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For those that do not know, this year's Atlanta Linux Fest has been cancelled. I kept checking the site for updates and nothing has changed since last year's event. I decided to hit Google and see if there was any news elsewhere. Not being a Facebook user, I wasn't even aware that ALF had a Facebook page. In a post dated May 23 one of the organizers, Jim Popovitch posted the following:

"Folks, it is with great disappointment that I need to announce ALF 2010 has been cancelled. Josh, Nick, Amber, David, and myself all have too many distractions in our lives these days to be able to focus on the planning and fund raising necessary to bring ALF 2010 around. SELF (http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org) is certainly a worthy gig to consider as an alternative."

Unfortunately, I did not get the opportunity to attend SELF this year and was very much looking forward to ALF next month. Last year's event was a great time. So if you were wondering what was going on as far as ALF was concerned, there you have it.

Last weekend was The Next HOPE (following from The Last HOPE) in New York City. HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth and is a biennial conference put on by 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The Wikileaks guy may or may not have shown up. Some online say he didn't. Someone else told me "oh yeah, he was sitting behind the Tesla stage drinking Club Mate all day Friday," so who knows. Apparently his keynote timeslot resulted in everything being timeshifted by one hour though. The physical security folks said he ran long. Though maybe it was a substitute who did so? I don't know. Kaminsky had another of the keynote slots, talking about SQL injection and the difference between programmer ways of thinking ("I'll just concatenate these strings here…") and programming-language-developer thinking ("We'll parameterize these, so they don't break anything…"). He made the very good point that the reason programmers ignore that parameterization stuff is that it's a pain in the neck to have to jump all around as you try to read the code figuring out "ok now insert first parameter…back up to code…second parameter…wait which one's the seventh parameter?" and outlined some ideas he has to make syntax programmers won't hate that can still fix the problem. And yeah, let's face it. Trying to escape every bad character is total Whack-A-Mole.

A group of librarians were here talking about how to get FOSS into libraries. They had a very important tip: brush your teeth. If you show up looking like a caricature of a hacker, it's a bit hard for the librarians to take you seriously. So, look like you've bathed since last Tuesday and know what a toothbrush is. Yes, they mentioned Evergreen.

Deb "freedeb" Nicholson from the Free Software Foundation spoke about why diversity is important to the growth of Free Software (hint: more diversity = more people!) and how to get there. In a similar vein, Nikki Neulist had a talk called "Hey, Don't Call That Guy A Noob: Toward a More Welcoming Hacker Community." She was talking about how new people provide new perspectives and if you're willing to just be helpful early on, they can end up really useful later. I think this is something we've tried to exemplify in the Ubuntu world, though I do still occasionally see some unwelcoming behaviour on IRC. Unfortunately, during her talk's Q&A, some guy thought it made sense to say tough cookies, this is our hacker culture and if your skin's not thick enough, you don't belong here. C4BL3FL4M3 and I started yelling at him from opposite sides of the room. How on Earth could "if you don't like our bad attitude, GTFO" fit in in a conversation about being welcoming? Why did he even attend if that's his attitude? Troll!

The Vintage Computing talk ended in me dragging a 14 year old I was showing around to the Borders across the street to buy her a copy of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution to give her more context about things like the Altair and the PDP-11.

There were talks on "Color, Light, and Perception" and "Cooking for Geeks." In the former, I learned that magenta does not exist as part of the white light spectrum. You will not find it with a prism. It's not a single wavelength of light but rather a trick in our brains when red and blue wavelengths overlap. I also learned about additive colours, which is what the RGB colour model we use for defining colours on a computer screen is based on. The reason I see white captions on a black background as red/blue-split (like when you look at 3D stuff without the glasses) when seeing it at an angle out of my glasses was also explained. Neat! The latter was about food science, a basic introduction to it, and a reference to there being more in the speaker's new book of the same title. Apparently the temperatures we're taught in food safety courses assume you're not hitting the coldest part of the meat, that your thermometer's wrong, and a bit more, so they're overestimated by a good 15°. Not that I eat meat or am interested in testing that. Time at temperature was brought up as well—the fact that reaching a temperature doesn't matter as much as maintaining that temperature for a decent amount of time. Various enzymes take various times to break down into something tasty. I think he said brussels sprouts were in the category of things that need to spend a good amount of time at high temperature to taste good. Someone should tell my mum this. Hers are too bitter.

