Recorded LUGRadio Episode 3 last night and it was fun. Plenty of different things to discuss, an interesting interview, and the usual array of fun and banter. The show is out on Monday.

Yesterday Paul and I started poncing around with Asterisk@Home. We have been intending to fiddle with it for a while, so down in the demo lab I installed A@H and then we both explored the configuration. Within an hour or so we had two phone extensions set up and we could call between the phones on the network. We also got Linphone rolled into the mix. All of this wondrous delight was configurable with the Asterisk web interface. This was far easier than I expected. I was half expecting to be thrown into the kind of acronym hell that telephony typically affords – aside from your PSTN, you need to know your FXS from your FXO, and then decide if you want SIP or IAX, and finally consider all the wonderful codecs that you don’t actually give a shit about. A@H made all of this much easier to digest. I plan on continuing the aforementioned poncing tomorrow.

I have been thinking a lot about collaboration recently, and I really think it can hook into the vision for the desktop I have outlined in Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop. With some of the recent discussion about whether Gobby should be part of GNOME, it seems to make better sense to allow collaboration to occur at the application level and not have a specific tool that needs to be bodged into satisfying 100 desperate requirements. We really need to take libgobby and integrate it into Abiword, OpenOffice.org, F-Spot and other applications, and with a consistent interface for establishing and running collaboration sessions, this would be a really killer feature for the Linux desktop.

Whether it happens is really up to the developers. In the desktop development community it seems that clear solutions appear to solve certain problems (think cairo, avahi, hal, dbus, udev etc), and I hope Gobby can become the solution for collaboration. This stuff really needs to happen. What do you folks think? Is collaboration that important in the desktop. Would you find it a cool feature to use?

So, it seems that jonobacon.com survived to live another day, despite my predictions of doom and disaster. Hey, with the risks of drinking too much, smoking too much, bird flu, killer mouth disease, being run over, getting bottled by an all day drinker, being blown up by terrorists or watching the pure, unadulterated bollocks that is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, there is the outside risk that jonobacon.com may have dragged my day down too. Thanks to everyone who let me know about bugs, oddities and other examples of rushed hacking in the site. I think most things are fixed now. I do have two outstanding issues that need nailing, but we are nearly there.

For the last two days I have been locked in our demo lab teaching my PHP and MySQL course. We run these courses very regularly and they are always hugely popular. PHP and MySQL really is rocking everyones world, and it is satisfying to see people get so excited about the technology. At the end of every course there is always a bunch of people whose eyes have lit up at the possibilities that PHP and MySQL gives them. This is what Open Source is all about.

I have moved my main computer over to Breezy and everything seems pretty decent, apart from the infuriating synaptics touch pad. It seems there is no way to turn the infernal thing off. After hunting around the net, you are advised to either make a setting in xorg.conf, pass a couple of module options or apply a patch to the driver and load it. I really want to try and keep /opt on this box as empty as possible. My previous machine had gigs of of compiled, patched and generally buggered about with code in /opt. Mind you, I do want to install CVS GStreamer to poke around with PiTiVi and Diva.

Work on LUGRadio Live 2006 is continuing. The other day we went to have a look around our likely venue. It seems ideal and affords us plenty of space. We have also been in touch with some initial people to badger them into talks. We are keeping these names under our belts for now until the venue is confirmed. The date and venue are booked, but they are in the process of figuring out a price for us. While this is happening we have come up with some incredible ideas for the show. I can assure you one thing – LUGRadio Live 2006 is going to be the coolest event you can go to next year, with some incredible speakers, fun new ideas and the whole shebang is fervently for and about the Open Source community. Those of you who are gamers, go and sign up to neuro’s grand LUGRadio Live ET tournament – also check out the thread. I am also really keen to see some kind of hardware hacking exhibition at the show. If you are into hacking hardware and fancy helping to organise this, drop me a line.

