Last night Sooz, Steve and I went to see Kreator and Dark Tranquillity at The Electric Ballroom in Camden, London. We headed off from here at about 5pm and finally got there at around 8pm. Aside from a decidedly woolly sound, the gig was a pretty stonking affair. It was great to finally see Dark Tranquillity after missing them before when we saw Arch Enemy. Kreator were awesome as usual and every time I see them it makes me realise just how much I adore thrash metal. It was the style of metal that I originally got psyched about when I was younger, and although I also listen to death metal, power metal, rock, stoner metal and so on, thrash is still probably top of the pile with bands like Kreator, Overkill, Annihilator, Testament, Metal Church, Xentrix, King Diamond, The Haunted, Dew Scented, Solstice, Slayer, Anthrax and others. Oh, and one other thing; as we were heading out of the venue after seeing Kreator, we met the singer from Dark Tranquillity. Sooz was utterly over the moon and I took a photo of her with him. Quality.

Today I have been training a bunch of people in LAMP all day. This has involved about six people and they have done well. This morning I started explaining what LAMP is, and by the time we finished at 4.30pm, we had got to the point where we had inserted data in the database. The course continues tomorrow and we will continue with the database gubbins and then move onto sessions and fun with CSS. The group seemed to enjoy using Bluefish in Ubuntu and people seemed to find Linux a very usable platform to work with.

I got a mail through from O’Reilly indicating that my advocacy article will be online near the end of the month which should be quite cool. I am actually writing a few articles about advocacy for O’Reilly, and they should be shaping up to be a column. I am working to make these articles not only interesting from an advocacy perspective, but also interesting from a general-world issue. I believe a lot of advocacy practice can be learned from those who have advocated outside of the Open Source or even the IT space. A classic example is Martin Luther King. He was first and foremost an advocate, and his wisdom of how to get his point across in a world that condemned his opinion was incredibly admirable. Where it gets interesting is where the line is drawn between advocate, evangelist, activist and…er…salesman, and is yet to be defined. I have my own views on this which I have been meaning to write up for some time. Anyway, I will keep you posted when the article is online. For advocacy fans, I also wrote a piece for Linux User and Developer that will be in the next issue. It is all about guerrilla advocacy. While I am talking about publishing, my Writing section is in a dire state and I am going to update it with a stack of articles when I have some time. I have let it fester recently.

LUGRadio fever continues to spread across the interweb, and aside from the coverage on Slashdot, OSNews, Newsforge, Gnomedesktop, and others, it seems that a load of people seem to be digging LUGRadio and hanging out in the forums and IRC channel. I am really psyched about all of this. One thing that is cool is that because LUGRadio is inherently a social radio show, and not a dull and boring show, it means that the folk who listen to it are pretty fun, social people too. Nice. We are still working towards LUGRadio Live and it should be a great opportunity to meet a stack of these people. It could also be the mother of all drinking sessions…

Speaking of events, we leave for FOSDEM a week tomorrow!! Expect the usual array of stupid photos to be posted when I get back. Oh, and I saw these photos on Aq’s site. Cool; I had not seen these before. 🙂

Finally, there must be some hackers out there with an interest in HAL. I recently tracked a discussion on the HAL mailing list about Bluetooth support in HAL. I then asked if anything had happened with this. David is open to the idea of HAL tracking connected Bluetooth devices, but is still waiting for patches. Ahha. So, this a call out for some hackers to write these patches. I certainly don’t have the skill or time, but I am sure some of you do. This will really help HAL. 🙂

Got up on Monday to do a days training in the LAMP system. I was training at home and luckily my Nokia 6610 arrived. I got everything charged up and it is a really nice phone. The challenge now is to figure out how to get it hooked up via Bluetooth to my laptop (which has a built in bluetooth card). It seems that the Bluetooth subsystem is working, as I can run hcitool scan and detect the devices in the room. I am also able to run gnome-phone-manager and it will ask on my phone if it will allow ubuntu-0 (my laptop) to connect. After that, it spurts an error saying [ERROR]: expected parameter (at position 1 of string ',,,,,,,,') as well as saying ** Message: Failed connection to device on /dev/rfcomm0. Anyone got any clues?

