No Speaker: (Music)
DW: Welcome to the Ubuntu UK podcast. You're greeted by me Daviey
TW: I'm Tony
AP: I'm Alan
CD: ...and I'm Ciemon
DW: This show brings us...
AP: An interview with Ian Ozsvald from http://www.showmedo.com
DW: Graham Bleach from Hants. LUG
AP: ...and Mark Shuttleworth
TW: OK, my body clock is telling me it's three in the morning. What a perfect time to do a podcast, lets get on with it.
No Speaker: (Music)
CD: We've spoken about screencasts previously and for this podcast we've got Ian Ozsvald from http://www.showmedo.com
IO: Yes, Thanks for having me along
CD: Tell me about http://www.showmedo.com what is it all about
IO: So, http://www.showmedo.com is an educational video site. You can think of us as YouTube for education. We show screencasts, we only show screencasts, no granny falls off a log videos.
No Speaker: (Laughter)
IO: The whole point of the site is that we realised that we really enjoyed teaching people, my partner and I, Kyran, how to use software, but you have to have us in the room to show you how to use the software.We figured that if there was a video site which showed you how to use software, we could teach people around the world. There wasn't one, so we set about building it and that became http://www.showmedo.com 2½ years ago.
AP: Fantastic! Being you are on Ubuntu podcast, we assume, you have Ubuntu videos on there.
IO: Yep, we've got over 500 screencasts on the site, around fifty of those are to do with Linux, and the majority show Ubuntu in action. A couple recently, show some other derivation of Linux.But, for the most part we got videos showing how to use applications like, Open Office, Inkscape and programing languages like Python, inside Ubuntu. So we've got authors there contributuing these various topics and showing Ubuntu in action.
AP: Excellent, and what do I need if I want to go to the site and view them? Do I need to sign up or anything like that?
IO: No, you can just turn up to the site cold, from Google, and as long as you've got a Flash player installed so you can watch videos on any other video site on the web, then you'll be able watch our videos as well and they'll just stream straight down.
AP: At the moment you have to use the Adobe...
IO: Yes, you need the Ubuntu Flash Plugin. The Gnash one conflicts with the video player we use, so we can't use that at the moment.
AP: But they're working on that I understand
IO: Yes, I understand that there are improvements being made there. For users that don't like that, you can also download the videos and watch them off line.
AP: What format do they come down in?
IO: The videos when you download them, they come down as Flash video, with .flv ending. You can watch that with VideoLAN Client or mPlayer or any of the standard media players on Ubuntu.
TW: So of the 500 videos on the site. Have you and your partner created them all?
IO: Oh no! I've created almost 100 of them in the 2½ years we've been going.But, 400 have been contributed by 70 authors. They're all open source authors, people who have knowledge and like to share it. Then they found us, and they realised they could demonstrate their skills to a world wide audience and so they put aside their time, made the videos. Then we just help teach people how to use software.
TW: How do they make the videos?
IO: You can use Open Source screencasting software. All you need is a microphone, and half our authors use the built in mic on their laptops.Anyone who's got a microphone built in to their laptop, with some Open Source software like RecordMyDesktop, and we've videos showing you how to use that on Ubuntu, can sit back and in the space of a couple of hours start making screencasts.It's interesting, we've grown this huge audience and we've never actively advertised. I've tried a little dabble with Google Adsense. But aside from that it's just word of mouth. Our videos are good, people talk about them and we get a large audience.
AP: What are the ones people clamor for and ask you for?
IO: It's a lot of beginner videos, how do I start using 'X'. Out of all the different topics that we've covered, it's the beginner videos. How do I start writing my first GUI application.How do I install the software and then write my first 'Hello World' GUI tool. Certainly on the Ubuntu ones, how do I use Open Office to write a letter, to configure printing and to configure the letter.
CD: Are you looking at coordinating the content you're providing. Aiming at specific areas, specific bits of software. Or is it just people thinking I'd like to make on IRSSI, the IRC client. Going after anything specific or just people make their videos and put them on and that's it.
IO: People make the videos in their own time for free. They're giving back to the comunity and so we encourage our authors to just make videos on the topics that they enjoy and they know the most about, and they want to share with the world. We don't ask anyone to actively focus on certain topics. If know something and you want to share it, and certainly if you've taught other people that topic before, that's a fantastic area for you to make screencasts in.
