Episode: 1059
Title: HPR1059: OggCamp12 Day2 The morning after the night before
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1059/hpr1059.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 18:08:31

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Good morning, how are you? We're talking about the video. I'm down here and we're all
setting up start of day two and I'm talking to Popeye. Hello. How are you doing, Popeye?
Yeah, all right. I was recovering from a job a good night. Yeah, it was really good.
We had a big room in the hotel and everyone kind of sat down with these huge round tables and
mixed and spread about and loads of beer was drunk and there was some like music and
it was really nice. People stayed up till quite late which was I was surprised how I thought
people would have gone to bed early and been sensible and all that sort of thing. No chance. Now
everyone was up late and yeah, good times have I all I think. Yeah, actually it's working out
very well. The facility is everything's nice and big. The venue has been nice and very close.
Yeah, we've been very lucky with the venue because they provided it for us at no cost to us,
which in previous years we've had to pay a fair amount for a venue. So this is just made life
so much easier and because it's a university the rooms are all set out for lectures and we've got
loads of chairs and projectors and they've got all the audio equipment here as well and plenty of
space and a nice bit of green area outside so we can have a picnic or geeknick as we call it.
Yeah, it's been really good. Listen, I'm not going to keep you any further. Just carry on and
thank you very much for the short update. Hello everybody. My name is Ken Falan and I'm standing
outside the new relocated exhibition area here at Hackebobu Radio. Yes, right beside the Hackebobu
Radio booth at on camp 12 and I'm talking to Lorna Mitchell. And Lorna, what are you doing here?
I'm here because I'm involved in lots of open source things. I'm a web development consultant
by trade. I run a PHP open source project and I'm one of the organizers of a bunch of different
events that I'm involved with with PHP in the UK. And what are those? I've got a few coming up
but particularly I'm excited about PHP Northwest which is a Manchester-based conference. It's our
fifth year this year. I should confess I'm less involved this year than I have been but that means
I get to speak this year so I'm just as excited as ever. It's a community conference. We bring
together the best of PHP people and other allied technologies in Europe. Put it all together,
fairly reasonably priced and the beers cheap too. Awesome. Excellent. What's fairly reasonably
priced? I think our current ticket prices are £95. You've missed the early bird. I'm afraid because
our dates are early October. Okay. And what sort of person will be interested in attending your show?
It's a real range and it's anyone working with PHP, any of the frameworks and we have hobbyists
as well as people who do it full-time, senior developers but also quite junior ones and some
graduates. So there really is something for everyone. It's three tracks. So there's different
different sessions in every slot and we cover a real range of topics. Okay and what's the feel of
the event like? How many days is it? What's the time? That sort of thing. Okay. It's a weekend event.
We have a tutorial day on the Friday the forehand which is in-depth, rather more expensive,
really detailed with experts and I'm teaching one of the sessions as well. And then the main
conference is all day Saturday and until lunchtime on Sunday so people will go and get trains.
But if you're coming, come Friday night because we're going to have a hackathon too.
And what's a hackathon, Prietel? We sit down and we hack. I'm not sure exactly what form it will
take this year. I'm hoping to get some stuff done on my own open source project which is joined in
a system for leaving public feedback for events, speakers and events. But there will be loads and
loads of different projects that you can just jump in and start coding. And is it most certainly
hobbyist attendance or is there quite a good representation from the business community?
I would say most people are doing PHP as their main job but not everybody.
So I mean ideally if you're involved in coding PHP then you will get your company to funds
you for that. Absolutely and I think for businesses it makes sense, it's a relatively inexpensive
conference, it's a weekend. So although you might also be paying sort of travel and accommodation,
you're not losing people off your projects. So if you have the kind of employees that can get out
of the weekend, it's a really good opportunity. And there's no requirements to have your code that
you're working on to be open source or how is the open source feel at the event?
Absolutely not. I mean PHP itself is open source, many of the frameworks and the products
that we're using PHP are open source. A lot of people work on code that isn't and that's not a
problem at all. Who are your sponsors? We've got some great sponsors this year, we've got
Invika, Centio Labs, the sponsoring us. Do you know I'm not sure about who else is sponsoring us
because I haven't been organizing but we typically have some really good organizations involved
and they really make it happen and keep the ticket price where it is. Okay, excellent. How did you
happen to wander into getting involved in something like this? I've been a PHP developer
for a number of years and I speak at all the conferences. So when the local community started,
wanted to start a user group in Manchester and then start the conference, I'd just gravitated
to that and I've been involved ever since. It's been such a great network and yeah, we have a
ball every year. Excellent and if people wanted to find out more about this, where would you send
them to? conference.phpnw.org.uk.nw. What's the NW for? PHP Northwest, we're based in Manchester.
Thank you very much. It's been a long time folks. Anything else that I forgot to ask?
No, I don't think so. Just hope everyone comes down and we'll see you there.
And have you been having a good time here at the show?
Our camp is always great because it exposes me to technologies that I don't use every day.
I've enjoyed the talks that I've seen so far and I've bought some new books and I'm going to go
and see the open hardware hacking shortly. We've just been up to the open hardware hacking
and it's excellent, excellent. Are you intending giving any talks yourself?
I have spoken at every odd camp that I've been to, everyone that has existed.
This year, my challenge is to sit down, relax and not speak, but I did go on a panel yesterday.
Okay, excellent. Well, thank you very much for taking the time out for this interview and I
really hope your event goes very well. And if anybody listening to Hacker Public Radio is actually
going to the event, if you wouldn't mind bringing a recorder along and grab some interviews,
we can also schedule them to be released here on Hacker Public Radio.
