Welcome to LRL09! (Photo Credit Solexious)

Well here we are again, another year, another LugRadio Live. For anyone who has never heard of it, LUGRadio Live is a community conference for supporters of Free and Open Source software.

Some big changes are taking place this year though, as the date had been altered from July to October, the venue has moved to the Newhampton Arts Centre just outside Wolverhampton, and unfortunately the conference is only for one day. Still, these points aside it remains an excellent event. Here’s a quick summary of what went on, and of the talks I attended:

Brock Craft – tinker.it

Brock is from London-based design-studio tinker.it, he spoke about the open-source hacking platform Arduino. Arduino was designed to be a cheap and easy method for learning about electronics and hardware hacking, and as a quick method for building devices. Brock gave examples of its usage by artists, designers and hobbyists, and it certainly seems like it could have many ingenious uses, including the RFID cat flap which Brock had built for his own feline friend.

Gervase Markham – Mozilla Drumbeat/BBC Basic

Gerv spoke firstly about Mozilla Drumbeat, which is essentially a grass roots campaign to keep the web completely open to all. Gerv mentioned net neutrality, the mobile web, and closed application stores such as the Apple app store as examples of threats to the web. The project’s motto is ‘people, ideas and action for a better internet’ and it’s certainly an admirable aim we should all support! In the spirit of the conference’s ‘back to basics’ theme Gerv then presented his first ever program, written at age 8, a ‘choose your own’ adventure style game written on a BBC Micro. Gerv is a charismatic and engaging speaker, and the presentation raised a few good chuckles from the crowd.

Matthew Somerville – MySociety

Matthew works for MySociety, a registered charity probably best known for their work with the Number 10 petitions website. Matthew spoke about the various projects they have undertaken over the past few years. These include TheyWorkForYou, which can alert users when their MP speaks in Parliament, and holds transcripts of Hansard from 1935 onwards. It has also recently started hosting videos of parliamentary proceedings. Closely related to this is WriteToThem, which allows anyone to contact their MP directly, and HearFromYourMP, which is essentially the opposite.

Matthew also spoke about some projects which are designed to make life easier for people and communities, for example FixMyStreet which allows members of the public to report problems such as potholes and graffiti to their local council quickly and efficiently. MySociety has produced some excellent and easy to use services and hopefully this will continue.

Brock Craft - Tinker.it

Des Burley – A Real Lawyer Speaks

Des works for the independent law firm Martineau, and came to speak about trademarks and licensing in free/open source software. He covered the reasons why people would want to trademark software, what can be covered/protected and the differences between trademarks and copyright. He also spoke about the harm that can be wreaked by patent holders, with the model railway software designed by Jacobsen being a good example.

Andy Robinson – OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is a project designed to provide everyone with a complete, open and free mapping facility. I already had a little background info on OpenStreetMap from a talk given at Manchester Free software last year, but it was really interesting to see how far the project has come since it’s conception, and that we might soon reach a point where the information stored in the OSM database is of better quality than that of any mapping company. Andy also gave the interesting example of the work done in OSM to build the first complete and accurate map of the Gaza Strip, which was then being used in the humanitarian relief effort during the Gaza war in January this year.

Steve Lamb – The Changing Face of Work

Steve Works for Microsoft, but don’t let that put you off, honest! Steve has been at loads of the LRL events and always puts forward an excellent talk to present to us freedom-lovers. Steve spoke about giving employees more freedom and flexibility in their use of technology, whilst somehow creating a balance between work and home technology. He quite rightly suggested that it can be counter-productive if an employer forces specific tools or devices onto employees, and there were many excellent points to agree with.

Summary

The Twitterfall

The event was well organised this year, with the main stage featuring three big screens. One featured the presentation slides as they were delivered. One was used by an excellent portrait artist who sketched each speaker as they were on stage using the Gimp and a drawing tablet. The final screen featured a live twitter feed (or ‘twitterfall’), to which any conference attendee could tweet using the #lrl2009 hashtag, all tagged messages then appeared live on-screen. This produced some hilarious moments during and in-between talks, as ASCII drawings and abuse were consistently twittered by the delegates throughout the day. The conference music was excellent as always, with Rage Against the Machine, Paramore, Bowling for Soup, System of a Down and the Offspring all featuring prominently!

During the recording of the live show, the presenters announced that this really was the last LugRadio event, although it was later discussed that if someone else were to arrange the event next year, then the LugRadio presenters agreed to attend to provide another dose of their unique presenting style. So hopefully this won’t be the last we hear from the LugRadio crowd and I’ll be back in Wolverhampton next year!

