I prepared some notes on a few topics and they weren’t used that much so I thought that I’d use them here as it’s been a while since I said anything useful on anything other than the miniutae of any particular issue.

So, Sun finally released the Java source code under the GPL. Great News. Why? Well, here follows a slightly rambled list of opinions on the topic.

I don’t use Java particularly. Not on the desktop or the server and most people don’t really care about Java applets that much any more, but Java is pretty popular on embedded devices such as your mobile phone to play games and TV set-top boxes. Which I would guess is Sun’s main source of revenue from Java and I believe will be unaffected.

The good news for the open source community is that we get a solid bunch of code that we’ve had to largely avoid in the past due to licensing and redistribution issues. We have a platform we can use at last which will be easy to install and redistribute. We can now run Java apps easily – the Azureus bit torrent client, Freemind, the Java components of Open Office.org, the Apache Tomcat server, Open Exchange which builds on Tomcat and so on. Not exactly a raft of Java applications, but then we’ve never had a Free and complete Java implementation before. Java has always been something which has been viewed with suspicion under Linux.

Not only is the Open Source and Free software community now free to install Java and Java applications, but we now have the possibility to use Java as a language and a platform properly for the first time. The Java community can now contribute optimisations and features that they’ve been waiting for, which will only make Java better and prevent it becoming obsolete on the desktop and in the server room in the face of .NET, Mono, PHP and Python. It also gives us a powerful application server engine.

One of the big cliffhangers for whether Sun would Open Source Java was whether it would be forked, leading to 2 or more incompatible, competing Java implementations. I don’t believe this to be likely in anything other than specific uses.

There are already several non-Sun Java implementations such as:

• Blackdown
• Kaffe
• Classpath
• IBM JDK
• Others

Most people aren’t using them. The Sun implementation is the standard and reference implementation and who wants to use a non-standard version. Certainly, Blackdown and Kaffe have been around for a few years and latterly, Classpath and none have ever been complete or widely used.

The only likely scenario of a competing Java implementation being a threat to the Sun implementation is if the Sun implementation doesn’t give users what they want and who would be stupid enough to do that? Besides, this is the Open Source community, where you can submit your own features and extensions.
As I said, aside from embedded usage, server and desktop usage are Java’s other 2 main areas. Installation and redistribution have always been troublesome on Linux, as nobody can package it for you, you have to get it from Sun, run the installer script, wave goodbye to your ethics and then set up your path. Awkward and compromising. Or use an incomplete implementation or live without. Thats for your desktop, for the server, you probably can install it yourself and have your ethics wiped away by business needs or management decisions, but still these issues all made Java a more difficult choice on Linux and one which people weren’t keen to utilise or program with.

On Windows servers, you probably do everything in ASP.NET, on Linux you probably did everything in PHP, or more recently Ruby, Python or even Mono. Now we have Java too and we can use Tomcat and Jakarta. Java is at last now a viable option on the Linux desktop or for the glue in server applications.

…Stupid mail servers.

You see, while being a reasonably well balanced person, I tend to see through things quickly, particularly advertising, marketing, PR, promotions, special offers and those guys with the throwing games at the fair ground and shit songs, irritating adverts and crap, mindless TV programmes piss me off really badly so much so that I have to turn over the TV or radio to make it all just go away.

As you may have read here and here, I like tinkering with mail servers, there seem to be endless permutations to solving any number of problems. So, I implemented greylisting a few weeks back and it has worked well, I received compliments on how much the spam rate had dropped, in fact to pretty much zero. I estimate that at least 90% of email connections my main mail server receives are spam and we drop about 40% of that with spam blacklists, Spamassassin was pretty ineffective and caused problems under heavy load so I dropped it and replaced it with greylisting. Greylisting refuses every email connection the first time round and tells you to come back in a short while.

A core feature of mail servers is the ability to spool message to retry later. When the retry comes , if it is after a certain period of time, the mail server looks up in the greylisting table whether it has seen mail from you recently and if it has, lets the mail through. Simple huh? And a pretty common tactic. Most spam comes from virus infected Windows machines and the spam software on them (which you won’t notice apart from your Internet connection being slow) isn’t normally intelligent enough to handle retries, they are normally optimised for sending as much spam as possible, regardless of whether it reaches it’s destination.

So, what has pissed me off today is a client complained that they aren’t getting some mail. I look into it and find that in each case the sending mail server can’t handle retries. WHY NOT??? Because, probably, their administrators don’t know what they’re doing. In one case, I guess it’s a policy decision. That’s YOU Blueyonder, spam capital of the UK. But in the other case, it looks like a home hosted mail server run by people that don’t know what they’re doing.

