So why is this a big deal to me?

Last weekend was the third OggCamp conference, OggCamp 11, at the Farnham Maltings in Surrey. Two years ago, at the first OggCamp (a one-day event at the Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton), we invited Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc) to be our opening keynote speaker. Andy co-invented the MQTT messaging protocol about 10 years earlier and, while there was a server implementation of MQTT (Really Small Message Broker; RSMB) that you could download for free from IBM’s website, it was proprietary and there was no open source implementation available.

Andy wrote a new presentation, especially for OggCamp, describing the geeky innards of his Twittering house (as seen earlier that year on the BBC). The presentation was a fantastic kickstart to the day and (somewhat predictably for a conference with its foundations firmly in the open source world) Andy was questioned about what bits of his home automation system were built on open source software and open standards. The one significant part of the system that was proprietary was RSMB (the core part that enabled all the parts of his house to communicate).

Then OggCamp started, we had a good time, and we went home exhausted but happy.

And then, just two weeks later, Roger announced that he’d registered a new project called Mosquitto (as in MosQuiTTo) on Launchpad. He’d been inspired by Andy’s talk at OggCamp to write an open source alternative to RSMB. Within what seemed like days he had a working bit of code which was taken up and tested by others in the open source community and hardware-hacking communities like Homecamp.

I cannot claim any credit at all for all the hard work that Roger and others put in developing and testing Mosquitto. I’ve always been proud, though, that Mosquitto was born at OggCamp – we played our small part in helping connect the previously mostly corporate/business MQTT with the open source communities.

That Facebook announced they were adopting MQTT for their new messaging system the day before OggCamp 11 meant we could vicariously revel in Roger’s glory while we tried to find out just whether Facebook had adopted his code or their own implementation. The answer seems to be somewhere between the two.

And while I’m proud for OggCamp (of course), I’m also excited for Roger in his own right that his name is now in the licence agreement of apps from the mighty Facebook – that kind of recognition for your hard work must be such an amazing feeling!

It’s brilliant that there are people who have taken the event name literally and are camping for the weekend. Hopefully the weather will favour them! The Farnham Maltings venue has a really nice feel to it and is ideally located for the park and pubs. The attendees at OggCamp really make the event what it is and the best bit (well, one of them) as an organiser is seeing everyone arriving at the venue on Saturday morning!

We’ve got three stages, two of which are being run as an unconference. That means that the wonderful OggCampers volunteer talks and others vote for the ones they’d like to see most! We’ve had some really great talks submitted this way in the past. It sounds a bit chaotic and it is, but it works! We’ll be using CampFire Manager by Jon Spriggs to schedule these talks for the first time this year so you’ll be able to propose and vote for talks by txt msg and see the schedule up on the digital displays around the venue.

Our main stage schedule is basically complete. The Ubuntu Podcast team will be joining forces with the Linux Outlaws for the traditional live podcast recording. There will be a panel discussion and a raffle (of course) too! Our wonderful main stage speakers include:

• Simon Phipps
• LornaJane Mitchell (careers in Open Source)
• Chris Gutteridge (Southampton OpenData project)
• Steve Lee (Accessibility)
• Wayne Myers (professional music production on Linux)

We’ve got some exhibitors, including

• O’Reilly (who are offering 40% off their books on the Saturday)
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Hacker Public Radio
• Ubuntu UK
• Reprap 3D printer

We’ve also got some surprises planned for the weekend which you’ll only find out about by being there. If you want to come along and join in some or all of the weekend’s activities, you can. It’s free. That’s right, it doesn’t cost a penny. There are a few tickets left and you can get your hands on them here: http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com

It’s free thanks to our lovely sponsors:

• Bytemark (our headline sponsor!)
• Google
• Chris Procter on behalf of lug.org.uk
• Bitfolk (sponsoring the Saturday night party!)

This week is always the quickest of the whole process. Before we know it we’ll be standing in the William Cobbett pub sharing a drink or two with the lovely OggCampers on Friday night and won’t touch the ground until after the Sunday night drinks! The plan for the weekend (and lots more information) is available on the OggCamp website.

One of the best parts of the weekend is meeting people who listen to the show, so please say hello! See you there!

Hello, and welcome to the Ubuntu UK Podcast! It’s Tuesday the 1st of March 2011 and with me this week are….

And with (something like) that, this Tuesday at 8.30pm (UK time), we’ll be kicking off Season 4 of the Ubuntu-UK Podcast. And you can listen along. Live.

Regular listeners might be aware that we attempted a couple of episodes live last season. It mostly seemed to work. The weak excuse for broadband in Studio A held up well enough that we’re going to give it a go properly. So every two weeks, you can listen along with us live on the Internet.

