Most of this week has consisted in me catching up with all the stuff put back while I was working on the LAMP course with Elliot. As such, I have been calling people, emailing people, doing paperwork, fixing bugs, setting up servers, setting up CRMs and more. It has been one of those weeks where you have not achieved one large goal but lots of small ones that make you feel you haven’t done much at all. In the scheme of things though, a lot has been done.

This week I have also been battling with PEAR; I have had quite a strange problem with this. On the Mac Mini I have installed Ubuntu Warty, and I installed the php4-pear package from Universe (just the Debian archive really). I tried to do a pear list and it was fine, but when I tried a pear install HTML_QuickForm it spat in my face and accused me of being a communist. The particular aggravation that pear spoke of was a fatal memory error. Mmm, don’t you just love those fatal memory errors…well, no. I changed memory_limit in php.ini to be 128M but the pesky problem persisted. Quite frustrated, I ditched the package and installed pear from the go-pear site. Same problems and even worse issues as the entire thing crumbled to floor in a withering mess. I think it is safe to say pear is b0rked. Anyway, after some discussion on the pear IRC channel on EFNet (apparently its the official channel; being on EFNet felt like I was 16 again :P) I was encouraged to file a bug report.

In other news, I lost my wallet yesterday. I was at a LUG meeting and was sufficiently inebriated when ginger-ling and I piled into the rubber bald’s tractor, I noticed my wallet was not caressing my left buttock as it normal did. I went back in and it was nowhere. As you can imagine, I was pretty gutted. Aside from having to get my cards cancelled and new ones sent out, I also lost my driving license picture ID, and possibly most gutting, the pick I took from Scott Ian’s (Anthrax guitarist) mike stand when we supported them at the Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton. It was my lucky pick and now some thieving scally has probably tossed it in the bin as he feasts on the 20 quid that was still in there.

On the LUGRadio front, I am pleased to say that Ian Bell (co-author of Elite), Sarah Ewen (maintainer of the Linux on Playstation 2 project at Sony), Gervase Markham (big Mozilla guy) and Andrew Lawson (homebrew 3D scanner builder) are just some of the additional speakers we now have lined up for LUGRadio Live! Ade has also booked 24 tickets for some LUGRadio paintball on the weekend of LUGRadio Live. It is gonna be great. Ha, I nearly forgot; we also got Slashdotted again. 🙂

Anyway, tomorrow, I head down to London to see Nick from Microsoft about this mystery deal they have done that I mentioned in a previous blog entry. I will keep you posted on what I discover.

On Monday I got into work and the Mac Mini had arrived. When this little box of tricks was released, I figured this could be useful as a development server. It is super quiet, very small, and will be ideal to sit in the corner of my studio, running an XDMCP session so I can develop from anywhere on the LAN.

For your unusual enjoyment, I took a few snaps as I went from unopened Mac Mini to Ubuntufied Mac Mini within an hour. Here is the evidence:

The box

The front of the lovely little thing

The back of the Mac Mini. All the server essentials.

The first thing to install was the Hoary preview…

Hoary was a little flaky (still in testing stages, obviously), so I put Warty on there

In other news, I had a nice email from Dave Neary of the GNOME project about some work he is doing gathering case studies. He references Unwrapping the numbers game and mentions a particular case study that fits in with my view expressed in the article. I will hopefully be supplying him with a few case studies sometime soon.

Today I also set up a fancy Dell rack server. I needed a server at work (the Mac Mini is for home) that I can use for setting up test installs of CRM/CMS and web related tools. Ant installed it in the rack and I stuck Ubuntu on there. This thing is a dual Xeon and it goes like the clappers. Again, Ubuntu took to it like a duck to water. I will start using the machine tomorrow when I work on customising a Sugar install for a client. I installed Sugar just before I left work and it seems great. From the outset it looks fairly configurable; I will give you a heads up on how I get soon.

