I was interviewed in episode 35 which you can now download.

It’s even spurred me into working harder on sorting out music production on my Ubuntu Studio set up this week. I still use Windows XP for the odd music job which I’ve always been honest about. However, all podcast production and other audio is done on Linux and has been for a very long time I’m proud to say. I’ve got some hardware gripes with a possibly faulty audio card but I’m on the case now. Earlier today I started working on a new blues song in Ardour. It wasn’t planned but a nice riff popped out of my brain and I started recording, I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ve not had time to produce much music in the last few months and I don’t see that changing very soon, but I do want to do more music on Linux and really see the how strengths and weaknesses stack up. It’s long been a goal of mine but time just hasn’t allowed it. Hopefully that will all be fixed in 2010!!

Ok enough rambling, enjoy the interview. See ya,

Dan

Digital Britain Report

Hello folks, today I have a very serious matter to discuss with you. The Digital Economy Bill is being passed through parliament in the UK right now. This is the law which would allow UK citizens to be disconnected from the Internet on the accusation of file sharing or piracy, not conviction, accusation. As a musician, online broadcaster and member of the Open Rights Group this is obviously an important matter to me. At the moment certain members of the government are trying to force this bill into law without a proper debate in parliament. This is a bill which goes against the advice of the Government’s own Digital Britain report published last year, which clearly stated Internet disconnection should not be used as a punishment.

I have written to my local MP today to ask them to call for a full debate on this before any law is made. Whatever you think of the Digital Economy Bill and whichever side you consider yourself to be on, passing this law without so much as a proper discussion has to be wrong. It doesn’t benefit any of us. Don’t let large media companies make laws like this through the back door, demand proper democracy!

If you live in the UK I urge you to write to your MP too and make them aware of the situation. I’ve copied my letter below. I sent this to my local MP Stephen Hesford today. You can find details of your own MP and how to contact them through the fabulous writetothem.com

Remember, they work for us and we have a right to ask them questions but please be polite at all times. Abusive rants will do our argument no good. You can also use the 38 Degrees website to make this process even simpler.

Thanks for reading

Dan

————————————————————————————————————

Dear Stephen Hesford,

I’m writing to you today because I’m very worried the Government are planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate. An important change to the law like this must be properly reviewed and debated in the house not just rammed through carelessly, as I’m sure you appreciate.

Industry experts, internet service providers (like Talk Talk and BT) and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo are all opposing the bill – yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a debate. This is obviously wrong, it’s no way to make legislation. Especially legislation that affects something so vital these days as Internet access. In today’s world we all need computer access to interact with even the government’s own services like the Inland Revenue, NHS, benefits agencies and so on. There is no burden of proof in this law, only accusation is enough to incur punishment. That has to be against the long standing principals of justice and equality we pride ourselves on in this country. Guilty until proven innocent is not justice in my view.

As someone employed in the IT industry for years and now a part-time broadcaster/journalist reporting on these matters, I worry that the people forcing this agenda don’t actually understand the full technical and social implications of their actions, not to mention the practical headaches of implementing this. What we need is time for proper research, debate and reflection, rather than a ham-fisted approach to something so vital. I am a musician and broadcaster who uses the Internet as an empowering tool that gives me opportunities I’d never get otherwise. I produce a podcast about Linux and Open Source software which now gets over 15,000 downloads per week. I believe everyone deserves the same chance to use the Internet to educate and inform themselves. There is some strange media coverage of this situation right now and the line that “the Internet is bad for musicians and must be stopped” is a complete misnomer. There are many professional musicians, artists and broadcasters on both sides of the argument. The likes of the Featured Artists Coalition (Radiohead, Billy Bragg etc) have condemned Internet disconnection as a disproportionate and heavy handed punishment. That voice needs to be heard in this debate too but it seems the people forcing this bill realise the power of the argument and would rather pass the law before it can be heard. We all want to help artists and musicians thrive in the new digital world and as a musician myself I have a vested interest in protecting that more than anyone. The Digital Economy Bill cannot be passed in it’s current state as it will do more harm than good, however good the intentions are.

