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Rather like last time, just another random photo from my gallery which I like and have decided to share.

Digger

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I was looking through my gallery and randomly came across this picture I took in Brussels for FOSDEM two years ago and I remembered that I really liked it. I thought I would share it with you lucky people.

Brussels

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Yesterday I went to see the second of two performances of “Teechers” by John Godber at the Oasthouse Theatre in Rainham. The play was being performed to raise money for Jenny’s trip to Ecuador. She assures me that this isn’t just a holiday, but that she’s going to help teach young children. More importantly, it was an opportunity to see three very good friends of mine acting. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Chris performing, I’ve never seen Jenny in as big a big part and I’ve never seen Heidi perform in a play at all! It was all very enjoyable and hopefully raised some cash to help swell the charitable coffers. Particularly impressive was that the cast of three brought to life about twenty different characters, which was an excuse for some particularly tongue-in-cheek performances which I’m sure would be recognisable by anyone who has worked in education. Not, I should add, just characterisations of students, either. It was certainly fun to see some classic silly voices be wheeled out for some of the smaller characters.

The Teechers cast

The programme for the play was also special, as I had taken the cast photos for it. It was, pretty much, my first commission, albeit not a paid one! The session, which was a couple of months ago now, was fast and fun, but I learnt the same lessons as Graham “codedragon” Binns did recently shooting outside in strong direct sunlight. Although I did have a reflector, there wasn’t time to use it as effectively as it could have been. This was because I was rushing. (To be fair, there wasn’t much time, we all had other appointments to make.) I shot lots and hoped they would be OK, rather than taking a bit longer to ensure the shots were set up properly. So I learnt some important lessons and am looking forward to the next time a similar opportunity arises.

I gave a CD with the JPEG versions of all the image to the cast with a list of of images I recommended, although I was doing so without knowing the context of the play. It was therefore quite interesting to see the ones that they selected for use; on the programme covers, a centre-page scrapbook montage and for each character (not cast) biography. (The image above is the one they picked for the poster.) It was surprisingly gratifiying to see photos I had taken all over the programme.

I also won a bottle of wine in the raffle. Having previously scoffed at the auction of cakes and comestibles at other AmDram productions, I am now convinced by this activity and will petition the National Theatre to follow suit. I want to see Trevor Nunn giving away Blue Nun forthwith!

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Despite my best intentions, it’s been a while since I posted here. Last time it was to shamelessly shill the latest editions the Ubuntu podcast from the UK LoCo team. This post may not be significantly different as it seems most of the trivia of my day is increasingly dissected and distributed on twitter and identi.ca. Not that I ever intended this blog to be a log of thoughts of the calibre frequently shared via twitter and the like, but it seems I don’t feel the need to write long missives any more. (Although there may well be one about ISPs on the way. Watch this, erm, site.)

Episode 7 of Season 2 of our little podcast has hit the (community donated) mirrors this evening and is already sneaking its way onto all manner of computers and portable media playing devices around the world.This episode features an interview with the executive director of the Open Rights Group, an organisation of which I am a supporter, Jim Killock. Unfortunately the output from the phone interface was very low during the interview, which I didn’t really notice at the time. (We use a digital output from the desk into the laptop which records the show, so I should have just brought everyone else down to the same level then boosted the whole lot in the mix.) But despite a shed-load of compression, I wasn’t able to iron out the difference satisfatorily. At least for me. Technicalities aside it was good to catch up with all the latest campaigns that ORG is working on.

It is always exciting when we release an episode to see the first few hundred downloads hit the logs in a couple of hours. It feels to me that we’re hitting our stride with the new series and format now. We regularly record over an hour of material in two hours. The secret is in the preparation. It’s also in the concentration; our biggest slips have happened when someone has drifted off for a bit. The downside of hitting some kind of stride is that is feels like we’ve been doing it for a while. I feel like we’re half way through the season already, when realistically we’re only one third of the way in. Podcasting is a marathon, not a sprint, maintaining pace without burning out is the key. That’s one of the good things about doing a fornightly show; you get almost an entire week off between episodes. (We keep and eye on the website and news stories betweentimes of course.) At the moment we’re using that “time off” to tweak some of the systems behind the scenes. This has involved upgrading Wordpress and various plugins, patching podcoder and so on.

