Archive for February, 2008

Posted on February 28, 2008 - by jono

First LugRadio Live USA 2008 Exhibitors Confirmed!

Organisation for LugRadio Live USA 2008 on the 12th and 13th April 2008 in San Francisco coninues apace, and we are in the process of confirming exhibitors. Our first raft of exhibitors have just been confirmed, and I can announce them as:

• Google
• Dice
• GNOME
• PostgreSQL
• O’Reilly
• OpenSuSE
• Linden Labs
• Magnatune
• gOS
• Neuros
• Sun
• Texas Instruments
• South California Linux Expo
• Komputers 4 R Kids
• San Francisco LUG
• BytesFree.org
• Ontario Linux Fest
• Frets on Fire
• OpenNMS
• One Course Source

We are currently working to add another twice as many exhibitors. If you would like to exhibit you’re project, organisation or company, get in touch with us at show AT lugradio DOT org.

Of course, LugRadio Live USA 2008 is much more than just exhibitors, we have 35 speakers who will be speaking across three stages:

• Miguel de Icaza (Mono / Novell / Co-Founder Of GNOME)
• Ian Murdoch (OpenSolaris / Founder Of Debian)
• Robert Love (GNOME / Google)
• Aza Raskin (Mozilla / Humanized)
• Benjamin Mako Hill (Ubuntu / Debian / FSF)
• John Buckman (Magnatune)
• Val Henson (Kernel / VAH consulting)
• Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla / GNOME)
• Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons)
• David Schleef (GStreamer)
• Matthew Garrett (Power Management / Kernel)
• Danese Cooper (Intel / OSI)
• Aaron Bockover (Banshee / Novell)
• Liana Holmberg (Second Life / Linden Lab)
• Emma Jane Hogbin (Hick Tech)
• Joe Zonker Brockmeier (OpenSuSE / Novell)
• Kristen Accardi (Kernel)
• Joe Born (Neuros)
• Selena Deckelmann
• Stewart Smith (MySQL)
• Dan Kegal (Wine)
• Ben Collins (Ubuntu / Kernel)
• Jason Kridner (Texas Instruments)
• Jeremy Allison (Samba / Google)
• Christian Hammond (VMWare)
• Ian McKeller (Songbird)
• Alison Randall (Parrot / Perl / OSCON)
• David Huffman (LVM)
• Brian Will (Pigeon)
• Belinda Lopez (Ubuntu)
• Ilan Rabanovich (SoCal Linux Expo)
• Eddy Mulyono (Packaging)
• Matthew Walster (Demo Scene)

It is going to be a kick-arse event. And remember it is only $10 for the entire weekend. Thats it. Ten bucks. If you want to come and join in the fun, please go and pre-register, it guarantees you’re entry, and also includes a bunch of other benefits. Look forward to seeing you all there!

Posted on February 28, 2008 - by jono

brainstorm.ubuntu.com, bow chicka wah wah

Diggity Digg Da Digg Digg Diggity Digg!

One of the toughest challenges when building a Linux distribution is trying to ensure we are solving the problems and feature-gaps that are affecting our users – we genuinely want to make Ubuntu rock for everyone. In terms of problems, specifically defects, people can report bugs, but in terms of features, gathering a decent collection of features, assessing their popularity, and weeding out the crack is a tough process. It really is a devilishly difficult problem. It is however, a problem that we have been discussing across a few teams for a while, and I am pleased to see the fruits of these efforts online – brainstorm.ubuntu.com

The concept is simple – you can go to the site and see a range of ideas that have been submitted by the community. These ideas have a couple of arrows on the left side of the idea in which you can vote to add your popularity or vote against the idea. This provides an excellent means of us assessing the popularity of ideas and which things are affecting people. Everyone is welcome to sign in and add ideas, and we encourage you to get involved and contribute to the site – this is going to be the primary method of sharing your ideas with the community and with the Ubuntu development community. There are already a bunch of stunning ideas on there, and I can’t wait to see what you all add.

brainstorm.ubuntu.com will be a primary resource in assessing what we should be discussing at each Ubuntu Developer Summit (the next one being in Prague). So, get along to brainstorm.ubuntu.com and get involved!

