No Speaker: Intro Music
CD: Welcome to Episode 18 of Season 2 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast. It's Friday the 20th of November 2009 and in this episode we're going to hear from Stuart Langridge and Eliot Murphy about the fantastic new Ubuntu Music Store, we'll cover the latest events, and then we'll have even more from Stuart Langridge, this time with Jono Bacon, talking about their new podcast and then we'll do the competition, ecosphere, and some feedback. I'm Ciemon and this week there's three of us again. A bit of a swap around; the two regulars of course... Three, it's the magic number
TW: Three, it's the magic number.
LC: Yeah
CD: Come on what's been going on this week you two.
TW: Laura, come on, you go first.
LC: I got a new car.
TW: It's very nice.
LC: It is. It's all shiny, I got it this afternoon.
CD: Is it an open source car?
LC: No, but it does do 60 miles to the gallon, I'm told.
CD: It looks quite geeky, it's got a sorta nice geeky look to it.
LC: That's a bit true. Yeah.
CD: A C1 is it?
LC: Yeah, a C1
CD: Very nice.
LC: It's all shiny and silver
CD: Whose going to be the first denter you or him?
LC: I don't think I've ever dented a car.
No Speaker: <laughter>
CD: Oh dear.I'll do it on my way out.
TW: This goes out on Wednesday so that's five days to put that right.
LC: I don't think I have.
TW: No, not yet.
CD: What've you been up to mate?
TW: Very little Ubuntu wise, although I've been using Ubuntu to write some essays. I'm doing a course at the moment so I'm writing those big essays and it's quite interesting using Open Office a bit and using some of the more advanced features in that. Learning how to format documents all the same way as the style guides say, but they're all written for Word and you're trying to do it with something else.
CD: Uh-huh. I thought, aren't they not going to take Open Office off Ubuntu and just leave G-editor.
LC: Trouble maker
CD: More on that later.
TW: Yeah, something like that. Anyway, what about you?
CD: I've been using Ubuntu. You know I'm a Crunchbang fan. I've gotten a bit tired of not having all the latest crack. So I've installed Karmic on a couple of systems. Which was going really well.
TW: Until?
CD: Until I had no sound.
TW: Ah
LC: Ah
TW: Yeah, I've had quite a few problems with sound as well on Karmic.
LC: Yeah, people at work have.
TW: Yeah, hopefully they'll sort it out in a few weeks or so.
LC: I did get asked if I knew anybody who knew about sound on Linux in general. And I don't think I do. Does anybody out there know?
CD: There's a fair bit out there on the wiki and stuff about how to diagnose your problem, but..
TW: I've had even quite fairly simple things fail like trying to play back a file using Totem. I think if something grabs a hold of it and grabs a hold of the sound device it won't play anything else. It seems like that sort of problem. But, yeah, i mean it's some fairly fundamental things not working which is a bit odd.
CD: Well normally I do a release upgrade so I"ll go from an old release to a new release, but I've stopped doing that. And I've said this in the past that I think it's a really -and Popey would fight me to the death over this- but I think it's a really bad way of doing things so these installs have been fresh to make sure it all works. And in fact, both did, worked just find soundwise and everything else and then without an update or anything the sound just stopped and has not come back.
TW: Ive had issues with Nautilus as well just stopping working. You if you're looking at a directory using Nautilus that it previews all the icons. Sometimes it just sits there with a little spinning icon and doesn't show you any files in the directory. And it's a little, I dunno, there just seem to be a few little rough edges.
CD: We should do a fault diagnosis segment shouldn't we? Maybe we should do that next season.
TW: Next season, yeah.So where is Tweedle Dee and and Tweedle Dum then?
CD: They're out in the States, aren't they? Decided what's going to be in Lucid Lynx
TW: Yeah, they're letting Dave and Alan decide.
CD: Frightening.
TW: It'll all go wrong.
LC: We've seen a picture of Daviey with a gun
TW: That made me glad I was the other side of the Atlantic from that, but yeah, they seem to be having a good time. They've sent us a couple of interviews, as Ciemon said at the beginning, so we're gonna play those in.
CD: And that's about it.
LC: Sounds like a fun packed show!