While you listen, please join us in the chat room, on Twitter or identi.ca and offer feedback and other contributions as we go.

If you’re new to UUPC, it’s a one-hour Internet radio show on which we mostly talk about stuff relating to computing and the world of Open Source Software. If you can’t listen live on Tuesdays, you can download the show as a podcast from our website or from iTunes. We’ve been called “the Radio 4 of Linux podcasts” – basically, we’re family-friendly (no swearing) so you can listen around the house or in the car. We like to think we’re entertaining and a bit humorous. And we drink tea and eat cake when we can (though not while we’re talking!).

If you’re curious, have a listen to a past episode or to Tony’s Episode 0 teaser which he released last week.

See you Tuesday for:

I went to visit OggCamp10 venue The Black-e this afternoon with Dan and it’s really cool! It’s right in the centre of Liverpool and right next to the massive and brightly coloured Chinatown arch, the entrance to the oldest Chinatown in Europe. The Main Stage is a lovely big room on the upstairs, Stage 2 and 3 are in the basement, and the exhibition/chillout area is on the ground floor by the entrance. We’re planning to have conference wifi too, supplied by one of our sponsors, The Linux Emporium.

After spending longer than planned roaming The Black-e and trying to imagine it filled with people, we walked 5 minutes down the way to Studio 2, the bar for Saturday night. Studio 2 is the “studio where Coldplay, Barry Manilow, Take That, Spice Girls & Diana Ross recorded” but is now converted into a rather unique-looking bar with food. The building is still a proper recording studio though and, in Studio 2, the padded doors remain, as does the glass window between rooms, and separate recording booths. The bar will be available from 6pm until 2am and the chef will stay on in the early part of the evening so that we can buy food there.

And finally, there’s Liverpool itself. I’ve had various slightly doubtful enquiries about whether it’s worth going to Liverpool (especially if it’s quite a way to travel). I’ve been to Liverpool a few times in my life and I think it’s a really cool city nowadays.

As the 2008 City of Culture, Liverpool has been much regenerated over the past few years and is a really interesting place to be. Lots to see as a visitor, like the big wheel down by the docks, Albert Docks themselves, the Merseyside Maritime Museum, food at the old Bluecoat School…

…and not forgetting the rather random SuperLambBanana, an “unusual artwork [that] was created to warn of the dangers of genetically modified food, whilst being appropriate to the city of Liverpool due to the port’s rich history in the trade of lambs and the import of bananas”,  and the 125 mini SLBs that have been sponsored by local (and not-so-local) businesses and are mostly located around the city just waiting to be found–including near the OggCamp10 venue:

And of course there’s loads of good food (including good Chinese restaurants right by the venue), lots of shopping down the road, and, if today’s anything to go by, lots of sunshine too.

p.s. Thanks to Dan Lynch for the first photo, and to my Mum for the last three.

What’s happening in the video…

The red/orange lights flash faster when the electricity usage in my house increase. The green/blue lights flash faster when the electricity usage in my Mum’s house increases (though in the video, the usage stays at a constant level so the lights don’t speed up).

Initially, the lights are flashing at the default reading of 1 kW. Then as the electricity usage levels vary, the red/orange lights start to flash out of sync with the green/blue lights. After a short time, though, I switch the kettle on (you can just about hear it in the background!) and you can see the red/orange lights start to flash a lot more quickly (as the kettle takes about 3 kW on top of whatever the current reading is). The lights slow down again as the kettle switches off.

How does it work?

In my house I have a Current Cost monitor, which reads the live power usage of the house and publishes it (using IBM messaging protocol MQTT) to a server on the Internet. An application on my laptop (to which my Arduino – small circuit board with a processor on it – is connected) subscribes to the readings in real time and passes the information to the Arduino. The Arduino does some calculations to convert the readings to speed of flashing so that the higher the reading, the faster the lights flash. The Arduino uses that speed calculation to control the relay switches connected to the Arduino, which in turn control the power to the lights – when the relay allows power to the lights, the lights come on; when the relay cuts the power to the lights, the lights go off, and so on.

This slideshow on Slideshare shows the overall connections between all the parts, and some pretty pictures:

When I set up my blog, back in March 2006, I adorned its posts (and pages) with the RedStripes theme. Which was particularly exciting because, despite never having seen PHP previously, I managed to fix a bug in it!

The RedStripes theme was always slightly awkward because it didn’t resize very well (either if you changed the size of the font, if you used page titles that were too long, or if you just added too many pages). While also rather pretty, IMHO, it was also slightly dated (I like to think ‘retro’) in style, even at the time I adopted it.

So, having seen the bang-up-to-date artistry of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge’s blogs (basically the fact that they have natural curves that emulate the real world, rather than straight lines), I went looking for something similar.

