UK Linux User Groups

Provided mostly as a supplement to the latest post by The Sesquipedalist, I’ve dug out some old cover images from AD magazine in the 70s.

Much better qualified to explain the history of architectural journalism than I, The Sesquipedalist sets the scene:

During the “book business model” of the ’70s, where the magazine almost completely eschewed advertising, the covers became outlandish and featured Cedric Price, Archigram, Foster Associates, Buckminster Fuller, Royston Landau, Alvin Boyarsky, The Smithsons, Aldo van Eyck and some attractive ones too.

Another fascinating entry from a great blog, I encourage you to add it to your feed reader if you haven’t already. I’ll merely add the simple observation that the predominant use of illustration rather than photography serves the magazine well in its exploration of potential futures, ideas rather than things.

There’s much to learn from the 30 year old pages. Of particular interest to me have been the pleas by foresighted ecologists proposing basic environmental science improvements that are to this day dealt with as fringe concepts - such as the benefits of passive solar in the ‘Housing Provision’ issue of August 1976 by Gerald Foley. The landscape issue from the following month (cover by Ron Herron) contains a piece by Sutherland Lyall, whose name might be known to fellow bloggers thanks to his column in the Architectural Review on architecture web sites.  Which gives me another opportunity to thank him for his kind words back in November 2005:

I realise now that I’ve completely ignored his advice about using blogs for company websites.

The December 77 cover showing a beautiful Erskine drawing has been uploaded more extensively before, also you may like to contrast and compare these with somewhat more sombre approach taken by the AR during the same decade.

You can see all the covers I’ve uploaded over the last few years in a flickr collection.

A while back I asked you to all re-connect with the Ubuntu ethos. I asked for your stories of how you define your Ubuntu ethos, and there were some wonderful responses. Thank you everyone.

Ethos is important. Critical in fact. It is the glue that will bind us through the turbulent years ahead as we continue to grow and step up to the status quo, demanding change. We are going to face all manner of challenges in the coming months: both technical and social. The competition are going to be on our case almost constantly, but we will be there at every step of the way to nail our colours to the board. Ubuntu has made huge progress in recent years. We have managed to capture some real mindshare. We now need to get out there finish the job.

The next level of the game is going to require many skills. Diversity is going to be the key to us flourishing. We are going to need great packaging, software development and bug-fixing. We are going to need rocking documentation and translations, more and more testing and lots of feedback. We will need training, we need to support our new and existing users, and we need to focus our energy positively. On one hand diversity can be read as the things that make us different. On the other hand it can be read as the many different varieties of arse that we are going to kick in the coming year, united in our shared ethos.

Ubuntu is all about people. In response to my post on ethos, regular jb@h poster ethana2 summarised his vision of Ubuntu as “I am what Ubuntu means to me. I don’t just use it, I contribute to it, I personalize it, I spread it, I support it“. He hit the nail on the head. Ubuntu, and the wider Open Source and Free Software ethos is all about people working together, uniting behind an opportunity to make their own world better. Fortunately making your own world better often means making someone else’s world better too.

The way we are going to win is to enable good people to do great work. Good people is what drives our community forward. Daviey Walker touched on this in his response:

Why is the community full of ‘good’ people? Does Ubuntu only attract ‘good’ people? Is there, in actual fact, good in everyone? Does Ubuntu bring out the ‘good’ in everybody? Do only ‘good’ people want to get involved in the community?

There are many, many examples of good people and great stories in our community. One really touched me recently.

In response to my last post about open learning, Dan Trevino from the Florida LoCo shared a story about some of the excellent work that they are doing with an organisation called QuinnCo Inc:

One formerly active member started Free Geek Central Florida, and just recently, a new loco member started QuinnCo Inc. Free Geek needs no introduction, but QuinnCo might. In their own words:

“Our goal is to provide special computers to kids with special needs. We take donated computers and load them up with free education games that teach kids computer skills, literacy skills, and math skills”.

The customised Operating System that QuinnCo are working on is based on Xubuntu.

