It seems like in the last month or so, I had to explain to several people, several times in a couple of venues why Dan and I do not immediately release a version of the show once we are finished recording. I thought I should repeat the explanation here for everyone’s benefit.

Linux Outlaws was never meant to be a news show. When I came up with the concept, I was modeling it very much after MacBreak Weekly and to some extend This Week in Tech itself. That is to say LO is designed to be discussion of and reflection on the Linux and open source / free software news of the week in a friendly, often lighthearted atmosphere. It should not be your primary source of these news. As such, LO was never designed to present a comprehensive, authorative or even reliable selection of what has happened in the last week and because of that I had never thought it to be a big issue that we have a pretty long lead time with the show (usually at least three days from recording to release). You could say that Linux Outlaws isn’t optimised to bring you information quickly, instead we concentrate pretty hard to maximise the quality of the show. This extends to content (both serious and humorous) and also audio quality and general listenability (cutting out the uhms, ahhs and pauses) which is especially important to both Dan and I. This takes time and we know that. The whole concept of the show is build around it. We realised pretty early into it that some people rather prefer the show very raw and quickly delivered. That is why we started experimenting with streaming it live and have kept that arrangement up since then. We now provide you with exactly the recording of it all as it happens live, both in video and pretty high quality audio formats. I even save the video to the Ustream site when I don’t forget to record it. This is our compromise for those of you who want the show immediately and/or in its raw state. We are, however, not willing to sacrifice the quality of the actual podcast because of this. There will be no raw, TLLTS-style, fresh-off-the-tape release of Linux Outlaws. The editing and releasing of the podcast will always take time and I am acutely aware of the fact that it has been taking longer lately. I will take steps against this (more on that in a minute) but I will not compromise the core values of our show for it. As long as this is still a hobby for both Dan and me, there will be no way that I can release the podcast much faster than we have done in the past couple of years. If you want it faster, either pay me to do the editing or watch the live show.

As the show has been getting longer and longer, and with the original mission in mind, I have come up with a plan to re-focus Linux Outlaws a bit to adjust for this. Starting with the next show (#136), we will stop listing all distro and software releases that we pick up on. We will only talk about the ones we find noteworthy for some reason or another. You are of course still free to send us feedback (which we always appreciate a lot) and tell us if you think we missed something important, but please respect our decision if we do not mention stuff you send us. By now, we are getting a lot of email and everybody has something else that he or she finds important. In the same vein, I will take it upon myself to more radically cut down the actual news items we talk about. I always do this in some kind of fashion or another, but I will try to be more ruthless with it now since I think we really need to focus on the important things and make the show a little less complicated again. If I do this correctly, chances are you won’t even notice but if you do, please remember: we are human too and humans make mistakes. With any luck, this will speed up the release of the show again and keep it fresh for many, many more episodes to come. Our purpose always has been and always will be to produce the most relevant while still entertaining Linux podcast in the highest quality possible out there.

Again, by all means send us feedback on all of this, we are always interested in what you think and how we can make the show better for all of you. Just one more thing: Before you send us email, think about what you are doing. Maybe read it over again before you push that “send” button. As I said, we are starting to get a lot of email and we take a chunk out of our personal free time to read it all (and we do read all the mail we get) — so please make it worth our while. If you do that, I am happy to read all of your feedback, a lot of it warms my heart every week and totally makes it worth it to do this show. We are grateful for all the intelligent rants, funny insults, well-worded criticism, witty jokes and random “I really like your show” comments we get. Please keep that up!

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…

Howdy folks, it’s been a while since we updated this blog and I thought I should fill you in on all the recent excitement of OggCamp. The event actually happened just a few days ago on Sunday October 25th, but it’s taken me this long just to catch my breath, I’m still recovering but it was worth every second. There was obviously a lot going on over the weekend with LRL 2009 and other things happening, I honestly couldn’t fit all that into this post. Instead I thought I’d give you my personal account of OggCamp and share some stories. It was an amazing experience and seemed to go really well, we’ve had some lovely feedback so far and I’m really glad people enjoyed themselves.

