Had a good day yesterday, although I have been feeling under the weather for a few days. Yesterday I spend some time hacking some bits of Python code together so that I could connect to HAL and DBUS. It all went fairly smoothly, and it is quite cool that I could create something so quickly.

I came home last night and learned the ADSL had been switched on. Spent some time backing up my server and then turned it into a Smoothwall 2.0 box. Thanks must go to Adam and Aq for their assistance on some of the points. I then managed to get everything working and went out for dinner with Sooz. We got in and fixed a few other bits and then went to bed.

Then, in the middle of the night I was enveloped with some kind of fever. I felt horrific and got virtually no sleep. I have a terrible sore throat and I feel gurgly in my stomach as well as having that feverish hot/cold pins and needles thing. After a tough night I decided that I could not really go into work, and I am now sat on my sofa now. I feel awful, I really do.

Fun day today. This morning Matt and I interviewed Mark Shuttleworth for LUGRadio. I am pleased to report that Shuttleworth is an incredibly personable, honest and intelligent chap. We had an interesting conversation about some of the aspects of Ubuntu and Canonical, and you can expect to hear the interview, potentially in the next episode of LUGRadio released on the 17th January 2005. We are deciding tonight when the interview will be merged into the show, but I suspect it will be in the next episode.

After the interview I got into work and started to finish off some things in the article I was writing yesterday. While working on this I had a phone call from Rebecca, the new Production Editor at Linux Format. Seems pretty cool, and I am pleased they have found someone suitable to fill Matt Nailon’s shoes. Matt did a great job. The Linux magazine industry is a funny old beast, and people seem to move around quite a lot. In the five years or so that I have been writing, people have moved consistently. I suspect this is a combination of moving interests but also the fact that people in this industry are so incredibly over-worked. It is not uncommon for editors to be working well into the evening on most nights of the week. Not something I would want to do, I must confess.

Today I spent some time working away on Python. I didn’t really have much time today to dedicate to it, but I have come up with a nifty idea for a project to learn Python. As regular baconians will know, I have an iRiver that I use as my portable music player. To stick songs on there now, I need to drag them over using Nautilus which works fine, but then I need to rebuild the database with iRipDB. Anyway, I figured it would be quite cool if I could write a little GUI application to act as an interface to this. I want it to do this:

• Present a graphical list of iRivers plugged in. I know people will generally only have one, but there may be more than one.
• The user should be able to select an iRiver from the list and the Update Database button will be ungreyed.
• The program will then use iRipdDB to update the database on the iRiver

This program will need to use HAL and DBUS to deal with the device, and although looking through the HAL Device Manager code I can see the relevant bits, the big gap of knowledge about using Python with HAL made it a little more complex. Luckily, the chaps on the HAL mailing list were of good help.

Bejesus, its been busy recently. Got in today and had a meeting about some up and coming work that we are looking at. After a few hours in this meeting, I headed up to the office and continued working on an article for Linux User and Developer magazine about guerrilla evangelism. In this article I have focused on the whys and wheres of how to advocate from the inside out. I have also put some comments from Zak Greant in there; it is shaping up quite nicely.

Today I had a phone call from Bob Holland from Sheffield who has invited me to go and speak at an event up there penned in for the 2nd March 2005. When it is finally confirmed, I will add it to my events diary. Speaking of events, I am keen to do more speaking at events, so let me know if you want a long-bearded Open Source advocate to come and talk. I have been looking into a few other events going on, and I may submit some papers soon.

I had an annoying experience with my iRiver today. I have spent the last few days ripping CDs with Grip, and I transferred them over to the iRiver using iRipDB. This little tool basically rebuilds the database that is present on the iRiver. The original iRipDB was written by another chap, and has since been migrated to a different maintainer. This new maintainer has switched the use of libid3 to libtag and it does not quite work right. What was even more frustrating was that Grip did not write the tags in the files correctly. The result of this is that I need to re-rip all of the CDs I had done. Arse.