Hi, everybody. This is Ken. We're down at the exhibition area and I've just come across Simon Fips.
How are you doing, Simon? I'm doing pretty well today. Thank you very much.
And are you lacking your hair down? Are you here for a specific reason?
Well, I'm giving the main stage talk at noon today, so in half an hour.
Do you nervous?
No, not particularly. I didn't think you would be. So have you been enjoying the show so far?
So far it's been, I had a lot of energy, like it's supposed to have, so I think it's working pretty well.
Have you seen anything in particular that you think is setting a trend or
is a new, new, interesting thing to call to your attention?
The 3D printer yesterday, and you know, the mix of 3D printers and Raspberry Pi's and
hardware stuff, you know, I first got into electronics in 1976,
soldering resistors and transistors onto a bit of stripboard. And during the middle of my
computer career, all that stuff fell away as everyone went out and bought all their electronics.
And it's interesting to see it all coming back again, and people discovering soldering
ones again. I think we've got a definite trend there, and I'm sure that the
forces of big corporate technology are trying to work out how to stamp it out as fast as they can.
Pretty much like the netbook, you know, the way that was kind of obliterated from the market.
But I don't think the Raspberry Pi itself is too cheap, would you agree without
to be snobbed out?
Well, it is actually very cheap, although I've been excited to see people coming in with
lower price point items. So I've got a Raspberry Pi sitting by my front door at home waiting
for when I get back from this trip to go work with. I think that that sort of device is going to be
a very interesting development. I actually think it's still a bit too hard for the average
dabbling geek to quickly get into. What I'm hoping we'll see is just a slight getting slightly
easiness because there are all sorts of things people could be doing with it, you know.
Everyone needs a home voiceover IP switchboard. A Raspberry Pi with a cut down version of free
switch stuck inside it would be absolutely perfect. But to do that is going to involve quite a lot
of know-how and skills. But I think that we're definitely leading edge of an important new trend there.
Okay, listen, I'm going to let you go. Thanks very much for taking the time and thanks for
doing the interview yesterday. We appreciate it. It's my pleasure. I'm going to go and talk all
about the communications data bill that everybody needs to take some action about if they want to ever
be able to keep a secret again in their life. Hi everybody, this is Cameron Don, the next
exhibition area and Ak is hanging around the coffee machine. How are you doing?
Not too bad. Not too bad. It's Sunday morning. Things are going well.
Enjoying yourself? I am actually. I'll come at this here has been quite interesting.
To find interesting for me. Well, there's not a lot of talks going on. It's kind of a bar camp
thing. So you've got no big sense of what's going to be going on when you get here. But
it's a good bunch of people. So you get a bunch of interesting stuff going on. I'm
currently trying to think of a lightning talk to do. Well, I thought of a low top and I'm trying
to plan it. But there's a lot of stuff going on. I'm just wondering as you say, I'm just wondering
about the exhibition in the coffee area. And there's some people called Scraper Wiki who are doing
something to liberate public data. And that seems really interesting. There's a lot of
hardware hacking stuff going on. So I mean, it's all come. It's always like this. But it's nice
to get together and meet a few people again and just find out about all these projects I don't know
about. It's amazing. I just not bothered going to any of the talks. I'm going to assume they're
recorded and I can watch them again. Because I'm more interested in the stuff that's going on
here in the corridors and talking to the people that's walking around. Well, I think that's the
thing. It's, yes, I'm coming on watching talks. It's important looking at the exhibitions
is important. But the most important thing to me is that I get to meet up with all these people
again. Keep connections fresh. Know what's going on. So because it's a community, right? I mean,
there are plenty of conferences you can go to where people have paid £10,000 to get a stand
and will give you the sales pitch and so on. But it's great to see people coming here from all
sorts of different projects. I mean, you know, I work for Canonical on Ubuntu, right? So we're one
of the larger projects in this community. But there's also people building their own tiny MP3
players from scratch, stuff like that. And I'm really interested in one of the things that I've
seen coming out of this sort of conference, this sort of community recently is the idea of
turning hard by stuff into a product. Historically, we've been quite good at the idea of saying,
look, here is a chip. We've made a chip. We've made some software for it. But now people
have started talking about how you make a finished product. So how you make a plastic case
that it will go in really nicely. How you sell those things. Richard Hughes from the
GNOME project is here with a colour hug. Which I mean, I don't pretend to understand exactly
what it is, but it's about checking the colour temperature of your monitor. And he's designed
and made this thing. And now he sells them at cost. And it's not, and you could buy commercial
things to do this, but they were like 250 quid or something. But he's trying to make a finished
real product. Up until fairly recently, that's been the province of big companies doing that sort
of thing. We've been good at saying, okay, look, here's some software on an FTP site. But not
making a thing that real people can have. So I'm really interested in that evolution of us being
able to make finished products that people can use. Okay, fantastic. Can I talk to you about some
canonical stuff? You can, and although... How's the going with canonical, are you enjoying yourself?
Yeah, actually. I'm not going to ask any shitty difficult questions. It's just going to be nice
and light, okay? Okay, how good is that? I'm not here on the table. Yeah, I like my job. It's brilliant.
Okay, any opening openings that are in canonical for interested hackers?
There are. Actually, I mean, we're always hiring. The company's grown enormously in the space,
I joined three and a half years ago. And since then, we've roughly doubled in size.
So we're always on the lookout for good people. I particularly work on Ubuntu 1, so that's
obviously the bit you want to work on. But we did loads about the stuff too. If you have a look at
canonical.com, there's a load of jobs. I think Ubuntu.com slash jobs as well. But in general,
always looking for people. Excellent stuff. I hope you enjoy the rest of the show, and thanks for
taking the time to have a quick interview. No problem, thanks very much. Okay, cool.
