Steve Pearce

Jeremy Alison - Samba

Jeremy Alison is a major contributor to the Samba project. A free implementation of Microsoft’s SMB protocol. I use Samba a great deal and so I went along to the talk with the aim of learning more about it and one of it’s creators.

The talk was brilliant, and possibly one of the finest talks I had attended throughout the event. Jeremy delivered exactly what I was expecting, a deep history of Samba, plans for the future and their relationship with Microsoft throughout development.

The parts in the talk in my opinion where when Jeremy discussed the court cases Microsoft faced regarding interoperability. The issue of interoperability was also raised briefly on Sunday during the Mass Debate where he commented on ODF/OOXML.

I was previously unaware that Microsoft were forced by EU courts to reveal SMB documentation.

Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza

One of the funniest moments of the day was the Gong-a-Thong. I was luckily aware of what was to come. I had not guessed however that the LUGRadio community hero MrBen was to be the (almost) naked one :|

One of the talks I enjoyed and learned something from was Mathew Garrett’s community hating time talk. Don’t be a dick, tell people they are being dicks etc. Popey and Fabian’s talks were also good and informative, regarding podcasting hardware and the podcasts they host. The guy who spoke of the Linux brand and his difficulty of selling it was also quite interesting.

I will mention briefly that I have discussed with a couple of LRL attendees of a subject I could talk about on the Gong-A-Thong next year (yes, LRL is back next year… excellent!). I have already began collecting statistics for this talk. So people who say that Gong-a-Thong talks are unplanned and poor will have me to answer to :P. I would say 365 days is more than enough time to plan for a five minute talk.

Conduit

What did I learn from this talk? Nothing. Seriously. Not because the talk was rubbish, I am sure the talk was actually brilliant. Its just that when sitting down, I managed to spill piping hot coffee down my right leg.

I was forced to leave the talk and head back to the hotel for a change of clothing. It must have been a funny sight for some attendees who noticed me walking out.

Returning to the talk I managed to catch the last 15 minutes. I look forward to the downloadable video of this talk. What I heard from “Sio” on the last evening party about the project really wowed me. It is certainly an application I will have to revise.

With the Conduit talk coming to an end. I went to grab another coffee. I then picked a great seat for the last episode of LUGRadio.

LUGRadio Live

And a great episode it was. I am not going to give my thoughts on this part of the event. You best listen to it or watch it when Tony/Laura or others release it. The first couple of minutes should pretty much sum up how awesome it was.

Regarding the news of the event coming back next year: Beautiful!

I will link to the episode upon its release.

Evening Party

I attended the evening party and arrived quite early. Early enough even to see Jono patiently waiting for a Pizza delivery.

I grabbed a drink and moved towards the main bar area where I sat down with a couple of guys, Bruno and I discussed my Eee’s 3g modem of which (at the time) had been bolted onto the reverse with sticky pads.

Everyone else was getting involved with Karoke. I am not much of a fan for noise. Not to say that the singing was awful, its just that it was miles too loud for me to handle.

We decided to move into in the cafe area where around 15 of us set up a nice table area and spoke about stuff. I made a lot of friends that evening, Most of which I am in contact with outside of LUGRadio.

Bruce and I discussed screen-casting that evening. He asked me to demonstrate the 3g card and how to get it running under Ubuntu. He also asked me to consider screencasting it. It makes sense to do so. This 3g card wasn’t documentated very well when I started using it. I will therefore screencast this and will upload it to a number of sites within the week.

LUGRadio Live UK 2008 has been and gone. Here’s my story/review.

The event took place at the Chubb Buildings in Wolverhampton over the 19th and 20th of July. It sort of started on the 18th with the pre-party. See the previous post regarding that.

Walking into the venue was quite an experience. I walked in grabbing my badge and “nutsack” to the sound of Airbourne. Simply awesome…

The venue had three stages, two of which were in lecture rooms and the other set up under a gazebo in the atrium. My first impressions of the building were positive. It was very well lighted, airy and there was plenty of room to walk around.

I firstly went to the Kubuntu stand and grabbed an 8.04 KDE4.0 remix. I have been using Kubuntu on a desktop for quite some time using the standard issue KDE3. I look forward to seeing what it will look like in a year or so.

The next stand I visited was the Open Rights Group. I forget the name of the person on the stand, but we had a good 10 minute convosation regarding the group, where it is going and it’s competition.

Competition is probably the wrong word. But I basically asked him how ORG relates with groups such as the FSF. Eventually I signed up and I now support them paying £5 a month. I am a student… forgive me :P

The four gents then mounted the centre stage to introduce us all to LRL and they pointed out each talk location etc. I headed out to the Lightning Talks stage.

Kevin Sandom: Grouphug - Clustering With an Evil Twist.

