Adventures In Open Source

Something awesome this was comes…. yes that’s right we’re going to do another OggCamp this year. The first one was such a success and we all enjoyed it so much that we just had to really. It’s a bit earlier in the year this time and it’ll be in Liverpool rather than Wolverhampton, but we sincerely hope you’ll come and join us. I’ve been very busy since the New Year putting all this in place. I’ve braved the ice for meetings at various venues, set the phone alight with negotiations and I’m pleased to say things are really coming together. We announced the dates and other details on Linux Outlaws last night. They’re also all over the microblogs, but for anyone who missed it here goes…

Date - 1st and 2nd of May 2010.

Venue – The Black-E, Liverpool, L1 5EW.

Website - OggCamp.org

Free Software, Free Culture, Free Thinking!

Don’t forget to get here on Friday the 30th and attend my Rathole Roadshow gig to kick the weekend off in style. It’s a Free Culture music gig featuring David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and myself, all playing live along with other guests to be announced. I’m working with the hotel arrangements with Liverpool Tourist Board right now. More details to come very soon. It’s a popular weekend being a Bank Holiday though and a popular destination, so book early! Keep an eye on the website of follow us on Twitter and Identi.ca for updates. For those who might be curious about the name, Ogg is a free and open media container format, it’s a barcamp style event and the 10 has a double meaning, it’s the year 2010 and also it’s a binary joke for all the geeks.

The venue is massive and the building is incredible, it’s going to be an epic weekend and it’s in one of the best cities in the world. Ok so I’m biased, but trust me. We need as many people to fill up this place as possible. Come and see us!!! …or I’ll come and find you

You can also sign up on Facebook if you’re a Facebook user.

Regular readers will notice I missed my Weekly Rewind this week but I’m afraid I’ve been so busy I can’t fit it in. I’ll do one next week when things calm down a bit I promise. Thanks for reading.

Dan

Just a quick post to let you know about an interesting event coming up in Liverpool next month. I mentioned in recent updates that I’ve been chatting with Ross Dalziel of Sound Network (amongst other people), about events in the city next year. He organised Open Source City which I attended, and did a really great job. He’s into creating music with technology, hacking and general geekery. What’s not to like about that? Well, Ross has an event of his own coming up soon at the FACT building in Liverpool City Centre. It will feature what he’s calling the “DS Orchestra” and anyone is free to come and join in. As the name suggests it will feature a lot of people using special software to make music with their Nintendo DS handheld consoles. There’s some custom software that’s been written for this by PixelH8, who some of you may well have heard of already. He’s pretty well known in the chiptunes scene and should even be there to play alongside everyone else on the day. You don’t have to have a Nintendo DS to join in you can use any geeky device as long as it’s capable of paying notes and making a tune. That’s good news for me as I don’t have a DS. I wonder if taking my laptop and midi keyboard along would be cheating? It might be a bit hard to carry around anyway, I’d need to invent some kind of harness, a true geek approach to the problem hehe

If you’re interested in getting involved have a look at this article on Wired.com. It’s 6pm to 8pm  on Thursday the 17th of December at FACT and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Part of the idea is to get kids excited about technology and show them that games consoles can do s much more with a little imagination. Who knows, maybe we’ll inspire a new scouse Kraftwerk somewhere along the way, “Kaftwerk La!”.  So if you have kids with a Nintendo DS bring them along to see what’s happening, it’ll be fun. I’ll see you there!

Beep beep,

Dan

This is just a quick event post but for all the International readers I apologise, if you don’t live within traveling distance of Manchester in the UK, this isn’t going to be very relevant to you. So you might want to duck out now, I understand. The rest of you, come closer and listen in.

I realise this is very last minute, as with many things I do, but Manchester Barcamp 2 (“this time it’s personal”, my tagline not theirs) is happening this weekend, 7th & 8th of November. Entry is free and there’s even going to be free beer I was told thanks to the sponsors. Free as in beer, nice! It’s an overnight Barcamp and you can stay there too if you like, you have to bring a sleeping bag though so don’t expect any 5 star hotel rooms. There are some spare places left and it could be a really good opportunity to meet other techy types, make business contacts and generally geek out. It’s happening at  Contact Manchester. Registration opens at 9am on Saturday and the welcome session will start at 10:30am I believe. If you’ve got some free time over the weekend come down and see some talks, even give a talk if you want, it’s gonna be fun. I’ll be there on Saturday afternoon and I’ll be around certainly into the early evening at least, if not later. Come along and say hello, I’d be pleased to meet you and have a chat.

You can reserve your place for free at the Barcamp Manchester 2 website now, so go and do it! There’s also travel information and anything else you could need on the site.

