James Hooker

Hi All!

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!