LinuxPlanet Blogs

Cross-posted on Geek Feminism. Co-authored by Moose J. Finklestein, OLF's Content Chair.

Some conference organisers will say "we didn't get any submissions from women" to explain the lack of women on their stages. As of two years ago, the Ohio LinuxFest was in that category. With a little outreach effort, and embracing diversity as a core value, the Ohio LinuxFest has successfully recruited more women to share their experience at OLF.

How'd we do? While last year only five of the speakers at Ohio LinuxFest were women, out of a total of 31, this year 14 of the 38 speakers are women. That's a third of the conference speaking slots! One of the two keynoters is a woman. There were 107 talk proposals for the 27 general speaking slots. Before anyone tries to suggest that we simply took them all, it should be noted that a full 48% of the proposals for talks categorised as not assuming high levels of prior knowledge (making them suitable for the most attendees) were from women.

We believe that much of this success is attributed to community outreach. This year, we contacted Ubuntu Women, Debian Women, LinuxChix, DevChix, and the FSF's Women's Caucus mailing list about the call for presentations, and did it have an effect!

Recognising the various concerns women speakers can face, we tried to specifically address potential issues in the email sent to women-focused mailing lists. Some of these known issues include lack of confidence in new speakers, not being clear what the intended audience is, or the "imposter syndrome," where someone doesn't recognize that they are qualified to speak on a topic. The woman to woman dialog made the difference.

We wanted to make sure people weren't refraining from submitting because they lack confidence in their technical abilities (an excuse we'd heard before), so we explained the attendees' demographics, hoping to get more proposals that would fill the gap we had for user-aimed talks. Ohio LinuxFest has everything from home desktop users who started using Ubuntu a week ago (or even that day!) to seasoned system administrators who love Slackware, Gentoo, or NetBSD. Nevertheless, beginner proposals have tended toward introduction to development topics, not leaving enough for people who want to be users, not developers. We also made sure to mention that it's a great crowd who is very welcoming of first-time speakers.

Women are involved with more than just speaking at the Ohio LinuxFest. Beth Lynn Eicher has been actively involved as a director for 6 years now, and the current staff, all volunteers, is about 35% female.

The Ohio LinuxFest takes pains to create a weekend conference friendly to all people, not just women. The diversity statement includes gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, and even operating system -- folks who don't use Linux are just as welcome as those who love it. There are regularly talks about or including BSDs, interoperability in heterogeneous environments, and cross platform free software.

Additionally, all speakers are instructed to keep the content of their presentations clean. The Ohio LinuxFest bills itself as a family friendly conference and aims to keep it that way. As an effort to make a positive effect with the community at large, the Ohio LinuxFest will host the second annual Diveristy in Open Source Workshop on September 12, 2010.

Looking at the growing trend of more female influence on the OhioLinuxFest we'd like to see it be the leader for more women to attend and become more involved with other free software interests.

For those interested in pretty graphs, I've been graphing women speaker proportions at various LinuxFests on the GeekFeminism Wiki.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

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.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

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'm at Southeast LinuxFest right now, listening to Daniel Chen's Linux audio talk. A bit over an hour ago, I finished my presentation on the Linux security myth. It's meant to be accessible to normal users or to geeks needing to explain to normal users. I was asked afterward why I didn't talk about buffer overflows. That's easy: normal users can't do anything about them.

Slide 31 shows what happens when a .desktop is not executable and is in a home directory. Notably, that Fedora and openSUSE make it easy to run anyway, while Ubuntu policy says those buttons aren't OK (thanks James Tatum for the link pointer). I can understand that reasoning, but I don't expect normal people to know how to mark it as trusted or geeks to know that that's a euphemism for "set the executable bit."

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

Last night I did a presentation on Ubuntu Developer Processes for Columbia (MD) Area Linux User Group. You can find the slides on SlideShare.

From http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com

Hello all, it’s been some time since I updated you properly on what’s been happening. Now that the OggCamp dust is beginning to settle though and life is moving back towards normality ( or my version of it anyway), I can afford to reflect a little on how things went. I’m not going to get into a detailed breakdown of every day events for the last 3 weeks I’ve missed, that would be like torture, for you and me both. So I’ll just concentrate on telling you my story of the OggCamp weekend itself.