This one time, at Barcamp..

In case you’re confused by the whole Barcamp concept (I know was before I went to one), it’s basically a tech conference with no set agenda or schedule. People come along and sign up to give talks on the day, so anyone can get involved. Ad hoc sessions are usually thrown together as the event goes on and it’s all driven by the attendees. If there’s something you want to see or hear about, you can make it happen. If nothing else it will give you the perfect excuse to start stories with the line “and then this one time, at Barcamp…”. You can find more detailed information about the Barcamp idea on Wikipedia.

Hope you can make it along if you’re withing traveling distance, I’ll see some of you there

Dan

Wow, what a week it’s been. I’m so late with my usual Sunday blog post this time because we were in Wolverhampton doing Oggcamp. I’ll get into that more later of course, but I’m just trying to recover and get some energy back at the moment after 3 days of non stop work and partying. It was epic. Let’s get into it…

We skipped doing a live Linux Outlaws on Monday night but instead released our interview with Randal Schwartz. The downloads for that took off quickly, mainly due to Randal’s celebrity status I assume. Then he mentioned us a few times on FLOSS Weekly and it took off even more. I just hope our server can cope! On Wednesday Fab arrived from Germany and I collected him from the airport. We then went to pick up the PA for the weekend from my mate Keith. With all that lot loaded into my tiny Nissan Micra and looking pretty comical, we headed back home. In the evening we went for a few beers with my oldest and best friend Will (AKA Chemist), I’ve known him 26 years now (what a scary thought), we met in nursery school at the age of 3. It turned into a later night than I’d expected, but was great fun nevertheless.

A competing event - photo by Darren & Amy

On Thursday we did a live show from here. We had a lot of people joining in and I came up with the mad idea that we should try to release it almost straight after. To achieve this we bypassed our usual hours of editing and did the show all in one go, with music mixed in on the fly by me. At the end I just compressed the audio a bit and cut it to length. Fab did a great job of encoding and releasing. All in all, we got the show out in under 2 hours from saying “goodbye” on the broadcast to hitting the RSS feeds. I’m amazed by that, and I think it came out sounding pretty good in light of it. The reason for all this rushing was because I had to pick up the hire car for Oggcamp the next morning, load it up and hit the road to Wolverhampton pretty handy. We managed that, and despite my inability to get to grips with the “automatic handbrake” on the executive car I’d hired, the trip was great. We swung past Liverpool Airport and collected our friend Kevan on the way. We met up with many more friends in Wolverhampton: Anna, Alistair and more, for the Lugradio Pre Party. It was a very late night, involved lots of drinking and talking, great fun. The Next day we hit Lugradio Live 2009 a bit late after sleeping in. So late in fact that the hotel restaurant had finished serving food, they wouldn’t do room service or even bar food, but I managed to sweet talk the receptionist into getting the chef to make us 4 BLTs. I’m still not entirely sure how, but I’ll have to try and recapture that persuasive skill in other areas of my life. Fab gave his talk on Linux in schools at LRL and it went down a storm. I thought he did brilliantly and the room was packed out. I was really happy for him. You may notice I’m glossing over some stuff here because of there’s just so much of it. We stuck around to see Andy “Blackadder” Robinson and Bruno Bord talk in the main room, they were both excellent. It was then time for the last ever (they swear this time) Lugradio Live & Unleashed. Jono was wearing the Chinny Racoon suit from last year, and he must have been sweating his nuts off under those lights. Adam kept telling me how ill he felt all day from the pre party antics. Despite this you would never have guessed from the show, it was great. Hilarious as ever, with plenty of audience interaction. Later, I took Fab and a large party of other folks to the curry house right by the hotel. He experienced his first Vindaloo, which I think he’ll remember for a while. I’m much more of a wimp and stuck to a mild curry. There was some German swearing and sweating but he ate the whole thing and enjoyed it. A hell of an introduction to Indian cuisine I must say, not sure I could have handled it. The after party at the hotel was sponsored by Microsoft apparently, but there were no free drinks or food and we got kicked out at 11:30pm. So what they actually paid for I have no idea. The karaoke perhaps? Either way, they clearly don’t know how to throw a party, and I can’t say I’m surprised. The Fedora party in Berlin was 10 times better, another victory for Free Software! We carried on drinking in the hotel bar till about 3 or 4am, mainly thanks to the legendary Phillip Newborough (of Crunchbang fame) and his rucksack full of beer. Probably not the wisest move ever when I was head of the Oggcamp crew, and I’d set the call time for 9am, arrgh!!!

