as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

For those of you who missed the greatness that was LugRadio Live USA, or those lucky lucky people who were there and couldn’t see all the talks, we’re now starting to make videos of the talks available for download! Tony Whitmore, our hyper-competent video guy, is busily processing the videos, and as they’re made available we’re adding them to the LugRadio Live USA schedule. Currently there’s video of the LugRadio live show recording, Ted Haeger talking about “Freedom and the Cloud”, and Emma Jane Hogbin talking about women in open source. More will be appearing over the next few weeks! Keep an eye on that page to find video that you can stream or download in a load of formats.

(Those of you who are hyper-keen can actually get the videos quicker by watching the official video thread in the LugRadio forums, too.)

I’ve been noodling about in Inkscape, and reading The Order Of The Stick, a webcomic. It’s got a unique visual style, which always makes me laugh, and I thought (despite my lack of artistic ability): I wonder if I could do that?

(there’s the SVG too to look at, which is a better size, although it’s 1MB because of the embedded images)

I’m not brilliantly happy with Chris or Adam, but I think Jono and I came out OK :)

Maybe I should do a LugRadio webcomic.

Inkscape’s a really good tool, by the way. The people who do it should feel very proud. I am distinctly short of artistic ability, and I’ve barely used Inkscape before, and I managed to put that together in relatively short order. Good work, Inkscape team.

Oh, yes, and LugRadio Live USA is this Saturday. We’re coming to America. Get ready.

And now we have the schedule for LugRadio Live USA. Go and see and plan which talks you intend to watch!

LugRadio Live USA 2008 schedule

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…

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.

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?.

A random collection of things that I don’t have enough time to properly write about but which ought to be noted for future reference:

• All sorts of news in the world of Humanized. Enso is now free to download, although disappointingly not Free Software. However, Jono di Carlo has left a comment suggesting that that might happen; my fingers are crossed. I’d love to see Humanized and the free desktop in partnership, because I think their work is excellent, and we have a dearth of good usability engineers. Another potentially great move in this direction is that Mozilla Labs have hired some of the Humanized engineers.
• We’ve announced dates for LugRadio Live USA: come to the greatest show on earth on April 12th and 13th 2008 in the Metreon, San Francisco. I’ll shortly be allowing people to register for the event; at the moment I’m trying to decide precisely how to do it. Paypal’s a pain (because they hassle you to create an account if you don’t have one), Google Checkout requires you to have a Google account as far as I can tell: any other suggestions for how to do online registration are welcomed.
• Adam Jackson writes that the phrase “Linux is about choice” is holding everything back: “It strangles the mind and ensures you can never change anything ever because someone somewhere has OCD’d their environment exactly how they like it and how dare you change it on them you’re so mean and next time I have friends over for Buffy night you’re not invited mom he’s sitting on my side
  again.” I couldn’t agree more, I really couldn’t. Well said, that man.
• Stuart Colville (currently fourth in a a Google search for “stuart”, one place behind me, ahaha, take that, Colville!) writes about the new Macbook Air and compares it unfavourably to the Eee PC. I’m a big fan of the Eee, because Asus have the right idea; there are lots of similar sub-notebooks coming out which all have the idea “we need to make a small notebook” but don’t have the idea “and we need to not charge a thousand pounds for it”. I know lots of people who have bought an Eee, precisely because it’s two hundred pounds, and it’s actually a really nice machine. We were keen on it on LugRadio, too (and don’t forget that we’re giving an Eee away; go enter the competition. Good work Asus, I say.

In the latest episode of LugRadio, “One From Four”, we test four Linux distributions — Mandriva 2008, Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, OpenSuSE 10.3, and Fedora 8 beta — in a series of real and ordinary tasks. Printing, connecting via Bluetooth, playing Ogg Vorbis and MP3, watching Youtube, using wireless. Is Linux really ready for ordinary people on the desktop? Well, we had fun finding out. Four identical machines, four non-identical presenters, four Linux distributions. The results were pretty entertaining to discover. (I ought to note that it was a little unfair on Fedora, since we were using a beta, but Fedora 8 isn’t out yet; certainly it did not embarrass itself!)

Also in this episode, the odd world of Machinima (making animated films using 3D game engines), the odder world of the Otherkin (what the fuck is that all about?), and a chap from Mandriva gets repeatedly beaten about the Mandrake Club. Plus all the usual fun and games. Go listen and tell us what you thought by email or phone or on the LugRadio forums.

I’ve just released the latest episode of LugRadio, “Lock, Stock, and One Smoking Barrel“, which is the second episode of season five (five! still amazes me, that). We talked to Greg Kroah-Hartman about the Linux Driver Project, we ruminate about online office suites and whether they’re completely pointless, about another free software project which seems to be lost in space, and whether the open source community eats itself alive too much, which it does (as per discussions on Planets Gnome and Ubuntu passim). And, y’know, people write in to tell us we were wrong about things (thanks Gerv!) even though we clearly weren’t. You know the score!