I first went to the “Lighting Talks” stage for the GroupHug talk. I admit, the clustering subject is totally new to me and somewhat beyond my understanding from a technical standpoint.

This was officially the first talk I have ever attended also. I feel I did all the right things. I had a notebook in my hand at all times. Taking down anything I felt I could make use of when I got back home.

What I understood of the presentation, is that Kevin has written a job scheduling system for Bash and each node writes reports back to a main core. He displayed three Konsole sessions on his Eee for demoing the scheduling and reporting. It was quite impressive to watch.

To be completely honest. I did not understand much of what he was saying. It was an excellent presentation anyhow. I hope one day to be able to revisit it via the videos  knowing exactly what it is.

Andy Robinson: OpenStreetMap

Immediately after the Grouphug talk came a talk about OpenStreetMap. This talk had a hugely positive impact on me. I was taking notes for the first time also.

Andy spoke of Google Maps and how I cannot legally use the data or map images freely without paying a license fee to Google.

I was actually completely unaware of this. I had been taking screenshots of Google maps for quite some time. Sometimes even posting those screenshots with directions etc online for friends/colleagues to view.

I was also unaware of just how much BS there is in Google maps. It is apparently full of errors of which can only be fixed by Google. With a mapping solution such as OpenStreetMap, anyone can flag maps as erroneous and request a fix. Simply put: it is the way things should be done.

He told of how the mapping process works. By using a GPS device you can literally jump on a bike and travel around your village/town. When returning to a machine, you can then edit these GPS traces and create a map for anyone to use without restrictions.

I decided pretty much on the spot that I would map my village when I returned home. I have also now encouraged a few of my friends/colleagues to do the same. They own the kit also :P

The talk was amazing. On the Sunday evening, a large group went on a small mapping adventure around Wolverhampton. I wish I had joined them. But it is obviously better to map an area you know well.

A Two Hour break

I spent the next two hours touring the building and taking a look at each of the stands.

I remember meeting Dan and Fab from the Linux Outlaws. Another excellent podcast worth listening to. I remember noticing how laid back the guys were, just as they are when discussing items on the show.

I picked up my first two stickers from that stand also. Both of which are plastered on the reverse of my Eee.

Just opposite them was the Debian stand. Selling t-shirts, stickers and posters. I was quite surprised not to see Debian CD’s. Someone correct me if I am wrong. But I am pretty sure it was just merch at the stand.

Anyhow, I picked up two Debian shirts and a couple of vinyls for the Eee and desktop.

I browsed the other stands as you do. Picking up whatever merch I could. The coolest of the freebies had to be the OpenSuse 11.0 CD’s and fluffy camealons. They were full of win. I look forward to revisiting OpenSuse when I get the time to study it properrly.

It begins here.

In the last post I wrote about the trip up to Wolverhampton. The following posts will talk about the actual event itself and briefly of the evening parties.

The Hog’s Head was an experience I’ll never forget. Much like when I visited my LUG for the first time, people were approachable and you could talk with anyone. I had never attended a Linux event previously. So everything I experienced throughout the weekend was new to me.

Walking into the Hog’s Head, I was approached by a chap called Chris. Who sat me down with a small group of attendees. Most of them knew each other. It was quite early in the evening, so there were not a great deal of attendees around.

More people started to show. I remember seeing Popey from Ubuntu-UK wearing an Ubuntu hoody. I realized at that point that awesome things would happen over the next 60 hours.

More “celebrities” started to show. By celebrities I mean people of which I recognized from blogs and podcasts. Neuro, MrBen, more Ubuntu people and Bruno for example.

The feeling was wild. I was in a small area of a pub with loads of Linux people around me. Most of which more experienced than me. But that didn’t stop me from being able to approach random faces and discuss things.

Three of the most interesting people I met that night were the guys from Bytemark. Who were responsible for the epic gaming rig. See the photo below:

I felt I learned enough about them, their gear and the work they do to really believe in Bytemark’s hosting solutions.

One of the guys carried a Nokia E90 and demonstrated to a couple of us what it could do. He showed off a Putty/Screen session. He first demonstrated Irssi running on a random box in the Bytemark office via 3g. I was amazed.

He then predictably dropped to a console and started playing. I say predictably because the second the connection established, I drew these pictures in my mind of say for example, if something went horribly wrong in an office. You could just whip out the phone and fix it. Wherever you are.

The handset looked lovely. My contract runs out in two months. I will likely be looking for a device with similar functionality.

Leaving

Leaving home at 4:45am was a little painful to say the least. I had stayed up most of the night rebuilding Ubuntu for the weekend gear. I ended up sleeping at 2:30am ish.

I left Norwich at roughly 5:45am. The bus was to take me from Norwich to London, Victoria Street Station.

