Writings

Howdy folks. Apologies for missing an article last week. It was a very busy weekend and I just didn’t get the time, I’ll tell you about that in a minute. I was surprised to learn this week that some friends of mine actually read this blog. It’s odd because although I write this stuff and publish it, I never really expect anyone will bother to read it. It’s nice to find out they do. I’ve got almost 2 weeks worth of stuff to catch up on, so let’s get into it.

I’ll begin on Wednesday 18th of August. The day was mostly taken up with Drupal hacking and various bit’s of CSS. Whisper it quietly, but I finally feel like I’m starting to make some sense of CSS. I’m far from a master but I’m getting somewhere at last. I received a last minute call to appear as a co-host on FLOSS Weekly again just the night before. One of the hosts dropped out and Randal asked if I could fill in. Of course I was happy to. We interviewed Stephen Hemminger about Vyatta, a Linux-based network gateway. My first appearance on FLOSS a couple of months back went ok but was dogged by technical problems. I’m glad to say the delay was sorted this time and the HD camera sent to me by Fab was a big improvement. I used my studio kit and the audio sounded a lot clearer. People seemed to enjoy the show and it was released as a podcast a couple of days later.

Cain's Brewery Tour - Part 1

I’ll skip forward a little bit to the weekend. On Saturday it was my cousin Anthony’s stag do in Liverpool. He’s getting married next month and we all went on a tour of the Cain’s Brewery in town. Cue the jokes about arranging a piss up in a brewery. The tour was very interesting and I really enjoyed it. We ended up in the Brewery Tap pub at then end, sampling the wares with our beer vouchers. This was pretty early Saturday afternoon and I’m not a big drinker so it was an early start for me. Despite that I kept up alright and we staying in the pub a few hours before heading to a restaurant in the Albert Dock. We then wandered back into town and hit a couple of places like the Slaughterhouse, before my uncle insisted on taking us all to The Cavern. He knows the manager and was desperate to show we could get in free with his connections. It was very nice of him and we did indeed all get in for free. They had a band on called The Cave Dwellers in the main bar. I’ve not heard of them before but they seemed fairly good and apparently they always invite members of the audience up to sing and play with them. I was asked many times if I would be getting up and my uncle put my name down, I asked if they could do Jumping Jack Flash, they couldn’t. What sort of pub band doesn’t know that song. A quick look through their catalogue showed they didn’t know many songs I know. I settled on Ziggy Stardust and didn’t think much more of it. Suddenly the MC called out my name and I was shuffled onto the stage in front of a fairly big crowd. This is all after about 12 hours drinking. I borrowed a guitar (managing not to break any strings) and struck up the opening riff. The song went well, though I’m not sure if I was singing in tune because you couldn’t hear a thing on stage. People clapped and congratulated me afterwards so they must have thought it was alright. After that we had to move quickly to catch our last train back home. I stumbled in sometime after midnight and watched TV for a while before bed.

The following morning I was supposed to be helping with the How Why DIY event in Liverpool. I was pretty late after my long Saturday. I loaded up the car with gear for the Rathole Radio live show and then drove over to town. Finding parking was a bit of a nightmare but I managed eventually. As I walked through the door with all my stuff I was informed I was running a session on streaming video, not a subject I’m really an expert on, and it started “10 minutes ago”. Nevertheless Andy Goodwin and I formed a great double act with no plan or rehearsal. The people attending the workshop certainly seemed to enjoy it and that’s the main thing. The rest of the day was spent helping out in various ways and moving my car around before I got parking fines. I also went up to Kimo’s a couple of times for food. It’s a really great Mediterranean place nearby. The event was all taking place in the old Rapid Paint shop on Renshaw Street, right in the heart of Liverpool. It’s quite an iconic DIY shop which recently moved to a new location, that’s why we wanted it for How Why DIY.

Cain's Brewery Tour - Part 2, inside

In the evening I set up in the shop and did a live Rathole Radio show in front of about 15 people. A small but appreciative audience. I took my electric guitar and played a few live songs for everyone but managed to break 2 strings in as many songs and that put paid to it really. I’ll have to sort out a heavier gauge of string or look at my playing action I think. It can’t be right that I break so many strings all the time. I became used to playing an acoustic guitar for years and I was able to bash out rhythms on it quite heavily. You can’t get away with that on an electric guitar, this is something I’ll have to work on. I think I’m single handedly adding points to Ernie Ball‘s share price at the moment, hehe. The show was great fun and people seemed to like being there to see it live. Hopefully it’s something I can do more of in the future.

That brings us up to this week, which started with more Drupal hacking as always. That continued as the week went on so I won’t bore you with all that again. We were scheduled to do Linux Outlaws as usual on Monday night but it was aborted at the last minute, Fab managed to douse his laptop in coffee. It seems even a Thinkpad can’t take that kind of abuse. The free time did allow me to watch the Liverpool V Man City game instead, but I wish I hadn’t. We were hammered by City and it didn’t look good. The show was recorded on Tuesday and released yesterday as episode 165 “Hairy Fridays”. It’ll be the last show for a couple of weeks as Fab is off to Italy on holiday. We’ll be back very soon but in the meantime please don’t panic, everything is fine

Me at How Why DIY, not sure what the Fez is about.

On Wednesday night there was more podcast action as I again joined Randal to co-host FLOSS Weekly. This time we were talking to Dan Scott about Evergreen library systems. I was still a little nervous with the large audience on FLOSS but I feel as though I’m finding my feet now. I’m never quite sure if it’s ok to cut in with a joke as I would on Linux Outlaws. The recording went well and hopefully it’ll continue to be a semi-regular gig. I’m enjoying it a lot and the exposure doesn’t do me any harm. The rest of the week was fairly quiet apart from the aforementioned Drupal stuff. We had a band practice on Thursday night and I was pleased to get back into the swing of things. We’ve finally decided on a name, get ready for it….

Twenty Pound Sounds. It’s a bit odd I know but it was the one we could all agreed on, and I think after messing around for a couple of months it’ll do us good to finally have a name. I’m thinking it should be pounds as in weight rather than currency. In keeping with my addiction to domain names I’ve registered 2 for the band already: 20pound.net and 20lb.net, unfortunately twentypound.net is taken. There’s not a lot to see there yet but we’ll have a proper site soon. I want to do it with Drupal and make something we can all contribute to, somewhere people can join up and get involved as well. We need a decent logo/design and I’m thinking the name should be written 20lb Sounds, if anyone has ideas on that let me know. I might have an acoustic gig for us in town soon and we certainly need to book more gigs. I think that’s how you really get good. Practising is great and it definitely helps, but regular gigs are how you really learn to play together. I saw Noddy Holder talking about this recently on a documentary, he said “once you’ve played in pubs on a Saturday night with people right in your face looking for a fight, how can any gig phase you after that? Stadiums or whatever”. He makes a good point, not that I think we’ll playing stadiums any time soon. The weekend has been spent doing various little things I can’t remember right now but I plan to chill out and enjoy a break today and tomorrow. It’s a public holiday here in England tomorrow, woo hoo!

Upcoming:

There’ll be a break from Linux Outlaws for a couple of weeks as I said, so don’t turn up on Monday night expecting to see a show. I don’t have any more bookings for FLOSS Weekly yet but hopefully more will come. It’s Liverpool LUG on Wednesday night and I’m keen to get down there after missing the last one. I missed Chester LUG last week so apologies to everyone for that. At the weekend there is talk of another live Rathole Radio from the old Rapid shop, I’m yet to confirm it though. I hope we’ll be able to do an unplugged gig with the band as part of that. I’ll let you all know as soon as I find out for sure. No doubt other exciting things will crop up, so I’ll tell you about those next time. Till then, take care everyone.

Dan

AMP

Hey folks, just a very quick post to let you know I presented the AMPed podcast this week. It’s the weekly round up from the Association Of Music Podcasting which I joined quite recently. The show contains music submitted by some of the various member podcasts. It’s only 37mins long but still had plenty packed in.

You can download it here if you’re interested.

Should have mentioned it in my last Weekly Rewind but forgot. Now you know

See ya,

Dan

Time for another Weekly Rewind and although it’s already Tuesday I’m not half as late as last week. I had a lot of stuff to talk about with the camping trip and man did I go on, nearly 2000 words in the end. I don’t think this write up will be quite so long but I hope it’ll still be fun and fact packed… ok maybe not, but I can try Let’s get into it.