So I'm here talking to... Aid Retro. How's it going to aid? How are you enjoying the show?
Very much, and I'm refreshingly not hung over. Why is this? I'd like to say it's the wisdom of age.
I would say it's probably more because the beer tastes are really, really bad. You are correct.
There was no great deal of choice in the beers. No, there was two beers and one of them ran out.
Yes, there was some epic fail going on. And of course, you interacting with Germany and the
purity of their beer system over there. It did cost my mind. I was thinking, has the beer always
been this shit? Or have my standards changed? Yeah, living in the Netherlands were right close
to Belgium. You know, and being a parent, I have one beer a month, and if it's going to be a beer,
it better be a good one. Absolutely, I do the same thing. So, yeah, just drink one beer and I,
but make sure it's a damn good beer. Absolutely, yeah. And don't drink just tons of shit.
Just drink one or two really good beers, yeah. Although it is kind of funny, once you start drinking,
you know, chop his beers and you just have two, and then you go drunk from your feet up.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. We were discussing yesterday, the brew dog beer, is it tactical,
nuclear penguin one? It's like 32 percent. A beer that's 32 percent. And it's 35 pounds,
by the way, for 330 milliliters. Okay, but if you want more to know more about the beers,
just go to the pod brewers network and they have home brewing stuff, but only how, how is
I'll come for you? I'll come. It's good. Love the venue. Very, very good. It's warm, you know?
Not the venue. I mean, just live up all in general. Yeah. I think there's a heatwave going on here.
We're not used to this whole concept. It's a kind of English heatwave with no real visible sun,
but warm nonetheless, yeah. And it's not really, you know, for the one time in four years,
when there's going to be a warm day and not really worth putting in air conditioning for that.
No, not at all, no. It was interesting to have Stephen Fry interview yesterday, do you think?
You didn't attend it, right? Okay. So how did that go? What was it like? It's cool. It seemed
as though they emailed some questions to him and he was just kind of sat in his lounge.
He looked a little hungover or just woken up, to be honest. And he was just kind of rattling
through those and his charming characters. His charming way. No, I met the conscious decision.
I'm going to stay out here and watch all the talks afterwards. So what have you been doing
in the last year, since we got up to? So in the last year, so I'm working at Red Hat as a consultant,
yeah. And I haven't really released this news yet, but I'm transferring to Red Hat Germany.
I've been in a lot of work in Germany. And obviously my girlfriend lives in Germany.
And so still your girlfriend? Still my girlfriend? Oh, yeah. She hasn't sacked me, is that what you mean?
I'm just wondering if you're walking slower past jewelers around here?
Ah, okay, no, no, not yet, no. Not walking past prenatal or anything.
No, okay, just keeping the listenership informed.
No, that's good. Yeah, so yeah. And first of November, I'm going to transfer over to Germany.
And start working. So exactly the same role, different manager, same kind of work.
Hopefully learn better, some more German.
It will be obviously a lot easier when you're there, immersed in the whole thing.
Everyone tells me this, yeah, but it is three months of serious pain, though.
Right, right, okay, yeah. The problem I have though is, you know, I go there quite a lot,
but all of Ilke's friends, all speak English. And they just switch like that, yeah.
One or two of them might be interested in teaching me one or two things, but yeah,
they're just, it's easier if we all just speak English.
I remember the first time I've actually, you know, in the Netherlands where I actually had to speak
Dutch. It was with my mother-in-law. And I had two sentences. One was the town is more like,
you garden is beautiful and you know, it is low. But fortunately, she had, well,
unfortunately, she was a bit of a memory problem, so she kept forgetting and I was able to keep
repeating the same two sentences for an hour or two. But no, that's by the way. So,
whereabouts in Germany are you going to be? So, technically based in Frankfurt, but not really.
So, I'm going to be living in Bonn and working kind of around the north, yeah.
Getting sent all over the place, apparently it's 80% travel. So, yeah, it doesn't really matter
where you live, because it's going to be 80% travel. And that's within Germany, the German?
Yeah, Germany, I think, yeah. So, I guess I'll maven get sent to the UK to do stuff,
so it's kind of flip over, I don't know, but yeah, I think the majority of it will be Germany.
Yeah, it seemed to be looking forward to it, at least.
Yeah, very much, yeah, very much looking forward to it.
Okay, I want you looking forward to hear for the rest of the day.
Um, yeah, I don't know, I haven't really looked at the talk yet, so I guess they've changed overnight,
and yeah, it was a little bit of chaos yesterday getting everybody to actually
nominate some talks and put them in time spots, but yeah, hopefully it's all going to be slick today.
Yeah.
Okay, it's genius to start today, an hour later.
They've always done that, and it's always a good move, I think, yeah.
It would have been nice to tell me, because I've been here since all hours, no, I haven't.
Okay, yeah, I think everybody looks kind of fresh, and there's loads of people here,
I expected it to just be like a handful of people here on a Sunday, because maybe it was that beer problem last night.
Yeah, it could have been.
Okay, with that, I'll let you go, have your coffee.
Thanks very much for doing the interview.
Hi, this is Ken with the Hangover, not at all.
We're standing outside on cam 12.
It's just started to rain, and I'm here with John, TM, the nice guy.
Hi there, how are you doing, John?
I'm very well, slightly stressed, but yeah, on the whole, not too bad at all, thank you.
And you'd be stressed because there's a computer operating system, a computer application,
beating at the heart of on cam 12, and that's written by you, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah, written, I think he's probably the wrong way to describe it at the moment,
more kind of dredged out of nothing, and kind of vaguely formed into something that might work occasionally.
