Despite having lots to do, I managed to do something to my back. This has resulted in me spending much time on my back today. It seems to be getting better though and I should be fine to go up and speak at the d:CODE event up in Hull. These chaps asked me to come up a while back to provide a general introduction to Open Source at the event. I am intrigued to see how I am going to react to long drive early tomorrow morning. I will be there most of the day. I am also looking forward to meeting James Wallbank again, and hopefully meeting some of the Hull LUG.

After this, it will be back to record LUGRadio Episode 5 tomorrow evening. I better get to bed.

You know, I hate moving house. It really sucks, big time. On this particular moving occasion, Sooz and I are moving about 200 yards from our current house (we are renting now and want to buy) and hence the moving process seems so utterly pointless as we are just going down the road. Nonetheless, this weekend was dedicated to packing, and we put all of the crap in this house in bin-liners to be moved to the other house where it will sit, untouched, like it has here for the past two years. It is remarkable just how much crap we have, and I am slowly persuading Sooz to bin half the junk she has collated like the bag lady that she is. 😛

I have booked today off work to catch up with some things, and this morning there was a knock on the door. Sooz had assured me that my Christmas present was arriving today, and I was given stern instructions, complete with threats, not to tamper with the box. She was in the shower when the doorbell rang, so I belted it downstairs and there was a delivery chap with two parcels (one being my new Palm Wi-Fi SD card) and the other being my present. I had already spent a while whining on to Sooz about getting me a particular present, and I was surprised to see that the muppets from the store had plastered the name of said present on the side of the box. Although surprised at knowing what I was getting a good few weeks before the big day, I was all smiles when I saw the immortal words ROBOSAPIEN written on the side of the box. For those who are unaware of such a blissful piece of machinery, this is what a Robosapien is:

It is a robot that can move and behave in a very humanistic way. I actually first saw one of these in someone or others blog (I think it was Miguel, Nat or Joe’s blog) and then Scott at work put a name to the glorious unknown device. Scott, being the total gadget addict that he is, was telling me about Robosapien, and I decided I just had to have one of them. I promptly mailed Sooz in an act not too dissimilar to writing what you want and putting it up the chimney for Santa. Sooz then began to weave a carefully constructed web of lies to tempt me into a false belief that Robosapiens were sold out everywhere. It seems not though, woohoo! Incidentally, this is not the first less than serious Christmas present I have lusted after…

Well, the LUGRadio train is rolling on and I think we have more people listening to the show than ever before. You know, I am amazed at just how popular the show has become. Our little idea for a fun Linux radio show has spawned into a whole community who seem to enjoy listening to it. I was curious why people do actually listen to the show, and I stuck a poll on the LUGRadio forums. What I find intriguing is that when we set forth with the idea of LUGRadio, we never intended it to be anything but a piss about one evening round at my house. We all predicted that we would record a couple of shows, no-one would listen and that would be that. It seems not. We now have a dedicated bunch of listeners who we have got to know, many of which hang out at the forums and on the #lugradio IRC channel on Freenode, and we also have a bunch of dependable mirrors to share the load. I think what I am most proud of is that we have created a show that is not riddled with political correctness and dry boring technicality, and all of it has been done on a shoestring. This is collaborative community radio at its best – we have a deep connection with our listeners as they help to keep the show mirrored and keep us going with ideas, social commentary and constructive criticism. Yet another example of the Open Source ethos at work it seems…

Recently, I decided that I wanted to compile the GNOME CVS copy, and I want to be back on the bleeding edge of CVS code again. I am not sure where this strange desire has bubbled up from, but I am pretty sure a lot of it is derived from reading Planet GNOME, seeing the progress of Beagle and also not getting any more updates for Warty. There was a temptation to make the plunge to Hoary on my main laptop, but after X.org failed to work on the PPC I have decided to give it a wide berth until it is more stable. This is no doubt a PPC specific issue though.

