Been busy as usual. 😀

The hacking on my new site is going pretty well, but I am only really allocating time for it at weekends. I tend to spend Saturday night from about 1.30am until I pass out hacking on stuff. The new site is getting there, despite the usual wrangling with CSS. I need to invent a magic box where I can think of a design and it will happen without having Uber-Zeldman skills.

I recently finished an article for the O’Reilly Network about PiTiVi and GStreamer. In it I interviewed Edward Hervey (author of PiTiVi and Ronald Bultje (general GStreamer and video hacker). Both seem pretty happy with the article and it is submitted and awaiting publication. Fingers crossed, this article will help clarify some issues in where video production on Linux is going. I know Edward is busily hacking on the infrastructure behind PiTiVi (porting gnonlin and gst-python to GStreamer 0.9). He also told me that Wim Taymens (scarily talented hacker) has optimised the seeking code is GStreamer even further. This is pretty important as the seeking in 0.8 and below seem rather crufty. All good stuff.

I went down to London last week to do a talk at an IBM seminar. I headed down the evening before to have a few bevvies with the IBMers, and they are a really sound bunch. Got back to the Hilton at around 2am, hit the sack and then headed out at around 8am. The seminar was well run and there were an army of A/V monkeys on site to capture the show. Around 170 people seemed to fill the main room and the talks were also streamed in the exhibition room where another 30 or so people mingled. My talk was about how Open Source came to be and where it is heading in the future. The talk has quite a strong theme of understanding people – this software is essentially socially driven, and if you understand the people, you understand the software. Anyway, the talk seemed to go fairly well and I hope to hook up with the IBM guys at some point soon. Slides comes soon also.

In the last few evenings I have been recording some tunes with Emelye (resident cello player lass). We have been working on one song in particular, and I have also recorded an acoustic guitar piece. The new mic is really having an effect with these acoustic stringed instruments. The dynamic range of an acoustic guitar or cello is far greater than that of a heavily distorted guitar. Distorted guitars are slightly easier to handle in some ways due to their more compressed range, but more complex in other areas. The result so far have been pretty decent and I hope to get something online fairly soon.

Next week, the Ging, the Suit and I head over to What The Hack for four days of beer, hacking and tents. I will be taking my video camera to document the events, and fingers crossed it will be edited in PiTiVi sometime soon. 😛

Fun weekend. Met up with friends on Saturday night, and I also met up with the band on Sunday. We have had some time off due to an injury with our drummer Jon. We are all looking forward to getting back into it. In addition to this I spent some time on Saturday working on a new tune, and I am quite pleased with it. It needs a guitar solo adding and then it should be complete. On Saturday night I also spent a few hours hacking on a new incarnation of this site. It is going to take a while to do, but it will be better. Much better.

Today I headed over to Reddich for a meeting. This meeting was with a very interesting organisation who are moving over to SugarCRM running on a Linux server. They are very interested in Open Source, and I think they will make a fantastic case study. More news when I can reveal it.

On Wednesday night I head down to London. IBM are putting me up in the Hilton and we are heading out for some drinks and a curry on the evening. The day after (Thursday 14th July 2005) I will speaking at an IBM Linux Migration Seminar at The Meridien Piccadilly Hotel in London. My talk is at 10.40am for around 30 minutes. I will be talking about how Open Source has become a force in the IT industry and how Open Source has matured in different directions. The event looks like it is going to be pretty well attended.

In other event news, I will be speaking at the UK UNIX User Group Conference in Swansea. My talk is all about LUGRadio, how it happened, and why on earth we continue to punish our listeners with it. Both events are on the Events page.

LUGRadio recording tonight. Should be fun. 😀

I am not going to talk about London – the bastards responsible want the attention. My sympathies are with the victims and my hatred are with the responsible.

Well, the LUGRadio: Live and Unrestrained video is finally released. Go grab a torrent. Getting this thing encoded and working on all systems has been a real pain. The final result is an xvid video and is around 280MB. Christian was wondering why more videos released by Open Source people are not released as oggs. In our case, there were simply no tools available to do this. My first shot at creating a theora file was by running a gstreamer pipeline:

gst-launch-0.8 oggmux name=m ! filesink location=file.ogg { filesrc location=lrl2005.mpg ! decodebin name=d d. ! audioconvert ! rawvorbisenc ! queue max-size-time=5000000000 max-size-bytes=25000000 max-size-buffers=0 ! m. d. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue max-size-time=5000000000 max-size-bytes=25000000 max-size-buffers=0 ! m. }

Today while trying to encode, Christian DCCed me a script he wrote to do this, but there were some problems with the audio not syncing with the video. I don’t know if this is a problem with the player or the codec.

