Living an unfocused life (notes by a geek)

Explaining the gibberish in my status updates

2008-12-11T13:51:00.006Z

I was asked yesterday what the "gibberish" was in my status update on Facebook. I tried to explain it in a comment, but really, I ran out of space, and not being able to show people what I was talking about makes it a bit difficult!

So, here's what I wrote:

@nikdoof @dantheman @fabsh A #LUGCamp or #FOSSCamp would be a good idea, perhaps with keynotes by #UUPC, #LinuxOutlaws?

Because of the way that Facebook works, it can be updated by an external website - for example identi.ca or twitter

You will notice that both of these sites have a pretty standard template. Picture on one side, name of person next to the photo and then a message, finished by the date of the message. Like blogs, facebook and myspace, these systems are starting to become ubiqutious. Most news channels now have a twitter feed, and during the recent Presidential Elections, Barack Obama used Twitter (amongst other Social Networking systems) to rally support.

Twitter and Identi.ca (and others) are collectively known as Micro-blogs, or Microblogging sites, because of the size of the updates, which is limited to 140 characters, which is set at this size to be used (initially) with SMS, as a single SMS message would contain the nickname of the person who sent the message and their message.

Most microblogging sites follow a common convention for referring to things, so people are usually prefixed by an @ sign (for example @jontheniceguy), and a subject of interest will be prefixed by the # symbol (for example #bcliverpool). So that explains the symbols, but how about the words?

Here's what I wrote again:

@nikdoof @dantheman @fabsh A #LUGCamp or #FOSSCamp would be a good idea, perhaps with keynotes by #UUPC, #LinuxOutlaws?

So, we now know that I wrote to three people, nikdoof, dantheman and fabsh, the last two are presenters of a podcast, and the first the organiser of the Liverpool Linux Users Group, and I proposed that we should organise a "LUGCamp or FOSSCamp". LUG stands for Linux Users Group and FOSS (sometimes written as FLOSS) stands for Free (Libre) and Open Source Software. Linux is the basis of an alternative operating system to Windows or MacOS, but unlike Windows or OS X, it has a permissive license, which allows it to be given away for free, and installed on as many computers as the user wishes, without requiring any license feeds to be paid.

My inspiration for this event was another event I attended this past weekend, which was a "BarCamp". Now, a BarCamp is not something to do with drinking (although plenty occurred), but instead refers to computing jargon. A BarCamp is an "Unconference", where participants of the event, on their arrival, decide if they will be doing a talk, and if so, indicate to all the other participants by putting the details of their talk on a post-it note, which they then place on the schedule, which is usually a blank sheet of paper just detailing the available rooms. A BarCamp will tend to discuss computer topics, but can just as easily have a discussion about hypnotism, environmental issues or football! It tends to be a "geeky" event, but that isn't to say that non-geeks aren't welcome - in fact, frequently they will be welcomed to the group and encouraged to talk about what they are expert in.

By proposing that we organise a LUGCamp (a BarCamp for Linux Users) or a FOSSCamp (a BarCamp for those involved in Free and Open Source Software), I want to encourage the use of truely Free Software (which includes Linux based Operating Systems), and Open Source Software (of which Free Software is a subet), and I think a BarCamp like event would be a good way to start something up.

The last part of my text suggested that the keynote speeches (usually the inspirational talk given by a community leader or business director at the beginning or end of a conference) would be given by podcasters from the Ubuntu UK PodCast or the LinuxOutlaws Podcast. A podcast is a recorded audio or video show that is distributed via a web server and announced to RSS readers or specific "Pod Catching" software using an RSS feed.

I hope I've not missed anything out in explaining this properly, and if there's anything here I've missed, please let me know, either in the comments of this blog, or by e-mail.

Project Statuses, and should I start a new project?

2008-10-21T22:34:00.005+01:00

When I first started writing this blog, I said that I was a magpie. Sadly, this lifestyle of mine has just arisen again, and tried to bite me.

For a while now, I've heard about dropbox, which is (I've heard) a multi-platform, daemon based file synchronizer and version control system, with a web based UI. Sadly, the daemon portion of this system is closed source (apparently because it feeds into EC2), but I love the idea of this.

Because I can't stand that something which seems so simple should be locked down, I figured I'd write it from scratch.

In essence, this system has a few calls;

1) Create
2) Delete
3) Update
4) List
5) Revision History
6) Get Permissions
7) Set Permissions
8) Rename

So, I figured... how hard could this actually be? You've got the beginnings of a file system here, and if you tied this in with something like a NAS box which can run code, or shared hosting, then it'd probably work really well.

But then I realised. OK, I can start this project, stick it on sourceforge and then let it die like the rest of my projects. Yes, all those projects are mine with the exception of the VNC Server for the Pocket PC platform where I tried to contribute the code for a fix back and got no answer, so I created a new project, and put it there with the fix. It's not great but I know a few people use it. Personally, I later found another windows-only project which does the same thing a lot better. I use that now, but if I ever actually manage to go Linux-Only, then at least I'll have a VNC Server.

OK, so I should also mention that I'm also not the only contributor to Laconi.ca Tools. The name might be a bit of a nuisance as it now appears that Evan Prodromou is now considering renaming the server software as Identica, and letting Laconi.ca fade into the wind. There are three mini-projects on Laconi.ca Tools, an SMS->Laconi.ca gateway, an RSS->Laconi.ca poster and a Laconi.ca feed converter.

Ideally, I'd finish up my projects and make them vaguely useful, or I can blog about them and hope that someone will offer to do something with them :)

So, what do I have?

Ongoing

SMS->Laconi.ca Gateway

I'd like it to have the ability to send billable SMS messages in PDU mode, as well as receive them. It needs to handle 8bit and 16bit messages, rather than the current 7 bit messages, and it needs to cope with Text Mode instead of PDU mode. The PDU mode is already in a separate file from the main message handling section, so this file could also be included in other projects than want to send SMS messages.

