosher Solar System, and you can view it in your web browser (thanks to S5). I’d be happy to come and tell other people about all the stuff around Jokosher (or anything else you want me to talk about); just contact me for details.

As mentioned a few days ago, the LugRadio team are going to be at SkyCon in Limerick in February 2007. Since we’re there anyway, they asked me if I’d like to do a talk. I said I was happy to, and they asked me to choose a subject.

Now, those of you who read this a lot will have noticed that the stuff I write about tends to be a mix of Linux and the web, and a mix of hard technical information and windy philosophising. So, that suggests something of a framework. If I were speaking somewhere and you were attending, what would you like to see me talk about? It strikes me that the talk could be about Linux or the web, and be either technical of philosophical. Your combinations therefore break down as something like:

The web + technical

This would likely be heavily DOM Scripting focused; JavaScript’s a growth area and it’s What I Do to a large extent. Think of this as something along the lines of bits of DHTML Utopia in talk format.

The web + philosophical

Where’s the web going? What’s the best way to use all this Ajax technology? What’s on the horizon? Why are we wasting web technology? That sort of thing.

Linux + technical

This’d likely focus on some bit of Linux software I write, like Jackfield or Jokosher; technical detail again of how we did the Extension API in Jokosher, for example, or a demo of Jackfield and what’s coming up for it, or some other bit of software I participate in.

Linux + philosophical

This is the sort of thing we talk about on LugRadio a lot. How’s the Linux desktop shaping up? Where does it need to go to be better? What’s the vision for the future? Why should you care?

What would you like to see me talk about? Maybe it’s something completely different to everything above. Post your comments now!

Over the last little while I’ve been adding stuff to kryogenix.org. The first thing is a list of events that I’ve been at or am going to be at, on the events page, which picks up all its data from Google Calendar. Coming up are a talk next Monday at WYLUG in Leeds about Jokosher; Jono and I are talking about the project itself, the community, and all the bits around it. Next February the LugRadio team are going to SkyCon in Limerick, Ireland; we’re covering the conference and recording a show there, like we did at Guadec 2006. Should all be good fun!

The second added thing is a page about books I’ve written. Every time I looked at Chris Brookmyre’s book descriptions it made me laugh, so I thought I’d do something similar.

Thirdly: there’s now a nicer search engine for the whole site, using Google Custom Search.

I’ve got lots of other stuff planned, but it’s finding the time to do them…

I couldn’t make it down to LinuxWorld UK this year, but two cool things happened there.

First thing: there was a Jokosher stand in the .org village! People had lots of questions about what Jokosher is going to be able to do, and I’m inordinately proud that we had people there pushing the Good Word Of The J. You just wait. It’s gonna rock like nothing you’ve ever seen. The only bigger rock will be the Moon. There are pictures of the stand, including Dave Morley having to explain to a guy from Zend that yes, we give it away rather than sell it. Amazing.

The second thing: the Best Open Source Marketing Campaign trophy at the UK Linux & Open Source Awards 2006 went to… LugRadio Live 2006! We are better marketers than Ubuntu! Rock, again! Jono collected the trophy for us (Matt has more detail on why we didn’t go, but briefly because it was £120 per ticket!) since he was there anyway, what with being a judge. Nice one Bacon. Don’t think that this means that it lives on your mantlepiece, though :)

I was a speaker on the JavaScript panel at the @media 2006 conference this year, and they’ve just published the audio from that JavaScript panel for everyone to listen to. Go thou and listen!

At LugRadio Live 2006, we recorded a live show for the second time (the first being at LugRadio Live 2005). That show is now available for download in both audio and video formats. Go thou and get LugRadio Live and Unleashed 2006.

This is the last show of season 3 of LugRadio. We’re returning in September, after the summer break (so we all get a holiday).

I want to say a big thanks to everyone who turned up to LRL2006 this year and made this live show such fun to record, and an even bigger thanks to all the people out there who listen to LugRadio and keep us going with emails of thanks or criticism or participation on the forums or any one of a dozen other things. Next season will be even better, and it’ll be here in a month. Get your earphones on, and enjoy the live show!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

We’re at Guadec!

The mighty and great LugRadio team have put out the first of five daily episodes of LugRadio while we’re here. Recorded (mostly) in Jokosher, too!

It’s been rather cool indeed. I did my Jackfield lightning talk and didn’t die on my arse, which cheers me up quite a bit. There are some real coding powerhouses here, too. Edward Hervey’s a mighty cool guy in person, despite his beard, and the Fluendo chaps are just quality. I say this because we partied hearty on the beach last night until 4am on their dime, with a free bar. Very pissed. Very pissed. And got a lift home with a lunatic Frenchman. Quality. Many photos around: Paul’s are on flickr and Jono has a load.

It’s pretty cool to see how many people have at least heard of LugRadio, too. The Jokosher talk may have helped with that; certainly it has excited interest in Jokosher!

I’m having a great time here, I have to say. The restaurants are for shit, mind. Bah. Ade is especially unimpressed, since “I am a vegetarian” here means “I eat fish, and I don’t mind getting some fish in my dinner even if I specifically ask to not have any meat or fish of any kind”. On the other hand, a random bloke selling sunglasses on the street did accuse Jono of looking like Ali Baba, so it’s not all bad.