No Speaker: Bumper music
AP: Okay, I'm here with Stuart Langridge and Eliot Murphy from Canonical, now you both work on the Ubuntu One project. Now we've talked about Ubuntu One before. Can you just give us the 30-second elevator pitch for what Ubuntu One is.
SL: Well, Ubuntu One is bringing cloud services to Ubuntu. When we started off we did file synchronization so you could save files on your local machine and they'd be synced up to the cloud and then down to your other machines no problem. Since then we've gone on to do Tomboy note synchronization and contacts from your Evolution address book and that was all released for Karmic which came out recently, as I suspect your listeners may know.
AP: And today we saw the announcement that there was going to be extra functionality for Lucid.
EM: Yeah, so we're talking about improvements to the services we already had, but the really exciting thing today was announcing a music store where in the default music player in Ubuntu, you'll now be able to go buy from a very large catalog and get that music downloaded right onto your Ubuntu machine.
AP: And so by "very large catalog" do we mean the kind of music that people will hear on the radio or are we talking weird artists on open source websites
SL: This is not just a very large catalog of independent artists, this is major label music exactly the same as other famous computer music stores you may have heard of. So you'll be able to, from your Ubuntu desktop, get the music that you want to listen to, download it, and play it.
AP: And will this be a seamless experience in the applications we're already used to? Or will it be a new app? How will that be implemented?
EM: It's the app that's already there, Rythymbox is the default music player. And there'll be you select the store, you'll see a new tab in Rythymbox and you'll be able to browse the catalog and purchase music using your Ubuntu One account.
AP: So the only prerequisite really is that you're running an Ubuntu desktop, you've got Rythymbox -which is in by default, and you've signed up for Ubuntu One.
SL: Correct
AP: I'm getting this, this is really good. I like this, it's really easy. Obviously there's going to be deals struck between Canonical and some record labels and how are you implementing the buying stuff? Is that going to be your going to pass us off to some third party to buy stuff or is it going to be straight away in the music player I can get it straight away or how is that going to work?
EM: There will be phases we're going to partner with someone who specialises in building white label music stores so there will be an Ubuntu Music Store. And then that will be presented through a browser control in Rythymbox. That's sort of phase one what we're talking about doing for Lucid. At some point in the future we'll have access to all the APIs for that music store and we'll do an even richer, more seamlessly integrated experience. You won't have to do anything crazy in order to get the music downloaded -go off to a separate website or something- it will be integrated right into the player so you put in your credit card details and buy the tracks you want. They'll be downloaded automatically into your music library.
AP: And what format will those music files come down in?
SL: MP3s. That sort of thing is largely controlled by the record labels, so the bitrates of the MP3s vary. They tend to go from 320kbs all the way down to 128 or something, but they will come down as MP3s.
AP: And out of the box, obviously, I can't play MP3s so are you dealing with some magic that will make that work? Or am I going to use the existing features that automatically get codecs or whatever?
EM: So for now we're not changing that experience at all. It will work exactly the same way as it does now in Karmic, where gstreamer prompts you for getting some codecs on your machine the first time you play some MP3s or other types of files. This is just about providing a very easy conduit for you to actually buy music on your Ubuntu machine.
AP: So onece I've downloaded my music and I can play it in Rythymbox,once I've got the codecs, and that's a one time thing and most users will do that, I guess.
SL: Most users, I would say, would already have them.
AP: Yeah, a user that's already using Ubuntu, yes, fair point. But a new user, brand new experience, they've never used this before, obviously their going to sign up, but, yeah, you're right they probably already have. How do they then get that, is it going to be seamless that they can get that music, once they've downloaded it, onto their music player, whatever that might be?
EM: We think we might need a file syncing sort of service kinda thing to make that happen. We have one of those in Karmic. In Karmic it only syncs the Ubuntu One folder in your home directory. One of the other things that we're doing in Lucid is to allow users to select "oh I'd like these other folders in my home directory to be synced also" so you'll be able to very easily say "please sync my music folder" and that will sync around to all your machines. I don't think we've mentioned it so far, these MP3s will have no DRM. It's totally okay for you to play them on your other computers as well and Ubuntu One will make it very easy to put those, not only back them up to the cloud, but make them availible on all your laptops.
AP: And will there be limitations on numbers of machines you can copy them across to?
EM: No, so you're purchasing the music, you own the music and it's for you to use on your machines, but there's no DRM that's counting how many laptops you put it on or anything like that.