I missed much of the "Simpson's Did It" talk, but I caught Mouse's segment where she talked about Mozart. Apparently "Miserere" by Gregorio Allegri was well-loved by the pope of his time. So well-loved, that he had analogue DRM on it! That is, no copies of the sheet music could be made without the pope's permission, period. Only two copies ever were, and they were for princes who had to promptly return them as soon as they finished. Additionally, the song could only be played during Easter week. What did Mozart do, knowing he couldn't get sheet music? Showed up, listened, memorised, and transcribed from memory. DRM broken! Thanks, Mozart!

If you want to write online about controversial topics and you find that your free speech is being harmed by those who do not want you to be heard sending false DMCA notices, you should know about Project DoD, a web host who is willing to send a counter-notice in response (apparently unlike most others). You still have the mandatory 10-day offline period while the counter-notice goes through, but at least it's not a permanent offline period. They're willing to fight for their clients. Lawyer Tiffany Rad (who was my carpool for the trip) and Chris Mooney were talking about this project of theirs.

I mentioned earlier taking a 14 year old around. She's a smart kid named Johannah, so I was introducing her to the other LinuxChix and other assorted cool people. I explained public key cryptography (the practical, not the mathematical theory) to her and showed her how to generate a GPG key. She's an Ubuntu user, so I got her uncle to pick up a copy of How Linux Works for her. It looks like an excellent book for her skill level. It starts out with basic command line stuff and goes on all the way through explaining bootloaders and system internals. Cool!

We attended a LinuxChix Lunch on Saturday, where the women who'd been there in 2002 for H2K2 were expressing surprise at how many women were present, saying LinuxChix would soon be obsolete. They said H2K2 had somewhere between 10 and 30 women total. Improvement was obvious. And by the way, yes, the hacking community does seem to have more women than the Free Software community. There was definitely a higher percentage of women here than even at SELF, which I've already said has more than I remember seeing at any other Linux event (uh, outside of LinuxChix events, obviously). Funny enough, when we got back, I ended up talking to some woman I'd never met who saw my panoramas on my screen and wanted to know how I took them. I told her about Hugin and Free Software and Ubuntu. Anyway, the "funny" bit is that one of the first things she said when asked how she liked the con (she'd never been to a hacker thing before, but her son was a speaker, so she showed up) was (paraphrased) "this is all very interesting, but I notice it's mostly male, and mostly Caucasian." Yeah…still got a ways to go.

I had a duty while I was there too. I was handing out postcards for Ohio LinuxFest to everyone I saw with a Tux, GNU, or distro logo on their shirt, laptop, or tattoo. There were a lot of Ubuntu users. At one point I thought I saw an Ubuntu laptop in front of me, but it was actually OSX.

I just registered and booked a hotel to attend FOSSCON this Saturday. The official description of the event is as follows:

The people behind FOSSCON are free software enthusiasts, user group members, coders and users — just like you! Free software is all about community and this is a very grassroots event, organized by the community and for the community. Our common goal is to provide a space for us to all come together in the northeast.

I’m hoping to meet up with lots of people from the open source world and attend some interesting and informative talks and workshops. If there’s anyone that would like to meet up during or after the event, feel free to post a comment here or contact me at leftyfb at ubuntu dotcom. Hope to see you all there!

