Adventures In Open Source

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