Lugradio live is now finished and done. It was well worth attending - I really enjoyed it. Wolverhampton is a shit hole of note, but the conference itself was good.

Notable talks I saw were:

• Malcolm Yates from Canonical: numerous talk on anything that he considered relevant :-)
• Alan Cox on how to help in Open Source, and persuading hardware vendors to part with their documentation.
• Matthew Garrett on Power Management
• Scott James Remnant on 10 really cool things (quite a few of which didn’t work) :-)
• Michael Sparks from the BBC on Kamelia - a concurrent programming framework
• Becky Hogge from the Open Rights Group
• Gervase Markhams brilliant talk - How to Win every argument. He went through various fallacies, and how to use them to your advantage.
• Joe Born from Neuros

Talks that I missed, but want to catch up when they post the videos (any guesses why I’m blogging this :-)

• Flumotion
• IAAL (I am a lawyer)
• Telepathy
• Gong a Thong
• Chris diBona
• ELER

I walked off with a free Nokia N800, as I’d come from so far away. A man who flew in from Singapore also won one. I have a suspicion that the Californians should have got it instead of me, but the WiFi was down so nobody could google distances :-)

On that topic, I really think that all geeky events like this should have pervasive WiFi coverage. Some of us are a long way away from home, and would like to be able to read our mail in-between talks. Also, it makes the GPG key signing party easier. I didn’t pre-register for the signing, so only a couple of people signed my key, but I did get 2 CAcert assurances. I’ll try and get some more points while I’m in a part of the world, where you can actually find assurers.

The N800 is very cool. It’s ARM based, runs Linux (Maemo), and has decent WiFi / bluetooth abilities. If you want to quickly check your mail, watch youtube (yes it has flash) or do some basic IRC chatting in free wifi zone (i.e. a hotel reception area), then it rocks. The handwriting recognition isn’t great, and it’s quite different to what I’m used to on my P910. So I mostly use the on-screen keyboards (there is quite a good thumb-sized-keyboard option).

It uses Telepathy for Jabber IM, and has a few VoIP options: Gizmo, Skype, Google Talk. But the best part is that because it’s an open platform, you can run most Linux software on it. I’ve installed Xchat, Mplayer, and an Xterm, so far… Because my amd64 laptop can’t run Skype / flash, this is a really handy device to have around.

My train back was re-routed, and in total, it took 5hrs to get home :-( (fortunately I had a movie to watch on the n800)

For those who don’t know, I’m in the UK, catching up on some sun and geeky events. The sun hasn’t got going yet (I still have my South African cold), but I’m in Wolverhampton for LugRadio Live 2007.

Getting to Wolverhampton was a pain in the arse:

• My credit card got replaced last week, but the new one has a PIN number that I don’t know :-)
• I missed my train because of the above, and had to wait until after rush hour.
• Then ended up catching a train to Manchester by mistake (I’m a geek, I only read signs once, and expect to be going the right way)
• So an extra hour’s detour later, I was in Wolverhampton, but my taxi got stoned by teenagers hanging outside the Kebab joint.

Anyway, now I’m sitting outside the cafe at LRL, and occasionaly posting photographs

The poor cafe’s internet connection is screwed - the DNS totally broken, OpenDNS is the answer: 208.67.222.222 Mr Butler from Ubuntu UK plied me with Biltong and free “Powered By Ubuntu” stickers. Wohoo!