As a constituent I am writing to you today to ask that you do all you can to ensure the Government doesn’t just rush the bill through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate. I am a member of the Open Rights Group in the UK and a look at their website http://openrightsgroup.org might also offer some useful information.

Thank you for your time,

Dan Lynch

There’s been a couple of Linux Outlaws releases since my last update. We’re up to episode 140 now, which I can still scarcely believe considering our expectations when we started the show. It continues to go from strength to strength and for that I’m very grateful. You can join us for the live show from 7pm GMT on Mondays. The IRC channel has been crazy during the show lately and we seem to average over 100 live listeners and viewers now. It doesn’t sound much and as a proportion of the 58,000 downloads per month I suppose it’s not, but the live interaction really makes a big difference and I’m glad people enjoy it. I also did another Rathole Radio last Sunday night which you can download at your leisure. I finally released the tickets for the live gig and so far they’ve sold ok but I need to sell a lot more to break even. Much time was spent this week licking envelopes, writing notes and posting those out. If you want to come along please buy tickets in advance from the website. Thanks! I also got a new logo for the show this week and I’m really pleased with it (see image below). It was created for me by graphic designer extraordinaire Scott Jones of Bad Format and we’ve also been doing a fair bit of website work together lately. I’m mostly hacking Drupal sites, customising modules and so on. I’ll give you more details on that when I can in future.

New Rathole Logo

These events are all out of sequence now but let’s carry on. My 5min Ignite talk entitled “The Blaggers Guide To Linux” went really well on March 4th. There were about 50 people there and they seemed to enjoy it. Overall the night went brilliantly and I enjoyed the other talks immensely. There was quite a mix of art and cultural stuff and it fell to me to finish off the event with something geeky. I hadn’t intended to talk about Linux really, people expect that of me and I don’t want become a one trick pony (also the title of a good Paul Simon album BTW). It seemed to bring a nice balance to things though and people said they liked it. The after party at the Everyman Bistro was much fun and still continuing as I left at about 1am. The Ignite talks were filmed by a local media company so I hope I’ll be able to share that footage with you in future. It’s being edited right now I’m told. I think it will end up on the O’Reilly site somewhere.

OggCamp10 planning continues at pace. I’ve been chasing up sponsors a lot in the last 2 weeks, some of whom haven’t paid yet! I think we’re making progress though and I’ve also been inviting many interesting people from the Open Source world to join us. I had some drama with the venue and I have to confess it had me worried but it’s all sorted now. The person I was dealing with left the organisation and it seems the paperwork hadn’t been done properly, probably why they left. I had nightmare visions of 300 people stranded in Liverpool city centre with nowhere to go but thankfully that’s not going to happen. I went over for a meeting on Friday and we agreed all the details which was a major relief. I also met the lead tech at the Black-E and it turns out he’s a true Free Software beard, literally. He had the Stallman look going on and he’s a core developer on the Rivendell radio automation project. That’s really cool and it looks as though the technical requirements for the venue are all up to scratch. Sadly we won’t be able to use the historic dome at the front of the building as the main entrance now. There’s building work going on in the venue which should largely be finished by OggCamp, but they can’t open the dome because the roof may not be passed as safe for the public. I’ll be signing the venue agreement and sorting out payment in the next week. Then it’s on to writing the kit list and tech spec for the event amongst other things. I also have to do a full risk assessment which I haven’t done since I worked in theatres many years ago. I’m sure that’ll be as thrilling as it sounds. It’s usually a big bunch of paperwork to satisfy health and safety regulations where there’s a public audience.

Other things I’ve done in the last two weeks include:

• Attend LivLUG and have fun socialising with everyone.
• Produce another Software Freedom Law Show.
• Rebuild my studio PC with Ubuntu Studio 9.10 and fix some hardware problems.
• Lots of Drupal hacking and server admin stuff for various clients.
• Learn the true power and beauty of Firebug for debugging a CSS stylesheet of over 1300 lines.
• Get more slightly depressed about the sorry state of Liverpool Football Club.

There’s probably more stuff that I’ve forgotten but that about covers it for now, you’re pretty much up to date. I’ve had quite a quiet weekend by my standards and I’m in need of a break. A little time to unwind is appreciated right now.