DW: So I provide a video files with sound. How do I get that to you?
IO: You login to http://www.showmedo.com and then you get a tab for My Page. It's very much like YouTube. You go into My Page and you can Add Video and then in there, you add some details. You put in a title, a couple of paragraphs description, some tags. Upload the video file, takes maybe half an hour to upload and then our servers process it. Then it's ready half an hour later.One thing to add, unlike YouTube and other video sites. We preview all the material that comes through. We're incredibly careful that we only want educational material so people can trust in us, and we're not an unfiltered video site.Everything comes in. We get notified and then within 24 hours we'll have seen the video and then given any feedback, if necessary. For the most part videos come in, we look at them, we're hugely impressed and we publish them.
TW: If you have all this bandwidth usage. All these people viewing the site and viewing the videos. How do you paying for all that?
IO: It comes out of our own pocket. Starting a video based start-up is an easy propositon if you think about what you're trying to deliver.We run this out of our own investment. Then before Christmas we decided to build up the showmedo club. The club is a subscription based club, it's a bit like subscribing to a magazine.There, rather then produce videos, in a ad-hoc manner, on topics that we thought were interesting. We instead decided to focus on producing a very clear and focused series about ½ hour in length each.Starting with Python. Teaching beginners how to program with Python. It's a club containing all the material you're going to need over time to learn the language.Once we've established that club, and it's growing very nicely at the moment. We're going to spread out in to other areas. I'd imagine that Ubuntu would come into the club, because that's an obvious large open source area we'd love to support.
TW: What is it, specifically, about educational videos that attracted you to start working on this project. Have you done any thing in the educational field before?
IO: Both Kyran and I are long term academics, Kyran much more then me. We are driven by learning, we love to learn and we love to share what we've learned.We know when you pick up a book, you often don't know if what you're reading about will solve your problems. Certainly with computer manuals.But if you can see a video showing you how something works, you can look at it and you can pay half-attention first of all, watching what's happening, and you see your problem has been solved, you can go back and watch it again. Because you know this is exactly what you need to solve your own problem.Video is a very efficient medium for getting across the message.Not only that you can do this, but here are exactly all off the steps you need. Even if a new version of the GUI comes out and the menus are in a different place, you can still follow the gist of the video. Much more so then when a book goes out of date.
TW: That's quite a good point. Because things like screencasts do get out of date when the next version or distribution comes out. The art work changes, the menu locations.Although some people will be able to follow through and sort of guess. There'll be equal another set of people that will be totally thrown by a different menu structure.It's a lot of maintenance to keep those screencasts up to date. Is that something the community shoulders or do you try to keep on top of that.
IO: At the moment, because we're 2½ years old most of the content. Infact almost all of the content is up to date. I've found some of my earliest videos, I've now deprecated them. They're in the site but marked as been deprecated.I would say 5 out of 500 videos are deprecated at the moment. So I'm not worried about material going out of date.As the content base grows that will be come an increasing problem, that's much one for the future. That'll be a nice problem to have.
AP: Are all of your videos in English?
IO: Interesting question. When we started we assumed everything would be in English.It didn't take us very long to find a couple of European authors. One in Belgium and one in Germany. They both wanted to produce content in their home languages. Which in both cases were German.So we have a mostly English content base. With some German videos and then just recently via a European school we've now got Russian and Chinese. I think Spanish video is coming as well. But certainly Russian and Chinese at the moment.
AP: Does that mean your going to have to, or if you already have, internationalise the showmedo interface as well.
IO: We're Unicoded, but the main language is English throughout the site. But desciptions and titles are in home language.
AP: Related to that, there's also the topic of subtitles. Do you include those or have you considered including them?
IO: We have considered including them. We had a problem with the player. A technical issue when we first looked at the problem.So we choose not to worry about encoding subtitles. For our foreign language videos, the authors typically hard code English subtitles. So you can read the English subtitles whilst listening to the foreign voice.
AP: When you say hard code, it's on the video itself.
IO: It's part of the video stream.
AP: Right, OK.
TW: In your wildest dreams, what do you see showmedo becoming in the future.