Niamh and Sam would love it here, I think, except for the food. I think we should come to Spain. Not this year, though, ‘cos this year we’re going to Caorle in Italy again!

It’s fascinating seeing all this stuff getting done. Daniel Holback decided to package Jokosher for Ubuntu and did it during Jono’s Jokosher talk. You don’t get that at other technical conventions.

Oh, and there was another guy here with an atmedia2006 bag! After the minor awkwardness where I thought he’d stolen my laptop, he turned out to be a cool guy. This is, of course, because he liked the JavaScript panel that I was on. Good work, fella.

Right, less writing about fun and more actual fun for me, I think. Listen out for the second day’s LugRadio tomorrow!

Well, everything’s packed, I think. Tomorrow morning at 9am 75% of the LugRadio team* and Paul Cooper from OpenAdvantage meet up in Birmingham to begin the grand trek to Vilanova. I’m ridiculously excited, yes I am. Less than twelve hours to go!
LugRadio are official media partners, which means that we’ll be prowling the halls and beaches with microphones and talking to people. Jono’s quite keen on doing a show a day, which is fine by me because I don’t have to do the editing. Watch out Gnome hackers: Lugradio is coming.

Bloody Christian Schaller has just written that “according to rumours …Stuart [will] have 90% of all Dashboard applications working in time for his lightning talk” on Jackfield. While I have nothing but respect for Christian and all his work, and I’m ridiculously flattered that he refers to my (5 minute!) talk as a cool highlight that you don’t want to miss, the figure for “percentage of Dashboard applets that Jackfield runs” is miles and miles away from being 90% at the moment. Don’t get your hopes up, although I shall be frantically hacking all day Monday by the look of it to get the number up a bit!

After much work and lots of emails, we now have the talks schedule for LugRadio Live 2006! Get over there and plan what you’re going to see while you’re at the greatest Linux and open source event in history!

I’ve signed up to do a lightning talk at Guadec on Jackfield. That’s scaring me a bit, that.

If you’re going to Guadec 2006, as are the LugRadio team, and you’re hoping to meet the four handsomest and most talented open source software radio show presenters there, then your best place to look is…well, the best place is probably the bar. Failing that, though, according to the Gnome wiki, you should be able to find us in bungalow 510 in the Gnome Village!

I’m going to Guadec 2006, along with the rest of the LugRadio team. It’s going to be cool, although not as cool as LugRadio Live, for which we nearly have the complete speaker list confirmed. All very exciting!

There aren’t many good pictures of me in general, and the ones taken at SxSW are no exception. There were a few decent ones, though:

Just had an entertaining lunch with Steve Chipman and Kevin Smith and Travis. I need to write down all the people I’ve met since otherwise I’ll forget that I’ve met them, which would be a bit bad. Good fun lunch, considering we drank about five beers: that’s a proper lunch. Yes indeed. They’ve all gone off to buy cowboy hats, but I already have a cowboy hat and so am now back at the SxSW venue. Thirsty for more beer, mind, but I probably ought to dial back until this evening.
The three of them reaffirmed my contention that no Americans that I know support Bush. We talked politics for a bit; about ten people I’ve met since coming here have said “please don’t judge us by our leaders”. What I don’t understand is that I know plenty of Americans, and they all seem decent literate clever people, and not one of them votes Republican. So where are all the Republican voters?
I should stay out of arguments I know nothing about.
I did find out that you’re allowed to pay waitresses less than the minimum wage here on the assumption that they’ll make it up in tips. Astounding.

Here I am at SxSW. Austin’s nicer than I was expecting, I have to say. We went down by the river yesterday and saw turtles sunbathing on the rocks. Wasn’t imagining that a scene like that would be in a city in Texas.

There’s beauty in all sorts of odd places if you look for it.

I’m sitting in the day cafe in the Austin Convention Centre, and a chap here was singing a country song about his poodle. He’s now singing a song called “I wish I had a beer sponsorship”. Madness.

Although I do now have wireless working. I have been subject to much puzzlement from Mac people here (that is, everyone here) who do not understand why I spend time fucking about with Linux when Macs just work. It’s a pretty compelling argument; I did try explaining about open source, but I was quite drunk.

I’m debating putting together an argument around Adobe’s declaration of not bringing current Photoshop to the MacBook Pro (so you have to run it in emulation slow mode). The Gimp will work on both, I shall say. I’m not convinced that this argument is any good, but it may help to illustrate the point.

Right, off to see if I can find some of the rest of the gang.

I am now back from d.Construct ‘05. It was great; the clear:left guys did a good job putting it all together. I have learned a number of things:

• If you’ve got a widescreen laptop, change the scren resolution so that it’s not a widescreen resolution when you plug it into a projector, otherwise some of your presentation gets cut off and people laugh at you. I hasten to point out to people that it wasn’t a problem with S5 (or with Linux, for that matter, although apparently Macs can auto-sense the projector resolution? That’s really cool if true.)
• It is possible to drink so much that you wish you were dead the next day. Superb evening out drinking; mAd respec’ to Budd, Rutter, Hammond, and Amy.
• People are doing open-source Flash development stuff; it always seems weird to me to be proud of developing open-source code on a closed platform. Windows and the Mac are the same here.
• My head still hurts a little bit.
• There is a web community in the UK. We need to do more with it.

The talk I gave on DOM Scripting and Ajax is available.