Upcoming:

It’s Sunday afternoon and I don’t have too much planned for the rest of the day. I do have to edit a new Software Freedom Law Show and I’ll continue to tinker with my studio set up. I have Skype working through JACK now which is very exciting and after the bugs on Linux Outlaws last week I’m also going to investigate Ekiga and other FOSS alternatives. Skype has always been a necessary evil for me. It’s hideously closed source but the audio quality is so much better than anything else I’ve found, and as an audio engineer sound quality trumps all other considerations to me, even software freedom I’m afraid. I hope in future experiments with Speex wideband will help fix this, but when you’re pressed for time and you have a show to do you just want to press a button and have it work. There’ll be more Linux Outlaws live tomorrow night as always. I’ll also be doing Rathole Radio next weekend but I may manage to report back before that. There’ll be a ton of OggCamp paperwork, phone calls and so on, which have become a staple part of my life in the last 2 months. It’s all good though and the event is going to be worth it, you should come and join us if you’re within travelling range and don’t forget to come to my gig the night before, tickets on sale now at http://ratholeradio.org/gig

See you soon, take care,

Dan

Printed Tickets

The tickets are for sale now though the Rathole Radio website priced at £5 each plus £1.50 per order for processing and postage. I’ve kept them cheap because it’s not a money making exercise. If I sell all 200 odd tickets I will just break even, and only then. I’m putting this on because I want to have something cool for everyone to do in Liverpool the night before OggCamp, I also get the chance to play a gig alongside some of my favourite artists and that’s my payment. I’m taking it easy on public promotion this week to give OggCampers the chance to get in first and get tickets, after that I will be promoting hard and selling to the general public, once they’re sold out I’m afraid it’s tough. The venue has very limited capacity so the bottom line is this… IF YOU WANT TO COME BUY A TICKET. A lot of people seem to feel they’ll just wander in on the night and that may not be possible.

David Rovics

So far I’ve sold around 40 tickets since Sunday and it’s great to see people posting on Identi.ca that they’ve received them, that’s very satisfying and rewarding. But I’m still £807 in the hole staging this (I have a spreadsheet) and that tends to focus your mind. I’m not complaining or bitching, I enjoy doing the work and I will continue to, I’m confident we’ll sell out. I just want to make sure everyone understands the situation. If you want to come along please book now before I start pushing tickets outside of our usual circle. Besides, it’s going to be a great night and you should come and celebrate music, technology and Creative Commons with us. I’m already discussing innovative ways to bring technology into this event with some hacker friends. We’re looking at message walls, live streams and perhaps a robotic (might be a slight exaggeration) audience member who can make noise based on the reaction of the online chatroom. It’s going to be something quite unique and it’s not to be missed.

I have no problem with OggCamp attendees not being interested in this or not wanting to come, that’s absolutely fair enough. But if you ARE interested book now or risk being disappointed and turned away. I want to avoid that wherever possible but limited space and financial constraints mean I have to be strict.  You can’t say I didn’t warn you.

Tickets can be purchased direct from http://ratholeradio.org/gig

If you don’t have Paypal or for some reason don’t want to buy online, email show@ratholeradio.org and we can try to make alternative arrangements for you.

Thanks for reading this rant. Take care everyone a be lucky

Dan

Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it.

Open the Preferences dialog in Firefox (on the “edit” menu in Linux)…

…go to the applications tab…

…type “mailto” in the filter box to bring up the mail settings. You can then use the drop down box to select Gmail, Yahoo or others.

