Planet LivLUG

I took my newly purchased 50mm f1.8 lens to the Chinese New Year celebrations in Liverpool, I have uploaded a few shots to flickr. I'm still getting used to getting my composition right without being able to alter the focal length.

Update: Fixed the white balance on the images to remove the blue tint.

Just a quick tip for you today. It may be that everyone already knows about this, but I ran into an interesting problem this week and wanted to share the solution. My mum has been using Ubuntu on her laptop for a long time now and she likes it a lot. The other day though she asked me why it opened “some other weird box” when she clicked on email links in web pages. She’s a savvy computer user, she taught me how to use a computer when I was a kid, but this confused her.

It was launching the Evolution mail client and starting a new mail message every time a “mailto:” link was encountered. I remember this behaviour from years ago with Outlook on Windows. I have never bothered to do anything about it on my own machine because I tend to copy and paste an email address from a page straight into a new message. I’m a geek though and trying to explain that to non-technical users is hard, it shouldn’t really be necessary either. Clicking a link and expecting it to open a new message in the client you use is not unreasonable. So after some searching around I found that the solution is actually very simple. You can set Firefox to use Gmail or other webmail providers for email links in the preferences. It’s 2 second job, and here’s how you do it.

Open the Preferences dialog in Firefox (on the “edit” menu in Linux)…

…go to the applications tab…

…type “mailto” in the filter box to bring up the mail settings. You can then use the drop down box to select Gmail, Yahoo or others.

That’s it, next time you click on an email link it’ll open a new message in your web mail. A simple little tip which everyone may already know but I didn’t until recently. This will of course work in Firefox running on any platform, Linux, Mac or Windows. The preferences link is under the “tools” menu and not “edit”  in Windows, it may be different on Mac too. Hope this tip helps someone and gets your mail links fixed. Other web browsers are also available of course

Cheers,

Dan

It’s time for Weekly Rewind number 53 and for once it’s not late, wonders never cease. Since my last update included Monday and some of Tuesday of this week, I’ll just start from Tuesday and make this a little shorter. I’ve still been a bit ill this week at times but overall I’m feeling much better right now I’m pleased to say.

So, on Tuesday I synced up the audio from Linux Outlaws and shipped it back to Fab. It was a little bit longer than expected as I said in my earlier post, but I think we’ll settle into the new format with practice. That was later released as episode 137 “Bing!”. It seemed to be pretty well received and downloads for the podcast in general have been shooting up lately, good news. I think we might have finally jumped the shark. I also got on with sorting out sponsorship for OggCamp and various other things. We’ve been working on an advert to appear in Linux Format magazine very soon. They wrote am article about us this month in very kind terms and we appreciate the support. They’re even offering Oggcamp attendees 40% off a year’s magazine subscription. So, without further ado here are our wonderful OggCamp10 sponsors: (drum roll needed)

Media Partners: Linux Format Magazine

(trumpets)

• The Linux Emporium
• Bitfolk
• The Open Learning Centre
• Viglen
• Opsview
• Recuit12
• Linux Fund

I’m still working with some sponsors who are confidential right now, rest assured I’ll let you know as soon as I can. It may be a cliche but we really couldn’t put this event on without their support. It costs a lot of money and it would probably bankrupt us, we’re a non-profit community event. It sounds dramatic but it’s true. So a hearty thanks to these folks for their support, we appreciate it.

Anyway, back to events of the week. On Wednesday I worked on some Drupal sites for a while. I’ll give you more details on those in coming weeks when I’m allowed but it’s quite exciting. I also did more research for my Firefox Mobile article and wrote up some notes. On Thursday I interviewed former OpenSUSE Community Manager Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier for Linux Outlaws. I’m still working on the audio at the moment but you should be able too hear that as a special episode next week. It’ll be about 45mins in total. It was a very interesting chat I thought. Sadly I missed Chester LUG on Thursday evening because I was still feeling pretty rough. I’ll have to make it up to them next month.