This week we have been running a PLONE course here, and it is going well. Each lunchtime I pop down to have a natter with the people on the course to see how they are enjoying it, and overall it seems very popular. What is intriguing from my perspective is to see the diverse range of people on the courses. You would imagine that these courses would be filled with geeks who are keen to grab a weeks worth of free training, but we seem to have a pretty diverse bunch; so diverse, it could pass the political correctness mafia at the BBC…

One of the tough things about advocacy that I have discovered is that being different can often hamper you as much as being similar. There are so many organisations who are really keen on cutting their teeth on Open Source, but the fact that it is different makes people feel uneasy. This is particularly prevalent in organisations with a traditionalist approach to management. Joe Manager, who drives his roller to work and tries to steer clear of the workers is likely to find the concept of Open Source difficult to swallow as he is likely to have little, if any, interaction with the IT staff. This brings in the issue that you can never advocate change unless the people you are preaching to have an understanding of the problem. I have met so many people that so blatantly have no idea of what they are trying to solve, but they enjoy the attention at a meeting of how Open Source can solve this and that. The problem is that they are then unable to go away and translate the talk into action.

The problem is that this is an issue that plagues the IT and governmental sector. There are unfortunately too many people that are dealing with high level decisions that are physically incapable of translating talk into action. As some of you will know, and as some listeners of LUGRadio will know, I have always taken a very pragmatic approach to my advocacy. I don’t like sitting around all day on mailing lists discussing this, and discussing that. I like to get meetings booked, discuss the issues at hand, and begin preparing a solution that can be implemented. The problem with this is that the web of talk spreads beyond the capable reach of the meeting participants. If I am sat in our board room discussing how someone can use Open Source and they are interested, this then triggers an attempt for the person to gain authorisation to allow the changeover to occur. This can then involve meetings with that person’s manager, strategy documents getting written, outbound research, feasibility studies, accountancy checks and other tape ‘de red are wound round and round. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying people should blindly enter into an Open Source solution without performing a comfortable level of research and checks, but I have known people to have satisfied their appetite for research and still been ground down by the wheels of bureaucracy.

With all these challenges facing Open Source advocacy, one could be led to believe that Joe-no Bacon is having a tough time with it and getting frustrated. This is most certainly not the case. Part of the reason why I run my blog is to share the thoughts that are rushing around my simplistic little brain and see what comments people have to develop a solution to these problems we face. The result of this is that I will typically share with you the challenges that I see more than the gains. Speaking of gains, I will share one little nugget of joy with you though. The other day I was helping a chap who works at a large nationwide organisation to install Ubuntu on his home PC. He had come in and I had advised him on the choice of a CRM for his organisation, and while discussing the CRM, he was impressed with the desktop interface on my laptop. I told him it was called Ubuntu and he expressed an interest in running it on his home machine. Immediately after the meeting, he belted it over to PC World to pick up a second hard disk, and the next day he called me to guide him through burning an ISO to a CD. He then went away and installed it. With bated breath, I awaited his call the next day to share his experience, and he was overjoyed with how simple and easy Ubuntu was to install, how simple the desktop was, how much faster it is than Windows 2000 and how pleased he is in general with it. He told me his only problem was that he could not write to his Windows disk. I explained to him what NTFS was and why writing was an issue at the moment, and then he told me that it was not a problem as he just popped in his USB keyring and copied the files there. You know, desktop Linux is on its way…

Well, tonight we have a LUG meeting, and I am going to have a few drinks with my cohorts. Eat, drink and be merry. Oh yes, I dig that…

Had a nice weekend. On Friday I headed down to London with Sooz and Steve to see Dismember play. Excellent gig and they were supported by the fantastic Anata. After the gig we traveled back, then went to bed and as Sooz fell asleep, I watched the first few episodes from my new West Wing Season 3 box set. Such a great show…

It seems that the joke that is the SCO vs. Humanity case is becoming more ridiculous by the day. As I perused the depths of #lugradio, the gent cordially known as mrben linked us with the following amusing image:

Oh dear. I remember when this whole situation kicked off, and there was doom and gloom that Linux had been nailed by the man McBride and his cohorts. Despite such predictions, we are still here, still clear and SCO have not made a jot of progress. The issue I am unsure about is where all of this is going to end. They must be running out of money quicker than we could possibly imagine. The last time I was this unsure was when I was a young child and I asked my dad what a Haemorrhoid was. I was startled to learn that it wasn’t one of the bad guys in Dr Who…