IO: Becoming a huge educational resource that everybody can call upon. We'd love to have stacks and stacks of free content.We'd love to go beyond video as well. We've even talk about having interactive educational sessions. Almost classrooms on-line.Teach people around the world. If we have the support that we need to grow your side of the business so that we can work at it full time. Then we can keep growing the free side of the business.
AP: So where can people get more information?
IO: Come to http://www.showmedo.com there's a resources menu on the navigation bar. You can find out the author's dicussion forum and the learner's discussion forum.You can come there to talk to us and if you log into the site then you'll be on the mailing list and you'll hear from me every month.We'd just love you to come and get involved. Have a look at the videos, realise how easy it is to make screencasts yourself. Then have a go at making your own and conributing back to the community.
AP: Great stuff
No Speaker: (Music)
AP: We've been given some prizes to give away on the show
DW: Have we?
AP: Yeeeeesss
DW: What have we been given
AP: We've been given some tokens from the Canonical online store
CD: Cool
CD: There's some good stuff in there. How are we going to get rid of these tokens?
AP: We figured we'd have a trivia question and then in two weeks time, when we record the next episode. Which will be the 3rd of May, we'll go through all the answers we've been sent and pick a winner
TW: ...from the hat
AP: In fact, we'll ask Mark Shuttleworth to pick the winner for us.
TW: Wow!
AP: We'll email the voucher to the winner.
TW: Excellent! So, Canonical employees and those of us sitting in this room, recording the podcast, sadly can't enter because that wouldn't be fair.
AP: Anyone else listening to the show can enter. The way they enter is, I'll read out a question, in a minute and you send your answer to competion@ubuntu-uk.org and it needs to get here before the 3rd of May.
DW: A link to that will be in the show notes.
TW: Cool! so, what's the question.
AP: The question is; What's the name of free software only official derivative of Ubuntu?What is the name of free software only official derivitive of Ubuntu?
TW: Good luck everybody
No Speaker: (Music)
DW: Now last week we mentioned about a certian hacking competition which happened where Ubuntu appeared to come out on top. Following that we had Graham Bleach contact us, so I've got Graham here who wants to talk about Unix malware. Hello Graham.
GB: Hiya. So, I was interested in the segment and I thought that there had been a lot of interesting publicity coming out of that competitionWhere there were basicaly three laptops, which were available for people to try and brake into and at the end of the three day competition only the Ubuntu one hadn't been hacked.I thought it was quite interesting, because a lot of people. Mentioning no names, Popey! Seemed to be forming the impression that this proved that some how Linux was more secure than the other OSes and I don't necessarily think that's the case.
AP: Why's that then?
GB: What you've got to remember is, it's a hacking competition where people try to win some money in return for showing a zero day exploit.The interesting thing about it, was that the Mac machine went down first due to a bug in Safari.and then secondly the Windows machine went down due to a bug in flash.The first day it had to be a remote vulnerabilityOn the second day of the competition they were allowed to actually navigate the browser to a web site they'd crafted, which exploited the browserOn the third day they were allowed to install common applications, such as Flash for example. The interesting thing was that Vista did very well, I thought, in the competition. Because it was only when they installed some Adobe software on it, they could actually compromise it.I was thinking that perhaps, if you installed some common applications Linux would be just as vulnerable as the other OSes.
TW: But why was that not the case. Why did people go for the Mac and the Vista box over the Ubuntu box even when they had the opportunity to install all those things.
GB: The frustrating thing is we don't really know and this is why it isn't really telling us much about the security of the platforms.Because we don't know how many people had a go at the Ubuntu laptop and what sort of security backgrounds they had. So it doesn't really tell us anything is what I'm saying.
TW: But isn't system security always a case of not been totally uncrackable, nothing is totally uncrackable. It's just a case of being tougher than the other people. So people go after the easier targets. Which is usually the Windows PC or whatever.
GB: Yeah that's fair enough. The point I've been trying to make is that people in the Linux and Unix communities do to seem to have an attitude that something about the platform makes us more secure.So we don't have to worry about viruses is what I hear people say all the time, and there are Linux viruses in the world. They're just not very common.
DW: So are you saying that the community could potentially be looking into getting a false sense of security over this. If that's the case, how can we avoid this?
