While I enjoyed watching some of the DebConf 8 Video Team’s Excellent Service, not all of it was at convenient times for me, being several timezones away, so I used the following script to record some of the streams:-

#!/bin/sh
# Example: recordstream 09:00 09:55 -Otalk.ogv http://server:8000/stream
start=$1
end=$2
shift 2
( echo wget -q "$@" '&'
echo 'echo $! > $HOME/wget.pid' )   at $start
echo 'kill $(<$HOME/wget.pid)'   at $end

I think that’s right, but I might have fluffed a $@ for a $* or similar (I usually use the simpler rc shell but it’s not on that server yet). It uses the oft-forgotten at command for one-off timed scripts, so you’ll need the at package installed. I think it might exploit the fact that players like mplayer, VLC and ffplay don’t mind truncated streams, but it seems to work fairly reliably apart from the timing. In other Debian-related news: Debian GNU/Linux: 15 Years Old and at the Crossroads by Bruce Byfield seems an interesting summary (warning: its feedback form contains an eyetest), but doesn’t mention DebConf apart from getting its name wrong. I had the impression that there were a few “at the crossroads” type of talks at DebConf. I guess we’ll see what concrete results come out of DebConf over the next few weeks.

Argh! Our beloved leaders have just started a consultation on making it mandatory for internet service providers to keep email and web logs for a year and deliver them to local councils and police on request. Large ISPs have already been doing this, in order to make friendly-friendly with gov.uk, (do their customers know they are being watched?) but requiring it of all ISPs might put some small user co-operative hosting services out of business because it will drive up costs (need more disk to store that data and staff time to distribute it on request). Not what I expected from a Labour and Co-operative Party government. Fortunately, the Lib Dems and Tories are speaking sense like this:-

“Ministers have proven time and time again that they are not to be trusted with sensitive data, but they seem intent on pressing ahead with this snoopers’ charter. ” (Source: BBC)

However, I’m pretty sure when the EU-level parts of this were being discussed, the Lib Dems and the Tories agreed with it. Something I’ll ask Neil Parish MEP when asking him about the progress of the promised reply to my three strikes by the backdoor questions. You can see why I’m sceptical about the “but it doesn’t mean what it appears to say” assurances, can’t you? They were worthless last time, and the time before that, and the time before that (yes, I’ve been doing this so long that I supported ST@ND). The consultation closes after this year’s Parliament and the Internet conference, which could also be an interesting place to ask questions about it. And it’s another consultation I should ask the Phone Co-op (aff) about. Please reply to the consultation and give a loud “NO” - if you have particularly good reasons, please let me know in a comment. I’ve no argument against policing, but a year’s logs? Local councils? There are too many holes in this to let it pass unchallenged. Thanks.

Nameservers are part of the basic infrastructure of the internet, translating names like www.software.coop into numbers like 86.7.8.9. You really don’t want them to be completely unreachable because it breaks lots of things, so as well as the primary nameserver, it’s good to have secondary ones, both in the same hosting facility (for fast replacement if the primary fails) and a different city (for fallback if the hosting facility or its network fails). Since moving one of our customer’s secondary nameservers to an OpenVZ virtual server in another city last year, it’s been having serious stability problems. That server ran MyDNS as its main brain, but the primary servers are an unholy mishmash of BIND, MyDNS and I don’t know what else (they’re not all ours), so domain updates are done by periodic AXFR requests. Every so often, mydns would quit with an “out of memory” error, which was narrowed down to a few possibilities on the mailing list. I tried pretty much everything that was suggested (mostly off-list), but we still didn’t have a stable nameserver. Since then, MyDNS-NG has taken up development and Howard Wilkinson has worked to cure some of the memory leaks. I’ve upgraded to 1.2.8.3 and this time, the nameserver is still running so far. The out of memory problem was random, so I’ll leave it a few more days before sending reports and thank-yous upstream, but I’m pretty damn happy about this.