This is on the Laconi.ca Tools project hosted at Sourceforge.

Radio Times Data Manipulator

Fortunately, this never made it to Sourceforge, and is instead on a hosted SVN repo, partially because I'm not sure of the legal status of this project.

I am able to read the XMLTV data from the RT website, and feed that into a database, and have it e-mail me when programs I like are on TV, far enough in advance that I can program my V+ box, but without needing to remember it within the two weeks that the RT data is new. For example, if I wanted, I could put in the name of a series which is *due to start* in a month or so, and then it'd let me know about 7 days before it starts so I can schedule it! I could also search back through old data, and check who was in a TV program (where available), and see what else they're in.

Currently, all I have is a search program and a data importer, but these are all command line, and not really intuitive. The searches should all be web based and look pretty. They should also be functional and transparent (unlike the RT website, which loves it's adverts and can't cope with the fact you don't have channels it lists). Oh, and I really could do with translating some of the boolean data the XMLTV data contains into real values (like, I suspect, has subtitles or, is widescreen).

A proper food and exercise diary with proper APIs!

So, here's the rub. The overweight person I am needs to lose weight, but the geek in me wants to quantify it. I need to eat 100 kcal less per day than I expend. Actually getting this data together is semi-hard. You know what you're eating (more-or-less - hopefully more than less, otherwise that's a whole other problem), and you know what you're expending (or not as the case may be) thanks to things like pedometers, wii fit, and heart monitors. Realistically, I'd also want it to measure things like "on day one, my waist was X cm and my chest was Y cm and my lung capacity was Z etc." "on day 10, I'd lost x cm on my waist, y cm on my chest and increased my lung capacity by z".

Add APIs to this, and you get a cross-platform, themeable system capable of being used anywhere. Include half-decent authentication, and you also get to let your doctor, gym instructor or mates see what you want them to see. Hell, do it right and you get a whole dashboard of measurements ("I see you covered an extra 5 miles today. Well done!")

Again, it's not on sourceforge, but on my personal SVN repo. I think I was writing it from the perspective of being all APIs which are callable from the PHP code, but I got lost in the database, and gave up all hope.

Projects in my head

A life stream

A few people have told me that there are existing services which would give me lifestream capabilities. Frankly, I think they're all shit. I want something like friendfeed without the comments (damnit, go to the source of the data and put your comments *there*), in a long line with no "three other messages were posted at the same time". And I want the stream to be hosted on my website. There. I said it. I want to be *in control*. Isn't that the whole point of the AGPL? You can take my code and run your own stream. If there's something like this already, let me know where it is and I'll be all over it!

A network device manager

One of the things I hate about networking stuff is that nothing really is designed to interoperate. I want to make sure that my server is running, OK I can do that. I want to check what log messages it last reported. Hmmm OK, I could use syslog I guess. I want SNMP traps to appear in the same place. Yep, that's just about doable I suppose. Oh, and I want to back up all my devices and run a centralised authentication system through this lot too? Finally, you want something which looks pretty to show all this lot at work, and a paging system to cap it all off. Hmmm could be tricky, even with commercial software.

Well, I did actually write about 1/3rd of this a while back, and was then persuaded to scrap it. I've probably still got the images of this work knocking around somewhere and I just need to write up what I did, and maybe even dedicate some time to it again at some point.

Write a reasonable man-management system for overtime purposes

My style of self management is to write tasks on my phone, on a post-it and in my calendar, depending on my technological state when I get the task. Realistically, this should all be transferred to one system, which then is accessible wherever I want it to be.

Frankly, I work more than I should do. I often start early, work through lunch and leave late. I really need to make a recording of what I'm doing so I can get paid for it, and sometimes take time out (because I worked so hard the day before) and get to go home early and read a book.

If I got this tasking system working for my not-work-life, I could make it work at work, and then make it give me a report at the end of each week on who I worked for and how long I was working for them to do my time sheets, and, if I figure it out right, get the *system* to generate everything I need to submit this rubbish for a payslip.

I started this as an API driven system, and then wrote a thin web UI, which became a big web UI called "My Framework" and I condemned it to my SVN store, never to be seen again.

Revive my Wiki

There once was a presenter on LugRadio who commented he had a private wiki in which he stored his personal notes on how to fix things. For a while, I put up a trac based wiki, which when I discovered Horde's development tools, I thought I'd transfer it all into the Wicked Horde module. Of course, I struggled in vain against Hordes modules, and never got it working the way I wanted it to, so gave up on it. It currently resides as a series of trac wiki marked up text files on my home machine, just waiting for the nod.

The Roundup

So, how to proceed? There's always more chaff in my head than I've finished or even started. I'd love to start anew, but tonight when I had the opportunity to do either, instead I wrote a blog post.

Hmmmm.....

What would you do, dear reader?

SMS to Laconi.ca - An introduction

2008-09-01T10:40:00.005+01:00

I've not posted in a while, but I thought I'd put together some notes about a little project I started to help out the Laconi.ca community.

Just to introduce Laconi.ca for those who don't already know about it; it's a federated micro-blogging system. You might have heard about this from people talking about identi.ca (which is the best known implementation of the Laconi.ca code base).

So, what does my project do to help you?

A lot of these micro-blogging systems have their message sizes based on the size of an SMS text message, but the Laconi.ca code doesn't have a way of receiving text messages. The code I wrote allows members of the community to set up their own SMS gateway which, using the most complete Laconi.ca API (which just so happens to be based on the Twitter API) relays the message to any Laconi.ca (or, because it's based on the Twitter API - twitter) instance.

If you want to set up your own smsToLaconica gateway, the code is available from my Subversion Repository, but you will also need a few things.