The thing I don’t get about codecs is why on earth they vary so much. My naive view of codecs was that you encode something as MPEG2 and it would work on any system that purports to support MPEG2. I had vastly different results on two different Linux boxes and a Windows machine. This is crazy. Encoding is a real black art – you need to know about strange little tools, and few of the well known tools seem to do the job.

I agree with Christian in that PiTiVi (with its spanky new website) has a real opportunity to change this. PiTiVi is currently being ported to GStreamer 0.9 and 0.9 seems to rock a lot harder than 0.8. It is all looking really promising for Open Source multimedia. Fingers crossed, by September we will not only have a promising video editor, but we will also have a further stress tested GStreamer framework suitable for multimedia creation applications.

First things first. Software patents have been thrown out. This sounds pretty final as Dave Neary points out. This is fantastic, utterly, utterly fantastic. Tonight happens to be a LUG meeting, and we are all going to celebrate – Kat is even baking a cake.

Last night I knocked up a quick article on my O’Reilly Blog called Plugging in the web. It talks about the chronic lack of integration between between different web applications. The article also talks about how the Open Source desktop has been ploughing through these challenges.

Elliot has demonstrated his god like programming prowess and has created a Python script to suck the ID3 tags out of files and sort the files into Artist/Album Name directories. This is really handy and he needs to be knighted immediately. Thanks Elliot. 🙂

Oh, and this gem arrived today:

Hacked some more on the shopping cart – small look and feel fixes. The problem with projects such as this is that they can turn into a life dominating project. I have another five projects to write, so that best not happen. 😛

Today I worked on an IBM presentation for an event I am speaking at in a week and a half. I will provide more details on this soon. I am also speaking at the UKUUG conference in Swansea – more details on that are forthcoming too.

Today I bought one of these babies:

This is an AKG C 2000 B condenser microphone. I have been hankering after a decent vocal mic for a while, and never got round to putting the order in. I chose this one after doing a bit of research and it is a quality bit of kit for recording vocals, amps and acoustic instruments. When this gem is in my studio it will be getting screamed at on a regular basis.

Congratulations to my other half Sooz who started work at the BBC today. She sent me a mail from her new bbc.co.uk address. She is travelling to Birmingham with me every day, so when she is driving, I get an extra half an hour sleep in the morning. 🙂

Go grab Episode 19 while its hot. Speaking of LUGRadio, the videos from LUGRadio Live 2005 are still in production. I am having a nightmare of a time battling with codecs to get them working on all platforms. The world will be a brighter place when Pitivi, Theora, Direc and HAL/DBUS handle firewire devices.
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Spent some time hacking a shopping cart that I wrote about a year ago into a usable state for the book. This involved the usual process of converting all the crufty old crap that was the peak of knowledge back then into all the new stuff I have learned since. Hacking really is an evolution of not only skills but also mindset. I consider myself a fairly competent PHP developer, but reading old code always makes you realise how important it is to stay near the edge of your game. Become complacent and the world passes you by. This process of cutting the weeds out and planting fresh code has been both interesting and inspiring. It is pleasant to see your progress in a year.

This evening I had a trip down memory lane while fiddling with Google. One of the great things with the modern Internet is that you cab dig up some old memories if you want to. Ladies and Gentlemen, for your enjoyment, here is a short history of a Bacon who got started on the web:

• Apr 1997 – My first website – this was my first shot at a site. This is really where I got started writing too – I wrote free guitar lessons as plain text files
• Oct 1997 – First usenet post – one of my earliest posts to the Net. In this case I was asking about which Ariel I needed to pick up certain signals with my scanner
• Oct 1997 – First IRC channel – I set up an IRC channel about radio scanning
• Apr 1998 – Slackware – this was my first post about being a Linux user
• Jan 1999 – Linux UK first incarnation – I got started on my first Linux based site called Linux UK, ironically made in Frontpage
• Feb 1999 – Installfest HOWTO – first document contributed to the Linux Documentation Project
• Nov 1999 – Wolves LUG – I set up Wolves LUG, and this was the first webpage
• Feb 2000 – First KDE post – first post to kde-devel
• March 2000 – Linux UK gets
  flashier – as I started university, the influence of PHP and MySQL crept into Linux UK

I think thats enough digging through the net. 😛

I am knackered. this week has been a long and tough one, mostly due to a lack of sleep since last Thursday. Despite walking around like a zombie, I managed to get lots done and its been a productive week. Luckily, things are starting to settle down now a bit at work. I have tied up much of the assists that I have been working on, and as my diary opens up, I can get on with things that I have neglected for the last few weeks.