One incredibly cool thing about this phone is that it runs on Series 60 Platform, and this platform has had Python ported to it by none other than Nokia. Get in there! This means that I have the ability to write my own special scripts that can do funky things. I have yet to look into this port in great detail, but my talk plan includes 1000MB of data a month, which gives me the ability to basically access the net from my phone at any time. I have a ton of ideas about how to maximise this. 🙂

Well, LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 9 has finally got Slashdotted properly. This is of course, not our first appearance on Slashdot, but that story was not on the front page. From some initial reports from our six or so mirrors, in a day we seem to have shifted around 85 gig of data and possibly around 8000 episodes. This is great. We have had some new mirror offers, and BitTorrent is becoming a real priority. It is great to see the LUGRadio community moving and adjusting to the new needs for the show. I am so personally grateful to everyone involved. Oh, and thanks for the mail to the LUGRadio mail address – it is good to hear from you all, and we will be reading it out at the end of the show as usual. 🙂

One thing that is pretty cool is that our server stayed up while all of this happened. With the recent issues with our server it seemed odd that it stays up while we get a Slashdotting instead of going down. Surely the whole point is to make the server more instable? It seems we need a constant Slashdotting. Come on Slashdot, give us some more mentions. 😛

Today has been an essential day for Open Source. Over on Nat Friedman’s blog he announced the Hula Project. This project provides a much needed mail and calendaring server. This server includes a web interface and also support for Evolution, Thunderbird and others. As a consultant, this chunk of functionality has been essentially missing. To achieve some of the things that Hula can apparently do there has been the need to gather knowledge from a stack of different areas and apply some little hacks here and there. This is going to be ideal for SMEs and other types of organisation such as schools. Stroll on Novell. Can I take you out for a beer?

Oh, and one last thing. A strange experience happened the other day. The pirate key from my laptop keyboard (‘R’) decided to jump off in the middle of the night. I have no idea how it happened, but when I woke up in the morning the key seemed to have had enough of life and me constantly hammering it in the face, and decided to walk off. It didn’t get far though, and was found laying near my laptop. I spent some time trying to figure out how to plug it back on my keyboard, but alas, I am not a l33t enough hardware person. Paul is though, and in a feat reminiscent of the A-Team, he managed to get the key back in place. So, just for my unfounded joy of having the R key back, let me celebrate – RRRRrrRRRrRRRRRRRrR. Thanks, I am finished now.

Phew! A few days have passed since I last blogged, and things have been incredibly hectic. Just to complicate matters, I did actually write up a blog entry the day before yesterday and never got round to posting it (I fell asleep on the couch). I have since tried to hunt it out and I seem to have either lost it or forgotten where I saved it. You can have all the technology in the world around you, but an idiot is still an idiot. I am an idiot.

To begin with, I have been saying I would get the Wolves LUG Christmas party photos on for a while, and they are finally available here. A nice photo is a picture of the full group who came to the bash:

This week has been busy. Aside from generally flying around like a blue-arsed fly anyway, the busyness this week has been largely due to picking up where I left off before I got knocked over with the delightful bronchitis a few weeks back. When I returned to work after being off, I had a big pile of work I needed to catch up on, and a growing pile of paperwork to process. Paperwork is the downside of my job, and a necessary evil. Each assist I do needs to be documented and signed off, and it is a small price to pay to spend everyday talking to people about Open Source.

There were a few highlights this week that made me smile. Firstly, there is some of the stuff that I am working on with education. I have been in touch with a few schools regarding a potential move to Open Source, and one school in particular is going to be making a big shift to Open Source. This move will be to Open Source on desktop computers, an LTSP setup and a mail server. The chap behind the move has been remarkably brave is his approach of Open Source software. As someone who is not a typical techy, this headmaster has applied an honest and lateral approach to learning about Open Source technologies and how they can help his school. I originally had a meeting with him about the migration back before Christmas, and we are looking to start the ball rolling in a few weeks when he has cleared some things off his radar.