A strong computing foundation in Xubuntu and a strong local community foundation in the Florida LoCo team is a compelling combination; a combination that is making life better for kids with special needs in Florida. In my mind this gets to the very heart of the opportunity of Open Source: making life better for people. Keep up the great work folks, we are all behind you!

LoCo Teams are responsible for so many of these great stories. It is LoCo Teams that are on the ground talking to potential users, giving out CDs, talking to local businesses and charities and more. They are a huge asset to Ubuntu. We have hundreds of teams around the world doing incredible work, spreading the message of Ubuntu far and wide. They themselves exhibit the very ethos that we are sharing with others.

I am keen to know more of these stories. I would like to ask each of you in a LoCo Team to share a story on your blog or in the comments below. I would like to begin building a compendium of example stories that showcases the kind of excellent work that LoCos are doing. This is the first step in getting our LoCo Teams better coordinated, sharing experience and advice, changing the world one user at a time. I look forward to hearing from you all.

A while back I asked you to all re-connect with the Ubuntu ethos. I asked for your stories of how you define your Ubuntu ethos, and there were some wonderful responses. Thank you everyone.

Ethos is important. Critical in fact. It is the glue that will bind us through the turbulent years ahead as we continue to grow and step up to the status quo, demanding change. We are going to face all manner of challenges in the coming months: both technical and social. The competition are going to be on our case almost constantly, but we will be there at every step of the way to nail our colours to the board. Ubuntu has made huge progress in recent years. We have managed to capture some real mindshare. We now need to get out there finish the job.

The next level of the game is going to require many skills. Diversity is going to be the key to us flourishing. We are going to need great packaging, software development and bug-fixing. We are going to need rocking documentation and translations, more and more testing and lots of feedback. We will need training, we need to support our new and existing users, and we need to focus our energy positively. On one hand diversity can be read as the things that make us different. On the other hand it can be read as the many different varieties of arse that we are going to kick in the coming year, united in our shared ethos.

Ubuntu is all about people. In response to my post on ethos, regular jb@h poster ethana2 summarised his vision of Ubuntu as “I am what Ubuntu means to me. I don’t just use it, I contribute to it, I personalize it, I spread it, I support it“. He hit the nail on the head. Ubuntu, and the wider Open Source and Free Software ethos is all about people working together, uniting behind an opportunity to make their own world better. Fortunately making your own world better often means making someone else’s world better too.

The way we are going to win is to enable good people to do great work. Good people is what drives our community forward. Daviey Walker touched on this in his response:

Why is the community full of ‘good’ people? Does Ubuntu only attract ‘good’ people? Is there, in actual fact, good in everyone? Does Ubuntu bring out the ‘good’ in everybody? Do only ‘good’ people want to get involved in the community?

There are many, many examples of good people and great stories in our community. One really touched me recently.

In response to my last post about open learning, Dan Trevino from the Florida LoCo shared a story about some of the excellent work that they are doing with an organisation called QuinnCo Inc:

One formerly active member started Free Geek Central Florida, and just recently, a new loco member started QuinnCo Inc. Free Geek needs no introduction, but QuinnCo might. In their own words:

“Our goal is to provide special computers to kids with special needs. We take donated computers and load them up with free education games that teach kids computer skills, literacy skills, and math skills”.

The customised Operating System that QuinnCo are working on is based on Xubuntu.

A strong computing foundation in Xubuntu and a strong local community foundation in the Florida LoCo team is a compelling combination; a combination that is making life better for kids with special needs in Florida. In my mind this gets to the very heart of the opportunity of Open Source: making life better for people. Keep up the great work folks, we are all behind you!

LoCo Teams are responsible for so many of these great stories. It is LoCo Teams that are on the ground talking to potential users, giving out CDs, talking to local businesses and charities and more. They are a huge asset to Ubuntu. We have hundreds of teams around the world doing incredible work, spreading the message of Ubuntu far and wide. They themselves exhibit the very ethos that we are sharing with others.

I am keen to know more of these stories. I would like to ask each of you in a LoCo Team to share a story on your blog or in the comments below. I would like to begin building a compendium of example stories that showcases the kind of excellent work that LoCos are doing. This is the first step in getting our LoCo Teams better coordinated, sharing experience and advice, changing the world one user at a time. I look forward to hearing from you all.