In other news, I have recorded a new track called Look Right Into Me and stuck it on Recreant View. Go and have a listen and let me know what you think. We also record LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 3 tonight. It also seems that the hardest man I have ever seen has decided to do Everybody Loves LUGRadio, a spin-off of Everybody Loves Eric Raymond; a comic strip written by northern hero, John Leach.

Right, I am in the process of moving over to the new site. Naturally, any move to a new codebase is going to have its share of snags, and there may well be some problems with the site over the next day or so. To complicate matters, the switchover of the DNS often causes problems. So, the moral of the story? Hang tight and normal service will be resumed soon.

Interesting day today. Had a meeting with a local community project who are looking to implement a community center full of Open Source boxes. After some discussion, they will be running Ubuntu, GIMP, Blender, OpenOffice.org and more. They are also interested in using phpBB to develop community relations on a forum. This is interesting not only from the perspective of getting the solution built, but also in terms of a community building, an activity some of you will know I have a perverse interest in. Build it and they will come.

Had another meeting today about an entirely different project related to the KTP scheme. I am working on a couple of projects related to KTPs, and it is pretty cool how the scheme works. Sure, it is wrapped up in the usual form-filling inanity, but the project today could be interesting for a number of reasons. Unfortunately, I am sworn to secrecy, but when the details can be revealed, I will tap you all on the shoulder and let on.

Work towards LUGRadio Live 2006 has been afoot today, and we are pretty much confirmed with the date and venue. Thanks to the generosity of our pals at Bytemark, this year is going to be far easier to find the cash for. Last year the four of us were rooting around behind sofa cushions to find loose change to make the damn thing happen. This year no such rooting is required. When all the loose ends with the venue are confirmed, we will announce it. Rest assured, the venue this year is pretty darn cool (both in terms of being rather dapper and not being the boiling hot sweatfest it was last year), bigger and has more potential. It will rock, and you will all be rocked into rocketry rocksalt with a garnish of rocket salad. Rock.

I am confirmed as a speaker at the Southern California Linux Expo on Feb 11th and 12th next year. I have never been to California before and I am quite looking forward to it. I am also hoping to squeeze in some LUGs and other bits while I am there – if you are in a LUG and would like me to come over and do a talk or just hang out, do let me know.

I have been thinking today about integration of web services in the desktop. This, combined with many of the ideas that I scribed in Remixing how we use the Open Source desktop keep popping up in my head as concepts that could work well in something such as Project Topaz. After the discussion of these ideas on LUGradio Season 3 Episode 2, I pointed it to Jake (who works on the EGS CRM) and it would be cool to see these things tying together. I plan on writing this up sometime soon into something fathomable.

It looks like the FOGOB is growing. Go and add the things that annoy, irk and grumpify (!) you.
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Got back into work after a number of weeks away from the office. In this time I have been on holiday for two weeks and then another two weeks looking after the new puppy at home (one week working, one week off). I want to thank my incredible bosses at OpenAdvantage for this, they have been awesome in making the schedule of holiday and puppy all work out rather well. The two weeks at home with the pup was well worth it – they are settling in together really well now.

I am really pleased that there are other grumpy old men who hate fireworks out there. We definitely need to form some kind of coalition to rid the world of fireworks, or if all else fails, go to firework displays and gently urinate on the pointless things. Ironic how we are technically celebrating terrorism by banging on about bonfire night. Come on Labour, you have banned or changed everything else that might be affected by the big T word – lets have a crack at the fireworks. Go on Tony…you know you want to… I am now going to form a new organisation called the Fellowship Of Grumpy Old Bastards (FOGOB), an acronym that rather nicely looks akin to Bog Off when reversed. Fireworks were just the beginning, lets start a revolution! If you want to join up, let me know! 😛

Dug through a pile of email today and consequently booked three meetings. In the process of working through this stuff and catching up, I have decided I want to learn how to set up Samba properly. It has always been one of those things that I have played with a little bit, but not extensively. I may enlist the services of one bald individual to assist. I also have Asterisk scribed on my list of things to tinker with. In January I am giving a seminar and a two-day course on it. I hope to spend some time this week poking with it. The SIP phone at home is cool, but I want to have To send Bacon money, press 1. To ply Bacon with food and drink press 2.