Jimmy Kaplowitz writes:

“Software in the Public Interest, Inc., will hold a public board of directors meeting on Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 19:00 UTC. [...] SPI meetings are held on the OFTC IRC network, irc.oftc.net, in #spi. [...] Agenda“

A couple of weeks ago, I asked why people do and don t join SPI? The answers I got can be grouped into a few headings:-

Don’t know about SPI

“I admit that I was unaware of SPI. However seeing its age, a few familiar names on the board and also on the project list it looks like a solid organisation.”

“I too am unfamiliar with your organization”

“I guess I would be yet aother person who was not aware of this group.”

“Lack of awareness of SPI is probably the biggest hurdle. I too, was unaware of SPI. I am aware of the Linux Foundation and the FSF and others, but how does SPI differentiate itself and its goals from those organizations?”

Don’t know about joining

“The membership page on the SPI website is buried at the bottom of a secondary menu. One has to really go looking for it. And this definitely gives the impression that adding members is not a very high priority.”

“I ve been looking a while for how to join, is not the first time, I did before and never found it until now”

Don’t see why to join

“Even as an open source software advocate, I have not joined SPI because my particular interest and focus is on Plone. The Plone Foundation handles largely the same functions that SPI does for smaller, independent groups.”

“Why, what’s in it for me? The betterment of mankind or bragging rights when a corporations steals all of my work and gets rich off of it.”

“If you are someone who is very interested FOSS (free and open source software) rights and licenses, you are probably more inclined to become a part of the FSF (Free Software Foundation) or the OSI (Open Source Initiative).”

I’d welcome any thoughts you have on how we should overcome these barriers, either in the comments here, or on IRC #spi - I think I should be there a bit before or after the meeting. I’ll try to summarise the best over the next Wednesday or two.

DebConf, the annual Debian Conference, is held this year in Mar del Plata, Argentina. One sometimes-overlooked part of this is the brilliant video streaming service, with each stream supported by an IRC feedback channel including announcement of talks and events as they approach, start and finish. While I was watching Martin F. Krafft’s talk yesterday (which introduced the topgit patch manager to me, which I’ll look at and may suggest to the Koha project), I was blown away by the production quality of the video. It’s even better than last year, which was already good. The shots of the slides with the presenter in a little window on them are a particularly clever idea and much better than the “auto-refreshing slides webpage” method I’ve seen from other conferences. It does look like a little encoder tweaking might be possible to get the slides (which don’t change much) pixel-perfect while compressing the presenter window, but I’d be happy if all conferences were covered this well. Read the debconf announcement for links to the streams and schedules. I was having a few problems watching this afternoon (packets getting lost between telecomplete and bytemark), but switching to a European video server helped it. Mplayer’s hardframedrop also seems to help in bad network conditions, but it takes multiple attempts to get a successful connection from mplayer, for reasons I don’t understand. The conference continues until next weekend, which includes Debian’s 15th anniversary.

It seems to me like basic business common sense not to attack your software’s users, because they’re people who might fund your future development work, when they want some new feature adding or some adaptation making. We should hope that this audience will become co-promoters, co-developers or co-producers of free and open source software in the future. Indeed, one of the basic lessons at our webmaster cooperative is to try to direct enquiries about software we’ve co-produced to somewhere useful, even if the question isn’t really much to do with us (because it’s about some part we didn’t produce or it’s something we’re no longer funded to work on), or even if we suspect the questioner has done something very silly. This approach has worked well so far. So, just don’t attack your users. It’s not on. Don’t do it. This basic lesson of not attacking users doesn’t seem to have been learned in software industries in general. Most software comes with a very restrictive “End User License Agreement” that seems to treat the user as if they are a potential criminal and grabs as many rights as possible for the software producer. I expect that Microsoft’s new post-Windows operating system will continue this approach and that the user-tracking possibilities of internet-centred operation will be exploited as far as legally possible. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see pre-installed Linux growing strongly in UK as Bristol Wireless describe. However, this pales into insignificance compared to many media companies. One of the worst offenders is Bristol-based TV Licensing who send us a “pay up or else, you potential criminal”-style letter each year. If there’s ever a reform that makes BBC subscription voluntary, they will probably reap the seeds of hatred that TVL have sown by attacking their audience. I have quite a lot of admiration for people like Martyn Drake who are fighting a noble fight in things like TV Licensing - the war begins! but I wonder whether media companies will learn not to attack their users before they cease to exist.