Last Monday I was really screwed after the camping trip and all the other events of a busy weekend, so I took it a bit easier. I tried to catch up on jobs around the house, did a bit of tinkering on my web server and various other things. I also took Fab up on his kind offer to postpone Linux Outlaws till Tuesday, I needed a rest. So on Tuesday night we did the live show at the usual time, all be it 24hrs late as I joked.  It went well and afterwards I  synced up the audio before shipping it back off to Bonn for final editing. It’s quite a process but it’s become second nature to us now I think and we’ve been talking about updating the podcast we recorded about show production. Back in episode 19 we documented our set up and although things haven’t completely changed, they have evolved enough to warrant another show on the subject. Fab has gotten himself a new microphone and a rather lovely valve (or “tube” if you prefer) compressor. This means the audio can be a lot more polished on recording and doesn’t require quite so much attention in post. I’d loaned out my compressor/limiter/gate to a friend but I’ve got it back and set that up now as well. We’ve got quite some kit and it’ll be good to share the information with the world. It’s probably the question we get asked more than any other, “how do you make the show?”.

Rant-O-Fab

Speaking of making shows Fab has finally launched his new podcast Rant-O-Fab and I should have mentioned it last week but forgot with everything else going on. It’s short 10min(ish) “shots” as Jono and Aq christened them. Each one contains a rant about a subject he feels strongly on, as the name suggests. He’s done a great job with the artwork and the audio sounds excellent as usual. The new microphone is paying off I think. There’s a new website for the show so go and check it out.

On Wednesday it was back to Drupal hacking full time during the day and I’ve realised something through this process. The more I learn the more I realise how little I actually know. I suppose that’s true of life anyway but I’ve learnt so much about CSS and other things in the past couple of months and I’m only just scratching the surface. I’d like to learn JQuery and do some funky AJAX effects on pages too. Front end stuff and design is what let’s me down I think, I’m happy with a Bash shell or a database to play with but I need better front end development skills. One step at a time, I’m still getting comfortable with Drupal development and PHP, coming from an ASP and .NET background. Some of the projects I’ve worked on recently have overrun and I’ve been thinking about Django again. Sadly a lot of the people I work with are tied to one web host for various reasons, and that host only really supports LAMP apps, they don’t even do that brilliantly. I’ve been wondering how easy these projects would be to develop in Django and whether I could get them to think about Python support on their servers. I haven’t played with Django in quite some time but for truely custom web apps I think it’s hard to beat. I have some friends who swear by Ruby On Rails but I tried that and it never quite clicked for me. I much prefer Python to Ruby as a language any day. I’ll let you know what comes of my experimentation if and when I get around to it.

Work was interupted on Thursday by the exciting arrival of my new phone. I talked about sending back the Nokia N900 last week and although I had Fab’s old Samsung Galaxy to use, the battery life and processor speed (or lack of it) were really annoying me. I spent some time comparing deals and the various costs of buying an unlocked handset vs getting an upgrade on my O2 contract. In the end I plumped for a contract upgrade and I now have a shiny new HTC Desire. I haven’t had it long enough to give a proper review yet but the first impressions are amazing. It’s fast, light, stylish and the battery life compares well to the N900, it might even be better. The handset cost me £150 up front and I signed a new 18 month contract with O2. This worked out at about £650 in total, including the monthly bills. If I’d bought the handset unlocked it would have been £420 alone, then once I’d added the monthly contract cost it was more like £900. As you can see I did a lot of comparisons and calculations on this. So far I’m loving Google Voice Search and many other apps on there. It runs Android 2.1 so I’ll probably root and upgrade it soon. I’ll let you know how all that goes as soon as I can.

HTC Desire

On Friday evening I joined Fab to interview Jonathan Nadeau for Linux Outlaws. He’s a fascinating guy and it turns out he’s very funny too. At the time of writing that episode hasn’t come out yet but it will soon. Jonathan is a blind computer user and he’s done a lot of work to make Linux systems accessible to blind and visually impared people. It’s something I (and probably you) as a sighted person don’t even consider on a day to day basis, but speaking to him certainly made me think. He’s running his own company Frostbite Systems selling a great range of Linux computers, some of which are completely blind-optimised. This means they are ready to go out of the box and there’s no need for a sighted person’s help to get started. You can’t even get that sort of support on Windows and I think what Jonathan is doing is nothing short of inspirational. He’s had a lot of adversity thrown at him in his life but he obviously doesn’t take any of it lying down. We could all learn something from that. Listen out for the interview, I really think you’ll enjoy it.

Over the weekend I tried to relax a bit more, played with my new phone and watched Liverpool’s opening game of the league season, on TV that is, I’m not made of money. We drew 1-1 with Arsenal and probably should have won but with 1 less player for over half the game I won’t complain at a draw. I hope we’ll go on from here and have a good season. After the match I met up with the band and we had a bit of a Sunday session. It was good to get back at it and I think we all missed playing after a 2 week break. We still need to decide on a definitive name, book some more gigs and sort out our original song recordings. The band is one of the best things that’s happened to me in a long time though and I can’t wait to see how far we can take it. Once the name is decided I can think about websites and other ways to get people involved. Watch this space.

Upcoming:

At the time of writing we recorded another Linux Outlaws last night, number 164. You’ll be able to hear that soon. There’s plenty more going on this week. A couple of band rehearsals, a new website project to get stuck into, a last minute call to appear on another FLOSS Weekly tomorrow night, a North West Drupal User Group meet on Friday and the How Why DIY event in Liverpool on Sunday. It’s at the old Rapid paint shop in Renshaw St in the middle of town. Anyone from around these parts should know it. There’ll be all kinds of hacking and geekery going on, plus a live Rathole Radio in the evening now as well. There should be a show on Sunday anyway and I decided to incorporate it into the event. I don’t know what the live aspect will consist of yet but there’s a few days to work it out. I’ll fill you in on all that next week. Till then, take care and stay safe.

Dan

Note: This was written 11th Aug, but didn’t get a chance to post.

Will you still need me? …Will you still feed me? …When I’m 64. Yes that’s right folks it’s Weekly Rewind number 64 already, feels like it’s come around quickly but I suppose really it hasn’t. I started blogging in earnest somewhere round the beginning of last year so it’s taken 18 months. I’m pretty late this week with the update (even later posting it) and I’m going to try and recap what’s been an exciting and busy time recently. Strap yourself in and let’s get this show on the road…

Last Monday night we recorded Linux Outlaws 161 and broadcast it live as usual. I had great fun chatting and worked on syncing up the audio later, before shipping it back to Fab for editing. He released that show later in the week with the title “The Operating System Is Called Windows”. I kept busy during the day with Drupal work and other things most of last week, so I’ll gloss over that as we have a lot to cover. Sadly I didn’t make it to Liverpool LUG as my friend’s brother was rushed into hospital at the last minute and obviously he had to be there. In truth although I found out late I wouldn’t be getting a lift I could have made it if I’d driven myself. I felt pretty wiped out though and needed some rest. I hope everyone at the LUG will understand. I got an email off Nokia on the Monday saying “can we have our phone back please?”, or words to that effect. It was a bit of a surprise after 8 months with the N900 but I could hardly say no. It was collected by courier on the Thursday and they didn’t waste any time. I’m sorry to see it go as I liked the N900 a lot and as a pure hacker device I still think it’s unrivalled. As an everyday phone though it’s probably lost the battle already, a lack of clear direction and support from the company hasn’t helped. I think Meego has an uphill battle against the strongly embedded Android and iPhone options (that’s almost a pun). You never know though, I hope they’ll surprise me. I sincerely thank Nokia for the chance to play with this device and I find it really odd that some people seem to think I should be pissed off they want it back. There was never any indication this was anything more than a loan and besides, that would seem pretty ungrateful to me. So long N900, but I did get to keep the funky box they sent it in. I just need to find a purpose for the Arduino inside now.

Liverpool Ignite 3

On Thursday I shot over to the Static gallery in Liverpool to help out with Liverpool Ignite 3, and it’s a good job I did. They had a large PA in the main room and nobody who knew how to make it work. I wasn’t familiar with the particular kit, but I’ve never met a sound system I didn’t like so I got it all fired up. There was a weird mains hum at times but I managed to EQ it out for the most part. I think someone had put a stack of power cables and live connectors in the roof truss alongside the signal cable. A cardinal sin in the theatre tech world! I manned the mixer through the show and had great fun doing it. I was reminded of my former life as a full time “noise boy” and I felt a bit nostalgic. Hopefully some day I’ll get back to that, who knows. Everyone had a fun evening and by the end I was certainly ready for bed. A good sleep sorted me out though.