On Thursday I had an interesting meeting with some chaps who had traveled up from Sheffield. These guys have been deeply involved in spreading Open Source in South Yorkshire, and they are doing some great work. I originally got to know some of the chaps up there when I spoke at the Hull Time Based Arts d:CODE event. I have since been asked to do a talk at an event discussing the merits of the LAMP platform up in Sheffield. Much of this work is being coordinated by Digital South Yorkshire, and I am pleased to see such good work going on. Being a northerner born up t’north in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, I have a sympathy with the work going up there. I have assured the guys that I will help in any way I can. It is great to see a region that has traditionally been dominated by the mining industry finding new avenues in which to develop local trade, and Open Source is making a stake in the area.

After a frustrating and annoying experience trying to get my hands on a Nokia 6630 from Orange (don’t ask, or I may rant about it), the order has finally been placed and it is on its way. So, what does this mean, you may ask? Well, firstly, regular readers of the Bacon randomness will be aware that I like to take photos when I go to places. Recently, my trigger happy finger has had nothing to click on due to my ancient digital camera being utterly knackered recently. I suspect this is partially due to the foam, beer, pathetic ‘street’ impressions, meeting random people, meeting random oversized bandicoots, paintball, visiting German metal festivals, going to weddings, recording a radio show and other randomness that have taken a battering on the poor little thing. Anyway, the 6630 has a decent built in camera that will be used to snap everyone and everything. No one is safe. Another cool thing is that I get 1000MB of data transfer a month with 3G and 60 minutes of video calling. This means I can get on the net from anywhere with my laptop. This will relieve some moments of boredom wen on the train.

A few bits of band news. Tomorrow, well later today, we are doing a gig up in Liverpool. We are headlining a really cool metal night up at a place called Heaven n’ Hell. We have also booked some other gigs around the UK, and we are pleased to be taking part in:

This event is going to be dedicated to the pure and utter inspiration that was Dimebag Darrell. Just getting on stage a dedicating a performance to a man who gave so much to the music I love will be a real honor. I can’t stress enough just how much of a loss to the metal world Dime was.

—–

Yesterday Susan was due to have her wisdom teeth yanked good and proper out of her head. I took her to the hospital for 7.30am and then headed off to the work. I had booked the day after off to mop her brow, but the operation was canceled. I went and picked the non-hamsterfied Susan up and she was not amused. Things like this don’t amuse Susan, they really don’t.

Last night we recorded Season 2 Episode 9 of LUGRadio. It was great fun, as usual, and we were joined by Miguel de Icaza on the show. Miguel filled us in on what is going on with Mono. The interview was interesting, and it, along with the usual array of jokes, jibes, sarcasm and actual discussion will be available for download on Monday. If you are enjoying the interviews, you will pleased to know we have some other interesting interviews lined up and we will also be calling some interesting people for quick five minute updates.

Today I spent a little while getting Beagle working on Ubuntu. This was inspired by Paul getting it working on NLD. Luckily, the instructions for doing this on Ubuntu Hoary have been written and everything went pretty smoothly. Sure, it crashes a lot and it doesn’t actually pull out all the information that is there, but it seems to be progressing nicely and gives you an idea of where all of this is going. You know I love screenshots, so here is BEST; the Bleeding Edge Search Tool:

Something else that looks cool is Xgl and this was posted on Nat Friedman’s blog recently. The basic idea behind Xgl is that the X display is managed and programmable as OpenGL. This provides the opportunity to do some stupidly funky things like spinning round the display when you do something, spinning interface elements around, real-time shadows and other kinds of effects. The other benefit seems to be that the 3D hardware in your computer can be used to accelerate the desktop. I don’t know a huge amount about just how much is possible, but I am intrigued to see what happens with this. 🙂

It has been a busy day today. I seem to have a lot of assists piling up around me and I needed to sit down and process some of the paperwork. While doing this it reminded me of the patterns we seem to be seeing in Open Source adoption. The big boy is LAMP. People love LAMP. Animals love LAMP. Even people who hate LAMP love LAMP. LAMP is the subject I probably spend most of my time talking about, and the attraction of a low cost, stable and productive platform really gets people going. 🙂

It seems the server is doing pretty well at the moment. Last night I had a few weird problems with the front page of jonobacon.com, but it seemed that the problem lied with my O’Reilly Weblog feed. I have since disabled external feeds until they are sane again.