This week (on Monday), LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 11 hit the digital stratosphere. Part of the show included an interview with Aaron Seigo. This has been linked over on dot.kde.org. It amuses me how some of the comments are a little fanboyish. Aaron is a great spokesman for the project and he responded well, and he himself outlined how the show is all about vibrant debate and that is the reason why the interview was the way it was. Don’t get me wrong, I know I am a bit fanboyish about Ubuntu, but I don’t close my eyes off to other technologies; I can’t to do my job properly. Sure, I have preferences, but I will always try to try things. Some of the fanboy comments dotted on project websites (certainly not just the KDE site) make me wonder if these people have tried alternative technologies.

Today I played with Kino a little. I have been meaning to get my FOSDEM footage off the camera and into your web browser, and today was a first step. I am still working out a few quirks with it, such as not getting audio in Kino but the captured footage having audio when played in Totem, but there is something so cool about controlling you video camera via Firewire. Not cool to my video editing girlfriend though who gave me a series of odd looks as this simple idiot was impressed with such basic things to a video person. Here is Kino in action earlier this evening:

Last night I decided to write an article about some of the corporate pong going on in the IT world and how futile it is. If you head over to my O’Reilly Blog you can catch it, and it is called Unwrapping the numbers game.

Speaking of articles, the new fancy schmancy OpenAdvantage website is online here. As part of the site, I have written some articles, and those of you interested in using the Linux desktop or providing people with a quick overview of the desktop may be interested in Walking through the Open Source desktop. You should also give Evaluating open-source software and Taming the web with Firefox written by Paul and Elliot.

Admittidly, I have no artistic talent with the GIMP, and I am pleased to see that some of the LUGRadio community have created a few buttons to promote LUGRadio Live. Here is one that I think is really cool:

If you are going to enrich your life and be at LUGRadio Live on Sat 25th June 2005, add one of these buttons (obviously smaller than this!) to your site. For more details, go here. 🙂
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The end to another busy week. The training this week went well and I was eminently impressed with Elliot’s teaching abilities. I do enjoy working with Elliot; he has a very methodical way of approaching a subject and he shows compassion and dedication to those who want to learn. I think we made a pretty decent team and I look forward to doing more projects like this one.

On Friday I had a interesting call from a friend who works for Microsoft’s PR firm. She informed me that Microsoft are going to be announcing a big deal that they have secured with an organisation that has over 110,000 members. She could not detail the organisation in question, but on Friday next week I will be heading down to London to have a chinwag with Nick McGrath (Microsoft UK’s head of platform strategy) and the client. Nick is a good man, and I look forward to hooking up with him again anyway, and I will get the details on who this mystery organisation is. I will offer my analysis when I can find a net connection on Friday or Saturday.

It has been a pretty crazy week in terms of LUGRadio Live. We have been getting in touch with a tonne of different people to see if they want to come and talk. These people have ranged from the ridiculous names that will typically require a large chunk of cash to people who are keen innovators in the Open Source world. As part of our efforts, the LUGRadio team have spoken to Patrick Moore, Violet Berlin and Adam Hart-Davis. Unfortunately, none have confirmed; but all have been incredibly supportive of LUGRadio Live. Most of these ‘big names’ have declined as they have prior engagements or are not in the country. This is nice that they are so supportive; it gives us the confidence that LUGRadio Live is going to be a good thing. It certainly will. Speaking of LUGRadio Live, I have added some updates to the website and I also created some buttons that visitors can add to their homepage.