An old mobile phone with PC connection - either via a serial port or a blue tooth adaptor

Connectivity from your phone to your PC. Linux users may want to use a combination of Bluez and Ser2Net (details below). Windows Users may be able to address the device COMx:, however, I've not tried this and I'm not entirely convinced you can read and write with it like a file. I've also never used a Mac, so I don't know how this would work.

I set up Bluez using the Gnome Bluetooth tools by pairing the phone with the computer, but I know that not everyone has even a desktop on their Linux machines, so I've researched a little and found that everything we need can be done with one tool, hcitool.

Running the command

hcitool scan

will return

Scanning ...
11:22:33:44:55:66       MyDeviceName

where 11:22:33:44:55:66 is the Bluetooth ID of the device. Pair the device with the adaptor using the command

hcitool cc 11:22:33:44:55:66

Once the phone is paired, as root, edit /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf and add the following text:

rfcomm0 {
 bind yes;
 device 11:22:33:44:55:66
 channel 1;
}

again, using your own device's Bluetooth ID instead of 11:22:33:44:55:66. Restart the bluetooth service using

/etc/init.d/bluetooth restart

and then we need to configure Ser2Net.

WARNING: Ser2Net, by default, exposes a serial port as a general access telnet service with no restriction on who can access it. This does have a security implication in that once started, if your instance of the smsToLaconica scripts aren't using the port, then potentially any user of that system could connect to your mobile phone and dial out. This is solved by doing two things - 1) make sure your smsToLaconica script is always running and 2) allow ser2net only to bond to the localhost adaptor, not your ethernet adaptor by prefixing the port number with the IP address as detailed below. This still leaves this service open to local exploit, but ultimately your local users may have had access to the serial ports already.

Install ser2net (which is available in most Linux distributions) and edit the config file (again as root) in /etc/ser2net.conf, deleting the existing lines (unless you're likely to want to share your COM1: for anything else) and add the following line:

127.0.0.1,2000:telnet:600:/dev/rfcomm0:9600 8DATABITS NONE 1STOPBIT

Save this file, then restart the ser2net service with

/etc/init.d/ser2net restart

then telnet to localhost 2000. Confirm it works by sending the AT command to it - you should see a response of "OK", although you may also get a response of

AT

OK

Now you can set up the scripts for your own local copy of smsToLaconica. To make smsToLaconica work, you'll need php with php-curl and php-mysql, which are usually available from your repositories. You'll also need a MySQL server which stores the account details of your users and the messages before processing.

Check out a copy of the Subversion Repository (or just pull the files from the server) and put them in a NON-WEB-DIRECTORY. This is very important! Almost all of these files are not web pages, with the exceptions being ui.php and admin.php. If the only user on this SMS gateway is you, you don't even need to put those into a web directory (see the notes below). Edit the config.php file with appropriate settings and import the SQL table structure to the database configured in config.php, then finally call the run_scripts.sh (which just calls the read_sms.php and process_db.php scripts into the background).

If you put the ui.php and admin.php files into your web host, you will also need a copy of the config.php file. ui.php is where users configure their laconi.ca instance, username and password, and get told the mobile number to send an authorization code to. This is also the same page where they can remove their details from the gateway. The admin page shows how many users are on which Laconi.ca instances and any unhandled messages.

There is currently no index page for the web instance, and no user authentication, so you should probably configure .htaccess files for the admin page, if not remove it completely, or use it to send e-mails to the admin using crontab.

To set up the system without the web interface, you should insert a row into the database table called users, with the following columns completed: base_url, username, password and code. The code column should be something to send to the SMS gateway to associate your number with the service.

If you get stuck with any of this lot, please leave a comment, send me an e-mail or follow me on identi.ca

Was this money well spent? A comment on the British Heart Foundation advert on TV tonight.

2008-08-10T21:33:00.003+01:00

This week, I've heard a lot about the two minute advert for the British Heart Foundation; people in my office were talking about the radio advert "I'm {a minor celebrity} and I'll be watching it", I've seen the posters "This could be the most important two minutes of TV you'll ever watch" and so I thought, OK, I'll watch that.

Jules and I recorded the TV program which was on around the advert, and then stopped what we were actually watching in order to watch the advert.

But what actually was it? Well, I won't spoil it for those who actually want to watch what they recorded, but I seriously think that the BHF wasted their money, not so much on the advert itself, but for the hype they generated around the advert. I understand they had a lot to get across, and so probably couldn't have made it a series of short adverts - I mean, after all the had run the adverts with a skin belt tightening across a guy's chest a few years back (which I seem to recall got taken down because it was a pretty scary picture), so making everyone watch a 2 minute advert was a reasonably cool idea, but, I dunno, it just seemed like a waste to me.

After all, what were they actually saying? If you experience these 5 symptoms, it might be a heart attack, and the paramedics would rather hear from you than not.... that could easily have been an ongoing advertising campaign.

While I support what the British Heart Foundation do, I'm glad that I'm not one of their many supporters who are now probably asking themselves whether their money was well spent or not.

Lug Radio Live - Day 2

2008-07-20T21:36:00.001+01:00

I woke this morning feeling *AWFUL*. Once again, my body clock woke me early, at about 5:30, 6:00, 6:30, 6:45, 6:50, 7:00, 7:10, 7:30, 7:45. I finally gave up trying to reject the world and had a shower and finished the blog post I was writing last night. I went down to breakfast and met up with the guy from breakfast yesterday. We talked about the party last night and the states that various people got themselves into during the evening. I bought a bottle of water from the bar, scrounged a couple of ibruprofen from another LRL'er, settled my bill and left some luggage with reception, and then made my way to the venue. There was already a queue outside, but as I arrived it started to rain. The hordes approached the entrance and were let in! I noticed that Fab and Dan (from Linux Outlaws) failed to arrive at anything even vaguely approaching the right time!, but figured that they were big grown up boys and would probably manage :)

After we were played some intro out-takes and more people arrived, the LRL team started the show back up. I went first to Barbie's [1] talk on Inbox Malware. I feel pretty awful about this, but it's a subject I'm pretty aware about - albeit about 2 years out of date, so I half dozed through this talk.