When working on mailservers, I’ve noticed that Yahoo’s mailservers seem to “punish” others by sending code 421 (service not available) for a few minutes for a first report of spam that originated from there, longer for a second report and so on. Yahoo’s help pages suggest they do this if you don’t “comply with our guidelines (described below)” (which aren’t actually described below). That system seems to completely screw everyone on a server if a user forwards their own email to Yahoo and then flags some as spam, or if a website user who registered with a Yahoo mail address then closes their Yahoo account without updating their registration details. In the worst cases, a server’s mail queue can become clogged with stuff that it can’t forward to Yahoo. I’ve suggested that server owners ban forwarding to Yahoo, but not all have done that yet. Yahoo’s server-punishing tactics are particularly unfair because of the amount of spam we receive from Yahoo - when I tried rejecting that, the server tested seemed to get more 421 punishment for that. I now usually direct it to a blackhole, which feels a bit dangerous. Now I’ve just seen this from Indymedia which makes it sound like Yahoo’s getting even worse recently:-

“Yahoo doesn’t make it so easy for us. They do (unintendedly) transport a remarkable amount of spam, often sent by robots which automatically (and wide scale) crack Yahoos’ new account signup CAPTCHAS (those images with the cats + dogs + digits + letters in them) just to relay their spam through Yahoo. So it’s not easy to determine who sends legitimate email through Yahoo and who does not.”

I wrote about some alternative service providers back in 2006, including ippimail, which Yahoo users might like to change to. I’d be interested in comments about any new arrivals in this field. BT internet customers are probably using Yahoo-hosted email too. I recommend changing to The Phone Co-op, but my company is an agent for them, so I would say that, wouldn’t I?

While developing an RFID extension for the Koha library catalogue system over the last few months, I’ve learned a lot about I-Code tags and security systems, but I’ve not yet looked into Mifare, which is the other big RFID product line from NXP. I have been seeing several reports of problems with Oyster (which is Mifare-based) and a crack to be published. I thought Mifare was meant to be a much tougher product than I-Code. I’m surprised and disappointed that NXP’s reaction to a hack was to try to prevent publication. I haven’t heard from any suppliers about vulnerabilities, so I doubt that NXP are passing the message on to all Mifare-operators yet. They should tell Mifare operators so that they can protect themselves. It looks like the head-in-sand approach to security, which is very worrying. At least one of our RFID systems is Mifare-capable (which is why I think we should have been told about this vulnerability), so I’ll look into that when I get some spare time (March 2012 perhaps?) unless someone points me at a link with juicy details.

Software Cooperative News has been upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 (and other co-hosted sites too), the “subscribe to comments” plugin has been activated and all comments will be pre-moderated from now on. There’s a few more changes to come, but hopefully nothing as dramatic. WP-2.6 has a few more SALTs and KEYs in the config file, but it was a local change to the wp-settings.php to make virtual hosting work across many domains which took us off-line for a few minutes this morning. Sorry if you missed us. There seem to have been a few changes to the rich text editor (the Icon to add align-left etc has disappeared from blog text editor and some users can’t word wrap) which I need to check, too. In other website news, updates from three people have gone onto the list about Online Banking with GNU/Linux, Firefox-based browsers or Free Software - Firefox-3-related breakages at NatWest and Norwich and Peterborough and a report that Nationwide works with FF3. Thanks to those contributors - as usual, I won’t say who told me what, in order to avoid telling people who banks where, but I’ve added more names to the credits.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename etch). In addition to correcting several security problems and a few serious defects in the stable release, for the first time in Debian’s history an update for a stable distrubtion also adds support for newer hardware by giving users the option to install newer drivers.”