Last night I went over to the ginger minger’s house. We spent some time working on some Python and Glade things, and I am really psyched by Python at the moment. It seems such a simple and effective language, and Glade looks fantastic for my needs. I already have a few little programs that I am interested in writing. I plan on looking into this more at the weekend. Unfortunately, the ginger one and I also deduced from expansive chin-wagging that our HAL FDI networking distribution system is not really going to be viable unless someone from the HAL project says that we have misunderstood some of the intricacies of HAL. When we have some time, we are going to write a post to the HAL mailing list to ask for some feedback.

Tomorrow morning we interview Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Canonical and the Ubuntu distribution) for LUGRadio, and then tomorrow night we record the first LUGRadio episode for 2005!

Its a funny old world, and in this funny old world, computers try to be funny and just end up being old. This weekend I decided I was going to get our network at home sorted out. I bought one of those green frog Speedtouch modems and I thought I would get it plugged in and the rest of the network sorted out before the ADSL is switched on, which should hopefully happen later this week. Anyway, I had managed to break the power lead to my hub (one of those strange two pin European plugs) that I bodged it into a four-plug adapter and managed to nork up the plug socket. I decided it was time for a new hub and went to a computer fair and picked one up for about 30 quid. I came back home and tried to get the Apple Extreme Base Station plugged in and working. After experiencing some odd functionality with it (sometimes connecting but mostly not, and terrible range), I read in the booklet that if all three LED’s flash quickly, the unit is failing the power on test. After seeing them flash, I boxed the engorged mint imperial looking device into its box to take back to work. After this malarkey, I figured I would go back to my original wireless base station, but the damn thing seems to have stopped working. Arse. So, that is going back to PC World soon…

Got into work and started fixing some things up on my laptop. I then had a phone call from Zak Greant. It was great to catch up with Zak, and we chatted for a good hour or so and chewed the fat. I hope I will get the chance to meet up with Zak sometime soon at a conference here or there. After this I started to do some Python programming with Glade. I have been meaning to get around to learning some Python stuff recently, and I had a play around with some of it using this tutorial. I only got so far as it seems PyGtkMoz is not packaged for Ubuntu for some reason. Over the weekend I spent a little time with Dive Into Python, which is conveniently packaged for Ubuntu, and I am getting used to to Python. I am over at Aq’s tonight, and I am sure he will throw a few nuggets of Python wisdom my way.

Today I also wrote and submitted a submission for Guadec 2005. This was influenced by Paul who is also thinking of submitting a paper. I would love to get along to Guadec this year, and I will keep my fingers crossed for both Paul’s submission and my own. for those who are interested, my submission is called From KDE to GNOME: Refining the Open Source desktop. Here is the abstract (written in the normal third person format for paper submissions):

As a developer involved with the KDE project and a contributor to a number of KDE projects (including KDE::Enterprise and the KDE Usability Study), Jono Bacon has since moved over to GNOME as his preferred desktop. The reasons for this move included technical, social, usability and cultural reasons, and in this presentation Jono shares candidly some of the reasons for this move and how the two desktop communities compare and contrast.

In the presentation, Jono will discuss how the GNOME desktop differs from KDE on a technical and usable level, and how the GNOME team are innovating in new and distinctive areas. These functional issues will be augmented with some discussion of how the two different projects culturally and socially differ, and how the GNOME project can learn and evolve from some of these differences. As the Open Source desktop is becoming an ever increasing reality, it is important that we explore how to craft our software by learning from both sides of the fence of how we can not just work harder, but work smarter.

Today we mailed also off the OQO to Colin Watson to begin the process of hacking together some bits of the installer for Hoary on the device. I am looking forward to hearing any feedback he gives us on how he gets on. He is a scarily clever guy and I am sure he can fix most of this in his sleep, not that he sleeps anyway.

Catch you soon folks.
—–

Got into work, revived my Hoary install again and heard it breathe a sigh of relief as it felt the soft presence of an Internet connection again. No Internet connection home is really starting to annoy me,and be prepared for me to rant until it is resolved. Luckily, my frog modem arrived this morning, so I am just waiting for BT to remove the long finger of inability from their respective crevice and switch me on.