I am intrigued by the work going on by Red Hat with their free implementation of Java. I have been reading about this on Planet Classpath, and it seems like quite an interesting effort. My only cynicism is how worthwhile this project is going to be in the long run Admittedly, and this is the disclaimer, I don’t really know all that much about why they are creating another version of Java, and I don’t know what the reasons are for this, so I would be happy if some of you could enlighten me. Sure, it is remarkably unlikely that Sun are going to Open Source Java anytime soon,irrespective of the witterings from ESR, but what I am keen to learn is how compatible this newer version will be and how it will improve on Sun’s incarnation. What also confuses me is how Fernando Herrera has been making the Java based Eclipse work with GNOME. I thought that one of the limitations with the Sun JRE was that it could not be themed. I am so confused.

You know, one of the concepts I am steadily coming round to with my advocacy efforts is that the initial problem faced by the organisations I deal with is often the symptom to the real problem, and this can begin a chain effect. Take for example that of a CRM. An organisation needs a CRM, so we help them choose and use one. With this CRM, all staff are encouraged to be more pro-active in how they log their work and use the software. This then triggers a few other issues – the staff need a better web browser, the staff need to integrate their PIM tools, the staff need a method of logging information with as little effort as required. At this point, we then come round to the age old challenge facing IT – we have a lot of disparate tools and none of them hook together. When you are this far down the line, the initial foray into Open Source with a CRM has then been transformed into a potential IT infrastructure revolution within said organisation. This though, is where the true spirit of Open Source comes through. We can take these tools, poke them with a stick and make them work together at the most fundamental level – the availability of the source code provides us with the necessary clout to help contort a square box into a circular box. Sure this will not solve all of our problems, and there are many challenges ahead, but when you are next advocating the use Open Source to solve someone’s problem, try to look behind their eyeballs to determine what the real problem is.

Before I go and let you get on with your work, LUGRadio Season 2 Episode 4 is due for release today. Go and listen. 🙂
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Blogging is such a fun thing to do. Despite the fact that Paul and I sit two feet away from each other, it is still fun to blog about our opinions. That is not to say we ignore each other at work (oh yeah, Paul is my boss at OpenAdvantage), but we might as well ramble in public so others can ceremonious toss their ten penneth into the pot.

The current theme is that of Oooff and Michael Robertson’s consumerism of Linux with Linspire. Paul has an interesting and grounded perspective of Robertson and his projects, and although I am all for the consumerisation of Linux and Open Source, an endeavor that the man Robertson has rigorously thrown himself into, I am not all that convinced that the job is adequately done. Let me give you an analogy. Let’s apply the principles of Open Source to the leisure industry. There are a bunch of different components that are randomly available such as slides, water features, swings, restaurants and so on, and each of these components are maintained by different companies and groups (see the metaphor?). Anyway, these components are only really known to the leisure industry geeks and they really need to be made available in a more general fashion. Some people combine these components together to form theme parks with differing aims. The metaphor I have with Linspire is that Robertson has produced a product that is comparable to that of a tacky Blackpool resort. Sure, the consumer features are there, sure, there is some added value there, and sure, the resort is on general sale in consumer retail outlets, but the overall product is nothing to write home about and seems a little tacky.

I think the point here is that within any industry there are a number of el-cheapo outfits that offer a solution or product that although capable, may not be the best solution. Maybe I am being a little harsh on Linspire here – it seems my main grunt with them is their marketing is pretty cheap, but then again I am not entirely sold on the product. I think if they were to raise the profile of the company, while still keeping it firmly grounded in the consumer market, they could do well, and even better than they are doing now. I would also like to see them moving away from trying to simply replicate Windows and sell it as a cheaper product. This kind of reminds me of those crap iPod shaped rip-offs that you see at computer fairs. These units claim to do a similar job to the iPod, look virtually identical and cost about 20 quid. Although I am all for choice and competition, but I am not all for trying to confuse the consumer with a similar looking product. This can often end in failure as the consumer expects a feature that is present in the real pukka version, and the cheap knock-off cannot deliver it. Does this apply to Linspire (or rather Lindows, back in the day)? I hope not.