That’s it, next time you click on an email link it’ll open a new message in your web mail. A simple little tip which everyone may already know but I didn’t until recently. This will of course work in Firefox running on any platform, Linux, Mac or Windows. The preferences link is under the “tools” menu and not “edit”  in Windows, it may be different on Mac too. Hope this tip helps someone and gets your mail links fixed. Other web browsers are also available of course

Cheers,

Dan

So, on Tuesday I synced up the audio from Linux Outlaws and shipped it back to Fab. It was a little bit longer than expected as I said in my earlier post, but I think we’ll settle into the new format with practice. That was later released as episode 137 “Bing!”. It seemed to be pretty well received and downloads for the podcast in general have been shooting up lately, good news. I think we might have finally jumped the shark. I also got on with sorting out sponsorship for OggCamp and various other things. We’ve been working on an advert to appear in Linux Format magazine very soon. They wrote am article about us this month in very kind terms and we appreciate the support. They’re even offering Oggcamp attendees 40% off a year’s magazine subscription. So, without further ado here are our wonderful OggCamp10 sponsors: (drum roll needed)

Media Partners: Linux Format Magazine

(trumpets)

• The Linux Emporium
• Bitfolk
• The Open Learning Centre
• Viglen
• Opsview
• Recuit12
• Linux Fund

I’m still working with some sponsors who are confidential right now, rest assured I’ll let you know as soon as I can. It may be a cliche but we really couldn’t put this event on without their support. It costs a lot of money and it would probably bankrupt us, we’re a non-profit community event. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. So a hearty thanks to these folks for their support, we appreciate it.

Zonker

Anyway, back to events of the week. On Wednesday I worked on some Drupal sites for a while. I’ll give you more details on those in coming weeks when I’m allowed but it’s quite exciting. I also did more research for my Firefox Mobile article and wrote up some notes. On Thursday I interviewed former OpenSUSE Community Manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier for Linux Outlaws. I’m still working on the audio at the moment but you should be able too hear that as a special episode next week. It’ll be about 45mins in total. It was a very interesting chat I thought. Sadly I missed Chester LUG on Thursday evening because I was still feeling pretty rough. I’ll have to make it up to them next month.

On Friday I wrote, edited, formatted and published my FF Mobile review with some screen shots. It’s been pretty well received so far and I hope people enjoy it. I think mobile web browsing is a big area right now, and with the expansion of the smartphone market that’s only going to grow. I also spent some time working on HTML and CSS for a client site on Friday night. Trying to tweak a style sheet of over 1000 lines that someone else originally wrote can feel like chewing razor blades at times, but I finally got somewhere by the wee hours of the morning. Over the weekend I’ve been working on the Zonker interview audio, answering tons of email and I’m now editing the next Software Freedom Law Show for release on Tuesday. I’m also working on my 5 minute presentation for the Ignite Liverpool event next week. More on that in a second.

Upcoming:

Next week I’ll be getting onto OggCamp exhibition planning now that sponsors are mostly sorted. I also need to start working on a technical plan with the people at the venue. We’re going to be doing Outlaws live on Tuesday night at 7pm rather than Monday. Then it’ll be LivLUG on Wednesday night and I hope to be in good shape for that after missing Chester. On Thursday night I’m going to be giving a presentation at the Ignite Liverpool event, part of global O’Reilly Global Ignite Week. The idea is that you have 20 slides and 5 minutes to talk. The slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. I wasn’t sure what to talk about but now the idea of a 5 minute “Blaggers Guide To Linux” seems good to me. I get so many emails, phone calls and face to face enquiries from people asking me what Linux actually is, I think it would be good to give a quick foundation. Hopefully I can make it funny too, I’ll try. Come along to the Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University at 6pm if you fancy seeing the result. You’re more than welcome. I’m sure there’ll be plenty else to get my teeth into next week. There’ll be more Rathole Radio at the weekend and I hope to have more news on gig tickets very soon. I’ll report back ASAP. Take care till then, see ya,

Dan

FF Mobile In Action

Today I’d like to tell you about Firefox Mobile on the N900, running in conjunction with the new Mozilla Weave web service. I’ve been testing them out on my handset for about a month now since the beta release of Fennec (the codename for Firefox Mobile). The N900 is the first device to get Firefox Mobile but it should also appear on Google Android phones in the near future. There is talk from Mozilla of an iPhone version too, but Apple are so draconian with 3rd party software I’m not sure that’ll happen. I just can’t see them allowing another browser on the iPhone to compete with Safari. (correction: According to Fab the iPhone has allowed some 3rd party browsers already, see link in comments) Anyway, here’s my thoughts upon testing Firefox Mobile for some time.