Speaking of my O’Reilly Weblog, I have written a new article entitled Firefox and the impact curve. This article was spawned from some breakfast discussion the morning after seeing mighty Megadeth in Birmingham. I was chatting to a good friend who sits on the other site of the fence and writes web applications using Microsoft technology. Over breakfast we sparred over a few of the issues I later brought up in the article. The fun is always in the debate. Let me know your thoughts people…

Oh, and yet another surprise on the LUGRadio front. I visited forums.lugradio.org this morning and took a look at how many people were online:

Nice one. Good to see the forums filling up so nicely.

Got through some news from Colin Watson about his efforts porting the Hoary Ubuntu installer to the OQO that I have lent him. He has fixed many of the quirks from the installer but is still having trouble getting mouse support working. This is strange, as Windows on the OQO reports it as a normal PS/2 mouse, but it does not conform to a normal PS/2 Linux driver. Colin is working away at it and I am trying to dig some info on the hardware out of the people who make the OQO. Fingers crossed we will get it sorted. 😀

I submitted a paper for OSCON. I am in no way, shape, or form expecting to get it accepted, but its worth a shot.

Oh, and the radio interview went well. The guy who runs the show is a really nice chap. We talked about the band, discussed where we are going and he played Caged, To The End and Reanimate from our debut album ‘Caged’. If you fancy hearing a Bacon growl, head over to seraphidian.com.
—–

Well, it appears like we are back again. After a few days downtime (including a day of service-so-unstable-it-was-virtually-down-anyway-time), it appears we are back.

Let me explain what happened. On Thursday night I tried to access jonobacon.com and it was unavailable. I tried to log into the admin shell and that was down too. I suspected it must be a hosting issue and I received a few mails that the machine that hosts our virtual Linux machine had gone haywire. I was assured it would be back up that night. The next morning there will still no access. A few hours later I accessed the site and I was greeted with this rather unsettling vision:

At this point I bricked myself. It appeared that my site did not exist any more. Matt from Bytemark (where we host the machine) assured me that he was trying to restore the filesystem and all should be well. A few hours later I heard from Matt that there were some issues with some parts of the filesystem, but my files and the database were fine. We also discovered our previous backup process was not actually backing up properly. We did however manage to restore the files and everything was fine. Aq and I then worked to things fixed and we were back online.

We then faced the next round of problems. It appeared that Apache was forking itself into oblivion. As this was an Apache from a Debian Stable system, and Debian Stable is generally the most solid of the rock solid rocks, it struck me that it could be likely to be a configuration issue. This morning I spent some time fiddling with some bits and it seems that some of the logging directives in the Apache configuration file were causing it to throw a wobbler. I have been restoring our configuration bit by bit to try and nail where the problem is, and I think it is pretty much isolated now. So, we seem to be back up, but I need to restore a few of the other sites on the box. LUGRadio.org is back also.

In other news, I had a nice couple of mails from a chap called Andy Balcombe who fixed some bugs and added some changes to GNOME iRiver. After a few mails to clarify some bits and bobs, I merged the changes in and consequently, the 0.3 release of GNOME iRiver now looks like this:

In this version, the program will now update the device list if an iRiver is plugged in/removed while the program is running, it now quits cleanly, and it uses the new GNOME file picker in the Preferences dialog box. I have also just had a mail from Andy that contains a progress bar that is displayed while the database is being updated. I will merge this into the 0.4 release and try to fix a bug in which the mount point is sometimes not updated and resultantly can cause the program to not start the iRipDB process.

Another nifty thing I saw was this on Amazon.co.uk:

Oh and one final bit of news. I will be appearing on the radio along with my fellow bandmates in Seraphidian on ARFM tonight (Sat 5th Feb 2005) at 9pm GMT. The show is called The Extreme Zone and we are doing an interview and having a few tracks played from our album. The show is streamed on the net, available on the radio and available on Sky TV channel 913. Tune in if you can!

Got into work today after a stupid amount of time on the M6 this morning and did some research into some assists that we are working towards. This afternoon I then had another meeting with the chap about Open Source CAD software development. The meeting went well and I wish him every success in achieving his ambitions. He is going to be working towards developing a report on how to go about developing the software he is interested in. It seems like the majority of what he needs to do could be implemented into Blender with a decent level of hacking. I even suspect that the required changes could be implemented in Blender using the built in Python scripting interface; I don’t know how much would need to be written in C.

