Videos of Linux (& FOSS) Talks

What’s the best way to understand something? Have somebody else explain it. Of course its not always possible to go and see talks. But lots of talks about Linux and FOSS are videoed and published to the internet!

The talks give an introduction to all sorts of interesting topics, such as: rsnapshot; AJAX; ReactOS; power saving for laptops; linux training/certification; Mark Shuttleworth’s FOSS ‘challenges’; etc – there’s something for all interests. Practically no prior knowledge about the topic is needed for most of the videos.

• FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Development European Meeting) has videos of the main talks since 2005 although if you explore the mirrors you will will also find so called ‘lightning talks’ (aka short talks) among other videos not linked from the main pages.
• LugRadio Live has videos of most of its talks (very interesting even if you’re not a fan of their podcast!): 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and USA 2008.
• HantLUG (my local LUG, although I’ve never been), has videoed all of its talks.

I’m sure there must be more videos around, determined to hide from me, so I’d appreciate anyone with links to other groups who have similar videos!

Me and Mobile Phones (and Android)

It may surprise you to know that as a teenager living in England, I do not have a mobile phone. (Well, strictly speaking that’s not true, but that’s mostly irrelevant.) Why? I had to reason to want one. More recently my reason has changed, I’m waiting for the right phone. OpenMoko, Android and Ubuntu Mobile were all about to be released. In other words, FOSS for phones. OpenMoko came, but it was unusable as a phone. Great in principal, but not yet ready. But today the first Android phone was announced, and the system shown off in a very stylish fashion.

You probably know what Android is, if not Wikipedia tells us: “Android is a software platform and operating system for mobile devices, based on the Linux operating system, developed by Google and later the Open Handset Alliance”.

So what do I find exciting about the new T-mobile G1 running Android? Well its open source nature is a good start. And then the videos make it look so polished.

But dig beneath the surface and you’ll also find it seems like Google has built a great infrastructure for developers to expand upon, with easily replaceable components – even core ones like the home screen or the email app. The Androidology series is well worth watching along with A first hand look at building an Android application.

So is the T-mobile G1 likely to be my first mobile? I would suspect the answer is still no. Give it until Christmas and more manufacturers will have brought out Android phones, perhaps ones that are not sim-locked. Subsequent generations will surely be even better?

The Planet Photo Meme

I may not yet be a member of any planets, but still…

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
3. Post that picture with NO editing.
4. Post these instructions with your picture.

SLiP – a “Sorta Like Python” shorthand for XML

This morning, while eating breakfast I had a brainwave. Python, revolutionized programming, with no more curly braces {}, replacing them by indentation. Why not revolutionize XML with a similar format?

Further investigation found that it exists. SLiP – a “Sorta Like Python” shorthand for XML was written by Scott Sweeney and published under the MIT license. The reason I said ‘was’ is that the last release was April 19, 2002. So it’s not really a viable solution unless someone decides to bring it back to life and starts to work on the unimplemented features on the project’s homepage.

I would love to be able to use this or something similar, so please let me know if anyone does do anything with this, or if there is a similar ‘language’ in existence!

DRM Free Music in the UK

Until today anyone in the UK wanting to legally download DRM free music was stuck.

• Amazon MP3 offers music from all free major labels, but is available only in the USA – an international launch is promised for later this year.
• iTunes is obviously not available for linux, but only has DRM free music from EMI.
• Napster offers an MP3 store in several countries, but not in the UK.
• Play.com, but with a limited choice.
• 7Digital, but without Song BMG songs.

However, as of today 7Digital has signed a deal with Song BMG meaning DRM free music whichever label your favourite artists have contracts with. Popular artists such as ABBA, Amy Winehouse and Metallica are all now available DRM free for the first time. Their homepage proudly proclaims “We are now 100% MP3″. This isn’t strictly true, for example the High School Musical 2 Soundtrack is available only in WMA.

Still, this is a massive victory for music lovers in the UK. No more waiting for Amazon MP3 in the UK – although perhaps the prices will be slightly lower when it does come.

Programming with Python

I’ve always had an interest in programming. I started with PHP, because prior to that I had learnt HTML. Also this was back in ‘the Windows days’ so I would upload my work to a free web host without the effort of having to download and install a program to compile and then run my code. Of course finding a decent free webhost was never easy!

Anyway, PHP (with MySQL as a database) is great for developing websites. However it is not widly used for developing desktop applications – and thats what I decided I wanted to have a go at.

Enter Python. It does not require compiling (similar to PHP); allows for object orientated programming (something I hear is the future); has an unusual clean syntax {no more curly braces} and seems to be very popular for linux desktop programming.

So, I installed it (aptitude install python – although you’ll probably find it’s installed already on your machine).

The best thing I’ve found about it, is that you are able to use the libraries available for it. In particular PyGTK (for Gnome/GTK style programs) and GStreamer (for sound output – as used by Rhythmbox, Banshee, Totem, etc).

So to help me learn python I’m creating a media player. I have some ideas which are rather different to the current media players available, so watch out! Currently it does very little (I mean practically nothing), but it’s being a great learning experience for me. Perhaps I’ll even post a few tutorials here!

Fluid Images (aka fluid webpage layouts for images)

Whilst this immediately deviates from my original open source suggestion of what you could find on my blog, this really amazed me. You have to see it to understand it, but it is awesome! Now we just need someone to create an open standard implementing it…

Edit: Further investigation shows there is an open source C/C++ library called Liquid Rescale to do this and a GIMP plugin which can be installed in the Ubuntu gimp-plugin-registry package.

Hello world!

As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now I’m Greg, also known as fluteflute. What this blog will evolve into, I have no idea, but hopefully somebody, somewhere, at sometime will find it at least some of it vaguely interesting. Thats enough somes, so lets get down to business.

Basically, I’m interested in computers. Recently (well in the last few years) I discovered open source software – in the form of Firefox – at the time not differentiating it from plain freeware. Later, I discovered Ubuntu, and this lead me to find out more about the available open source software. So here I am now, extremely enthusiastic about all the exciting open source stuff out there.

Things I’m keeping an eye on range from the well known and established: Firefox, PHP, Python, Ubuntu, Debian, Wine, etc to the new and evolving projects such as Ubiquity, Ubuland and Gwibber. The list just has no end.

So, lets get started!