OggCamp will happen in Wolverhampton on Sunday 25th October.

Why Wolverhampton? Well that’s where LugRadio Live 2009 (@lugradio) will happen too. On Saturday 24th October. See what we did?

So, the Ubuntu-UK Podcast (@uupc) and Linux Outlaws (@linuxoutlaws) podcast teams will be at LRL on the Saturday (and probably the Friday night as well) so we figured we may as well stick around on the Sunday too and organise an unconference where you can drop in to nurse your hangovers, see everyone again, and see some more talks, demos, or whatever.

As it’s an unconference, we won’t publish a full schedule beforehand (if you have an interesting presentation, just turn up on the day and if enough people are interested, you can give it) but both podcasts are likely to record some material during the day (one with swearing and one without ).

I will post more information as we know it. For instance, we should be able to announce the venue any day now…

InfoSlicer is a small application that enables you to download articles from Wikipedia, drag-and-drop sections of them to create new articles, and then publish your collection of articles for others to install or view on their own laptops.

The ideal of InfoSlicer is to support teachers in schools where access to books is limited. They can use InfoSlicer to quickly obtain content from the internet (maybe at a cybercafe rather than at the school or at home) and to create customized versions of the information that are suitable for their pupils and can be viewed with needing access to the internet.

Since completing the initial prototype, however, it’s become apparent that InfoSlicer could actually be more useful to the pupils themselves than just as a means to receive information created by their teacher. The children themselves could use InfoSlicer to download articles and then learn how to re-organise information for a specific audience or purpose and how to attribute someone else’s content without plagiarising it; the outcome of creating the articles is then less educationally important than the process of doing it.

So if you have Sugar, download the first version of InfoSlicer and give it a go (or just find out more) from: http://sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/InfoSlicer

Update 13th April 2009:

On re-reading this article (which was intended to be just a short intro to publicise InfoSlicer), it sounds as if I wrote the software myself! I didn’t. It was the outcome of the brilliant efforts of the InfoSlicer Extreme Blue team during their internship at IBM Hursley last Summer. Here’s a photo of the team at their Expo stand in Germany:

Jessica Vernier, Matt Bailey, Chris Leonard, Jon Mace

Of course, just the thought of manually editing xorg.conf in this day and age shouldn’t even have crossed my mind. Especially on Ubuntu. But (as my Twitter followers might have observed) I recently acquired a new Lenovo Thinkpad at work–specifically, a T61p widescreen Thinkpad which, unfortunately, has an NVIDIA graphics card (really really bad open source support under Linux because NVIDIA won’t open up their drivers). NVIDIA, however, do provide proprietary Linux drivers which are far far better than the ATI drivers of my previous Thinkpad T41p (under either Linux or Windows).

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)…

Yesterday, Tony and I trekked to Wolverhampton, video kit on our backs, to video the recording of the last ever studio episode of LugRadio.

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…

Back in February I attended a couple of sessions about free software in education. One was the kickoff meeting of OLPC Europe (the European support group for One Laptop Per Child). The other, was a fantastic talk by Knut Yrvin, who’s done a lot of work with free software in education in Norway.

His focus in the talk was on cross-platform free software – that is, free software that can be used in schools and runs on Windows, Linux, and (usually) Mac. He gave four examples of free software that he thinks is great in schools:

GCompris (award-winning software for younger end of primary school children) (www.gcompris.net/-en-). Having since met a 5 year old at LugRadio Live USA whose favourite activity on her OLPC laptop is GCompris, I’ll happily recommend it too.

StopMotion (for older end of primary school) (I’ve just been hunting for the URL for Windows but can’t find anything about it – can only find the page for the LInux version developer.skolelinux.no/info/studentgrupper/2005-hig-stopmotion/index.php – will let you know if I find the Windows one cos it looks really cool software)

OpenOffice.org (for secondary school level) (www.openoffice.org) – He made a point of saying that we shouldn’t inflict office skills on young children cos it’s boring. But at secondary level, this is a great alternative to paying for Microsoft Office. I use it all the time at work and at home. It’s free now but used to be a product from Sun Microsystems who sold it as Star Office. Much better now and is compatible with MS Office documents (eg .doc, .xls, .ppt files). Just download it and have a go.

Firefox web browser (all ages) (www.mozilla-europe.org/en). Again, I use this all the time (alternative to Internet Explorer) at home and at work.

If you’re a Windows user and want to know more about free software in education, there’s more free software that will run on Windows here: www.schoolforge.net