I went from there to the Mass Debate. The panel consisted of Mr Ben (LugRadio Community), Jeremy Allison (Samba/Google), Matthew Garrett (Kernel/X.Org) and Max Spevack (Fedora). Let's be honest... Again, I'd prefer a more technical talk, but it's not a realistic hope given it was a debate rather than a technical forum. Some of the subjects discussed while I was there were:

1) GPLv2 vs GPLv3 - good thing, bad thing or apathy rules? What circumstances would people be recommended not to use GPLv3 if starting a new project today?

Of the hands raised, a VERY small proportion said it was a bad thing, and then the rest of the hands were 50/50 good thing/apathy. Slightly worrying, but Jeremy did say that most people don't care about the license, until they have to enforce it. The only circumstances where people would be encouraged to not license something under GPLv3 was if they were writing a kernel patch (as this is currently GPLv2 Only) or for integration into a project which is GPLv2 only. Jeremy also said that if this is the case, make sure the license says "GPLv2 or greater", to ensure you have the ability to roll on to GPL3 without needing to contact all the contributors to ask for their permission to upgrade the license.

2) Is anyone surprised that Hans Reiser did it? [2] and what is the future of ReiserFS, to which one member of the audience yelled out "It's fucked" while another said "It's an open source project - it doesn't matter, someone else can carry it on". The Hans Reiser issue was not discussed at length, except for Jeremy saying it was a shock to him as he had met Hans in the past.

3) What did the panel think of OOXML?
A brief summary was that Jeremy followed (and wrote a lot of) the Company Line - OOXML was always redundant as ODF fulfilled everything that OOXML was supposed to fix. Mr Ben said that he thought the issue will only benefit the Open Source community, and someone (I can't remember if it was Mr Ben again) said that the additional information provided by Microsoft allowed the OOo [3] project to fix some bugs in the legacy DOC and XLS formats as they are, in theory, backwards compatible. Jeremy finished by saying that he can only applaud the Microsoft Office team for taking the decision to integrate ODF into ongoing versions of Office. There was more discussion about this issue, but most of it generally re-iterated these views.

4) Should the major distributions try and work towards the goal suggested by Mark Shuttleworth and try to release at the same time. The discussion did prompt the question from Max that why would the major enterprise distributions agree to something that would help a non-enterprise distribution gain market share from the market leader? The rest of the views basically revolved around the Application people saying that it would be good to have a stable platform to work from, but wouldn't it be really boring doing bug fixes for 3 months and feature development for 3 months? The distro people, both on stage and in the audience said that most enterprise distributions release based on features rather than time, as these tend to have long support periods. Jeremy finished off by saying that even if the distros did get "in step" for one release, they'd be completely out within two more releases!

5) How do we get more "New blood" into Open Source?
All the board seemed to think that desktop development is now fairly boring and the fun stuff is online. Matthew said that people are now likely to develop a facebook application, then migrate to a wordpress install, to PHP and then to "something better", which brought a murmur from the floor. Mr Ben finished off by saying that, contrary to popular belief, geeks did actually procreate. Jono wrapped up the mass debate at that point!

I went to Subway for lunch at this point and got talking to a couple from Aberdeen about the work they do and what, if any, other podcasts they listen to (none). We talked for about half an hour and then went back to LRL.

I went to the Telepathy talk in the afternoon (and plan on trying to figure out how to make it all work!) watched some of the talk on Second Life, and then made a point of attending the lightning talk on "Terminator". The project looks REALLY cool, and I'll be installing it on my laptop when I get back to a reliable and fast network service. He also talked about turning a weekend hack into a project. He said some stuff that I already do, but also mentioned that the main problem I tend to have (I'm a magpie when it comes to scratching itches) is fixed by getting users who adopt your project. He's right, I've just not got around to getting a project that's actually usable yet!

I went to the closing speech, and it was really great. I caught a penguin and the RedHat mini mouse :)

I said my goodbyes to Jono, Aq, Chris and Adam, to Dan and Fab and to the various other peoples that I'd spoken to over the weekend, then walked back to the hotel, retrieving my luggage and chatted with one of the Jaiku lot until about 10 minutes before my train was due to leave. I walked to the station and caught the train home.

I'm exhausted, very disappointed this was my first LRL, and desperate to find a replacement for my LugRadio loss.

I'm glad I got to meet all of the people I spoke to this weekend. I've had some really cool discussions with people, and made friends with people I'd never have experienced otherwise.

All in all. Bloody good fun.

Oh, and those looking for a new podcast to listen to; I can strongly recommend LinuxOutlaws if you like LugRadio. It mixes the irreverence of LugRadio, with actual content. Who would have thought it eh? :)

[1] Barbie is a guy. It threw me. There you go.
[2] He killed his wife, in case you didn't already know.
[3] OpenOffice.org

Lug Radio Live Day 1

2008-07-20T01:16:00.002+01:00

Today started like any other recovering-from-a-hangover day... wake up too early, try and figure out why that was, go back to sleep, wake up, shower, have breakfast... except the next part was slightly unusual.

Because I had a 2-or-so wait until LRL started, I figured I'd try and get some coding done, but I decided... why go back to my room, when I can maybe meet up with some other geeks, so I fired up my laptop on the sofa at the bottom of the lifts at the Wolverhampton Novetel hotel. I'd just succeeded in connecting to the SSHd at home, when some guy came up and asked me if I was here for LRL. I said yes, and promptly put away my laptop. Coding... Fail.

We talked for about an hour and then decided to go and find this place. The guy I was there with also needed Ibruprofen, so we went on a mission for pain relief.