In this case, I had to whitelist (that means automatically allow, for the non-techies) the servers in question to allow my customers to receive the mail.

So, aside from my other rants on the topic of mail administration above, if you run a mail server, make sure you can handle reties within a reasonable period, unless you have a specific technical reason not to. As a hint, make the first retry within 10 to 15 minutes and then another one after an hour.

Oh yes, in completely unrelated news, I have given up smoking again. Completely unrelated, as I say.

On the good front, it amazes me how useful David Watson seems to be. I’m almost certain I’ve never met him, but he seems to keep popping up with solutions to my quandaries. Such as here and here. And he’s a fellow bass player. Keep on being one of the most useful people in world dude :).

I have finally gotten around to buying a Cowon iAudio X5 multimedia player. So, ogg audio and video playback on the move for me. I meant to buy one a while back but couldn’t squeeze the legacy money repository any tighter.

So, woohoo for me 🙂

I’m going to be putting some servers into a data centre and manage them remotely. That means power control and optionally an IP KVM. Does anyone know the best way to do this? Do I need an IP KVM? What do they do that would mean I use an IP KVM rather than a normal KVM, both if I had to visit or if I worked from home?

The options I’m looking at at the moment are either some kind of remote power control device, using servers like Sun X2100s with either ” Optional System Management Daughter Cards” or “Standard Service Processor with embedded LOM” which use IPMI. Or maybe regular Dell or other servers, with the same kind of cards.

Are these cards any good? Do they work with Linux. Will IPMI 1.5 do what I want or do I need IPMI 2? It’s a minefield I tell ya. Can anyone make recommendations for remote power control devices, or BMC manufacturers and suppliers? What is preferable? A card or a separate device? I don’t know.

Oh yes and all of these servers will be running Linux…

I recently trialled and then implemented greylisting on a few Exim mail servers, seems pretty straight forward when you know how to add it to the Exim config. I guess I ought to post that config snippet in case it is of use to anyone as it took me a few goes to get right. On Debian and derivatives you need exim4-daemon-heavy and greylistd. You will also need to add the Debian-exim user to the greylist group and ensure that /var/lib/greylistd/whitelist-hosts is group readable.

I use Vexim for added ease of use as most of the integration of Spamassassin and ClamAV is done for you and it provides a web interface to managing virtual domains and users. Therefore my config is different from the Debianised split config. I used dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config to tell exim to use a single config file.

Note the commented out line, this was necessary to make it work with my customised Vexim setup. Yours may well be able to use it so leave it in to start with. I put this in vexim-acl-check-rcpt.conf, which of course you won’t have unless you’re using Vexim, so you’ll have to work out where to put it. I guess I can make edits if people tell me the details.

Give /etc/greylistd/config the once over to make sure it’s set up how you want it, I set my retry period down to 10 minutes as I have users who have time sensitive emails. Also look at /var/lib/greylistd/whitelist-hosts to allow all of the machines you need to be allowed straight through.

With Vexim, you are also using SMTP authentication by default so it would be nice to allow your users through without having to find another means of not greylisting them. If you don’t use SMTP authentication you’ll have to find another way and take out the !authenticated = * line.

This is essentially taken from the greylistd /usr/share/doc/greylistd.

Due to problems with getting WordPress to format the code for me and not hide the backslashes, I have removed the actual config and instead point you to my wiki article on greylisting. Apologies for that.

There are extra bits of config that allow you to catch emails with no envelope sender address, but I’ve not set this up satisfactorily yet, so answers on a postcard.

Other links to Exim Greylisting are at the following:

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/167

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Spam-Filtering-for-MX/exim-greylisting.html (didn’t work for me)

http://spod.cx/blog/greylisting_with_exim_spamassassin.shtml

I’ve been helping test Jokosher again, just as we come up to the second development release, but sadly I seem to have a problem with Jokosher recognising my Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live 5.1 since upgrading to Edgy. It all worked fine in Dapper. Please help if you have any understanding of DBUS, Gnome audio and ALSA. I don’t know where to go from here. So for now I’ll have to use my limited spare time on trying to help the docs team.

On a side note, check Jokosher out if you are interested in Linux audio production, we’re always looking for developers.

Well actually haven’t but it feels like I have. I only went to Cyprus but it’s been chaos since I got back. It’s been a while so here’s a rundown.

