Archive for November, 2007
Posted on November 23, 2007 - by jono
Bring. It. On.
Everyone has a list of bands that they wish they got to see, but never did. One such band on my list is Carcass, one of the first death metal bands I ever heard, and a huge inspiration for my own music. Well, metal-fans, good news:
Legendary British death metal band, CARCASS, will reunite for next year’s Wacken Open Air festival. Bassist/vocalist, Jeff Walker, issued the following statement on behalf of the band:
“Well, they said it would never happen. In fact I said it would never happen. Then I noticed no one pays attention to what I say anyway and I sounded like an idiot…
“Myself, Jeff Walker, on bass and vocals, ‘the semi-legendary’ Bill Steer and Mike Amott on lead guitar and Daniel Erlandsson (ARCH ENEMY), filling in for Ken on drums, look forwards to mutilating your hearing”.
Bring. It. On. 
Posted on November 23, 2007 - by jono
November 2007 Ubuntu Community Report
Ladies and Gentleman, the November 2007 Community Report is now available! Go and read it to find out what many of the Ubuntu teams have worked on this month. Rock and roll.
As ever, we are looking for more and more teams to take part in the reporting process – to get involvement, and to show off your team’s work, read this simple guide. It does not take a lot of work, and is a huge asset for the wider Ubuntu community.
Posted on November 22, 2007 - by jono
Black Crusade
I just wanted to say a huge thank-you to Jason Meers and Jim. A few days back Jason contacted me to say that he knew I liked metal and wanted to offer me a free spare ticket to the Black Crusade tour in Manchester. On this tour Shadows Fall, Arch Enemy, Dragonforce, Trivium and Machine Head put in an appearance. I drove up there last night and had a great night. Thanks a huge amount chaps!
The review:
- Shadows Fall – missed them, but I love their stuff.
- Arch Enemy – incredible as ever, new material sounded good and they put on a good show, despite the sound being a tad ropey at times.
- Dragonforce – more cliches than you can shake a stick at. I am a big fan of Power Metal, but I can’t help but think these guys are a poor quality imitation of bands like Hammerfall, Stratovarious and Kamelot, just sped up and populated with endless self-gratifying, posing solos. I used to see these guys before they got signed, when they supported a bunch of bands at The Underworld in London. I am pretty surprised at how well they have taken off, particularly with the seeming over-saturation of Power Metal bands right now. But, nonetheless, a well executed show and good playing, and clearly the fans loved it, so more power to the people.
- Trivium – missed these on the previous tour with Annihilator, which annoyed me. Great show, and much more metal than I expected – was very impressed. Highly recommended.
- Machine Head – as expected, Machine Head pulled off a stunning show, and Rob Flynn is just a master at work. Great show, great playing and incredibly grounded interaction with the crowd – they seem like genuinely nice chaps. The only downside was that they butchered Davidian a bit as the adrenaline pumped, but it was an incredible show and Machine Head can still bring the heavy.
Great night all in all, and thanks hugely to Jason and Jim.
Posted on November 22, 2007 - by jono
The MOTU train rolls on
MOTU arse-kicking sponsor by Super Hard Steel Toe Capped Dr Martin boots:
Posted on November 21, 2007 - by jono
Smart. Enthusiastic. Decent.
In my last post I uttered the following words:
You know, every so often it is tempting to get wrapped up in minutia and having it obscure the bigger picture. Sometimes its easy to forget we are surrounded by incredible, genuine, inspiring individuals, and this is a privilege and not something we should take for granted.
The point being, we often can’t see the wood for the trees, and sometimes lose sight of the incredible people that form our community. Well, I wanted to take this concept and push it a little further.
Open Source is an interesting game because it fundamentally combines two core principles, technology and ethos together in a high-traffic, detail-orientated environment. Right now I am subscribed to 154 feeds in my RSS reader, 22 of which are planets aggregating hundreds of individual blogs. This results in a huge burst of information every morning when I log in and catch up with the state of the art. Within my reader I see numerous discussions about new technology, ethical issues, licensing, new software releases, conspiracy theories, pundits opining over the irrelevant things that they deem so relevant and a million and one other pieces of information. Every morning I attempt to sort and prioritise this news-burst in my head, keeping the interesting information and desperately trying to make space in my feeble pea-sized brain by forgetting all the useless cruft that has collected over the years.
The Open Source community is by its very nature detail-orientated. We deal with thousands of bugs, patch queues, email, endless mailing list and forums threads, feature specifications, governance infrastructure, policy documents, licensing specifics and more. We have a lot to balance in our respective pea-sized brains, but fortunately we have people who have considerably larger brains than mine. Mark my words, in 100,000,000 years evolution will have driven Open Source people to have tefal-heads.
But with all of this detail and noise, sometimes its easy to not only forget that we are working with incredibly bright, capable, smart people, but to also forget many of the core attributes that we can so easily take for granted. I iterated this view many moons ago in an entry called Unwrapping Learning Potential With Open Source in which I opined (much like the pundits) that the education world is blind to the collaborative nature of Open Source and missing an opportunity to teach kids how to work together, learning from many of the social and technical lessons that we take for granted in the Open Source world. Again, they focus on the detail (ticking feature comparison boxes between different Operating Systems) as opposed to identifying the real value and the real opportunity that Open Source provides – working together to make cool things happen.