Finally, we found the venue, and discovered that we were 2nd and 3rd in line. The first guy had travelled down *THAT DAY* from Aberdeen for the show. Very dedicated! We waited for the show to get ready (and I took a about an hour or so) by which time the queue had started to go around the corner. I'd planned to take some photos of that, but frankly, couldn't get a decent shot. The music was loud and pretty good, and I recognised some of the exhibitors pushing past us to get into the show.

At about 10:30, (may have been closer to 11:00), we were all invited to "come on in then!", where we paid for our tickets, picked up a "Nutsack" and then filed in further to the Atrium.

In the Atrium were all the stall-exhibitors, and I spent most of the first couple of hours talking to the Open Rights Group, the Neuros OSD community guys and the Linux Outlaws.

The ORG had a pretty cool image on their laptop machine which was of the "Now, that's what I call music" CD case, showing "Now, that's what I call personal data - 25 million records lost". It looks pretty cool, and I want to send that to some mates. Sadly, it looks like there might be licensing issues and I'll need to fix them first, but yehr, that was cool :).

The Neuros OSD community guys were pimping the OSD device, but also had a pre-release OSD-2 to show off. If I hadn't just invested the time in the PS3 and Mythbox solution at home... well, I'd have bought one yesterday! (Oh, that and I didn't really have the money to blow on it!).

Besides it being LugRadioLive - you know, the thing that made me listen to podcasts in the first place, I also wanted to meet the podcasters who do Linux Outlaws. These guys have a really slick podcast and are the natural successor to the Linux Podcast throne - in my humble opinion :) I'd hoped to talk to them at the pre-show party on Friday Night, but they'd had their own pre-show party in Liverpool, which sounds like it might have been just as drunken as the LRL pre-show party!

So, yehr, I talked to Dan and Fab (Linux Outlaws) for a bit, and even took a few pics, although they're on my phone right now. They were really nice guys, but they were pretty busy with people talking to them a lot, so I figured I'd give them some space.

I showed off my EEE with the Ubuntu Netbooks Release on it, and shoed the devs for the fact that the icons were into the file browsing section... until I realised I'd had an update a couple of days back and it fixed it. Miracle of Miracle! :) Please forgive me Ubuntu Netbook Team and the Ume-Launcher Team.

The show started with a rousing welcome from the LugRadio Guys, who let us know what was going on and then... on to the talks.

I went first to the GroupHug presentation, which was billed as "Clustering with an evil twist". Basically the guy has figured out a job scheduling environment for Bash on multiple machines which all report back to a common core. He did a presentation, but I don't think it went down well. Someone said to me "This was an I Did It presentation." If I could figure out where I'd use it, I'd look at it again, especially as the clustering projects I have looked at all seem to have failed.

I didn't really fancy the OpenStreetMap talk, so I went to the cafe and considered having a soft drink or two. Ordered my first one and decided I couldn't really afford the second one, so I mooched around the stalls again, and had a good chat with a guy from 64Studio who was showing off an example of where his project has worked well, which is this Samsung touch panel device. It's been adopted by loads of rappers in the states, as something to do their mixing on while out and about. It was pretty cool, and if I had any musical talent beyond being able to whistle a (practically) perfect sine wave and a little bit of singing, I'd be very much up for some of that little device.

Another stall was a "Collaborative Art" project. Basically people were encoraged to put their mark on an A1 sheet of paper. Being the un-original guy I am, the stall next to this one was the Debian stall, so I copied their logo into the top left quarter of the sheet. For fairness, I then did the same for the Fedora project. Again, I have a photo.

I watched Bruno's talk on "Baguette on Snails" - a mocutation (is that the right word for a mocking presentation? Probably not) about the fact that to program, or use most of the Internet, you need to know English, and that not enough projects put the efford into I18n (Internationalization). Oh, and it got a few (slightly cheap) laughs from the audience when he "created objects" representing the presenters of Lug Radio as Cows.

The guy I met in the hotel in the morning and I went looking for lunch, and having walked around about three streets, we decided to get "Pork in a bun". It was very nice. We went back and waited for the afternoon shows.

I went to see the talk given by Jeremy Allison about the Samba project, which sadly was stuff I'd heard before, so it wasn't really that interesting. I'd have preferred to see a talk about reverse engineering the Microsoft Protocols, or how you deal with stuff when your user base is as big as it is. Never mind, he was an engaging speaker and I guess there must have been some people in the audience who hadn't heard the story before.

I went to see "The Gong-a-Thong", presented by no less than the Community Hero for years running - Mr Ben. Let's just say, you have to have massive balls to present the Gong-a-thong, but it must be pretty cold, as they weren't on show! The topics weren't very good for the most part. Basically, you have 5 minutes per talk, and they fit as many in as they can. Sadly, the bulk of them hadn't really planned what they were going to say, and the one guy who did (that I really enjoyed, but seemed to fall flat for the rest of the audience) was talking about safely getting from one pub to another using routing protocols. The best part of that talk was when he said "to identify the TTL, you had to set up a loop between two pubs and visit each one, consume a drink there and carry on to the next pub. The TTL was set when the traffic stopped, and that it wasn't user specifiable!"

Once Mr Ben had reclothed himself, he did a talk on "Supporting World Domination", where he had some really great ideas, that I'm eager to be involved in implementing. I'll not talk about these too much until the end of day 2, but yehr... that was a good talk.

Lastly, we had.... LUGRADIO LIVE & UNLEASHED.