On Friday I did some more hacking during the day and then packed up my stuff and hit the road at tea time. I was due to camp in North Wales at the Hoofer Doofer festival. It’s a dance festival set on a remote farm and some friends of mine run it. Despite this being the 3rd event I’d not made it to one and decided I should change that. I picked up Gary from the band and we set off in the car. We then promptly got lost as I took the wrong turn off the main road, but found our way back after 15mins of driving around small country lanes looking at sheep. In hindsight this was an omen of things to come later that night. We drove through towards Bangor and actually passed the camp site where we could see everyone else, this past at least was deliberate. We were planning to go to the large Tesco to stock up for the weekend and I was assured it was “just at the next big turn off”. We took that turn off and got even more lost but not for an 15mins this time, more like an hour. We drove around one place to the next searching in vain for this mythical Tesco until eventually we gave in and asked a local, terrifying him and his family as we followed them up their driveway to the front door. After getting directions from the very helpful man we finally made it to the supermarket and stocked up. I’ve seen some big supermarkets in my time but this was like a Tesco department store, they sold everything and even had different floors. We spoke to some friends on the phone to check whether we needed to buy extra tents or not, remember this as it’s important later. They’d taken tents and set them up for us so we were told there was no need and headed back to the festival. We were so late that is was almost dark by the time we hit the site and to top it off it was beginning to rain. A quick inspection of the two tents we were supposed to sleep in left us both unimpressed. They were knackered and I couldn’t even fit in mine, I know I’m big but I’m not that big. With a snap decision it was back off to Tesco to buy new tents, luckily a 24hr store. We managed not to get lost this time and returned within 30mins in the now pitch black and driving rain to erect our new canvas homes. With the help of a head torch and some perseverance I got the tent up and was very pleased with my effort. I’m not a hardened camper by any means so it wasn’t easy putting that thing up in the dark. Thankfully it looked ok the next day in the light and crucially it was dry inside. Ray Mears eat your heart out.

The Gunmen's Set Up

After that we sat around, chatted and chilled out for the evening. The next day I was awoken by my mate H shaking the tent quite enthusiastically. He was due to play at midday and needed a laptop from my car to do the show. He and Gary did a drum n bass set as The Lone Gunmen and I became the self appointed roadie. I had to make tea in the cafe at one point because all the staff were “too wrecked” from the previous night. I just made brews for the 3 of us and left some change on he counter, then settled in to watch the guys play live. It was really good and the music was excellent I thought. Sadly there were only about 10 people there because everyone was still asleep. Midday is a stupid time to put that sort of thing on at a festival anyway. I’m convinced if the lads had played later there’d have been a massive crowd. I hadn’t had anything to eat and neither had anyone else, so once again it was back off to the loving bosom of Tesco for a warm meal. I joked we’d spent more time in the Tesco and should have pitched the tents there, it must have been close to the truth. I’d originally planned to come back home on the Saturday night but ended up staying as the weather improved and I didn’t feel like I’d really seen anything on the first night. It was a Sci-Fi fancy dress theme which I didn’t know, but thankfully I wasn’t the only one without a costume. It was humbling to see the effort some people had gone to though. Ghostbusters, Star Wars characters and also Futurama seemed the most popular themes. We went around the rooms checking out the music, chatted to friends, drank, chatted some more and generally had a good time. I awoke on the Sunday sweating like crazt as the sun had finally come out. It was still muddy in the fields but nice to get a bit of warmth. I discovered later this brief bit of sun was enough to burn head, but at the time I was in ignorant bliss. We packed up and headed home about tea time and stopped at the Little Chef on the way for food. Little Chef is a chain of road side restaurants in the UK and my dad always calls them “Little Thief” because they’re really expensive. When you’re on the road you don’t have a lot of choice and I really enjoyed my £10 rasher of bacon and piece of toast (mild exaggeration). I made it home at about 6pm and realised I’d done no preparation whatsoever for Rathole Radio that evening. Despite sun burn and tiredness I managed to pull off a show, even if it was a little late starting. People were very patient with me and we had good fun in the end. I’ve released that now as Rathole Radio 32 if you want to hear it. I’ll leave the rest of the information till next weeks report as I’ve gone on long enough.

Upcoming:

So, what else is coming up this week. It’s Wednesday as I write this so there’s not a lot of time left. I’m getting a HTC Desire (paid for) to replace the N900 and I can’t wait to try that out. I’ll let you all know the juicy details as soon as I can. I’ve got much more Drupal hacking to do and hopefully there’ll be a chance to make some noise with the band again. I’m supposed to be presenting the next episode of AMPed, the round up show from the Association of Music Podcasting. I’ll record that at the weekend and I hope it goes well. I’ll let you know. For now take care of yourselves and I’ll see you soon. Remember, clouds can give you sun burn too apparently so wear a hat or something

Enjoy the music to play us out.

Dan

Hello… hellooooo… is this thing on? It’s finally time for another Weekly Rewind. You could be forgiven for thinking it should be called the Monthly Rewind, or even the Annual Rewind of late. I’m sorry it’s taken so long to write something substantial. The limited spare time I’ve had off has mostly been spent with the band or on other endeavours, but I intend to fix this ASAP! There’s still been regular episodes of Rathole Radio and Linux Outlaws to keep you company so I’ve hardly been off the radar. Looking at the blog calendar I see I only managed one solitary post in the whole of July, how sad. Rather than try to remember everything that’s happened to me in the time since then (cos frankly I can’t), I’ll resume the story a week ago with the events of Saturday July 24th.

I practised with the band in the afternoon and we had a really long session, it went fairly well but we were all tired and it showed a little. I then hot tailed it home to record an interview with Tom and Doug from the Music Manumit podcast. We talked for ages and it was great fun. I love to talk, as most of you have suffered, but the guys were very accommodating and gracious. The recording has just been released and you can download it here. I spent the whole of Sunday listening to tracks and making selections for Rathole Radio that evening. I left it a bit late but managed to get everything sorted in time for the show. It was a rush job. You wouldn’t think listening to some music and making a set list is that hard would you? I didn’t either before I starting doing it on a regular basis. I never repeat tracks and I try hard to vary the content of the show. It takes time to track down the real hidden gems in the online musical wilderness, I could never play a track I didn’t honestly think was good. I was really happy with the selection in the end and other people seemed to enjoy it too. Lots of folks joined me in the chat room and that makes a massive difference. You can get instant feedback and it’s good to know somebody is actually out there. I got to sing my rendition of American Pie by Don McLean after it won the song vote. It came out well, if a little too shouty in some places, I was overexcited. If you’d like to judge for yourself check out Rathole Radio 31, which I released on Tuesday evening. I’d been told there were some problems with the last release on iTunes and I think I’ve tracked it down now. Somewhere in the maze of connections between Libsyn, Feedburner and my own website, the media enclosures we’re getting messed up. The new release seems to work and I’ve fixed the previous one too. If you’re an iTunes user you may want to download number 30 again manually. Sorry for the mix up.

So, onto Monday and I was knee deep in Drupal code, CSS and other such joys again. This has taken up a lot of my time lately but I’m hoping it’ll calm down again in the coming weeks. I’m gonna have to be more strict about taking days off and not overloading myself. It’s not something that comes naturally to me, despite my laid back appearance. I’m making good progress on some customizations to Drupal 6 sites but I still feel I’ve got a lot left to learn. I guess we all have in a way. I’d like to be more confident in hacking custom functions and modules onto Drupal sites. I’m learning at pace and every week I feel like I’ve picked up a massive amount, so hopefully that will continue. We recorded a slightly different Linux Outlaws with cut down feedback on Monday afternoon because Fab was off to GUADEC the following day. We skipped the live Monday night show and I hope we won’t make a habit of that. Since the World Cup we’re still finding our rhythm again but I think the Monday night slot works well. Lots of people seem to like it and it gives you something to look forward to after the last embers of the weekend have gone cold. The show was about an hour long and wasn’t streamed live, just recorded. I cut it together later in the week and prepared everything for the release. We left space for Fab to cut in any content he got at GUADEC and as of this writing he’s just finishing that off, so you should hear it very soon. Update: Linux Outlaws 160 is now out.

My New Amp

Most of the rest of the week was taken up with bits of hacking and server wrangling. I did find some time to upgrade this blog to WordPress 3.0 and also do some general housekeeping on my server. I needed to clean up some files, unused sub domains and other detritus. It all seems to be working (touch wood), though I did kill the blog for a hour or so while I was working on the server, doh!! On Thursday evening I went out to see the band and catch up with them. We had a really great session and it felt amazing. Some days are just like that I think, things click and you all feel really good about what you’re playing. The sound is evolving as we have Ross’ practice pads going through a program called Addictive Drums and it sounds excellent. I was sceptical at first that it could really sound as good as a real kit but it does, in fact it’s better. It’s all running off a laptop and Gary being the Cubase wizard has taken care of that. I also bought myself a new slightly larger guitar amp a couple of weeks ago and I’m getting used to how it sounds now. It’s louder obviously but that’s not the main reason I wanted a bigger amp (honest!!), it has more body and the bigger speaker gives out more bass. Being mainly a rhythm guitarist and former full time bass player I like some bottom end in my sound. I bought a Vox VT30 if any guitar nuts are interested and I thoroughly recommend it. On Friday I took a little time out to relax and unwind, most of the weekend has been quiet actually. The first in a long time. I believe this is what most people call “a normal Sunday”? I’ve caught up with friends and just tried to recharge a bit really. Hopefully there’ll be more of that before next week encroaches on my consciousness, it inevitably will. That brings us right up to date.