While it's possible to do nearly anything DNS query related with the dig command it's a lot easier to extract the data and reuse certain fields if you have access to a decent data structure rather than grepping bits of text out. Over the next couple of days, while I'm elbow deep in our domain name system, I'll be posting, hopefully useful, little snippets of code to illustrate how you can get a lot of value from little code.

Today we have a script that accepts checks for the presence of the specified subdomain in all the domains mentioned on the command line and reports success or failure. I've not had to run it in anger yet but it should, fingers crossed, save me a lot of digging around tomorrow. You invoke the script like this - check-subdomains-presence blog example.org example.com.

The code is short, easy to read through and will hopefully whet your appetite for the longer posts to come...`

y'know, a whole bunch of young'uns won't understand this: dialup kid

Technorati Tags: history, modems

I realise I'm about a week late, but hey I've been on holidays, for the first extended break in far too long, so I've been neglecting my readers. Too bad, I needed the holiday!

So, it's a new year and all that. What have I been up to? Well, Xmas was quite fun, as we went up to Wamberal and had some family around for Xmas lunch. Then I went for a swim in the afternoon, and spent Boxing Day at Ben and Kaz's place. Very nice, very chilled.

For New Year we went up North to a site near Nimbin for a friendly and fun party with mates from BrisVegas who I've known for years. A mixture of old ausravers and related people. Great to catch up with the crew, since the last one of these parties I went to was the 2000 New Year.

We've been back since the weekend and chilling out, mostly.

Some out-of-towners have been around, as usually happens in Summer, so we've managed to catch up with quite a range of people. Julie and Jeff popped around for a BBQ before Xmas. The photo above is potatoes we pulled from the garden and chucked on the barbie. The weird speckled purple ones stay that colour through cooking! Also in town: Greta and Steve, Margaret and Cordelia, Charlie and Bridget. Martin, Jo and Max are in town too. Woody and Liz are in Australia at the moment, and we managed to catch up over New Year.

Been to a few gigs recently. Holy Fuck at the Annandale were amazing. People have been trying to do the live techno thing ever since there was techno, without much success. These guys seem to have finally nailed it, without it becoming a different style of music. Amazing!

Another Canadian band, Stars were also very good. Beautiful music, with delicious textures and heartfelt delivery. These guys really love what they do.

Coming up this month is a whole host of more gigs. This Saturday is the opening night of Sydney Festival, with lots of cool stuff around town for free. We've got tickets to the Popfrenzy night at the festival bar with Metronomy and Pivot, which sounds like loads of fun. The following weekend is All Tomorrow's Parties on the fantastic Cockatoo Island in the harbour. This used to be a working shipyard in my lifetime, so it'll be an incredible place for a music festival. Even better, it's curated by Nick Cave!

Later in the month I'll be seeing Serj Tankian, though I'm more interested in the support band, Mike Patton's Fant%C3%B4mas. Then early in February, Playground Weekender, a festival on the outskirts of Sydney with a pretty fun atmosphere, by the sound of it.

All up, it's gonna be a hectic Summer. But hey, at least it's warm this year!

Around the house there's been some activity. The garden is looking great and we've been eating a lot out of it. The potatoes were good, though they take up a lot of space when growing so I doubt I'll grow them again. We've eaten stacks of rocket, lettuce and silverbeet recently. Tonight I did a stir fry of silverbeet, bok choy and chilli from the garden, spiced with some of the herbs. Coming along well are the tomatoes, and I had the first cherry one the other day. Delicious.

In the planning list is the shed for the garden. I've contacted someone to help me with the planning process, so we'll see how that goes. There's some complications like retaining walls and the like, so if I'm going to need an engineer I might go the whole hog and put in an underground water tank. Something to keep us busy!

Contact me

If video games have taught me anything it’s that explosive barrels are red, and that all buildings have a liberal supply of them to use as impromptu ammunition against ones enemies. The heating at work has been broken all week, resulting in the following scene.