Facing The Critics:
It seems fashionable with some people to bash Firefox right now and use it as the butt of their jokes. I think many of them are too quick to forget the great work Mozilla have done for us in spreading Open Source software to the masses. Many users get their first exposure to the wonderful world of FOSS through the likes of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Sure it’s not perfect, it has it’s bugs and it can be slow at times too. But I think the emergence of real competitors like Google Chrome has and will continue to improve Open Source browsers in general. I like Chromium but Firefox is still the browser of choice on my desktop. Weave is also an interesting prospect and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. I was curious to see if I would like this new compact Firefox quite as much as I like it’s big brother.

What’s Weave?

Weave At Work

I mentioned Mozilla Weave earlier, it’s a new web service designed to make syncing your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, form data and even passwords easy over multiple installations of Firefox. Imagine you have Firefox installed on a few different computers around the house, a laptop and a desktop perhaps. Having them synced up and sharing data means you’re always up to date whichever machine you’re on. There have long been extensions to share bookmarks but this takes it to a whole new level. Add in the fact that Firefox Mobile supports this on your phone and it becomes a much more interesting prospect. Wherever I happen to be a quick click on my phone brings up all the tabs I have open on my laptop. This is all achieved by syncing the data to a remote Mozilla web server and then sharing it between devices. You have to sign up for an account with Weave which is free, but a lot of people will have serious security concerns about it. According to Mozilla the data is all encrypted locally before it’s sent to their server, so even they can’t access it without your permission. I still don’t trust it with precious things like passwords and form data though, perhaps I’m paranoid. I use Weave to sync browsing history, bookmarks and tabs. It’s very easy to change these settings and it doesn’t share your passwords by default, which is a good thing I think. It’ll be interesting to see if it takes off as the browser spreads to more devices.

UI Design:

A drag to the left...

Obviously mobile devices have much less screen real estate for developers to use and the last thing you want is to have your page blocked out by copious toolbars, “tool” being the operative term in that sentence. The N900 has a pretty respectable 800×480 screen resolution but I’m still pleased to see the Mozilla guys have thought about using it wisely. They’ve done this by hiding extra controls to the left and right of the main display area. You can expose them by dragging the page left or right with you finger. To the right you have forward & back buttons, a “bookmark this page” shortcut and access to the app settings.

...and a drag to the right

To the left you have tabs and access to Weave integration. I have to admit I was dubious about this interface design at first and I didn’t think dragging the whole page to the side would work. It actually becomes second nature pretty quickly and the ability to have multiple pages open in tabs is very cool. I also like the fact that the “awesome” bar works the same as its desktop counterpart. If you start typing part of an address you’ve visited before it will narrow down helpful suggestions. This actually speeds up browsing a lot and in my laziness I use this feature far more than bookmarks. Having it integrated with your other Firefox installations through Weave makes this much more powerful too. Firefox Mobile helps you fill out forms quicker and jump between fields which is handy. Overall the adapted UI works well, despite my initial reservations I got used to it very quickly.

Performance:
This is the area where most people have issues with Firefox and on a mobile device your patience tends to be even shorter. I have two browsers on the N900 right now: Micro B which is the official Maemo browser, and Firefox Mobile. There’s no doubt that Firefox takes longer to start up and performance is generally slower. The really odd thing about this is that both browsers are Mozilla based so they should be similar. I don’t know what they did to speed it up Micro B but they need to pass that knowledge back so Firefox can be improved. If only Firefox was under the GPL they’d have to pass it back (edit: Possibly not, see comments), but that’s another matter. In fairness the final 1.0 release saw a speed improvement over the beta and RC. Once the browser is loaded it runs quickly enough but does occasionally bog down and crash. I can hear the Firefox haters laughing in the distance. It still needs a little work in this department I feel.