Oh, I am looking to buy one of those USB controlled wireless presentation remote flickers. I have seen this but does anyone have any experiences with these in Linux?

LUGRadio Season 3 Episode 2 is released today!!

Did the gig tonight at the Little Civic and it went well. We got up on stage, treated the audience to 30 minutes of pounding metal and got off. You know when you have put your heart into a gig when you get off the stage and feel rather dazed and dizzy. The response was good, signed some tickets, met some new friends and had a great time.

You know, call me a curmudgeon, but I fricken’ hate fireworks. In this country we celebrate bonfire night every year, and the whole process of worshipping these pointless and inane fireworks irks me. Ohh…look…a big flash of light in the sky…wow, isn’t it beautiful. Erm, no. Maybe I am getting a little miserable in my old age, but I wish someone would figure they were a risk to national security and ban them. Maybe someone should plant a load of sparklers in Camp X-Ray and we can architect these infernal buggers to be banned. The problem is fireworks do nothing but amuse chavs and frighten the elderly, animals and men of a tall and bearded variety with a penchant for ducks. To be honest, my position on fireworks was not exactly improved when I was hit in the leg by one a few years back…

It seems that All hail the speed demons is causing some heated discussion on various sites, particularly on LWN. It is interesting to see so many viewpoints on the subject, and I have had some nice mails from some readers letting me know their thoughts. I was quite pleased to get a mail from Torsten Rahn who asked why I think his name is cool. He responded by saying my name was cool, to which I responded “Ahhh you see, it may seem cool from the outset, but having a surname that refers to a piece of pig that is eaten in a sandwich is not one that the girls immediately jumped at when I was at school many moons ago”. You know, I seem to amuse myself with some odd conversations sometimes.

New site hacking continues, and the anti-spam stuff is getting there. Just need to finish it and add some sheen to the site while also buffing the style-sheet up somewhat. I wish I had a big and popular website where I could get my readers to do it for me. 🙂

Tuesday evening I headed to Manchester to speak at an IBM migration event. Headed out in the evening for a few beers and it was great to meet up with Cliff, Andy, Tony and Colin again. It was really great to see Justin Davies again – I only ever meet him at events, and always have a good laugh. Nice also to see Jon Masters. He never fails to amuse me; funny guy. 🙂

The event seemed to go well, and the talk seemed well received. Lots of feedback afterwords and plenty of interest in OpenAdvantage. I belted it back to Wolves to see how the pooches were, and they seemed to get along well. It was the longest they have been left so far.

Yesterday evening we recorded Episode 2 of LUGRadio. On the show we had John Leach, commander-in-chief of the rather amusing Everybody Loves Eric Raymond comic on the show. I didn’t realise that John released the last strip which had a pop at the show, and amazingly, my slightly younger face adorns the t-shirt that Linus wears in the strip. Now my life is complete, with my mug on a most amusing comic strip. Cheers John. 🙂

I am sure many of you will be as annoyed with the comment spam as I am. I am feverishly working away on the new site with its Super Comment Spam Reduction Code (TM), and I hope to get it online this weekend. It may be slightly delayed as today we were asked to do a last minute gig at The Little Civic in Wolverhampton on Saturday night. If you are local person for local people, head down for 9pm to see us play. 🙂
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Today the PVR-350 and the channel switcher box arrived. This evening I had a crack at getting them working and the channel box works and the PVR-350 is nearly finished. I just need an S-Video lead before I can complete the setup. I will pick one up tomorrow.

Tuesday I am giving a talk at an IBM Migration Seminar at Old Trafford in Manchester. I am not listed on the schedule as it was a recent addition, but I am looking forward to running my latest talk. This one is about the choices that need to be made when migrating to Linux and how OpenAdvantage help with this. I am gonna work the slides tomorrow and then head up tomorrow night for a chinese and a few pints with the IBM chaps and Jon Masters.