At the moment, I'm not really feeling that positive.
Yesterday, I was brimming with joy with the cam, with the cam fire manager.
But yeah, today, it's kind of, it's got a little bit nerve, a little bit nerve racking,
and not been working quite as well as I'd have wanted it to.
But we're all right, we're doing okay, I think it's just, you know, been stressful.
It's, well, it's a difficult task that you have to do, because you don't really get to test it
until the event has such.
Yeah, I mean, and it's not, it's not even really like you can particularly stress test this application,
just because of the sheer kind of crazy way that you're relying on kind of a,
like chaos theory of people submitting stuff and removing stuff all kind of on the fly,
on like Wi-Fi that may be flaky over a network connection that might not be there,
over a SMS that may or may not work.
It's, yeah, it's kind of a lot of variables, and it's a lot more risky than your normal kind of
common garden website. So, yeah.
Just to let people know the cam fire system is a way that people can schedule talks,
and you can schedule them via the website, via SMS, via.
Yeah, and the SMS, and you can also use Twitter.
Unfortunately, both the SMS and Twitter engine both broke yesterday, and I've just not had a chance
to fix them, which, you know, it didn't add, didn't reduce my stress levels at all,
not even a little bit, you know, it just kind of bumped up and made it more painful.
But yes, on the whole, the SMS engine, the Twitter engine should work, it's just sort of very simple
mistakes that I just haven't had a chance to fix yet. Not to worry, not to worry.
Are you enjoying the show generally, otherwise?
Yeah, it's been a really, really great event. I haven't been to many talks because I've been
fixing problems with the scheduling software, but no, it's been a fantastic event,
and I've got to talk to some great people, meet some brand new people that have been phenomenal.
I've got to actually meet you in the flesh now, which is being done.
There's a lot of oblivion.
And I can't comment on that, but no, I've got to catch up with old friends and, you know,
have new conversations with new brand new people about amazing and fantastic subjects, so.
And people might, who have listened to the show for a while,
know we did a seriously long interview before on CC hits. How's that going for us?
Yeah, CC hits is going really, really well.
We've got about three or four podcasts that are submitting tracks into the system now,
and obviously we're always looking for more. Daily show has been running.
We've very few incidents for, I think we've had maybe sort of total of four shows lost
for daily shows lost in coming up for two years now, so yeah, it's going really, really well.
I'm also the quality of what comes through is absolutely excellent.
Well, it's benefitted by the fact it's filtered by some amazing people, you know, effectively,
you know, the only stuff that tends to be in there is stuff that people think is really good
from the outset. So obviously, you know, there's not to say an individual may come across stuff
that they don't like, but on the whole stuff that's in there is in there because someone said I
like that enough to play it. So it's been, yeah, it's been really good for me as well.
I've got to discover all sorts of music that I never thought I'd like. So, for example,
I've discovered Dubstep and Dubstep's great, and considering I'm normally a heavy metal guy,
that really is really kind of weird for me, but no, it's good.
It is actually a bit, I must say it is a bit odd. I was asked for some reason to mention dancing.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
This section of the show has been censored to protect the identities of the people who were dancing last
though. Listen, last year you couldn't make it here because you were having it.
So, yeah, last year my son was really quite small and the timing just didn't work out, but no,
last year it was a real shame that I couldn't make it here, but no, this is closer to where I live
as well, so it gave me more flexibility to get here, and no, it's, was it your first child?
Yeah, my first child. How has life changed as a parent?
You know, that whole thing, wait, before childhood, before you have a child, you have time,
and now there's less of that, a lot less of that, so.
That's an also a lot less of sleeper, bud.
Well, it doesn't help when you're an idiot, like I am, and you write two kind of projects,
one of which has a really, really high tight, really tight time scale campfire manager,
and the other of which has a tight time scale for every single day, which is CC hit.
So, yeah, sleep, what sleep? The last couple of months have been sort of six AM starts
for sort of work, you know, bring getting my son up, and then two AM going to bed, so I'm looking
forward to the next month, maybe having some sleep. Yeah, take it easy, take it easy, well deserved.
Listen, thanks very much for taking the time for the interview, and Tommy, have you anything planned?
Take a few minutes out to go and see your talk. So, I'm going to the Lightning Talks,
where I've been told that Stuart's act of language is about to give me a showing
for having written campfire manager, which is going to be fun. So, I've got to do a rebuttal
to that, apparently, and I'm going to see the Dicturpen Roadshow, which I have promised faithfully
to screw up their talk scheduling, because that's what John the Nice Guy's do best,
to Pete, the bastard, Turkin, Serpin. There's been a lot of talks. There's all sorts of things
that I want to catch up with, and I want to meet up with people in the exhibition space,
and I haven't been to the open hardware space yet either. You definitely have to do that.
Yeah, I really need to. Actually, though, if you're interested in hardware hacking,
might be a good place to avoid. Yeah, too many hobbies. Well, indeed, I'm actually a licensed
radio amateur as well, and that hobby has gone to the wayside in the last few years as well,
and I really need to start thinking about getting my radios back up and running again,
because there's been a load of developments over the last 10 years since I properly was on the radio,
so I need to get back into that as well. Give us a podcast from that. We have some US-based
ham radio shows in the queue here from one or two of our listeners. I'd be interesting to get
a European slant on ham radios. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I haven't got a particularly good
place to come from as far as the UK ham radio environment, because it's been a good 10 years
since I properly did any radio stuff, but before that, I was very heavily into packet radio,
and I did a little bit of stuff with the UK repeaters. So, effectively, packet radio uses
an IP-like protocol called AX25, which is derived from X25, which, if you ever use a Microsoft
Exchange server, you might have seen X25 there. The packet stuff uses AX25,
and then they layer IP on top of that, so you can tell that and stuff like that between nodes.