Posted on February 28, 2008 - by jono

Installfest for schools in the USA

Just wanted to plug a rather cool looking installfest for schools that is using Ubuntu on recycled computers and organised by the Untangle folks. They are performing a bunch of installs over a number of locations including San Francisco, Berkeley, San Mateo and Novato. It is happening this Saturday – 1st March 2008.

Check out the details of the event here and sign up to volunteer here.

Posted on February 27, 2008 - by jono

The 5-A-Day Love In…Applet Style

You know what, it stuns me just what is possible when we all link arms and step forward together.

About a week ago 5-A-Day was launched, and it is kicking some rather serious arse (now…is that seriously kicking arse or kicking an arse that is serious – what would be the form of a serious arse?…hmmm I appear to have digressed). So yes, 5-A-Day is kicking arse and taking names, and we are seeing some incredible growth in the community with it, and lots of incredible bug work going on.

More and more people are getting into the 5-A-Day phenomenon, and as important as doing the bug work is sharing your 5-A-Day with other people. People are doing this via email signatures, blog entries and more.

Well, the always incredible Markus Korn has produced an awesome little panel applet that makes reporting your 5-A-Day progress incredibly simple – you simply drag Firefox tabs onto the applet and it adds that bug number to your log. Markus shows off his work in this video. Check it out.

Thanks to Horseman Holbach, we have a delicious PPA with this little applet – the applet is called five-a-day-applet. It uses the same PPA as listed on the 5-A-Day wiki page. The wiki page will be updated soon with how to use the applet.

So, go and do the 5-A-Day thang.

Posted on February 27, 2008 - by jono

Earthquake Terror

Last night I was in an earthquake. I was laid in bed reading my book and suddenly the room started shaking, everything rattling and my bed shaking from side to side. It lasted about 3 seconds but was quite freaky. Which exotic location was this?

…Wolverhampton.

No tell of a lie.

An emergency fund has been set up to send blue pop and fish scraps to the devastated area. Thankfully it looks like the quake will have not affected the pork scratching industry, and pig snacks will continue to be distributed across the nation. Phew.

Posted on February 26, 2008 - by jono

LugRadio Birthday Drinks

Just a quick note – the chaps on the show (Aq, Adam and Chris) and I are heading out with ex-presenters Matthew Revell and Ade Bradshaw for a few celebratory birthday drinks this Friday (29th Feb). Everyone is welcome.

We will meet at 8pm at The Varsity in central Wolverhampton (address is Stafford Street, Wolverhampton, WV1 1LZ). If you can get along, let us know.

Posted on February 26, 2008 - by jono

LugRadio – Four Years Old Today

DIGG!

Well, today LugRadio turns 4. Quite a roller-coaster it has been too.

Just over four years ago, in the far corner of The Moon Under Water pub in Wolverhampton, we hatched the idea of LugRadio. For a while I had been thinking of doing on online radio show about Open Source, and when Matt Revell joined Wolves LUG, he mentioned he had had thoughts of doing an online radio show too. We roped in a few loud characters from Wolves LUG (namely Aq and Sparkes), and LugRadio was born. It would be a few months before we finally got round to recording our first show in my tiny home studio in my house. Although my home studio was reasonably kitted out, it was nothing compared to the current setup – we were using a cheap multi-tracker running on a PC, four drum mics (with socks as pop-shields), and all four of us crammed into an extremely small space. The first show was 22 minutes and 38 seconds long and was frankly…rubbish by today’s standards, but at the time I think it genuinely brought something new to the Open Source community, and the core LugRadio formula was there in its rawest form. Knowing we could not afford to distribute the shows, we concocted a devious scheme of allowing our listeners (assuming we would get listeners) to mirror the show and therefore share the bandwidth hit. That system is still in place now, and a typical show will have 15+ mirrors pumping out shows to an estimated 20,000 listeners.

