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I've updated my GPG key because of the issue described at http://www.debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/48.
The new key is available from key servers and the fingerprint can be found here: http://tonywhitmore.co.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GPG/Fingerprint
In due course I will revoke the old key as superseded, but that won't happen for a while yet. In accordance with my GPG policy http://tonywhitmore.co.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GPG/Policy I will document the revocation here: http://tonywhitmore.co.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?GPG/RevokedKeys
This message is signed with both the new key and the signing subkey of the old key.
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On Monday I gave a talk at the Open Source Schools Unconference about our experiences at work using the Xen virtualisation system. The talk was a shortened version of a case study for the Excellence Gateway, which has now been published. You can read it here.
It includes a photo of me trying not to look uncomfortable standing outside the college entrance.
Free Software advocate Richard Rothwell died last week. I knew Richard through his work in the Free Software community. Richard was one of those people who I seemed to see at every conference I went to. AFFSAC, FLOSSIE, FOSDEM, you name it, he was there. It is ironic that I heard of his death at the Open Source Schools conference on Monday, an event at which I would normally expect to meet up with him. I got to know Richard a little more through SchoolForge-UK and always found him an intelligent and passionate conversant.
More recently I have enjoyed reading his tweets and blog posts as he continued to ridicule and rail against everything he found hypocritical, invasive or offensive in the UK.
Richard is in the centre of the above photo, in the red tie. There are more tributes to Richard at http://tributestorichardrothwell.net/
On Tuesday I was invited to the tenth birthday party for MQTT, which is, as I understand it, a messaging protocol. Ubuntu UK Podcast regular correspondent and creator of the tweeting house, Andy Stanford-Clark asked me to come along, have a sandwich and take some photos. That’s close enough to a commission in my book. Never one to turn down free food, I went along. The photos can be found on the MQTT website.
Before the first episode of the Ubuntu podcast from the UK LoCo team was released, back in April last year, I knocked out a bash script to ensure we had consistent filenames and tags for the files we produce, right from the start. I named this script “podcoder” (short for podcast encoder, funnily enough) and stuck it up in my darcs repository.
I’m actually really proud, in a distinctly nerdy way, that we have had very few changes to the meta-data over the last 28 episodes. I started setting the genre tag midway through season one, and have added a track number in recent episodes. I also added “experimental” support for OGG and MP3 comments. But these are additions to data, not changes. The important thing is that we’ve never yet released an episode that doesn’t have consistent meta-data and filenames. I know of at least one other podcast uses podcoder to help produce their episodes.
Two people other than me have contributed to podcoder, which is, I should remind you, still a hacky bash script. The contributed patches produce a file which is compatible with last.fm and to produce files without season information. It’s great to have these contributions, but I’m starting to realise that the code is getting a little unwieldy and hard to maintain. So I’d like to put out a “request for patches” (if such a thing exists) or even just comments and advise on how podcoder should develop. There’s lots of repeated code which needs to be moved to functions and things like the MP3 comment tags which need fixing. So if you fancy poking around in the innards of podcoder, please be my guest! Send any questions or patches to me using the link at the top of this website.
Rather like last time, just another random photo from my gallery which I like and have decided to share. 
Digger
I was looking through my gallery and randomly came across this picture I took in Brussels for FOSDEM two years ago and I remembered that I really liked it. I thought I would share it with you lucky people.
Brussels