I think it is safe to say that OggCamp 10 was a success. Looking back at the last week, I feel incredibly happy and grateful but also relieved that everything went mostly as planned. We increased the attendance of the conference, sold pretty much all the T-shirts and most of the mugs¹ and financially broke even, which was the goal. We did have one or the other minor technical fail, but nothing too earth-shattering. The guys from the Linux Emporium even managed to keep the wifi up for most of the event, against all odds and under fire from foreign DHCP servers. There’s also a feeling of emptiness now that the weekend we planned and worked towards for so long is over but at the same time there’s a hurricane of new memories and experiences. Since everything is already blurring together, I thought I’d sit down and write a summary post on all the things I can remember from the event and around it. So strap yourselves in, I will try to keep this as chronological as possible…

I flew over to Liverpool on the Tuesday before the event with my girlfriend Katy as well as Ilka & Thilo (two friends from Bonn) and we spend a few days at Dan’s place where we met up with Ana as usual. I was quite stressed at first due to the fact that Germanwings — I’m never flying that airline again — had cancelled the tickets I had bought months earlier without telling me and I had to frantically reschedule on Sunday night. In the end we took the trusty easyJet A319 over from Schiphol and safely on the ground in Merseyside we spent some time relaxing with many a beer and some Vindaloo.

On Friday we headed into town and moved into the apartments we had booked. At night, things kicked off with Dan’s Rathole Radio gig which was an amazing experience. It was very cool to see many of the Linux Outlaws regulars there, including NYbill & Windigo (who once again flew over from the US for this), YaMatt, Peter Cannon and many others. I spend some time sorting out the live stream connection with Jon The Nice Guy and we got it up in the end, despite some pretty hefty technical problems². I made it to the stage in time to see Attila The Stockbroker and the amazing David Rovics perform, though. Especially Attila’s stuff might have been a bit too radical for some people in the audience, but I enjoyed it a lot. By the time David played Operation Iraqi Liberation, one of my favourite songs of his, I was completely ecstatic. After David and Attila, Dan and his as yet unnamed band³ took the stage and played a fantastic set of mostly very unique covers ranging from Pearl Jam over Billy Bragg to an excellent rock version of Bob Marley’s legendary masterpiece Redemption Song. In addition, Dan also played some of his own music in the shape of his excellent track Elephant in the Room. If you want to check this out for yourself, Dan has released a recording of his set and two of David’s songs in the latest episode of Rathole Radio. After the actual gig, I had a really nice chat with David and also discovered that Attila spend quite some time in the DDR and speaks German fluently. All in all, the evening was amazing and everybody seemed to have a lot of fun. It sure was a pretty long night for most of us except the Ubuntu UK guys (and gal) who seemed to go to bed at ten. The hard core partied on until they kicked us out of the club⁴.

Getting up the next morning was pretty hard accordingly. To their credit, UUPC and most of the crew was already on the ground and working their butts off at the OggCamp venue when we got there. Special thanks to Windigo who brought me a Pittsburgh Penguins jersey over from the States, I was proudly wearing it for the rest of the event. I spend a lot of the morning getting the wifi for the event into shape with the guys from the Linux Emporium, including up to two minutes before being called on stage for the introduction — that’s probably why people told me afterwards that I hadn’t said much, I was still pretty distracted. Because I was running around so much, I never even got to see one full talk on the Saturday. I did see the end of Simon Phipps‘s keynote, however, which was very good. Even if I don’t agree with the man on many things, he’s a great public speaker. Later in the afternoon we had a panel discussion moderated by Dan and including Simon, Chris Procter and Ade Bradshaw (both ex-LugRadio) plus others.

I was watching on the sidelines and was getting ready to storm the stage at one point but didn’t have to in the end as Dan kept it all together pretty well and got my clue about mentioning the AGPL during a crucial point in the discussion. The whole panel idea turned out pretty well and judging from the comments I heard was well received. We closed the day with the now famous OggCamp raffle which included an unbelievably cute fluffy cushion version of the Ogg mascot which was given to us by Becky Newborough — thanks again for that, Becky! With the first day of the conference concluded, we all went to the Studio 2 club for the official OggCamp 10 party. This was one of the coolest party locations I’ve ever been at and while they ran out of food very fast (I single-handedly eat most of the meat, I was that hungry) we again stayed until they closed the place down at 2:30 drinking lots of beer. I can’t remember much but at one point I was discussing software licenses/communism with Chris Procter in the sound-proof drum room I think…⁵ Thanks to Laura Czajkowski and Dan for sorting out this amazing venue and extra thanks to Laura for introducing me to the head-splitting awesomeness that is the Baby Guinness.