The week leading up to OggCamp was very busy as I welcomed Fab and his party of four Germans to my home. We managed to find room for all the guests fairly easily with almost every room in the house doubling as an emergency bedroom, apart from the bathroom that is, nobody had to sleep in the bath but it was close. We even had an extra guest as Anna arrived the next day. It was nice to have a house full of people and everyone seemed to enjoy it, but I must confess it’s nice to get your own space back too after a week. I prepared for the Rathole Radio gig by practising with the band in between other jobs. On Friday 30th of April I headed over to Liverpool with my mate H and a car full of audio gear. He brought his decks to DJ at the gig and was a great help overall in setting things up. We dropped the kit off at Bad Format, did a little prep work and then headed on to meet Andy (another old friend and partner in crime) at the Everyman Theatre. He kindly lent me a lectern for OggCamp and we loaded that into my little car  then took it to The Black-E. Now, the weather had been nice 2 weekends in a row leading up to this and I’d already given up any hope of it being sunny again, but I hadn’t quite expected the torrential downpour we had on Friday. As we tried to move the lectern from the car into the Black-E it was already filling up with water. I joked to H “If this rain keeps up we’ll have to turn this into a canoe!”. From there I dropped him back at Bad Format and ran backwards and forth with various kit throughout the afternoon and evening. I was also planning to check into the apartment we’d rented with friends for the weekend. Luckily Kevan managed to take care of this though and it took a load off me. A very nice place I must say and I enjoyed staying there, a large city centre apartment on two floors with plenty of beds and a cool open plan kitchen/lounge. It made a great base for a few of us but I still don’t understand why they could only give us one key to a 5 person apartment. We toyed with the idea of going to Rapid and getting some extras cut, but didn’t really get time in the end.

On Stage With Reflect Harmony Group

Back at Bad Format I met Attila The Stockbroker on his way into the club and we had a good chat. David Rovics turned up a little later and we got everyone sound checked and ready for the gig. Adrian McEwen and Andy Goodwin were helping me with the technical side of things. I’d been promoting the gig as and interactive online experience and we’d put a lot of effort into that side of things, even making a little robot audience member to interact with people. Adrian did some amazing work with an Arduino and some other components. There was however one slight problem. The club only let me know a few days before the gig that their phone line had been cut off, and with no phone line there is no Internet, great! I tried to arrange to hop onto the university wireless next door, that failed. I talked to other neighbours in the area but in the end we were stuck using a 3G connection by the window. Adrian and Andy tried really hard to get all this working and by about halfway through the gig we had a connection thanks to them and JonTheNiceGuy. I was so busy that the audience bot fell by the wayside as I tried to hold it all together introducing bands and generally being host. The Reflect Harmony Group were a brilliant opening act and I really enjoyed performing a song with them at the end of their set. Up next I introduced Attila The Stockbroker and David Rovics who did their thing for about 90mins to the delight of the crowd. During that time I was still trying to fix up the Icecast stream, video camera and other things. We got the radio stream up and many people heard it later I’m pleased to say. I played a set with my new band and that went down really well. We all enjoyed it and hopefully we’ll take the band a bit further and do more gigs, I’d really like that. Time will tell. I’ve released some of the audio from the gig in a special episode of Rathole Radio which you can download from the website. I hope you enjoy it.

After the gig I went out with David & Attila to show them to their hotel and sort out a few other things. This took a while longer than I’d expected and sadly the battery on my phone died at the same time. I had the key to our apartment, my friends were back at the club unable to contact me and wondering where I was. Luckily they managed to get into the apartment by talking to the people at the desk, but I was still gone a couple of hours. I didn’t realise but this really worried them quite a bit, leading to all sorts of crazy theories that I’d been killed or mugged and other such things. I was perfectly fine though and once I got back I convinced them of that. I know Liverpool pretty well and that’s not to say that something couldn’t happen to me here, but I keep my eyes open and I know the people and places to avoid well enough. I was sorry I’d scared them but the phone dying at a crucial moment was just bad luck. I collected some of the stuff from Bad Format before they locked up for the night and headed back to the apartment for some sleep.