But I mean, it's been a long time since I've done any of that, but the stuff that seems to be around
at the moment is a system called EchoLink, which is VoIP over the internet, so proper voice over
IP, which then comes out into repeaters or standalone nodes, and you can get Android application
for that, which means that even if you haven't got your radio with you, you can at least bring
up a repeater and talk on it. How difficult is to get your exam? So, since I did my radio
measures exam, they actually changed the way they were doing things. As I understand, it's
get the foundation. It's pretty straightforward. The main thing about the radio measures down in
the UK was always about educating you on effectively how to begin putting a radio together, how to
get a radio up and working, and then what not to do to interfere with anyone else's traffic. So,
I don't know whether it's still like that. Certainly, the UK used to have to pay for your license
every year, and about six or so years ago, they removed that requirement. So, now, as long as you've
passed your test and you pay an initial fee, you now never have to pay again after that. So, it's
it's kind of encouraging people that have had licenses that may have let them laps to renew
them and bring them back up to speed again, even if they're not necessarily particularly active.
It gives the hobby a much longer base to play with, and if you've had an interest in the past,
but you've not had time to keep it up, or you've not had the finances to keep it up, but your
circumstances change in the future. It means you don't have to go back through. Oh, where's all my
paper? Can I renew it? How much is it going to cost me to renew it? Do I have to back pay or
all those sorts of things? So, nice. I mean, again, it's all a matter of time and effort, and I'd
like to get back into it. It's just finding the time to fit it in around, you know.
Everything else? It's a major project. Plus my son, plus the Manchester Geek scene that I'm
involved in, not quite as heavily as I used to be, but, you know, still am a little bit. And
the podcasting stuff that I'm involved in, because I get quite heavily involved in the
Budcast, which is a UK music podcast, and kind of get involved in talking to people about that.
Yeah, so I really need to get back involved in the radio stuff, but it's just not done it for a while
yet, so. Okay, listen, I'm going to let you go. Thanks very much for taking the time for to do
it. Thanks for doing campfire, and definitely thanks for doing CC hits. Thank you very much for
interview me. And, as I said, you know, if any of your, if any of your other podcasts want to
submit music to CC hits, then contact show at CC hits.net, and I'll talk to you about getting in.
Hi, I'm here at the coffee room at our camp 12. We're about to be photographed talking to the
man of the moment, Adam's suite. Clearly, how's it going? Not too bad, how's life?
Pretty good. A little bit slow this morning, I'm afraid. It was, it was a long one last night,
but however it appears that a particular beer of my choice, yes, evening, is the way forwards
to not having hangovers. Normally, I'd be dead and buried by now, but I'm here and I'm alive,
and it's going quite well. It's probably mostly due to the fact it was watered down.
There is a good chance that that could be the case. I think you're one of the most popular
people here at our camp 12 this year. Obviously, and for very good reason. Yes, the next
are seven donation. Yes, there it is. My company is sponsoring the event by providing a Google
next to seven as a raffle prize. I've always kind of noticed that it's a conference is,
it's nice to reward people for just being cool people. So, as my company's fairly new,
we started about a year or so ago. Where did it? My company's called Transitive Technology is
limited. Obviously, we're still building a reputation and getting our name out there,
but I thought, you know what, wouldn't it be nice now that we can give something to somebody,
to just make somebody's day, hopefully week. Yeah, definitely week. I have plans for one of
these myself. I formally intend to win it and keep it for myself. I could, if no one was listening,
just give it to you, but I'm afraid I have already handed it over to Dan, I think, from the next
outlaw. Oh gosh. So, how has the show been so far? I think it's been fantastic actually.
The thing is, it's quite easy going, which means that you don't feel, as we speak,
two little kids are coming and looking at your cake. Oh, very tasty. Oh, and she's just
grabbed the cake. Oh, no, no, she's not happy with that. Oh, she's going to have to have the
hot hot hot hot leafy. Yes, we've been invaded by raiders. I've forgotten the question.
The question is actually how chilled out and relaxed it is, and I think we just saw,
and there's a little bit right there. There are two kids running over and there.
Yeah, I think that, again, I don't know whether it's just open source conferences in general,
or whether it's the particular vibe that Oddcamp has got, which is, I guess, being an un-conference
it's loosely, and there's a lot of hard work into it, but there's talks themselves are loosely
organised there, just about scheduled before they occur, and basically everyone's really relaxed
and easy going, and it's a kind of stress-free conference. I think if you're a control-free
displace, would drive you absolutely insane. Yeah, I've seen a few gigs rattling in the corridors,
because not everything isn't structured and organised for them. But yeah, thankfully,
you have a crack team of people ready to go and help them. Yeah, somebody needs to go around and
kind of scoop them up and put them in a room, in a chair, in front of a speaker with a projector,
in a civilised organised manner, but if you need that kind of thing, perhaps this isn't the
place to come, but for everybody else. Yeah, it's a really great event. Okay, are you looking
forward to anything today? Are you doing a lightning talk yourself? I'm utterly unprepared,
and so, unless I have to, and it will take a lot of pressure to find me, because I plan on
escaping, if there is any pressure, I have no plans to do a talk. I suppose I should have done,
but kind of life gets in the way. I do have a talk that I could do, I don't have it with me,
and I would have to compress it to be barely intelligible. So, for me, it's a no, I think.