On Friday I wrote, edited, formatted and published my FF Mobile review with some screen shots. It’s been pretty well received so far and I hope people enjoy it. I think mobile web browsing is a big area right now, and with the expansion of the smartphone market that’s only going to grow. I also spent some time working on HTML and CSS for a client site on Friday night. Trying to tweak a style sheet of over 1000 lines that someone else originally wrote can feel like chewing razor blades at times, but I finally got somewhere by the wee hours of the morning. Over the weekend I’ve been working on the Zonker interview audio, answering tons of email and I’m now editing the next Software Freedom Law Show for release on Tuesday. I’m also working on my 5 minute presentation for the Ignite Liverpool event next week. More on that in a second.

Upcoming:

Next week I’ll be getting onto OggCamp exhibition planning now that sponsors are mostly sorted. I also need to start working on a technical plan with the people at the venue. We’re going to be doing Outlaws live on Tuesday night at 7pm rather than Monday. Then it’ll be LivLUG on Wednesday night and I hope to be in good shape for that after missing Chester. On Thursday night I’m going to be giving a presentation at the Ignite Liverpool event, part of global O’Reilly Global Ignite Week. The idea is that you have 20 slides and 5 minutes to talk. The slides automatically advance every 15 seconds. I wasn’t sure what to talk about but now the idea of a 5 minute “Blaggers Guide To Linux” seems good to me. I get so many emails, phone calls and face to face enquiries from people asking me what Linux actually is, I think it would be good to give a quick foundation. Hopefully I can make it funny too, I’ll try. Come along to the Design Academy at Liverpool John Moores University at 6pm if you fancy seeing the result. You’re more than welcome. I’m sure there’ll be plenty else to get my teeth into next week. There’ll be more Rathole Radio at the weekend and I hope to have more news on gig tickets very soon. I’ll report back ASAP. Take care till then, see ya,

Dan

Today I’d like to tell you about Firefox Mobile on the N900, running in conjunction with the new Mozilla Weave web service. I’ve been testing them out on my handset for about a month now since the beta release of Fennec (the codename for Firefox Mobile). The N900 is the first device to get Firefox Mobile but it should also appear on Google Android phones in the near future. There is talk from Mozilla of an iPhone version too, but Apple are so draconian with 3rd party software I’m not sure that’ll happen. I just can’t see them allowing another browser on the iPhone to compete with Safari. (correction: According to Fab the iPhone has allowed some 3rd party browsers already, see link in comments) Anyway, here’s my thoughts upon testing Firefox Mobile for some time.

Facing The Critics:
It seems fashionable with some people to bash Firefox right now and use it as the butt of their jokes. I think many of them are too quick to forget the great work Mozilla have done for us in spreading Open Source software to the masses. Many users get their first exposure to the wonderful world of FOSS through the likes of OpenOffice.org and Firefox. Sure it’s not perfect, it has it’s bugs and it can be slow at times too. But I think the emergence of real competitors like Google Chrome has and will continue to improve Open Source browsers in general. I like Chromium but Firefox is still the browser of choice on my desktop. Weave is also an interesting prospect and I’ll talk more about that in a minute. I was curious to see if I would like this new compact Firefox quite as much as I like it’s big brother.

What’s Weave?

I mentioned Mozilla Weave earlier, it’s a new web service designed to make syncing your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs, form data and even passwords easy over multiple installations of Firefox. Imagine you have Firefox installed on a few different computers around the house, a laptop and a desktop perhaps. Having them synced up and sharing data means you’re always up to date whichever machine you’re on. There have long been extensions to share bookmarks but this takes it to a whole new level. Add in the fact that Firefox Mobile supports this on your phone and it becomes a much more interesting prospect. Wherever I happen to be a quick click on my phone brings up all the tabs I have open on my laptop. This is all achieved by syncing the data to a remote Mozilla web server and then sharing it between devices. You have to sign up for an account with Weave which is free, but a lot of people will have serious security concerns about it. According to Mozilla the data is all encrypted locally before it’s sent to their server, so even they can’t access it without your permission. I still don’t trust it with precious things like passwords and form data though, perhaps I’m paranoid. I use Weave to sync browsing history, bookmarks and tabs. It’s very easy to change these settings and it doesn’t share your passwords by default, which is a good thing I think. It’ll be interesting to see if it takes off as the browser spreads to more devices.

