Some Ubuntu Stuff

Hey folks, I’m going to break the habit of a life time here and actually tell you about an event in enough time to make plans for it. Usually I’m a failmeister and only announce these things at the very last minute but I’m trying to fix that, so here goes. Next month there will be a release party for the new version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope, terrible name if you ask me) at the BBC in Manchester (UK), Friday 24th April at 7pm. I’ll be attending, barring any natural disasters and if you’re within easy traveling distance we’d love to see you there too. Perhaps even if you’re not within easy traveling distance but are ridiculously committed you could also come, don’t put yourself out too much though. Read the rest of this entry »

25th March 09

You may already know about this but I thought I should give you a quick nudge – admittedly a last minute one -  in the direction of Document Freedom Day. Tomorrow, 25th of March 2009 will be the 2nd global Document Freedom Day; “but what exactly is Document Freedom Day?” I hear you ask, I did myself. Well, here’s how they describe it on their own website:

“Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It will be a day of grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general.

Complementary to Software Freedom Day, we aim to have local teams all over the world organise events on the last Wednesday of March. 2009 is the second year that Document Freedom Day is being called for, and we are again looking for people around the world who are willing to join the effort. Read the rest of this entry »

The Weekly Rewind

Time for another Weekly Rewind, hard to believe this is the 4th one already, but then I’ll be saying that with each new one forever now probably. Much as I’ve done with Linux Outlaws, we’ve done 80 episodes now and that honestly still surprises me but since about episode 10 I seem to have been saying, “wow I can’t believe we’ve done [insert ep number] episodes of this”. So what happened this week then? Well, it’s been pretty busy and very interesting, so let’s get into it.

Monday night we were set to record Linux Outlaws 80 but had to cancel when something came up at the last minute and Fab couldn’t make it. I wasn’t really worried, the only problem being that I’d already announced it would be live and gone around whipping everyone up. I sat in the IRC channel for a couple of hours talking to people and explaining what was going on, trying to make up for it I suppose. We actually recorded the show on Tuesday lunch time (UK) instead. It wasn’t ideal as most people were out at work, college, yoga class or some combination of the above but the live stuff is improving I think, and it was only our 3rd attempt at streaming the recording. I even mixed in the music live so felt like quite the radio host, it was great fun.

Me, in slightly odd stance

I spent Tuesday night and most of Wednesday afternoon editing the show. Then got the files to Fab for release while I shot off to the Liverpool LUG meeting in the evening. I was my customary 40mins late and unfortunately missed Graham’s talk which I’m sorry about. I’ll really have to stop thinking I can get places in half the time it actually takes to travel there but what can I say, I’m an optimist at heart. Once they invent the teleporter I’ll be sorted… ok, I won’t I’ll probably still be late but it’s a thought. Had a great time chatting to everyone as always, there was lots of interesting talk about Aphex Twin, Boards Of Canada, Chris Morris and other random stuff. We also interspersed it with some techy subjects too though. I really urge you to try and find a LUG (Linux User Group) or some other kind of geeky social group in your area if you can. I’ve benefited from it greatly in the last year or so. There really aren’t many places you can get a laugh from a joke about Cron and what could be better than that? They should be cherished. Thursday and Friday I did various stuff but most of it wasn’t that interesting or worth reporting, sorry. Spent quite a while working on my talk for Think Visibility as it approached rapidly.

Tim Nash doing strange things with buckets

So that brings us neatly to the Think Visibility event which happened yesterday. I enjoyed a largely quiet train journey to Leeds on Friday afternoon, apart from a very loud hen party discussing who their favourite serial killer was further down the carriage. I kid you not, at one point I actually overheard “yeah Myra was ok but you can’t beat Fred and Rose for me”. There’s not a lot you can say to that apart from “who’s for Harold Shipman?”, so I turned my music up and tried to block it out. Friday night we had a speakers meal and I met some really lovely and infinitely knowledgeable people, then promptly lost to most of them at pool in the pub, the Guinness didn’t help. It was a good night. I gave my talk about podcasting at the event on Saturday and it went pretty well I thought, wasn’t busy, however there was a small but perfectly formed group of about 15 people who kindly listened to me. We had some good questions and a bit of a discussion at the end. I was going to post my slides here as part of this write up but since I’ve already managed to ramble up to 700 words it’s probably best I leave that for another day, when I can go into more detail.

I had a really great time and have to give a big thanks to The Hodge(tm) and all the others for working so hard to make the whole thing happen. I think the attendees really enjoyed it from speaking to people and the speakers certainly seemed to. I also got a chance to try Wii Tennis for the first time at the after party and I got hammered by pretty much everyone at that too. I should have stuck to pool but never mind. I know everyone in the entire world has a Wii by now but I still don’t and I’ve hardly even had the chance to play on one either. Really cool little things and a part of me will always love Nintendo even if they’re not open source. I had an 8 bit NES in the 80′s as a kid and I loved that thing to death (not literally, for the dirty minded).

The pictures from Think Visibility were taken by sk8geek and posted on his Flickr account, used with his kind permission, you can see the whole lot here

Upcoming:

So, this week I’ll be recording Linux Outlaws tomorrow, barring any sudden emergencies. You can tune in to hear us recording the show in the afternoon (UK time) if you like. Just head over to http://linuxoutlaws.com/live and you can see it there. Announcements will be made on our Identi.ca and Twitter accounts but we suspect mid afternoon. I don’t know exactly what I have planned for later in the week but no doubt things will appear on the horizon. I’ll finish and publish my Debian Lenny article this week, scouts honour. I’m actually typing this on Ubuntu 8.10 as I needed something I could install quickly for my talk and that was the first CD that came to hand as I dashed for the train, so perhaps I’ll do an “apt-get dist-upgrade” and try out the latest alpha of Jaunty (9.04) before moving onto Sidux as promised and then checking out Arch properly. We’ll see what happens. Stay tuned for all that and of course my fabulous slides from the podcasting talk…

(announcers voice) Warning: the aforementioned slides may not actually turn out to be as fabulous as previously claimed, all purchases are subject to terms and conditions, call now!