Well at least we are well stocked for the impending zombie invasion/rift in space-time/teleporter accident.

Last year, I posted a list of projects I wanted to complete in 2008. How did it go? Well….. not brilliantly:

• MythTV - box didn’t get touched, let alone back up and running, although it did see use at Camp again as the shop database.
• Church Office:
  • Display machine - yes! this got fixed (mostly) using keyjnote (now impress!ve) presentation software, which is much more stable than OO.o seemed to be with this display adaptor. May well try OO.o again once it’s upgraded to Intrepid Ibex
  • File server - same as MythTV box; untouched other than some crayon courtesy of Mira
  • Firewall - still working perfectly, still not upgraded
• Linkpot - I handed this project over to schwuk when I realised I didn’t have the time available, and other projects became higher priority
• Church Website - well - it’s “almost” there. Watch this space

The other projects didn’t even get a look in, but I did gain a new project in the “Invest” programme (which will eventually get a post of it’s own), plus another project that I’ll be announcing next month. Oh, and Classic Yak kicked off too, which has been very significant.

I’ll be posting this years plan later on. Maybe.

mrBen

I believe that most debian developers ignore discussions of possible general resolutions like the current one, until/unless they look like reaching the required number of seconds to trigger a vote.

It’s hard to prove that a group is ignoring something, but disproof is simple: please could all DDs who watch pre-proposal discussions of possible GRs please email mjr-possiblegr at debian.org. I’ll count with from -f possiblegr.mbox | wc -l in a week or so, after filtering out any emails from non-DDs.

Feel free to ask other debian developers to email if they watch reasonably likely places (planet, non-technical lists, …) for pre-proposal discussions of possible GRs. Please don’t spam debian-devel or announce lists about it, unless you’re expecting future possible GRs to be sent there. I’d welcome a quick comment if you post it anywhere.

If you can see a way to prove that a group is ignoring something, let me know. I realise that failing to disprove this isn’t the same as proving the opposite, but I think it would still be useful.

The other day, I received four dollar coins as change from a vending machine. I forgot how much I love them! In fact, during my last visit to Canada a few years ago, I recall being quite smitten with the utility of the loonie, toonie and friends. Naturally, I am equally fond of the shekel coins found in Israel. Why haven’t more people learned to love these wonderfully-convenient pieces of currency? In all fairness, some actually do like it. We make such heavy usage of fractional coins that it seems only natural to stay the course and use a full-dollar piece! Just a thought…

The Atheist bus campaign raised so much money last year that they have been able to massively expand their plans.

Instead of the original 30 buses they were planning in London, they are now running 200 buses in London and 600 more in other places in the UK. The bus campaign officially launched yesterday. They also have the money to pay for adverts in tube trains which will appear next week. These adverts contain quotations from well-known atheists. I'm particularly happy to see that they have included on of my favourite quotations from Douglas Adams.

For the last few days we have been having problems at work, after a worm attacked an exposed Windows server, then worked it's way round the rest of the Windows infrastructure. The admins have been running round patching and rebooting boxes in a vain attempt to keep systems up and usable.

It's very annoying to find things not working that are important. It's made worse by the fact that quite a few things don't work on reboot, the service needs to be manually restarted before it actually starts to work... and don't get me started on the insanity of continuing to use core machines that have compromised by some external agent without restoring from known clean backup...

Years ago when I was at OpenAdvantage, I worked closely with a group called Access To Recycled Technology. Formed by two salt-of-the-earth students called Steve and Vinnie, they secured what they referred to as “access space” in Birmingham. It was basically a decent sized room that they used to fill with old, discarded computers. They would then install Linux on these computers and use them to train people and upskill them in Open Source software and general computing skills. Linux was the perfect choice: it ran well on older hardware, and software such as XFCE managed to squeeze more juice out of those machines.

For many of the people who came to access space, Steve and Vinnie would furnish them with a computer that they could take home to continue to learn and refine their skills. The guys had struck a deal with Birmingham City Council to take a warehouse full of old computers that were destined for the dump. This gave them a stock of computers to give out to the local community, complete with Linux and application software pre-installed. It was perfect for all involved: for the council to dispose of the computers in landfill was expensive, so when Steve and Vinnie came knocking, it was ideal.

