I have this week booked off and have decided to dedicate it to the pursuit of walking around in my pants, eating flapjack and watching Diagnosis Murder. In addition to such important duties, I have also continued work on my MythTV masterpiece. The bits are now fitted inside the machine. For those will a penchant for circuitry, here are some cheap frills:

After some initial problems getting the hardware installed (things have changed since 1999 when I last built a computer), I installed AMD64 Ubuntu:

It seems the MythTV packages in Breezy are broken. I considered setting up a bounty to get them fixed, but then I was reminded that I can install the normal x86 Breezy. So, I installed it and the packages were all available and ready. Everything installed fine, and it seems the DVB card that is in the box is working fine too. I then set out to fix some last remaining problems.

The first issue is the TV listings. I have managed to get XMLTV to sync up with the Radio Times site, but it has not downloaded the listings yet. I am going to work on this tomorrow. The next issue is the VFD/IR that is built into the case. For the benefit of Google, my case is a Silverstone LC14M and the LCD and IR unit is an iMon PAD. It took a bit of hunting around to discover this page which provides drivers. This contains a patched LCDProc and the latest version of Lirc now contains the patch for the iMon IR unit. I have consequently got the hardware working, but not had time to make MythTV talk to it. This should be fairly trivial.

So, most of the hard stuff is working, and I am pretty pleased with it all so far. I still need to pick up a Sky channel changer and add a few quieter fans, but its all hanging together pretty well. Its great fun setting something like this up.

In other news, Frankie arrived at Castle Curtis-Bacon (Sooz is making sure I don’t call it Castle Bacon, and probably reading this to check :P) and he is doing fine. To see some pics of him, Banger and my Fluendo t-shirt, check out this page. Banger is a little nervous around him, but they seem to be getting on pretty well. Banger also went into the docs to have the nuts off on Monday. He is healing up pretty well, and I am taking him to the vets tomorrow to check everything is fine.

Finally, Season 3 Episode 1 is recorded, mixed and ready for release on Halloween. Its great to be back, and it was awesome fun recording the show. Its nice to know the community is so excited about Season 3, and we are looking forward to the crazyness to follow. Hey, and go and add yourself to the LUGRadio Map that Ade set up.

Wahay! The case for my MythTV super-machine-of-insane-coolness came in and it looks dang good. The first interesting point is the power supply – a specimen of epic proportions:

I stuck the supply in and took a few shots of the delightful case:

The board is not in there yet (I am still at work), but check out the cables hanging around the case already:

Finally, here is the case closed up:

I can’t wait to get all this running together.

In other news, I have fixed up some bugs in Recreant View – thanks to mrben for some pointers on a CSS problem. I have also been informed that the site is fairly broken in IE. I don’t tend to use IE all that much, so if anyone wants to take a look at the CSS and fix it, you would be doing me a great favour and earn yourself a pint. 🙂

Finally, look who we are picking up tonight:

🙂
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Another fun day at EuroOSCON. Saw some great talks. The greatest was certainly from r0ml who gave a stunning talk on the parallels of Open Source from around 400 years ago. There was also the makers fair – an exhibition dedicated to homebrew DIY hacking. This was awesome and I saw some incredible devices that people have hacked up such as wearable computing, week long TV recording, toy hacking, RFID safes and more. I also saw a pretty scary MMORPG and met a guy who spends 12…yes…12 hours a day on it. Wow.

Tonight we went out for some beers with Scott and Paul from OpenAdvantage, kNo, Dean from GLLUG, Simon Willison, r0ml and some other chaps. Had a few nice beers that hail from all over Europe and then we headed out for a wander to grab some food and poke fun at the red light district. I amazingly saw a friend of mine wandering around the district too – quite a strange experience seeing your pal in such an obscure place.

Today I also wrote the Mozillarization of OpenOffice.org which discusses how OpenOffice.org could benefit from some Mozilla like love to slim it down and tart it up. The word Mozillarization does not exist, so you heard it here first. Go check it out and let me know what you think. It was also picked up on OSNews.