So, please download the show and listen. A lot of work goes into it. If you like it, or dislike it, please send us feedback through the various routes given on the website.

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On review, this blog post is pretty dry and nowhere near as witty and enlightening as I had wished. On the grounds that being neither witty or enlightening has not stopped me publishing blog posts in the past, I have hit the big “Publish” button.

We’re now three episodes into season two of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. It’s part of the reason I’ve not posted anything to this blog for a while. The rest being a fantastically full social life, of course. Trips to London for various shows, a fantastic trip to Norway and bombing a Mercedes around Brooklands have all featured in recent months.

We put out the last episode of season one late, in mid-January. The first episode of season two appeared at the beginning of April. I was surprised at the number of people who, shortly after season one ended, e-mailed in asking for more episodes! It can only be a good thing that people wanted to hear more from us, although some appeared to have missed the announcement that it was a planned season break not just us slacking!

Listeners will detect a bit of a different feel in this series. Partly deliberate, partly as a consequence of changes to the way we produce the show. One of the things we struggled with towards the end of season one was editing the segments. Although we’ve always strived for a distributed work-flow, the reality was that editing either didn’t happen quickly or it fell on one person to get it done. This was for all sorts of reasons, including personal or work commitments, or just sometimes low motivation. In an effort to reduce this burden, which often helped smooth the rough edges of segments, remove gaffes and generally make us all sound a bit more intelligent and coherent than we are, we have been recording segments for series two “as live”. This means we start the segment and keep recording until the end. Everything in between is left in.

This has worked well, with a few exceptions, and with practice we are getting better at making the segments coherent and avoiding tangents. We’re not perfect though, by any means! There are still plenty of “umms” and “ahs” around. The main thing we’ve learnt is that preparation is much more important when there’s no post-editing. This means identifying who is going to introduce the segment, what, roughly, needs to be covered and how long the segment should last. It’s not restrictive and stifling, it just prevents all four of us floundering around being unsure what’s going on. It takes less time to prepare a segment properly beforehand than to edit it properly afterwards. So far this season Ciemon has been so quick off the mark topping and tailing the segments that the rest of us haven’t had to do any editing.

One of the consequences of recording “as live” is that the banter, which normally takes place between segments, gets left in. This has meant the segments have more laughter and gentle ribbing between us. It’s not very Radio 4, but hopefully the segments are no less informative or interesting as a result. So a process-related change has had a stylistic impact.

We’ve also agreed on a regular Monday recording night for various logistical reasons and as far as possible will stick to this. This means we all get our weekends with family and friends and there’s less chance of conflicting social engagements. (Towards the end of season one, when we recorded at the weekend, we sometimes struggled to get four of us in a room at the same time, even with guest presenters.) We have even set ourselves a two hour recording window and so far have pretty much stuck to it. The following two evenings are then dedicated to editing, mixing, preparing the web pages, choosing an episode title and other administrative tasks which need to be done before the show can be downloaded. It’s a fairly tight routine but it means that within three days the episode is done and dusted, we can have a few days down time before preparing the next episode in earnest.

We have also increased our use of twitter and identi.ca. Laura is now “producing” the show, which means keeping the micro-blogs up-to-date, feeding back comments into the segments and making the tea. We tried this whilst recording episode one, without really publicising it in advance, and had a great response. Being able to ask a question at the start of a segment and have short replies from people for inclusion before the end of it was a fantastic way to get people involved. The content almost generated itself!

On a purely technical front, not much has changed. Episode three was the first episode mixed using my new (albeit secondhand) Soundcraft Spirit mixer. I think it sounds nicer than the old mixer, but we will have to wait and see if there is any feedback from listeners. The other kit is all the same. We used a different method to interface with the telephone for episode two, which worked really well. (Robbie recorded his audio in his studio at sent it to us later, which is why he doesn’t sound like he is at the other end of a phone line. Interviewing audio geeks is a good thing. ) I didn’t apply any normalisation to episode three’s audio before loading into ardour, just compression using the SC4 plugin. With the new mixer having a digital output through to the I/O unit, I’m going to see how necessary compression is during the recording process too. I might just stick to using a limiter instead.