Rafflecasting Again (Pic by m0dlx on Flickr)

Bright and early the next day OggCamp work began. I started at 7:30am I think but can’t really be sure as I only went to bed about 4am. We all headed to the Black-E just up the road and began sorting out everything for the day. There were lots of people running around and plugging things in, setting up stalls, testing projectors and much more. The main stage was pretty much ready to go which was great, I picked up my crew radio and proceeded to run around putting out various fires and seeing that things went well. We got a wireless network set up thanks to the wonderful folks at The Linux Emporium. There seemed to be a healthy number of people queued up outside by the time we opened the doors at 10am. Simon Phipps kicked off the event in style with his keynote about digital rights in the modern world. The speech was entertaining and well received, it led into many more great sessions across the weekend on various stages. I didn’t get to see many of the talks myself as there was always something to be done and a crew radio blaring down my ear. That’s one of the things you learn in organising events though. You don’t really get time to enjoy them, it’s about making sure things run smoothly and the people who attend enjoy it. Having said that I did get to moderate a panel discussion on the main stage in the afternoon which was a lot of fun. Sadly Ian Forrester from the BBC was ill and couldn’t make it. As he and Simon Phipps were lined up to be on the panel we had to quickly fill the slots with some excellent people. I roped in Ade Bradshaw and Chris Proctor of LugRadio fame,  along with Samantha Bail and Brad Pierce they did an amazing job. Finally, to close the first day we did a raffle on the main stage. There were so many great prizes it was hard to keep track of them all in my mind. Here’s the ones I remember: we gave away some Viglen machines, a Aleutia fanless PC or two, a 1.5 TB MyBook external hard drive, some Ubuntu backpacks and a stack of books from Apress and Wiley amongst other things I’ve forgotten. Last but not least it was my great pleasure to give away the amazing cuddly Ogg cushion made for us by Beccy Newborough. For me this was by far the coolest prize, and I said so on stage. It’s gone to a good home and I hope we’ll see more people creating them from the pattern Beccy made.

After a brief trip back to the apartment it was off to Studio 2 at Parr St for the evening festivities. A very cool venue indeed for any party and one of my favourite bars in the whole town. I was delighted we were able to get the place and while we didn’t have exclusive use we certainly took it over with OggCampers. It’s part of a working recording studio where many gold and platinum discs have been recorded over the years, I think a few people were impressed by that. I had a great time catching up with friends and I also tried to get around the tables and do my bit for the community. I wanted to get people’s thoughts on the event so far and make time to chat to them all for at least a short while. It’s hard to do this with a large group though and remembering everyone’s name isn’t always easy. I think I’ve become better at that and being in a room full of people who know your name while you’ve never even met them before is quite an experience. Everyone seemed to have fun and I left at about 1am to get back to the apartment with my gang. I believe some of the others were out much later but after working on the gig Friday night I was happier retiring to the apartment for a quiet drink and chat with friends. I forget what time I went to bed but it was much earlier than Friday I’m pleased to say and we had some amazing laughs in our little luxury pad, Will, Anna, Kevan, Alistair and I. The TV only seemed capable of showing one channel but it really didn’t matter as we had no time to watch it anyway.