Last, and by no means least I can finally announce my brand spanking earth shatteringly bootilicious new music website called Recreant View. This is the new, dedicated home for my music, and it also includes a podcast feed as well as new song and blog RSS feeds as well as new features such as song ratings, user accounts, song comments, avatars, FAQs, studio pictures and more. There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out, so let me know any bugs, but I am quite chuffed with it. 🙂

Interesting. Microsoft announced about an hour ago here at EuroOSCON that they are releasing three new licenses that may actually be OSD compliant. Although the last thing we need are yet more licenses, it is a pretty impressive fact that Microsoft are bending to do this sort of thing. It will be fascinating to find out more about what is going on with this. The licenses have not been through the approval list at the OSI, but apparently Lessig has had a look at them.

Currently over at EuroOSCON in Amsterdam. I had a beast of a trip getting over here. I missed my alarm for 3am to get over to the airport for 5am. Missed my flight at 6.10am, so headed to the airport and arrived at…6.10am. Booked onto the 8.10am flight which was then delayed by a couple of hours. Finally got over to Amsterdam, and while clenching certain unmentionable parts of my ass with the need to drop some friends off at the pool, I waddled around Amsterdam trying to find the hotel. Found the hotel, defecated and then run the conference. Phew!

The conference is interesting, and I saw a great talk about hardware hacking which has got me really excited – tomorrow there is also a talk about hacking the PSP. Tonight I went to dinner with jdub, kNo, Treenaks, Paul and a few others. It was fun, ate some odd pancakes, drunk some beer and I am now back at the hotel with its complementary wireless access. Nice one there.

Good to see some familiar faces at the conference such as Nat Torkington, Simon Willison, Bruno Bord, Jack Janssen, Gervase Markham, Dean from GLLUG, Josette from O’Reilly, Jeff Waugh and some others.

All in all – running pretty smoothly so far. 🙂
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Some of you may have noticed its been a little quiet around here for the last few weeks. This is because I have been away on holiday for two weeks in Florida with Sooz. We had a fantastic time over there and I recharged my rather depleted batteries. It has been pretty hectic recently and has included:

• The week before jetting off to Florida I went to the CNET awards and got horrendously drunk on wine and felt rather ill for three days.
• The day after the CNET awards (still feeling rough from the night on the sauce) I headed down to Heathrow to meet up with Cliff from IBM ready for a keynote the day after. The morning of the keynote I felt much better and it was a good event.
• The following day we flew to Florida. Spent two weeks taking it easy, eating a huge amount of food and having fun.
• Got back from Florida on Saturday and met up with the LUG on the evening. Jeff Waugh was supposed to be coming over to give a talk but unfortunately could not make it due to an early flight the next day.
• Last night I got no sleep at all and spent the night watching Everybody Loves Raymond and reading my book. Gave up trying to get to sleep at 6am and got some breakfast. This morning I gave a seminar about Podcasting at 8am.
• Tomorrow Scott, Paul and I head over to EuroOSCON. After no sleep last night I was overjoyed to hear our flight is at 6am. Happy happy joy joy. 😛
• Get back on Thursday and the day after we pick up Frankie; our new pup.

While I was away, a few interesting things happened. I was invited to join the Open Document Fellowship and was then elected part of the 6 person committee. O’Reilly published a few of my articles – Open Source Advocacy for the Enterprise (my latest advocacy piece), What Is the Linux Desktop and also the latest installment of My Favorite Projects. There were a few other interesting mails drop in that I will announce when things are a little more concrete.

While in the US I bought myself a Sony PSP. Pretty sweet device and the battery lasts ages. Today when I got into work Scott also presented me with a bunch of components he has given me for building my MythTV box. I bought this beast of a case and a power supply and all I need now is the RAM. Its gonna be an awesome box. 🙂

LUGRadio Season 3 starts on Halloween! Go get excited. 🙂

So, EuroOSCON is next. If anyone is going and wants to meet up, drop me a mail. Oh, and spammers…piss off. 🙂

Today I headed over to Coventry to do a talk for the brand new undergraduates on a multimedia and creative computing course. It was their first day today and it was decided they should be plonked in front of me for an hour, poor bastards. I gave them my opensource cool talk, and it went down pretty well. After the talk I had a beer with the lecturers – nice bunch of people who are really committed to their students. It was also great to have a discussion with James about Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required. James has an opposing view to some of the points I make in the article, and its always much more fun to debate issues over a beer rather than via email.