Despite my apparent cynicism, one area in which I do have a heap of respect for Linspire is the way they have contributed back to the community and prompted the realisation of tools such as Nvu. Robertson is clearly a keen Linux and Open Source advocate, and although I am cynical about some of his methods to achieve greater consumer market penetration, he has managed to get where other can’t. He is certainly an Open Source entrepreneur – I just wonder if he is the Arthur Daley of the Open Source world. I am certainly willing to be persuaded otherwise, so feel free to log your comments here.

Anyway, in other stuff, we have been pretty busy recently and there are some truly interesting projects going on at OpenAdvantage. I can’t really say too much about it at the moment as we are just starting these projects, but if everything works well, these projects will really help the growth of Open Source in some key areas. I will let you all know what is going on when I can.

Oh, and something else that was quite cool was that I got something mentioned on Radio 2. See this thread for the details, and thanks to those who heard it and mentioned it in the thread. As a side note, Terry Wogan is a god among men. There is no doubt that Wogan keeps me sane when I am braving the depths of the M6 every morning. All hail Wogan and his infinite worth to the human race. Part of this worth are the hilarious Janet and John stories and the way that Wogan, Pauly and Boggy crease up when reading them out. It kind of reminds me of LUGRadio in strange way…
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After the busyness of last week, it has been nice to spend a week without traveling all over the place. Since I have got back from The Hague I have been working on a few areas in which there is the potential for some Open Source adoption. This has hooked in with a lot of the government related events I have been to recently. Part of this has been working towards getting some relevant local government people sat around a table to discuss the possibility of Open Source adoption. I have also been thinking a lot about some of the problems that many local authorities seem to be facing in not just adopting Open Source but also working with each other. The stupid wheels of bureaucracy seem to be difficult to break at times.

An interesting facet of my work has been getting to know the issues that people face when they move over to Open Source. The most popular route, and one that we advocate at OpenAdvantage, is that of moving over to OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and the GIMP. These common productivity tools work on Windows, and largely provide a functional replacement to their proprietary equivalents. Although I have ultimate confidence in each of the above tools, there are certainly some problems in the path to a full migration. Yesterday, I headed to Chase Academy over in Cannock where I had a meeting with my friend and principal of Chase Academy, Mark Ellse. When you meet Mark, he is not the kind of person that you expect. Although a personable, friendly and very tolerant person, Mark manages to disguise his technical interest and competence in Open Source quite well. Some may look at him and think “that chap over there is a principal”, but I am guessing that few people underpin him as a Linux bod. Anyway, I popped over to have a meeting and catch up on how they are doing with Open Source. Mark informed me that they have deployed OpenOffice.org and Firefox across the school, but the process was not without incident. Although he found the migration a great success, there were certainly some usability issues involved in moving someone from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.

I always find usability a curious subject. On one hand, we have such influential scribers as the mighty Spolsky writing humorous and interesting reads, on another hand we have sandal wearing artisans such as Nielsen discussing the theoretical quagmire of computing, and on a freakish third hand we have the every day hackers who digest all this crap and actually try to write some software. The difficulty faced by Mark and the thousands of other people migrating over to OpenOffice.org is that although it looks like Microsoft Office, not everything works exactly the same. So, on one hand (yes, OK, I do seem to have a ‘hand’ affinity today for some reason) we have the benefit of attracting users over to OpenOffice.org because it looks pretty similar and is not drastically different to use, but when the user is over, assumption plays a double edged sword. At this point, frustration can set in as users cannot figure out how to use the software.

Alas, all of this becomes meaningless after a while because the general reduction in frustration seems to drop in relation to that of the paperclip-laden equivalent. Its strange, on one side I respect the usability issues, but on the other side I just want to tell people to pull themselves together and get on with it. Maybe this is my Yorkshire heritage coming through. Oh ‘aar, thats reet graaand, pull yer finger out t’arse and downlerd OpenOffice from t’internet. The heartening fact in this story is that most people figure out OpenOffice.org and how it works in a few hours. Although the usability brethren will be chattering about usability until the cows come home, I am more interested in getting people to use it.