I recieved some interesting emails since the last blog update. First, thanks to Hal Smith for pointing me to his article that is based around some of the points made in Sowing the Seeds of Open Source Advocacy. His article is an interesting read. I also got an email from David W. Mendoza about an organisation that he runs that is based around Open Source advocacy called Open Source Centroamerica. David is going to translate the article into Spanish and post it on their portal. Thats pretty cool. 🙂

Ubuntu update: at the tail end of last week I did a dist-upgrade in hoary and a bunch of new packages and a new theme were added. This theme is really nice, and here is a shot of my desktop running the wonderful little Bluefish:

Tonight I finished Season 2 of 24. A good series and entertaining right to the end. I still don’t get how whenever a CTU bod is kidnapped they leave their mobile phones on them, but hey, lets not be picky. 😀

Uploaded a few snaps from seeing my friend and yours, Karl Spain, on Friday night. Here is a snap of Karl entertaining the Glee Club massive in Birmingham:

And here is a nice shot of the chap after the gig with your genial host:

I used to live with Karl in Wolverhampton in a student house and he is a thoroughly nice chap and hilarious comic. Check him out at your local laughery.

Not much to blog about; well lots to blog about, but no time to blog. This is the group I am training this week:

Recorded LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 11 last night and we have been discussing about people who we would love to have at the show. One such name that cropped up over lunch today was Patrick Moore; king of space and regular fixture on The Sky At Night. Rather surprisingly I managed to chat to Patrick on the phone a few minutes back and he very politely declined our invitation. He was very friendly and I suspect his age would get in the way of a jolly up to LUGRadio Live in Wolverhampton. Nevermind, the quest for cool will continue. Meanwhile, keep sending in your paper submissions. Any Patrick Moore lookalikes?
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Good weekend this weekend. On Friday night we hooked up with an old housemate called Karl Spain who has since become a professional stand-up comedian and is touring all over the world. He was, as you may expect, rectum-shakingly funny, and we had a great night. It was fantastic to see him again, and we hope to meet up sometime soon. 🙂

The Sowing the Seeds of Open Source Advocacy article has resulted in some nice email from some people. I was particularly pleased to hear from Ted Haeger who markets the Novell Linux Desktop. I had a flick through his blog and it seems pretty interesting. I look forward to meeting Ted sometime soon. I also had an interesting mail from Hal Smith that outlined his views on how Open Source is similar to communism. Strangely enough, quite some time ago I wrote this and mailed it to Eric Raymond in which he sent me a stark reply condemning my suggested parallels between Open Source and communism. He did make the valid point that communism is forced upon its people whereas Open Source is not. There are however, still many ties though even when you apply that caveat.

So, Ubuntu users, have you seen the new hardware database client that is in Hoary? If not, install hwdb-client and check the Device Manager. You will see a new button that fires up a little program to ask you questions about your hardware which you can submit to the online hardware database. Although it is still quite buggy and bits are unwritten, I meandered into #ubuntu on irc.eu.freenode.net and chatted with the author of the software. I thought you may find the conversation interesting:

me: hi all
me: is hwdb-client working right for people?
ogra: jono: its not done yet 🙂
me: ogra, I can run the client but it seems to hang at the end, is this because there is no server to send data to ?
ogra: jono: this is becase there is not even a sending part yet 😉 i'm just writing the assembling bit that glues the data together
me: ogra, ahha, is there a plan to merge this hardware database into future versions of Ubuntu to automate configuration? or will it *just* provide a web service?
ogra: jono, the information we recieve should flow ack into development....
ogra: back even
me: ogra, this kinda hooks into David Zeuthens talk of an online FDI database for HAL device files
ogra: jono: i will talk to him after the release, how we can merge the efforts....but currently i'm more busy in getting the app in shape 🙂
me: ogra, sure, I understand, I assume you are detecting HAL keys and sending them to the web server, right?
ogra: jono: run hwdb-xml on the command line 😉
me: ogra, ahha, that looks suspiciously like HAL keys 🙂
ogra: jono: i enhaced hal a bit for that....(there is a bios, processor and memory device)
ogra: jono: to get the missing data...
me: ogra, something I have talked about at various conferences is the idea of developing an online repsitory of automatically generated FDI files, and then when you install a distribution, the distro could download the FDI files (or include them on the CD) and automate the sane defaults - you could reasonably include things such as X resolution in a graphics card FDI file and monitor rates in a monitor FDI file, and then configuration of X and the monitor goes away 🙂
ogra: jono: but that would involve the need being online at install time.....
ogra: jono: improving the autodetection mechanisms based on this data is probably a better approach....
me: ogra, well, you could include a snapshot of all FDI files with the distro, they are only tiny text files, and any devices configured after the network is up can use the online repository - most distros try to get online ASAP so as to offer the ability to download packages and security fixes
ogra: jono: true...
me: ogra, I think this would set Ubuntu apart as a truly seamless distribution with respect to hardware configuration
ogra: jono: i think hal will be the base in the future, but yu need to port the apps to use it as well, so it will take its time.... the hwdb stuff is the initial step in that direction
me: ogra, spot on 🙂 I think where this is interesting is that when I developed some ideas for an online driven hardware database, I thought the most difficult bit was getting usable data from *normal* users; this has been done already with hwdb-client 🙂 I think the key is in hooking that data into the distro so it truly automates the process - if the data is left on a website for users to deal with themselves, it won't be much use, but if it automates hardware configuration, it will really make a difference - HAL is the ideal middleware to make this happen
me: ogra, where it gets really interesting is when you open up a channel for meta-data - imagine asking the user what the best resolution for their graphics card is or some other user information that could possibly be un-detected; this way you have the opportunity to then use the community to step above autodetection - naturally this requires some moderation, but there are various options...
ogra: jono: it will flow back, be sure 😉 but building a online database is helpful in other ways too for support issues....
ogra: jono: the DB will hand out a token to hwdb-client after submission, so if you got a support case, you can supply this token and the supporter can look up you HW and log data...
ogra: jono: the online DB is only the first step here, because its the easiest to manage use case we have on the list....
ogra: jono, everything else involves adjustment in other apps...
me: ogra, cool, the token idea is great - I agree that much of this will need buy in from apps, but I am pleased to see the infrastructure is being built so you can theoretically hook this data into apps and potentially the installer

This week I am training people in LAMP all week with Elliot. It went well today, but is pretty exausting. We will get there… 🙂 Oh, and check out the wonder and glory that is XAMPP.

Wow, busy week. Once again, the ‘ol blogging has taken a hit with all the stuff I have been busy with. We have been busy working on a bunch of materials for a week long LAMP training course. This takes one heck of a lot of preparation, and aside from this I have also had other things to do.

On Tuesday I headed over to The Genii Of The LAMP event over in Sheffield. Using my pal Tom, I managed to get there without pulling what little hair I have left out. I was asked to go down and talk about what LAMP is and provide an introduction to the whole shebang. The talk seemed to go well, and it was also good to hook up with some of the guys from the Sheffield and Hull LUGs as well as Josette from O’Reilly. Digital South Yorkshire are doing some good work up there. I will heading back up there in a few months to do another talk, this time about Podcasting and Internet radio.

A while back I started writing a series of articles about doing Open Source advocacy the right way, and the first one appeared on the O’Reilly Network on Thursday. The article, entitled Sowing the Seeds of Open Source Advocacy hit the wire and I was hoping that it would prove useful for some advocates who want to approach the challenge from a more organised perspective. Later that day, I was rumbling round the web among my daily business, and then saw this:

By ‘eck, the article appeared on Slashdot. It also appeared that the brethren on forums.lugradio.org also picked up on it and then I later noticed it hit OSNews and various other sites. I am pleased it seems to be doing well, and I am looking forward about writing more about the subject. As many of you will know, advocacy is the part of Open Source that I am most passionate about and I am looking forward to discussing it more.

It was also pointed to me that Schuyler Erle’s (fellow O’Reilly blogger) latest blog entry, he picks up the slack on some of the stuff I discussed in Lowering the bar to code. Schuyler says, “If you think that reimplementing the C++ Standard Template Library in C is a bad idea, you will like KDE / Qt. If you think that the C++ Standard Template Library is a bad idea, you will probably like GNOME / GTk+.”; I never really considered it from the STL perspective, but he may have a point there.