UI Design:

Obviously mobile devices have much less screen real estate for developers to use and the last thing you want is to have your page blocked out by copious toolbars, “tool” being the operative term in that sentence. The N900 has a pretty respectable 800×480 screen resolution but I’m still pleased to see the Mozilla guys have thought about using it wisely. They’ve done this by hiding extra controls to the left and right of the main display area. You can expose them by dragging the page left or right with you finger. To the right you have forward & back buttons, a “bookmark this page” shortcut and access to the app settings.

To the left you have tabs and access to Weave integration. I have to admit I was dubious about this interface design at first and I didn’t think dragging the whole page to the side would work. It actually becomes second nature pretty quickly and the ability to have multiple pages open in tabs is very cool. I also like the fact that the “awesome” bar works the same as its desktop counterpart. If you start typing part of an address you’ve visited before it will narrow down helpful suggestions. This actually speeds up browsing a lot and in my laziness I use this feature far more than bookmarks. Having it integrated with your other Firefox installations through Weave makes this much more powerful too. Firefox Mobile helps you fill out forms quicker and jump between fields which is handy. Overall the adapted UI works well, despite my initial reservations I got used to it very quickly.

Performance:
This is the area where most people have issues with Firefox and on a mobile device your patience tends to be even shorter. I have two browsers on the N900 right now: Micro B which is the official Maemo browser, and Firefox Mobile. There’s no doubt that Firefox takes longer to start up and performance is generally slower. The really odd thing about this is that both browsers are Mozilla based so they should be similar. I don’t know what they did to speed it up Micro B but they need to pass that knowledge back so Firefox can be improved. If only Firefox was under the GPL they’d have to pass it back (edit: Possibly not, see comments), but that’s another matter. In fairness the final 1.0 release saw a speed improvement over the beta and RC. Once the browser is loaded it runs quickly enough but does occasionally bog down and crash. I can hear the Firefox haters laughing in the distance. It still needs a little work in this department I feel.

Extensions, But No Flash:

Unlike Micro B I don’t seem to have support for Flash in Firefox Mobile. This may be because Micro B comes pre-tweaked as part of the OS, I don’t know. I have my issues with Flash but I do still find support for it important in browsers. Hopefully that will change as HTML5 takes off, but right now I still want Flash support sorry. I tend to switch to Micro B to use YouTube and other sites. Mozilla don’t want to distribute proprietary software and this is probably the main reason Flash isn’t pre-configured, a position I respect. It’s also possible that I could install it myself with a little hacking. Trying to do that automatically in the browser or via a .deb package didn’t work though. On a positive note you do have access to extensions in Firefox Mobile, which many people have become used to on the desktop. I have a few installed and the selection is growing all the time, right now the main one for me is Weave, I don’t use a lot else.

Conclusions:

I enjoy using Firefox Mobile, particularly in conjunction with Weave and I think there’s much to commend about it. However, I’m afraid the overall impression it leaves is of performance problems which still need to be fixed. Slowness and random crashes are not something most users will put up with, especially on mobile devices. I use Micro B a lot more on the N900 because it’s quicker and more stable. There are some interesting features in Firefox Mobile and I do think it has great potential for the future, it’s only just come out of beta so I don’t want to be too harsh. How it will fare on other platforms like Android I’m not sure. The N900 has pretty quick hardware and I shudder to think how slow it might be on a G1 or other handset.

At the moment the browser situation on the N900 is similar to the one I see on my desktop, and at the same time completely different. Bear with me I haven’t lost my mind. It’s great to have a choice of browsers and competition is always good. On the desktop I use Firefox 80% of the time and Chromium the other 20%. On the mobile though it’s Micro B 80% of the time and Firefox 20%. Once the performance improves and I fix flash support that balance may shift. For now though my verdict on Firefox Mobile 1.0 is nice try, I really like the potential, but come back when it’s a bit more polished.

You can download Firefox Mobile here.

Also check out the full slideshow for more pics.