Fluffy Ogg Made By Beccy Newborough

Sunday didn’t start quite as early, we left a lot of the stuff set up from the previous day. I collected my crew radio again and got to work making sure all the rooms were functioning. We couldn’t use the 3rd stage for a couple of hours in the morning as there was a martial arts class booked in there. I had agreed to this in the rental but I’d been told it was Tai Chi which is quiet and these guys made a lot of noise, they had very big swords though and I decided it was best not to upset them. The day went without a hitch and everyone seemed to have fun. I think the venue worked out well and despite some minor disagreements about covering up artwork we managed to settle in nicely. The event culminated in a live show from ourselves and the Ubuntu UK crew. I was late as usual and I arrived in the room to chants of “Dan! Dan! Dan!!!!” in a very Alan Partridge fashion. I suspect people think I was trying to make some kind of grand entrance but it really wasn’t that calculated. I was just late because I’d been working downstairs cleaning up the other rooms. The live show was fun and we will have the podcast ready for release later this week so you can all hear it too. At the end of the event we packed everything away in a surprisingly quick time, this was largely due to the amazing crew of helpers we’d been blessed with. Every one of them made the event possible in their own way and I’m really grateful for the support. After everything was packed away I was off in the car to unload it all again at home in my garage. Everyone else headed back to Studio 2 for post-event drinks. I had some dinner at home and then joined them later on. No rest for the wicked hey.

Main stage before opening (photo by KevanV)

Overall I think the weekend went really well. It was the result of 4 long months work for me but it was all worth it just to see people having a good time. I was also pleased that quite a few people who’d never been to Liverpool before realised there’s so much more to this town than stereotypes would lead you to believe. It proved a great host city, as I always knew it would. I’m proud of this place and I certainly don’t try to hide it. We did have a lot of loud stag and hen parties around town for the Bank Holiday weekend but I don’t think they disturbed OggCampers too much. I’ve learned a lot of things from doing all this but I think the main one has to be not to run two events on top of each other. One event at a time is quite enough for anyone. The gig went well but the technical problems and other hiccups could have been fixed if I’d had more time to spend on it. I also think doing this on a Bank Holiday worked against us in the long run. We had a good crowd don’t get me wrong, but originally I thought we’d get more people because it was a holiday, in fact I think it meant we got less. People tend to have family things planned on holiday weekends and it also pushes hotel and travel prices up dramatically. You live and learn though, and I always learn best by my mistakes Thanks to everyone who came along and particularly all those who helped us out. Leave your thoughts on the weekend in the comments below if you like, I’d be interested too hear them.

Upcoming:

This hasn’t been a regular Weekly Rewind but I’ll still try and fill you in on what I expect to happen in the coming week. We should release the OggCamp Live podcast episode and another episode of Linux Outlaws we recorded reflecting on the event. I’ve edited a new Software Freedom Law Show this weekend and you should hear that soon. There’s a Liverpool Tweet-Up on Thursday night which I should be attending, I might see you there. At the weekend there’ll be another new Rathole Radio at 9pm (UK) Sunday 16th May. I also have a lot of new Linux distro releases to catch up on now that event madness is calming down. I want to get into reviewing and testing some of those as soon as I can. I’m meeting up with the band on Wednesday night and we’re gonna try and learn some new songs. We’ll also try some original stuff I hope and it’ll be good to get more gigs, I’ll keep you informed when I report back next week. If there’s one thing that remains to be said in the aftermath of OggCamp I think it has to be this… PHEW!

See you all soon, take care out there,

Dan

Just in case you haven’t read my original announcement, I just wanted to let you all know on here as well that OggCamp 10 will be taking place in Liverpool in the UK on the weekend of May 1-2 this year. The second ever OggCamp (10 being binary for 2, get it?) will be even bigger and more awesome than the inaugural event last year. The whole thing is preceded by Dan’s Rathole Roadshow gig on the evening of April 30 featuring himself, David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and many more live in concert. For OggCamp itself, we have a much bigger venue this year and we have a lot of plans how to use it to its full potential, so keep an eye on the OggCamp site as details emerge over the next few weeks and months. The event will of course feature a live recoding of a combined Linux Outlaws / Ubuntu UK Podcast show again and there is the possibility of the LugRadio crew getting involved as well.

If you are planning to come along, as you most definitely should, I would advise you to look at booking accommodation as soon as possible since the weekend seems to be very popular because of the bank holiday on the Monday after. Dan has created some helpful hotel and travel sections on the OggCamp site to help you with this. Ticket prices for the event haven’t been announced yet and we’d really like to make it free admission again, but that depends on what kind of sponsorship we are able to get. If you can help with that, please get in contact with us via the link at the top of the page. Failing that, you can also help us by placing one of these shiny buttons on your site, blog or forum signatures. Please help us spread the word, even if you can’t attend the event yourself. We realise that many of you live in countries and on continents all over the globe, so getting to Liverpool isn’t always practical, but please help us to publicise OggCamp 10 nonetheless. If you have any ideas or suggestions for the event or if you want to be part of the crew or help us out in any other way, please also use the contact form and get in touch.

