Adventures In Open Source

The Weekly Rewind

A quick look at my watch tells me it’s Weekly Rewind time again so here comes a round up of what I got up to this week.  It all started on Monday when I recorded an interview with Matt Lee of the FSF for Linux Outlaws. We talked for about half an hour and it came out really well I think, you can hear the results in episode 82 of the podcast. One thing that came out of the discussion was licensing and it really made me think. I’ve tended to just use the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commerical Share Alike 3.0 license for everything in the past and never thought too much about it. It seems though that the NC clause makes it incompatible with the GPL and it’s not considered a free license by the FSF. This came as something of a shock to me but I suppose it’s my own ignorance for not really considering the implications. I was worried about people charing money for my work when I release it for free and I’d like it kept that way. The NC clause does protect from that but in practice this isn’t really how it works. It prevents anyone who has a commercial interest of any sort from using my material, not necessarily just selling it as such but perhaps playing one of my songs on the radio or including something I’ve done in a magazine. In light of this I’ve re-licensed this very blog under BY-SA and I shall use this license for most of my future works. It was quite a learning experience and I suppose the main thing I’ve realised is not to just choose any license quickly, instead put proper consideration into it. Anyway, we recorded and also streamed the rest of episode 82 that evening. Read the rest of this entry »

The Weekly Rewind

Hold on a minute, did another week pass already? Damn, I think it did. You know what that means, it’s Weekly Rewind time again, so here goes nothing.

On Monday we recorded Linux Outlaws 79 and also streamed it live. This is only the second time we’ve streamed the show via Ustream but people seemed to enjoy it. Still no sign of a web cam on my end sorry but you can all tune in to watch Fab and listen to us on Monday evenings if you like. He’s even set up linuxoutlaws.com/live which shows how committed he is to this whole thing, seen too much TWIT if you ask me It’s all part of our new plan to record and stream the show on Mondays and get the podcast out on Wednesdays. It works out better for both of us as we have more time to edit earlier in the week and we can keep the lag between recording and release down, that’s important I think. In true Outlaws style we haven’t set a regular time for recording on Mondays yet but keep an eye on our Identica account for announcements. Exciting stuff.

On Tuesday I had hoped to go to Geek Up in Liverpool but wasn’t feeling too well and I also discovered I had to attend a funeral on Wednesday morning. I was disappointed to miss yet another Geek Up, I’ve been threatening to attend one for a couple of months now but I will manage it one day, I’m determined! I also found the time on Wednesday to finish and publish my Sabayon 4 review which has had an interesting response. 42 comments last time I looked.

Les Talking About ZFS

On Thursday I went to the first technical meeting of Chester LUG at one of my old stomping grounds, Chester University. It was actually called Chester College (and part of Liverpool University) when I was there studying computer science but it’s now a bone fide university in it’s own right. The meeting was great. Les Pritchard talked about Git, ZFS and OpenVZ and Stuart Burns also talked about Crunchbang Linux. I really enjoyed the topics and I’m going to have to  look into ZFS and OpenVZ a lot more I think. I’m a little concerned that Crunchbang is stalking me lately, it’s everywhere, I can’t get away!! Hehe I’m happy for Phil though and it’s a really great project. Les posted the details of the meet on the LUG Blog.

On Friday I edited the next episode of the Software Freedom Law Show for my friends at the SFLC. I’ve sent the files back to Bradley and you can expect to hear them on Tuesday when it’s released. This time Bradley and Karen discuss choosing the right open source license for your project and it’s well worth a listen for any developers out there. On Friday evening I got a bit worked up about copyright in the EU after watching the excellent video by the Open Rights Group, so I posted a piece about the situation which I’ve had a lot of nice responses to.

Stuart Demos Crunchbang

What Lies Ahead: Over the weekend I’ve been playing around with Debian Lenny some more and making notes. I’ll write up the review and release it sometime in the coming week I hope. I’ve been running Lenny for almost 2 weeks now since it was released actually and I have a lot to say about it.  Keep and eye out for that.  I’ll be going to Liverpool LUG on Wednesday night at our new location of the Liverpool Social Centre at 96 Bold Street. It’ll be starting from about 7pm I think and should be a lot of fun. If you’re in the area come along and say hi, you can ring the bell on the door and someone will let you in, we’re a friendly bunch. I’ll recording Linux Outlaws tommorrow and I’m also scheduled to do a talk about podcasting at Think Visibilty in Leeds on Saturday. I’m gonna be pretty busy but I’ll report back next Sunday and hopefully find time to post some other stuff throughout the week. So until then take care of yourselves and who knows I might even see you at once of these events, I hope so.

Dan

P.S – All this talking about my week reminds me of the classic sketch from the 90’s UK comedy programme The Fast Show.  “This week I are been mostly eating… Borbon Biscuits!!”

Just thought I’d give you an update on both recent and upcoming events in my little world. Had a great time at both Liverpool and Chester LUGs recently, salivated a little over all the Google G1 phones on display at LivLug as well I have to admit. They’re really nice I think, despite some disagreements with friends on aesthetics (it’s ugly apparently, fashion victims) if I had to choose one smartphone at the moment this would be it. Of course this is all academic as I don’t have the money and couldn’t afford one anyway but I like to kid myself along. I’ll be interested to see what other Android handsets come out later in the year. If I have some money then (stop laughing) I might get one as an all-in-one Linux based media player, phone and Internet tablet, I can dream.

6ix Toys Album Cover

I finished editing Linux Outlaws 76 this afternoon and hopefully it’ll be released later tonight. I’ll have another Software Freedom Law Show to edit next week and probably plenty of other Linux Outlaws related stuff to do as always. I need to sort out our European merchandise store and perhaps something for all our loyal Aussie listeners as well if I can, though that might be a bit harder to arrange. I’m looking for a UK manufacturer or supplier who’ll offer top quality stuff at a reasonable price for the fans. We want people to feel they’re getting good value and a good service, that’s vital! It’s not so much about making money for me as giving people the things they’re asking for, t-shirts, mugs, flame throwers… ok maybe not the flame throwers. I have some leads to chase up and I know I’ve been saying this for ages but I really am looking into the options, hopefully I’ll have something to report soon. Fab’s done some great new t-shirt designs and I can’t wait for people to see them.

This Thursday (Feb 12th) it’s the Liverpool Twestival which I’m gonna head along to. In case you don’t know what a “Twestival” is it’s essentially just a name given to an event organized on Twitter the microblogging site. I don’t know who came up with the term and it smacks a little of “web 2.0″ or “geek chic” style buzzwords to me but there we go. The event looks like it’ll be a lot of fun, there’s gonna be live bands, a raffle, an auction and all kinds of other things. It’s all raising money for charity too so it’s nice to support a good cause. I’m not sure if there’s any tickets left at the moment but it’s free to book so head over to the site if you can make it along. 6ix Toys are playing and I’ve really fallen in love with this band in recent weeks, they’re a 7 piece funk band from Liverpool with an amazing sound. I’ve always loved funk and these guys are certainly funky. I first heard them on the Craig Charles Funk & Soul Show on BBC 6 Music and bought their CD off the website not long after. Well worth checking out I’d say. I’ll report back on the event next week.

Looking forward, I have a review of Handbrake for Linux about 80% done and I’ll post that very soon. From there I’m gonna get distro hopping again and my first stop will be Sabayon 4 I think. It’s a recent release, a distro that makes some rather large claims about itself and one I’ve looked at before. So it’ll be interesting to see how it’s coming along. Right that’s it I think, as always any thoughts or comments on anything you see here or perhaps would like to see, just let me know.

Take care, over and out