It all began at some stupid hour on Sunday morning as I dragged myself out of bed at about 8am. “That’s not early!” I hear you cry, but it is when you went to bed at 4am after too much drinking and partying. I was head of the crew for OggCamp and I’d set the call for 9am in a fit of optimism weeks earlier. I had a quick shower and hauled myself down to the hotel lobby. It seemed there weren’t many of the crew around at that time, so either I was late or early. For once I think I was actually on time. Maybe that’s what threw people off, I’m usually late if anything. I took the opportunity to sneak into breakfast and down as many bacon sandwiches as I could manage (about 2 to be precise). There still weren’t many people around in the lobby when I emerged so I rang Tony, only to discover he was already on the top floor setting up the room with Laura, Ciemon and others. I led the assembled crew members to the car park where we loaded all the drinks, mugs and assorted stuff in from Popey’s car. I’d just like to take a minute to mention and thank our wonderful crew. Without them we couldn’t have done this and I was amazed by their constant willingness to help and go above and beyond the call of duty. Drum roll please, in no particular order, may I present the OggCamp 2009 crew:

• Andy & Jo from LivLUG
• Kevan Vautier
• Anna Bierzanska
• Alistair Kidd
• Will Noakes
• Nathan & Katie
• Robert  McWilliam
• Jacob Hume
• Steve Bradshaw
• Matt Daubney

I have a horrible feeling I’ve missed someone off the list but it was hard to get everyone’s names while so busy. If I missed your name out let me know and I’ll add it ASAP. We appreciate you all. I know other people chipped in spontaneously on the day and we were grateful for that too. Anyway, back to the story.

The crew set about valiantly sorting out the break out rooms and putting up signs all around the hotel while Tony and I rigged the PA for the event. I’d borrowed a small rig from a friend of mine and it worked brilliantly. Tony brought the mixer and various other bits, so between us we had it well covered and a few people commented on how good the technical side was. Being an audio geek comes in handy sometimes. We were kindly loaned 12 walkie talkies by Gordon Pearce. So each of the crew could run around the hotel and stay in touch, that really helped. We weren’t sure how many people would actually turn up and there had been discussions between the group beforehand, some thinking lower numbers and others high. Personally, I thought about 100 people would turn up and in hindsight even that was conservative. I’ll never forget the white look on Tony’s face when he returned from a trip downstairs looking a bit spaced out. Naturally I asked “What’s up?”, he replied “There’s people queuing for 3 floors down the stairs!”. I don’t remember my response but it was probably something incisive and witty like “fu#k me!!!”. We had about 140 attendees in total and I was a little worried we wouldn’t fit everyone into the room. It was a great turn out which we were all totally over the moon with. We did our official welcome and got the event under way. Andy Stanford-Clark kicked us off with a great talk about his Twittering house. From there I was busy operating the PA, running around eating more sandwiches and other such important stuff. I didn’t get too see many of the talks which was a real shame, they looked amazing. I particularly wanted to catch Beccy Newborough’s pig drawing analysis session, but sadly couldn’t. The schedule filled up quickly, we had some great sessions and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I was really happy with that.

There was a moment of hilarity when I got stuck in the lift with 3 other people as we headed for the top floor. We arrived at the correct floor only to find that the lift doors didn’t open. So we waited a bit, then we waited a bit more, but they just weren’t opening. One of the others was about to push the emergency call button when I remembered I had a radio attached to my belt. I picked it up and announced “#buzz# erm… guys? We’re stuck in the lift and the doors won’t open. This isn’t a joke #buzz#”, we waited another minute and then I said ” #buzz# if we don’t get out of here I might have to do the show from the lift #buzz#”. Apparently this went down a storm in the main room where everyone heard it loudly over the radio, right in the middle of a talk. Some bright spark suggested we try going down a floor and sure enough the doors opened when we reached that stop. It was something of a relief but also incredibly funny.

Safely out of the lift I joined the others for the live show at 3pm. We drew the raffle first and gave away some great prizes donated by our lovely sponsors: Bitfolk, Canonical, Tinker.it, The Open Learning Centre, The Linux Emporium, Viglen, the ever present Pokebook and Linux Format magazine. The raffle proved so popular we used a whole ticket book up and someone had to dash out and buy another. I wasn’t expecting that. The live show itself went really well, we discussed some interesting topics and got some good laughs from the crowd which felt amazing. The crew and various other good folks helped us to get everything packed up at the end and striking the PA didn’t take as long as I thought at all. We were out in well under an hour. With my hotel room stuffed with PA gear again it was time for us to join the others in the hotel bar. There were about 30 people left hanging around and Aq suggested we organize somewhere to eat if we didn’t want to lose the group. Duly inspired, I had a chat with the rather charming young lady on reception and a Chinese banquet was arranged for everyone in town. We all enjoyed the food and then headed back to the hotel for more socializing in the bar.