GB: We are lulling ourselves into a bit of a false sense of security, yes. How many of us would consider running a Windows box with out a virus scanner.But, how many of us would consider running a Linux box with out a virus scanner and I think many more of us would be happy running say Ubuntu with no virus scanner. I know I do it, myself and I know many other people do it. Where as we wouldn't do the same thing with a Windows box
AP: What should we be doing with our Linux machines to make them as secure as... this sounds wrong... but as secure as a Windows Machine that has all the relevant patches, the anti-virus, and the firewall, and the malware detection and that kind off stuff
GB: At the moment we're in a situation where most Linux users. Most users of, for example, Ubuntu, and Debian and things like that.They're fairly cautious people any way and they tend to be quite highly skilled. But, certainly these days you're attracting more of a different user profile on to the platform.And I think any increase in popularity and any increase in the number of less experienced users will perhaps make Ubuntu, or Linux in general, a more attractive target.So perhaps one of the things you might consider doing is in the way that Ubuntu ships with automatic updates and other things ship with automatic updates turned on, virus scanning should be integrated into your email client and the updates for virus scanning should be turned on by default.
AP: A lot of people who migrate from Windows to Linux, one of the first questions they ask is where do I get the anti-virus software. Because they're so used to it, it's drummed in to them, that on Windows, you absolutely need an anti-virus product.
DW: One thing I'm particular pleased to see with the new Ubuntu Hardy release. They are actually shipping a firewall. I thinks it's great, because previously there was an ethos going around the community it wasn't required because there was no services switched on by default.
AP: So theres nothing listening? Nothing opening connections?
DW: Well of cause there is outbound stuff happening. I'm quite pleased to see the new distribution, the long term release as well, is actually going to have a firewall built in.
AP: Well arguably it's always had a firewall, because iptables is part of the Linux kernel.It's just a case of configuring it.
TW: Is this just a new GUI for configuring the file?
AP: Actually it's not a GUI, it's command line. It's called uncomplicated firewall.
GB: I think one of the things there is, are they going to deal with the problem of, I installed my Skype and now it doesn't work, in sensible way. That sort of usability problem that leads people to just turning the thing off.
AP: Which is exactly what Windows users do. Although a lot of the Mickey Mouse desktop software firewalls that people use have, Skype is trying to make a call, would you like to allow this and allow it permanently and just go yes, and that's it.
TW: The difficulty is, people then get in to the habit of saying yes to anything that pops up because they say no to something and it doesn't work, they're put off from saying no to things in the future.
AP: Absolutely. When an email client spawns a nasty child process and then, the firewall pops up and says your email is trying to contact, they'll let it through.Yeah, sure.And are we going to get to that same point with Ubuntu. If we add these protection measures, like anti-virus and then a graphic firewall. Aren't we just going to lead our users down the same path of, just ticking yes on every dialog.
TW: This is the same sort of thing that Fedora users have had with SELinux. In that, it's designed to restrict what applictions can do. Whether they can open ports, what they can address, what devices they can use, things like that.But, because it was so complex in the past to get up and running. One of the most frequently asked questions about Fedora was, how do you turn SELinux off?
DW: (Laughter)
TW: Now App Armour is in Ubuntu, and I think it's on by default. Things like that seem to be very appropriate tools for stopping things like malware on Unix if it was to propagate. But because they are so complex to manage, people will just turn them off or ignore them and live with the risk.
CD: What is the risk? This is one of the things that is always spoken about in these discussions. If as a user on my Linux system I get a virus and I get infected. So what, I've just infected that one user. Delete the user, make a new user, carry on.
AP: What's the most important thing on your computer? Your data, in your home directory and you have rights to change that. Therefore any program that you run has rights to change and corrupt and delete it.Whilst you may well get to a situation where you install something or you run something that can't propagate it's self because it can't install it's self as a service and run it's self over and over again every time you boot the machine up.It can completely hose all of your data, or pick up all of your passwords from your instant messenger and email them out to some one else.
TW: The most important thing on my system is my data. It's my photographs, my documents, whatever. Obviously I'm a sensible user and I run back ups. If my system was compromised half an hour with an Ubuntu CD I can have a base install back up. An other hour perhaps installing a few additional applications on there. Getting my photographs back if I've not backed those up is impossible.
CD: What about wider reaching things. Virus that are going to try and do system level damage. Obviously you need root permissions to do that.