We were all pretty nervous if LugRadio would go anywhere; we figured it would either generate some interest or really piss some people off and last only a few shows – we knew the recipe would be somewhat controversial for some people. In fact, in the early days, I was a full-time freelance journalist, and I will never forget going to karate with this deep uncertainly about whether LugRadio would be a wise idea for my career. At that point, my work was starting to become fairly public (due to my magazine work), but my voice was always carefully written, edited, crafted and refined before it ever went to the editor – LugRadio however, was balls-to-the-wall frankness, largely un-edited and up-front. As I mulled on this over a few days I came to the conclusion that I am my own person, and I should never hide my personality; I figured that as a journalist, and eventually as an advocate and community manager, being frank and truthful with people is essential, not optional. Fortunately, LugRadio has had the opposite effect and helped grow all of our careers, as opposed to hinder them.

We are all amazed at where LugRadio has gone in the last four years – none of us ever expected it to grow like it has. There are many milestones that have freaked us all out – people who we respect listening to the show, showing up at conferences all over the world and people saying they like the show, winning a marketing award, topping magazine reviews of podcasts – each of these was a huge surprise as we have always seen the show as fundamentally four loud blokes rambling on in a room; our benchmark has always been other shows, and we have always felt somewhat amateur and still do to this day. To see formal recognition like this is a very strange experience, but a huge buzz too.

The community that has grown around the show is stunning, and it always amazes us that we have such a thriving community and importantly, a culture that has been defined around the show in the forums, planet, facts, quotes, clan, #lugradio IRC channel, and with hashlugradio. People contribute to the show in many ways – we have nearly 1000 members on the forums, and around 100 people constantly in #lugradio on Freenode, and people constantly contributing emails and ideas to the show. The emails segment in the show has always been my personal favorite segment – it is really great to have some fun with the emails people send in, and we get some truly interesting and amusing mails. One thing I love about our listeners is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and are more than happy to put the boot in where required – it always provides fun and exciting content. Our incredible community has helped with all aspects – the content, the website, the system administration, the mirroring, the promotion and more.

Thanks must also go out to the 100+ interviews that have been conducted in the last four years, and some of the frankly bizarre questions we may have asked people – these include Simon Willison, Quim Gil, Lennart Poettering, Rob McQueen, Christian Tismer, Niall “digitaldeath” O’Brien, John Alfred Knottenbelt, Alan Cox, Sean McGrath, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Adam Williamson, Havoc Pennington, Colin Walters, Will Stephenson, Sacha “Sago” Goedegebure, Alexandre Juillard, Gavin Henry, Lee Jordan, Jeff Waugh, Miguel de Icaza, Sven de Marothy, Aaron Seigo, Mike Hearn, Seth Nickell, Kevin Carmony, Michael Meeks, Ralph Giles, Edward “lamb-burning surrender monkey” Hervey, Ryan Quinn, Henrik Nielsen Omma, Carl Worth, Joe Shaw, Paul Leonard, Adrian Keward, Paul Sladen, Caroline Yates, Jonathan Riddell, Maria Blackmore, Hubert Figuere, Alex Hudson, Aquarion, Schwuk, Digit0, Mozrat, Richard Allan MP, Howard Berry, Russ Phillips and Jen Phillips, Mark Shuttleworth, Dave Camp, Yannick Pellet and Carlos Guerreiro, Ian Brown, Sarah Ewen, Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Ian Wilson, John Leach, MrBen, Adam Leventhal, Philip Copeman, Bill Hilf, Jeremy White, Jacob “jimmac” Steiner, Dave “pig-carrying Irishman” Neary, Chris Messina, Simon Phipps, Timothy Miller, Cliff Brereton, Jeremy Katz, Matthew Garrett, Michael “mdk” Dominik, Ted Haeaeaeaeaeaeagear, Rory McCann, Matthew East, Gareth Bowker, Mirco Müller, Aaron Bockover, Robert Love, Luis Villa, Bastian Nocera, Philippe Normand, Jan Schmidt, Graham Taylor, Justin “juski” Hornsby, Peter Hollingsworth, Justin Davies, Cory Ondrejka, Sava Tatic, Stephen “SheepEatingTaz” Garton, Pia Waugh, Scott James “Three Shot” Remnant, John Cherry, Eric Raymond, Alan “Popey the sailor man” Pope, Matt Wilson, Andrew “spline” Lewis, Chris DiBona, Stéphane Marchesin, Mickey Lauer, Wouter van Heyst, David “tyrion” Dolphin, Christian Schaller, Becky Hogge, Ian “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock, James Governor, Matt Lee, Chris Jones, Jeremie Zimmerman, Neuro, Branden Holtsclaw, Bradley M. Kuhn, Zeth Green, Barbie…