Speaking of articles, last night I knocked up a quick article called Hindsight is Always 20/20. The piece is intended to outline how experience really paves the way to understanding the Open Source community. I make this point by using myself as a case study of how not to do it. I am a firm believer that if you screw up you should take a step back, identify why you did it and poke fun at yourself. This article is a testament to that philosophy.

Tomorrow I head down to Bedford and then to London for the C|NET Technology Awards. I love awards. As you can imagine, I don’t wear a dinner jacket all that often, so its good fun to stick one on. Its going to be a nice swanky evening with a hotel in Mayfair, the awards on Park Lane and plenty of wine and good food. OpenAdvantage is up for most innovative Open Source project. Keep those fingers crossed…

Oh, and OSDir have asked me to submit my favourite less well-known applications. Go and check it out – I think this is updated over the coming weeks as I sent them five applications.

The hectic week continues, and some good and bad things have happened. Being the optimist that I am, lets start with the bad thing. This specific bad thing lies in the form of pure, unadulterated incompetence from amazon.co.uk. Deep breath Jono…deep breath…

As many of you will be aware, I have an Amazon Wish List. Before I published the wish list, I wanted to double check that my address was correct as I had moved house. I logged into amazon.co.uk and there was only one link that had the word address in it. I clicked the Manage your address book link and there were two addresses there, my old address and my parent’s address. To be totally sure, I deleted both addresses and added my current address. I was now set, so I published my wish list and begged like a cheap tramp to readers of jonobacon.com for presents. 😛

Some of you kind individuals were nice enough to buy some things from the list and I had a big grin on my face like some sort of idiot. A few days later nothing had arrived and I got an email from someone who bought something from the list saying that item was returned with an UNDELIVERABLE state. After poking around amazon.co.uk for ages trying to find a phone number, I eventually found one by going to Yell. I called them, explained the situation and the chap there called the Royal Mail to find out what was wrong. He called me back and shared the wonderful truth from the Royal Mail that it was delayed but they didn’t really know why. Thats right, the Royal Mail could not determine the progress of of one their own packages. Astonished, I wanted to call Royal Mail myself and give them a rollocking. The guy from Amazon said I could just quote the Amazon order number and they could track it. I called Royal Mail and discovered that the guy at Amazon was a total liar and you could not specify such a number. So, I rung back Amazon and spoke to someone else. He was unsure what the problem was and checked all of my account settings.

Here it gets juicy…prepare yourself. It seems that my old address was still the address for my wish list. My natural assumption that changing addresses in your address book will change…er…addresses, was obviously wrong. No, I needed to go into the address book, add the new address, and then go to my wish list, click on the tiny link about delivery options and then select the new address. This is totally, utterly, unforgivably unusable for three reasons:

• Why on earth do I need to go somewhere else to change wish list addresses? The term Management infers that the page will look after all processes relative to the subject in hand, in this case, addresses. [mentally hear the Family Fortunes uhh-errr! sound]
• If you do need to add this extra process for the wish list, why not at least inform the user that they should go to this separate page. There is simply no visibility for this process requirement. [uhh-errr!]
• How, in the name of buggery can an address that I deleted from the account still be valid for the wish list? Why on earth does the site not inform you that you are deleting an address used for your wish list? Wait for it…wait…[uhh-errr!]

To be fair to Amazon, they are generally pretty decent when it comes to usability, but this is a travesty of design. They could fix this problem by simply adding a link inside the address book management page with something like Make this my Wish List delivery address. They should also add error checking for when you delete the wish list address and when there is no address currently set.

