Je Hais Le Printemps

After a few evenings of work I finally managed to hack on a minimal code to publish Beer Over IP using a tiny Django application (0.96).

To get the full power of this awesome application (you know you want one in your living-room, right?) just quickly browse the list of available beers. Yes, I know... At the moment, it's a short list... But thanks to the "user-generated-content" principle, you can help providing more items via our Launchpad bug interface. Please send us:

• the name of the beer,
• a picture or a link to the picture, with the absolute requirement: it must be Free (Creative Commons, license, for example),
• appropriate credits,

Yes, it's your turn. With your help, your favorite poison will soon be available to anyone via the Internet Protocol.

The source code powering this website is distributed under a dual license... You may redistribute it using the terms of the WTFPL or the BEERWARE license. The first one allows you to do what the fuck you want with this code, while the other ones offers you to do what you want with this code, and if we meet in real life, you may buy me a beer.

(note: for this application, I didn't follow the principles I told about in my previous post. I know. But this is a pet project, don't make me think that this project deserves a multiple team organisation)

As it has been announced on our Launchpad Project page and as Florian "tiax" Heinle sent a reminder to us all, PyRoom 0.3.1 has been released, and is ready to be translated... So far, a few languages have been quickly done via Rosetta, but anyone knowing English and another tongue may proceed and help PyRoom being available in every available language on Earth (and beyond?)

Let me inform you that, after a few geeky-kung-fu actions, you may instal lPyRoom in Ubuntu using our officiel PPA repository.

Typing

sudo apt-get install pyroom

Oh yeah.

What is the very first thing that I must do when I've registered a project into Launchpad?

The answer MUST NOT BE "dive into code".

From my experience, you have to create at least 3 to 4 different teams, each one of them having different levels of permissions and aiming at different tasks.

Matthew Walster, alias dotwaffle twittered this:

Opsview_IRC++ Big help guys, thanks! Now, there ought to be a site for BeerOverIP - Scred?

Then I jumped on my keyboard and quickly bought-published : Beer Over IP website (very dirty HTML at the moment).

From now, if you want to offer a beer over the web to someone, you can.

TODO:

• give people the choice to offer a different sort of beer (beeroverip.org/stout, beeroverip.org/lager, beeroverip.org/blonde). I don't think I could be able to use free (as in speech) pictures of different brands.
• internationalise it.

All the credits du to Florian Heinle (known as tiax on Launchpad), and the rest of the Pyroom dev team, and it can be announced that the version 0.3 of PyRoom has been released!

You can download the tarball from Launchpad, and wait a bit for the Debian / Ubuntu package to land, but this wouldn't be too long. You may want to browse the brand-new-shiny (and it's all tiax's work, again) PyRoom Website for more information.

For the record, PyRoom is a full-screen monochrome text-editor, which prevents you from being distracted while writing. It's fully written using Python with GTK bindings, and is being Freely distributed under the terms of the GPL v3 License.

Enjoy!

It's kinda like a "release" : the slides (S5 format) and python source code of Baguette on Snails are available.

I've picked up the WTFPL license to publish the code. First, because it's ultimately free, compatible with itself, and that it fits perfectly with the stupidity of the content.

Now waiting for the video...

It's quite a tradition, now : the 2008 edition of Lugradio Live has been a total success. about twenty speakers talked on three tracks about various very interesting topics during a fantastic week-end (sun was even briefly involved!).

Once again, it's been a pleasure to meet my good friends from oversea, and even meet people I've never met ; some of them being stars in FLOSS, the others being totally unknown, but everyone being so friendly that it was very... Lugradio-ish, if you see what I mean.

A few clouds in this blue sky, however ; on saturday, the manager of the venuebar that was inside the venue, the Lighthouse, bounced Russ and Jen, apparently because they brought their baby with them ; and Xalior had words with the same manager, who apparently pushed a little bit aggressively a friend of his, Penny. She was on a wheelchair, by the way. This kind of attitude is really not in the spirit of a party. I assume that something went really wrong at this very moment and it let me a bad taste in my mouth. Well... maybe it was a bit because of the karaoke, too.

Boo.

Talking about my "talk" about Baguette on Snails, everything went pretty well, apart from the fact that I forgot one of my power jokes, unfortunately. Okay, so, for those who were there, and for the others:

In baguette on snails virtual machine, if you want to exit, you just have to type in "surrender" at prompt, and the VM says "RUN AWAY!"

As usual, I almost died 10 minutes before being on stage. Normal stuff. Move along.

picture by JonTheNiceGuy, CC-BY-SA licensed.

Baguette on Snails is my framework of choice
- Aq.

Laughing out loud. The slides and the source code I used for this talk will soon be available online. The python code will be published under the terms of a Free license, even if I doubt that anyone would take any advantage from it.

The biggest laugh on the week-end was definitely the sudden apparition of a giant furry racoon, nicknamed "Chinny". Underneath it, the true-and-only-one mrben, who also bravely accepted to climb on stage for the Gong-a-thong sequence, wearing only his underpants, the gloves and feet of this Racoon...

It was absolutely hilarious to see Jono watching Ben it this "suit"... Unforgettable.

In my humble opinion, also, between Tux and the Chinny Racoon... I'm quite sure that the Racoon is the toughest guy, don't you think?