It's an hour or so of talking, and I shouted stuff from the back a couple of times that they heard and responded to. I'm hoping I'll be audible on the recording, but if not, it was still great feeling. You should listen to the show as there's no way I can describe it beyond saying it was really good to be there, be an active participant in a show rather than just a consumer of it. The really good news that came out of it was that these guys wanted to carry on with the Live shows, so they'll probably be doing that next year. I hope that even if they don't do it (hey, a year is a long time for life to change things) that they might still recognise me at the Combined UK Podcasts tour instead :)

I went back to the hotel, sorted out some stuff and then headed out to go to the evening party, when guess who was behind me... Dan and Fab from the Linux Outlaws show, plus a group of their friends who met on Jaiku. As I'd spoken to both Dan and Fab earlier, they recognised me (although it might have had something to do with me saying Hi to them!), and as I knew where I was going, we went off into the centre together. We all had something to eat together, and it was a really nice feeling being able to just sit and talk with them all... I'd definately do that again (given the chance). We went on to the LRL venue again, and I bought some of the Jaiku lot a drink - I'd have bought them all a drink, but they'd already bought their own by this point. I was feeling good... I was drinking with these online-heroes of mine, and then Jono walked past, and I bought him a drink... and he was there with Dan and Fab and me for about half an hour... Rock On!

Then, the Karoke started up. Well, what a mixed bunch were there! Some people were really good, and then others... well, weren't so good. Jono Bacon and "Sarah", an Irish girl who I should probably know from the way everyone else was treating her were excellent examples of Karoke done *right*. There were a group of three interlopers who really couldn't sing and I just couldn't stop laughing which didn't go down so well with them. After a few songs and feeling more than a little drunk, I went for a sit down somewhere quiet, and discovered Bruno sitting by himself. He and I talked for more than an hour about all sorts of stuff, and it was really cool. This is one of the nicest guys I've met at LRL, and I've met quite a few this year.

I suddenly realised that even though I'd not had a drink for more than an hour I was still feeling incredibly drunk, so I decided that it was time to head back to the hotel. I bought a bottle of water at the hotel bar (which was surprisingly still open at gone 1AM) and retired to my room to try and flood out my hangover with pure water. Sad to report, it hasn't worked!

LugRadio Live 2008 - the Pre-Event Party

2008-07-19T00:32:00.003+01:00

Today was the first time I'd ever really been in the presence of heroes in my eyes (except Alan Cox at my first ever Linux Expo UK - without realising that was who it was!). Today, not only did I get to meet Daviey and "Cied" (Ciemon Dunville), but I also got to offer Aq a pint. I'd have actually bought him one, but I was actually in the middle of a conversation with Daviey at the time, and wanted to continue the chat!

For those who don't know, Aq, Jono, Adam and Chris are the presenters of the famous-amongst-linux-peoples podcast LugRadio. Aq and Jono started the podcast four years ago, and this year they decided to close up shop - a sad day for all of us who love to chuckle in public at audio via headphones.

Having had a fairly quiet journey (as far as Stafford) from Manchester and checked into a nice-ish hotel (except for the people in the room next door) I decided to check out the pre-show party, as mentioned repeatedly on the LugRadio podcast, at the Hogs Head in Wolverhampton.

For those who have never been to Wolverhampton, let's just say that it's not exactly a large place. I walked from the outskirts to the centre in about 10 minutes, and even then most of that was wandering in circles making sure I'd actually not gone too far for the junction I was looking for!

The venue was packed (as it would be on a Friday Night), and my first order of the day was to charge my mobile. I turned on my laptop, turned off the power saving and plugged in the mobile.

Now, in a normal pub, this might have turned heads, but on this occasion, I think there might have been too many mobiles and laptops to phase anyone, so having put my laptop back in the bag and confirmed I was still charging my phone, I made my way to the bar.

The queue was rather heavy, but I managed to get close to the bar and order what soon became my usual - two Blue WKDs, and then made my way back to where I'd been charging my laptop.

I'd already spotted an 802.11 detecting T-Shirt, and suddenly realised that I'd made a fashion faux pas... I had exactly the *SAME* t-shirt. What was I to do? I couldn't arrange a wardrobe replacement overnight. Oh well, at least I was fairly unique in my lego-style "I love it when a plan comes together" A-Team T-Shirt, and maybe by Sunday the batteries in his T-Shirt would have run out and mine would still be fresh... plus I have a Transformers shirt, and no-one else there did... HA!

I slid over to where the Wifi-T-Shirt guy was standing and asked him if he was anything to do with LRL. He said yes, and directed me towards the beer garden. Oh my. What a lot of geeks.

I tried to take a photo, but sadly, as all I had with me was my dodgy mobile, the photos look like crap. They are tagged at the dashwire LRL08-pre-party tags page.

Fortunately, after about half an hour of standing around like an idiot, I saw someone I knew from GeekUp Manchester, and talked to him for half an hour. I know *who he is* but not his name. It's very bad of me. Hopefully, he'll post my picture on Flickr and I can tag it, and get his name as a result!

I went and bought some drinks (two Blue WKDs and a guiness for GeekUp Guy) and then headed back into the fray. I'd seen a Ubuntu-UK Podcast jacket and was looking for Dan and Fab of LinuxOutlaws fame. Sadly I didn't spot Fabs dreadlocks, so I couldn't lurk, and instead went and spoke to Daviey from UUPC. We talked for a while and eventually offered him a drink, and, while I was at the bar, recognised the dulcit tones of one Stuart "Aq" Langridge. I offered him a drink, but when the bar staff weren't damn quick enough for me, suggested I'd give him the money and come back to talk to him later. He declined and suggested I could offer him yet another drink tomorrow night. Oh why not I thought, and pocketed the about £1.80 in change I had!