Read the full announcement for full information, links to release notes and upgrade instructions and so on. All of our debian servers are already running this. It’s worth upgrading. (My contribution was just suggesting a few minor changes to the draft announcement, as far as I know. Hopefully it’s an easy enough read!)

Regular readers may remember that I stood in the board election of Software in the Public Interest, the main democratic free software corporation, a few weeks ago. Well, the result is posted with David Graham and Jimmy Kaplowitz are re-elected. Well done and good luck to both. Thanks to the other board members for running the election and restarting the voting machine as necessary. The postponed July meeting might happen in irc.oftc.net #spi today (Wednesday) at 1900UTC, but I expect they’ll announce it in the usual place before it happens. Naturally, I’m disappointed that more news, members’ panels and the annual report weren’t attractive enough to get more votes, and that old untruths were being reposted to some forums, but I can’t get too upset about this year’s result because both elected candidates had fine manifestos. I’m glad that Jimmy Kaplowitz’s platform includes posting more news and look forward to seeing that. Slightly worrying are the low turnout (down for the third year) and that over 80% of those few voters were from debian (my estimate). I’ve my suspicions why, but I’d love any non-voters to leave me a comment telling me why you think it is. The apology: the summary of responses to my questions about SPI membership will appear next week because I made a mistake on one site, set the closing date a week late and I don’t see any way to edit surveys after they’ve opened. Oops. Sorry. (Now, if that site was running free software, I’d see if I could fix the user interface to allow previews.) (Aside: I was going to include a bar chart of the voting, like last year, but Wordpress’s stupid post editor strips style attributes from li tags. I’ll go looking for that with a hack-axe Real Soon Now, before it causes me serious trouble.)

This is a pretty technical note, which I’m posting here for review and hopefully to help other people. The reinstall I mentioned last week was a MacOS X 10.5 server, so this time I installed Koha more simply and took more notes. I don’t want to put this in the distribution as INSTALL.osx, for reasons mentioned below. Also, I’d be very happy if people replaced all osx servers with debian ones, or at least some sort of tidy GNU/Linux. The sysadmin installed XCode and fink for me and I ran

fink install apache2 apache2-dev mysql mysql15-dev

without any great event. I also re-used an old, imperfect, local finkinfo/idzebra.info to

fink install idzebra idzebra-shlibs

Next, I used the extremely horrible command

fink list $(sed -n -e “/PREREQ_PM =/,/ / ;s/^[ ']*//;s/::/-/g;s/’.*\$/-pm588/;/-.*-pm588/p; ” Makefile.PL tr A-Z a-z)

inside an unpacked koha-3.00.00.094 folder to find out which modules fink had packaged already. Something similar can be done for debian and ubuntu, using apt-search or dpkg instead of fink and a libperl- prefix instead of a -pm588 suffix. (I think all systems should do something like that. Then we could merge the INSTALL.*s into the main INSTALL because they lag behind.) Three of those, I copied to /sw/fink/10.5/local/main/finkinfo and edited slightly (usually to increase the version: dbd-mysql-pm, html-template-pm, xml-libxml-common-pm, xml-libxml-pm.info and xml-simple-pm.info… also in my fink-10.5 folder) and then ran

fink install dbd-mysql-pm588 text-iconv-pm588 xml-simple-pm588 data-dumper-pm588 digest-md5-pm588 file-temp-pm588 getopt-long-pm588 html-scrubber-pm588 list-util-pm588 list-moreutils-pm588 mime-base64-pm588 net-ldap-pm588 test-harness-pm588 text-wrap-pm588 time-hires-pm588 unicode-normalize-pm588 xml-dumper-pm588 xml-libxslt-pm588 xml-rss-pm588 yaml-syck-pm588