Went to Cyprus, the Turkish part. It’s really nice, very peaceful where I went but you can see the place is in the middle of (re)development. It has suffered from under investment since the split with the Greek side but you get a sense that they are suddenly becoming aware of the income from tourism. Most of the place seems to be either run-down and covered in patches of debris or is being developed as fast as you can see, there are homes and apartments being built everywhere. Still, worse than British workers, there seem to be 7 or 8 people doing construction job and all but one of them are watching the other one do something small and fiddly.

I turned 30. I didn’t celebrate other than go for a meal with my family. Not that I was pissed off or depressed at my passing youth, merely that I just couldn’t be arsed. I really don’t feel like going out and getting wrecked these days, which was pretty much par for course during my late teens and 20s. Guess I’m getting old, but I can neither afford to waste money in such a way, nor waste the day afterwards recovering and more often than not, the day after that too. Some of my best friends also turned 30. Happy birthday to Rich, Adele, Anna, Joan, my nemesis Felim Whiteley who all share the same birthday as me and are also not listening apart from Felim probably. Hope you’re well my man, oh and by the way, someone left you a message in my comments. I can mail you his address if you don’t already have it.

I started doing a CCNA, funded by work, this is kinda cool but it’s all theory at the moment. I’m looking forward to playing with routers and stuff. It’s a real struggle to find the time to get my work done, especially with 2 or 3 weeks to catch up on after my holiday but I’m almost back up to date.

My mobile phone seems to be a bit fucked. The signal has always been a bit weak at home, but I’ve had calls drop out without signal problems and SMS messages that didn’t turn up. If you sent me a message and I didn’t reply then I can only apologise. Worse than this is the fact that the screen is now fuzzy in the top half and it’s a struggle to read messages some times. Ahh well, I’m not going to waste money I don’t have buying a new one when I’ll get a new one in March. Still I gotta wait for about 4 months with a dodgy phone.

I reinstalled my Ubuntu desktop with Edgy, which was kindly released on my birthday. The main reason was to make a clean sweep as both me and Aq wondered in the when we upgraded to Dapper whether we had missed out on some of the wizzy bits and pieces by doing so; and also to put my /home partition on Linux software RAID so I could play with it.

At work I’m busy as always. Top projects are still Asterisk, which I’ve been away from for quite a while, but which may well become quite important and a few other things. I have a number of “Dear Lazyweb” requests coming up so may well be asking for your advice.

I also have to learn PHP which is going to be a challenge given that I’m already short on time and doing a CCNA. Anyone got recommendations for PHP5 books or courses? My employer would like a number of us to learn at the same time, in a semi-organised way.

Oh yes and I’ve been ill for the last week. I was in a bad way Sunday and Monday, went in to work for a meeting feeling lousy on Tuesday but have been getting better since. My throat is still really sore and my chest is heavy, I haven’t smoked since I’ve been ill and I’m having sleepless nights. Hopefully I’ll be properly recovered soon.

That’s all for now, no doubt I will think of more stuff to write after hitting submit and will then take another 6 weeks to write them out. Hope you’re all well you kerrazy kidz.

Yeah I turned 30 today and so far it seems ok.

Got 3 cards so far but no presents, don’t that suck? In fairness I haven’t seen anyone yet apart from my work colleagues so I’m sulking about nothing. I’m going for a meal with my family later so all of the surprises are to come.

I was thinking about the excitement of birthdays from when I was a kid. Man it seems like forever ago. Not being able to sleep the night before and then waking up to all of those presents. Wow. The magic kinda goes away after your early 20s. It’s weird how all of those toys would make you so happy and these days I’m so hard to please. Think I lost something somewhere along the way.

Ahh well, that concludes this episode of the sad and desperate 🙂

Wow, I turn 30 in about 3 weeks, on the 26th October to be exact. I would like to be quite detailed and retrospective, but that will have to wait for another time, but for now, let me suffice to say that I am happy with what I have done over the last 30 years. I have few regrets and have achieved many things that I think few others will. I have certainly done most of the things I would like to have done by the time I’m thinking of retiring.

I have had a fantastic time over the last 12 years. I’ve also had some of the darkest periods of my life during that time, thankfully they have been few. What I want to do next is find some stability and some roots. Yes, I am getting old and sensible, many people never thought that would happen, I’ve always been a rolling stone and gathered no moss. I am a little too self-sufficient for my own good and am fiercely independent. It’s time to get serious, lay down some roots somewhere and make plans for the future. There are many things that I should be organising for the rest of my life which I have done little about. Contrary to that idea, I really would like to travel more, it’s always been one of my goals. So far I have yet to make it out of Europe.

That’s it for now. More thoughts another time.

I’ll be on a long overdue holiday between the 4th and 19th October so if you want me during that time I won’t be available. Also, if you need me urgently before then, you’re pretty much out of luck as I’m at work during the day and working on my CCNA for the next 2 evenings. So there 😉

Eek.