Upcoming:

There’ll be another Linux Outlaws tomorrow night and hopefully back on the normal live schedule. Come and join us from 19:00 UK time (18:00 UTC), chat in the chatroom, heckle us and generally get involved. The address you need is linuxoutlaws.com/live to do that. On Wednesday night it’s Liverpool LUG as usual. It’ll be 19:00 (again UK time) at the Liverpool Social Centre in Bold St. If you’re in the area and have any interest in Open Source software or just technology in general really, come along. We’re open to all and I think it’s fair to say it’s an informal atmosphere. We seem to spend most of our time discussing music and films, not just software. On Thursday evening there’s the 3rd Liverpool Ignite event in almost as many months, or so it feels. I spoke at the first one, the last talk of the evening no less and the concept revolves around 5 minute lightening talks. The speaker gets 20 slides which auto advance every 15 seconds. It’s quite a skill to practice a talk and work out the rhythm like that. I found it very challenging but also rewarding. The crowd is friendly and it’s a mixture of geeks, artists, political activists, journalists and all points in between. Come and join us at the Static Gallery in the centre of town from 18:00 on Thursday August 5th. It should be fun. Then on Friday I’m heading to North Wales for a couple of days. Some friends of mine run a music festival out there in a field and I’m heading over with a tent. I don’t think I’ve camped since I was a kid so that’ll be interesting. It’s gonna be a lot of electronic music probably and I don’t believe there any actual bands (in the traditional sense) playing. The other guys in the band are going and there is talk of a guerilla gig in the car park, rocking out with the cows! Perhaps the acoustic guitars will make an appearance you never know. I’ll fill you in on all the details next time, which I sincerely hope will be a week from now. Take care of yourselves till then and I’ll see you soon,

Dan

Hello everyone. This week’s update finds me sat enjoying a sunny Sunday evening and unable to move after the delights of my home made beef Cannelloni. Ok not completely home made, I have to admit the Cannelloni was bought from a shop but the sauce and other things are original. It was delicious and I’m now stuck to my chair with a full belly. Putting this fascinating information aside though let’s talk about what happened this week.

On Monday I released a new episode of Rathole Radio. Episode 29 to be precise, the one I pre-recorded before England’s dismal World Cup defeat to Germany. I had to put the media files for this show on my Dreamhost account because I’d hit my data limit for the month on Libsyn. I can host up to 250mb of files on there which might seem a lot for a fortnightly podcast but in reality it works out at 2 episodes of the show. It’s released at 128kbit quality so the music is listenable, if not pristine, and also there’s an ogg and mp3 version for each one. I usually scrape in at about 240mb a month. It seems that because months are not exactly 4 weeks long over time you end up with 3 episode release dates falling in one calendar month. I could up my Libsyn account to the next level but it seems pointless for the odd time this happens and besides it would be expensive. All fascinating stuff for you I’m sure but this is really a long winded way of explaining why you might experience a slightly slower download for this show. It should all still work fine though.

Static Gallery, Liverpool

On Tuesday I got to work on one of my first custom Drupal modules. It’s been a bit hit and miss so far, but I’m attempting to use the hook_user function to log visitors to a site into an external forum at the same time. This is done via SOAP messages and web services. Once (if) I get it all working I’ll explain the process. I needed to do this for one site and decided it would be good to make it a reusable module with some simple settings in the admin area. It’s got some way to go but I’ll let you know how it turns out. In the evening I went out to see the band and we worked on more new material. We should be recording some of the songs soon to share with the world. I really hope people will like them as much as I do. Time will tell. Wednesday saw the inaugural meeting of Social Media Cafe Liverpool at the Static Gallery in town. I headed over to see some friends there and ended up operating the sound desk and also performing the crucial and highly skilled job of pressing the button to change slides for one speaker. We had a talk about data analysis from Liverpool Daily Post Digital Editor (that’s a title and a half isn’t it?) Alison Gow up first. Alison helped me promote OggCamp and my gig earlier in the year. She’s a great speaker and everyone enjoyed it. There was an interesting talk about Foursquare followed by WordPress guru Dave Coveney which the crowd seemed to appreciate. I stood behind the bar for the talks and even ended up serving drinks at one point. I actually quite enjoyed being barman for a brief moment there. I was even asked by someone later on if I “owned the bar”, which was funny. I wish. There were about 70 people in the venue which doesn’t sound a lot but it was packed and also a really hot night. I was sweating like mad. The whole event was a success and the plan is to hold them every month I believe with interesting speakers and guests. I look forward to it.

On Thursday night we did the first live episode of Linux Outlaws in 2 or 3 weeks. It felt amazing to be back in the saddle, if you’ll pardon the pun. We recorded for about 2 hours and chatted to people in IRC as we went along. It made me realise just how much I’ve missed doing the show during our short break. I’m still working on editing that but it should be out very soon I promise. On Friday I nipped over to a printing shop in Liverpool to pick up some Linux Fund posters for Barcamp Blackpool. I was asked if could take them with me and being the nice chap that I am I agreed. That brings us neatly onto Barcamp Blackpool actually.

JonTheNiceGuy giving his talk

On Saturday morning I set off for Blackpool in the car, only to realise about 15mins into my journey that I’d left my phone on the bedside table at home. So, after a little boomerang trip I was off Northwards again. I haven’t been to Blackpool since I was a kid and for some reason it’s always seemed like a massive journey up there in my mind. In fact it’s a lot closer than I remember from childhood, only 90mins in the car. That’s less than the average episode of Linux Outlaws. Perhaps it’s because I was a kid it felt like a longer time back then, you get bored quicker and it’s not long before the “are we nearly there yet?” instinct kicks in. Anyway, I followed my sat nav until I saw the Blackpool Tower on the horizon and I knew I was in the right place. The Barcamp was held at the casino in the Blackpool Pleasure Beach theme park. They’d arranged discount parking behind the casino itself but being predictably late I missed all the spaces, so I drove around a little bit and found a £7 all-day car park not far away. After claiming my badge and checking in I was informed that it was “pie time”. The mind boggled as to what that could mean but it turned out it literally meant free pies from a van in the car park. I know how to time and entrance. I bumped into my good mate JonTheNiceGuy (AKA Jon Spriggs) and we took our place at the back of the now massive pie queue snaking around the car park.

A sunny day at Blackpool Pleasure Beach

It was a really hot day and Blackpool was packed with tourists as you’d expect. I saw the donkeys all lined up getting their EU sanctioned 15mins break. I don’t know if it was the EU or someone else but I remember all the fuss when the law was brought in saying animals had to have a set break. It must have been a slow news week. The first session I caught after lunch was an introduction to sign language and it was fascinating. I learnt to sign my name and most of the alphabet, I say most of the alphabet because I’ve forgotten some of it now, not because they didn’t show us the whole thing. I don’t know why but learning those few signs made an impression on me and it’s definitely something I’d like to continue in future if I can. Next I went over to see another mate Les “Quarter” Pounder at his Ubuntu demo area. I also saw @heeed, another podcast listener and OggCamp survivor helping out. Les showed me his Joggler (no that’s not code for anything). It’s an O2 touch screen tablet which runs Ubuntu Netbook Remix beautifully. The only thing I can’t understand about the Joggler is why they don’t have a battery pack for it. You have to plug it in and I’ve been told that’s because it’s designed to be more like a digital photo frame than a mobile device. Next up it was Jon’s session about his Campfire Manager software in a nearby room. I really enjoyed his talk and I’m a fan of Campfire, we used it to organise OggCamp after all. It seems not everyone in Blackpool is so keen though and there’d been some heated words on the mailing list over it’s use for the barcamp. We had a good discussion, together with some of the people who weren’t as keen and I think some good suggestions we made. Later in the day I scrounged an Ubuntu 10.04 CD from Les and installed it on my laptop. Right in the middle of the main room as there was a talk going on. I’ve been so busy this year that my distro hopping has really suffered, it feels nice to be on a different distro at last. I’ve even moved the window buttons back to the right with a quick Gconf hack. Some people may think that petty of me but it really wasn’t natural having the window controls on the left. When I want to close a window I automatically click the top right corner and I’m not alone in that.

I chatted to many other folks around the venue and generally had great day. I have to say Gemma Cameron (@ruby_gem) did a great job of organising it all and it was good to finally meet her in person. They even had bars of Barcamp Blackpool rock which was a great idea. For foreign readers and anyone else who doesn’t know what rock is (in this sense), it’s a type or hard candy sweet that Blackpool is known for. It’s basically pure sugar as far as I can tell. I stayed for the evening party where we had a buffet and live entertainment from a magician, the £500 free bar didn’t last long but that was nothing to do with me. I was driving, but I enjoyed a free coke or two. So after a great day I went to see if my car was still there and enjoyed the drive back home on quiet empty motorways. I made it back in just over an hour which must be some sort of record. Sunday was a lot quieter and it needed to be, I was tired after a long week. I spent most of it getting used to the new Ubuntu.