OggCamp

UbuntuUK & LinuxOutlaws

With LugRadio Live having been cut down to just one day this year, it was obvious that someone would come along to fill the void. OggCamp is an ‘unconference’ (ie: an unorganised conference) where rooms are set aside and anyone can turn up and offer to speak on any free/open source related subject.

The event was held in the Connaught Hotel, around 10 minutes walk from the centre of Wolverhampton. The schedule of talks for the three rooms quickly filled up, and I attended a few fantastic presentations. I attended Tim Dobson’s presentation on his DFEY group, and Bruno Bord’s talk entitled ‘Explaining programming to my grandmother’. Although my favourite was presented by Andy Stanford-Clark with his talk on his ‘Twittering House‘ (as featured on the BBC) which tweets such events as power consumption, windows/doors opening, light/appliances being turned on/off, phones ringing, as well as other useful information about the house.

Unconference Schedule

His most recent addition being an SMS controlled Rudolph light display on his roof. This tied in with other cool little projects Andy had been working on, such as monitoring his local ferry using the ship’s radio frequencies which were then fed into Twitter, and eventually adopted by the ferry company as their live ferry update service, it was very entertaining to see how much could be achieved on such a small budget.

OggCamp certainly filled the void left behind the second day of LugRadio, and hopefully OggCamp will continue even if a LRL event can’t be arranged for next year. All in all, an excellent weekend, I met some nice new people, put some faces to names, and caught up with old friends. Roll on next year, in whatever form it takes!

8.10 isn’t a massive release by any measure, there are only several noticeable improvements, although it seems that a lot of time and effort has gone into making this release as stable as possible. For me, even though 8.04 was a LTS (Long Term Support) release, it seemed to lack the stability that I had come to love in Ubuntu, applications would crash for no reason, and I had massive conflicts with Flash9, Firefox and Amarok all trying to hog the sound output, with no end of frustration caused.

Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop

8.10 is a fantastic return to form for the Ubuntu team, the addition of Flash10 (despite it’s proprietary evilness) is a welcome upgrade as it solves a lot of the issues that dogged my daily web browsing sessions. Network manager has had some major improvements, now supporting VPN, Wireless, DSL, and mobile 3G broadband services, through a nice (although sometimes confusing) screen.

There’s the usual updates to X.Org, the kernel and Nautilus, the latter now providing a nice tabbed browsing interface, probably not something I’ll use, but I’m sure some people will see great uses for this. Nautilus is also now more tightly integrated with Pidgin, meaning things like status messages can be updated through the Gnome panel, a nice little addition. Another upgrade to File Roller means that it supports many more compressed archive types, which saves wasting time installing different archiving applications.

We also have the addition of an optional encrypted private directory, meaning your sensitive files can now be stored and encrypted very easily, although with the advent of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which forces citizens to hand over their encryption keys/passwords if requested by the authorities, this facility may have lost a lot of it’s advantage for some users.

Another nice little feature is the built-in guest account, something I have previously had to create myself, which allows you to quickly launch a low privilege password-less account, with absolutely no access to the file-system, in case your mate needs to quickly check his or her email on your laptop.

All in all I have found 8.10 to be rock-solid so far, and really wish that 8.04 LTS had offered this same high level of stability!

It comes as a surprise to many people that ‘deleted’ computer files are not in fact deleted at all by default, the space on the disk that they occupy is merely reallocated as blank space, to be written over as and when it is required, meaning that deleted files stand a relatively good chance of being recovered depending on how much the disk has been used since. Whilst there are many commercial photo recovery packages available, I wanted to avoid having to steer people down this expensive and not necessarily reliable path.

Free Software provides an interesting contrast to this, with the excellent PhotoRec, part of TestDisk. The Ubuntu community wiki lists several other applications for data recovery, but these aren’t all cross-platform, wheras TestDisk/PhotoRec will build and run on just about anything. Whilst it does lack the bells and whistles of the commercial packages (and it really is screaming out for a basic GUI front end to tempt people towards Free Software, and if I could write one I would!) is nevertheless is a simple and very reliable package for Photo, Video, Document and almost any other file type of data recovery.

Available for Linux/OSX/BSD/Solaris and even MS Windows, PhotoRec can recover more than 180 different file types across all of the major file systems (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3 etc) and on just about every type of camera or removable media device there is.

Despite my complaints about the lack of a basic GUI to assist the less-technical users, the command line interface is almost foolproof, everything is auto-detected, and given the completely read-only interface of the application it’s fairly impossible to cause any damage.

Pre-built packages are available for almost every GNU/Linux distro, and a simple “sudo apt-get install testdisk” within Ubuntu will have you ready to roll in 30 seconds flat.

The screen shots below show an illustration of a data recovery being performed on a 1GB SD card.