to install those modules. For the remaining modules from CPAN, I set PERL5LIB to my new Koha folder (export PERL5LIB=/Library/WebServer/Koha/lib:/Library/WebServer/Koha/System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/:/Library/WebServer/Koha/lib/perl5/site_perl/:$PERL5LIB) and ran perl -MCPAN -e shell, telling the configuration screens to use PREFIX=/Library/WebServer/Koha (so install into the Koha folder instead of splattering across /System/Library). Then the command

install Bundle::KohaSupport

just worked, thanks to excellent work by Mike Mylonas and others. Finally, all that was left was to run the normal installation in the koha-3.00.00.094 folder, picking the “single” configuration and ignoring “make test” failure (because it’s a work in progress and this is RC1), edit the /Library/WebServer/Koha/etc/zebra/*cfg to point at /sw instead of /usr, symlink koha-httpd.conf into /sw/etc/apache2/sites-available and run the a2ensite commands, copy the service plist files into /Library/LaunchDaemons and load them into launchctl, browse koha and start testing it. Simple(!) It only took me a full day of work to figure that out and do the reinstall… compared to under 2 hours from scratch on debian at the moment. Maybe it’s faster if you know the OS better and/or aren’t trying so hard not to splatter stuff across the base system. Did I do anything wrong above?

The Grade-II-listed Grand Pier Weston-super-Mare has burned down. It was right in the centre of the next bay south from me, facing down the main street between the town centre and seafront, visible all the way around Weston Bay. There’s been a half-mile exclusion zone in the middle of town, but I’ve not been travelling that way today. I go past the pier four or more times a week. It will be very strange for it to be missing. Pictures by a nearby resident really capture the scale of the shock. The pier is literally an icon, used for the WsM Forum that I help to run for the town. At least those landside towers are still standing. More reaction on WsM Forum.

I just asked this question over on another site and thought I’d widen it to here:-

I’m standing for election to the board of Software in the Public Interest this month, so I was wondering how many users who contribute to free and open source software have joined? If so, why? If not, what’s stopping you? http://www.spi-inc.org is the organisation’s website. Even if I don’t get elected, I’m interested to know why people do and don’t join and would like to summarise the answers to SPI, so please mention if that’s not OK with you.

I’ll summarise some of the other answers I’ve had in a day or two.

This weekend, I will be mostly watching the Tour de France. It’s been a very good tour for software and cooperatives. Look at the current leaderboards:-

Teams

1. Carlos Sastre Candil (also 2nd in King of Mountains) Team Computer Sciences Corporation - Saxo Bank
2. Frank Schleck (3rd KoM) Team CSC - Saxo Bank
3. Bernhard Kohl (1st KoM) Gerolsteiner bottled water - OK, not related
4. Cadel Evans, Silence anti-snoring product - Lotto Belgium - also unrelated
5. Denis Menchov, Rabobank cooperative

Points

1. Oscar Freire Gomez, Rabobank
2. Erik Zabel, Team Milram, a brand of Nordmilch cooperative
3. Thor Hushovd, Cr dit Agricole cooperative banks

Teams

1. Team CSC Saxo Bank
2. AG2R-La Mondiale insurance mutuals
3. Rabobank
4. Euskaltel - Euskadi - privately-owned telco and a government
5. Caisse d’Epargne cooperative bank

So however it finishes, I think it probably will have been a much better race for software and cooperatives than last year’s tour, likely to take 4 of the top 5 team positions and 1-2-3 in the green jersey contest… even the doping scandals have been for other teams this year, I think. One day, one of my companies will sponsor pro-cycling. I hope. Anyway, if you’d like to cheer on other Software and Cooperative firm teams until then, European TV coverage details are on another site of mine and Saturday’s time trial start times are posted on a sister site.