I woke up the next morning and felt like Adam Sweet at the last two LugRadio Live events: totally wiped out. I was so tired, I even briefly feel asleep when we got back to the venue. Much to the chagrin of many observers. But there was much more work to be done and I ran around some more trying to fix broken display screens and assorted bits of gear as well as keeping an eye on the wifi again. I was so busy that I never got to deliver any of my proposed talks and also didn’t get around to doing the Pony Express BoF I had announced before (that doesn’t mean I have given up on the project, however, I will write a follow-up blog post soon to explain what is happening with this — it most likely just means that we have to kick things off without meeting in person). There was some major fail when my laptop refused to play video files in an orderly manner during Campbell Barton‘s excellent talk about the latest Blender movie project and I have to apologise to Campbell for that. I hadn’t planned to present anything with my machine and a Fedora alpha/beta isn’t ideal for anything that crucial without prior testing. His talk was very good nonetheless and we might get him back on Linux Outlaws in the future to tell us more. I think I saw two full talks that day, which was at least something. From what I have been told and have read on the web, the general selection of talks was pretty good. This is of course the one flaky point about unconferences but from what I’ve heard people were pretty satisfied.

We closed day two with the customary joint UUPC/LO live show which was again a lot of fun to do and turned out pretty well, we thought⁶ — people seemed to enjoy it a lot at any rate. Highlights included me agreeing with Steve Jobs, Flash getting hammered by popular demand and the expected digs at Ubuntu‘s button placements from the Red Hat crowd. The resulting recording will be released on Wednesday on both podcasts, LO once again releasing the uncut version including swear words (even those perpetrated by the Ubuntu UK crew). After the live show we packed up all the gear and said good bye to the wonderful Black-E which provided us with an ideal venue for the weekend⁷. Most attendees went to another impromptu party in the evening, I think, but we went home to Dan’s place for some well deserved rest and a long night’s sleep⁸.

We had another great day on Monday, including a lot of fun playing Wii Tennis, and then flew back home on Tuesday. Everything considered, I think we lived up to our slogan of a bigger, better OggCamp. It was a lot of work putting this show on but from all the feedback we’ve gotten so far, people had a great time and it was well worth it. The whole week was a lot of fun and it was great to meet many of the people you normally only talk to in email, IRC or on websites. I really hope that all the people who attended had as much fun at OggCamp 10 as we had putting it on. Thanks again to the fantastic crew who did a lot of the work and was also a lot of fun to hang around with in between. Dan’s mum and Katy did stellar work selling the merchandise and everyone else kept the place organised and running smoothly. If there is one thing I remember most from the weekend it’s the general atmosphere of friendliness around the place, it really felt like a gathering of 200 good friends, there was nothing edgy about it at all. We will now rest for a few months without talk about conferences and organising I think, but feel free to send us feedback on the event and if you have any ideas on what can be improved, send that too please. Who knows, maybe there will be another OggCamp next year? This one was certainly a blast!

Ohio Linux Fest 2009
Free and Open Source Software Conference and Expo
Columbus, Ohio : September 25-27, 2009

Registration Deadline: September 18, 2009

The Ohio LinuxFest 2009 registration deadline is September 18, 2009. If you have not registered yet, please hurry over to http://www.ohiolinux.org and register today.

Join us for the seventh annual Ohio LinuxFest conference to celebrate 40 years of Unix. We have an exciting line up of talks and this year the conference extends from Friday to Sunday.

Friday, September 25, features professional training courses (Professional package registration required) and a course for Linux beginners which includes a refurbished computer, with Linux pre- installed for you (Quick Start package required). A series of conference talks and other sessions will be held on Friday as well.

