LUGRadio Live is over

Well, I’m back from LUGRadio Live and I have gathered a mass of tshirts, stickers and pens. For some reason I took part in the legendary Adam Sweet’s Gong-A-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza (which was pretty funny I must admit). And I lost. To a man talking about pub food distribution strategies. Oh well, he was a random drunk guy and deserves his Nokia N800 Linux smartphone thing.

I’ve got some DVDs of OpenSolaris, which is nice, since Sun says “Hey! This is Open Source now! It’s free!” but then makes you go through some registration crap to actually access it. But now, probably thanks to Ian Murdock (Mr “I am the Ian in Debian”, but when I say he’s “in Debian” I don’t mean this Debian because that would be wrong), I have 2 DVDs of OpenSolaris and some distributions based on it (Belenix, Schillix, Nexenta and of course all of the source code, as well as a DVD of Java-type stuff (yay, I really like Java, especially since I’m forced to learn and use it in University when Python is a hell of a lot easier to get my head around!)). Which is nice. I always like to expand the number of Free Software computer systems I try.

So yes, my taking part in Adam Sweet’s oiled-up, sexual monstrousity… It was basically an hour of 3 minute talks, seperated by Adam Sweet (wearing a thong, but also being a pussy and wearing pants underneath) banging a gong. I decided to get up and have a bit of a rant about Firefox being seen as the new desktop and web applications trying to reinvent perfectly good desktop apps (which I have blogged about earlier), and was complimented when I stepped down by Ted Heagar (who works for Bungee Labs who do web apps! (Actually, to be REALLY ironic, my talk included how web apps are actually Idiot Exploiter/Firefox apps, and as a 64bit Epiphany user this is a nightmare. Guess what? Searching for “Bungee Labs” on Google gives the top result as their site I just linked to, but what does Google’s cached description bit say? Take a look:

3 letters, and two of them are Ls!)), then later on at the Saturday night party by a guy who turns out to be a Flash developer for the BBC (a funny story which bagged me a Neuros tshirt at the goodbye session :) ), and then on Sunday morning by Stuart Langridge himself (apparently that’s what he’s talking about at GUADEC). Well, I’m glad I didn’t get a shoeing over it at least (that was saved for the guy carrying round a hubcap :) ) By the way, my GNOMEFiles news feed told me about Tribler, which looks like the kind of thing I am advocating, it is a peer2peer system using Bittorrent and YouTube and stuff, which links to external players (namely VLC) to do the playback, and stuff like that. Basically embodying the kind of program I would love to see (well, until programs are done away with at least)

I also met a nice guy at the party from South Africa (oooo, home of Mark Shuttleworth indeed!). He runs the local LUG/University society, so it was really interesting talking to him about their Freedom Toasters and stuff (I was saying how I like scribbling down user interfaces, and he said their current UI is a bit terrible and is being reworked in Python and GTK. Which is what I was thinking of making one in!). I also saw him about in the hotel and train station too. Overall it was an amazing event, and I want to say a big thank you to Gareth Qually (wow, couldn’t believe I eventually found his site!) (even though he’ll probably never read this) because I didn’t get chance at your talk because I was being a bit of a pussy, but anyway: Thank you for trying the apps, reading documentation, messing around and experimenting, providing very useful feedback and most of all not saying “Linux is shit, it doesn’t run Photoshop”. Thank you thank you thank you thank you, I wish there were more professionals out there willing to experiment and generally mess around with things they don’t know in order to find out stuff, rather than forking out masses of money for things and then becoming blind to the existence of anything else. Cheers for the great talk too, by the way.

So yes, I’m home. And my packaging app is nearly working at a prototype stage. I seem to be in good books with Harriet’s Mum for getting her some perfume for her birthday which also makes the chances of me going round soon a bit higher, which would be nice ’cause I haven’t seen Harriet in an eternity (a few weeks) as she couldn’t come to LRL due to the birthday thing and other stuff, and I have some stuff to give her for generally being ace and everything (well done on your exams and things by the way!).

So yes, I think I’ll leave it there. No N800 for me, but now the OpenMoko thingie has come out, so the N800 is SOOOO last month (I promised myself that if I did win one I’d give it back to the LUGRadio crew to donate to a worthy developer, as long as it wasn’t Adam :) )