Anyway, today I decided I was going to get Ubuntu to play nicely with one of the new OQO units. For those of you who have not encountered an OQO, here is one posing provocatively:

Paul informed me that he had tried to install warty,but faced problems with the installer taking up the right amount of screen estate. I decided to try a Hoary daily, and it seemed to fix the problem in the 7th Jan daily. The problem I faced was that bsdutils could not be found on the CD. After some digging around, it seemed the problem was that I burned the CD too fast on my laptop, so I burned another at 8x and it seemed to fix the problem. I then encountered some missing packages that caused a dependency problem when installing the kernel. I have since discovered that a report on the Ubuntu site indicates these kinds of problems. I am now just installing an earlier daily from the 4th Jan that seems to be devoid of package problems, but we’ll see.

Anyway, I was having a chat with the chaps at work at lunch and we thought it would be good if we could lend an OQO to Canonical. We have a few units here, so it seems a reasonable thing to do, and after a chat with Jeff Waugh in #ubuntu, we seem to be on to lend them one. This is good, and what is particularly convenient is that the Installer chap (Colin Watson) and Laptop chap (some other dude) live in the UK. This makes it more feasible in getting Unbuntu running on it. Imet Colin at the expo, and he is a good friend of Aqs.

In other news, I am currently investigating how a local project could potentially help do some translations for OpenOffice.org. Nothing is anywhere near concrete at the moment, but I am going to discuss it further with a few of my colleagues. This organisation basically want to explore Open Source as a means to furnish a community center, and we discussed how Open Source opens up a number of possibilities for localising language and customising software for a particular ethnic group. The idea was to see if this organisation will fund the translation of OpenOffice.org into these languages and then contribute the changes back to the community. After a quick chat with Michael Meeks on the phone a few weeks ago, it seems it takes about four months to do a translation of the core suite. Michael got in touch with me a few days ago updating me on the fact that Novell may not be able to help in this area. There are still a number of options available, and I will keep you updated.

Well, after a well rested Christmas, and rather hectic new year, I am back at work. I started back on Tuesday, and spent the morning getting some initial bits and pieces sorted out when I got in. This included upgrading my laptop Hoary installation. I updated the system with new packages, and resolved a few issues with OpenOffice. This included installing a separate package with the GNOME GTK+ theme for OpenOffice (which looks really good), and also the GNOME VFS add-on for OpenOffice. Now OpenOffice uses the GNOME file picker, and this feels much more consistent. Regular readers will recall some ramblings spurting forth from this Bacon a few months back about how we have so many file pickers and these should be unified. It is good to see GNOME and OpenOffice hooking together better. I wonder if OpenOffice understands Nautilus VFS paths now. I know Mark Ellse will be chuffed if it is.

So, on Tuesday I upgraded Hoary and prepared for a presentation with a certain organisation that must remain nameless at the moment. They are interested in moving over to an Open Source CRM, and they were very interested in not only the CRM, but also the concept of Open Source and where it can lead to in other parts of their IT infrastructure. This organisation was particularly intrigued by the concept of vendor lock-in, and the IT chap had not really considered it before. All in all, the meeting was very successful and we are pushing forward with the implementation of a solution. There are a number of things I have been noting down in a private notebook about some of these advocatorial experiences, and I plan on writing some of this up in the new O’Reilly articles I discussed recently.

Apart from going into work on Tuesday, I have not been in since then. This has been because I was doing an assist with Adam Sweet from Liberty Consulting, and I have spent two days training him in PHP/MySQL programming. Adam has done really well, and we have also spent plenty of time discussing other facets of Open Source and how it can work for him. We have also spent some time discussing Ubuntu and he is interested in moving over to it for his desktop.

Ubuntu seems to be impressing more and more recently. With Hoary well and truly sunken into my laptop, I have thrown every USB based device I can chuck at it to see how it works. Apart from my knackered old digital camera no longer working, I had some great success with a USB Epson Stylus printer. Plugged it in, went to System Preferences -> Printer and clicked on the icon to add a printer. It detected it fine, so I clicked OK and proceeded to print out the PDF form that I needed Adam to sign for the assist. Unfortunately Ubuntu can’t fix all problems – we had run out of ink. Damn.

