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A couple of weeks ago I went up to the Black Cotton Club night at Volupte to celebrate Kate’s birthday. Kate is an old school friend, another one of those who I haven’t seen for over ten years. I also met up with Mark and Dave that evening, for whom it has been a similar interval. It was great to meet up with lovely people after so many years (as well as nice new people like Kate’s husband), although it was a shame that some others had ducked out at the last minute.

Walking round a strangely deserted Holborn, past pubs shut on a Saturday night and darkened corporate headquarters, gave me the feeling I was about to turn the corner and face a pack of 28-days-later-style ravening zombies. London was presumably happening somewhere else that night.

But waiting on a side street off a side street was the club, two sets of doors, half a dozen chairs and some very friendly door staff. Upstairs is a small but relatively modern bar, with colour-changing LEDs set in the ceiling and a decidedly modern range of drinks. It was, however, packed with 20-, 30- and 40-somethings mostly attired in genuine and reproduction 1920s, 30s and 40s dress. It was amazing, everyone looked so confident. The hats, the stockings, the hair, the lipstick! The girls, not me. (I hope I looked rather dashing in my suit, but I was definitely not period!)

Downstairs is a small, almost tiny, room. Three or four large round tables, a few smaller tables and chairs and a dance floor. No flashing lasers, just a few static coloured lights yet they still created an atmosphere of excitement. The DJ equipment was decidedly modern, although the old tracks benefited from more bass than the equipment of that era could have provided. But the two DJs played out tunes from the first half of the 20th century from vinyl, but I don’t know if they were genuine 78s. Right from the start people were jiving and throwing each other around the dance floor with gusto and, fortunately, accuracy. Unfortunately I had to leave before the live band started.

The night really evoked the era it set out to recall. The deserted streets, the subterranean venue, people talking, smiling and dancing with strangers. Even the Coke I had to drink was served in bottles rather than from a postmix machine. I found myself thinking about my grandparents and whether they ever went to places like this. I’m sure they did, although the major difference, aside from the odd mobile phone and digital camera, would have been the absence of a smoke ceiling and the accompanying smell. By the time I left, the sweat of so many stuffed in such a small space swinging and jitterbugging almost compensated for that missing scent.

It was a bizarre, fun and thought-provoking evening and I was glad to have been invited along.

Today has been the traditional “recover from FOSDEM” day. There’s so much packed into three days that a fourth is sensible to recover from it!A lot of people I spoke to said they thought this year was busier than ever. It certainly seemed manically busy, but then it always does! I think I went to fewer talks this year than previously, as there just seemed to be fewer that interested me. Despite this I completely failed to get to any of the Ruby on Rails talks as I spent the time around the exhibition tables and working on a “special secret project.”

Friday saw the annual beer event. It was at the Delirium Cafe this year, which was absolutely packed. It’s a nice venue but probably too small for the number of people trying to get in. I wussed out early but some of our party were still going strong at 3am. They were less “strong” the following morning though.

The most interesting talks I saw were on the Saturday, although not the three keynotes which were all rather unsatisfying having all somehow failed to tackle the really interesting parts of their subjects. The two I really appreciated were from the Fedora/CentOS room. As I don’t use either product, it says something about the strength of the programme in that room that I was there. Who knows, I might actually use one of them one day! “SE Linux: Don’t just switch it off” was a useful insight to what SE Linux can actually do you for. Fedora/RHEL/CentOS seem to have made a good job of the management tools in recent releases too. I’m not sure how easy it would be to manage on a headless remote system but using the stock rules as a base seems to be the way to go. Pluggable monitoring with dstat was a useful look at a flexible tool. Showing all sorts of system performance measures in one screen and with highly flexible layout options I’m sure it will come in handy for debugging performance problems one day soon.

Sunday lunchtime saw the CACert and GPG keysigning. My main priority was the CACert part. I already had 25 points and wanted to get up to 100 so I can start generating server SSL certificates.* I only checked a couple of IDs for GPG and have decided that I probably don’t want to take part in any really large GPG key-signings like those at FOSDEM. I don’t mind smaller ones or individuals, but the administration of doing twenty, fifty or a hundred keys puts me off, even with some of the scripts available to help.