Late last night I hacked on the new site and all is working out well. Still plenty to fix, and a few irksome array oddities that are going on, but it is beginning to hang together quite nicely.

LUGRadio Season 3 kicked off today to some fanfare by the community, and it seems to have been pretty well received. We shifted a stack of episodes and the new server seemed to handle it pretty well for the main website, but not for audio uploads. Apache is not hugely suited to lots and lots of large uploads, so we plan on shifting it over to thttpd again. We record Season 3 Episode 2 on Wednesday and I am really looking forward to it. We have a corker of a segment brewing. Oh, and check out the map now. Wow!

Tonight I finally got some photos online from our holiday and the fancy dress party. Here are few choice cuts – lets kick off with the holiday. Like the hat?:

You know, I love ducks, and at the Magic Kingdom, we found some friendly ducks on a fake island:

Yep, I love ducks…

Alas, not many photos other ducks it seems. Then again, there are loads of Florida photos elsewhere on the net. We did see my mum and dad while over there. Don’t you think my dad looks like Ned Flanders?:

OK, now on to the fancy dress party. I spent ages on my make-up and costume to transform into a maniac bloodthirsty doctor. Just look at the poor victims of my slaughter:

You don’t want to see this when you go to hospital to have a stone removed:

Three quarters of the LUGRadio team in their usual state of dress. Adam Ant Prince Charming (Aq), a strange vicar (Matt) and the Dr (me):

Its amazing what you can do with a plastic decapitated finger:

And, just to top it off, three gimps dancing:

Oh dear.
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Well, its been a hectic week and the fruits of my MythTV efforts are present and correct. I now have pretty much the entire remote control working (apart from the directional buttons which I have a few bugs with), the LCD screen is fully working and is remarkably cool. I have ordered one of Joseph’s little boxes which should arrive tomorrow, and my PVR-350 should hopefully arrive tomorrow, if not, Tuesday. My channel listings are all working and thanks to a chap on the MythTV IRC channel, I also have icons installed for the Freeview channels. The final steps are to fix the directional remote buttons, install the PVR-350 and configure the channel guide to use the sky switcher to flick the Sky box to the right channel. With all this complete, I will set the box to automatically boot into MythTV and the geek medal will be mine.

You know, I never knew that mplayer does not support DVD menus. That sucks. After a few hours of trying to get to the DVD menu I just could not make the damn thing work. When I discovered this nugget of information, I decided to use Xine instead for DVD viewing in MythTV. I am surprised mplayer is suggested as the default with this limitation. Anyway, after a bit of poking with Xine command line options all is good. I also have it working with lirc. 🙂

On Friday night Sooz and I went out with Aq, Sam, Matt and Lyne and a few of Matt and Lyne’s friends. It was a charity fancy dress party designed to raise some cash for a local hospice. I went as Dr Death, Sooz as a naughty nurse, Aq as an Adam Ant prince charming, Sam as a princess, Matt as a vicar and Lyne as a naughty Nun. Great fun was had by all and despite dancing to Chesney Hawkes with Sam, there will be photographic evidence available. I will stick the pictures online tomorrow for you all to cackle at.

Today at the Seraphidian band rehearsal we discussed plans for our follow-up album. We are hoping to record around late Feb. We will probably hit the studio for a week this time, and we will no doubt lay down 8 tracks. The new stuff is sounding absolutely awesome. I can’t wait to get out and gig it. There are gonna be some mean pits to this stuff… 🙂

Wow, LUGRadio Season 3 is released tomorrow. Can’t wait. And, we record the second episode this week. 🙂

Oh, and as for you spammers. Why don’t you bugger off and spend your time badgering other people’s websites. Considering this site is mainly about computers, Open Source and digital rights, I am 110% sure that no-one will even consider responding to your spam, so don’t waste your time.