No kidding, the super-mega-big-fucking-great-news, was the announcement that, even if the regular show actually stops, there will be another Lugradio Live next year!!! Seriously, I assumed that an informal meeting would have been planned on a yearly basis, but the fact that the four large gents received tons of emails begging for a Live event convinced them to do so. I think there is a need for this sort of "expo", as a counterpart of "normal" floss-based-events.

The Lugradio Live is a perfect mix of "serious" talks and some stupid presentations I've been part of. The FLOSS community apparently wants this kind of 50/50 funny/serious yearly event. Please note that the other less "rock&roll-styled" conferences are still needed too ; there's enough room for any kind of expo.

As far as I can tell, I'll be there next year. And you can count on me to push you to be there too. Yes. You too.

Lugradio Live UK'2009. Bring it on.

Well, that's it. All the goods things must end one day. Even the things that you couldn't believe to have an end.

I'm sad, but I do understand why and how the gang decided to finish at the end of the season 5. There are tons of reasons: being tired of it, trying to end the show before people arguing about it being less interesting as time passes by, etc.
I'm fine with that. What's sad is that it's like losing a friend or something. Someone you don't meet all the time, every day, but someone you care for. You had great times with him (or her), sometimes you had arguments, sometimes jokes that made you cry out of laughter. Now the friend is gone, and you don't want that to happen.

And you struggle with the 5 steps of mourning:

• Deny: Oh come on, Jono, tell us it's joke! Aq! stop that - it's not funny!
• Anger: Fuck off, guys. You bastards, You don't have the right to stop it!
• Bargaining: Maybe if we kidnap them we can force them to record more shows
• Depression: Now we won't have the opportunity to see the lovely Wolverhampton, what a waste! - ok, this one is a lie... - How will I meet mrben, neuro, Xalior, and all the others, now? - yeah better
• Acceptance: well... c'est la vie

But what moves me is that a tons of things happened in my life just because of these 4 guys speaking in a microphone every fortnight. Unordered:

• I cried out of laughter listening to the National Lottery Rant,
• I switched to Ubuntu Linux because of their 15 seconds review of Warty (I'd probably switch to Linux anyway, but they did probably fasten this process),
• I made my first trip abroad alone
• I made my first trip in the UK,
• I could go to the EUROOSCON in Amsterdam,
• I've met / seen talks of dozens of interesting people, some famous (Jeff Waugh, Mark Shuttleworth, Matthew Garett, Simon Willison, Scott James Remnant, Bastien Nocera, Jonathan Riddell, Gervase Merkham, Mirco Müller) some "unknown" (mrben, Xalior, neuro, schwuk, resiak, davee, Aquarion, pickle, Russ and Jen, Chairmanmeow and GingerDog, Essk, Cillian, Bryn_S, popey, Treenaks, Dave Morley, Daviey, tonytiger and Laura, and all the other bunch that makes the Lugradio Massive). There are some I may not meet again, some I had a nice chat and/or a beer with, some I can say they're my friends.
• I had so many nice advices, hints, tips, help and support while hanging on #lugradio on IRC, I can't count them.
• I massively improved my english (well, I've learned idiomatic phrases as well as more swear words),
• I massively improved my english accent,
• I drank my first (and last) sip of TVR,
• I made my first talk in English,
• I discovered that british can't make proper coffee, so that's probably the reason why they drink tea,

(and so much more)

The sum of these points led me to say loudly and I still thinks it's true: Lugradio is my LUG.

So, kudos to the whole Lugradio team: Steve, Matt, Ade, Chris, Adam, Stuart, Jonathan for these long years of happiness, fun and big mouth arguing about Free Software and Open Source.

What will happen now? There's a Freenode channel that just can't stop, there are forums that will probably slowly die. There are a bunch of people I'll be sad not to be able to visit every year, in the shittiest city in the UK (right after Cumbernauld).

Lugradio is still my LUG, will always be. The show may end, but the spirit and the people hanging around this show won't leave.

• According to this page, I need IE7 to save the Earth,
• I don't have it, and don't want to download it,
• If you go to using Firefox, you land on this page stating that you absolutely need IE, thus Windows to browse the website.
• Go and fetch the User Agent Switcher extension,
• Change your agent to "IE on Windows"
• Go back to carbon grove
• ...
• BANG! IT WORKS, YOU RETARD

34.

I know people who'll laugh at me reading this post, but, whatever. I often say: The problem is not the media, it's the message. That could make a nice conclusion, really. All right, I'll copy-paste it at the end. Couldn't hurt.

Much ado for nothing.

Well, it looks like it's good news for users, and bad news for Microsoft and Yahoo! shareholders.

But what a waste of time...

It's so wicked, I just can't tell you more on this...

There's even a ouaibesite

Hi all,

First of all, I can now tell to the world that this blog is proudly powered by Django

It's been tough work rebuilding this home-made-application, but now I have a much cleaner, more reliable code base. In the meantime, I've managed to reset my templates - you may want to watch the website directly, it's a lot prettier, now - cleanup the models a little, make a python script that converted articles, comments and such in my new database, etc.

The code won't be released, but I may publish a few snippets and extracts that will prove the power of Django.

(btw, sorry for the "spam" in planet.lugradio.org)

As someone said it: "that's a title."