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Last weekend I went to FOSDEM, and on my return was promptly ill for a week, probably with some Euro-virus. I’ve mostly recovered now, so here is my belated review. This is the fourth time I’ve been in five years and I think it’s the one I’ve enjoyed most.

It’s an expensive weekend however you look at it. The Eurostar is usually between £70 and £90 depending on when it’s booked and what time the trains are. We stay at the Novotel which is very convenient for the city centre and is right at the start of the bus route to the University. It’s clean and comfortable but not the cheapest, about 140 to 190 euros for two people over two nights, again depending on the deal. And that doesn’t always include breakfast. Throw in the cost of travel on the wonderfully efficient Belgian busses and metro system for the weekend (about 8 euros), a couple of meals out and drinks to accompany and you’re soon heading for £250 per person.

I don’t mind forking out for that if it’s going to be a fun weekend and I learn something useful too. The problem is that in previous years I didn’t feel I’d done that. In 2005, I probably selected the wrong talks. Not being a developer, a lot of information wasn’t any use to me. I also lost contact with the HantsLUG lot I’d travelled out with and spent the Saturday evening on my own in the hotel. So I didn’t worry about going back in 2006. The year after I decided to give it another go. I understood more of the talks and enjoyed the social activities. More importantly the contents of the talks I attended were actually useful. But I always come away wondering whether I can justify coughing up the dough next year.

This year, the FOSDEM organisers seem to have introduced lots of new ideas, all of which make life a little bit easier for people attending the event. These are important steps. The easier it is to get to, enjoy and get away from an event, the more likely you are to return.

Instead of one bar there were two, reducing the rush at peak times. The same simple and cheap sandwiches were provided, although the chip van was even more popular this year, in its new, prime, location. And the best idea yet: Breakfast! Each morning volunteers dished out coffee and pastries to attendees for only a few euros. Compared with the 18 euros per person the hotel was charging this was a great price and helped lessen the cost of the weekend. They had a free cloakroom, so we didn’t have to lug our bags round with us all day, the usual curse of the Sunday at FOSDEM. There were free buses provided throughout Sunday afternoon between the University and Gare du Midi from which the Eurostar departs. Although Belgium’s public transport is very punctual, there is no direct route between these two locations, so the special bus service meant we could stay a bit later to catch that extra talk. As last year there was a “spouses tour” run by professional guides, a perfect way to occupy potentially bored other halves, dragged to a fantastic European capital only to be subjected to the insides of a drab sixties university occupied by the finest cross-section of geek culture. As ever the large volunteer crew kept everything running smoothly for the 5000+ geeks in attendance, whilst seemingly remaining cheery throughout.

It’s still not perfect though. The noise from the bar still drifts up to the main Jansen lecture theatre and some attendees still thoughtlessly leave the doors between the two ajar, exacerbating the problem. The PA in Jansen is still next to useless. You can only hear clearly if you sit right at the front or directly facing one of the sets of speakers mounted in the room higher up this massive lecture theatre. Once you cotton on to that trick, all you have to do then is filter out the murmours and mutters from the assembled continental geeks who seem to maintain their own conversations through most of any speaker’s presentation. Some of the developer rooms, notably the Debian room, never seem large enough to accomodate all the people who would like to get in. The corridors are over-crowded at times, meaning it takes ages to get between rooms.

There were a few problems with the main schedule, requiring amendments to be displayed. Ted T’so had his laptop stolen at the grim Gare du Midi station. The developer rooms still haven’t been pressured into finishing all their talks on the hour so that people can easily move between tracks. Moving the event to the beginning of February rather than the end meant that attendees were forced to decide between getting cold dashing between buildings or having to carry a big coat around with them inside. The street outside the venue for the Friday night beer event, Cafe Delirium, was a crush again and it proved impossible to get inside for hours. Perhaps there is no venue suitable for that many geeks but FOSDEM has certainly outgrown this one.