Upcoming:

Next week we’ll have the release of this Linux Outlaws episode I’m working on right now. There’s another LivLUG (Liverpool LUG) meeting on Wednesday night at 7pm and I’ll be there. Come down to Bold St and join us if you’re within striking distance of Liverpool, details and directions are on the website. There’ll be more Rathole Radio on Sunday and much else besides no doubt in the coming days. For now though I think I’ve gone on enough so I’ll speak to you next week with more dispatches from the front line. Take care till then.

Dan

Hello folks, welcome to another of my Weekly Rewinds. Just a little slice of what’s been happening in my exciting (probably not that exciting) life of late. It’s been an odd week really, up and down. Truly embarassing World Cup showings from the England team, balanced out with writing new songs and having fun with the band. I suppose that’s how life is supposed to be though isn’t it? It’d boring otherwise. So, let’s get on with it.

We didn’t do a live Linux Outlaws on Monday night because of the many World Cup distractions, but we’ll be back with avengance very soon don’t worry. The last recorded episode was released over the weekend by Fab. Episode 156 “Blame The Uwe Seeler” tipped the scales at 2 hours long, so there’s been plenty of content lately. We’ve had good feedback and I hope everyone enjoyed it. I’ve realised how much you miss doing the live show and interacting with people over the last couple of weeks. I’ve haven’t had this many free Monday nights in a very long time. If this keeps up I may have to take up knitting or something… nah, I’ve had plenty to do actually. On Tuesday I ended up doing some unexpected Javascript hacking (the best kind I’m sure you’ll agree) for a new website. A friend asked me to help them out and it was a tougher job that I’d expected. For a guy who started his programming life with Java I really should know more about Javascript. I had to fix up a scrolling image carousel and it proved very tricky. Before the fellow geeks deluge me with comments and emails, I know the main thing Java and Javascript have in common are the first 4 letters of their names, but I still feel I should know it better. You can’t deny that the syntax is similar if nothing else. I was victorious in the end and I got the function working as needed. Perhaps I could be good at this programming thing if I tried harder, I used to be ok at it hehe.

Sticking with that theme I did some Drupal work on Wednesday and fell even deeper in love with Drush. I’ve talked about this before but if you’re managing Drupal sites and you don’t you Drush you need your head looking at. Being able to update all your modules and even the Drupal core with a simple command “drush pm-update” is a godsend. There are far better developers than I who could tell you about this, but I’ll try to write some little articles or even make a screencast soon. In the evening I went down to see the band and we worked on a new song. More on that later.

Chester Uni Coat Of Arms

Thursday involved much more admin and hacking during the day and then Chester LUG in the evening. I watched Stuart Burns give his talk and demo on RPM and Yum, a subject I know a little about but I’m certainly no expert. He showed us some cool tricks and it was a very enjoyable talk. Going back to my old stomping ground of Chester University for the LUG meet felt strange. It’s actually the 2nd time I’ve done it now but 10 years ago I was beginning life as a student there. How time flies. Friday was a little quieter during the day as I caught up with jobs and then tried to relax a bit. In the evening I headed over to Liverpool to see the Liverpool Acoustic Live gig at View Two Gallery in Matthew St. I met a my friend Anna from Scribblepool there and we watched a great show together. Any of you who know Liverpool and particularly Matthew St won’t need to be told this, but it’s one of the nosier and busier parts of the city on a Friday night. Lots of shouting and groups of drunks hanging around, what we lovingly refer to around here as “nob ‘eds”. I’d never been to the View Two gallery before, or even heard of it, but it’s like a little oasis between the noisy bars and clubs. I turned into the little entrance door opposite Cavern Walks and preceeded up the many stairs that followed, nearly broke the handle off the door and terrified the two ladies at the desk, but eventually made it to my destination. Inside was a wonderful art gallery with all kinds of interesting paintings, sculptures and artifacts. I’ll definitely have to go back and look around the place properly sometime.

The gig was held on the top floor and man it was hot up there. Not much ventilation either as 50 of us crammed in to see the show. I finally managed to meet Graham Holland of the Liverpool Acoustic Spotlight podcast and he greeted me with the line “I was listening to you in the car today” which seemed funny. I’ve chatted to Graham online a few times but we’d not met in person so it was good to finally put a face to the name. We were treated to 4 great acts starting with Wirral singer-songwriter Pete Cunningham, followed by female singer Dogstar and then Mark Byrne. I hadn’t heard of Mark before but his set was incredible and culminated with probably the best version of “Bad Moon Rising” (by Creedence Clearwater Revival) I’ve ever heard. I’ll be chasing him to come on Rathole Radio at some point in future for sure. The final act was Canadian singer Lorelei Loverage and her band The Harem. They were brilliant and played for about an hour I think in the end. The whole group were clearly talented musicians in their own right, all 7 of them. She had 2 backing singers, 1 playing a banjo, 2 percussionists, a bass player and an electric guitarist, to go with the acoustic she was playing herself. The sound they made was terrific and the room had a really great acoustic to it I thought, no pun intended. I had a fun night and met many interesting people, I’d recommend it to anyone. Check out the website to see future gig line ups. They play all of the artists for the upcoming gig on the podcast the month before so you can get an idea of what to expect, and it works very well. The venue is only small and tickets are very limited but it’s well worth trying to get hold of one if you can.

Justice, Howard Webb Style

On Saturday I spent a fair bit of time preparing my playlist for Rathole Radio on the following day and then relaxing in the sun watching football, it’s a tough job but someone has to do it. I actually pre-recorded the show on Sunday lunchtime because of the big England V Germany game later on. My good friend Howie of Lone Gunmen fame played the recording for me on the stream at the usual time. I went to watch the match with the band and a load of other friends. It turned out to be a pretty depressing affair as we were deservedly smashed by Germany 4-1. Despite what you may hear about legitimate goals not being given we needed a lot more than that to bail us out this time. Tonight everyone has been raving about the performance of the English referee Howard Webb in the Brazil v Chile game. How we cling to the straws of success. Perhaps we should give up football alltogether and see if there’s a refereeing World Cup we can enter instead, we might do better at it. Despite the obvious downer of the match the band got together afterwards and we played for about 3 hours straight, almost getting 4 original songs together. It turned the day around for all of us I think. Once we have the songs properly worked out the plan is to record them and finally share what we’re doing with all you lovely people. I have a feeling some of you will like it. I hope so anyway. That brings us neatly up to today, so you’re all up to date.

Upcoming:

We’ll be doing a live Linux Outlaws on Thursday night this week instead. It’ll be the usual time of 19:00 UK time so mark your diaries. I’ll see you there in the chatroom for some fun. I can’t wait to get back into the swing of a live show again I must say. I’ll be doing much more music, hacking and other shennanigans throughout the week. Apparently Wednesday is Social Media day I’ve just been told. I’m dubious about the over use of the term “social media” these days but I think the idea is a good one. There’s the first ever meeting of the Liverpool Social Media Cafe at Static Gallery 6pm on Wednesday. I’ll be heading along to see what it’s all about and catching up with many good friends from the Liverpool geek scene. If you’re in town come and say hello. I’m not sure exactly what other delights this week holds for me yet but I’ll relate those to you next time. Till then take care of yourselves and been good… and if you can’t be good hide the evidence… or get a good lawyer… or both, yeah probably do both

Dan

It’s time for another Weekly Rewind and we’ve made it to the big six zero woo hoo. We should have gotten here a few weeks earlier but I’ve missed a few posts. I’m sat here on a sunny Sunday evening watching the delights of the 2010 Football World Cup in South Africa. I say “delights”, but to be honest the tournament hasn’t been great so far. The first round of matches were pretty awful and it’s hard to remember a good one. Thankfully though it has improved and we’ve seen more goals and excitement in the second matches. I know not all of you are interested in football so I’ll move on, but I warn you there may be (read: will be) more World Cup talk as we go on

On Monday I released a new Rathole Radio. I haven’t heard much feedback from it yet but I think people enjoyed the show, there’s been plenty of downloads. I enjoyed making it anyway and the show really relies on listener input, song suggestions, emails, live chat and taking part in votes. I want it to be a 2 way experience wherever possible and I’m thinking of ways to finally make the website the all encompassing digital masterpiece I want it to be. I have some ideas for a suggestion box and perhaps even bringing a social networking element to it all with Drupal. We’ll see how that progresses and of course I’ll keep you up to date on developments. We didn’t record Linux Outlaws live on Monday night because of the World Cup schedule (oops I mentioned it again), but fear not as we recorded a show on Tuesday. I did the preliminary editing and shipped the audio files back to Fab the next day.

