Memoirs of a Roadie

Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?

Posted on 20th February 2008

LUGRadio Live 2007

LUGRadio Live UK dates have been announced as the weekend of 19th/20th July.

At the moment the guys are busy preparing for LUGRadio Live USA, so expect more details for the UK event after next month. The US event will be the first time the LUGRadio experience will have been seen on such a major scale outside of the UK. The guys seem suitably excited and I'll be keen to discover if the American event has the same manic and mayhem feel as the UK event. The UK event is very definitely about getting the Linux and Open Source communities together, to hopefully provide an opportunity to meet and greet with fellow developers or just people you meet on IRC or the forums. It doesn't have that corporate feel is much more laid back, thus having a much more social nature about it than many traditional conferences. Not to diminish the value of the talks and presentations, but the atmosphere is much more conducive to discussion, questions and feedback than more formal events. For me that has perhaps more value as I like to get feedback and ideas from others and some more corporate events often don't encourage that atmosphere.

In the meantime, if you're in the US and can make it to the West Coast over the weekend on 12th/13th April, checkout LUGRadio Live USA2008 and try and get along to The Metreon, San Francisco. As a tempter, watch the video trailer created by Tony Whitmore, AV coordinator for the UK event.

I shall be at LUGRadio Live UK, although whether that's as a speaker, attendee or member of the crew remains to be seen. I'm thinking of submitting my Understanding Malware talk, but seeing as it's about an hour long, and I definitely DON'T want to be on the main stage, I'm hoping the guys will agree to hiding me in a smaller room. They guys always manage to put me up against big names (Mark Shuttleworth and Chris Di Bona for the last two years), so this might be my chance to steal some of the audience back for the little guy ;)

As I don't specifically talk about Linux stuff, but more general Open Source stuff, I've often felt a bit of an outsider as a speaker. The Malware talk is again not about Linux specifically, and some aspects are not Open Source (for justifiable reasons), but the content, particularly for anyone interested in understanding what malware is and eager to gain some very basic hints and tips to protect your inbox, it's ideal. Seeing as most of the attendance for LUGRadio are knowledgeable Linux people, I'm hoping the talk will be of interest to a wide variety of people. I've now done the talk twice, for Leicester LUG last week and Coventry LUG last night. Both presentation went down very well and generated lots of interesting discussion afterwards. Seeing as some of these guys are very clueful sysadmins and developers, as a benchmark, I think the LUGRadio audience will love it. We'll see ;)

The UK event will be returning to Wolverhampton University Student's Union, the venue for the 2006 event. Personally I liked the Lighthouse, the venue for 2007, but I know the guys got heavily criticised for a variety of issues, that meant they had to reconsider the venue for the 2008 event. The SU venue is smaller than the Lighhouse too, which might cause some problems, as I can see the event getting a bigger attendance this year. For the past 3 years the attendance appears to have been increasing anyway, but in the last year, I am noticing more and more articles, blogs and posts about LUGRadio. I just hope there is enough space for everyone.

BTW if you're attending LUGRadio Live USA2008, please take a camera and post your photos publically. My site always gets a lot of hits for LUGRadio, and I'm sure the thirst for photos for the US event will be just as popular.

Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)

Posted on 30th January 2008

A few weeks ago, some colleagues of mine sat an LPI 101 course on Linux. A couple of years ago I took the 201 course and although the course itself was fine, the exam at the end provided me with no confidence in anyone, who would put that they had passed an LPI exam on their CV. I have heard of others being critical of the LPI exams, so I know I'm not alone. Many of those on the recent course had an understanding of a Linux based operating and had used it as basic user. However, the reports coming back were not good. One attendee had trouble trying to install a copy of Red Hat and ended up having to abandon 3 different machines, thus wasting a good portion of the first day. Considering this is a 101 level course, I really don't see any point in teaching someone to install a distro. In a few cases some had already done this on their home machines, but for the majority at work the boxes are already preconfigured and setup by a dedicated team who build our testing and production environments. Aside from that, every major distro installs differently, and has vastly different configuration tools, so why bother?