The notorious nutsack (cc-by-2.0) The conference pack for LugRadioLive was called a “nutsack” for some reason (anyone know why?). It seems like a pretty good pack, as far as these things go. First of all, it’s a durable paper bag, so much greener than plastic. It contained:

• the event programme/schedule
• a LUGRADIO LIVE badge which I only discovered when I tipped the bag out,
• a key-shaped yahoo keyring - I don’t know what it’s meant to symbolise and I already have one far-too-big novelty keyring - seems like a total waste of metal
• UKUUG t-shirt with amusing slogan on the back and a membership application form - tempting, especially since AFFS seems to be idling since I quit and ORG is a self-perpetuator AFAICT
• flier for PyCon UK 12-14 Sep 2008 Birmingham
• subscription form for the 50/year Linux Magazine
• flier for LinuxPro Magazine’s conference streaming which says “no special software is required”. Well, users actually have a choice of Java, MPlayer, Real, WindowsMediaPlayer or anything else which can view an Ogg Theora stream, which is pretty good, but not quite “no special software”. ffplay seemed unhappy in my first tests, with errors like “[vorbis @ 0xb7dbc430]Not a Vorbis I audio packet.
  [theora @ 0xb7dbc430]Warning, unsupported keyframe coding type?!
  [theora @ 0xb7dbc430]Header packet passed to frame decoder, skipping” which I’ll follow up RSN, unless any kind soul knows how to fix that.
• a bytemark pen - always handy to advertise a decent hosting company at people in business meetings, but I don’t think it’s refillable, so that’s not going to last long,
• a fun goodbye postcard from Birmingham Perl Mongers to LugRadio - it’s actually a digital photo print, which seems a really good idea that I’ve not seen done before
• CDs of ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition (oh well) and openSUSE 11.0 (oh dear)

All in all, smarter than your average conference pack… or am I just thinking that because it looks a bit like a picnic?

LUGRadioLive 2008 by sheilaellen (cc-by-2.0) One aspect I didn’t mention in the LugRadio Live Event Review was how old-fashioned it seemed in some ways. I guess I’ve got used to seeing conferences experimenting with various web2.0 toys like live-blogging, feedback walls and so on, or the excellent live video streaming of DebConfs, but it was a bit of a surprise to find myself the only person in the audience who connected to the IRC channel from the event. One possible reason for that was that the wireless network was a bit difficult, or at least that was what I was told. I felt quite smug with my 3G smartphone IRC client (which I’ll blog about later) until Rufus Pollock mentioned the 800+ patents involved in 3G. Damn - I guess I hate freedom. In one way, I guess it’s appropriate if the network wasn’t up to the task. Broken networks were a regular feature of early ALUG meetings, as the end of this email hints. Web2.0 was there a little bit. There was a facebook page (which I accidentally spammed while travelling to the event), flickr:lugradiolive and a twitter link of #lugradiolive - but how does that work? There’s no user called lugradiolive and you can’t have usernames containing # Update: twitter:#lugradiolive (thanks to Dave Briggs for the explanation in a comment). Anyway, seeing as there will be another LUG Radio Live, maybe we can arrange something more interactive but free-software-friendly for 2009? More reviews I’ve read: davee: Lugradio-in makes me feel good , Peter Cannon: The party’s over for LugRadio Live and No’: Lugradio Undead - but why aren’t more people writing about this event? There seemed to be enough there. Or are they out there but I’m just not seeing them?

There’s an old saying that bad luck comes in threes. Today, I am doing unexpected work because:-

1. one webserver was reinstalled instead of the upgrade I was expecting,
2. another webserver was cracked and defaced (combination of two known security problems that we didn’t fix quickly enough, but that’s the server owner’s call really), and
3. my internet connection keeps going offline for about 20 seconds at a time, which is just enough to stall ssh and VoIP, but not enough to debug.