I went back to talk to Daviey and Cied (also from UUPC) about Amateur Radio - a hobby that Cied and I have in common, and one that Daviey seems to have missed by the skin of his IRC virginity. After a while talking (where I seemed to volunteer for a speaking part on the UUPC cast to be recorded during LRL), Daviey misunderstood the universal sign language for "It's your round", thinking it meant "Drink up, I need a kebab", so went around for about half an hour saying goodbye to people, and then carried on talking once he'd bought his round (although I should note, he didn't bloody buy me a drink. Damnit). Meanwhile, I was introduced to Jon, dubbed "The Nasty Guy", after I mentioned my usual Web2.0 nickname and he protested that he was the only Jon in the room, hence he got given the bad name :)

After Daviey and Cied wandered off, Jon and I discussed life feeds, and how you should be able to tailor the feeds into "all photos of X", "All microblogs of X", "all work stuff from X", etc. I think I'm going to write it, and friendfeed be damned.

I bought another pair of bottles and realised that actually I was rather drunk, and was starting to not make any sense, so voluntarily returned to the hotel, met Gordon JCP in the lift after having admired his t-shirt from afar most of the night, and stumbled to my room (where my noisy neighbour has either gone to bed or left! Woot!) and figured I should probably write up what has happened thus far.

The only downside thus far has been that I've eaten only marshmallows and drunk only Blue WKDs since arriving at Manchester Piccadilly, so tomorrow I am likely to either be suffering from a sugar hangover, or worse a real hangover. Not so good. Sadly, when the bar closed at the hotel, they stopped doing room service, so I can't even have something greasy to sober me up.

Never mind, I'll learn for tomorrow night... take advantage of the Kebab house en-route, and damnit, Wolverhampton is small enough that you can go down every street to get back to the hotel, and you'll still not take more than 20 minutes to do it :)

Good Night all :)

Book Journal - Jumper by Stephen Gould

2008-05-11T21:23:00.006+01:00

Purchase Location: Borders
Date Started: Approx Feb 2008
Date Finished: Approx Feb 2008

Reason for buying this book: I saw the film with Jules about a week before buying the book, and I thought the film had a lot of scope for at least a sequel, if not to turn into a series, because of the lack of information about Paladins and their complex relationship with the Jumpers. I bought the book to find out whether there was any more information than that revealed in the film.

A brief summary of the book: Mid-teenage boy is regularly assaulted by his alcoholic father discovers he is able to teleport. Leaves home (by teleporting), robs a bank, meets a nice girl, reacquaints himself with his mother (who walked out many years before), mother is killed on a plane which is hijacked, makes a profession of stopping hijackings, becomes useful to American Government.

My thoughts on the book: Once I'd realized that the book was nothing at all like the film, I really got into the book... in fact, I'd finished reading it within 24 hours of buying it. Similarities with the film pretty much end once he robs the bank, and there's nothing about Paladins in the book. Some of the scenes were pretty descriptive, but not enough to stop me reading. It interested me enough to make me buy the second book (Reflex), although not enough to make me buy it first-hand! If I were still actively running and playing role-playing games, I'd probably use the plot line for at least a character, if not a whole game, although to be fair, I'd have probably done that from the film as well as the book. The character in the book is better rounded though.

Rating: 4/5

Impulse Buyer!

2008-04-07T20:05:00.006+01:00

I'm a bit of an impulse buyer. I see something online or in a bricks-and-mortar shop, and decide I want it.

My most recent grab was my EEEPC, but before that it was my Playstation 3, then my MDA Vario III, and before that it was a Wii, then a Nabaztag/tag, a digital photo frame, my MDA Vario.

I always get a bit wrapped up in what will I do with it, I try and get involved in the various communities around what I've bought, but generally I don't manage to last long, and pretty soon, it's a lump of unused plastic sitting on a shelf.

A perfect example of this is the PS3. Having read loads of stuff online about how great a Linux platform it was, I rushed out and bought it fairly soon after it came out. I downloaded the YellowDog Linux ISO for the PS3, and tried to install it. And failed. I did this about 5 or 6 times, and eventually decided that it was more effort than it was worth. Another good example is the Nabaztag/tag, where I bought it based on what I thought I could do with it, and without actually finding out what you can do with it... which turned out to be not as much as I thought you could.

I've managed to not get a large (>35") TV only because every time we bought one and got it home, it wasn't working or it failed after a couple of days. Jules and I agreed that it wasn't worth the hassle, after the third time we bought one.

My latest desire is VGA glasses. I really want to be able to have glasses on when I'm using my EEE, but for the life of me I can't actually figure out what I'll do with them beyond using them as a bigger screen... but here's the thing, the maximum resolution you can achieve with VGA (or Video) glasses is 640x480, unless you're prepared to spend over £1000, which frankly, I'm not.

If you read my twitter feed (http://twitter.com/JonSpriggs), you'll know that I bought Wii Fit this weekend just gone. I've gone a bit bonkers with it, doing more than 3 hours exercise on Saturday and Sunday, and then 10 minutes on Monday and this morning, and I've done another 30 minutes tonight, with more to come once Jules has done some on there. Jules worries that I'll get bored with it if I keep at it. I hope she's not right.

My projects - an overview

2008-03-30T09:32:00.002+01:00

Lately, my focus has been slightly torn, not only do I have two personal projects on the go at once (DSSN and OCDL) and some planned projects (like TCP over HTTP), but I've also got a big work project I'm doing and have been doing for months now. On top of that my dad's not been well, there's a whole bundle of Birthdays coming up (Jules' Mum - 50, Mine - 30, Jules - 29, Jules' Dad - 50), and we've been rather busy almost every weekend since January.

Needless to say, (with the exception of the work project that I don't really have a choice about) I've not really kept my eye on the ball with anything.

Let me explain a little bit about the projects I'm trying to do (again, excepting the work project - I'm resolving now never to talk about work in my blog... it's just too damn dangerous and I've heard of too many careers destroyed by talking about or talking at work).

DSSN is my main focus for personal project work at the moment. It stands for "Distributed Secured Social Network" and grew out of an idea I had for an authentication system to improve the security provided by OpenID. I talked about the whole DSSN system at BarCamp Manchester in March 2008, where my authentication system was described as "having reimplemented Kerberos". After the day was over, I looked into Kerberos, and while there are similaraties between Kerberos and the Authentication System I devised, it's not the same.