I’ve just been called by the Anthony Nolan Trust, a UK bone marrow donor register, as I am a potential match for someone in need of a transplant. I announce this in a heady cloud of trepidation and the feeling that I could be saving someone’s life if my samples are a good enough match.

I signed up in June or so, when a colleague in need of a transplant himself organised a mass attendance at a testing session. In short, I’m really nervous as I’m pretty squeamish but how can you turn down the opportunity to save someone’s life?

There is a real shortage of blood, bone marrow (particularly male and ethnic minorities) and organ donors in the UK and I urge you to actively go out and give blood and bone marrow samples and sign up for a donor card. You could be saving somebody’s life.

Yes, thanks to Stuart Langridge, I now have audio previews in Nautilus, the Gnome file browser.

It turns out that, according to this comment, the key to audio previews in Nautilus, is Sox. I didn’t know that and nothing about the sox entry in my package manager, be it apt or Synaptic, suggested that this might be the case.

So, thanks for that 🙂

Does anyone know why audio previews in Nautilus don’t work for me? They work for Jono and we’re both running Ubuntu Dapper. I remember him showing me some Ubuntu features way back around the time of the Warty stable and Hoary development versions whereby if you mouse-over an audio file in Nautilus, you get an audio preview, right there in Nautilus.

I run a pretty much stock Ubuntu configuration and don’t mess with audio and Nautilus preview settings, but still, I’ve never had this feature work for me and seeing Jono’s machine a few times recently reminded me of this fact. Bastard 😉

As per default, my preview configuration plays audio previews for local files. Does anyone know of any other issues that might be responsible?

Anyway, I can’t complain too much about Jono as he took 2 hours out of his day to teach me about GStreamer so I can help out with Jokosher and he also rescued my Everybody Loves Eric Raymond t-shirt which I left at LUG Radio Live.

I’m going on a long overdue holiday in 3 weeks and I want to take a good Linux book or 2 along for the ride. I’m going for 2 quiet weeks and so I’d like something for the downtime or when I’m not feeling sociable.

Last time I went on a longish holiday I took this copy of Rebel Code by Glynn Moody, though it seems there is a newer edition now. In many ways, it was the most influential Linux book I’ve read. I was on a quiet, near 3 week holiday with plenty of time for for taking stock and making decisions for the future. I was just getting serious with Linux and this book sealed it for me as it matched my level of understanding at the time. It was at that point that I decided I wanted to make my career in the Linux field.

So this time I’m looking for something equally influential and I’m asking you for recommendations. I read the Richard Stallman biography, Free as in Freedom which painted a pretty good portrait and I’ve also read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond and was bored to tears, I never did finish it.

Programming or other real tech books are no use because I don’t think I’ll be taking a laptop with airport security the way it is at the moment and there’s no way I’m putting one in the luggage hold. I don’t think I’ll find Python, PHP, Perl, Bind or Exim in a Cypriot Internet cafe.

What do you recommend?

I have said this to a few people recently so I thought it would make a reasonable post:

Heh, not quite the guitar God I thought I was. Since buying all of my gear I have come to a number of realisations.

1) I can’t sing.
2) I can’t sing and play guitar at the same time.
3) I’m not as good on the guitar as I thought.
4) I can’t play much lead.
5) I can play some lead better than I thought.
6) I don’t know how to write songs.
7) I have an obsession with 70s bands (The Clash, The Who, The Sex Pistols) and hairstyles (Clash and Pistols).

Which make the grand master plan a little harder.

Aside from this, I’d like to thank everyone who emailed, IMed and commented after reading the last post. Thanks for showing an interest. It warms the heart to know that people actually give a shit 🙂

Also, and this is specific to my closest friends (RACHEL!), just because my blog is mostly about Linux and other bits of computing nomenclature, doesn’t mean you should feel precluded from posting comments and saying hi. I expect you to leave a comment if you have something to say on what I’ve written. I’d be very sad if I thought my oldest friends weren’t leaving me comments, even when the posts are nothing to do with Linux/computer stuff, just because all of other posts are. My blog is specifically about me, it just so happens that Linux is what I spend most of my time doing and most of the other commenters are the same. You can comment on the other stuff if you have something to say. It lets me know you’re still out there and care about what I have to say.

I’m going to go give myself a warm, fuzzy hug 😉 No, not the private kind 😉

Well, I’m quite pleased with myself.