The usual suspects were present on the stands, including the lovely Josette on the O’Reilly stand. I resisted and didn’t buy anything though, for once! The stands occupied most of the communication space in the outlying “AW” building too. Although I don’t get much out of those stands, it’s good to see from the general levels of activity around them that I appear to be an exception.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The weekend started by meeting up with Adrian at Waterloo. Having planned for the worst effects on the trains of the continued snow, we were in plenty of time, so we went for an enjoyable lunch in that little restaurant under the railway arches opposite the station. Knowing that the Eurostar wasn’t due in to Brussels until about half seven we also stashed sandwiches into our bags for consumption during the journey so we could get to the beer event as soon as possible after checking into the hotel. At St. Pancras we met up with Graham, Hugo, Andy, Neil and James before boarding a hassle- and noise-free carriage. The Eurostar has started selling tickets for the Brussels’ metro system but ran out before everyone had got one. This meant an inevitable wait while multiple ticket machines, credit cards and cash denominations were tried before the entire party had a valid ticket. One of the useful things about FOSDEM the way that we have tended to do it (travelling on Friday and Sunday) is that you can do the whole weekend on a “5 journey” ticket so at least once the hurdle of getting the tickets is surmounted, it doesn’t need to be repeated. Next year we vowed to order tickets online before travelling to eliminate the hassle. Time will tell if any of us remember this.

By the time we’d reached the hotel, checked in and unpacked, it was gone nine. Those who hadn’t packed lunches for the journey dived into Subway for rapid refreshment. Fortunately the location for the beer event, Cafe Delerium, is only a short walk away, although the walk does involve running the gauntlet of the tourist-hungry restaurants who are especially forceful in trying to gain your custom in the winter slump. Having got there and ploughed halfway through the aforementioned crush, we diverted into the bar opposite, which was marginally less crammed. A few beers down, we were joined by the bald Ade Bradshaw and his friends. Ade was in a particularly jolly mood helped no doubt by the excellent Belgian beverages. Eventually Laura and I braved the alley way and made it into the Cafe proper and found Emma Jane Hogbin and Matt Garrett, as well as meeting Selina ??. Conversation was difficult as the pub was so packed with inebriated geeks it was hard to make oneself heard. Fortunately I was able to grab a seat after a bit and spent some time shouting at Will Thompson. Laura however showed no such difficulties and was happy to chat away until the small hours. Which made the following morning more difficult.

Looking over the schedule online before the event is essential. Unless you want to rely on the conference wireless of course! There were twenty tracks this year so most of the talks only had the title included in the printed booklet. The website however gives whatever extra information is available on each talk, incredibly useful when the subject matter is obscured by the talk title. The upside of this is that if you know there is nothing you desperately want to see at ten in the morning, you don’t have to drag yourself out of bed in time to do so. Which is what we did on Saturday morning, arriving in time to get breakfast, donate to support the event (whilst picking up a t-shirt!) and catch the start of the second keynote, Bdale Garbee talking about Debian.

Bdale is a genial speaker and his brief history of the Debian project was well delivered. However his talk seemed to miss a real central topic, which was hinted at by a brief rundown of Debian’s governance from a historical perspective. It would have been interesting to look at some of the thinking behind the successful governance of Debian and the impact of particular incidents on how the community runs itself. Maybe given the turbulent times Debian has recently been experiencing this was too fresh a subject matter for such public dissection but it resulted in a talk which, whilst superficially interesting, seemed like it skated around its real subject matter.

Wandering around the event on Saturday, I bumped in to Scott James Remnant, James Westby and Bruno Bord as well as the suspects from the previous evening. It was great to catch up with them all and really helps one to feel part of the community. I also stuck some Ubuntu UK Podcast stickers on the notice boards and Jan Cleys of the Belgian LoCo was happy to give out more from the team’s stand. After lunch I went off to the talk by the DebConf video team. The talk was considerably delayed, but fortunately Matthew Walster was also in the audience so we chatted whilst watching people try to make video equipment work. It was probably not the best idea to have the video team giving the first talk, as they were still setting up the bits of equipment necessary when the talk was supposed to be underway. Once they got going, two rather frazzled speakers took us through the set up used to stream the multi-venue DebConf to viewers on the ‘net. There are probably better ways of doing it, but few cheaper, I suspect. I was also very interested to hear about DVswitch, a networked software vision mixer. It’s very simple, both in terms of features and GUI but apparently much more complex to set up. It could be a very useful project if development continues.