Extensions, But No Flash:

Managing Extensions

Unlike Micro B I don’t seem to have support for Flash in Firefox Mobile. This may be because Micro B comes pre-tweaked as part of the OS, I don’t know. I have my issues with Flash but I do still find support for it important in browsers. Hopefully that will change as HTML5 takes off, but right now I still want Flash support sorry. I tend to switch to Micro B to use YouTube and other sites. Mozilla don’t want to distribute proprietary software and this is probably the main reason Flash isn’t pre-configured, a position I respect. It’s also possible that I could install it myself with a little hacking. Trying to do that automatically in the browser or via a .deb package didn’t work though. On a positive note you do have access to extensions in Firefox Mobile, which many people have become used to on the desktop. I have a few installed and the selection is growing all the time, right now the main one for me is Weave, I don’t use a lot else.

Conclusions:

The Awsome Bar At Work

I enjoy using Firefox Mobile, particularly in conjunction with Weave and I think there’s much to commend about it. However, I’m afraid the overall impression it leaves is of performance problems which still need to be fixed. Slowness and random crashes are not something most users will put up with, especially on mobile devices. I use Micro B a lot more on the N900 because it’s quicker and more stable. There are some interesting features in Firefox Mobile and I do think it has great potential for the future, it’s only just come out of beta so I don’t want to be too harsh. How it will fare on other platforms like Android I’m not sure. The N900 has pretty quick hardware and I shudder to think how slow it might be on a G1 or other handset.

At the moment the browser situation on the N900 is similar to the one I see on my desktop, and at the same time completely different. Bear with me I haven’t lost my mind. It’s great to have a choice of browsers and competition is always good. On the desktop I use Firefox 80% of the time and Chromium the other 20%. On the mobile though it’s Micro B 80% of the time and Firefox 20%. Once the performance improves and I fix flash support that balance may shift. For now though my verdict on Firefox Mobile 1.0 is nice try, I really like the potential, but come back when it’s a bit more polished.

You can download Firefox Mobile here.

Also check out the full slideshow for more pics.

I’m very busy with event planning at the moment and sponsorship stuff, a lot of which I’m not really at liberty to talk about yet. So if this update seems brief rest assured there has been plenty of OggCamp business and you’ll hear about it soon. It all began last Monday with another recording of Linux Outlaws, a recording which would become episode 136  “Make Love, Not Proprietary Software”. Following this blog announcement by Fab earlier in the day, we were experimenting with a new slightly leaner format. I think it worked well and the show was still 75mins long, hardly too short by any means. A lot of people told me they preferred it and we’ll keep trying to do that in future. Having said this on the last recording for episode 137 this Monday we went well over time. So I guess it’s a learning process. Personally I’ve long said that 60-80mins is the ideal length of show for me. That’s not to say I haven’t played my part in derailing shows and making them longer; I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but I do try to push us on and keep to some semblance of schedule. Some people completely disagree with my view and think the show should be 15 million hours long every week, which is cool, it’s nice that they feel they enjoy it that much. The amount of work this entails for us is what causes the problem though. Beyond about an hour show time the editing gets very time consuming and tiring. It’s a weekly show after all, so it’s not as if people don’t hear plenty of us anyway. Listenership has shot up lately which is fantastic, but I’m convinced keeping the show closer to an hour each week would make it much more accessible to a wider audience. I’ve now spent ages discussing not going on too long, oh the irony. Anyway, let’s move on (my catchphrase).

In the last 10 days or so I haven’t gotten any real distro hopping or writing done. Other things have overtaken that and I’m still trying to get back on track. Hopefully you’ll see a substantial article in the next 2 days. My February blog stats could certainly use it, there hasn’t been much to draw people to the site this month. I’ve also been a bit ill the last week and that’s slowed me down, I’m still trying to get back on a more even keel. Other things I’ve been up to in the last 10 days include: hacking Drupal sites, recording a new Rathole Radio, doing gig preparation and trying to sort out tickets for sale, constantly emailing and phoning people with OggCamp business and much more.