AP: No, you don't really because you can elevate with tools like sudo.
GB: It's trying to get out of peoples way when they're doing administrative tasks. So they have, say 30 minutes or 15 minutes of potential to use sudo to escalate your privileges.If I were, theoretically, to try and write some malware to target Linux users. The first thing I would do is to try and run something through sudo to see if a could.
AP: ...and schedule it to run every fifteen minutes as user based cron job
GB: Just loop in the back ground and wait until the sudo privileges are available.
AP: Obviously for listeners who don't know, we've just babbled on about sudo. In Ubuntu when you go to System Administartion, any thing under that menu requires administrative access. So that invokes sudo, which escalates your privileges and there are other commands you can run using sudo. There's no way for you to press a button in Gnome or Ubuntu to say kill my sudo privileges, I no longer want that time span. But you could create a shortcut.
TW: If listeners are aware of a way of doing that.
AP: Email in. If we're all completely wrong, especially Graham.
CD: OK we've spoken about most things. What about untrusted software. I've just downloaded a rather nice program for downloading GPS software, but it's from an untrusted source. Should I be worried, what should I be worried about with untrusted packages.
AP: Define trusted.
DW: Well if you've got the GPG key, then Apt won't moan and as far as you're concerned it's a trusted source.
GB: Do we actually believe that the Ubuntu and Debian developers are auditing the source code to make sure there's nothing dodgy in there.I don't believe that. What the GPG key tell us is that the package matches what was uploaded by the developer. It doesn't really tell us whether the software is safe or not.
TW: Isn't that the developers job. Can developers, reasonably, be expected to audit code for security.It does happen. Apache and SSH and things like that. Where they do quite tight security code audits. There's probably 100 applictions, for every one that's heavily audited that isn't, and developers just take the source code from the original site, package it up, tweak it for the Debian packaging guide lines and of they go.
DW: I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect a Debian developer or the Master of the Universe for the Ubuntu Universe repository. For them to actually know some of the software inside out to be able to see security issues.
GB: We know that people have tried to, for example, introduce a back-door into the Linux Kernel. I think there was a famous case a while ago were TCP wrappers was compromised for several months. They simply broke in and installed a back door and watched as people downloaded it
CD: So, if we've got our security heads on, then really, we can't trust anything. So, how do we keep a check on our systems, or how do we watch to make sure that something untoward isn't going on. What can I do to make sure my system isn't emailing passwords and things back out to somebody on the other side of my firewall.
AP: Part of that would be having a decent firewall
DW: Outbound as well, checking, as most people only do NAT as a firewall and that's checking inbound only
TW: It's who you trust. I have to trust Canonical and the Ubuntu teams, that they do a good job of packaging the core applications.I have to trust that Linus and his team can develop the kernel properly. I have to trust the open SSH team that they do a good job.I'm not a programmer. I couldn't start to sit down and look at the source code for all these applications let alone understand what the implications of every single line and every single function might be.To say yes this is written in a reasonably sane way, and no matter how good they are there is always going to be security vulnrabilities. You've just got to put your faith in certain groups or certain bodies, and certain organisations and just say I'm going to trust you with the security of my system. And the question you've got to ask as a user, I think, is do you trust Canonical and those people over, say Microsoft or Apple.
DW: Launchpad now makes it really easy for you to package and actually have your own repository on Launchpad and it's called PPAs. Which is Personal Package Archive. I think we've talked about them before. I'm actually quite suprised we haven't actually had more problems with malicious software going into them. Because the thing is I could package something up which would potentially have something harmful in there.I'm suprised we haven't had more problems with that.
AP: Maybe as the platform becomes more popular, we will, as graham says. Part of the reason this isn't happening is because we don't have the mass of people using it.
CD: So it's safe to assume actually that we shouldn't be complacent, just because you're running Linux doesn't mean it's secure. I know there are loads of experts out there and I really hope that we get stacks of feedback about this, I'd like to see what people are doing to secure their systems. Let us know.
No Speaker: (Music)
TW: I've been away for a couple of weeks and I've not been on the internet very much, I've missed all the news. What's been going on?
AP: Red Hat have pulled out of the desktop Linux market
CD: Again?
DW: Did they ever actually enter it?
TW: What's all this mean for Fedora?