Then the Lightning Talks room. If there’s nothing else specific I want to see, I’ll usually end up there. Mostly because you might just see something totally random and unexpectedly interesting whilst minimising the short discomfort of an irrelevant talk, but partly for the teutonic efficiency with which the room is run and the carefully planned pun with which each speaker is presented with a box of chocolates afterwards. The Linux Defenders presentation was a slightly curious attempt to describe a pro-software patent organisation which aquires patents and makes deals with companies to defend FLOSS developers. Given software patents are not inforcable in Europe (thanks, OpenRightsGroup!) and that most FLOSS developers have an instinctive dislike of software patents anyway, this talk did not have the impact it would probably have done in front of a US crowd. The next talk, SmallMail, was equally curious. Touting itself as a solution to e-mail privacy in an era of data retention, it seems to use a mixture of public-key encryption and the Tor network to anonymise e-mail whilst still retaining the important functionality of enabling two people to communicate electronically. The format of the anonymised addresses shown present a usability nightmare and I suspect this technology will remain in the domain of tin-foil hat brigade for some time yet. I did promise myself I would look more into the technology to better understand how it works though, so I will.

The FLOSS Metrics talk gave an insight into how the health of a project can be measured using mailing lists, wikis and VCS commits. This information might be of interest to statistics nerds or potential investors but it wasn’t clear to me who outside of those groups would benefit from the huge amount of information being mined out of the various sources. The Bazaar talk was given by Lenz Grimmer, a Sun employee working on MySQL. Apparently Sun use Bazaar a lot internally so it was reassuring to see the tool being advocated by someone who wasn’t one of its developers. After a break I returned to the Lightning Talks and heard James Peel talk about what’s new in Opsview 3 and what will be coming in the next release. I am a fan of Opsview and it was great to see that there is a lot of development work still going into it. The next talk was a real highlight: Marionnet. Marionnet is a network simulation tool. Designed for an education environment, but suitable for anyone who wants to test and debug networks and network applications, it allows the GUI construction of networks incorporating servers, hubs, switches, routers, dodgy cables and ports, unknown network clouds and more. It can generate packet duplications and losses, with simulated NIC status lights actually reflecting each packet hitting the card. Each server or router has a terminal from which the user can issue commands, perhaps to attempt a denial of service attack or to test firewall settings. Graphical applications can be run on the virtual hosts. Being designed for education, it even includes an exam mode where the actions of the candidate are recorded for assessment. Unfortunately the GUI is in French at the moment but as it gets translated I’m sure it will proove increasingly popular.

Back to the Debian room to find out about running Debian on a NAS device. If you just want to use your NAS device as a NAS then you might as well stick with the firmware bundled with it, but if you want to turn your NAS device into a print or shell server too then you might be able to do so. Debian Lenny supports lots of NAS devices and we were given a rundown of which ones work best. Most have very small amounts of RAM which makes life tricky though. Unfortunately this talk was a recap of talk given the previous year, so the rundown of new devices didn’t suit the largely new audience very well, myself included. I’ll need to do more research before I can retire my old file server and replace it with something greener and quieter. My last talk of the day was Gemvid, a program for monitoring animal behaviour. As the keeper of two animals whose behaviour often bewilders me, I was amused to hear how relatively cheap kit from Ebay could be used to measure the activity levels of, in this case, rats. It turns out that rats mostly don’t move during the day and mostly do move during the night. Individual rats can then have their normal patterns of activity “fingerprinted”. This can then be compared with readings taken after they’re given a presumably experimental dose of some chemical or other.

The evening saw Emma and James join the HantsLUG lot for the now traditional Saturday night curry. After a brief confusion over in the lobby of which Novotel we were supposed to be rendezvous-ing and my confusion about the location of the restaurant in relation to the large columnate buildings that populate central Brussels, we made it. The curry was good when it both it and my seat had eventually arrived. I enjoyed the company too.

I missed the Cobbler & Koan talk on Sunday morning for similar reasons to the day before. I heard some interesting things about it afterwards, so was mildly annoyed at having done so. After breakfast I made it to the MySQL HA talk, given by the same Lenz Grimmer who had talked about Bazaar. The first third or so of the talk was taken up with a discussion of what High Availability is and isn’t. As I’m familiar with the theory if not the practice of HA this wasn’t useful for me, but would have served as a good introduction for people with no experience of HA whatsoever. The remainder of the talk looked at the various replication topologies that MySQL can use to provide HA, as well as other tools which can provide related redundancy options.