Ever since I was about 17 or 18 I’ve always wanted a couple of guitars in particular. A decent quality Les Paul and a Telecaster. Plus a great sounding amp. On Sunday I went to Birmingham to buy a new VCR (my old one is dead and I have some stuff on VHS which I’d like to save digitally). You’d be surprised how hard it is to get a reasonably priced one these days, nobody wants them and they’re legacy equipment so the prices are higher than for a DVD player. Anyway, so I shopped around and I could get a good VCR for 20 GBP less from Birmingham than anywhere else so I hopped on the train as they won’t deliver to anywhere other than the card billing address.

I was on my way out of Birmingham New Street station, walking down Queensway towards Richer Sounds when I saw a guitar shop over the road. I decided to have a look around and took a fancy to 2 guitars. I mooched around for a few mins, bought some strings for my appalling, lowest common denominator, won’t stay in tune Squier Strat that I bought a few years back and headed off to get my VCR.

On the way back to the station, it occured to me that I could afford, on an impulse buy, to get one of the guitars I wanted, a red sunburst Squier Telecaster Custom with a neck humbucker. I went back into the shop, had another look around and asked if I could try the Squier Tele and an Epiphone Les Paul Custom Black Beauty through a Fender amp and a Marshall.

While Marshall is the king of rock amps, I really like The Sex Pistols guitar sound, raw, raunchy and tangy and so I was interested to hear a Fender amp. I also thought the Tele might sound nice through it. I tried the Tele and liked the feel of it, solid and workman like, which is what I wanted it for. For those that don’t know, guitars sound different to each other. It’s in the wood, the components, the circuitry and the the pickups. A Fender Stratocaster sounds warm, clean and pingy, a Telecaster sounds cold, thin and scratchy. A Gibson Les Paul sounds warm, thick, powerful and bluesy – the archetypal rock lead guitar. A Gibson SG sounds thick and tangy (think AC/DC). Each guitar has it’s own sound and they are useful for different things. Telecasters, despite my description are great for rhythm or backing guitars, while Les Pauls are great for lead and the two sound particularly good when complementing each other. Due to the high cost of Fender and Gibson guitars, many companies have made their own copies, including Fender and Gibson themselves, branding their own copies as Squier and Epiphone respectively, which would rank as semi-pro standard.

Anyway, back to the plot. So I played this Tele and I probably would have bought it anyway. It felt good but sounded a bit shit through the Fender amp. So the shop guy recommended I forget the Fender and try it through a Marshall. Amps again have different sounds, depending on the circuitry of the pre-amp, the speaker quality and whether it uses valves or transistors. Valves sound way better (to me at least) but sometimes blow and aren’t cheap to replace.

I noticed an immediate difference through the Marshall and was set on buying the Tele when the guy came over and passed me the Les Paul Custom. The cool thing about Les Pauls through a good amp is that you can just give it a kind of deadened chug and you get this heavy purring hum come back from the speakers that hits your stomach. I did just that and I started to shake with the sensation. Fucking hell. I played some riffs and some lead parts and the shaking didn’t go away. I was blown to pieces by the sound. I stopped playing and thought for a second. I looked at the guy and told him to price the lot up for me, with guitar bags, spare strings, a couple of guitar stands and plectrums. I’m not going to say how much it was in public, but it was more than a quite a lot. I weighed it up and bought the lot. Plus a Shure SM58 microphone for recording. SM58s are best for vocals and I wanted an SM57 also for miking up the amp, but they didn’t have any, so the guy showed me a trick for turning an SM58 into an SM57. Very useful that and saved me 80 GBP.

The only problem was getting it all home. I’d left my car at Wolves train station and so had to carry everything. After much deliberation and exploration of options I decided that I would have to collect the amp next weekend by car and carried the rest by hand. It was a near nightmare carrying 2 guitars, 4 guitar stands, a microphone box and a VCR but I made it to the car shortly before I breathed my last breath and quietly expired.

So why am I doing all this? Well, I’ve wanted to get into home music recording for years. I was a professional musician for 5 years and have barely played since. I’ve wanted those 2 guitars and that kind of amp since my late teens and now I can just about afford them. With Jokosher getting ready to rock the world, I have the software to do it at no financial cost. I’ve been readying myself to do this for years but have never really gotten to grips with my old tape based 4 track recorder. I already have a bass guitar and a drum machine and I came to the decision that my old strat is just not up to anything useful. I’ve decided to do another jingle for LUG Radio and that was all the excuse I needed to go out and get some gear and be serious about setting up a home studio. Also it might be said that perhaps I’ve missed my chance to make another attempt at a serious recording career by feeling burnt by the last time and hiding under a stone ever since and now I’m deciding to resurrect my musical interest now I’m nearly 30 and having an early mid-life crisis. I’ve already damaged the speaker on my crappy little Fender practice amp that came with my Strat by playing too loud.