The recent course wasn't taught by the LPI, but it was meant to follow their course outlines. It was very obvious that in some areas the course notes were out of date. In this day and age four years is a long time. Four years ago who had heard of Ubuntu? While that might not be a problem when you're explaining things like top, grep, locate and many other tools that have been around for a long time, but it does get ridiculous when you have to memorise the command line options to lpr (which I haven't had any reason to use in over 15 years!). It also doesn't help when the course notes are written for SUSE and you're trying to install Fedora Core.

When I took the exam an actual question was "Who writes the official Linux documentation?", who cares? The answer was 'The Linux Documentation Project', which I'd never heard of and have never referenced since. Another was along the lines of "How do you find what command line tools are available for what you want to do?". The answer they wanted was 'apropos', and again I've never used it, and had never heard of it before the exam. The answer I provided in the comments was "I use Google". I took issue with the examiners about these sort of questions as they are pointless and have no bearing on whether I know my way around a Linux distro. I can well imagine some could memorise all the command line options to various tools and scrape a pass and still have no clue about how to configure a distribution.

Certification is a dodgy concept and only serves to line the pockets of the examining body. With badly presented courses and exams like those of the LPI, they serve only to fail the examinee by teaching very little that they can actually use in their workplace. In truth I don't believe I've used anything I learnt in the 201 course I did, apart from understanding better how to compile a kernel. I have heard that Red Hat certification is worthwhile, and seeing as we use RH8 or RHEL5 at work, then that would likely be a better course to apply for, but I suspect the cost may be an inhibiting factor. Having said that, you also get what you pay for.

I would be intrigued to meet someone who actually values the LPI exams and can prove that they are worth taking. Since a very highly skilled Linux system-admin and programmer (you rarely find someone proficient in both those skills) that I know, failed to get near 100% in the exam, I don't have any faith in any accreditation bestowed by LPI.

A Light In The Black

Posted on 5th January 2008

Now that I'm looking to another year of the Birmingham.pm World Tour, with visits to a number of UK LUG and Perl Monger groups, LUGRadio Live (UK not US), the UKUUG Spring Conference in Birmingham, YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe, as well as possibly a few European Workshops too, I need to start think what I'm going to present. I like the fact I can go to Linux based groups and conferences and talk about a variety of Perl topics, as although I might not be an expert, I know enough to give an introduction in several areas at least. But for more Perl specific technical events, I really need to stick to what I know.

The problem is that I feel I've done enough with CPAN Testing, Phrasebooks and Selenium for the time being, and it does get a bit boring for both me and the audience if I'm repeating myself every year. I may do some update on CPAN Testing, as there are likely to be changes in the coming year, a lot of which is being worked on currently, but what else is there that I could present that would be of interest to somebody?

One talk subject that has crossed my mind has been to do something like 'Labyrinth - A Perl Success Story'. It's been commented a few times that within the Perl community we talk a lot about the possibilities (particularly with frameworks) rather than getting to the finished product. While Labyrinth might not be for everyone, it might possibly be something that works for some, and as a consequence might interest people who have been asking me what it is and why I wrote it. However, although it is related to web and content management it isn't the next Catalyst or the new Jifty. You might be able to draw similarities between them all, but there are also many differences. Labyrinth isn't a framework as such, it's not meant for high-availability websites, and it also doesn't have the large development team knocking out code and fixing bugs that the others have. It's just me. But it might have just enough functionality and usability for someone to pick it up and get a site running how they want it to work, without having to understand the magic internals of frameworks like Catalyst and Jifty. I wouldn't be talking about the internals anyway, as I would prefer to give examples of how I solved problems and interesting asides that led me to learn something new about web design. I'm just not sure enough people would find it that interesting.

Further topics that come from the guts of Labyrinth, and are things that I have been keen to see how other people solve the same problem, are user input validation and content output correction. At the moment Labyrinth handles these within the same codebase, and it works rather well. However, it seems rather the wrong thing to do, to present a talk where the code to do the job isn't on CPAN and is embedded in another system. As a consequence I've been thinking about abstracting the code out of Labyrinth and releasing it separately. It might make for an interesting discussion and may provide people with an reasonable example of how they can use one solution to treat their input and output.

