LUG Radio Live 2006, Wolverhampton UK

This past weekend saw the second annual LUG Radio gathering, this time held at the Students’ Union in Wolverhampton. All in all it was an excellent event and great fun: lots of interesting people, lots of fun people and plenty of interesting talks/demonstrations.

Day One (Saturday)

At the start of last week, it was beginning to look like there was going to be a rail strike at the weekend, making it not possible to get to Wolverhampton by train. I therefore arranged to hire a car and publicized this fact on the LUG Radio forums, and thus I acquired three other Oxford-based passengers. Even though the rail strike was ultimately cancelled, it seems to make sense to drive there anyway. And so, at Early O’Clock on Saturday, I set off to pick up Nat, Simon and Andy, then off up the motorway…

Apart from Nat and Simon, none of us in the car had met each other before and so we had a long, interesting chat in the car. The fact that it was hot, combined with the fact that the car had no air-conditioning, meant that it was difficult speaking above the noise and as a result, I spent most of the rest of the weekend talking like James Earl Jones. Could have been worse, I suppose.

Arriving at the venue, I was greeted immediately by a number of familiar faces (Schwuk, LUG Radio Presenter Jono etc.) and a couple of new ones (Resiak and Phated – “the inimitable Phated”, that is) – arrived just after us. Phated was almost as manic and bouncy as she sounds on IRC!

After the four Large Gents introduced everyone to the weekend, I went off to watch Gervase Markham give his spoof talk on “How to destroy the Free Software Movement”, which was cleverly written and well delivered. After that, I took a wander around all the stalls selling T-shirts, mugs and so on, in the process bumping into a few more people: Seb Payne, David “GingerDog” and Kat, plus Xalior and Lois, Neuro, MrBen and so on.

The next talk was by Stephen Lamb from Microsoft and, although his talk was entitled “How to securely integrate Microsoft and Linux systems”, that’s not what he actually talked about. It was more “we’re trying really hard to make things more secure at Microsoft, honest”. A well-given talk, but he was rather brave to agree to talk at an event like this: Lamb to the Slaughter, appropriately enough.

Over lunch, I met up again with a few more familiar faces, together with more new ones: Neuro, Russ and Jen – the Official LUG Radio Married Couple(TM) – Bryn and Dotwaffle (he’d promised me a pint as a thank you for writing colordiff!).

After lunch, it was back to the main stage for The Debate. A variety of questions from the audience were put to the guest speakers: Stephen Lamb from Microsoft and Simon Phipps from Sun amongst them; this provided an additional avenue to attack the Microsoft guy and it was nice to see Sun joining in!

Later, I went to see Matt Bloch from Bytemark (where this server is hosted) talk about virtualization. He has the most low-tech presentation of all speakers (a large, white flip-chart with felt-tipped drawings!), but it was very interesting. He explained the different methods of running virtual servers on a host system and ways in which this is expected to develop in the future, particularly the use of Xen.

The last talk of the day was by far the most entertaining talk of the entire weekend. This was Bruno Bord’s “This talk may contain swearing” (a parody of the LUG Radio episode’s standard disclaimer “This show may contain swearing”). He presented a statistical analysis of the number of times each of the LUG Radio presenters said rude words in their recent shows. He started by explaining how he listened to the shows (configuring his audio player to play the recordings back at a slightly slower speed so that he could transcribe the rude words) and how he used a shorthand scheme for writing down who said what. Then on to the analysis itself and a number of interesting and entertaining (although not altogether surprising) statistics. Jono is officially the LUG Radio Potty Mouth. The aspect of Bruno’s talk that impressed me the most was the fact that he was giving a talk in a foreign language (he’s extremely French) about nuances of a language that was not his own and making it funny, well-timed and thoroughly entertaining. Good work that man!

After Bruno’s talk, many people including myself went off to check into their hotels, prior to the evening’s Party. The Party in the evening was good fun and I met even more people (Essk, I remember, Presenter Matt’s wife – Lynne, I think – Aquarion, Simon Ward and many more). I played Phated at pool. I won, just, much to my almost embarrassment! Xalior cracked open a few bottles of champagne which was great, too! Being a geeky gathering, no-one was dancing much. Even though the DJ started playing music at around 7pm, the first person dancing on the dancefloor appeared there at about 10.30pm, I think. One of the highlights of the dancing was Presenter Jono dancing to “Macarena”: it was like watching a slow-motion car crash. Absolutely terrifying, but totally captivating. I did not dance. For two reasons: (1) I’m geeky and (2) I’m a Dad.

Day Two (Sunday)

Despite the late night on Saturday, there was a remarkably good showing at breakfast at the hotel on Sunday morning. Since this was the “official” LUG Radio hotel, 80% of the residents were LUG Radio attendees. This must have been rather bemusing to the other 20%: this certainly seemed the case at breakfast, where a handful of elderly couples were looking at all these geeks with black T-shirts with “cd /pub; more beer”-like slogans on them. You could almost see it in their faces: “Who on earth *are* these people?”

First speaker on day two was one of my passengers from Oxford, Simon Willison, talking about the Django web development framework project he’s involved with. This was quite interesting, because I’ve never really got into using that kind of application before: maybe I’ll give it a go. He spoke very well and clearly and his talk was well-received.

The next speaker was the Sunday ‘star’ guest Mark Shuttleworth: Space man, Mr Ubuntu. I met him last year too and was looking forward to his talk. He spoke about the major challenges ahead for the open source movement and he made a lot of sense. A particularly impressive part of his talk was when he was discussing the collaborative text editor ‘gobby’ and tried to use it on his laptop: he didn’t have it installed, so he “apt-get install gobby”-ed, downloaded the package via GPRS from someone’s mobile phone and started it up. He then read out the address of his machine and asked someone in the audience to connect to it so that both of them could edit the same file simultaneously. Nice. After his talk, I spoke again to him and asked him for a unique quote for this weblog. I asked him “Given that there have been many great milestones for the Open Source community, what big milestone are you looking forward to? What will make you cheer?” He thought for a moment and then said “When Microsoft GPL their source code” Thinking about this afterwards, I think he meant *some* of their code, rather than *all* of it, I guess. And I shook hands with a Spaceman again!

I went out to buy some lunch after that and somehow found my way to Maplins in the middle of Wolverhampton, thinking that I could pick up some audio cables that I needed. Maplins was crawling with LUG Radio attendees, which was actually quite embarrassing.

In the afternoon, I went to the “Women in Open Source” talk given by Jen, Kat and Phated which was interesting: I’m not sure anything particularly revolutionary was discussed or discovered, but that wasn’t really the point. The three ladies explained their experiences of joining and existing in the open source community and some of the difficulties and problems they had encountered.

After the final talk by Seb Payne about iFolder (sounds great, but sounds a pain to setup!) it was time to come home. I collected all my passengers and headed for the car. Conveniently, PerfDave was just arriving at the moment and so we took a few minutes to have a chat: I hadn’t seen him in person since he left work last summer.

Summary

It was great. Let’s do this every year! Apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten to name check. I’ll edit this post if I realise I’ve forgotten people. There are quite a few pictures posted online from the event, I plan to grab a few and post them here at some point.