I’m not going to try to conquer the world. I can sing in tune, but don’t have an interesting voice and I can’t write songs for shit, but it will be fun just playing around and recording stuff. When I try to write, it either sounds like someone else or I try to overload it with depth of meaning and get lost. I can’t remember the last time anybody said anything useful in a song, not since The Clash and Pistols anyway and I always try to say too much before losing the original point.

After taking a recommendation from Jono and some of the other #Jokosher guys on IRC, I bought an M-Audio Delta 44 sound card for recording. It arrived yesterday and I had a play with it briefly but I will have to read the manual as there are too many capabilities, inputs and outputs from a software point of view to understand before I am able to use it properly. I also took great joy in getting my old guitar effects pedal board and drum machine out for the first time in maybe 6 or 7 years. My drum machine still holds a set of patterns stored as a song for a song I tried to write 8 or 9 years ago, I may have to finish it.

While avoiding going back to the shop and buying a Squier Precision bass and Epiphone SG, I need some good recording headphones and a set of proper studio speakers. A decent bass amp and a midi synth would be nice too, but will have to go on the wanted list with the Precision and the SG, speakers and phones come first. I could also do with sorting out my mess of an office into a PC area and a recording area, only then will the world be mine aaaahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa.

So, I’m pretty fucking chipper at the mo. Photos of the guitars will follow when I have my amp at home. It will be time for some cheesy ‘gear’ photos 🙂

Well, hello.

A few bits of post LRL info and personal stuff. Firstly I’ll be starting a Cisco Certified Network Administrator course in September which should be cool and hopefully not too hard. I guess I must be the prime example of the UK government’s plan for lifeling learning and ‘upskilling’. Maybe I’m bored of sitting on my arse. Maybe I wanted to do it anyway and my company offered to pay 😉

Wolves LUG meeting at the Pie Factory in Tipton last night which was great. I ordered a Desperate Dan Cow Pie, complete with pastry horns on top and it took me about 45 mins to eat. I was so full I couldn’t sit comfortably afterwards. Had to leave early as I was shattered after a late night on Tuesday too.

I picked up a Creative Soundblaster Live Platinum from Wolves Freecycle which is great news. I’m trying to do another jingle for LUG Radio and last time was a nightmare. The good news is that Jokosher has now been packaged for Ubuntu Edgy and I have a sound card with accessible quarter jack sockets. I have already written the drum pattern so now I just have to set up an Edgy machine or take another look at running CVS gstreamer, as the instructions on the Jokosher site didn’t work for me last time.

A few notes on LRL. It appears that TonyTiger didn’t like my suit and I don’t blame him at all. I don’t plan on doing it again next year. He also detailed the first conversation I had with him. Yeah that was pretty much on the nose. That’s a great description of my conversational style when I’m drunk, though at that point I wasn’t that drunk, or at least I didn’t think I was. The thing with this is that when he said the thing about being Jono’s cousin, I missed a few words from what he said and thought he was Jono’s cousin and Jono’s never mentioned any cousins interested in Linux. I didn’t realise he was the Internet’s TonyTiger. Sorry Tony.

Tony also wrote that one of the great things about the Free, Open Source and Linux world is that nobody has any pretensions of grandeur within the community and everyone hangs out together. You can be chatting to someone at the bar or around the venue and then you realise it’s someone whose software you’ve been using for years like Bastien Nocera or someone whose software you’ve been looking at for ages waiting to use it, like Mirco Muller. These people are just like me and you, just happy to talk about this and that and discuss ways we can improve our software, it’s mad. It’s like hanging out with your favourite musicians, or pop stars, or hanging out with the players from your favourite football team as if you’re one of them, or the people at the top of whatever your field of special interest is. I’m honest, I’m a pretty humble, grass roots Linux user. I’m reasonably technically capable, but I’m no developer, I’m no star of the show. I’ve always been a facilitator rather than a leader, I help other people do what they’re good at. It’s really cool that you hang with all of these amazingly intelligent, talented people and they don’t even think to segregate themselves, because we’re all in it together, sharing the same world, same code, same ideals. Wow.