Interestingly, though, I’ve been poking through my logs for lugradio.org and associated mirrors. In the past, people have asked (repeatedly) for an estimate of how many people listen to the show, and I normally quote some figures I worked out a long time ago showing that between eight and twelve thousand people grab it every two weeks. For various reasons it’s quite difficult to get figures across our mirror network and RSS and so on, but I believe I’ve put these together properly. It looks like, since the old days when I worked those numbers out, it’s changed rather a lot. As far as I can tell, an “average” episode (if there is such a thing) of LugRadio has about 20,000 people listen to it, and the most popular episodes get somewhere around 30,000 listeners. Thirty thousand! Blimey. So, I would like to say thanks to those thirty thousand people: we love it, yes we do. Keep on doing what you do, and we’ll keep on doing what we do.

Probably this is all explained by Bacon being the top of the Linux bloggers A-list, although I personally have my doubts about the methodology there (as does Don Marti, who did it). Then again, since I was sixth I can hardly complain too much. Don’t talk too much about the methodology; just let me enjoy the warm feeling, even if it is all built on mathematically dubious sand foundations. We march onward, indeed.

I currently (now that we’re in to season 5 and Matt has abandoned us) do the encoding of LugRadio ready for distribution. I’m not sure I’m doing it as well as it could be done, though. If you know anything about bitrates and that sort of thing, do please drop over to my call for help on the LugRadio forums and tell me how to do it right…

After a long-ish break over the summer, LugRadio returns for season 5! With an all-new pretty website, interview with Miguel de Icaza about Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Silverlight, and lots of the usual stuff. We’re planning to shake things up a bit this season; people have been asking us to come and do live shows around the country, and you can now get in touch to ask us about that. Let us know what you want to hear by mailing show@lugradio.org or going to lugradio.org/contact. If you’re in the USA (or can get there), then LugRadio Live USA is also now definitely confirmed! We’ll see you Easter weekend in San Francisco. Go get the first episode of Season 5 to find out more!

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, 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.

I’m now leaving work and going to set up LugRadio Live! If you’re coming, I’ll see you tomorrow; if you’re not coming, you’re missing out. Be there!

Have a good weekend: I certainly will.

Roger Light produces a spoof of the LugRadio Live Freedom March video, calling it the one-man Freedom March. Nice. He grew and shaved beards especially for the video, apparently. I’m finding a way to show this at LugRadio Live next weekend.

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.

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…

First

Bastian buys a 32″ TV

Then

I swoop into the gold medal position with a 37″ TV

Finally

Jono buys a 52″ TV

I think maybe he’s compensating for something…

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

Welcome to the second LugRadio Live 2007 promotional video, Don’t Listen Alone. See the perils of listening to LugRadio without coming to LugRadio Live!

LugRadio Live 2007: be there!

You can watch and download the video in various formats, including Theora, from the Don’t Listen Alone site.

Oh, and in case you haven’t got the message yet: LugRadio Live 2007 registration is open! Go and register! If you’re coming but paying on the door, go and register on that page anyway so we know you’re coming! You know it makes sense! Too many exclamation marks! Help! It’ll be great!

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

LugRadio Live 2007, the greatest open source event in the history of the universe, is four weeks from now, and…

Registration is now open!

You can register! You can come! Pay your fiver!

We’ve got forty speakers in three talk tracks, Birds of a feather discussion sessions, an exhibition, and the most intelligent, best connected, most freedom-loving six hundred people in the world all in one venue for one weekend!

The video above is called The Freedom March: if you can’t see it, or you want to download it, or you want to put it on your blog and tell people about LugRadio Live, you can get it in Ogg Theora, mpeg, and mp4 formats from the Freedom March site. Go post it on your site; go digg it; go link to it; go tell it on the mountain. LugRadio Live is coming. Be there.

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

This year at LugRadio Live we’re having The Hour Of Power again, like last year. It’s a one-hour main-stage session where people demonstrate cool visual things. Last time there was Justin Hornsby demoing MythTV, dotwaffle demoing, well, demos, Malcolm “pepsiman” Parsons demoing Linux on the Nintendo DS, msemtd demoing his home-built MAME arcade cabinet, and Mirco “MacSlow” Muller demoing Lowfat. This year we’re looking for more things in that vein. So, if you want to show off your media centre software or something you’ve built into an Altoids tin or some exciting pretty web technology or something else, contact us to volunteer!