One particular highlight was last night, I attended my first Wirral Tweet Up event. I’ve been to many in Liverpool but missed the first Wirral one. I caught up with some good friends from the Scribblepool writing group and also met some interesting new people. It was an informal event held at Cromwell’s restaurant in Irby. Lot’s of hard work was put into making food and also making everyone feel welcome by proprietors Kay and Kate. I’d like to thank them for their work and also everyone else involved in setting up the event. It was a lot of fun. Many of my freedom crusading friends wonder why I go to these Twitter events and don’t just stick to Identi.ca only. I can see their point of view but the vast majority of the general geek community, not even the general public just techy types, use things like Facebook and Twitter heavily. I like to engage with them and help spread the word about Open Source, Linux and other things in a friendly sociable manner. The FOSS world can be incredibly insular and while I love my friends within it, there’s just no sense in preaching to the converted all the time. You have to get out and engage with others, get other points of view and expand your horizons, rather than just have your old views reinforced by a group of friends who agree. A good example is the fact that I was surrounded by iPhones last night and I casually worked the conversation onto the sat on the table N900 between them; what’s cool about it, Android, Linux and other mobile things. Not in a preachy way but just in general conversation. A lot of people had never heard of these things and took a genuine interest. I don’t expect all of them, if any actually, to run home and install a Linux distribution on their computer, but it’s a start. I’ve noticed the tendency within Open Source to think we are a bigger part of the tech crowd and society in general than we actually are. It’s good to get some perspective from people outside and bring that back to the group. It gives ideas for how we can engage with more people and improve what we do. It reinforces my beliefs in the principals of FOSS rather than weakening them. Enough rambling about that though.

I released a couple of albums on Jamendo last week. One of Kagnee, my old ska punk band, and another from an even older project called The Shed Collective. You can download, share and copy the music under the CC BY-SA license. It also prompted me to sort out my main site a little. If you look at danlynch.org/music you can see this starting to take shape. The list of tracks is easier to read and more compact but the RSS feed still works like a proper blog with full posts. My mastery of Drupal Views knows no bounds… ok, maybe a few. I’m going to keep working on that and making the content more useful as and when I get time. Eventually I’ll redirect shedmusic.net to it, as the old music blog is largely dead right now. Stay tuned for more on that.

Upcoming:

So in the next few days I should be off to Chester LUG tomorrow night with any luck. I have an interview booked with former OpenSUSE community manager Zonker for Linux Outlaws tomorrow, there’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show, more celebration of Will’s 30th (mine is looming in May) and a whole lot more OggCamp business. I hope I won’t be so late with updates next time but please bear with me, things are hectic. I’ll be in touch again very soon. Until then take care of yourselves and stay lucky,

See ya,

Dan

We began on Monday with another live Linux Outlaws show as always. It was great fun and Fab released that later in the week as episode 135 – “So Good They Tried To Patent Him”. I also released a new Rathole Radio in the afternoon. I finally got around to making a Facebook page for the show as well. I don’t use Facebook much, but it seems the rest of the world does and I want to spread the word. Hopefully it will help get some new listeners on board.

Dave Lee - Drawing not be to scale

A lot of time this week has been taken up talking to various potential Oggcamp10 sponsors. I’m pleased to say we’re finally making good progress on that and I might not have to go bankrupt after all, which would be nice. I’ve also been working on some Drupal stuff and trying to organise my home site a little. It’s still a work in progress and it looks like crap, but the information is improving. I looked at some old albums I did as parts of various bands and other projects. I’ve uploaded some of them to Jamendo and if they’re approved I’ll post the links here soon. I’d like to get some of the music I’ve made over the years out there for others too hear, and with Jamendo I can do that under a Creative Commons license. Cool hey? I have some ideas to work on new music this year, but it may have to wait until the Oggcamp madness dies down. I’ll let you know.

On Friday night I tuned into The Bugcast live recording. The host Dave Lee was kind enough to play one of my songs and it was good fun chatting to everyone. Dave does a great job and I believe his wife Caroline usually co-hosts but sadly she was ill this week. They play some great music and make a really good show. Go and have a listen.

Ok I’m gonna keep this update a little shorter than normal, but there isn’t a lot else to tell at this time. I hope to announce some more Oggcamp related news very soon I promise. One of the most important things to remember is please book your accommodation now if you want to come. I’ve been saying this for a month but I’m still hearing from people who are taking their time. It’s a busy weekend, if you keep waiting you’ll have trouble finding anything. Head to laterooms.com and search Liverpool on the relevant dates. It’s the best resource I’ve found. I hope to see many of you joining us at the event for fun and Free Software.