Ok, so it’s been a week since LUG Radio Live 2006 and was it good? Fuck yeah 🙂

As with last year we met up on the Friday night in the Hogshead pub and it was great to see everyone from last year again. MrBen, Bruno, Neuro, Bastien Nocera and Jon (without an ‘h’, still haven’t worked out your surname yet though Jon) from Red Hat, Aquarion, Pickle, Russ and Jen, Michael Erskine, Robert Postill, Xalior and Lejt, Jonathan Riddell who I did my level best not to drunkenly hassle, plus a whole host of Wolves LUGgers. I have to say, my promise not to drink as much as last year was just about fulfilled, it was a close thing though. Oh and by the way, Michael Erskine is definitely the hardest bloke at LRL and a genuinely lovely bloke too.

I also got chance to have a good chat with Mirco Muller about Lowfat and I hope to talk more about that later.

Well we were all supposed to go home when the Hogshead finally kicked us out and the whole LRL tribe hauled ass around the city centre trying to find somewhere else that would let us in. Thankfully, nowhere would and the responsible members of the LRL community sloped disappointedly off back to their respective homes and hotels. Not so for me or the Red Hat guys. We continued to to trapse the city centre and found ourselves at the dreadful and almost empty Planet nightclub’s downstairs room where I ponied up for a round of Red Stripes. The next hour or so was filled with me mostly hassling everyone with my camera, drinking Red Stripe and dancing to hideous rock music, though my request for Hysteria by Muse was thankfully fulfilled and I air bass-guitared my way through it in the “I’m the best and most important dancer in the room” way of the irretrievably inebriated.

The Red Hat guys tired of the incessant Red Stripe and rock music around half 2 or so and despite my initial and continuous complaints at not going home at 1, Carl kept me there until at least 3am, convinced that he was about to pull the girl that looked like Wurzel Gummage. Thankfully, Carl gave in and we retired, Wurzel free and got back to my gaff at half 3.

4 hours later I drunkenly awoke and prepared to spend a day being hungover and trying not to fuck up the audio recording for the second year on the trot. I dressed in my second annual disgusting suit and headed to the venue. As with last year my suit was met by a variety of bemused stares, “fucking hell”s and “oh my God”s. Perfect 🙂

So, rather than go through every talk blow by blow, I guess it would be best to say what I enjoyed most and what wasn’t so good. For the first 2 hours of the morning I was tied to one of the lightning talk rooms looking after the speakers and audio equipment. Sadly I didn’t make many of the BOFs or talks over the weekend that I had hoped to, but Mirco Muller on Lowfat was outstanding. Also fascinating was Bastien Nocera talking about where Gnome should be going. I agree completely that to compete we need our own web services which export and APIs that can be accessed from the Gnome desktop. Everybody is using del.icio.us and flickr and so on. With Google rampaging to make the OS irrelevent then we need attractive web services which we can tie in to. In the interests of a Free system, we need Free web services. And yes of course, those services need to help us get laid 😉

As I said I missed quite a lot of the stuff I wanted to see, either due to responsibilities or lack of steam, but I caught some of John Leach’s talk on Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, which was good fun, some of Kat, Jen and Phated’s talk on being women in Open Source, which highlighted some of the behaviours we men seem to take as normal which are actually quite offensive. I don’t claim to know the historical reasons for why IT is so male dominated but I guess we are in a status quo where we tend to behave like a big boys club and like in any sexual vacuum, we gravitate immediately to the few women around by being over helpful, rude, overtly sexual and irritating, which of course keeps women away. Think we can all think of circumstances where we could improve on that score, even the most enlightened of us. Take “a/s/l” and “are you fit?” off your list of things to ask girls on irc.

I thought that Simon Phipps of Sun made a great deal of sense in the Mass Debate, though I didn’t catch his own talk. I thought that Stephen Lamb of Microsoft was a good sport for putting his head in the lion’s mouth as it were, but as gamely as he tried, I didn’t take much of what he said as useful to my world. Again, I didn’t catch his own talk, I only saw him in the Mass Debate. He made a point about kernel modules needing checksums for security reasons and well it’s a great idea when your kernel is hacked to pieces with third party bolt ons and atom-bombed on a daily basis by every malicious software writer in the world, *and* when nobody at all likes you, *and* when you have an instrinsically broken, Swiss cheese security model. But I’d like to think we have years to go before we have to worry about the security of kernel modules, expecially as third party modules are few outside of your distributor’s kernel. Besides, packages installed using the Debian and Fedora Core package managers are checksummed by default. I’d be worried if we needed to checksum our kernel modules at loading time. I will also be worried if that comment comes back to bite me in the ass in the next few years 😉

The Live and Unleashed recording as always was great fun but maybe could have done with more of last year’s singling out members of the audience and publicly abusing them. Apparently, the guys were lambasted after last year’s show for not actually discussing anything about Linux in the live recording, so maybe this was a natural reaction. Besides, I’m being a little unfair as plenty of attendees were abused in front of everyone.