On Wednesday I was busy doing CSS hacking and other bits of coding for a project. It’s been a good chance to get deeper into Drupal development and hopefully it’s something I can explore more in the future. I’m trying to brush up on my PHP skills and I’m working my way through a number of programming books, at varying rates of speed, if the word speed can really be applied here. I think I’ve talked about this before but for all the stuff I’ve done with Drupal, WordPress and other PHP web applications, my knowledge of the language itself is still a bit lacking I feel. I’ll fix that in time though. On Thursday night I went back to Fallen Industries rehearsal rooms to make some noise with the band. It went pretty well but it was a very hot night and we were all tired from a long day. It showed at times I think, playing with the band is always good fun though and I’m still looking into getting more gigs. We played our first original tune “Jimmy Carter” through a few times. I’m working on other new ideas and I hope we’ll have something decent recorded and ready to present to the world fairly soon. I need to get my guitars serviced and fixed up in the meantime. I could probably do it myself but finding time is tough and I think they’d benefit from a professional eye. I’m also looking into getting a new slightly bigger amp. It’s one of those things with bands, there’s always a battle for who can be loudest just underneath all the niceties hehehe. I don’t really want a larger amp to be louder though, just to get a fuller tone and a bit more bottom end in the guitar sound even at lower volume. I’ll let you know what I decide on.

Drupal 7 On My Server

On Friday I finished off some outstanding jobs and did various bits of server admin, making development clones of some Drupal projects I’ve done back on my own server. This should allow me to test out updates and changes without breaking live sites. I could do without angry phone calls asking “WHERE’S THE WEBSITE??!!!”. I learnt quite a bit from all the server wrangling and I know a few people want me to talk more specifically about programming projects and experiences here. It’s something I’m just getting back into more recently. I’ve learnt the power of Drush this weekend I must say. The name is short for Drupal Shell and it’s a module I have used in the past. I wanted to administer and upgrade about 5 different sites on one server but wasn’t looking forward to all the copying of files, messing around and goat sacrificing that involves in Drupal. I simply installed Drush on the server and copied the file into my system path. Then I could call Drush from anywhere I wanted and use the package manager to do all hard work for me. I broke sites a few times, swore a bit, scratched my head and fixed them again for most of Friday. I’ll try to give more in depth details on Drush and other Drupal stuff in coming weeks, but for now there’s a list of articles on developmentseed.org. I also downloaded a development version of Drupal 7 and tested that out. It’s really slick and they seem to be moving down the WordPress route with the admin controls (see the pic), a long overdue improvement in my view. I found I had to upgrade my version of MySQL to support Drupal 7 and it seems I was well out of date anyway with MySQL 4.1, official support for that actually ran out a few months ago, doh! I used the tools in CPanel (yes I’m a cheat) to build a new version of MySQL 5.0 (5.1 would have broken a few sites sadly) and then recompile Apache and PHP to match. After some initial problems with the YUM package manager locking on my CentOS box I got it all working, or so I thought. So now happy with MySQL 5.0, Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.3.2 I went off to watch the England game that night. The less said about that match the better to be honest, it was truly truly woeful. We played so badly that the lads were struggling to pass the ball 5 yards to each other. It was like watching a bunch of school kids… a bunch of school kids who’ve never played football before and don’t even like it. We drew 0-0 with Algeria and I the nation was united in a collective facepalm. We can still go through to the next round by beating Slovenia on Wednesday, but the way this is going who knows if we’ll do that. I always try to be optimistic. It wouldn’t be a proper World Cup is England played well know would it?

On Saturday I discovered my server tinkering the day before hadn’t gone fully to plan. I thought I’d checked every website to be sure it worked but RatholeRadio.org was definitely broken. Thanks to Fab and all the others who pointed that out to me online. I discovered in the end that my WordPress theme was incompatible with PHP 5.3.2 and the upgrade from 5.2 had broken it. I swapped the theme and fixed that error pretty quickly but then discovered an old phpBB site was badly broken by old incompatible code. I couldn’t really do much to fix that without rewriting some major customizations to the system. I didn’t fancy it to be honest and instead I rolled PHP back to version 5.2.13 which fixed everything. You live and learn I guess and I still enjoy poking around with servers, how much they like it though is anyone’s guess. Over the rest of the weekend I’ve sorted out some housework, watched a lot of football, played a lot of Super Mario Bros Wii and generally relaxed. It’s good to cut loose sometimes.

Upcoming:

I’m not  sure what’s happening with the Linux Outlaws schedule just yet but we’ll have plenty of shows coming out over the next few weeks don’t worry. I’ll let everyone know more as soon as I can. I’ll be hacking plenty more PHP, CSS and… whisper it.. Javascript in the coming week which I hope will go well. I’ll examine Drupal 7 some more but sadly I don’t think the modules and other things I need will be ready to use in time for an upcoming project. I think it’ll be a few months before we can seriously start moving over to Drupal 7 but it’s showing promising signs. I’ll be playing with the band some more, hopefully writing new tunes and there’s also Chester LUG on Thursday night. I’ve missed quite a few meetings now since Christmas and despite previous failed promises to fix it, I’m determined to succeed this time. I also have tickets to see the Liverpool Acoustic Live show on Friday night at the View Two Gallery in Matthew St. Come down if you’re in the area it looks like a fun night. Till then take care of yourselves and I’ll catch you on the flipside. Right now I think I hear the washing up calling me, though I’m doing my best to ignore it

See ya,

Dan

Hello again everyone, hope you’re all well. I missed another update last week and it seems to be becoming a habit lately. I had a solid run of weekly posts last year and I hope to resume that soon but a busy life gets in the way sometimes. I’ve had a good couple of weeks though with many interesting events, so let me tell you about them.

Last weekend I booked a rehearsal room with the band at a place called Fallen Industries on the Wirral. It’s nice and handy for us and they have a really cool set up (see pic below). On Saturday afternoon we blasted out the tunes for 3 hours in the blazing heat. I was tired after that I can tell you, but it was well worth it. Being able to play at full volume with a good PA, drum kit and amps makes a big difference and can only help our development I think. We’ve been working on our first original tune called “Jimmy Carter”. It all stems from a practice where somebody mentioned him and I immediately piped up with the trivia nugget “Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer”. It just sounded like the opening line of a song to us, so I went off and got working on turning it into one. We’ve got the structure sorted now and after some deliberation the lyrics are also in the bag. I’d written comedy verses about Jimmy White and Jimmy Hill but we decided to just keep the tune about Jimmy Carter rather than force in jokes. Ross came up with a great couple of verses. I can’t say I knew a lot about Carter but a quick look on Wikipedia provided plenty of material for lyrics. He’s related to Berry Gordy the Father Of Motown and also the late great Johnny Cash. You’ll be able to hear a decent recording of the song soon hopefully.

Fallen Industries

On Sunday I headed over to Liverpool for my friend Rosie’s birthday and somehow I ended up taking everyone to Riley’s to play pool. It was a good night. On Monday I got some work done during the afternoon and then prepared for the Linux Outlaws live show as usual. We had a good crowd and I think I everyone enjoyed it. I edited the recording between other jobs over Tuesday and Wednesday then shipped it back to Fab. It was released on Friday as episode 155 “There Is No Fabian Stable”. On Thursday night I went down to see the band and work on songs with the acoustic guitar for a change, we went unplugged. I think we could have 3 or 4 decent original tunes in the next month, if we manage that I’ll record an EP or something for everyone to hear. I should start looking for another gig really and get that booked too. It’s been 6 weeks since our first gig and we can’t rest on our laurels forever.

Most of the rest of my week was taken up with Drupal development for a couple of different sites. There was a bit of drama last thing on Friday as I got a call to say one of the sites wasn’t loading, and a very busy site at that. Just what you need at 16:30 on a Friday afternoon. After talking to the server admin and doing a lot of serious head scratching, I finally discovered the problem was an external service with an embedded widget on the site. Thankfully it wasn’t my fault for once. I disabled it and then dashed out to catch a train to Liverpool. I went for dinner with some friends at the Ego restaurant by the Philharmonic and enjoyed a lovely pepperoni pizza. We went to a pub around the corner afterwards and had a good night, until I realised I had 8mins to make it to Central station and get the last train home. I dashed off and just missed the train by literally seconds, not all was lost though as I managed to get the New Brighton train to get me much nearer home. I jumped in a taxi from Birkenhead in the end and made it home in good time. It wasn’t expensive either but I need to keep a better eye on those train times in future!