Tomorrow I plan on fixing up some other assists I have been working towards, and I am going to look into installing Ubuntu or Fedora on an OQO. Three of them came into the office on Tuesday, and I am looking forward to playing with it.

Oh, and before I head off. The problems you may be encountering with accessing Angel are indeed a pain in the region, but we are pretty much onto it. Aq has been poking the server with a stick and has a good idea that Apache is the problem. We close to nailing it and fixing the issue. I will keep you posted, and until it is resolved, please accept my apologies for the down time.

Astute readers of jonobacon.com will have noticed a distinct lack of blog postings. When I say to people before Christmas that I won’t be on the net much, I was not kidding when I referred to this Christmas. This is about the third time I have ventured onto the net, mainly because of a lack of broadband access at our new house. Being the tight money grabbing scrooge that I am, I am always counting the pennies when going online for an emergency dial-up fix. As such, there have been few traces of my life hitting the net.

Aside from not actually being able to get on the net, I have wanted to steer clear of computers over Christmas. Towards the end of 2004 I was doing too much. I was going to work all day, coming home from work and working some more, and when I grabbed some moments of relaxation I was still thinking of work. The break has been nice, and I am starting to get itchy feet to get back on with things. I don’t go back until the 4th Jan, and I am most definitely not working before then. I want to ensure that I am fully rested until I start back in 2005. I am pretty sure this year is going to involve even more work than 2004. I have a number of ambitions and goals in 2005, and I want to hit every one of them. I hit most of my goals for 2004, so 2005 should be fine. 🙂

—–

Fear not folks, I am still around. You may have noticed a distinct lack of website activity around here, but I have had precious little net access. I have recently moved house, and buried somewhere between the boxes and piles of random crap that I never knew existed, lives the tatters that is a dial up connection. You know how people say money spoils people? Well, I have been spoiled by broadband, and pathetically-narrow-shite-band is well…shite.

Anyway, this mockery of an excuse is not my only tick on the whine card. With the abundant festive season upon us, I have been thrusted into family-visiting mode. This has meant long visits around the UK to visit members of the Bacon clan, as well as trips to visit Susan’s oddball bunch of relatives. We are so lucky in that we have a fantastic relationship with our family, and it has been a pleasure to see them. This family visiting lark has also contributed to the lack of key-tapping going on on my laptop.

Despite all this, I have managed to upgrade my laptop to Hoary. My lack of a decent net connection erected my enthusiasm to max out Sooz’s parent’s net connection, and I allowed my laptop to suck a good two hours of Ubuntu goodness down the pipe and into my hungry laptop. Said laptop breathed a sigh of relief as I headed up the stairs to bed with a grin on my face and a working X.org server on the knackered old beast. Hoary is great, and aside from the expected bugs, it is looking to be a fantastic second round in the Ubuntu (they drink it in the congo) race. Good stuff.

So, its Christmas. The fat-bearded-pie-eating-reindeer-riding-old-fart seems to have visited our household, and I have been the lucky recipient of various presents. Many of you have emailed about the Robosapien; yes, it is great, and yes, you all need to buy one. Other presents included the West Wing Season 4 box set, Motley Crue live DVD, Bill Bailey DVD, bird house, bow tie for my dick (don’t ask), keyring kite (don’t ask again) and other bits of stuff. I have also been given some cash which is already burning a hole in my pocket, and in about 8 hours it will be burning a hole in a till somewhere in HMV. Tomorrow I am going to buy one metric tonne of DVD’s, and I plan on putting my back out carrying them home.

Top three’s

Ginger lynne seems to be carrying on the theme of top three’s, so here are mine:

Top 3 Events of 2004

• Some Linux event with the boys – it happens every year, and the usual crew are in tow. It is good.
• Wacken – full on metal and five days of it. Sweet.
• EuroFoo – great fun, and met some amazing people.

