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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

I’ve just given my talk “Developing Nicely: Digital Photography on Linux” at the January meeting of HantsLUG. First talk I’ve done in a while and certainly the first which has cleared the main meeting room. It’s always difficult selecting which information to leave out, but even so the talk went on for longer than I’d planned. It seemed to go well enough, a few interesting questions from the floor and relatively little heckling.

I’ve also been neglecting this blog a little recently but I think 2009 will bring lots of things I want to blog about. I’ve been twittering and identi.ca-ing though, and blog posts will now appear on those sites thanks to WordTwit.

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.

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

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

• a review and demonstration of the ASUS Eee PC running Xandros Linux,
• a review and demonstration of the Pinnacle/Roku SoundBridge and
• a beginner’s guide to using CPAN with Perl.

Head over to the website and check them out.

I’ve finished encoding and uploading the videos from the most recent HantsLUG meeting and they are available from the LUG website. This latest batch were recorded at Surrey University, which was a joint meeting with Surrey LUG. The presenters were Adrian Bridgett on Puppet and Alan Pope on UDS Boston 2007. I did a very short talk about bitlbee, the IRC to IM gateway.

I’ve not posted for a while, mainly because I’ve been busy working on the LUG Radio Live 2007 videos, which has taken up most of my spare time. The main stage and lightning talk videos are now available for download. For those who have asked about the Atrium stage videos, I’ll get those done just as soon as I get the audio recordings from Jono. Although I must admit I’m enjoying this little break from editing and encoding.

In addition, I’ve also processed another round of videos from our latest HantsLUG meeting. These are our first in widescreen and the unusual format of the mail client roundup meant I got to use closed captions for the first time. I think that video turned out pretty well. The videos are available in the usual formats from the LUG website.

I have proof!

There have been suggestions from LUG Radio and Nik Butler that the lug.org.uk project needs a President. The further suggestion is that Alan Pope is the man for the job. Whilst Alan has all manner of personal qualities that would suit a leadership role, the wider question is whether such a role is needed. lug.org.uk has survived, even thrived, since 1998 without a formal, democratically elected leader. Sure, Mark Lewis was essentially in charge in the early days because he was paying for the service to be set up and doing a lot of work on it. But for a few years the team has basically lead itself.

That’s not to say that lug.org.uk shouldn’t have a “leader” internally. Having someone who could make management decisions if opinion is split between the admin team could be a good thing. However, at the moment, with only a handful of people actively involved in administering the system and developing ideas there’s no urgent need. It may also be useful to have a named press contact to redirect incoming enquiries. Certainly at points in the last few years some internal leadership might have beneficial in motivating the sysadmins and speaking to potential hardware donors.

But what isn’t needed is some sort of President to speak forth on behalf of LUGs. Most LUGs are essentially anarchies. Fill a room with geeks and you’ll get as many different opinions on Free Software topics as there are bad haircuts. Presenting a consolidated view of one LUG is hard enough (I’ve been there), but doing so for all UK LUGs would be an impossible task. Many LUGs would object to being spoken for in this way. It could lead to LUGs who disagree with “the lug.org.uk viewpoint” leaving the service and going it alone. Rather than bringing the community together under one figurehead, it could split it.

There are practical problems in electing any sort of “President” too. There is no formal definition of a LUG, no formal definition of what LUGs should be able to vote on lug.org.uk matters (what about LUGs who don’t use the service?), no formal definition of membership of most LUGs, no formal definition of who represents a LUG to other LUGs (sometimes this is elected, sometimes a Benevolent Dictator), no formal definition of how different size LUGs should be represented within the lug.org.uk community (does a large LUG deserve more votes?) and most importantly no formal definition of an electoral procedure for any such post. Because it doesn’t exist.

Perhaps most importantly, there hasn’t been a clamour for such a President. One or two voices have championed the idea, but there doesn’t seem to be any demand from the LUGs themselves.

My good friend Alan Pope is interviewed on the latest episode of LUG Radio talking about UK LUGs. Alan did a very good job of representing the current state of LUGs in the UK. Download it and have a listen! I had been due to go on the show to talk about the recent goings-on at HantsLUG, but got passed over at the last minute in favour of Al.

I can think of no-one nicer to be abruptly shit-canned for.

Update: Alan has posted a blog entry that follows up, expands upon and reflects the interview. It’s well worth a read, and pretty much reflects my views on lug.org.uk, especially the hard work done by Andy Smith and the other admins. I have volunteered to help out lug.org.uk not by doing any admin work (the guys are much better at this than me and really have it all covered) but with things like the lug.org.uk BOF I organised at LUG Radio Live this year.

Following the EGM at the HantsLUG meeting on Saturday, I’m now the LUG’s newest Hostmaster. I’ve taken over from Adrian Bridgett who did a great job, so my main priority is not to screw it all up. Fortunately I sysadmin for quite a few servers so it should be OK. Having stepped down as Chairman back in August, you might be wondering why I decided to stand again. Well, the period for nominations was almost up, and no-one had offered to stand as Hostmaster. Given that it’s a relatively small post, I thought it would be a good way to keep involved with the running of the LUG without it taking up quite so much time.

Having said that, one of my first jobs is to draw up a mechanism for members to register to vote at LUG meetings. This might sound like some horrendous beaurocracy, but it isn’t really: There are usually only votes once a year. But the LUG mailing list had grown so large that we needed 26 people to have a quorate meeting! This was proving a bit of a problem, so the voter registration idea was introduced to try and keep the effective quorum down to something more managable. Fortunately lots of people made an effort to get to the meeting, including some especially dedicated souls from that London, made the journey down for the meeting and we had exactly the 26 members we needed.

It was great to see Andy Smith and Phil Clarke again, having met them properly at LUG Radio Live this summer. They had come down to help us reach quoracy but also to vote on the hotly debated issue of whether the LUG mailing list should have an open archive. It’s one of the debates that the LUG has had several times over and over in the past. So there was a vote and the short story is that the LUG is going to have a new list with an open archive. It’s good to have finally had a vote after everyone had the opportunity to put their side and hopefully the issue has been put to rest for a long time.

In other news, I’ve been playing with PHPSurveyor and it’s my latest favourite niche-filling web app.