Saturday, September 26, features the expo and four conference tracks. We have a great line up of speakers; Doug McIlroy, Shawn Powers, Dr. Peter Salus, and many more.

Two certification examinations will be held on Sunday the 27th. Linux Professional Institute will host an LPI certification exam, and the BSD Certification Group will offer the BSDA certification exam for Ohio LinuxFest attendees.

Four registration packages are available for the Ohio LinuxFest this year.

The Enthusiast Package is available at no cost for students, enthusiasts, and those that want to come to the event to find out more about Free and Open Source software.

The Supporter Package is available again at a low cost of $65.00 to support the event. As a measure of appreciation, the supporter package includes lunch on Saturday and a commemorative Ohio LinuxFest tee-shirt.

The Quick Start Package is available for $250.00, which in addition to access to the events on Saturday, includes a full day of Linux Basics training on Friday and a refurbished Linux computer to take home.

The Professional Package is available for $350.00, which in addition to Saturday's activities, also includes access to the one day OLFU tutorials on Friday.

The Ohio LinuxFest welcomes people from all 50 states and international participants. We have had participants from Canada, England, Argentina, Brazil, and Australia in years past. Note that the Ohio LinuxFest is a 501c3 non-profit, volunteer organization. All proceeds are used for conference costs.

Hi ho, it’s another Weekly Rewind and this time we’re up to the symbolic number 21. Key of the door and all that. The legal drinking age in the US of course, something I’ve never really understood. I’m not trying to extol the virtues of alcohol for teenagers by any means, but I do find it a bit odd that you can drive a car or by a lethal weapon (not the Mel Gibson type) at 16 over there, while drinking a beer suddenly makes you a deviant. Anyway, I’m sidetracking things here already. There’s no exotic location this week, I’m not on a plane or in some exciting foreign country, I’m just sat on my couch. I’ve still had an interesting week though, so let’s get into it:

On Monday I spent a lot of time online as usual and did some bits of work, but tried to take it a bit easier overall. This was due to a very busy previous week jetting around, I’d only arrived home from Manchester Airport late the night before. On Tuesday I did bit more development work and general admin stuff. I also did some research on Fedora 11 and found time to write up a quick post about the release of Firefox 3.5, my open source web browser of choice. I was quite busy with various things on Wednesday and I’m sorry to say I missed the Liverpool LUG meeting in the evening. It’s the first LivLUG I’ve missed in about a year, and I wasn’t happy about it. My hitherto unblemished appearance record is now officially blemished. I also missed a talk by Tim Dobson about his group DFEY, but I’m told it was recorded which is good.

On Wednesday morning I headed down the M6 in my battered old Ford Fiesta towards Birmingham. My destination was the EuroPython 2009 conference, an annual meeting of Python hackers from all over the continent. I spent the whole day there and had a really great time chatting and meeting people. I’m not a Python guru by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like the language and I’ve done some web development with Django, a Python web framework. Some of the technical aspects of the talks were a little over my heard I must confess, but it was still entertaining. I took my Zoom H4 and recorded about 5 or 6 interviews at the event. I talked to many Python developers, some of the event organizers, Bruce Eckel the well known technical author, and Steve Holden the head of the Python Software Foundation. They were all very gracious and hospitable. Hopefully you’ll hear some of those interviews in future episodes of Linux Outlaws, and if we can’t fit them all in, I’ll be sure to publish them here. I would like to give a big hearty thanks to John Pinner from Linux Emporium and Richard Taylor of Qinetiq for looking after me so marvelously on the day. John gave me a EuroPython t-shirt which I will wear proudly, and the majority of interviews I got were down to Richard’s kind assistance and keen eye for nabbing people. It seems the Python community is strong, vibrant but most of all, friendly. I’m very happy about that.