I loved the concept of the scheme. It fits the opportunity of Open Source perfectly: old computers re-energised with free software to give away to people who need them. It helps put computers in the hands of people who could not ordinarily afford them, helps encourage learning, and contributes to closing the digital divide. It is also an ideal green-friendly way to deal with the mounds and mounds of computers that are simply not cut-out for Vista.

The opportunity for Open Source in this area is stunning. While at OpenAdvantage I worked with Birmingham City Council to fill a Community Center in Aston (a deprived part of Birmingham) with machines that ran Ubuntu to help train the local community. Courses were given in using the desktop, office productivity, graphics with the GIMP and Blender, web development in HTML and PHP, learning and sharing knowledge with Wikipedia, desktop publishing with Scribus and more. We also worked with the center to run courses designed to excite local young people. Courses were run on podcasting, recording music, editing video and more. The courses helped to get kids off the street and in a computer room, being creative and enjoying the technology. It was great to see their faces when they realised they could take the software home and use it there too, and that they could share it as much as they liked.

Open Source really paves the way to learning. I have met so many people who have had a hugely positive impact on their lives by enabling their creativity with Open Source.

An example of this was a kid known as WeirdHat. Years ago he used Blender to composite him fighting an animated character in lightsaber battle (unfortunately I can’t find the original video to share with you all). He then entered Theforce.net’s fanfilm forum with this video of him having a lightsaber battle with himself. It is stunning. Not only that, but he then went on to animate Colbert with a lightsaber and got featured on the show. He used Blender for it all.

WeirdHat is obviously a talented guy. The free availability of Blender and a stunning community of Blender users helped unlock his creativity. There are thousands of similar stories happening right now: Open Source opening up doors to creativity which are not only rewarding, but career building. Do you folks have any other success stories to share?

But lets get back to the concept of using Linux to recycle computers. While there are many of these schemes around the world, it seems that they are largely uncoordinated. It strikes me that there is oodles of potential in getting these different projects together to share knowledge, best practice and advice. There is also huge potential in working with other user groups such as Ubuntu LoCo Teams and Linux User Groups to help staff the projects, deliver training and install the software on computers.

Speaking personally, I would love to see our worldwide collection of Ubuntu LoCo Teams help to deliver Ubuntu or its derivatives to people on these computers. Are any LoCo teams doing this? If we have a small number of teams doing this, lets get them talking together and see what opportunities flow from it.

Years ago when I was at OpenAdvantage, I worked closely with a group called Access To Recycled Technology. Formed by two salt-of-the-earth students called Steve and Vinnie, they secured what they referred to as “access space” in Birmingham. It was basically a decent sized room that they used to fill with old, discarded computers. They would then install Linux on these computers and use them to train people and upskill them in Open Source software and general computing skills. Linux was the perfect choice: it ran well on older hardware, and software such as XFCE managed to squeeze more juice out of those machines.

For many of the people who came to access space, Steve and Vinnie would furnish them with a computer that they could take home to continue to learn and refine their skills. The guys had struck a deal with Birmingham City Council to take a warehouse full of old computers that were destined for the dump. This gave them a stock of computers to give out to the local community, complete with Linux and application software pre-installed. It was perfect for all involved: for the council to dispose of the computers in landfill was expensive, so when Steve and Vinnie came knocking, it was ideal.

I loved the concept of the scheme. It fits the opportunity of Open Source perfectly: old computers re-energised with free software to give away to people who need them. It helps put computers in the hands of people who could not ordinarily afford them, helps encourage learning, and contributes to closing the digital divide. It is also an ideal green-friendly way to deal with the mounds and mounds of computers that are simply not cut-out for Vista.