In the meeting we discussed a variety of methods in which you can make an Open Source application happen. I identified with him the following options:

1. Write it yourself – the easiest option. Learn to code and start writing it yourself. Benefits: a direct approach to writing code. Disadvantages: difficult if you have never coded, you may well write it the wrong way if you don’t have the knowledge to know how to write it the right way.
2. Find a generous friend or win the lottery – if you have the ability to read the National Lottery website in Firefox, or have a wealthy friend, use the disposable reddies to pay a development team to write the software. Benefits: easy to direct how the software is written and not have to do the hard work of writing it. Disadvantages: requires money, and if you are a pauper, this could prove difficult.
3. Build a coalition of interested parties – build together a collection of people who can donate limited resources to the project and combine together to make it happen. As an example, if you know a bunch of people who can only throw 4 hours of a developer’s time at the project each week, just find 10 people with similar commitments and you now have 40 hours of development time. Benefits: you can achieve a lot with little resources. Disadvantages: it is tough to build a coalition and avoid the torrid wrath of time-wasters and chat-but-never-achieve-anything mailing list vermin.

I suggested to this chap that the third option was probably the most suitable. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I fully understand that building a coalition of interested people and getting them to (a) agree on how to do it and (b) actually do it, is tough, but it is feasible. He understood that there was a lot of work involved in this approach, but I don’t see how this is any more work than going away, learning C, learning how to code GUI apps and then learning how to write C GUI apps right. I look forward to seeing how he gets on. I promised him that if he gets a decent report and proposal together, I will write an article to pimp the idea.

Last night I received a mail from Aaron Seigo regarding Lowering the bar to code. Aaron and I have debated usability and KDE before, and he shared his agreement and disagreement with different parts of the article. In my article I basically extol the delights of Python when combined with PyGTK and Glade. I did say in the article that I consider Qt and C++ useful for larger applications, but Python and PyGTK were ideal for me for my own little programs. Aaron pointed out that other technologies do exist that offer simple programming interfaces such as Ruby and the KDE implementation of Javascript. Sure, I don’t deny this, and I don’t deny that some people may want to use Qt and C++ for smaller programs, but the weblog entry written from my own experience and my own perspective. I hope I didn’t deny to the world that other simple programming systems do exist, and included in this category is PyQt. For the record, my article was purely intended to showcase how Python and PyGTK/Glade worked well for me. We should get Aaron on LUGRadio to speak the KDE viewpoint. Admittedly, we have been a little too GNOME centric recently, so I will see if he wants to come on the show.

Speaking of LUGRadio, it was quite nice today to see the sheer amount of activity on the LUGRadio forums in a single evening. I last checked the forums yesterday afternoon, and when I got in this morning, there was the following new threads:

This was just the threads in the main forum categories. There were additional threads in the other two forum categories. Wow.

Oh, and we finished Season 1 of 24. Great stuff. On to Season 2 now. 🙂

OK, first off, I apologise for my failure to upload my LUG Christmas bash photos. Last night was a bit hectic with me finishing off some bits on an article and then falling asleep in front of Smallville (that annoyed the hell out of me).

Today I got into work and discussed a project we are working on to secure some Open Source in a deprived area. We discussed the merits of how to set up the solution and then Elliot and I headed off to hunt out a suitable book for a week long PHP/MySQL training course that we are running. While at Waterstones in Brum, we sat down with about six different books from a number of different publishers. The one we finally decided upon was Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL by Apress. The reason for choosing it was that it seems to enter into a decent level of detail about MySQL, covers important concepts of PHP early on, and does not focus on random chunks of crap that are irrelevant. We will be recommending it to our batch of students.

After buying the books, we headed back and I grabbed some lunch. I then sat down for a four hour meeting with a chap who is really keen on helping to foster the development of an Open Source CAD tool. I discussed with him the intricacies of Open Source development and the different challenges facing the creation of a successful project. We will be resuming tomorrow for another afternoon meeting, but it seems that there are a number of options for pushing his Open Source intentions forward. He has some really great ideas about how to help open up the CAD/CAM industry to the benefits of Open Source. His ambitions also seem rightly altruistic. He is really keen on making this tool a success in India where a graduate may be paid 4,000 quid to do CAD work and still have spend half his salary on the CAD software. When some details are finalised, I will give you all a heads up on what is happening with the project.