I've also started thinking about doing a short talk along the lines of "My Favourite CPAN Modules". A number of people have done this in the past and at one London.pm meeting several years ago, Leon presented one that got me looking up a few modules I'd not really heard of before. It's probably a talk better aimed at local group technical meetings and maybe a Workshop if appropriate, but I've also been thinking it might be better to actually to structure several talks of this style, but with a theme. So one talk would be "The Web Edition" and feature several modules useful for website development, another "The Test Edition" feature several useful Test modules, and perhaps also "The Mail Edition" with a selection of useful email modules. I've made an attempt at this style of talk before, but got too involved with the mechanics, when really all you need is a quick flavour of what the module can do, with enough references for you to go and find out more yourself.

I still need something more concrete for LUGRadio and the YAPCs, but at least I have some ideas to work with now. If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know.

Back On The Chain Gang

Posted on 2nd January 2008

First day back at work. I was dreading it a little as on the Saturday before Christmas my laptop screen broken and was unusable. I could plug it up to an external monitor, but that isn't all that useful to have sitting on your lap. Thankfully the laptop is under warranty, so our IS guys are going to send it back. In the meantime I've got a new chassis.

The laptop is a Lenovo R61, and although it's a wide-screen, I have finally got used to it. However, the biggest disappointment has been trying to get Linux, specifically Ubuntu and Fedora, running on it. I've given up for the time being, but I plan on having another go at some point. I've seen someone else with Ubuntu running on it, so it is possible.

Yesterday Nicole's laptop (a Dell Inspiron 1501) also suffered problems. The touchpad failed to respond and seeing as there is no other mouse pointer type device on it (apart from plugging in my USB mouse), it was a bit difficult to actually do anything apart from shut it down. I was expecting to be able to use CTL or ALT keys in combination with other keys to get access to the administration tools (this is Ubuntu 7.04). While there probably is some key combination, it wasn't obvious and I didn't have internet access to find out.

I opened up the laptop and couldn't find anything wrong with the touchpad itself, so put it all back together (plus a bit of cleaning) and it worked again. However, the sigh of relief was short lived. The touchpad now works but the onboard wireless now doesn't. I can't tell whether the mini-card or the antenna is at fault, and have now discovered that the side panel where a regular PCMCIA card goes is acutally an ExpressCard slot.

Seeing as a wifi ExpressCard costs over £50, I'm not sure whether to shell out for a new mini-card (about £20) or a USB wireless adapter (less than £20). Seeing as the Broadcom mini-card seems to be having a lot of problems keeping hold of the network, I think the USB wireless adapter might be the better bet.

When I bought the laptop originally, it was going to be mine to use at conferences and work on various Perl projects. After it arrived the annoyance of it being a wide-screen meant Nicole got it all for herself. I've learnt a few lessons from the purchase and is one of the reasons it's taken me so long to fork out for another.

DanDan got his very own laptop for Christmas, and last night was the only one fully working in the house. Considering it was the lowest spec of the three, it's stood up quite well. He's pretty good at navigating to his games sites and doing some basic admin stuff. It's got Ubuntu installed and yes Perl is on there too, but I think it'll be a while before I get him programming.

Looking at the Ubuntu WifiDocs pages it would seem the USB wireless adapter isn't as easy a choice as I thought it might be. Still it has to be better than another temperamental Broadcom card.

Video Killed The Radio Star

Posted on 7th July 2007

Today is the first day of LUGRadio Live. Well actually it could be considered the second day, as many of the attendees were assembled in Wolverhampton last night. I had to miss the festivities last night, so I'm hoping I can make up for it tonight :)

Several local user groups will be attending, so I'm hoping to see a lot of familiar faces. I'll be taking lots of photos, and this year I hope to have them online soon after the event, not nearly a year later!