Hopefully that’s it for today because there are other tasks I want to do. If I’m a bit slow to reply, now you know why! Sorry to anyone who was expecting me to do something else today - I will get back to you as soon as possible.

LUGRadioLive 2008 by sheilaellen (cc-by-2.0) This weekend, I learnt lots of things while at LugRadio Live in Wolverhampton. One thing was the surprising delay between posting something on this site and it actually appearing in the feed on my mobile phone. Another is that I can’t post to my new blog hosting from my mobile phone, which I’ll debug Real Soon Now. So, this is a bit later than when I first wrote it and it’s now one post instead of seven or so… Thanks to some unexplained delay travelling through Birmingham, I walked into LugRadio Live during the Introduction. The venue was generally pretty good, but the stage obstructed the entrance the acoustics in the atrium only seemed to work for the four gents. No idea what they said: I got past the stage into the audience and it finished almost immediately. For the first talk session, I went to see Rufus Pollock of Open Knowledge Foundation introduce a plan for the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network. Seems like a good idea. I’ve tons of questions, but I can’t quite get them into words, I don’t know when I’ll have time for this and I’m not sure they really matter anyway. I think I’ll mention CKAN to some librarians anyway and see what they make of it. I expected Emma Jane Hogbin’s “Form an orderly queue, ladies” to start an argument with the usual chix silliness but I was pleasantly surprised by how reasonable the advice was. In fact, the speaker also criticised the “chix” movements, although it appeared she participates in some women-only clubs, so not a 100% win for equality there. Sadly, much of the talk has been overshadowed in my mind by the memory of a giant furry racoon walking in unexpectedly, so I’ll probably grab the video of the LRL-USA version sometime soon. James Hooker’s talk titled “Taming the dragons — entrepreneurship and VCs” launched venturex as described on his own site already (along with more talk descriptions). It was an interesting demo, but it requires hackers to sell some votes in their companies to Venture Capitalists, which I believe is a bad thing for free software developers to do. We need to look more at a form of social entrepreneurism.</soapbox> I tried to ask a question, but the terrible atrium acoustics did funny things with my not-so-good hearing and I lost my way somewhat. At the end of that talk, I got chatting to an interesting web developer from Leicester who also forsook The Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza and headed up to the Lightning Stage for Robert Collins and the Bzr talk. As well as some glimpses of how it’s changed since forking from tla, it was interesting to see a real (imperfect) demo and a non-Emacs version control GUI. The web interface for casual users to submit patches sounded very interesting and I also learned that some people pronounce “svn” like “Sven”. Most things that Robert thought were benefits sounded like drawbacks to me, so I’ll stay with git for now. Steve Lamb’s Green IT talk was the last presentation I saw. This talk really disappointed me because it seemed to be skewed towards the corporate governance nonsense instead of seeing Green IT as a vital pragmatic step, mentioning points I’d seen put more clearly elsewhere, as well as advertising Vista virtualisation and some panoramic webcam from Microsoft (who employ him) that doesn’t work with any free software, according to a deserved verbal shoe-ing in the Q+A. Only thing I remember that seems useful: charging from USB is more efficient than using wallwarts. Is that right? Finally, the main event: LugRadio Live and Unleashed. It opened with the shock announcement that LRL will continue into 2009, as announced elsewhere already. The rest of the madness will presumably appear online shortly and I don’t remember it well enough to do it justice… A tech conference crossed with a rocking gig by the strangest boyband ever, with a cheerleading racoon and some very cool people. I’ll try to be at LRL 2009. Will you be there? Were you at LRL this last weekend?

All being well, as this post appears, I’m on my bike on the first leg of my journey to LugRadiO Live UK 2008 in Wolverhampton, blasting my way past WordCampUK who daftly picked the same day. However, I plan to post a report from LRL, while Dave Briggs will post from WordCUK. Now, shall I heckle Open Knowledge, Community-Community-Community or Beard?