The ride was mostly smooth and pleasurable. I was riding solo, loads of room. The 3G connection was pretty much solid all the way down. The ride was never dull.

London

Arriving in London, I had the pleasure of seeing erm…. nothing? Seriously, where the coach was taking us was basically derelict dump / permanent market. It was not a pretty sight at all. Moving towards the city center however, the place began to look prettier, but there were people everywhere. Like a ants. Quite the weird sight in comparison to Norwich.

As you can imagine, I do not get out much. Norwich City Center was nothing like London. When people describe cities as a system, I began to understand what those guys were saying.

The people of London looked almost puppet like.

Arriving in the coach station was even worse. I asked for assistance at an information point and I basically received a thousand cold stares rolled into one.

I felt better however when seeing this:

I was playing Crisis Core on the way up. Quite the perfect video gaming experience ;)

Birmingham

Boarding the next coach, mostly tired, I decided it was going to be a shocking ride. The coach was overheated, leather seated. And I had someone sitting to my right… pretty much restricting my freedom to move.

I couldn’t exactly get the Eee out and start playing with it either, because the bags were on my legs.

Eventually, we arrived in Birminghaam. It was at first equally as depressing as London. Derelict buildings and building work. Bums all over the place. Rubbish/bottles spewed all over roads.

I had built this image in my head of Wolverhampton. The four awesome gents of Lugradio often told of Wolverhampton. “it’s a dump” etc. I was beginning to think “does Wolverhampton look like this?”, and “will my Hotel room be filled with cockroaches?”.

I began to fear for the worst. I was told in the Lugradio forums previously that I was a brave man for wanting to walk around Wolverhampton to get a feel it.

Wolverhampton

Wolverhampton luckily turned out to be a beautiful place. I got of the coach and the surrounding area looked lovely.

I began to walk around. With the aim of finding my hotel. The hotel itself looked awesome.

I booked myself in, left my bags in the room and went outside to take pics.

Some of which are below:

“Wow” pretty much summarizes how easy that was.

I opened up a Filezilla session, pointed it towards my server, wiped the old WP files which I hadn’t tweaked, uploaded the new files and then finally pointed my browser towards upgrade.php.

No more than two minutes work. Thanks Wordpress. Very impressive!

I have discovered recently that writing about yourself can be a very therapeutic exercise. I enjoy noting down my plans for the future, writing up descriptions of items I have acquired and of developments I have made whether it be code or general life skills.

This got me thinking. I enjoy listening to “podcasts” covering free and open source software, hardware and general news. I feel like contributing a little but not for a large audience. I would record primarily for myself. If anyone else hears me and benefits from it in some way then it would be a bonus.

So, as a part of this fresh new website I will include what is known as a “blogcast”.

Like a podcast, it will be available to download via an RSS feed. ‘Casts are commonly distributed in the MP3 format. I will however only distribute it using OGG Vorbis because it is an audio format I strongly advocate. See here for more information.

For a definition of “blogcast”, see the following Wikipedia article: Blogcast.

In short, the blogcast will be a creative mix of news and thoughts regarding software and hardware I use on a daily basis, a little news of myself and my plans for the short term or maybe long term future. It will finally also provide brief how-to segments in a format similar to the older blog but in audio.

So think of this as an audio extension of this blog. It may just provide something interesting for visitors to want to come back here also.

Thoughts?

I have been running stevepearce.info for roughly a year. In that time it has seen some face lifts. Most of these reflecting what I have learned regarding PHP, XHTML, CSS and Gimp.The site you are looking at now has not only received a downgrade. But it’s database has been flushed. Meaning that yes, all of those (not so) excellent posts have gone and are never coming back.

I have reasons for doing this. Firstly, the content felt rushed when reading much of it back. It was also full of lazy typing errors and incorrect, poorly sourced information.

Secondly, I had over extended the website and focused primarily on the graphical presentation rather than performance. I recently tested the old blog with a roughly 4KB/s dial-up connection. ‘Fail’ pretty much sums up the result of that test run.

I have managed to take this Wordpress theme and tweak it to my liking. The various speed tests I have run on it suggest I am doing well so far.

Grade: A (95) - YSlow for firefox.

I imagine this figure will change when I start using images.

I have also learned some brilliant (though somewhat irritable) things regarding img tags. I was previously unaware that if you state the dimensions of the image you are pulling in, it will improve the request speed. Such a simple tweak it hurts.

So enjoy what you see before you. Take a look at the new areas under “pages”. Especially the photos area. Currently there is a shot of the Eee running Ubuntu. This was mostly for testing purposes.

In the next couple of weeks I intend to upload a mass of LugRadio Live photos. Seven days to go!

Enjoy the new stevepearce.info
Steve