Fab has done amazing job of cataloging all the pictures from the event at the OggCamp site. Check those out if you haven’t already!

That about covers it I think, I’m all out of stories for now. I’d like to say thanks to the sponsors, the crew, and most importantly everyone who came along and made this event such a success. We were humbled by the turnout and the general attitude of all involved. Let’s hope we can make it bigger and better next year if it happens. We’re certainly thinking about it, but there’s no commitment yet. You’ll be able to hear the full uncut version of the OggCamp live show in the next Linux Outlaws. Complete with swearing and explicit bits. There’s already a version out in the Ubuntu UK Podcast feed, which was skillfully edited by Tony. I should also say a big thanks to Tony, Laura, Popey, Ciemon and Daviey (who sadly couldn’t join us) for being such a great bunch of people. Organizing this event with you has been such fun, both Fab and I have enjoyed it immensely. To the rest of you, if you came along I hope you enjoyed yourself. If not, there may be another chance in future and we’d love to see you then. Take care everyone, I’ll catch you soon

Edit: Our own, ultimate uncut version of the live show is now out!

Dan

Hey folks, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on the blog and I figured it was time I stopped slacking – not in a Slackware sense, thankfully Also I was pretty surprised earlier this evening when Fab found an interesting article concerning us on Podcast Alley. It seems we were listed in their top 5 tech podcasts for May, and we didn’t even know until now. Have a look at the screen shot below…

Podcast Alley Listing

(click to enlarge)

You might notice a little podcast down there below us at number 8… what’s it called again? Oh yes, that’s it. Security Now! Hang on, that’s pretty amazing news. I don’t listen to it myself but I couldn’t deny that it’s one of the best known technology podcasts around. Part of Leo Laporte’s TWiT stable no less. I know it’s only one website and one month’s review so we shouldn’t get carried away, but it’s nice to see. I’m pretty chuffed by this and so is Fab, I wanted to share the picture. Thanks to everyone who’s helped and supported us in almost 2 years of doing this now. It’s a lot of work but we both have fun making the show, that’s thanks to our great listeners. We recently passed 100 episodes, a landmark I never imagined we could reach. Here’s to another hundred. We’re not done waffling yet.

Take care,

Dan

For all of you who were interested in Jon Kulp’s classical version of our theme tune but who are having problems reading the notation, he has produced new files with tabulature added: PDF version & LilyPond source file.

Thanks again, Jon! Now all of us Rock’n'Roll guitarists can read it as well.

Man, we have the best listeners in the world! Just a short addendum to yesterday’s post: Jon has just send me his recording of the classical guitar version of Sudo Modprobe and it sounds amazing! So, without further ado, I present you the classical guitar version of your theme song, written and recorded by the great Jonathan Kulp:

• Sudo Modprobe (Classical Version) Ogg Vorbis, 0.9 MB @ 96 KBit/s
• Sudo Modprobe (Classical Version) MP3, 2.2 MB @ 192 KBit/s

Have fun with this, everybody and thanks again to Jon for his great work and commitment! You will hear this being featured on the show pretty soon, I think.

Hey, everyone! I’m back with an update concerning the next few weeks and some very cool news. As we have mentioned a lot on the show already, Dan will be flying down to Germany on Saturday and we will spend most of the next week in Berlin at Linux Tag. We wil record a regular episode on Monday, but we will not stream it live. It will also not be released on Wednesday, since we’ll be busy geeking out and drinking beer in the capital. We will, however, record special content up there, so look for a flurry of activity in your podcatcher in the week starting on the 29th. All of this will mess up our schedule a bit and the Springsteen concert on the 3rd of July that I have tickets for as well as the Rheinkultur festival in Bonn the day after won’t help either, but we should be back on track during the second week of July. I hope all the extra content we’ll hopefully get out of all of this will be worth the disruption.

But now to something completely different: You might have heard Outlaws community member and resident music professor Jonathan Kulp announce in his audio feedback to us from Episode 96 that he was working on an arrangement of the Linux Outlaws theme tune, Sudo Modprobe, for classical guitar. Well, he’s done it already. How cool is that! Now, it’s been ages since I’ve played proper notes, but it looks awesome and the midi file he send us already shows how much intrinsic detail he put into the arrangement. I am really, really stoked about this and can’t wait for his recording; I can already promise you now that you will hear it on the show when we get it. Most definitely! It is totally amazing what Dan and Jon have done to the aweful little tune I hacked together at the beginning of all of this. This stuff is why I can justify spending 8+ hours each week working on the podcast and the many more I invest in growing the community around the show. Thank you very much, Jon! This is one of the coolest LO-related gifts we have ever received, I think. Although beer parcels are always up there as well, of course.