DSSN is designed to act as both Client and Server for the content you use online, acting like a combination of an e-mail client, RSS reader, calendar, to do list, and shared address book. The individual DSSN nodes communicate with each other using XML based feeds, over an HTTPS feed and use either PGP/GPG to encrypt the exchanged data or for those who don't have the ability to include PGP/GPG on their server, the system can automatically generate a hash from the message content and forward that as part of the XML.

So, why re-invent the Social Network? Well, frankly, I'm concerned that a very small number of players control the personal details of most of my friends, and their friends, and their friends... and so on. I know the Data Portability Project are designing a way to make sure you can get your Facebook information on MySpace, but I want to be sure that when Facebook gets bought out by Rupert Murdock, or MySpace gets bought by Microsoft (these are possibilities rather than predictions), I want to be sure that my data doesn't exist on their servers, or if it does, it's PGP encrypted with my private key, and they can't mine the data for "marketing purposes", and on the day that Bebo gets cracked, the crackers can't sell my contact details to the Russian Mafia for the purposes of Identity Theft.

So, why the delay? DSSN is a complicated beast. For it to be secured from the start, I wanted to be sure that the API's were right from the outset, and that I'd got my head around how to ensure the traffic flow was secure. I'm still trying to figure it all out (at http://spriggs.org.uk/projects/dssn/wicked) and then life got in the way.

OCDL is something that was suggested at the Manchester BarCamp at a talk about the ECDL, and was proposed because a certain monopoly has provided extensive "funding" to the ECDL (like they do with schools) to encourage people to think that to use a word processor, you need to buy their particular Word processing package, and again, when you want to use a spreadsheet, you'll want their Excel-lent spreadsheet program. For web browsing, well, I'm sure you get the idea.

The OCDL was supposed to be a series of lessons about computing, starting with the basics of how to use an internet browser, an e-mail client or web mail site, how to use a word processor and spreadsheet, and then with some "advanced" modules on the fundamentals of Databases (probably taught with OOo Base, MySQL or a common proprietary databasing application). The lessons would be released under two Creative Commons licenses, depending on whether it was a completed lesson, or one still being drafted (that is, the draft versions are released with a No Commercial, Attribution license, and then when finished, the released versions have a No Derivatives license, but this will be done with the approval of all participants in the process).

So why the delay here? As a concept, this dual-license sounds great, but in practice, how do you enforce these two very distinct and separate license clauses? Also, other people, much more knowledgeable with teaching skills and underlying knowledge about the products have already started to write other training courses.

I'm seriously considering ditching the idea of building an OCDL system, as I don't think I'm the right person to push it forward.

I've also got a series of microprojects I've got bubbling at the back of my head.

There's a project to wrap proper TCP or UDP packets in HTTP or HTTPS. This was designed to allow access to SSH and E-Mail from Wifi Hotspots where only HTTP traffic is allowed. The main reason I've not implemented this is because frankly, I work in IT Security, and I just know that the first day I catch someone who's using this at work, I'll let it slip that I wrote this traversal system, and I'll be in big trouble!

I want to write a web based Food and Exercise charting system, which should help me lose weight. The reason I've not got very far with it? I keep circumventing the system, and put data straight into the database using phpMyAdmin, which means I end up not actually doing what I'm trying to with the system, and just keep writing kludge.

Before the requirement for keeping an accurate logbook was removed from the Amateur Radio regulation, I had planned to write a full featured log book in PHP, and then I wanted to use Ruby, and now, I don't really know what I want to do with it all.

I had another couple of projects I wanted to work on, and wrote them up on my wiki at home (http://home.spriggs.org.uk) but they are all like shiny bits of paper, just waiting to tempt me away from what I'm working on at the time.

I'm slightly scared this blog will become another shiny bit of paper.

A change is as good as a rest?

2008-03-29T01:50:00.001Z

For the last 8 or so years, I've had a blog on a site that I grew to despise. Ignoring it's failings, about two years ago, I ended up not using it any more, and eventually, I got the message that I just wasn't using it enough... mostly because I got sent an e-mail to say "You've not updated your blog, and unless you put in an entry in the next couple of days, we're going to get rid of it", and unlike the previous twice I'd got that message, I didn't bother to submit an entry.

Around the same time, I tried to start a Free Software Advocacy Movement called "What's in it for me?", where you could author and share advocacy resources, like leaflets for users or letters to companies, asking them to consider the use of or development of Free or Open Source Software.

Everyone I spoke to about it sounded interested, including the great advocate himself, Jono Bacon, but all of these people wanted to know one thing alone... where's your blog? Having just shut one down, I told people, "I don't have a blog".

A little while ago, I attended a BarCamp, I talked about a project I wanted to start, to develop a new social network, that wasn't centrally located, that communicated between various remote nodes using a combination of personalized RSS feeds delivered over HTTPS, using PGP to encrypt the body of a message. In the run up to the event, it was suggested, if you want to prep people for your talk, then start blogging it... well, of course, I didn't have a blog.

And then, at the BarCamp, there were the guys from North Crew who were pimping their NorthPack Site... which is a blog aggregator. And I started to think, well, maybe I should give this blogging thing another go?

I've vaguely kept up-to-date with a twitter feed but frankly, even that I'm not much good at doing that. I guess what I'm saying is, expect this blog not to have regular postings, but then maybe have a batch all at once.

I'll still be keeping my Twitter thang going on, mostly because it updates my Facebook Status, and at the same time updates my mugshot profile (which should be where almost everything about me ends up).

So, for now, bear with me... I'm still getting used to blogging again. The last time I did this, I came to the conclusion that "only boring people keep diaries". I'm tempted to think this might all change, but... I guess we'll see :)

Jon