A Merseyrail Train

Over the weekend I spent a lot of time preparing Rathole Radio which was broadcast and recorded last night. Lot’s of friends turned up to listen live and that’s always nice, I’m really thankful for all the wonderful support I receive. I’m actually just working on the release of that episode as I write this. Multi-tasking like a good-un. I also watched England play out a disappointing draw with the USA in the World Cup on Saturday night. I hope we’ll improve as the tournament goes on, we need to, otherwise our World Cup will be over very quickly. Considering what a football fan I am it’s suprising it’s taken me this long into the post to mention the World Cup, but it started on Friday and it’s safe to say I’ll be watching with great care.

Upcoming:

We’ve actually decided to postpone the Linux Outlaws live show tonight because of the World Cup schedule, we’re dirty layabouts I know We’ll have a rearranged show later in the week. Stay tuned to our updates on Status.net for more news on that. I’m planning to hit the rehearsal room with the band again this week and test out the new song at full volume. I’m also just about to the release Rathole Radio so go and have a listen to that.

Hello again everyone, it’s been a while since I updated you with events in my little world and I apologise for missing last week’s post. Things have been a little hectic around here. I expected they’d calm down after OggCamp but in fact the calm didn’t last very long at all, about 5 days to be precise. I’m busy again now with various endeavours but I’m having fun, and that’s the main thing. So let’s get into what’s been happening.

Last weekend there was a big BBQ here to celebrate my 30th birthday. Many friends and family came to eat, drink and be merry, and I think we all succeeded pretty well. It was good fun to catch up with everyone and a fitting way to see in my 30th year. It wasn’t actually my birthday till Tuesday (May 25th) but we’ll get to that soon. After a very late night I pulled myself together and went down to practice with the band on Sunday afternoon. It was an epic session in blazing heat and we all lost plenty of fluids that afternoon. It was only about 30C which I know will make many readers in genuinely hot countries laugh, but when you’re crammed in a tiny little room with no ventilation and you’re trying to ROCK, it’s plenty hot enough trust me. I tried out my new foot controller for the Line 6 Pod XT I use on my guitar. It makes a big difference to the sound of a 3 piece band like ours and we can really change the dynamics a lot more. Being able to stomp on a distortion pedal at key moments in a song is great fun. It makes me feel like a teenager again, bringing back memories of buying my first BOSS distortion pedal when I was 13, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that. I also somehow found time to edit the Software Freedom Law Show on Sunday and do a bit of other stuff.

On Monday night it was Linux Outlaws live as usual and we had great fun with that. We’re past our 150th show now and it still seems to go from strength to strength, something I’m really thankful for. The IRC chatroom was buzzing away and everyone had a good time I think. Late on after the show I did the preliminary editing and synced up the recordings before shipping them back to Fab for editing. I also did a bit of work on a Drupal site I’ve been developing. This became a theme right through the week as I’ve been doing a vast amount of Drupal work lately. It seems this area might grow into something big and I would really like to brush up on my PHP and Javascript knowledge. I’ve bought a ton of books to help with that in the last 2 weeks. PHP has always been something of a blind spot for me really, I’ve just never gotten that far into it. I’ve done plenty of programming in other languages such as Java, Python, Ruby, C# and even VB.net, but for some reason I never really bothered with PHP despite the popularity of the LAMP platform. I’m making amends for that now and working my way through this pile of books. So I intend to master it in due course. I’ll let you know how that goes.

FLOSS Weekly 121 (feat me)

Tuesday was the big day, my 30th. I took some time out from work and just relaxed really. I caught up with friends and family and received an overwhelming amount of kind wishes from people on the net. I thank you all for that. My parents took me for a meal in the evening and I had one of the finest steaks I think I’ve ever eaten in my life at a nearby restaurant. It was lovely. Fab also published a special Outlaws episode dedicated to Fedora 13, released the same day. On Wednesday it was back to the grindstone, or the virtual grindstone in this case working on websites. In the evening though I was privileged to be a guest host on FLOSS Weekly with Randal Schwartz. I’ve gotten to know Randal pretty well over the last year and he’s a great guy, it was fun to host the show with him. We interviewed Jonathan Simpson of Freenode about what they do. Despite some monumental Skype delay on my part I think it went fairly well. I’ve had a lot of really nice comments and I’d like to do the show again in future if the chance arises. The 3 second delay on my voice will have to be sorted out as it did ruin my comedy timing though, I think that’s possible with some network tweaks. It was released as FLOSS Weekly 121 and you can download it here.

On Thursday evening I went over to Liverpool to see the Sugar Hill Gang live at The Masque, a venue I know well. I once did a gig in there to an audience of one person, just one person in a massive empty room, but that’s another story. The Gang were brilliant and I also enjoyed the support acts immensely, including a local ska/rap group called The Elementals. I shall be looking them up for Rathole Radio I think. I was a little shocked when the Sugar Hill Gang picked up instruments and started jamming in the middle of their set. I didn’t know they could play, and man they can really play. They rocked the house with many of their hits such as Apache (not the web server) and Rapper’s Delight, the first successful rap record ever made. I lost count of the number of times they shouted “somebody… anybody… everybody, scream!!!”, which of course we duly did. I’d almost lost my voice by the end of the night from shouting “hey… ho!” and many other things, that coupled with waving my hands in the air (like I just didn’t care) was very exhausting. Many thanks to my friend Will for getting me a ticket as a birthday present, I couldn’t have asked for a better gig as the first of my 30s. On Friday I did much more Drupal hacking, amongst other things.

Over the weekend I prepared Rathole Radio and spent many hours trawling through music to find something that made the grade. I enjoy listening through records but some people mistakenly think I just play and claim to like everything I hear. I don’t, I just don’t slag off stuff I don’t like, I choose not to mention it and move on. I filter out plenty of music that’s not much good in preparing each show and I like to keep the quality up. If I like a record I will play it regardless of what other think, but I certainly don’t like everything. This evening (Sunday) I broadcast and recorded the show, which went well. That brings up right up to date.

Upcoming:

There’s plenty going on in the next week and I’ll be doing a lot more PHP hacking. I’ve been asked to talk about that in detail but I can’t do that just yet as the site I’m working on hasn’t been launched. Once I’m at liberty to discuss these projects I will, you can be sure of that. Exciting times lie ahead I think, it seems I’m becoming a serious web developer again after some quieter years. Tomorrow I’ll be out playing with the band again and working on new material. I’ve written a couple of songs and I’ll let everyone hear those once they’re ready. We’ll also do Linux Outlaws live in the evening as always. You can join us for that at LinuxOutlaws.com/live from 7pm (UK). On Wednesday (2nd June) there is Liverpool LUG and if you’re in the area please come down and say hello, we’d love to see you. We’ll be at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold Street from 7pm. There are other things happening in the next week that escape my memory now, but I’ll fill you in on those next time. Take care of yourselves till then and I’ll see you soon

Dan

Hello all, it’s been some time since I updated you properly on what’s been happening. Now that the OggCamp dust is beginning to settle though and life is moving back towards normality ( or my version of it anyway), I can afford to reflect a little on how things went. I’m not going to get into a detailed breakdown of every day events for the last 3 weeks I’ve missed, that would be like torture, for you and me both. So I’ll just concentrate on telling you my story of the OggCamp weekend itself.

The week leading up to OggCamp was very busy as I welcomed Fab and his party of four Germans to my home. We managed to find room for all the guests fairly easily with almost every room in the house doubling as an emergency bedroom, apart from the bathroom that is, nobody had to sleep in the bath but it was close. We even had an extra guest as Anna arrived the next day. It was nice to have a house full of people and everyone seemed to enjoy it, but I must confess it’s nice to get your own space back too after a week. I prepared for the Rathole Radio gig by practising with the band in between other jobs. On Friday 30th of April I headed over to Liverpool with my mate H and a car full of audio gear. He brought his decks to DJ at the gig and was a great help overall in setting things up. We dropped the kit off at Bad Format, did a little prep work and then headed on to meet Andy (another old friend and partner in crime) at the Everyman Theatre. He kindly lent me a lectern for OggCamp and we loaded that into my little car  then took it to The Black-E. Now, the weather had been nice 2 weekends in a row leading up to this and I’d already given up any hope of it being sunny again, but I hadn’t quite expected the torrential downpour we had on Friday. As we tried to move the lectern from the car into the Black-E it was already filling up with water. I joked to H “If this rain keeps up we’ll have to turn this into a canoe!”. From there I dropped him back at Bad Format and ran backwards and forth with various kit throughout the afternoon and evening. I was also planning to check into the apartment we’d rented with friends for the weekend. Luckily Kevan managed to take care of this though and it took a load off me. A very nice place I must say and I enjoyed staying there, a large city centre apartment on two floors with plenty of beds and a cool open plan kitchen/lounge. It made a great base for a few of us but I still don’t understand why they could only give us one key to a 5 person apartment. We toyed with the idea of going to Rapid and getting some extras cut, but didn’t really get time in the end.