Today I added a new event to my Events page. I was invited a few weeks back to pop up to Sheffield to do a talk at a conference called The Genii Of The LAMP. The event is being put on by Digital South Yorkshire and I will be providing the first talk; A LAMP Overview. In more events news, there is the possibility that in addition to my work collegeages, I will be making a trip over to FOSDEM. This should be fun. 🙂

You know, I never really realised just how many people are psyched on Python. Ever since I wrote Lowering the bar to code, I have been getting a ton of mail from people saying they have experienced the same kind of things with Python and PyGTK/PyQt. Python really is proving to be a little gem. I know ging-a-ling-ling has been saying this for ages, but I never realised just how many people are getting into it. Rest assured though people, I do plan on shutting up about Python soon. I understand I have been rambling about this for quite some time.

Oh, and thanks for Jeff Waugh considering us as bastards. Damn ozzies…

This weekend I had Season 1, 2 and 3 of 24 arrive. We started watching Season 1 on Saturday afternoon and last night (Sunday night) we had watch 21 hours of it. We wanted a lazy weekend, and we got it. 🙂

LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 8 has been released. This show has an interview with Jeff Waugh and has an amusing discussion about the National Lottery’s reluctance to support Firefox. We have also made an active effort to read out listener emails. The usual array of formats on the main website and there has also been discussion of a Bittorrent tracker being set up to shift the episodes around. This resulted in Omahn setting up a test server. bagpuss from the LUGRadio IRC channel has indicated he is going to set something up soon.

Got into work today and I am feeling OK so far. I had a big list of things I needed to fix up. This included a bunch of contacts I needed to speak to regarding some migrations and assists. I sorted these bits and bobs out and my calendar is rapidly filling up. There seems to be a lot of interest in people learning how to code with PHP and MySQL, and my recent experiences with Python could prove a useful base in which to give some training down the line. Speaking of Python, Lowering the bar to code seems to be going down quite well. I have had some very nice emails from people, and I am pleased to see it has been blogged about in a few places. If nothing else, I would like the article to demonstrate that Python has enabled me to be productive with less effort, and I am all for being productive with less effort. This is why I drive to work and don’t walk 20 miles. 🙂

At some point this week I am hoping to spend some time on GNOME iRiver, but I have a pretty busy week. When I do grab some minutes, I am quite keen on looking at some other aspects of Python, and I am eager to explore some of the XML support. Part of the reason for this is that when I was originally discussing learning Python, I was interested in writing a GNOME applet to deal with some RSS feeds. Sure, this is nothing new, but I thought it would be interesting to work on. I am also interested in writing some code that hooks up with a MySQL database.

Oh, and I haven’t forgotten about the LUG Christmas bash photos. They are going online tonight or tomorrow. 🙂

Went out last night with Aq and his family. We went out to have a meal, but unfortunatly the evening was cut short when his daughter became sick. Sooz and I pass our best wishes on, and we hope she is feeling better soon. Oh, and happy birthday you great buffoon. 🙂

I have released version 0.2 of GNOME iRiver, and this release fixes many, but not all of the bugs in the previous 0.1 release. This release also adds a Preferences dialog box that allows you to configure where iRipDB is located on your system. Go and grab it and let me know how you get on. Oh, and it looks like this:

Speaking of GNOME iRiver, I have also written up a little article of how I approached learning Python. it is called Lowering the bar to code and I posted it to my O’Reilly Blog.

Well, tomorrow we release LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 8 to the world, and I am really looking forward to seeing what people think of it. The episode includes an interview with the man Jeff Waugh, discussion of Aq’s letters to the National Lottery about their inability to support Firefox, discussion of Sun and Patents, and the usual array of mindless discussion that is part and parcel of the show. The other day, I ventured into #gnome on irc.gimp.org and I got chatting to Telsa who have not had a chinwag with for a while. While in there, I also got chatting to Davyd Madeley (prominant GNOME chap), and we got chatting about LUGRadio. He went and downloaded a show, and then blogged about it. Nice one Davyd. 🙂