What is particularly interesting about Mark’s case is that he demonstrates a full-on grass-roots approach to IT. About two or three years ago he showed up at a Wolves LUG meeting where we were all embracing beer, cheesecake and hilarity, and he sunk his teeth into the idea of Open Source and how it could help his school. We explained the concepts of Open Source and Mark eagerly asked questions and made notes. Ron, one of the LUG faithful and possessor of all knowledge about Linux, ever, then went down to the school and installed a system for Mark. This system incidentally, has only gone down twice, both times due to power supply reasons. Mark is now keen to spread Open Source deeper throughout the school and we are going help him with the move.

You know, Matt has blogged about Oooff, the latest scheme from Michael Robertson and his Linspire group. I still don’t know what to make of this chap. On one hand (woohoo! hands again…), credit where credit is due by being innovative and trying to push Linux forward on the desktop. On the other hand, I find most of his efforts have such a ‘half baked’ feel about them, and I am uneasy about someone so blatantly ripping off somebody else’s ideas. Lindows was based around Windows, and the whole idea of Lindows is that it is a drop-in replacement for Windows. I am all for drop-in replacements to Windows, but something that is so bone-crunchingly similar seems a little odd to me. His latest idea with Oooff is to create a retail box set with OpenOffice.org and Firefox (as well as some other bits and bobs) that will be sold in consumer retail shops. Horrifically tacky packaging and such a blatant attempt to rifle some cash out of this software keeps me on the cynical side of the fence. Michael, I do like some of your ideas, but how about trying to raise the marketing quality so it is not like the Butlins of the software industry?

Oh, and hats off to my good buddy Aq about the pingbacks thing. Clever bugger. Still a ginger muppet in a yellow car though… 😛

More photos in the Gallery.

On Wednesday i headed over to the Open Source and Libre Software in Government conference over in The Hague, Holland. I met up with Pete Nichols from the UCE, checked-in and then waited for the flight. We got into Schipol at about 7.30pm (Amsterdam time) and then attempted to get a train to Den Haag Centraal. It seemed that the usually impeccable Holland train system was having a few troubles and there was a strong dose of uncertainly as we got on the wrong train, but heading in the right general direction. Nonetheless, we battled on, and with the good help of a kind Irish lass who we met on the way, we ended up in The Hague in no time at all. We jumped in a taxi, got to the Hotel, had a few drinks and then crashed out. The conference was quite an interesting one. The aim of the event was to provide a dissection of Open Source software in the public sector and government, and the event comprised of a number of presentations by people who have explored Open source and (in many cases) implemented it. These case studies were spread out across different sessions and were in general vendor agnostic (not too many shameless marketing sessions thankfully). One session was on national government, one on local government and another session concentrated on discussion of open standards. The main case studies included examples spreading across France, Germany, Austria, Spain, England and other countries. Of all these, I found the Extremadura case the most interesting and fulfilling case to listen to. The chap behind the project gave a good presentation, if a little complex (I don’t know an awful lot about how Spanish bureaucracy works), and Pete and I had a chat with him afterwards. For those of you unfamiliar with this fantastic example of Linux take-up, Extremadura is one of the poorest regions in Spain, and the government embraced free software by creating a new distribution called LinEx. The distribution was designed and build for use across 670 schools and was burned to over 80,000 CDs. The project developed a regional intranet link to hook together 1,478 government offices and schools, and the target was to have at least one PC per two students. They cordially hit this goal with no major problems. What is interesting about Extremadura is how they approached the problem sensibly. With the idea of running free software on school and government PCs, the project leaders could have simply mailed the 80,000 CDs out to the schools and merely expected them to grit their teeth and get on with it. This would have been likely to end in tears, and this very approach occurred over in Mexico with the Red Escholar project. Over there they expected to save up to $124 million in license fees. The problem was that the CDs were sent out with little training or support to actually get the software from the CD onto the machine. It is difficult enough trying to get people to rid themselves of inertia without expecting them to brave a complex installation routine. Anyway, in Extremadura the support was there, and it looks like over $7 million dollars could have been saved. This is pretty impressive for a rich region, let alone a poorer one. I always find it interesting to hear these monetary cost savings figures bandied about in presentations and articles. Sure, $7 million sounds an impressive amount, but the interesting question is how this figure is proportionally important (and it certainly is important in Extremadura). As an example, I heard of a case study of a school in the UK where the cost saving for a particular department was about £13,000. Sure, this doesn’t sound particularly impressive, but the head of the English department said that his budget was £1 per student, and you can see how £13,000 saved in proportion to the budget of the school was pretty groundbreaking. All in all, the conference in The Hague was a success. One area that was particularly prevalent at the show was the issues surrounding open standards. There were a number of people from different organisations including OSSOS, IDA, ISO and the Open Standards Alliance. There was some quite heated discussion in the final session, and some of the issues covered in the different speakers’ talks was queried by some members of the audience. This was also augmented by the venerable John Terpstra being invited to the stage to throw forth his ten penneth. It was evident from John’s comments that a number of issues niggled him with how open standards are being discussed and debated by organisations on the Internet. As one of the leading figures behind the Open Standards Alliance, it will be interesting to see how they can possibly bring some focus to the discussion. I don’t envy the people from these organisations; managing open standards on a European wide level is one hell of a task to take on. The big challenge is in getting people to collaborate – sure, we all love open standards, but unless we pick some key standards from the 660+ standards catalogued by people such as OSSOS, we are just going to end up with a bunch of open standards and no interoperability. The problem is that getting people to agree is on a par with herding ducks… After a busy few days travelling, watching the talks and schmoozing with some old and new friends, we headed back and I got into work on Friday. After a few hours catching up on email and working on a few new projects on a local scale, I headed back home, rested for a little while and then set off to do a gig that night. We played in a local watering hole called The Giffard where there is a monthly metal night. We were chuffed to see that the place was utterly heaving, and it was a wicked gig. Plenty of headbangers, and some feverish moshing. Luckily, we got the whole shebang on camera by Sooz perching on some seats and wielding a video camera in our general direction. After the gig, we headed back, picked up a few kebabs and crashed out. I am now upgrading my Powerbook from Ubuntu’s warty to hoary. I will let you know how I get on…