The opportunity for Open Source in this area is stunning. While at OpenAdvantage I worked with Birmingham City Council to fill a Community Center in Aston (a deprived part of Birmingham) with machines that ran Ubuntu to help train the local community. Courses were given in using the desktop, office productivity, graphics with the GIMP and Blender, web development in HTML and PHP, learning and sharing knowledge with Wikipedia, desktop publishing with Scribus and more. We also worked with the center to run courses designed to excite local young people. Courses were run on podcasting, recording music, editing video and more. The courses helped to get kids off the street and in a computer room, being creative and enjoying the technology. It was great to see their faces when they realised they could take the software home and use it there too, and that they could share it as much as they liked.

Open Source really paves the way to learning. I have met so many people who have had a hugely positive impact on their lives by enabling their creativity with Open Source.

An example of this was a kid known as WeirdHat. Years ago he used Blender to composite him fighting an animated character in lightsaber battle (unfortunately I can’t find the original video to share with you all). He then entered Theforce.net’s fanfilm forum with this video of him having a lightsaber battle with himself. It is stunning. Not only that, but he then went on to animate Colbert with a lightsaber and got featured on the show. He used Blender for it all.

WeirdHat is obviously a talented guy. The free availability of Blender and a stunning community of Blender users helped unlock his creativity. There are thousands of similar stories happening right now: Open Source opening up doors to creativity which are not only rewarding, but career building. Do you folks have any other success stories to share?

But lets get back to the concept of using Linux to recycle computers. While there are many of these schemes around the world, it seems that they are largely uncoordinated. It strikes me that there is oodles of potential in getting these different projects together to share knowledge, best practice and advice. There is also huge potential in working with other user groups such as Ubuntu LoCo Teams and Linux User Groups to help staff the projects, deliver training and install the software on computers.

Speaking personally, I would love to see our worldwide collection of Ubuntu LoCo Teams help to deliver Ubuntu or its derivatives to people on these computers. Are any LoCo teams doing this? If we have a small number of teams doing this, lets get them talking together and see what opportunities flow from it.

The idea is simple, you tell it the file or directory you're interested in, specify a single machine as the baseline and then specify a number of others as the machines to check against it. A sample invocation looks like this rd-differ /etc/apache2 10.10.100.111 10.10.100.112 10.10.100.113 and the output is show as a diff.

The files are rsynced down using ssh so your usual keys will work and while the normal output is that of the raw diff it's very easy to wrap the results and add other checks on top of it. The shell's not written to be very defensive (unusual for me) but the code is short enough that it's worth the compromise.

I am pleased to announce that James Westby is the new Featured Contributor on the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame.

We already knew that James rocked the house with his Ubuntu work, but the new Nominate somebody! feature in the Hall Of Fame generated a number of requests for James. So, it seemed only right that DJ Westby got the first prestigious Featured Contributor slot of 2009. Congrats James!

Make sure you all head over to the Hall Of Fame and click on the Thank James button!

We want to know which contributors you think are rocking the (K)(X)(N)(U)(Flux)buntu(Studio) (etc.) landscape. Its easy:

• Go to the Hall Of Fame website.
• Click the Nominate somebody! link.
• Enter the URL of the person’s Launchpad profile and a few notes on why they should be a Featured Contributor.

Easy!

I am pleased to announce that James Westby is the new Featured Contributor on the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame.

We already knew that James rocked the house with his Ubuntu work, but the new Nominate somebody! feature in the Hall Of Fame generated a number of requests for James. So, it seemed only right that DJ Westby got the first prestigious Featured Contributor slot of 2009. Congrats James!

Make sure you all head over to the Hall Of Fame and click on the Thank James button!

We want to know which contributors you think are rocking the (K)(X)(N)(U)(Flux)buntu(Studio) (etc.) landscape. Its easy:

• Go to the Hall Of Fame website.
• Click the Nominate somebody! link.
• Enter the URL of the person’s Launchpad profile and a few notes on why they should be a Featured Contributor.

Easy!

Question: Can I have stable Lenny yet?
Answer: Yes. Yes, I can.

Saw this article (hat tip to Mukidohime)which pointed me to this email telling me that the kernel firmware resolution was finally voted on and Debian Lenny is now free to be released! It’s a good thing and I’m very excited for the goodies which will show up in Squeeze, set to be the new testing. Also saw this article on Ars Technica and this post on OStatic.