On Friday it was time to hit the keyboard (not literally) and get this 3000 word Fedora article written. I duly did that and published it yesterday, after a lot of editing and formatting work. I then went on to edit the next Software Freedom Law Show in the evening before bed. You’ll be able to hear that on Tuesday when Bradley releases it. Today I’ve been upgrading and working on a Drupal site of mine, I’ve also been setting up AdBard and ditching Google Ads. AdBard is 100% FSF approved and only shows FLOSS related adverts. I feel much happier with it, we’ll have to see how it works out.

Upcoming:

At the time of writing I don’t know if there will be a live Linux Outlaws show tomorrow night or not. I’ll have to speak to Fab and find out. We’re getting ready to release our 100th episode very soon and he’s been working hard editing the backlog of shows all week. He has released both episode 98 and episode 99 in the last few days. Nice work!! There’ll be a live Rathole Radio show next Sunday at 9pm but I hope to get another article in before that. I’m not sure at this moment what else I have planned for the next 7 days, but no doubt something will come up. Why not join me next week to find out. Same time, same channel…

Ohio Linuxfest is now in its 7th year, but that's nothing compared to the 40 years that UNIX has been around. The theme this year is the Past, Present, and Future of UNIX & Linux.

Doug McIlroy will be keynoting. If you haven't heard of him yet, he was Kernighan, Thomson, & Richie's boss back at AT&T Bell Labs when they were creating UNIX and C. He's credited with creating the UNIX pipe ("|") as well. Peter Salus, known for his books "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and "The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin" will be keynoting as well. And finally, Shawn Powers of Linux Journal fame will be giving a keynote on "Fixing the Economy with Linux."

As with last year, Bdale and his daughter Elizabeth Garbee are expected to speak. Jono has also agreed to speak.

But these six people can't be it. If you've got something to say, why not submit a proposal? The call for presentations is only open a few more days—it closes on the 8th. Get your proposal in!

If you're not that interested in speaking in front of a large crowd, registration is open too. There's free admission, or for $65 you can support the fest, get a T-shirt, and have lunch. There's also a professional package that includes a day of training in addition to what's in the supporter package. That one is $350. There's more to that, but the details aren't fixed yet, so I won't post them yet. There are going to be BoFs and parties of course. LPI certification level 1 testing is expected to be available again as well.

And as I've mentioned before, there is going to be a Diversity in Open Source workshop day. Proposals are being accepted for that as well. Details on the linked page.

Finally, Ohio Linuxfest is now on Identi.ca and has a group there as well. This is in addition to the Twitter account that already existed.

Some time ago I heard about the EuroPython 2009 Conference and it seemed really interesting. Even more so because it’s being held in Birmingham, UK; somewhere I can get to reasonably easily. I contacted the organisers and we discussed my coming along to cover the event for the podcast. They were great and even made us official media partners, how cool is that? In my infinite wisdom (sic) though I decided to leave it a few weeks before beginning to really promote the event, and me being me, in that intervening time, I forgot. #facepalm

Fortunately, the event isn’t on until the end of next month so I hope some of you will still have plenty of time to book. Particularly if you live in the UK. There will be tutorials and classes in Python available, along with some great keynote speakers like Cory Doctorow and Professor Sir Tony Hoare, to name just two. There will also be many other great things to do and I think it could be really valuable to anyone who develops in Python, even those just looking to get started. I’m a big fan of Python and I make no secret of that. I also love Django (the Python web framework) for rapid and effective web development. The EuroPython event website is actually written in Django, so they immediately won points from me there. Without any further ado (waffling on my part) I should get to the vital event details:

EuroPython 2009 - 28th June to 4th July, Birmingham, UK

There’s even a promotional video (download link) on the website, along with much more information

It should be a lot of fun and I hope some of you will make it along. You can come and say hello to me as well of course, though that may be less of a promotional incentive. I’ll stay out of your way if you’d prefer So get booking now if you’re interested, the Early Bird sign up rate finishes very soon!! Hence my timing FAIL. Get it while you can and I hope to see you in sunny Birmingham in the summer.

Dan

(WARNING: Actual sun of the warm yellow variety may not be included, see pack for details)