Notepad Chaos was one of the first I found and no matter how many themes I found this one stuck out because, well, it doesn’t look like a WordPress blog.

So I spent another couple of evenings customising it slightly to fit the content on my blog, including creating the tag cloud pinned note, and tweaking meta information in the post footers, I give to you my new theme–unless you’re reading this on the blog rather than via RSS, aggregated, or on Facebook – which would make it all rather pointless!

P.S. Coincidentally, when I first applied the new theme to my blog so that I could see how it looked and how much customisation I’d have to do, @benjamindyer was searching for something, came across my blog in the search results, and tweeted his reaction and observation (though I can take no credit for the actual design)!

Fortunately, while not a freedom-hater, I’m not averse to using proprietary drivers if I can’t make my laptop work any other way. And as this is my work machine, I need it to Just Work (or as close to as I can). So I installed EnvyNG (envyng-core, envyng-gtk) and ran that to install the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers. Incidentally, enabling the NVIDIA proprietary drivers listed in System > Administration > Hardware Drivers screwed up my graphics – I assume the drivers that Ubuntu thinks are right for my graphics card aren’t actually the right ones. EnvyNG, however, got it spot on–the widescreen display resolution (1920×1200) was automatically detected and worked straight off.

Ubuntu Desktop Effects (aka compiz)

This works pretty well. I had to look up how to enable, for example, the rotating cube (which is the ultimate desktop bling) which seemed to me to be a pretty bad Out of Box Experience (OoBE) – before installing Ubuntu on the Thinkpad, I’d booted once into Vista to check that the memory I’d installed was detected. In my brief visit, I noticed that things like the pretty semi-transparent sidebar and thought it’d be nice if Ubuntu did that without any effort on the user’s part (though, to be fair, someone else had installed Vista and, presumably, ensured it worked before shipping the Thinkpad – it would be possible to do the same for a pre-installed Ubuntu machine).

Rotating cube

My general opinion of the Desktop Effects is that while the effects themselves are amazing and a real step-up for Linux desktops, the Advanced Desktop Effects Manager, where you enable/disable the effects you want, is not incredibly easy to use. It’s often not clear what a given effect will do if you enable it. Nor is it clear what all the many many options for each effect will achieve. Really, we need a much simpler interface that has advanced options hidden away – something I’ll take a look at at some point…

The effects that I’ve enabled for now, and found useful/interesting/pointless-but-fun are:

By the way, Wobbly Windows are enabled by default. If you’re interested in knowing more about how Wobbly Windows came to be, here’s an interview with Red Hat’s Senior Interaction Designer (in 2005), Seth Nickell (PDF).

Enabling an external projector/monitor

Coming soon (as soon as I get round to taking some screenshots)…

I feel somewhat privileged to have shared that small, sweaty studio at Jono’s house with the (current incarnation of) four large gents of LugRadio fame. And to have got on their final show (I said “Hello” a couple of times…before anyone gets too impressed!    ).

I’m by no means a serious fan-girl of the show (I’m not really part of the regular LR community – forums, IRC, etc) but I have listened to a lot of this season (Season 5) and several from previous seasons, and attended all LugRadio Live events except the first (but including LRL USA 08!). So I can tell them apart when they talk, at least.

I was sad to hear that they were quitting, though – not least because that means no more LugRadio Live! I gratuitously mentioned LugRadio Live in the editorial of the totally unrelated BCS-HCI Interfaces magazine after attending LRL 06 because it was such a good example of how a community can pull together such a great conference.

Every year I’ve been really impressed by the sheer number of people who turn up from all corners of the Earth (the furthest travelled gets a prize), including New Zealand and Hong Kong, to spend a weekend in Wolverhampton. Open Source and Linux conferences aren’t exactly a rare occurance these days but most choose to take place in a fairly glamourous or desirable location. My first LRL took place at the Wolverhampton Students’ Union…on a particularly hot weekend…without aircon. My memories include:

• It was hot.
• Mark Shuttleworth presenting about making Open Source Software more usable and attractive to normal users.
• Drinking copious amounts of free water from the bar.
• Ade getting a verbal pummelling from the female LR community members in the session about how to encourage more women into Open Source.
• Cramming into a tiny, airless BoF room to discuss the vision of lug.org.uk.
• The ‘Women in Open Source’ discussion continuing into the corridor while the next session got underway, and then in the car on the way home.
• Meeting Josette from O’Reilly and buying books from her.
• A packed room crying with laughter at Bruno’s epic talk: “This talk may contain swearing”
• Stephen Lamb from Microsoft bravely and successfully giving a presentation about Security to a room of Linux and Open Source fans.
• Being incredibly impressed by the range of speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors at this informal conference event that cost just £5 to attend.