As you’ll find out if you listen to the next episode of LugRadio (released next Monday), Matt Revell is leaving LugRadio. He lays out his reasons, and they’re reasonable (as reasons ought to be). All I can say is: cheers, Matt. We had a great time, and the show wouldn’t be where it is without you. Best of luck with all the other cool stuff that you’re now moving on to, and welcome to Adam Sweet who now joins the team on a permanent basis. LugRadio listeners, prepare yourselves for more server stuff, less marketing stuff, more of Adam’s strangely attractive accent (according to the mailbox at LugRadio Towers, anyway), and many many fewer phrases in foreign languages. Certainly the average language ability across the team has dropped by a significant margin. Thanks for everything, Matt! We knew the two days.

Matt says goodbye, and Adam says hello.

(11:21:11) Jono Bacon: ping

—

(15:57:42) stuart.langridge@gmail.com/Gaim: you pung?
(15:58:38) Jono Bacon: fuck you
(15:58:38) Jono Bacon: :P
(15:58:39) Jono Bacon: brb

It warms the cockles, I tell you.

OK, which one of you shower of bastards is responsible for gingalingling, eh?

I knew I’d get grief about getting a LiveJournal :-) Consider me subscribed; if I’m going to be depressed I’m surely better finding out about it through RSS than paying £200 an hour to a psychotherapist.

Nonetheless, you should indeed come and cry with me at LugRadio Live!

Update: and Jono too! ilovemybeard says “there’s so many people here i can talk to about the community. it’s like communitising a community within a community using community tools to promote community tools.” Ho ho ho :-)

Some interesting discussion going on on a previous post here about LugRadio’s licencing terms and the length of the show. Chip in if you’ve got an opinion!

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

We now have the talk schedule available for LugRadio Live 2007!

LugRadio Live 2007 Talk Schedule

The glory that is LugRadio Live proceeds apace. Getting the schedule together has been a pretty fun task. You’ll observe the Hour of Power doesn’t yet have names against it; we’re looking for cool submissions for demonstrations there. Let us know at the show email address, which is show at the lugradio.org domain!

We’ve just released (delayed by a day, because it was Easter Monday, a bank holiday here in the UK) “I’ll have a P“, episode 16 of season 4 of LugRadio. In addition to some conversation about the Apple TV, an interview with Ian Murdock (of Debian fame, and latest Sun employee), and the PS3, we’re also focusing a bit more on technology rather than philosophical discussion (we like technology! plus, there are only so many times you can argue that free software’s a good idea :)), and talking about the LugRadio community. What would you like to see happen in the LR community, if you’re part of it? If you’re not part of it, why not? Tell us and we’ll listen.

Oh, and listen to the show and then tell everyone else about it, too :-)

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!

Happy Red Nose Day from the LugRadio team!

Remember, you can still donate to The Big Red Recording, a whole album in a day being done by LugRadio’s own John O’Bacon.

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.

The LugRadio team proudly presents “The importance of being critical”, episode 12 of season 4 of LugRadio. Those of you who are already part of the LugRadio community will of course know about this, but those of you who come here for web stuff rather than Linux stuff may be interested in the big discussion in this show about web applications, desktop applications, why use one rather than the other, and me ranting about what “progressive enhancement” means. In particular, I’d be interested in comments on any full-on web apps that genuinely use progressive enhancement techniques, in that they work with simple or text-only or mobile browsers but provide a better experience to those people with modern ones, and they do something actually proper. I spoke about using progressive enhancement to improve existing apps a little, but was challenged to name a full-on app doing something complex like Google Spreadsheets that would work without Ajax, and couldn’t do so. Help appreciated.

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!

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!

In a recent review of Linux podcasts in Linux User and Developer magazine (no link because the magazine doesn’t seem to be available online), the reviewer said that LugRadio was like “a Linux version of Top Gear“.

I can die happy now.

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…

The LugRadio community is a pretty wild and diverse thing, and we’re really rather proud of it. However, you might not realise just how wide and diverse it is. Now you can find out! Go see the LugRadio Advent Calendar every day from now until Christmas to find a note about a part of the community you might not have known about. Get involved!

A new LugRadio is out! I’ve just done the release for “That’s Arr-Path”, episode 6 of season 4 of the world’s finest radio show. I’ve been pretty lax about mentioning them here recently, I must admit. Busy life. You get a pathetic exhibition of laughing on air at the beginning, and a big rambly outro at the end: what more could you want? Oh yeah, and some things about rPath Linux, planets, and push email. Go get it.

Ade has, as repeatedly requested on LugRadio, opened up his secret wiki to the world. In other news, a pig got airborne.

But seriously, folks. This is good work by the bald man. His wiki has much cool information on it. Kudos, Mr Bradshaw.

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 :)

LugRadio is back from the summer break! The first episode of season 4 is now available at lugradio.org. Hear us talk about which projects got overlooked in the Summer of Code! Marvel as half the LugRadio team are now working as part of the Ubuntu team! Be amazed at how we’re now in our fourth season! Mail the show!

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!

(courtesy of fuzzix)