CD: Who cares
AP: MySQL have announced, that in the enterprise version there's going to be some proprietary componants that won't be in the community edition.
TW: That's Sun getting open source again then.
AP: Yeh, so are Sun evil?
No Speaker: <Music>
AP: There's a new feature on the Hardy CD, that's recently been introduced. It allows you to install a free software only desktop.
TW: Isn't that what Gobuntu does?
AP: Yes, but it's not as free as Gobuntu
TW: It's only a bit free.
DW: So, are you telling me I get the normal Ubuntu desktop, the only difference is that I can't use my wireless?
AP: Related to that. On the Gobuntu developer mailing list, there's currently a lengthy discussion, kicked off by Mark Shuttleworth, of rethinking Gobuntu and it's relationship with the community and it's relationship with the gNewSense distribution.
CD: Does it have relationship with the community?
No Speaker: <Music>
CD: Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support, is being released on Thursday 24th April.
AP: On the same day as the Hardy release, there's a Hardy release party. There's one in London at De Hems in Soho.From the 16th May for a week there is two events, FOSSCamp and then followed by the Ubuntu developers summit.
DW: Where is that?
AP: Prague.
DW: There's also Ubuntu Live coming up on July 21-22 at the Oregon Covention Center in Portland, Oregon, America.
No Speaker: <Music>
AP: We have Mark Shuttleworth on the line. Hello Mark
MS: Hi there, how are you guys?
AP: Not bad at all. We want to get you on to have a little chat about Ubuntu in the UK. And we want to ask you a few questions. We've got a neq release coming up, Hardy.
DW: Which I'm sure he actually knows about.
AP: Yeh, I think Mark is aware of that. How are things going from your side of the fence.Well this is clearly our most significant release ever, as a community I think more people would have contributed to this release and more people will have very high expectations of this release.So the anticipation is running very high. Indications are all very good, we've put a release candidate out.The feedback has been very positive throughout the beta program, and we fully expect to hit the release date of 24th, so its very exciting.We've got a lot of companies and a lot of other communities around the world that are watching to see how we do.
AP: Yeh, the release tends to go a bit mad really doesn't it? Your servers take a bit of a hammering, a lot of people jump on IRC and we have parties all over the place.
MS: Yeh, it's time for celebration, it's kind of a combination of an intense six months and an opportunity to blow of some steam.I think we'll be putting a 14GB/s of Ubuntu just from London, and there will probably be about another 10GBs going out from other mirrors around the world, we have a fantastic mirror network of about 200 mirrors that will all be up to speed. So it's going to be a big day.
AP: Yeh it's phenominal the amount of traffic you push, that people just seem so eager to get hold of it. I know we're all Ubuntu fans so we are gonna be jumping on the mirrors and grabbing it.
MS: Well have you guys been running the beta through the course of development or do you tend to wait for the release and then upgrade?
AP: I guess it depends, I mean personally I run it on a couple of machines and then just do the incremental updates, so there's little for me to do on the end.
MS: For folks who install the beta or the release candidate it's a really small update usually to the final. It's the way to get heading of the insane rush, but then there's also something to be said for waiting until the green light and downloading the final images.
DW: I mean one thing I found is, where I have been running it for quite a while now the changes have been so incremental that I am not going to see a big difference.Now if I suddenly changed over on release date I would be really excited with all the changes we're having, sort of wish maybe I had waited for the green light now.
MS: If you go back, if you have a machine which is running an older version, Feisty or Gutsy and do the update there you suddenly realise just how much happens in a six month cycle, it's incredible.
AP: Well now this is a LTS release, there's clearly going to be some people who are upgrading from Dapper, so there is going to be a major change for them.
MS: It's really impressive to me that the guys have managed to make that a smooth upgrade. In part I think that's credit to the Debian community, the underpinnings of Ubuntu in Debian are so vigorously well designed that it makes that kind of thing possible. So we should give credit to them for that.
AP: Yeh, absolutely.
MS: Right, so there's a whole bunch of release parties on the day, and I guess you guys will be able to point guys at the wiki, but I believe there are atleast one, possible two release parties happening in London.So I thought it would be a good thing to invite folks to get on the wiki, take a look at those and come and join us on the day.
TW: Canonical are having one, is that right?