Welcome to an incredibly late Weekly Rewind. I was hoping to get this out on Sunday but with all the preparation for Rathole Radio and that fact is was my good mate Will’s 30th birthday, things got away from me. It’s number 52, a whole year’s worth of rewinds. Although actually we passed the first anniversary a couple of weeks ago and I missed it, doh! People asked me what “special stuff” I was going to do for this fifty second edition but to be honest I can’t think of anything that special to do. I could look back at some highlights of the previous editions, but then I did that only recently in my review of 2009. So I’m just going to stick with the usual format in the arrogant belief that this is “special” enough. We’ll see if you agree by the end

I’m very busy with event planning at the moment and sponsorship stuff, a lot of which I’m not really at liberty to talk about yet. So if this update seems brief rest assured there has been plenty of OggCamp business and you’ll hear about it soon. It all began last Monday with another recording of Linux Outlaws, a recording which would become episode 136  “Make Love, Not Proprietary Software”. Following this blog announcement by Fab earlier in the day, we were experimenting with a new slightly leaner format. I think it worked well and the show was still 75mins long, hardly too short by any means. A lot of people told me they preferred it and we’ll keep trying to do that in future. Having said this on the last recording for episode 137 this Monday we went well over time. So I guess it’s a learning process. Personally I’ve long said that 60-80mins is the ideal length of show for me. That’s not to say I haven’t played my part in derailing shows and making them longer; I’m as guilty of that as anyone, but I do try to push us on and keep to some semblance of schedule. Some people completely disagree with my view and think the show should be 15 million hours long every week, which is cool, it’s nice that they feel they enjoy it that much. The amount of work this entails for us is what causes the problem though. Beyond about an hour show time the editing gets very time consuming and tiring. It’s a weekly show after all, so it’s not as if people don’t hear plenty of us anyway. Listenership has shot up lately which is fantastic, but I’m convinced keeping the show closer to an hour each week would make it much more accessible to a wider audience. I’ve now spent ages discussing not going on too long, oh the irony. Anyway, let’s move on (my catchphrase).

In the last 10 days or so I haven’t gotten any real distro hopping or writing done. Other things have overtaken that and I’m still trying to get back on track. Hopefully you’ll see a substantial article in the next 2 days. My February blog stats could certainly use it, there hasn’t been much to draw people to the site this month. I’ve also been a bit ill the last week and that’s slowed me down, I’m still trying to get back on a more even keel. Other things I’ve been up to in the last 10 days include: hacking Drupal sites, recording a new Rathole Radio, doing gig preparation and trying to sort out tickets for sale, constantly emailing and phoning people with OggCamp business and much more.

One particular highlight was last night, I attended my first Wirral Tweet Up event. I’ve been to many in Liverpool but missed the first Wirral one. I caught up with some good friends from the Scribblepool writing group and also met some interesting new people. It was an informal event held at Cromwell’s restaurant in Irby. Lot’s of hard work was put into making food and also making everyone feel welcome by proprietors Kay and Kate. I’d like to thank them for their work and also everyone else involved in setting up the event. It was a lot of fun. Many of my freedom crusading friends wonder why I go to these Twitter events and don’t just stick to Identi.ca only. I can see their point of view but the vast majority of the general geek community, not even the general public just techy types, use things like Facebook and Twitter heavily. I like to engage with them and help spread the word about Open Source, Linux and other things in a friendly sociable manner. The FOSS world can be incredibly insular and while I love my friends within it, there’s just no sense in preaching to the converted all the time. You have to get out and engage with others, get other points of view and expand your horizons, rather than just have your old views reinforced by a group of friends who agree. A good example is the fact that I was surrounded by iPhones last night and I casually worked the conversation onto the sat on the table N900 between them; what’s cool about it, Android, Linux and other mobile things. Not in a preachy way but just in general conversation. A lot of people had never heard of these things and took a genuine interest. I don’t expect all of them, if any actually, to run home and install a Linux distribution on their computer, but it’s a start. I’ve noticed the tendency within Open Source to think we are a bigger part of the tech crowd and society in general than we actually are. It’s good to get some perspective from people outside and bring that back to the group. It gives ideas for how we can engage with more people and improve what we do. It reinforces my beliefs in the principals of FOSS rather than weakening them. Enough rambling about that though.