I reported these concerns to the chap on the phone, but I will be very, very surprised if this gets fixed anytime soon. The result of this mess is that six wish list purchases were sent to my old address which in turn returned them to the sender. This means that everyone who purchased an item will need to re-purchase it when they get an email indicating that the item was undeliverable. Could anyone who purchased something from the list send me an email to indicate they bought something and what it was – I may be able to chase Amazon to send it to the right address.

In other news, I went out last night to see the superb Decapitated in Birmingham. Support included Gorerotted (awesome), Detonation (awesome) and another band that I think were called The Damned (pretty darned good). Great night!

This coming week is pretty busy. On Monday I am into work and doing a talk in Coventry to some students, then on Tuesday I drive to Bedford and jump on a train to London to attend the C|NET Awards. I then get the train back to Bedford on Wednesday morning, work there all day and then drive to Middlesex in the evening for a few beers with the IBM guys. Thursday I keynote at the IBM event then head back that evening to Bedford to get an early night before we jet off to Florida. Phew!

In a final bit of good news, there is a good likelihood that the XAMPP Control Panel will make it into the next official version of XAMPP. There are a few things to fix such as removing its GConf dependency and adding some better error checking, and Kai has implemented the statusraw feature in XAMPP to help the control panel better track the status of running components.

The WMITA talk yesterday went well and it was great to see such a positive reaction to Open Source. I am sure that I will be hearing from a number of the delegates in the coming months.

After the event in the morning, I headed back to Birmingham to have a birthday lunch with my colleagues at OpenAdvantage, and then headed back out to have a meeting with Andy from Project Splinescan. He is doing some utterly fantastic work with his 3D scanner, and the entire project is rooted in Open Source technology. Andy is also keen to hook his scanner up to Blender to make scanning objects into a Blender a piece of cake. I am going to try and secure some opportunities for him to further his efforts and research.

Last night I went to JB’s in Dudley with Sooz and a couple of guys in the band to see Nevermore and Dew Scented. Utterly, utterly brilliant bands, and Nevermore were as incredible as ever in their live performance. Superb gig.

This morning I had a conference call with IBM about the Developing Software for an Open Source Environment event that I am keynoting at. The event takes place on Thursday 29th September 2005 at IBM Bedfont Lakes, Feltham, Middlesex. It looks a pretty exciting agenda and I will also be chairing the panel discussion in which three iPod Nano prizes can be won. Be sure to go and register and come down to what promises to be a very interesting day.

Today we booked our EuroOSCON tickets, and I am looking forward to heading over there. It will be good to meet up with some other folks who are going, and I will see if I can drop in on the Blender guys to say hi. If you are going and fancy a beer, do let me know. 🙂

Oh, while I am here, I may as well formally introduce you to a little chap who will become the fourth member of Castle Bacon (ignore Sooz about this Castle Curtis-Bacon nonsense :P):

His name is Frankie, and he is Banger’s new pal. He is currently about a month old and he is a chocolate tan mini dachshund. He will enter the Castle in about a month. 🙂

Sheesh its early. I got up today at 5.20am to head over to a WMITA event to talk about Open Source and how it can help businesses. At the event I will be demoing XAMPP, Mambo/Joomla! and WordPress on Windows. Windows is the chosen OS as most of the delegates will be Windows bods.

Well, it seems that Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org is doing well. After its appearance on Slashdot and and OSNews, the piece has gone on to inspire plenty of discussion, including in the article comments itself. Thanks so much to everyone who has commented, and also thanks to everyone to send me emails about the piece. I genuinely hope it can help bring some more people to the project.

Yesterday we had a meeting about some new events that we are running at OpenAdvantage. I will be doing some more PHP/MySQL courses, and I will also be doing a course about voice over IP. In terms of seminars, I also do a voice over IP seminar and interestingly, a seminar on usability and better web design. This usability seminar will talk about how Open Source software can inspire better design skills in both Open Source and proprietary applications. I suspect I will be using a certain bank’s online banking system as an example of bad design.

Got in last night, had a conference call with the other judges to decide the winners of the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2005. I then used my fancy-schmancy-pants SIP phone to give a publisher in the US a call to discuss a new project. Finally, went to bed, watching a bit more of RAW and zonked out.

Right best leg it out to Stone for this talk…