Upcoming:

As I mentioned at the top, my distro hopping has stalled at the moment, hopefully I’ll fix that this week. I plan to write about my experience of testing Firefox Mobile and Weave in the meantime. There will also be another Linux Outlaws live show tomorrow night and I hope you’ll join us for that. Don’t forget Rathole Radio next Sunday Feb 21st at 9pm too.

Take care everyone and have a nice week,

Dan

On Monday we recorded another Linux Outlaws and streamed it live as usual. Unfortunately Fab has been ill this week so best wishes to him, despite this he still got the show out on Friday though. Nice work! On Tuesday I worked on some audio stuff along with many other jobs. I put some stuff together as an audio trailer for OggCamp10 and released that here later in the week. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends on Tuesday night which was nice. On Wednesday I attended LivLUG where we had a fascinating talk about ZFS and BtrFS from Tom Hall, a storage and filesystems guru. Tom’s a good speaker and it was very entertaining. One of the LUG members (Neil Bothwick) later described it as a bit of a Jim Bowen moment though. For those who have no clue what I’m on about there, ZFS is under a license not compatible with the Linux kernel, so it’s doubtful we’ll see it in there any time soon. Jim Bowen is a British game show host famous for saying “…and here’s what you could of won”. Jokes are always better when you have to explain them aren’t they? I wasn’t sure Jim Bowen’s fame had spread from far from these shores yet, but it made me laugh anyway..

Thursday was pretty quiet and I got on with jobs but on Friday I went over to Liverpool on the train. I had a meeting at the Bad Format Social Club, the venue for my Rathole Roadshow gig and sorted out some arrangements for that. I then walked up to the FACT building for lunch with some friends and potential sponsors. I have some good leads there but we could always use more. If you or your employer would be interested in sponsoring OggCamp please drop me a line. Finally, I popped into the Black-E to sort some stuff some out with them before hopping on the train home. I used the N900 to keep up with emails and everything else during the day rather than taking my laptop, and I got a surprising amount done on the device. It did affect the battery life a little as I used it much more heavily, but it was a good test. I don’t normally go out for the day like that without a laptop if I have work to do. I listened to some teenage lad on the train trying to convince his mum he “really needed an iPad”. “It’s not a toy it’s for serious work, I’m going to do spreadsheets on it” he pleaded. I resisted the strong urge to jump in with a comment like “Spreadsheets my arse, it’s a big iPod Touch!! You can’t even install software on it. Get a proper computer you idiot” but it wasn’t easy. He kept looking over at the N900 to try and work out what it was I was using. Some sort of iPhone he hadn’t seen perhaps? Thankfully not. I engaged “smug mode” and remained quiet.

On Saturday I was interviewed for the Open Source Musician podcast which was a lot of fun. I was honoured to be asked on the show but felt like a bit of a fraud. I still have a dual-boot setup on my studio machine. I use Ubuntu Studio a lot but it does also have Windows XP on there which I occasionally use. It’s not a secret, I’m open about it, but it’s not something I’m proud of either. I’ve been “in the process” of going 100% Linux in the studio for about 18 months now. I never seem to get the time to actually concentrate on it with so much else going on. I’m proud to say I do all of my podcast production on Linux, but music is still a work in progress for me. I’m only 70% there. Must try harder, as it would probably say on my school report. Finally, today I streamed and recorded another Rathole Radio show which was great fun. I played a wide range of music and had a lot of fun as always. I’ve processed the audio just now and will release it tomorrow. It’s getting too late to do it tonight.

Upcoming:

Not sure exactly what I have planned in the next week but I know something will take up my time. I’m not 100% sure if Fab will be fit enough to do Linux Outlaws tomorrow night either, but hopefully so. I didn’t get chance to install a BSD and test it this week. I still need to do that for a review. I’ll also be doing much more Oggcamp business and trying to move all that forward. We made good progress on sponsorship this week and that’s my major focus right now. There’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show to produce and much more besides. Join me next week to find out what unfolds.

Take care,

Dan