The traditional lunchtime GPG keysigning took place, but fortunately I had restricted myself to CACert activities. When the GPG signers were dragged outside to complete their awkward ID-verifying conga I was glad I wouldn’t be enduring the cold to do so too. This was my first “mass assurance” session for CACert, having previously only done assurances for individuals. It was good to see so many people wanting to be assured and I was glad to finally be able to give more than ten points to someone, having notched up enough assurances to shunt me up the ladder. I curtailed my CACert activities to meet up with Ade and then did a couple of interviews which may be appearing on a podcast some time.

The highlight of the afternoon was Bruno’s talk about Pyroom. I tried Pyroom back in the early days but it was fantastic to see that it had been developed beyond Bruno’s expectations. As soon as my Internet connection is back at home (three weeks and counting PlusNet!) I’m going to try it out again. Bruno gave a largely serious but charming talk with excellent slides and threw in a couple of nuggets for the LUG Radio fans in the audience, including a reference to Baguette on Snails. I then caught the end of Ted T’so’s talk on ext4, which was largely the same as the one I’d seen at Google in December. Unfortunately the P2P Replicative Filesystem talk was cancelled, but the train times meant I would have missed it anyway. I also had to miss Leslie Hawthorn’s keynote on the Google Summer of Code scheme, but at least she gave me a big hug in the corridor beforehand!

The journey back was reasonably quick and quiet, although standing in the lobby area next to first class recording another podcast interview caused many amused looked from the catering staff. Let’s just say that one will have “atmosphere”. Heading down from London I was surprised to see that Basingstoke’s platforms were still covered in snow, both in that it hadn’t melted naturally or hadn’t been cleared manually. Although it means missing the tail end of the event, leaving that bit early meant that we were home by ten, much prefered to gone midnight as it has been in previous years.

Personally, FOSDEM 2009 was well worthwhile attending, and it was made more enjoyable by great company and new visitor facilities.

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I’ve just given my talk “Developing Nicely: Digital Photography on Linux” at the January meeting of HantsLUG. First talk I’ve done in a while and certainly the first which has cleared the main meeting room. It’s always difficult selecting which information to leave out, but even so the talk went on for longer than I’d planned. It seemed to go well enough, a few interesting questions from the floor and relatively little heckling.

I’ve also been neglecting this blog a little recently but I think 2009 will bring lots of things I want to blog about. I’ve been twittering and identi.ca-ing though, and blog posts will now appear on those sites thanks to WordTwit.

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As part of the Ubuntu Open Week I am running a session about media production on Ubuntu. I’m going to be covering video, audio and photography. At least, that’s the plan. Drop by #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode at 8pm UTC (GMT) tonight to see the carnage.

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Episode 16 of the Ubuntu podcast from the UK LoCo team has finally hit the web. This episode has been much delayed, firstly with a late recording and then a late release of said late recording. Life has been very busy for the protagonists on this show lately, with illness and trips abroad, moving house, birthdays, LUG meetings and hectic work schedules getting in the way of us all meeting up to record the show. We tried to get a VoIP setup which would provide us with high quality recordings whilst still actually enabling us to hear each other speak. The Linux Outlaws guys do this using Gizmo, as I understand it, but we wanted to stick to Free software and were using standard SIP clients. We struggled and then failed, really. For one of us, audacity could just record whilst still letting Ekiga make the call. For me, I had to use arecord to dump out a wave file, and even then it would only work with my crappy onboard sound card, not the off-board one I use to interface with my mixing desk. So we tried, but it sucked. Even if it had worked, I’m not sure we would have got the same energy and atmosphere as when we record in the studio.

Enough of us managed to get together the following weekend and, with super-editor Ciemon away, we got through the editing and mixing to make the release later than usual.Those excuses made, I think it’s a tidy little episode with a huge amount of feedback on episode 15 from listeners.

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I spotted this on Facebook a while ago and it made me chuckle, especially if you read it in chronological order.

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