I hope to see you all in Liverpool at the Rathole Roadshow and at OggCamp 10 – if last year was any indication then it’s gonna be totally awesome! And don’t forget to superglue your hubcaps on tight if you’re planning to arrive by car… ;)

Something awesome this was comes…. yes that’s right we’re going to do another OggCamp this year. The first one was such a success and we all enjoyed it so much that we just had to really. It’s a bit earlier in the year this time and it’ll be in Liverpool rather than Wolverhampton, but we sincerely hope you’ll come and join us. I’ve been very busy since the New Year putting all this in place. I’ve braved the ice for meetings at various venues, set the phone alight with negotiations and I’m pleased to say things are really coming together. We announced the dates and other details on Linux Outlaws last night. They’re also all over the microblogs, but for anyone who missed it here goes…

Date - 1st and 2nd of May 2010.

Venue – The Black-E, Liverpool, L1 5EW.

Website - OggCamp.org

Free Software, Free Culture, Free Thinking!

Don’t forget to get here on Friday the 30th and attend my Rathole Roadshow gig to kick the weekend off in style. It’s a Free Culture music gig featuring David Rovics, Attila The Stockbroker and myself, all playing live along with other guests to be announced. I’m working with the hotel arrangements with Liverpool Tourist Board right now. More details to come very soon. It’s a popular weekend being a Bank Holiday though and a popular destination, so book early! Keep an eye on the website of follow us on Twitter and Identi.ca for updates. For those who might be curious about the name, Ogg is a free and open media container format, it’s a barcamp style event and the 10 has a double meaning, it’s the year 2010 and also it’s a binary joke for all the geeks.

The venue is massive and the building is incredible, it’s going to be an epic weekend and it’s in one of the best cities in the world. Ok so I’m biased, but trust me. We need as many people to fill up this place as possible. Come and see us!!! …or I’ll come and find you

You can also sign up on Facebook if you’re a Facebook user.

Regular readers will notice I missed my Weekly Rewind this week but I’m afraid I’ve been so busy I can’t fit it in. I’ll do one next week when things calm down a bit I promise. Thanks for reading.

Dan

Just a quick post to let you know about an interesting event coming up in Liverpool next month. I mentioned in recent updates that I’ve been chatting with Ross Dalziel of Sound Network (amongst other people), about events in the city next year. He organised Open Source City which I attended, and did a really great job. He’s into creating music with technology, hacking and general geekery. What’s not to like about that? Well, Ross has an event of his own coming up soon at the FACT building in Liverpool City Centre. It will feature what he’s calling the “DS Orchestra” and anyone is free to come and join in. As the name suggests it will feature a lot of people using special software to make music with their Nintendo DS handheld consoles. There’s some custom software that’s been written for this by PixelH8, who some of you may well have heard of already. He’s pretty well known in the chiptunes scene and should even be there to play alongside everyone else on the day. You don’t have to have a Nintendo DS to join in you can use any geeky device as long as it’s capable of paying notes and making a tune. That’s good news for me as I don’t have a DS. I wonder if taking my laptop and midi keyboard along would be cheating? It might be a bit hard to carry around anyway, I’d need to invent some kind of harness, a true geek approach to the problem hehe

If you’re interested in getting involved have a look at this article on Wired.com. It’s 6pm to 8pm  on Thursday the 17th of December at FACT and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Part of the idea is to get kids excited about technology and show them that games consoles can do s much more with a little imagination. Who knows, maybe we’ll inspire a new scouse Kraftwerk somewhere along the way, “Kaftwerk La!”.  So if you have kids with a Nintendo DS bring them along to see what’s happening, it’ll be fun. I’ll see you there!

Beep beep,

Dan