It is good to see more work going into the desktop. Aside from Zack’s work on X eye candy, Bastien is also looking at easing sound card use at the Project Utopia stack level. This is exactly the kind of stuff I would like to see going into the desktop. It is still a royal pain in the arse to configure sound cards. The problem is not just in getting the card working, but cards such as the Delta 44’s and 66’s include special control panels that are invaluable. Fingers crossed, the GStreamer work, HAL/DBUS and other components are making multimedia easier to deal with. That, and the increasing maturity of Theora and Vorbis should give a decent stack.

Edward is hacking away at getting gst-python 0.9 ready and today committed changes to make 0.8 and 0.9 parallel installable. When he has completed ports of gst-python and gnonlin to 0.9, time can then be spent on hacking Pitivi into a release. I started work on a patch that Edward is going to merge when the porting is complete, and I am looking forward to writing some future patches. I really see so much potential in Pitivi, I really do.

I am also looking forward to seeing the new Hula interface that the gasman has been hacking on. It is due any time now, and Alex Hudson is working to be ready to provide some Ubuntu packages when it is ready. Here at OpenAdvantage we deal with stacks of people for whom Hula will be a godsend. There are some other thoughts knocking around in my mind regarding these systems and I plan on writing some of this up soon.
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Well, LUGRadio Live 2005 is finally over. It was a stunning weekend and incredibly heartening that such a vibrant community could pull together to pull off such a memorable event. We are so proud of everyone. Even Pickle. 😉

I am not going to iterate through the series of events at LRL, as they have been documented on other blogs elsewhere, but I would like to share my own personal thoughts about how it went. There was little doubt that this was truly community driven. This could be demonstrated not only in the way the entire event was populated by community hackers, but also by the way corporate companies such as Red Hat and Linspire were made equal to Debian, OpenOffice.org, Mambo et al. As much as there is a critically important need for commercial Linux services, LRL was all about equality. What made me chuckle was that Debian had a huge sprawling stand and next to them Linspire had a small stand with some flyers and box sets; a stand staffed by none other than the Linspire CEO, Kevin Carmony. Kevin was a great sport and flew over to England for LRL. Linspire have really risen in many people’s eyes.

It was pretty cool to open the event and get such a raucous and responsive audience. As many of you will know, I play in a band, and when we do gigs, the audience varies greatly. The general rule of thumb is that gigs you book yourself have a more lukewarm reaction that gig nights at clubs with metal nights and such. I was curious to see how the audience reacted to our own little event, and they were great fun. Both the introduction and the LUGRadio: Live and Unrestrained event were awesome fun. The audience interacted really well.

One of the clear highlights of LRL was meeting so many superb people. The LUGRadio community has become something very special, and I am so proud of everyone. mrben and kNo were awarded for their services to the community, and they have shown clear commitment and dedication. The reason why we wanted a community award was that we wanted to highlight how important the community is. If the community goes away, LUGRadio doesn’t happen, LRL doesn’t happen and daytime productivity will increase again. 😛 Seriously though, the community were essential, and I don’t think they will ever understand our appreciation of them enough. Sure, mrben and kNo were awarded, but there are so many more incredibly committed people, and we found it difficult enough choosing the winners this year, let along next year when we do LRL2006.

Thanks people. Incidentally, at the start of July, my life becomes normal again. On the Monday after LRL, I had three meetings and a seminar to write and present. This is fairly typical of my workload at the moment, but the crazy period ends this week. Blogging service will then resume…
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Not much blogging recently, mainly because I have been flat out with work. The last few weeks has been utterly insane. That is not an understatement – I have literally not rested hardly at all.

So, this is the big weekend. LUGRadio Live 2005 kicks off tonight with the pre-show session at the Hogs Head in Wolverhampton and then at 11am tomorrow, the doors open to an event over four months in the planning. We hope everyone enjoys it. We really have tried our best and we are confident it is going to be a great experience for everyone.

Thanks so, so much to everyone who has helped with this. The list of people who have mucked in is long. This is a grassroots community event, and we are all touched that the community really has pulled together. 🙂

It starts here…

Spent today catching up on various bits and bobs. The next few weeks are pretty busy – I have quite a few meetings, training courses and other projects we are working on. There is some pretty exciting work going on, and I am looking forward to getting stuck into it.

Today we had an informal meeting in which Paul, Elliot and I discussed a subject each so that we could share information on the things we have been playing with recently. Paul talked about PostgreSQL first, then Elliot talked about Eclipse and Ruby On Rails and then I finished with Glade, PyGTK and GStreamer. Paul had the idea about doing this, and retrospectively it was a good one. I think we all learnt something genuinely useful. We are sure to do more of these in the future.

Oh, and those of you who are near Birmingham may want to go to the South Birmingham Linux User Group on Thursday. I will be there doing a talk about LUGRadio and LUGRadio Live.
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