Top 3 Gigs of 2004

• Cannibal Corpse – cannon and ball corpse always amaze, and they did in London.
• Dismember – better than recorded action. Oh yes.
• The Haunted – a recent one, I experienced a one minute silence in dedication of Dimebag. Over 2000 silent metallers; quite an emotional experience.

Top 3 Experiences

• LUGRadio – I am so proud of LUGRadio, and I am proud of the people we have got to meet. It all happened in 2004.
• Starting at OpenAdvantage – Great place to work, and pushing my advocacy ambitions.
• Launching our album – recording and launching our album. Amazing experience.

OK, enough of this. Now for the predictions:

• Linux on the desktop – I don’t think Linux will be sealed on the desktop, but a big push will continue towards the desktop. GNOME will get stronger and the desktop will become more integrated.
• Big push to Firefox – big corporates will move to Firefox and IE will get a battering.
• Market action – someone will buy Apple, Mandrakesoft will go under, Novell will struggle with NLD and then make waves, Sun will face further problems with their Open Source policy

Before I rush off, I should let you know that 2005 is going to be another year where I am intending to push Open Source and advocating how Open Source can be useful for different sectors. I have just made some agreements to write some articles about effective Open Source advocacy, and I will let you know when these are available. Many of these will be on the O’Reilly Network, and I have blogged about this here. I am also in the process of discussing what features I will be writing in the press in 2005, and I think some of them will be really interesting. Finally, I am going to write a book in 2005, and it will be dedicated to some of my thoughts on Open Source, the community, advocacy and where we are going with it. I am in the research stage with it now, and I will keep you posted.

Have a merry Christmas, have a safe break and a great new year!
—–

I know I seem to start each blog entry off by saying that things have been really hectic recently, but they truly have. These things are currently battling for time in my life at the moment:

• Moving house – tomorrow we move to a new house and as such, our current house looks like a bombsite. I am in no way pleased how un-homely the place looks, and I am looking forward to getting everything back in order in our newer, snazzier castle.
• Work – I am currently working on a number of migrations at OpenAdvantage, but I can’t start some of them until the start of next year. This all involves getting the initial research, discussion, meetings and paperwork out of the way before the real action begins.
• Projects – I am currently on the tail end of a few writing projects, and the editing stage is coming to a close. When this is done, I have a few other projects I am interested in pursuing.
• Band – We have been busy promoting the new album, and have been writing new material. Included here is the need to book more gigs, produce albums, update the website and other bits and bobs.
• LUGRadio – LUGRadio has been growing from strength to strength, and I have been trying to keep up to date with the editing and recordings. I have also been trying to keep in touch witht he LUGRadio community; they are a good bunch. 🙂

Speaking of LUGRadio, do you want to see what a typical LUGRadio session looks like? Well, here you go:

Four grown men, sat in a small room…with an accordion. LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 5 is online now.

—–

Today is a sad day for metallers everywhere. One of the finest examples of a metal guitarist and all round good guy was murdered. Dimebag Darrell leaped to fame with Pantera in the 80’s, and they went on to become one of the most prominent metal bands of the 90’s. Pantera were an incredible band, fueled by thundering drums and fat chugging guitar riffs often delivered at breakneck speed. Dimebag way so key to this band that many people felt he was Pantera. This view was often perpetuated because Phil Anselmo, the lead singer and muppett of the year was increasingly becoming an ever abundant asshole. As an example of Anselmo’s random outbursts, we saw Pantera play in Wales a few years back and Anselmo praised the people at the front for being the real metallers and the people near the back were condemned as lesser fans. At this particular gig I had unceremoniously split my trousers in the mosh and was sat near the back. Anselmo’s comment was bad enough as he was accusing people who had paid good money to see them play as not being ‘true’ enough for the gig, but what was worse was that there were a bunch of disabled fans sat at the back who were lumped into the non-true-fan quagmire. These people were sat at the back and headbanging throughout the gig; true fans if I ever saw them. What a complete arse.

Dimebag was not like this. Every fan was a true fan to him, and I am proud to have appreciated his life and have him inspire my own playing. Have a few cold ones up there on us Dimebag…