Well, today I head over to FOSDEM with some guys from work. I have never been there, so I am intrigued to see whether it will be interesting or monotonous. I have heard good reports of people who have been to FOSDEM, so I am quite looking forward to getting over. My plane sets off at around 7.30pm, so we should be there and settled in for around 9.30pm. We will be there for two days and head back on Sunday night.

After continual prodding from Ade The Bald, I did install and play around with Fedora:

As a hardened Ubuntu user, it did need to perform to hight expectations. The installation was fantastic, and most things seemed to work. What did not work however, was the wireless card. The same chipset (Centrino) is in my other laptop and worked fine with a default installation of Ubuntu. I know that the particular driver relies on some firmware and hence it is in the linux-restricted-modules package in Ubuntu, but has this restricted it from going into Fedora? I know the Fedora team are very conscious of non-free software.

The other day my TomTom GPS reciever arrived:

Now, some of you may be aware that I bought a GPS unit months ago, and my grand plan was to get involved in the OpenStreetmap project and to try and help produce free mapping data. After extensive thought and research, it seems that their task is rather unsurmountable. Don’t get me wrong, I commend the guys who are involved with the project, but I need a SatNav system now and I can’t wait around until the project bears fruit. Even then, there are distinctive challenges in getting the world mapped with a volunteer effort – you need someone in every habited part of the world. If only someone would Open Source some mapping data…

LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 10 is complete and will be released on Monday. Has it really been one year since we started this thing?

Wow, I have failed to clock on with the blog for a few days. This is mainly because my parents came up to stay at the weekend. We had a really great few days and had a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing them soon. 🙂

When they had set off on Sunday, I spent a few hours playing around with getting Bluetooth working between my Bluetooth enabled laptop and my new swanky Nokia phone. When I last blogged about this, I was having some troubles getting a connection with GNOME Phone Manager. Still having the same problems, and doing a bit of digging around the t’Internet suggests that it me be a bug in GNOME Phone Manager as opposed to my Bluetooth set-up. I am not sure though; I am kind of wandering around in the dark with all of this.

What I have managed to get working is the ability to receive files from the Nokia on the laptop via Bluetooth. This works via the excellent GNOME OBEX Server written by Edd Dumbill. This means I can get photos from the phone, but I am yet to figure out how to actually send files to the phone. The first priority with me was to get photos from the phone, but the next priority is to get Python installed and working on the phone so I can put some of my ideas into practice.

Dealing with photos is a bit of a pain in the ass at the moment. When I blog with a photo, I basically dump the photo in my Random photo gallery and then grab the URL for the photo and add it to my blog entry. I am thinking of a more automated way to do this, and part of this is getting the Python scripting working. All of this is becoming increasingly important when I want to note something down and use my phone to transmit it wherever. I have recently got a Bluetooth keyboard that I am going to use with the phone to make much of this easier. The only problem is that like many other Bluetooth add-ons, you look like a muppet when using them. Nevermind.

A while back people were posting photos of their desk. I figured I would do the same:

And here is Paul at his desk:

There has been some fascinating discussion recently about the future of the Linux desktop and how it is hinging around Xgl and some other bits. If you are wanting to read up on this, check out the following links:

• Check out Nat’s post about Xgl, and then go and check out the discussion about it.
• Seth Nickel wrote an interesting piece about what Xgl could mean for us. He also comments that Red Hat are doing some good hacking on much of this.
• One of the most important potential changes for a lot of this work is to rework the concept of the theming engine in GTK. Havoc Pennington wrote a nice entry about how he sees this happening.
• Seth also wrote an entry about Sabayon; a next generation user profiling tool.
• gcompmgr has been written to allow you to play with some of the funky X.org features. Since I have installed X.org, I have not actually seen any of this aforementioned funk yet.

Some fun stuff going on…

LUGRadio records tonight!
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