Overall I have found PhotoRec to be one of the best-written GNU/Linux tools I have ever used, it does it’s job extremely well, is very easy to use, and is a perfect example of just how good Free Software can be. I’d advise you to bookmark the web address and grab a copy next time you or someone you know accidentally deletes something!

Richard gave a history of the GNU Project, the four freedoms and Free Software’s benefits and advantages over proprietary software. He also spoke about DRM and the other dangers of non-free software, such as hidden back doors and other spying and monitoring activities.

Richard also covered some of the important reasons why businesses, government and educational establishments should use Free Software, preventing the support and development monopolies which are now becoming commonplace, along with the problem of proprietary vendors offering gratis or near-gratis copies of their software to schools in order to keep students reliant on their package and then carry this reliance forward into their future academic and business careers.

We had only been expecting around 100 people to attend but the 300-seat lecture theatre filled up completely, with latecomers sitting in the aisles, it certainly shows how many people interested in Free Software we have in and around Manchester. The talk was very informative and I hope Richard returns to the UK at some point in the not too distant future.

Jonathan

My own brainstorm idea is a simple one, but I feel is could be very effective. Whilst watching a documentary on BBC3 it occurred to me how much free advertising Microsoft gets based on their default Windows logo screen saver. During a 1 hour documentary I’d say Microsoft got around 3 to 4 minutes of free advertising during interviews with people sat at their desk’s by their computer screens and I suggested that perhaps a default Ubuntu screen saver might provide some additional advertising.

I suggested the idea on the 31′st of March and it is currently at 135 positive votes. Making it the 3′rd most popular idea in the Marketing category.

If you feel obliged, click above and give it a vote!

Update: I have been notified that a Ubuntu screen saver has been present in the past, but had been missing from the last few releases. I am assured that it will be back in the operating system soon. Job Done!

Saturday

I arrived feeling quite refreshed on Saturday morning, surprising given the frighteningly early wake up of 6AM, like last year I spent a lot of time in the main stage, which this year turned out to be a cinema screen! The Linux-loving crowds were out in force, I’d say there were about 500 people in attendance. Anyway, here’s my Saturday summarised:

Ted Haeger – Bungee Labs
Ted is a former Novell employee who now works for a VC-funded start up called Bungee Labs in the US. Their product is called “Bungee Connect” and is basically a web-based IDE for developing web applications. It is quite similar to the EBase tool I have used in work in the past, but is geared more towards developing sites with AJAX, and getting them shipped fast. Ted was entertaining as always.

Alan Cox – Red Hat
Alan is a Kernel hacker for Linux who currently works for Red Hat, Alan spoke about the Linux community, how things work, how changes are made and development takes place, and marketing of Linux. Overall a very informative talk.

Gong-a-Thong Light Bulb Talks
These were a series of short 3 minute talks compared by one of the presenter’s ‘Adam Sweet‘ who arrived on stage in a dressing gown to the rocky theme tune, who promptly stripped off to reveal a bright yellow thong (thankfully with a pair of pants below). The talks themselves were interesting, the ones I can remember included an American man who had travelled from Indonesia who wanted to start using free software in this area to help the recovery after the Asian tsunami. The winner was a young man who had a speech on how ordering food at a bar was akin to computer networking, he revealed how it was open to ‘spoofing’ and ‘denial of service attacks’ and was a hilariously funny skit.

Mass Debate
This debate included Chris DiBona from Google, Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group, Nat Friedman of Novell and Steven Lamb of Microsoft. Steven took the brunt of the crowd’s heckling as he did last year, mainly over Microsoft’s creation of the OpenXML file format, with the crowd wanting to know why MS created OpenXML, when a free version, created with consultation with the free software community, which is also ISO accredited, already existed! He also took some stick over the BBC’s usage of Microsoft DRM in their iPlayer software, which will exclude any non-Windows machine from accessing BBC content over the web

Chris DiBona
Chris is Google’s open source program manager. He gave a talk on the area’s where google uses open source, where they contribute back to the community, and a lot of information on the Summer of Code program. Amazingly Google has released over a million lines of code into the community and has also contributed to projects such as Apache, MySQL, Wine, Samba and Gaim. He also talked about the history of Google and showed some amusing slides of the original google set-up, which consisted of several assorted machines and a monitor on a desk! Chris seemed like a great guy and stayed around for the whole conference which is rare for international visitors, I even managed to grab a quick chat with him which was nice.

Unfortunately I missed Kat Goodwin’s talk on Open Source advocacy in Schools, which I was a little gutted about as it’s something I am really interested in, but hopefully I can get a summary on it from someone!