I released a couple of albums on Jamendo last week. One of Kagnee, my old ska punk band, and another from an even older project called The Shed Collective. You can download, share and copy the music under the CC BY-SA license. It also prompted me to sort out my main site a little. If you look at danlynch.org/music you can see this starting to take shape. The list of tracks is easier to read and more compact but the RSS feed still works like a proper blog with full posts. My mastery of Drupal Views knows no bounds… ok, maybe a few. I’m going to keep working on that and making the content more useful as and when I get time. Eventually I’ll redirect shedmusic.net to it, as the old music blog is largely dead right now. Stay tuned for more on that.

Upcoming:

So in the next few days I should be off to Chester LUG tomorrow night with any luck. I have an interview booked with former OpenSUSE community manager Zonker for Linux Outlaws tomorrow, there’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show, more celebration of Will’s 30th (mine is looming in May) and a whole lot more OggCamp business. I hope I won’t be so late with updates next time but please bear with me, things are hectic. I’ll be in touch again very soon. Until then take care of yourselves and stay lucky,

See ya,

Dan

Evening everyone, it’s Sunday and you know what that means? It’s time for another weekly rewind. I’d like to start off by apologising for the lack of substantial articles in the last couple of weeks. Event organisation and other things have kept me so busy I just haven’t managed it. I’ve been meaning to get the distro hopping and reviewing under way again for a while. I even went as far as trying to install PC-BSD, only to discover it needs more disk space than I have available with my normal system partition layout. Luckily it warned me and I didn’t get as far as wiping my system. I’ll have to think about how best to fix this. I have some other things to write about, I’ll focus on those next week. So, let’s talk about what actually did happen.

We began on Monday with another live Linux Outlaws show as always. It was great fun and Fab released that later in the week as episode 135 – “So Good They Tried To Patent Him”. I also released a new Rathole Radio in the afternoon. I finally got around to making a Facebook page for the show as well. I don’t use Facebook much, but it seems the rest of the world does and I want to spread the word. Hopefully it will help get some new listeners on board.

A lot of time this week has been taken up talking to various potential Oggcamp10 sponsors. I’m pleased to say we’re finally making good progress on that and I might not have to go bankrupt after all, which would be nice. I’ve also been working on some Drupal stuff and trying to organise my home site a little. It’s still a work in progress and it looks like crap, but the information is improving. I looked at some old albums I did as parts of various bands and other projects. I’ve uploaded some of them to Jamendo and if they’re approved I’ll post the links here soon. I’d like to get some of the music I’ve made over the years out there for others too hear, and with Jamendo I can do that under a Creative Commons license. Cool hey? I have some ideas to work on new music this year, but it may have to wait until the Oggcamp madness dies down. I’ll let you know.

On Friday night I tuned into The Bugcast live recording. The host Dave Lee was kind enough to play one of my songs and it was good fun chatting to everyone. Dave does a great job and I believe his wife Caroline usually co-hosts but sadly she was ill this week. They play some great music and make a really good show. Go and have a listen.

Ok I’m gonna keep this update a little shorter than normal, but there isn’t a lot else to tell at this time. I hope to announce some more Oggcamp related news very soon I promise. One of the most important things to remember is please book your accommodation now if you want to come. I’ve been saying this for a month but I’m still hearing from people who are taking their time. It’s a busy weekend, if you keep waiting you’ll have trouble finding anything. Head to laterooms.com and search Liverpool on the relevant dates. It’s the best resource I’ve found. I hope to see many of you joining us at the event for fun and Free Software.

Upcoming:

As I mentioned at the top, my distro hopping has stalled at the moment, hopefully I’ll fix that this week. I plan to write about my experience of testing Firefox Mobile and Weave in the meantime. There will also be another Linux Outlaws live show tomorrow night and I hope you’ll join us for that. Don’t forget Rathole Radio next Sunday Feb 21st at 9pm too.