Of course, LugRadio has also spawned LugRadio Live which has seen three UK shows (2005, 2006, 2007) and the up-and-coming LugRadio Live USA 2008 and LugRadio Live UK 2008. We delved into and analysed the ethos and formula behind the audio show and worked to convert into conference form and every LugRadio Live has has been an utter blast. Particular thanks must go to the people who believed in LugRadio Live back in 2005 when we had no reputation behind us – and specifically to our good friends at Bytemark Hosting for supporting us every year. Two particular things stick in my mind with LugRadio Live. Firstly, I will never forget in the build-up to the first LugRadio Live – Aq and I would have lunch together in Birmingham to discuss and make plans, and we were both hugely terrified that no-one would show up. We came to the conclusion that if around 60 people attended, we would be happy. When it got to the big day, we had over 200 people attend in our tiny little venue. We were stunned. The second memory was the unbelievably heartening feeling that ran through my veins when we ran the 2007 event – we had over 12 crew (all LugRadio fans and volunteers) get to the venue at 7am and within minutes of us getting in, every single crew member was chipping in, working hard and doing their best. With all of the crew adorned in yellow t-shirts, it was like a pack of animals dispersing – they shot out across the venue and started constructing the entire event in two hours. With the months and months of build up, stress and tension that we had put in, seeing the crew put in every ounce of energy they could that weekend, was simply stunning.

I am so proud of what LugRadio has gone onto achieve – we are not the most insightful, we are not the best produced, we are not the funniest, but I am hugely proud to see the sheer amount of content around LugRadio and LugRadio Live, and every bit of it has been entirely volunteer based, done in spare time, fueled by caffeine and late nights. To be honest, we were half-expecting that the energy from the listeners and us would wain after the first year or so, but four years on, it is just as exciting as ever – LugRadio would be nothing if it were not for our incredible listeners. Thank you everyone for sticking with us.

I would love to hear people’s fave memories from the show, LugRadio Live or anything else – head over to this forums thread to add yours.

Posted on February 26, 2008 - by jono

Season 5 Episode 12

Can’t see the vid, click here

LugRadio Season 5 Episode 12 is out. It features a royal Chris kicking, discussion of Open Source celebrity, results of the Pimp My LugRadio competition (of which the above video is one entry), a brand new competition, discussion of LugRadio Live USA 2008 which of course has registration open.

Bring it on, and babble about it here.

Posted on February 25, 2008 - by jono

February 2008 Ubuntu Report

I am pleased to announce that the February 2008 Ubuntu community report is out!

As well as a range of general Ubuntu team reports, this report is pumped with a stack of LoCo Team reports too! Thanks for all teams who contributed.

If your team is not contributing to the monthly reports, see this page to get involved – it is great exposure for your team and genuinely useful for the wider community.

Posted on February 24, 2008 - by jono

Open Music Required

At LugRadio Live in the UK, we traditionally play a lot of rock music in-between talks – it keeps the atmosphere loose and fun. With LugRadio Live USA 2008 on the horizon, and well aware of the dictatorship that is the RIAA, I am keen to find a collection of good rock and metal that is suitable for legal public performance at LugRadio Live USA 2008. As such, musicians, I am looking for your help here – please add a comment on this blog entry pointing to bands and music that produce music licensed that will allow us to publicly play it at the event.

The kind of music we are looking for is good-time party rock and roll, like AC/DC, Beastie Boys, Rage Against The Machine etc, but also heavier music and metal is very welcome too. Get those suggestions in – this is an excellent way to get your music played at one of the premier Open Source events in the USA.

Oh, and don’t forget registration for LugRadio Live USA 2008 is open!