I spent an hour or so chatting with Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group on Sunday afternoon, and a couple of hours hanging out with “the bald” Ade Bradshaw as we failed to see two talks we were interested in. But I learnt interesting stuff about VoIP so it’s all good.

The journey back was long and quite a bit of hassle thanks to engineering works on the underground and between Waterloo and Woking. One of our party failed to make the Eurostar having mistaken the arrival time on his ticket for the departure time. Another person left his bags on the train at Southampton by mistake and got back on it just in time for the doors to shut and the train to pull away. But I’ve also found out that he has won a Nokia N810 in the donator’s draw. Lucky git!

Photos are in the gallery.

* By the time I got back to the UK I had already been assured up to 100 thanks to the folks I met at FOSDEM. Good work people! I’m now listed as an assurer in the Southampton area on the CACert website, so I’m waiting for my first request. This may also be something that we could do at a LUG meeting now there are three or four assurers in the LUG.

Oh, and my phone worked just fine thanks. In fact, it magically changes the desktop wallpaper depending on which country you’re in. In the UK it shows the Houses of Parliament, but it changed in France and Belgium

That is both quite exciting and totally pointless. I suspect that it has a bank of images installed in ROM but can’t be sure it’s not downloading the image over the data connection in each country. I can’t help wondering what images it has for other countries! I think the image on the Belgium wallpaper is of the palace in Brussels, but some of the details on the image didn’t tally when we went past the actual palace.

I’m off to FOSDEM next weekend, all being well. If you’re going (and I know and preferably like you) then drop me a mail to arrange a meet up!

I recently posted about winning the first ever reader competition over at the lovely Amy’s lovely blog. I eagerly awaited the arrival my prize, although as a fallible human being, I was less eager to blog about it. That’s not to cast aspersions on the quality of the prize itself, merely to justify the tardiness of this post with excuses about having been busy recently.

I knew exactly what to expect: Nothing I could ever predict. I was sure Amy would manage to find something totally random and yet reflective of her personality. I had been led astray somewhat by Neil, who suggested that I may need batteries, an aerial or an arc-welding kit to make use of the mystery prize. It was with a deal of trepidation that I opened the fairly innocuous package which arrived last week. Here’s what was inside:

A truly unique prize, I’m sure you’ll agree. As Dervla Kerwan might be paid to say, “This is not just an apron. This is a pink polka-dot apron with ‘A Little Bit Different Dot Com’ badge, lovingly wrapped in a luxury gold ribbon, topped by a certificate of congratulations.” The latter is presumably to prove the provenance of the former to any Lovejoy who might make my heirs an offer on such a prestigious item in generations to come. Here’s a closer look at the badge on the pink polka-dot apron:

She has managed to bring a bit of the madness of her life into mine. Thank you Amy, I feel special! If you and Neil come for dinner you’ll even get to see me wear it.

The videos from this month’s HantsLUG meeting are available for download from the website. This month includes:

• Practical Cryptography: GnuPG.

  Hugo Mills gives a short talk on GnuPG, a Free Software PGP replacement. This talk also covers some basic cryptography principles, but doesn’t involve any mathematics!

• OpenVPN

  Adrian Bridgett gives a short demonstration of and talk on OpenVPN, a Free Software SSL-based VPN. This talk requires some basic knowledge of networking technologies.

The videos are available for download in OGG Theora, MP4 and WMV format, as well as online in Flash video.

http://www.hantslug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TechTalks/2ndFebruary2008

Renowned polymath Stephen Fry has posted a review of the ASUS Eee PC. You can read it here, but here’s a quote:

The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU project and Linux. I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.

I am writing this article on a kind of mini John the Baptist, a system that prepares the way of the software saviour whose coming will deliver the 90% of world computer users who suffer under Windows from the expensive, clumsy, costly, ugly, pricey toils of Microsoft.