tensixtyone

Well, the “final” LUGRadio has been and gone, what a weekend!

After the initial fighting with trains, hotels, and various other things, I managed to get down to Wolverhampton with plenty of time to spare before the Friday night unofficial piss-up. After much Hoegaarden and other ales I managed to stumble back to my hotel to continue drinking. As you imagine this didn’t really help me for the next day…

So, mildly hung over, I stumbled down for breakfast at the local greasy spoon, the directions were a little vague and made reference to “The man on the horse” in Wolverhampton city centre. Lucky, some of the more organised members of the group worked out the directions before hand. The choice was good, from a small breakfast up to a 17 piece “death by breakfast” deal for £4.20. Due to the wicked hangover, I was hardly the most social person and proceeded to plow through my food without even a whisper to anyone else.

The event started later on with much fanfare as the previous show, and the jury-rigged improvement to the Atrium stage was a simple canopy over the projector screen, Ingenious. The layout remained the same as 2007 and while we had a little more walking room than last year in the exhibition space it still ended up as a maul to try and walk around.

First talk of the day, for me anyway, was Kevin Sandom on the Lightning Talks stage showing his Bash based clustering solution called GroupHug, as you can imagine the crowd chuckled at the initial idea of it, but as the presentation went on you could actual see use for it, possibly not by sysadmins, but for home projects. The project is amazing, and it seems to work extremely well for such a crazy idea. Maybe it would be useful as a replacement to the MythTV job queue system, but that’s for another post.

Andy Robinson from the OpenStreetMap Foundation was next on the stage, discussing the project as a whole and a brisk introduction to acquiring data for the project. The bright, Hi-Viz jacket amused a few people, I guess they’ll be great for getting the name out there in the public. His talk was straight to the point and gave a excellent overview to a very interested crowd. After the talk I ended walking back to the stall and had a very interesting discussion with Andy regarding the future of OpenStreetMap. In a ideal world, Andy would like to see an expansion in the database to allow dated entries, allowing for the generation of maps for a specific date period. So for example, you could generate a map of what the town looked like in the 19th century, He acknowledged that it would be a massive change in OSM to support this but the interest from the Genealogy crowd would be worth it.

After a quick lunch, I went to see Jeremy Allison from the Samba project on the main stage. Jeremy’s talk gave a quick insight into the milestones and issues Samba had getting to the point it’s at today. Various quips about the state of Microsoft went down well, and the talk was very insightful into the early days of open source software.

Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group gave a whirlwind talk on various topics that the group have looked at in the last year. The most interesting is the poor woman who was sued by the BBC for producing knitting patterns for Dr. Who characters, with the help of the ORG and some heavy beating by the likes of the Times and even CBeebies, the BBC backed down and licensed the lady’s works.
Glyn is also responsible of enlisting me as a support of the ORG, while I was slightly intoxicated may I add. I don’t have any regrets as the work they are doing is interesting to me. I hope i’ll be able to support the ORG for quite a long time and hopefully get involved when I can.

After another short break, It was time for LUGRadio Live, the final one. A lot of reminiscing and slander, as per usual. The shock announcement was that after some discussions the night before they have decided to continue the Live shows. The recording will appear in the next few days and you can have a listen yourself, if you missed it that is.

The nighttime entertainment at the venue was something not to be missed. Add Karaoke, quite a lot of drunk people, and you have a situation. Needless to say many people made a complete arse of themselves but it was all in good spirits, and the results can be seen on astopy’s Vimeo. Again, I had too much Guinness and ended up (some how) back in bed.

Day 2, a return visit to the greasy spoon and a groggy entrance into the event. The morning introduction was short and to the point, much to the delight of the hung over crowd. First talk of the morning was dotwaffle / Matthew Walster showing off the demoscene. As my brother was in a demo group called Crusaders while I was growing up, I had to go along to this one. Matthew showed a few demos from the “modern era”, initially I was disappointed that it was all heavily 3D based then later on with the showing of Kewlers/MFX - 1995 I started to liven up a little, a return to the “good old days” from my view. Matthew finished with a little invitation demo to Sundown 08, the Sundown event is accordingly the rebirth of the demoscene parties in the UK. I wish Matthew all the best in getting the UK back on the map for parties.

The Mass Debate was very interested. mrben, Jeremey Allison, Matthew Garrett, and Max Spevack all took the stage to discuss hot topics suggested by the audience, It was a slow start but after a few threats from Matthew regarding the GPL it started to move quickly. Most of the discussion has slipped my mind but I’m sure someone else will be able to go into more details about the topics.

Later on in the day Chris Jones gave a overview of his Terminator application, which might I add, i’m now using as a replacement to Gnome Terminal. The more interesting part is a overview of how he fostered a community around this new application. I’m going through a similar time now with my MythView application, while some basic code is there I need feedback on what feature people would like to see. Chris gave a great talk, which was sadly cut short due to overrunning.

So, it’s all over. The show closed with prizes being handed out and a few last minute slapstick jokes. All in all it’s been a excellent weekend of drinking padded out with talks and I’d highly recommend anyone to keep a space open in July for next year’s event.

photo credit: sheilaellen

While I maybe posting a tad late about this event, its just less than a week away. I thought I wouldn’t be attending but then a offer of a lift to the event popped up on the LivLUG mailing list.

So, what is going on? LRL started out as a community meetup for the listeners of LugRadio, but over the years its turned into a generic semi-conference for Linux users and projects, with the addition of a Live episode of LugRadio recorded during the conference.

Alot of the Ubuntu UK LoCo team are attending, so I grabbed the chance to head on down there and actually meet some of these people I see warbling on #ubuntu-uk, Also its a good chance to get my GPG key signed.

I’ll post a better run down after the event, hopefully with a few pictures as well.