I expressed my concerns that with the whole world gagging to move to web apps, the Free desktop could suffer. My argument was that when hacking on desktop apps , and all you really need a computer with GNOME/KDE on it. With web apps, the appeal of just hacking on Apache, Frameworks, MySQL etc might not be as attractive as hacking on something you can see, feel and use - where your brownie points are earn’t by people actually using your app, and the features being very visible.
Of course nothing really changes for those hacking for purpose, whose views are to improve performance.

A couple of the guys I was eating lunch with, Steve Burch and Chris Rose, explored the idea of integrating X within web browsers so we could directly port desktop applications to the browser.(As opposed to poor AJAX implementations we are seeing all over the place) Of course this has the big floor that if we went to auntie Maud’s windows machine with IE, we wouldn’t be able do anything… which would suck.

I have just installed Conduit on my Hardy machine… although it doesn’t work properly yet… I like the idea that I can share information in my desktop apps with the world (ie.. uploading photos in F-Spot to Facebook and Flickr) - but I can see where I might want more.

Apple’s MobileMe! Service looks very cool - the web apps are designed to look and work like the desktop apps, but strictly for light usage - mimicking the desktop apps in such a way, that you still use the desktop to do anything more than simply access the data.

I would love to see that with Ubuntu… some thoughts on how it could be done:

1. Extremely Smart Virtualisation - A hosting service that would create a Xen session for each user of the system, which has desktop apps installed and controlled via a web page.

2. (How Iwould do it) - Do it all with Django/Python. Have a plug in with Conduit that would take all of your gnome/kde settings (wallpaper, menu items, icons, basic apps etc) and put them into a standard template, which would achieve the look and feel. Then there would be some sort of GTK translator that would be able to recreate the look of an app using java or css… so you can have basic apps… then synchronisation of marked files. So you end up with something like Mobile me… The apps looks and feel the same, but just functional enough for accessing the data

3. User Google Docs/mail etc

I kind of have a want for this as i contemplate using a netbook type device for taking notes at University in September… for word processing, messing about online during coffee breaks etc - a core2duo laptop is too much!

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Back home after LUG Radio live, and another great weekend - and here comes the annual review!

The talks I saw…

Rufus Pollock - Open Knowledge Foundation

Rufus was showing the “Open Knowledge Foundation” project, which is basically a standardised apt type repository for knowledge - so we can integrate it into software. Thinking about it, I could really see the benefits of this, I’ve always wanted to have a crack at a trading analysis platform for banks, but with Yahoo being the only people the provide stock market information in a standard way, I have nothing to compare the data against. Quite cool!

Bruno Bord - “Baguette On Snails”

Bruno’s traditional Lug Radio talks are legendary - Always makes me laugh my ass off.
This one was a dig at how code commenting and documentation is very English biased and created a “Frenglish” python interpreter as a kind of olive garlic branch of peace. The BEST bit about this talk was the little ASCII snail used as a loading bar! On a serious note, it really isn’t fair that to hack on code you have to learn English - and this talk highlighted that very well.

MY TALK! \o/

After a quick beer, the nerves went away and I gave my talk and announced the newest project i’ve been working on VENTUREX “Dragon’s Den Meets YouTube!” type site.
I had some very kind compliments from people after the talk, and I really enjoyed speaking!

John Carr - “Laying down the pipes: connecting your desktop”

John was showing off his app “Conduit” which is a seriously cool little program to sync your desktop with web services. Ive been looking for something like this for ages. I felt for this guy though, everything broke during the talk which kind of left him as a target for an onslaught of questions. I really enjoyed this talk, great app and I think John handled the mishap well. First thing I did when i got home: sudo apt-get install conduit - you should too!

LUGRADIO LIVE!

Great LUG Radio live show, enjoyed as always - and it was annouced that even though there won’t be any more shows, LUGRADIO LIVE WILL BE BACK NEXT YEAR! I am so glad, I really enjoy this event and think that the loss of the “Rock and Roll” expo would be very damaging to the Free Software community in the UK - Im hoping they won’t stop next year and carry it on as a Live event.

After Party

A Karaoke machine, lots of beer and drinking with Chris Budden (rugby team mate) ended as expected with us all being stupidly drunk, I must have sung every damn song on that karaoke sheet and got stitched up by Chris Rose and Tom Kentell and had to sing Whitney Houston songs… bastards. (Which i slurred at them via the microphone… smoooth :E

Matthew “Dotwaffle” Walster - Demoscene

Every year I go to Dotwaffle’s talks, as I am freakin’ amazed by these demos. I can’t get my head around how these people manage to create this genius braindumps in 4k of code!! Seriously Cool. I kind of had an “inspiring” moment, and think I might have a bash at this demoscene malarky - if anyone has any tips/advice on how to get started with this with Linux, please let me know!
Everyone should go to the UK’s demoscene event: Sundown in September …

The Mass Debate -

Some views on the GPL v3, Distro release synchronisation …. by now the hangover was kicking in, and I couldn’t really make words out any more.

Benjamin Otte - Swfdec: Flash and Gnome

I’ve always clicked the “install adobe flash button” after a new Firefox installations.. and never really thought about the work that goes into the Free alternatives. I really enjoyed this talk, and installed swfdec when I got home.

Other Bits and bobs

A big thanks to Jono, Aq, Adam and Chris for another great weekend, for allowing me to talk, for 4 great years of LUGRADIO and for carrying on with the Live shows!

The talk is basically going to basically start with me bragging a little about the type of people (investors) I’ve worked with, and let you all in on how these people find projects, and what they look for in companies to invest in.

So if you are at LUGRADIO live this coming weekend, and are the entrepreneurial type, looking for venture capital, just interested how the whole thing goes down - feel free to drop in! (I am also going to be showing off a little project I’ve been working on with an investor to make the whole process a lot better)

I’ll be there all weekend, and drinking on the Saturday night!

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