Sunday

Sunday was a little quieter, not quite as many attendees, but still plenty to see and some additional exhibition stands. I spent a good amount of time on Sunday chatting to a man called Glyn from the Open Rights Group, he talked about the projects they have been involved with, such as efforts to eliminate DRM which will should soon result in legislation to force products that use DRM to be labelled as such. He also talked about the work they have been doing with monitoring and discouraging the Electronic Voting trials in the UK, which is certainly a good idea given some of the awful errors that have been made already, and the amateurish way that the system is being run, one example Glyn pointed out was one where a miscalculation in an Excel spreadsheet (yes, I know how stupid that sounds!) almost cost the SNP control of Scotland. I will certainly be signing up to support the Open Rights Group.

Michael Sparks – BBC
Michael is from the BBC’s research department and showed off some of the applications that they have worked on, including several from Google Summer of Code students. Some interesting ones including a BitTorrent Swarming application, and a secure network transport method which arose from certain high profile shows such as Doctor Who needing to be protected from theft during their transport.

Nat Friedman – Novell

Nat gave a very interesting talk where he compared the writing of the Dictionary, it’s many versions, revisions and authors as being one of the first examples of Open Source collaboration, he also discussed usability on the Linux desktop, and spent a large amount of time discussing patents, including the formation of the Open Invention Network, which is a collaboration of several high profile organisations with a large patent pool, to protect open source projects falling foul of intellectual property laws, and helping them out by counter-suing if necessary.

Wolverhampton itself is a fairly nice city, the usual shops you’d find anywhere nowadays, but it does have a nice air to it, and the venue reminded me very much of the Cornerhouse in Manchester, coffee shops, art, and independent and international cinema, a lovely place to hold a free software conference.

I spent most of the afternoon wandering around the exhibition, talking to people and drinking beer in the sunshine! All in all I had a truly excellent time, the people were great, the exhibitions gave me some great idea’s and I bought tonnes of merchandise, along with the HUGE goodie bag I got on entrance! I have posted a few pictures I took above, but more can be found here! Roll on LRL 2008!

There is a lot of buzz around at the moment due to Becta’s new purchasing frameworks. In a nutshell, Becta is the government’s advisor on education related ICT issues. Part of that role involves making recommendations on software that should be used in schools for certain functions, an example of this would be the MIS (Management Information System) which schools use to keep a database of their students and other information relating to the day to day running of the school.

The current arguments stem from the new framework for learning platforms which are being brought in by Becta in 2007/8. These give recommendations to Schools and Local Government on products that are currently in the marketplace and which satisfy their criteria. The problem is that due to the stringent nature of their criteria, and the fact that Open Source products are not officially supported or financially backed by a large organisation, it means they were essentially excluded from the framework, and even the SME’s that have sprung up to support OSS software, all failed the criteria. This seems to go against Becta’s own research that shows that open source software could save schools up to 50% on their ICT budgets.

So even despite the fact that products such as Moodle are already being used in hundreds of schools and colleges around the country to improve the education of this country’s children, Moodle and the SME’s supporting them are simply too small, and cannot compete, meaning schools will have to either pay for a ‘Becta Approved’ platform, or continue using Moodle and ‘turn their back’ (Becta Quote) on the extra funding that is provided to schools who use the software that Becta recommend.

This learning platform framework has recently been officially announced and as expected, includes no open source software or SME’s. It is completely dominated by the huge UK IT suppliers such as Viglen, Research Machines, Pearson and Ramesys. Although despite only the massive suppliers making the list, I can safely say that I have never heard of any of the learning platforms that are being recommended from these organisations, which seems to me as if they don’t quite have the same reputation as Moodle.

In an effort to fight all of this ‘injustice’, an organisation called the Open Schools Alliance was formed with the support of the UKUUG to campaign to allow free and open source software into Becta’s framework. They had some very good publicity and managed to have an EDM placed into Parliament (EDM 179) by Lib Dem MP John Pugh, this has also managed to stir up some further publicity from news organisations such as The Register and ZDNet. I was contacted by the UKUUG who notified it’s members about the EDM and asked for help in persuading MPs to sign. In late November I wrote to my MP for Ashton-under-Lyne David Heyes asking him to sign the EDM and I received a very positive response.

• Letter to David Heyes
• Reply from David Heyes

The EDM has now reached the incredible figure of 109 signatures, which currently stands in 36′th place out of 615 EDM’s put forward by MPs, which is an amazing achievement. Congratulations go to Leslie Fletcher of the UKUUG and Open Schools Alliance, and to the other members of the OSA for their amazing work! Hopefully they can build on this momentum to force a policy chance at Becta.

I will certainly be keeping a close eye on the situation in the near-future and will continue to support in any way I can.

Jonathan