Not a problem. Okay, listen, I'll let you go on with the rest of the show, enjoy your cake,
the carrot cake was delicious, and the brownies were very, very delicious, so I'm interested to see
what you think of that. Thanks Ken. Take it easy. Okay, just before we go, what's the name,
can you give me the website of your company? Transitive.co.uk, that's T-R-A-N-S-I-T-I-V.co.uk.
And what do you do? We are an open source support company. What we found is that quite often,
there's people using open source or Linux applications out there, and they start off as little
things just to solve a small problem, and either they become more and more important to the
company, they get grown upon and use more and more and more, and suddenly they become very important.
And for a lot of things, there's a certain kind of IT certification,
management certification that requires you to have a vendor for every piece of hardware and
software, and quite often, people get to the point at which you know what, actually, either this
is too important that if it goes wrong and we can't fix it, we need somebody, or maybe the
guy that's set it up, moved, got promoted, or left, and it's basically, I guess, a kind of
continuation policy really, so things can continue as normal in the event of a crisis or a crash
that no one can fix, or sometimes people just need things to do extra things, and that's kind of
where we come in. However, 95% of what we do is probably network monitoring.
Okay, it actually sounds like an interesting way to promote open source software within your
own company, because quite a lot of the times the argument I've gotten is, well, you know,
that's not supported by anybody, and now we would have a company that would be able to say,
do you support WordPress? Absolutely, and it is a problem for adoption. There's a lot of companies
out there that have traditional Unix and maybe some Red Hat Unix infrastructure that are moving away
from it, because the things that they've run on those things aren't necessarily supported by the
vendor, and so they're moving to Windows, because pretty much everything that you can run on Windows,
unless you're running a piece of free software in the original, the popularest sense is in
lowercase f. Everything is supported by its vendor, so you've got Windows Server, Exchange,
Outlook, Office, SharePoint, exactly, a SQL Server, and all of these kind of things,
and I'm sure other software vendors are available incidentally. They all have a supporting vendor,
and a lot of open source software that people are just throwing in to solve a small problem,
and actually it starts to become grown upon and becomes more important to them,
don't necessarily have a supporting vendor, so we do a lot of work with Nagios,
and the people that we support with Nagios aren't interested in buying the commercial version of
Nagios, because they've got the normal one, the free software version already, and it doesn't
cost them anything, but they've either taken it to the limits of the skills that they have in
house, or the guy left or got promoted or moved on one way or another, and they need to be able to
continue, and our plan was basically to kind of service that, or exploit that need.
I've been talking to a few people this weekend, as I said, we do most of our workers network
monitoring, that's not by design, that's just what people have come to us for, and I think there's
plenty of scope to find other areas that, for things that people are using a lot, and then offer
support for it. Fantastic, listen, thanks very much for taking the time, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Hi, this is Ken here, and I'll come 12 again, and we're down having a cup of coffee, talking to Chris,
how are you doing Chris? I'm a lot better for a cup of coffee, believe me. Did you have a few beers last
night? A few, yes, for some definition of few. It's the getting to bed at night half past three in
the morning thing that really does me in. It was a nice event actually last night. Yeah, it was good.
Well, these things are always good. I just meet loads of people who I haven't met since last
odd camp, and kind of catch up, and spend the evening talking about completely weird geeky stuff,
like you know, it's like the ones in the year get your geek on.
Yeah, you overdose some geek for two, a couple of days, and then you've had your fix for the next
few months, you're fine. Okay, people may remember you from the podcast, such as Lug Radio,
so how did you meet you since then? They may be, maybe, from your Lug Radio, but I wouldn't
bet on it. So I worked with Red Hat these days, I'm a consultant. I consulted Red Hat to
doing stuff for whoever will pay us money to get rid of consultants, basically. Yeah, you're doing
quite well actually, as it happens. First billion dollar open source company. We are the first
billion dollar open source company. We had a billion dollar party to celebrate that. One billion
dollars. Billion dollars. Yes, it was fantastic. It was like the week after I joined, so I had
actually no work and took lots of credit for the billion dollar thing. It was great. Excellent.
So where are you based mostly? So I'm down in London, fond of, it's our kind of main UK office,
and then because I'm a consultant, so I'm out of customers' sites all the time. I'm aware of
the customers are, but they tend to be banks and things like that that we... Yes, I'm moving on,
moving on, moving on, moving on. Not my fault, not my fault. That's what I'm saying. And tell me,
are you enjoying the show here? Any particular talks or any particular thing that culture
do you see any trends this year? I have to admit, I've not been to any of... So it's what lunchtime
on day two here, so I've not been to any of the talks yet at all. I still Stephen Fry, yes,
that was dreaded, but to me these things are all about, well, a lot of them, they're just about
bumping into people, random people, and so I'm getting... Having a child pretty much like that,
walking past, trying to distract you, yes. And then working entirely, yes, and so yeah,
so I kind of keep meaning to those talks, and then I'll be on my way there, and I'll bump into
some of your heart, having a scene for ages, and they're like, oh, how are you doing? How are you
doing? What are you up to? And half an hour later, I'll go, oh, I was meant to be the tool.
Well, my plan is, I'm completely with you, my plan is this is justification for getting the
nexus seven, because you know, you need something to be able to watch all the talks that you missed
Oh, right, yes, the video, so you just want to sit on the table in the way home and have your virtual
on-camp as you watch all the talks and... So, yes, excellent. Anything else that I missed?