So the following year, I went again (this time to the nicer Lighthouse venue); this time I joined The Crew – the yellow-t-shirted people who do all the ‘backstage’ stuff. Memories:

• It was another hot weekend.
• Getting up very early to stand outside The Lighthouse at 8am on the Saturday.
• Ron’s wife providing bacon butties to all the volunteers.
• Adam running down the aisle to the Rocky Theme in a dressing gown, then….in a thong….banging a gong…
• Continuing my habit of buying O’Reilly books from Josette.
• Changing a lot of video tapes.
• Setting up a lot of chairs, putting them away again, setting them up again, putting them away again…
• The low-tech wiki.
• Big LRL banners.
• Ted Haegar’s teeth.
• Being impressed yet again at the range of speakers, exhibitors, and sponsors the team had rustled up on the back of a fortnightly podcast that contains a lot of swearing.

And, bringing us right up to date: LugRadio Live USA 08:

• Tony’s fantastic trailer for LRL USA 08.
• An atypical heat wave in San Francisco (though, this being America, working aircon).
• Watching (from a distance) Adam getting frisked of his water bottles by Heathrow’s Security after having been warned three times not to carry liquids through Security.
• Jono commenting scathingly about Adam’s lack of travel experience, then thinking it a good idea to take a photo of Adam in Security….before disappearing under a swarm of Security staff supervising him deleting said photo.
• Helping ward off The Doom that kept descending on the team in the couple of days before LRL.
• Visiting Alcatraz and watching the team posing for more boy-band photos.
• Sitting in Hard Rock Cafe all afternoon and coming up with the best spoof ever…which I still think should be their Christmas Special.
• The view of Downtown SF from The Metreon’s balcony.
• The empty vastness of the venue at The Metreon when we were allowed in on Friday morning.
• Carrying (and dropping) far too many boxes of magazines and Nutsack goodies with Adam in the searing heat of the streets of San Francisco.
• Meeting Kynan, who just never stopped working!
• Being constantly amazed that Google (Google!) were bankrolling the entire event…and even bought us breakfast, live streamed to Google Video from a mobile phone (see it on YouTube here)!
• Brilliant talks from Emma Jane Hogbin (Women in Open Source), Kristen Accardi and Val Henson (Linux device drivers in 30 minutes – while baking cookies on-stage), Matthew Garrett (Power management and anger)…
• Stopping attendees sneaking into the building before the doors officially opened on the Saturday morning. The first group just sat down on the pavement and got their laptops out while they waited.
• One Laptop Per Child laptops everywhere!
• Small children – officially making this a (somewhat unlikely) family event!
• Emma Jane getting progressively hoarser throughout the weekend.
• Tedddd sprinting up and down the massive venue and videoing all the talks simultaneously.
• Jono playing ‘Jack’s Playing Ball’ on the Frets on Fire (OSS version of Guitar Hero).
• The MAKE kaleidoscope glasses.
• A significant number of the last people standing on Sunday night wearing matching free Banshee t-shirts in the bar.
• Massive Google beanbags.

And that’s just some of the things that I’ve enjoyed at LRL events. And why I’m going again this year. I’ll maybe see you there…

Here are the details (listen out for the trailer on your favourite Linux/OpenSource podcast, such as Linux Outlaws)…

LugRadio Live UK 2008
The Lighthouse Media Center, Fryer St., Wolverhampton, WV1 1HT

LugRadio Live UK 2008, the most popular community Open Source event in the UK takes place in Wolverhampton on the 19th and 20th and features three stages full of 25+ speakers including:

• Chris DiBona (Google)
• Max Spevack (Red Hat)
• Steve Lamb (Microsoft)
• Robert Collins (Canonical)
• Benjamin Otte (GNOME)
• Rob McQueen (Collabora)
• Edward Hervey (Collabora Multimedia)
• James Hooker
• Kevin Sandom
• Barbie (MessageLabs)
• Daniel James
• Emma Jane Hogbin
• Bruno Bord
• Ben Thorp
• Rufus Pollock (FFFI)
• Sam Birchall
• John Carr
• William J Giddings
• and many more…

In addition to this the show will feature over 20 exhibitors, special debate sessions, the legendary Gong-a-thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza (read: a series of small talks chaired by a man in a very small pair of pants and a very large gong – not to be missed!), parties on the Friday and Saturday evenings and much, much more.

All of this is just £5, and there are even a raft of hotel deals available to make your trip simple and cost effective. Head over to www.lugradio.org/live to find out more.

I was privy to a pre-release airing last night and I was very impressed, having sat through hours of recording time on Saturday…

The show now has its own Twitter ID (@uupc) so that you can follow its progress from recording, through editing, to release.

Enjoy!