On Stage With Reflect Harmony Group

Back at Bad Format I met Attila The Stockbroker on his way into the club and we had a good chat. David Rovics turned up a little later and we got everyone sound checked and ready for the gig. Adrian McEwen and Andy Goodwin were helping me with the technical side of things. I’d been promoting the gig as and interactive online experience and we’d put a lot of effort into that side of things, even making a little robot audience member to interact with people. Adrian did some amazing work with an Arduino and some other components. There was however one slight problem. The club only let me know a few days before the gig that their phone line had been cut off, and with no phone line there is no Internet, great! I tried to arrange to hop onto the university wireless next door, that failed. I talked to other neighbours in the area but in the end we were stuck using a 3G connection by the window. Adrian and Andy tried really hard to get all this working and by about halfway through the gig we had a connection thanks to them and JonTheNiceGuy. I was so busy that the audience bot fell by the wayside as I tried to hold it all together introducing bands and generally being host. The Reflect Harmony Group were a brilliant opening act and I really enjoyed performing a song with them at the end of their set. Up next I introduced Attila The Stockbroker and David Rovics who did their thing for about 90mins to the delight of the crowd. During that time I was still trying to fix up the Icecast stream, video camera and other things. We got the radio stream up and many people heard it later I’m pleased to say. I played a set with my new band and that went down really well. We all enjoyed it and hopefully we’ll take the band a bit further and do more gigs, I’d really like that. Time will tell. I’ve released some of the audio from the gig in a special episode of Rathole Radio which you can download from the website. I hope you enjoy it.

After the gig I went out with David & Attila to show them to their hotel and sort out a few other things. This took a while longer than I’d expected and sadly the battery on my phone died at the same time. I had the key to our apartment, my friends were back at the club unable to contact me and wondering where I was. Luckily they managed to get into the apartment by talking to the people at the desk, but I was still gone a couple of hours. I didn’t realise but this really worried them quite a bit, leading to all sorts of crazy theories that I’d been killed or mugged and other such things. I was perfectly fine though and once I got back I convinced them of that. I know Liverpool pretty well and that’s not to say that something couldn’t happen to me here, but I keep my eyes open and I know the people and places to avoid well enough. I was sorry I’d scared them but the phone dying at a crucial moment was just bad luck. I collected some of the stuff from Bad Format before they locked up for the night and headed back to the apartment for some sleep.

Rafflecasting Again (Pic by m0dlx on Flickr)

Bright and early the next day OggCamp work began. I started at 7:30am I think but can’t really be sure as I only went to bed about 4am. We all headed to the Black-E just up the road and began sorting out everything for the day. There were lots of people running around and plugging things in, setting up stalls, testing projectors and much more. The main stage was pretty much ready to go which was great, I picked up my crew radio and proceeded to run around putting out various fires and seeing that things went well. We got a wireless network set up thanks to the wonderful folks at The Linux Emporium. There seemed to be a healthy number of people queued up outside by the time we opened the doors at 10am. Simon Phipps kicked off the event in style with his keynote about digital rights in the modern world. The speech was entertaining and well received, it led into many more great sessions across the weekend on various stages. I didn’t get to see many of the talks myself as there was always something to be done and a crew radio blaring down my ear. That’s one of the things you learn in organising events though. You don’t really get time to enjoy them, it’s about making sure things run smoothly and the people who attend enjoy it. Having said that I did get to moderate a panel discussion on the main stage in the afternoon which was a lot of fun. Sadly Ian Forrester from the BBC was ill and couldn’t make it. As he and Simon Phipps were lined up to be on the panel we had to quickly fill the slots with some excellent people. I roped in Ade Bradshaw and Chris Proctor of LugRadio fame,  along with Samantha Bail and Brad Pierce they did an amazing job. Finally, to close the first day we did a raffle on the main stage. There were so many great prizes it was hard to keep track of them all in my mind. Here’s the ones I remember: we gave away some Viglen machines, a Aleutia fanless PC or two, a 1.5 TB MyBook external hard drive, some Ubuntu backpacks and a stack of books from Apress and Wiley amongst other things I’ve forgotten. Last but not least it was my great pleasure to give away the amazing cuddly Ogg cushion made for us by Beccy Newborough. For me this was by far the coolest prize, and I said so on stage. It’s gone to a good home and I hope we’ll see more people creating them from the pattern Beccy made.

After a brief trip back to the apartment it was off to Studio 2 at Parr St for the evening festivities. A very cool venue indeed for any party and one of my favourite bars in the whole town. I was delighted we were able to get the place and while we didn’t have exclusive use we certainly took it over with OggCampers. It’s part of a working recording studio where many gold and platinum discs have been recorded over the years, I think a few people were impressed by that. I had a great time catching up with friends and I also tried to get around the tables and do my bit for the community. I wanted to get people’s thoughts on the event so far and make time to chat to them all for at least a short while. It’s hard to do this with a large group though and remembering everyone’s name isn’t always easy. I think I’ve become better at that and being in a room full of people who know your name while you’ve never even met them before is quite an experience. Everyone seemed to have fun and I left at about 1am to get back to the apartment with my gang. I believe some of the others were out much later but after working on the gig Friday night I was happier retiring to the apartment for a quiet drink and chat with friends. I forget what time I went to bed but it was much earlier than Friday I’m pleased to say and we had some amazing laughs in our little luxury pad, Will, Anna, Kevan, Alistair and I. The TV only seemed capable of showing one channel but it really didn’t matter as we had no time to watch it anyway.

Fluffy Ogg Made By Beccy Newborough

Sunday didn’t start quite as early, we left a lot of the stuff set up from the previous day. I collected my crew radio again and got to work making sure all the rooms were functioning. We couldn’t use the 3rd stage for a couple of hours in the morning as there was a martial arts class booked in there. I had agreed to this in the rental but I’d been told it was Tai Chi which is quiet and these guys made a lot of noise, they had very big swords though and I decided it was best not to upset them. The day went without a hitch and everyone seemed to have fun. I think the venue worked out well and despite some minor disagreements about covering up artwork we managed to settle in nicely. The event culminated in a live show from ourselves and the Ubuntu UK crew. I was late as usual and I arrived in the room to chants of “Dan! Dan! Dan!!!!” in a very Alan Partridge fashion. I suspect people think I was trying to make some kind of grand entrance but it really wasn’t that calculated. I was just late because I’d been working downstairs cleaning up the other rooms. The live show was fun and we will have the podcast ready for release later this week so you can all hear it too. At the end of the event we packed everything away in a surprisingly quick time, this was largely due to the amazing crew of helpers we’d been blessed with. Every one of them made the event possible in their own way and I’m really grateful for the support. After everything was packed away I was off in the car to unload it all again at home in my garage. Everyone else headed back to Studio 2 for post-event drinks. I had some dinner at home and then joined them later on. No rest for the wicked hey.

Main stage before opening (photo by KevanV)

Overall I think the weekend went really well. It was the result of 4 long months work for me but it was all worth it just to see people having a good time. I was also pleased that quite a few people who’d never been to Liverpool before realised there’s so much more to this town than stereotypes would lead you to believe. It proved a great host city, as I always knew it would. I’m proud of this place and I certainly don’t try to hide it. We did have a lot of loud stag and hen parties around town for the Bank Holiday weekend but I don’t think they disturbed OggCampers too much. I’ve learned a lot of things from doing all this but I think the main one has to be not to run two events on top of each other. One event at a time is quite enough for anyone. The gig went well but the technical problems and other hiccups could have been fixed if I’d had more time to spend on it. I also think doing this on a Bank Holiday worked against us in the long run. We had a good crowd don’t get me wrong, but originally I thought we’d get more people because it was a holiday, in fact I think it meant we got less. People tend to have family things planned on holiday weekends and it also pushes hotel and travel prices up dramatically. You live and learn though, and I always learn best by my mistakes Thanks to everyone who came along and particularly all those who helped us out. Leave your thoughts on the weekend in the comments below if you like, I’d be interested too hear them.

Upcoming:

This hasn’t been a regular Weekly Rewind but I’ll still try and fill you in on what I expect to happen in the coming week. We should release the OggCamp Live podcast episode and another episode of Linux Outlaws we recorded reflecting on the event. I’ve edited a new Software Freedom Law Show this weekend and you should hear that soon. There’s a Liverpool Tweet-Up on Thursday night which I should be attending, I might see you there. At the weekend there’ll be another new Rathole Radio at 9pm (UK) Sunday 16th May. I also have a lot of new Linux distro releases to catch up on now that event madness is calming down. I want to get into reviewing and testing some of those as soon as I can. I’m meeting up with the band on Wednesday night and we’re gonna try and learn some new songs. We’ll also try some original stuff I hope and it’ll be good to get more gigs, I’ll keep you informed when I report back next week. If there’s one thing that remains to be said in the aftermath of OggCamp I think it has to be this… PHEW!

See you all soon, take care out there,

Dan