No, I'm just, I think it's been quite an impressive, impressive end, or I've just been upstairs,
actually, this is sort of the thing, I've not been to any talk, I've been to upstairs where there's
been the hardware hackers. That is fantastic, you know. But it's sort of weird, I didn't even know
they were there, really, and I kind of went to some, because I was still talking to you, said, oh,
I'm going to see the hardware hackers, I'll follow them, and when you don't, there's this whole room
of people who I've not met before, and I'm not seen, and I don't know nothing about what they do,
and it's like, well, where did this come from? I thought I understood this community, and
nope, they're all these hardest things. It's a fantastic addition, that's really, I really
look forward to that expanding and expounding. I think there's always a hardware hacker, I mean,
one, two, do those LED lights, that's the thing. Well, yeah, so I last year, I got the book,
I bought an Arduino, and I bought the kit one, so you cut it all apart, and you have to then
solder it together, and I've never soldered anything in my life ever, but I'm a complete failure
as a geek in that respect, and I sort of thought, oh, buy the board, and I learned to solder,
and I'll do all this kind of, and then I'll have this Arduino, and I do all this cool stuff with it,
and I'll know how to solder, and I'll be able to, yeah, and what have I done with it?
I put it on the desk, and it's been sat there gathering dust for the last 12 years, so...
Well, what you need to do, we've done, Mr. X has done two episodes on soldering,
download those, yeah, so now what you're thinking, a podcast about soldering, actually works out
quite well. Okay, yeah, have a listen to them, and he gives you links and stuff in the podcast to
get into soldering. Oh, that's exactly what I need then, I think, because yeah, it's not something
I've ever done, but it was like, kind of this opportunity to learn in a completely blown
way, so this year I bought a Raspberry Pi, which is already soldered, so I don't have to worry,
all I have to do is put an operating system on, and I think I can do that, so, you know,
excellent, listening and good electrical, thanks very much for taking the time.
Thank you very much.
Hi, this is Ken, standing outside in what is this light drizzle outside on Cub12,
an advantage to talk to? Mark, Marok, people might know you from podcasts,
such as the Ubuntu UK podcast, so how are you doing? Enjoying the show?
Yeah, I've just recovered after last night, it's about lunchtime now.
It's really good to see so many people come along, because with it being an uncomfortable
rinse, you never know how it's actually going to turn out, you might get no one show up,
you might get lots of people shot, but no one wants to do a talk, but it's gone really well,
we've had loads of brilliant talks, everyone seems to be enjoying it.
Have you been to a lot of the talks?
Um, I've mainly been, the stuff I've seen is mainly the stuff on the main stage,
I've been, yes, day was spent sort of troubleshooting for quite a lot of it,
so I haven't got to see as much as I'd like to, but I'm going to watch the lightning talks,
which we got on after lunch, there's some interesting things that have been proposed,
so I'm looking forward to see how they get squeezed into five minutes.
I think feuds might be the word we're absolutely, yes, I can see some arguments being started
and never finished. Yes, exactly. What have you felt has been the major trends this year?
Oh, that's a good question. Or is it too early to say?
Um, I don't think I've had enough of an eye on everything that's going on to be able to tell you
that. Okay. And to me again at the end. No bother. The organisation's been absolutely fantastic.
Who do you think we should thank for that? Me entirely.
No, seriously, the open labs who gave us the venue basically sorted out so much for us,
so that I mean, they gave us the venue for nothing, which compared to last year, it meant that we
had a lot less sponsorship money to have to worry about. And like whenever we've said,
you know, well, we were thinking doing this, would we be able to get some equipment? They've
just sorted it all out for us. So they're the real people. Thank, and obviously all of our other
sponsors who have given us various things. Yes. But when we talk about a venue, this is actually a
massive five-story complex, I think is the word, to, you know, modern, airy building. We're standing
outside here in a courtyard with couches all around. It's absolutely fantastic. Are you planning
to come back here for next year's venue? We don't know. Well, I'm being Rick Rolls brilliant.
I deserve that because I sort of Rick Rolls scheduling system earlier and broke at the same time.
Anyway, sorry. Would we come back here again? If we were doing a Liverpool again, I think we would.
I don't think we'd find somewhere as good as this to do it, like in terms of the facilities
and in terms of the environment. And because it's in the university, it has the sort of creative,
innovative vibe to it. Yeah. So yeah, I think I'd definitely be up for doing it here again.
We definitely an idea to look into universities as a place for holding. Because there's so many
people here as well trying to find a venue that they'll be able to handle this. And venues tend to
have quite good Wi-Fi as well, which is another big thing. We did have a bit of an issue yesterday,
but I think that's just because there are a lot of people in one place or trying to get on at once.
But that seems to have even now, but yeah, and also just the general facilities they have,
there's generally accommodation nearby as well. So yeah, universities are definitely a good thing
to plumb for, I reckon. Excellent. I'm just going to let you go now. Thanks very much for taking the time.
This is Ken here on Ogcamp, just outside the coffee area. And I'm talking to just then.
And what are you doing here? Well, I develop an open source project to develop
open energy, open source energy monitoring tools. So it's like a, it's both an open source hardware
project and an open source software project. And for the hardware is a series of units
you have a sensor unit, which measures how much electricity you're using in your house,
or how much you're, if you've got solar panels, how much they're generating,
and that transmits those values to a base station, which uploads that information up to the web
to an open source PHP JavaScript platform that we've developed to visualize that data.
And you can install that on your own server. And so this is a, how difficult would it
be to integrate it into your electrical system? Is it like a male plug thing, or can you just
describe it to our listeners? Yeah, yeah. So it just clips on the wire that comes into the building.
So it measures the total electricity use in that building. It's like a non-invasive sensor.
So you don't have to do any high voltage electric tempering. You just, I like this.
We'll keep the hackers alive. I know. Can you build that yourself?
Or can you buy it? Or what's the story? You can build it yourself.