The Live Show - Photo by Darren & Amy

I made it up in time for the 9am call, even had a shower and sneaked a bacon sandwich out of breakfast area (this was becoming a habit). I then took all the crew up to the main room and we got to work. Tony, Laura and most of the others were already there working hard. The fantastic volunteers we had got the breakout rooms sorted, set up projectors and generally made our lives so much easier. I’ve already thanked them a few times, but one more won’t hurt. You guys are amazing, you know who you are. Tony and I rigged the PA and miraculously it all worked. The whole day went off perfectly, a little too perfectly in fact and I kept expecting something to explode in our faces. But it didn’t. The live show went well, people cheered, and laughed, and hopefully had a lot of fun. I certainly did. I’m not going to go into massive detail about the event here because I’ll be writing a proper article for our Linux Outlaws blog soon. I’ll update this with links when I have them. As the show finished we packed everything up and headed to a local Chinese banquet place on mass. There were about 25 of us in the end and the food was amazing. I was a little worried when I was handed a bill for £275, but thankfully realised pretty quickly it was for all of us. After some more drinking and LOTS more chatting in the hotel bar we tried to get an earlier night this time, about 1am. I had to get the hire car back home for 11am the next day, a feat I didn’t manage in the end but I avoided extra charges. Maybe I had remembered those persuasion skills after all.

I’ve been home just over a day now and I still can’t quite take it all in. It was such an amazing experience and the constant flow of nice comments, photos and general feedback from people really makes me smile. We haven’t decided for sure yet if we’ll do another Oggcamp, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say I’d put a few quid on it, if I were a betting man. We drove back yesterday and just flaked out after really, I wasn’t any use for much else. Although, having said that I just remembered I did edit a new episode of the Software Freedom Law Show in the afternoon. No rest for the wicked. That episode should be out now if you want to have a listen.

Upcoming:

This week I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do, running PA kit around and returning it to various friends. I’ve got some work to catch up on, audio editing to do, I need to write up my experience of Ubuntu Karmic, and plenty of other stuff. It’s the Ubuntu Release Party in Manchester this Friday, I should be there for that. I’ve also got tickets to see Eddie Izzard live at the Echo Arena on Saturday night. I have to take Fab back to the airport tomorrow too, he’s off back to Germany again. It was good to catch up and hang out in person for a while. There is also Chester LUG on Thursday night which I REALLY should attend that, seeing as I’ve missed a couple. It’s gonna be tough with so much else going on though. I might not be up to it. I don’t want them to feel neglected, it’s just that something always comes up around Chester LUG time for me lately. We’ll have to see. No doubt there will be plenty going on, so I’ll report back next weekend. Take care till then.

Dan

Good day all. You’ve probably heard me mention organising things for Oggcamp here often. It’s a first foray into the events field for Linux Outlaws and Ubuntu UK Podcast. I’ve been trying to sort out merchandise for people to take home on the day. It works well in 2 ways because people get something they want to keep (they’ve even told us this), and we can get some money back towards out towards costs. Booking the venue, getting refreshments, AV equipment and all kinds of other stuff isn’t cheap. There’s a lot to consider. I originally wanted to have t-shirts but sourcing those proved more problematic than I’d expected. At least in a price range I was happy with. We hit on the idea of mugs, and now thanks to the lovely people at Mugstore.co.uk we actually have them, woo hoo!!! They’re safely tucked away at Popey’s house ready to be delivered to Wolverhampton. The mugs will be available with donations of £5 or more, which is a reasonable amount I think. Not too much for the average person to pay, but still enough to give us some help towards costs.

Are you ready to see them? Drum roll please… come on tap the table or something don’t hang me out to dry here Read the rest of this entry »

Me With Jeremy

Howdy folks, here’s the final of my LinuxCon Audio Diaries. I recorded it in Portland a couple of days ago but there was some trouble with my server and I had a lot of traveling to do, so the release has been delayed. This recording wraps up my week in Portland pretty well and I hope you enjoy it. I’m just off the plane back in England now, 2 or 3 hours ago. I’ve missed a nights sleep and I’m trying to keep myself awake till a normal time to help with jet lag. I’m a bit blurry eyed and definitely exhausted. It was an amazing week and something I’ll always remember for the rest of my life. I hope you’ve enjoyed the updates and I’ll have plenty more stories to relate as time goes on.

Mp3 file – The Final Update

The picture above is me with Jeremy “Ballmer” Allision, co-founder of the Samba project and all round top bloke in my book. There’s more pictures from Portland on Flickr.

Right now I’m off to find some match sticks to prop my eyes open. Take care, catch you soon

Dan

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