Take care everyone and have a nice week,

Dan

Greetings all and welcome to Weekly Rewind number 50. The big “five oh”, I’m referring to the number there and not using ghetto slang for the police. I do listen to a lot of hip hop but it hasn’t completely taken over my brain just yet. I once got a royal ripping (Liverpool slang for skitting) from my band mates for using the term “five oh” as a police car drove past. We laughed hard about that. Anyway this is all by the by, so let’s get into it.

On Monday we recorded another Linux Outlaws and streamed it live as usual. Unfortunately Fab has been ill this week so best wishes to him, despite this he still got the show out on Friday though. Nice work! On Tuesday I worked on some audio stuff along with many other jobs. I put some stuff together as an audio trailer for OggCamp10 and released that here later in the week. I also got a chance to catch up with some good friends on Tuesday night which was nice. On Wednesday I attended LivLUG where we had a fascinating talk about ZFS and BtrFS from Tom Hall, a storage and filesystems guru. Tom’s a good speaker and it was very entertaining. One of the LUG members (Neil Bothwick) later described it as a bit of a Jim Bowen moment though. For those who have no clue what I’m on about there, ZFS is under a license not compatible with the Linux kernel, so it’s doubtful we’ll see it in there any time soon. Jim Bowen is a British game show host famous for saying “…and here’s what you could of won”. Jokes are always better when you have to explain them aren’t they? I wasn’t sure Jim Bowen’s fame had spread from far from these shores yet, but it made me laugh anyway..

Thursday was pretty quiet and I got on with jobs but on Friday I went over to Liverpool on the train. I had a meeting at the Bad Format Social Club, the venue for my Rathole Roadshow gig and sorted out some arrangements for that. I then walked up to the FACT building for lunch with some friends and potential sponsors. I have some good leads there but we could always use more. If you or your employer would be interested in sponsoring OggCamp please drop me a line. Finally, I popped into the Black-E to sort some stuff some out with them before hopping on the train home. I used the N900 to keep up with emails and everything else during the day rather than taking my laptop, and I got a surprising amount done on the device. It did affect the battery life a little as I used it much more heavily, but it was a good test. I don’t normally go out for the day like that without a laptop if I have work to do. I listened to some teenage lad on the train trying to convince his mum he “really needed an iPad”. “It’s not a toy it’s for serious work, I’m going to do spreadsheets on it” he pleaded. I resisted the strong urge to jump in with a comment like “Spreadsheets my arse, it’s a big iPod Touch!! You can’t even install software on it. Get a proper computer you idiot” but it wasn’t easy. He kept looking over at the N900 to try and work out what it was I was using. Some sort of iPhone he hadn’t seen perhaps? Thankfully not. I engaged “smug mode” and remained quiet.

On Saturday I was interviewed for the Open Source Musician podcast which was a lot of fun. I was honoured to be asked on the show but felt like a bit of a fraud. I still have a dual-boot setup on my studio machine. I use Ubuntu Studio a lot but it does also have Windows XP on there which I occasionally use. It’s not a secret, I’m open about it, but it’s not something I’m proud of either. I’ve been “in the process” of going 100% Linux in the studio for about 18 months now. I never seem to get the time to actually concentrate on it with so much else going on. I’m proud to say I do all of my podcast production on Linux, but music is still a work in progress for me. I’m only 70% there. Must try harder, as it would probably say on my school report. Finally, today I streamed and recorded another Rathole Radio show which was great fun. I played a wide range of music and had a lot of fun as always. I’ve processed the audio just now and will release it tomorrow. It’s getting too late to do it tonight.

Upcoming:

Not sure exactly what I have planned in the next week but I know something will take up my time. I’m not 100% sure if Fab will be fit enough to do Linux Outlaws tomorrow night either, but hopefully so. I didn’t get chance to install a BSD and test it this week. I still need to do that for a review. I’ll also be doing much more Oggcamp business and trying to move all that forward. We made good progress on sponsorship this week and that’s my major focus right now. There’ll be another Software Freedom Law Show to produce and much more besides. Join me next week to find out what unfolds.

Take care,

Dan