We have an open hardware business selling kits to build it. So just like a bag of components
with a printed circuit board, and then you assemble it. It's all based on the Arduino,
other heart, as many of these projects are. And it's the basic components. A couple of resistors
and a couple of capacitors to do the actual current sensing. But yeah, it's all on the website.
So openenergymonitor.org is the loads of tutorials and documentation and active forums.
And you can run this on your own server because a lot of people are expecting these smart
measures to come in. Where the electricity companies expect you to pay to make their life a lot
easier. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, that's been, obviously, a really important thing for us is
that every part of this is open. You know, there are even the web service sites. Even if you're
using, because we have a host, we host the software is called Emon CMS. And we host like a public
version of that. And that's completely open. And if someone wants to like push it, push a feature
up there, they can just push it to the GitHub. And then we put it onto the server. Or they can
run it on their own server. And you know, been a complete newb as far as it goes with electrical
standards in different countries. Is there a different, say, if I was using this in the states,
versus using that in the, you know, 110 versus 220 voltage system, is there a difference there?
Yeah, yeah. So in the states, you usually need two current sensors and the voltage sensor,
because they have just a slight, a different electrical system, I guess. So you take into account
all these things when building it. So why would somebody even go to the trouble of doing something
like this? Yeah. So the intention of the, the aim of the project is to create a tool that helps
people optimize their use of energy. So you can, you can find out, you know, what appliances are
using how much electricity and identify, say, potential for saving. And it's also particularly
sort of interesting and it's so exciting to use when, when you have a generation equipment,
like a solar, solar PV, because you can then see when you're generating more than you're using.
And we've got little display as well, which is another little open source hardware unit.
And that glows green when you're generating more than you're using. And red, if you're,
if absolutely fantastic. I actually, my wife will be interested in this particular topic,
because she's quite into green energy and being kind of self-sufficient as much as possible.
And I will, I've been concerned about the amount of electricity that I've been using myself,
which is why I've decommissioned one of my servers and put in a Raspberry Pi and so on.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's actually a good, good topic. So how much would one of these sensors cost?
So the sensor node is a 27 pound kit. That's like an Arduino with the input circuitry to
interface with the sensor. The whole kit to get to do, like, a home energy monitor is about 120
pounds. So that's a base station, a display, and the sensor unit.
And what do you need a base station for? That's for the web connectivity. So you can get all that
data on the web and visualize it in, you know, in as much detail as you want. And when you say
visualise, what am I looking at there? You're looking at nice looking graphs, showing. So say,
um, one, one level is how much you use on a per day basis. So I use 10 kilo hours today and five
kilo hours yesterday. And then you can click on that, on that sort of bar chart and then that'll zoom
in and you can see how you use that just electricity through the day and you can zoom in right to
like the minute level. Okay. And say, right, I identified that I'm using far too much electricity. Can
I do a comparison between people in my neighbourhood or comparatively on a three five person house
and a two-story thing? Can I say, right, am I above using more or using less than somebody else?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, if you've got friends who are also managing, you can do that kind of
comparison. And I mean, there's a lot of information out there on what is sort of average electricity.
So yeah, I mean, yeah, that's definitely possible. And what sort of a license are you releasing
all this under? It's the general public license, the GPGPL, B3. And the the the Eman CMS is GPL
a fair row. So, you know, if you, the idea isn't that on a web service, you also have to contribute
back. I have to get very good. Excellent. Listen, if people are interested in your projects, where can
they go to get more information? Website is OpenEnergyMonitor.org. Yeah, no funny spelling in
there. It's OpenEnergyMonitor. Okay, thank you very much for taking the time to have the
interview. And I look forward to buying one of your kits in the very near future.
I'm down here at the restaurant and I'm talking to some participants in the open source community.
How are you? Who are you and why are you here? I'm why am I here? Oh, I'm my name's Agnes Lynch
and I'm here with Spot, my nephew. One of my grandson, Dan's nephew. We're just here because Scott
needs to be able to mix with the people who do the sort of thing he likes. What did you, if you don't
mind me asking? How old are you? I'm 13 right now, so. And is this your first adult camp? Yes, it is.
And what have you found most interesting about the show? Probably the hardware room because that 3D
print is really interesting. It's pretty awesome, isn't it? I agree. How far has it got already?
Well, so far, it's up to the point where you're almost able to actually make stuff with it.
Yeah, it's going to be great. And have you seen anything of interest up there?
I've been obviously up in the hardware room because I've been keeping my eye on him, but in between
times I've been running off and listening to Raspberry Pi lectures. They're very good at
very tasty, aren't they? Brilliant. What's excite you most about the Raspberry Pi actually?
Involving the children. Yeah, actually the lectures were more on the engineering,
which strangely enough I did manage to understand. But I was more interested in the fact that it's
supposed to be getting young children interested in programming, really, because I think engineering's
too much for very young children, but they have to do it step at a time. So I went along for that
reason, and I've had a chat to the guy who's developing it, and some software engineers.
So I think it's a good thing. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Are you planning on getting a Raspberry Pi
and doing something? Sorry, I'm interrupting you as you can your cake. It's what I do.
Yeah, well, I hope to get a Raspberry Pi at some point, but none's already bought one, so.
This will be Dan from the Linux Outlaws podcast for everybody just so you know.
Well, and what are you going to make? I hopefully will be able to make something that I can use to
edit and make these animations I've been making out of little pieces of microchips and things
that made characters and it's brilliant. Okay, I plan to get one put a motion detector on it.
I live beside the graveyard, you see, and I want to put a motion detector on and the timer so
that only comes on when it's dark, and after the caretaker has gone home, so that is a go.
Hey, not drunk! Let me out!
Okay, Dan, listen, thanks very much for allowing me to interrupt you, and enjoy the rest of your meal.
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