MS: Well we've organised one in Soho at De Hems and there's a bit of a tradition of one at the Penbury as well , that some folks go to. I think its one of the few bars in London that has a history of Ubuntu parties, and a pool table, and I think they have bandwidth.
AP: Last time I think they organised to have a mirror of the iso images so that if you wanted to have beer and iso.
MS: Would be the only Ubuntu mirror hosted in a pub.
No Speaker: (Laughter)
AP: That is some accolade to have actually. I remember the Gutsy party when you turned up and were giving me instructions over my shoulder to help someone get wireless enabled on their IBM laptop I think. I don't know how many people are able to claim that Mark Shuttleworth fixed my laptop.
No Speaker: (Laughter)
MS: Ofcourse we all look forward to the day when that's not necessary, and it just works. So let me know how it goes.And there aren't that many of you to go around, yes.
DW: So, can I just confirm will you be buying bars next for this party Mark?
MS: I think it will be a cash bar, but the company will all be good, so I recommend that guys get out and join us.So the release is a great time for celebration, but it's also a time for us to kind of mark a full cycle. Our community is really big and so we have tragedies during the course of a release cycle, and I heard just the other day of a community member here in the UK who died tragically in February.So I thought this would be a good opportunity to honour Lee Tambia for his contribution to Ubuntu. I know that he was a real advocate and passionate member of the community, and it's very very sad to lose someone in an untimely way, but I think that is part of the meaning of community right, this is a project which involves more than people's professional commitment, its sort of an extended network of friends and family. So there's sometimes that aspect of reality, so to those of you who knew Lee, my heartfelt condolences and to all of us who benefitted from his work and his advocacy and his enthusiasm. This is a good time to remember him.
TW: Well said.
AP: Thanks very much Mark.
DW: Yeh, thank you Mark.
MS: You guys do groovy work, I hope that the next couple of days are all smooth, and have a very very good weekend.
TW: Thanks for coming on the show Mark, it's appreciated Mark.
No Speaker: (Music)
AP: Harlem and Peter from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast, which you can find at http://www.freshubuntu.org/ asked me to go on their show last week, and it was really great fun. Nice to see how different podcasts are done in different ways and quality turned out really well, I was a bit concerned about using skype but it actually came out pretty well, and we had a bit of feedback sent here from David in Spain which we got via voicemail.
D(: Hi, good afternoon, this message is for Alan Pope of the Ubuntu-UK podcast. This is David from Spain and I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your contribution to the Fresh Ubuntu podcast this week, and I am now in the process of downloading the first three episodes of the podcast. So nothing more to say other than good luck and look forward to some great content in the future.
TW: Thanks very much David that's good to hear. We had quite a few e-mails as well following the last episode, David Gobwin e-mailed in about the GUI vs. CLI segment and he says "In the GUI there is only way to do something and each option or checkbox normally has a help button near it and a short descriptive text, so there is no scope for mistakes. Where as on the CLI you are just faced with a huge sort of chasm of despair almost, you can anything you like but only if you know what you need to do. It's obviously very powerful.."but David says "...when you are feeling clueless typing in some effectively non-english word with some seemingly arbitrary characters afterwards just deepens any feeling of helplessness you may have."
DW: Well put.
CD: We got another one from Sep in Bottrop in Germany who commented on the show and the fact that obviously English is his second language.Quite an interesting point is that obviously he's trying to follow our English and is doing quite well apart from the last podcast. Obviously we are gaining confidence and we all sped up, and he struggled a bit. So we've tried to slow right down on this one to give him a hand. But thanks for the feedback Sep.
TW: Yeh the difficulty is when we're really getting into a discussion and we kind of forget our microphone technique, and the fact that we're recording it for other people and just get into the argument.
AP: And accelerate and accelerate.
TW: So sorry if we do it, keep reminding us and we'll try and keep it to a minimum.We had an e-mail from Graham Bleach.
AP: Who happens to be sat here.
TW: Who happens to be sat in the room at the moment. Asking who we're aiming the podcast at.
AP: Graham happens to be here, so what prompted you to ask that question. What made you wonder what our target was?
GB: I guess I listened to the first three episodes and I was wondering if there was going to be some more techie stuff, because I'm quite techie, I've been using Linux for a long time and I deal with it professionally at work. So I quite enjoy getting into more technical detail about things.Although I understand it doesn't always work on a podcast.