If you are interested in Jon’s work so far, all licensed CC BY-SA of course, here’s the Lilypond source file and a compiled PDF document. You can also listen to a preliminary midi version of the arrangement but please use that as a preview (and maybe to experiment around with it) only since it’s not a proper recording and doesn’t sound like a real song yet. Anyway, have fun trying to play this awesome version, all you wannabe Roy Buchanans.

openstreetmap.org

This is very, VERY last minute but we were contacted by some of the guys from OpenStreetMap about an event this weekend and I wanted to pass it on. We would have mentioned it on the show this week but unfortunately it was already too late by the time we heard. There’s a mapping party happening this weekend, 4-5th of April, in the Black Country, which isn’t at all as forboding as it sounds; in fact it’s a rather lovely place with some fine people, honest. It’s an area in the midlands of the United Kingdom – otherwise known as LugRadio country – and they hope to get as many people involved as possible improving OpenStreetMap data for it. The event is being held in The Public, West Bromwich and it’s sponsored by Cloudmade. So if you’ve got a bit of free time over the weekend, you’ve cut the grass, walked the dog and you’re kicking your heels. Why not have some fun and help map the area? You can find all the information you could need on their wiki. You don’t need any special skills, previous experience or equipment to get involved. The guys will sort you out, just turn up and say hello.

Apologies to our readers in other countries for whom this is probably a bit far to travel but you may be able to help OpenStreetMap map your area, wherever in the world that happens to be.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend everyone,

Dan

Help Wanted

Hey folks, I’d like to take a quick moment to humbly ask for your help with something. I forget who said it orginally but as the great quote goes “ask not what your podcast can do for you, but what you can do for your podcast”. Ok so maybe I added the podcast bit, that wasn’t in the original quote but you get the point. A lot of people ask us how they can help with the podcast and there are many things you can do but I think I’ve come up with an idea which could offer people a cheap and easy way to help us. It doesn’t have to cost any more than a few minutes of your time and a bit of black printer ink… ok maybe some Bluetack or drawing pins too but that’s it honest!

The idea involves 4 simple steps:

1. Head to linuxoutlaws.com/wanted and download the PDF of our Wanted poster
2. Print it out
3. Stick it up somewhere: school, college, workplace or community centre. Anywhere you think interested people might see it
4. Lastly the most important step. Sit back and feel good that you helped us to spread the word

You can of course repeat these steps as many times as you like but we’re not expecting people to print 100 each and go fly posting them. You can if you want but just one is enough to make a difference. If everyone does one poster it could help us to promote the show massively.

Thanks everyone, you’re the best! Fab & I appreciate the kindness, generosity and good humour of all our listeners. You make doing the show a pleasure for us

Dan

As you are probably aware of, I had set up a Laconica instance for the podcast community quite some time ago. I was very ethusiastic about Laconica when I first heard about it and I still think it is a great idea and a very important Free Software project. I have, however, decided to shut down our instance of it at linuxoutlaws.net over the next week.

After debating this for quite some time and soliciting opinions on the forums, Dan and I have come to the conclusion that it is too much work to maintain the installation compared to the amount of use it gets. Don’t get me wrong, Laconica is great, but the administration and maintenance features are still very rudimentary — it is only in version 0.7.x after all. If this was the only site I had to maintain, I’d keep it up, but as it stands now this is taking a lot of time away from doing the podcast and dealing with the main site and the forums. On top of that, Dan has always primarily used identi.ca anyway and I have consolidated my microblogging presence over at that site as well. If you do not want to use identi.ca, there are quite a few other Laconica instances out there (naturally, all of them give you a lot more Freedom than, say, Twitter), so it is not like the federated model is at stake here.

In case anyone wants to get hold of their user data, please email me and I will be happy to send you an SQL dump of the public data straight from the database. I really hope you understand my reasoning for doing this. As you might have guessed, I feel really uncomfortable about shutting down the service, but at the moment I see no other alternative and I think it will be better for the podcast and our community in the long run. As I have said, I am still supporting Evan and the project 100% and I will keep a close eye on its development. It was a lot of fun playing around with the software I just think it doesn’t make much sense for us to keep the service running at the moment.