I have an analogy here. When we held LugRadio Live 2007, we had a crew of around 15 people who all volunteered to help set up and run the event. In the build up to LugRadio Live, we LugRadio gents were working like crazy to get everything in place, arranging and finalising hundreds of details, fixing problems and making sure everything was prepared. After a big night on the beer on the Friday night, I showed up with the other gents at 7.30am in the van, blaring out Stratovarious, to find most of the crew waiting outside the building. The venue manager opened the doors and we had three hours to get set up before the event opened. Within 10 minutes, every one of those crew members was adorned in yellow crew t-shirts and busy doing their thing, be it packing bags, setting up audio equipment, getting cameras ready, setting up chairs, configuring networks, putting up signs, making bacon sarnies or any one of a range of other things. It was tempting to get whisked away with the detail of the day and the worry of getting everything in place in three hours, but it was incredibly heartening to see this army of volunteers who had all dragged themselves out of bed with hangovers, disperse across the venue and work like a team to get everything set up – the diversity, enthusiasm and commitment in the crew mean’t all bases were covered, and everyone pulled their weight to make an event happen that fewer people could simply not achieve. I will never, ever forget that moment.
The key thing here is that in all the details, spats, debates, differences in direction and nitty-gritty, it is easy to forget that the core ingredients in this community are enthusiastic, smart, decent people who volunteer their time and energy to make Open Source happen. As Open Source continues to explode, and as we continue to see such huge growth and success as it spreads across the world and into different industries, we all need to remember that the raw ingredients that make this happen are enthusiastic, smart, decent people, and I for one feel privileged to spend every day with these people.
Posted on November 20, 2007 - by jono
Realising what is important
You know, every so often it is tempting to get wrapped up in minutia and having it obscure the bigger picture. Sometimes its easy to forget we are surrounded by incredible, genuine, inspiring individuals, and this is a privilege and not something we should take for granted.
Posted on November 19, 2007 - by jono
Bringing home the MOTU
With all the fun going on encouraging people to get involved with Ubuntu packaging, I was really psyched to see this blog post in which Efrain is writing a short diary of his progress going through MOTU. This is excellent, and will help us to continually improve and refine how people can get involved in Ubuntu.
I would love to see more blogs and diaries from people who are going through the process of learning how to package and become a MOTU. Rock on!
Posted on November 19, 2007 - by jono
LugRadio Season 5 Episode 5 released!
LugRadio Season 5 Episode is out! Go and grab it!
On this episode:
- Havoc Pennington and Colin Walters from Red Hat talk about the Gnome Online Desktop project (1.23)
- Do we need rockstar programmers? Prompted by Thomas “marnanel” Thurman talking about the hard but unglamorous work that he and the rest of the Metacity team do, we discuss whether it’s a good idea to have “rockstar” hackers involved in a project (26.40)
- El Bizarro’s Oblique Freak Show! This week on the freak show: Second Life! (41.00)
- The Finger Of God decides which distro is best, as requested by one of our listeners. Send us your choices and let the Finger decide! (54.10)
- LugRadio has been chosen as the best Linux podcasts in the Linux Format magazine Christmas issue. We’re pretty pleased by this, unsurprisingly (55.12)
- Your emails, and the best posts from the LugRadio Forums. A brilliant set of emails this time: thanks very much! Way too many to read, and we chose only the best — the very best email wins a LugRadio t-shirt every week, so get your mails in to show@lugradio.org, and look at lugradio.org/contact for our voicemail number and the LugRadio forums (56.58)
Enjoy.
Posted on November 15, 2007 - by jono
Fire up your MOTU engines
You know what? Packaging is super-important in the Ubuntu world. We need more and more packagers to help make sure the software in Ubuntu is up to date, high quality and reliable. With this in mind, we need more and more packagers, and this means you.
We are working to make it as simple as possible to get involved in Ubuntu as a packager. All new packagers should join the MOTU team – this team provides an excellent means of getting involved in Ubuntu packaging, learning the technical and community processes, and having plenty of resources available to help the solve your problems you face on your way to becoming a member of our incredible community. We are working to make the process as clear and straight-forward as possible, without compromising the core quality of Ubuntu.
You will be seeing more and more focus on MOTU and packaging over the coming months, and for now you should know two important things.
- First, a great way to get involved and get started is to read the Getting Started Page!
- Second, there will be monthly Packaging 101 sessions to teach how to get started learning to be a packager. The next Packaging 101 session will be on Thu 13th Dec at 16.00UTC in #ubuntu-classroom on Freenode. These sessions means new contributors are never more than a month away from an IRC tutorial session showing the basics.
There is never a better time to get involved as an Ubuntu packager and I am keen to hear from everyone who is going to learn to become a MOTU and how we can improve the process.
Posted on November 14, 2007 - by jono
Facebewk
I can feel my fingers curling as I write this post, and I can feel my peers looking on in dismay, but I have to say, I continue to love Facebook. I am not sure what it is about it, but it really is helping me stay abreast of what my friends are doing, is genuinely useful for keeping in touch with long-lost pals and is generally easy and uncluttered to use. Mind you, I would like to have a special button that instantly removes people the planet, erm, I mean…from my friends list, who have anything to do with Zombies, Vampires or other such nonsense.
Despite this, in Boston a week ago I heard someone say “I am totally going to friend you“. At this point my eyeball removed itself from the socket with rage. Nevermind, I guess the vernacular needs to reflect the current state of the art.
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Flickr Photos