Possibly the real highlight for me was Bruno “He’s basically French” Bord’s talk – This Talk May Contain Swearing. A lively, humourous and outstandingly well told journey through the quality and quantity of swearing on LUG Radio, over an 11 episode sample. For someone who’s primary language is not English, his comic timing was excellent and the talk was outrageously funny. Bruno, you’re a king 🙂

By Saturday evening I slowly started to crumble from my painful, throbbing hangover, lack of sleep and inability to go anywhere safely due to my disgusting suit, so after getting extremely irritable with my friend Carl, we grabbed some food and Carl went out to meet friends and I pretty much fell asleep where I lay and missed the LRL party. Sorry about that. Once again, that will teach me a lesson for staying out late and getting wrecked the night before LRL.

Sunday morning I took my PC to join in the LAN gaming where I promtly spent most of the rest of the day getting my ass blown to pieces by various people, not least by Moitio whom I accused of having a blog full of photos of fit birds, but alas I was wrong and he showed me who was boss by blowing me to shit with endless mines. Arsehole 😉

And that was largely it. Thanks to the LRL guys for awarding me with a free game from Tux Games for my pathetically small amount of help this year. The final play out of the event was when pretty much everyone who was still in Wolves met up at the Quality (Ch)Inn. It was really good to unwind with everyone and I got chatting to Corey Something from NYC. Sorry man, you’re surname had too many consonants to remember 😉 Hanging out at the Chinn was a great way to end the weekend. Sadly I had to go home earlyish as I was at work in the morning, but the farewell made glad I’d turned up in the first place. We have a great bunch of people here.

New friends for this year are Tony ‘tonytiger’ Whitmore who is an absolute God send and really genuine guy. Thanks for looking after the audio recordings for me dude 🙂 Seb Payne who looks about 14 and gets teased a lot for it but spoke authoritively on iFolder, Bryn who was the square headed ginger mate of one of last year’s concessionees and is a cool bloke, Phated – well what can I say about Phated that hasn’t already been said? She came all of the way from Singapore and made quite an impact to say the least. Finally, having probably missed out a great load of people, there is Felim Whiteley who despite losing all of his luggage on the way back from holiday came down anyway and became my new nemesis 😉 It was good to meet you man, you are a legend 🙂

To finish up, my LRL 2006 photos are on flickr here and the LRL 2006 flickr group is here (including ones of my horrific suit in Ron’s photos). As a side note, my LRL 2005 photos are now here.

See you all next year 🙂

Bumholes. I upgraded WordPress to the latest stable version a few weeks ago and it’s being a bit weird ever since. I moved from a Fedora Core 4 server to a Debian Sarge server as the FC machine kept dying for hardware reasons and besides, I much prefer Debian. After moving machines, I then upgraded WordPress and all of my plugins.

This move necessitated exporting my blog database in MySQL 4.0 format out of a MySQL 4.1 server, so I could import it into the 4.0 server on Debian. I managed to do this after a few hours of fiddling, but new blog posts seems to produce database errors, which I fixed by making the ID field of each table auto-increment. I imported my blogroll from Bloglines, but don’t seem to be able to delete the ones I don’t want, or any duplicates.

So, to summarise, if you have any problems with my blog let me know.

Thought I better update the world with the latest and greatest achievements in my oh so very important life.

Well things have been kinda bumpy but are now settling down. First of all, I broke up with my girlfriend. Long story that I won’t be telling here. I thought I was going to have to find somewhere else to live for a while but it’s all settled now. I went out in Manchester 2 weekends ago, well the details might have been more in depth if I were writing this a day or 2 afterwards, but now I’ll settle for saying I had a great weekend but my hangover was shocking and lengthy.

This last weekend was LUG Radio Live and well I hope to post on that separately before the memories fade. Again the hangover was shocking and lengthy.

I have recently noticed how bad my hangovers are compared to before and they used to be really bad then. I don’t drink very often these days but it has to be said that when I do, it’s generally quite heavily. The problem is that I burn alcohol off very slowly and consequently wake up drunk with a hangover a few hours away while my friends wake up with a fuzzy head and feel clear by late morning, having drunk the same as me. I’ve always had very bad hangovers, but just lately I’ve really been laid low by a night on the tiles. A Saturday night out takes me until Wednesday to feel back to normal. I wouldn’t mind so much if I was drinking 12 pints of lager and a cocktail of spirits, but I’m drinking maybe 6 or 7 beers and possibly a JD and coke. Outrageous. Then again, I am 30 years old in October, sob sob 😉

See you all at the bar 😉