AP: Yeh, we had a comment last week didn't we? From someone who wanted us to have some technical howtos. That was Paul O'Malley, contacted us, wanted some technical howtos, and we kind of discussed it over the week between us, and we're still really twitchy about doing it because it's hard to do something that's not dry.
TW: But I don't think excludes technical discussions about things like firewalling, and IPv6, and VoIP, and virtualisation. The sort of things you could really get into without still giving huge long command lines.
DW: Obviously we need to keep a good blend of high and low level stuff for both new users and seasoned users.
AP: We should get some feedback really and find out what people want us to do.
CD: We've put a bit of a constraint on ourselves and its been commented on actually. That we're limiting the show to about forty minutes, so if we're going to cover things for everybody, we are quite limited in that amount of time.
AP: I had a message on IRC from Chris Oattes, who is in the Ubuntu UK community. And we've mentioned over the last few episodes that we'd like some feedback, not only feedback but we'd like contribution as well.And he wanted to know exactly what kind of contribution we want. One way in which we could get more contributions would be to explicitly spell out what we would like people to contribute, do you think this would help? and if so what should we ask for.
GB: If was wondering if you guys could have a segment for people to send in their contributions, so you'd have a short spot and it would be perhaps a very very short essay on someones particular hot topic, or a tip that would work well on audio. I wondered if thats a good way to start and they could even leave them as a voicemail perhaps, if its a thirty second, or what's your voicemail limit again?
AP: The voicemail would be quite nice to have a thirty second clip, and that would work really well. If someones got a tip that they could give in thirty seconds then yeah, call the voicemail number.
TW: I think basically we'll accept any contributions, as long as it's of a quality we can put out on the show, both from a sort of audio quality and content.You'll have got the idea from the interviews and things that we've done, and the discussion contents that we've had, the sort of things that would be good.But pretty much anything, tips, contributions, whatever. Send it in.
AP: We've got a page which is linked on the left hand side of the website, so if you go to http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/, which is submission guidelines that tells you how to record something, and some tips for getting the best quality recording, and send it to us.
TW: We'd be really eager to help you out with that and give any further advice, if you want help grab us on IRC or e-mail the show.
AP: I mentioned on the Twitter feed, which you can get to at http://www.twitter.com/uupc, I mentioned that we had a competition coming up. I also mentioned it on the mailing list and a few people decided they would decide what the topic would be, which would be a limerick competition.Which, that's not what it is, but they're great limericks anyway, so we have a couple of limericks to read you.
DW: So we had a submission from Josh Blacker, and his limerick was actually, "There once was a podcast by popey, And Daviey and Ciemon and Tony, Though the content was great, Some said the music did grate, But those complainers are just dopey."
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DW: And he says to himself "It's possibly the worst limerick ever written."
AP: I don't know, not so bad, it's got our names in so it cant be that bad.
TW: Yeh, I think I'll go along with it.
AP: OK.
DW: And we had one from Sean Anderson, and his was "There once was a podcast by Alan, And Daviey and Tony and Ciemon, About a system named ubuntu, Abruptly popey said "I'll have a bun too," And then asked for extra cinnamon."
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CD: That really doesn't work.
DW: So, I'm afraid Sean you don't win that.
TW: Although he's got Alan's eating habits down quite well.
AP: If you'd like to send your feedback to us then you can use a number of ways, we have an e-mail address which is podcast@ubuntu-uk.org, we have a Twitter feed that you can subscribe to and send messages to, which is http://www.twitter.com/uupc
DW: And we also have a voicemail, where you can leave your messages at 0845 508 1986, and they can be up to thirty seconds in length.
TW: And you can join us on IRC at #ubuntu-uk on the Freenode network.
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AP: Thanks to Ian Ozsvald from ShowMeDo.
DW: And Graham Bleach.
CD: And also Mark Shuttleworth.
TW: I'd like to say hello to Nicolas <unknown>, who came up to me at LugRadio Live in the USA and said he enjoyed the Ubuntu UK podcast. So thank you Nicolas.
AP: Yay.
TW: That's about it for this time, we'll see you next time. Bye bye.
CD: Cheers.
AP: Bye.
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