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Good weekend, this one. Old flame Soraya came up to visit, and we all headed out for a curry on Sunday night. It was nice to spend a weekend not working for once. 🙂

After the success at the local governance event, I started following up on some of the leads from the event, and it is great to see the enthusiasm continuing to flow. We now have a solid list of people who are interested in exploring Open Source, as well as some contacts for helping to explore how local government can make better use of Open Source. To be brutally honest, part of the process for myself is about learning how all of this works. I have a cursory knowledge of how the engines of bureaucracy work in local government, but without a comprehensive understanding, I am not going to be much use trying to get Open Source adopted. Luckily I have been surrounded by people who have filled me in on some of the more subtle points of how the local government machine limps along.

Tomorrow should be fun. Elliot (a chap with an uncanny resemblance to Silent Bob) and I are heading down to the land of whistle and flute and jellied eels (London) to the Open Source in the public sector event. I am getting on the train at the ungodly hour of 6.38am, and we will be spending the day discussing and exploring the issues associated with Open Source in this important sector. Strangely, I actually met the guys who are running the event when I was at the LinuxWorld expo, and I was asked to speak at it. Since then, I heard nothing and assumed their programme got filled up. Should be interesting.

This week I am also heading over to The Hague to visit the Flosspols conference. This looks like an intriguing event, and I will also be meeting up with Mark Taylor from Sirius and John Terpstra (Samba guru). Mark has been doing some interesting work, and I last caught up with him at the LASA charities event down in London. It will be good to actually get to know him for more than a few minutes. Speaking of Samba, OpenAdvantage are also running a 4-day course that is given by John Terpstra from the 6th – 9th Dec 2004 in Aston, West Midlands. If you are based in the West Midlands, UK and want to attend the event, call me on 0121 634 1645. The event is entirely free for people who contact us from the West Midlands, and it also includes a copy of John’s book, Samba 3 by example. It looks set to be a great course that is given by the expert on Samba.

In LUGRadio land there has also been a few additions. Firstly, you can now read the LUGRadio crew’s blogs at Planet LUGRadio.Secondly, Season 2 Episode 3 has been released. Go and grab it and let us know what you think!!