July
2006
LugRadio Live 2006
I have to say the guys at Lugradio.org put on one heck of a show this weekend in Wolverhampton. Easily beating last years debut event, Lugradio live 2006 was held over two days instead of one and was housed in the really decent and spacious, yet hot, Students Union at Wolves Uni. Lugradio was created by a bunch of Wolves Linux User Group members who had the personality and rapport to carry what is a very likeable podcasty type thing. See this page for more details
Slick is one word I heard bounded around about the presentation, organisation and running of the event which is held for the open source community and attracted visitors from as far as Singapore. Professionally printed banners and programmes really showed how much work had gone into the event. The speakers were excellent and talked on many topics, Mark Shutleworth drew a big crowd to his talk on the big challenges facing open source as it progresses, Bill Thompson’s talk on how open source might be too focused on a head on battle with non open source, so much that it might be ignoring the needs of the developing world, was an excellent talk.
MythTV
Digital Rights Management was a theme during the first day and that was taken forward in the second day with the wonderfull work being done with MythTV as demostrated on stage in the hour of power on day two. It’s the idea of having freedom in what is a very restrictive area. I spoke with Justin who was running the MythTV stand and gained a facinating insight into where users might be able to take the PC as a dedicated entertainment centre. The project has massive potential to be bringing in things like flickr photo streams and the really cool stuff we do on PCs to the TV whereas Microsoft’s MCE might eventually get there, but be very restrictive and expensive on the way there. The DRM stuff on HDTV sounds really scary by the way.
Day One Photos
Lowfat : Document management
That sounds kinda boring, when in fact what the lowfat project is, blows you away. We had a demonstration by the programmer of the project who unleashed a certain wow factor and even admited that he maybe had watched too many films like Minority Report. You know the one where Tom Cruise has this touch screen and is moving things and making them fly and if you’ve used Picassa it had that same slick feel. Using graphic effects to display documents on screen and interact with them like that along with the Novell heavy xGL stuff the linux desktop could soon be more fun than MacOSX (not that I actually use a Mac)!!
Day Two Photos
In Summary
There’s too much to talk about. The general feeling of the weekend was relaxed and friendly, typically summing up what Wolves LUG is like, being the exception rather than the rule to the view that all geeks just sit around and do really boring things. The event was extreamly well planned, the venue was great and it was a very impressive gig. Matt asked for some feedback via blogs so ok just a couple of points. The PA systems in the lightning rooms didn’t seem to allow people to plug in their laptops and some of the volume levels on the main stage were a bit wonky. My xD picture card nuked half of my photos from day two, my bad. Going on this weekend I can’t see how they can top it, but I’m sure they’ll find a way.
July
2006
Wasn’t able to go, so it’s nice to see some photos! Cheers for the speedy entry.