AP: So if I've got oodles of machines and they all run Ubuntu One and I choose to share my music folder with Ubuntu One file sync service, they just magically appear on all my machines and everything's happy and no federal law agency or copyright people are going to come knocking on my door and tell me I'm using too many copies of my music.
EM: Right, and of course nobody has machines that don't run Ubuntu, but if someone theoretically did, they could then go to the Ubuntu One website and download their songs right from the the web interface that has all their files.
AP: Will that mean that I could download the songs I've already bought? So if I've gone through the Rythymbox interface and downloaded an album and I'm at my parents' house and I want to listen to music while I'm using their computer could I go to the store in the browser and redownload and play it there?
EM: So you won't go to the store and redownload from the store. They only give you one or two downloads and cut you off. It's very much like purchasing in a real store: there's a transaction and you get the item, but I think everyone will want to just sync those items with Ubuntu One to have them backed up and you will be able to go to the Ubuntu One website and download them as many times as you want.
AP: Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. So I can go to my sycronized files that are on Ubuntu One. That makes total sense. So as well as music, what about other types of media like audio books or movies, is any of that being considered for this cycle?
EM: So we want to do other types of media as well, but for Lucid, for this cycle, it's just music. We're still exploring how to get TV shows and audiobooks and other things in. This is just the first step.
AP: What about other players? I know Rythymbox is the default, but a lot of people, you know choice is a great thing on Linux, and a lot of people choose different players like Banshee and Amorak and so on. Will there be scope to make the functionality to work in those other players as well?
SL: Well our implementation is going to be, first of all, relatively simple and, secondly, relatively easy to port to other players because what we're actually doing is exposing basically a webbrowser control with a certain amount of cleverness around it to handle downloads and so on. It won't very difficult for someone to look at how that works and then port that to an alternative media player, Banshee or Amorak or whathave you, and part of what we're going to be doing is exposing the APIs we're going to be using and the documentation of those APIs from the partner, whoever that is, so other people can look at that at build their own players that go through the Ubuntu One, go to the Ubuntu one music store.
EM: So today in one of the sessions we were talking with someone from KDE about making sure we do this in a way that's as easy as possible to integrate into KDE music player and other music players that people might want to do. So what we're committing to deliver is something in Rythymbox, but we're trying to make it very very easy for people to pick up and do work and integrate into other music players.
AP: And in terms of the development work you're doing, how much of it is free and open software and how much is closed stuff behind closed doors?
SL: Absolutely everything we're building is open source. The music store itself provided by whichever partner we choose, that itself probably won't be open in the same way that Google isn't. But what we're building is entirely open source, built on documented APIs, and everyone will have the source and can start looking at it.
AP: So if this in the scope for Lucid, are you already making tentative plans for what's coming up in M.M. whatever that might be called?
EM: So we've got some plans. There's certainly been no shortage of ideas here at UDS from people who've been using Ubuntu One and are coming to us with really cool ideas on how to integrate into other applications. At lunch today we had a really interesting discussion with someone from the Mythbuntu project talking about how to use Ubuntu One to back up MythTV configuration files and there's people talking about cool things they're going to do with Gwibber and DesktopCouch, part of Ubuntu One. So it's obviously way too early to say what's going to be in M.M., but there's been tons of cool ideas coming out here at the conference.
AP: And when can we expect to see early versions of the music store in Lucid, I guess, somewhere in the alpha/beta stage?
EM: Early in the alphas, yes. We're still trying to get the paperwork signed with a partner, but it's relatively simple work and we want to get it into the first alphas.
SL: Yeah, we want to get it out as early as possible so people can start looking at it, working with it, playing with it, so on.
AP: Will there be any kind of referral system or means that I can, not just for the music store, but for Ubuntu One, I know other online services have the ability to refer my friend and if I give my friend an invite code or something like that then I could get a kick back for that and it also perpectuates the users of the system.
EM: So we want to do invite cose or rewards or something like that at some point. Not just yet. We've been very pleased with how many people have been signing up for Ubuntu One, it's been really nice to see the reaction and so we don't need to do anything right now to get more people on the system. We've still got a good bit of work to do with scaling the servers up and handling the load. Sometime within the next year we'll probably do something with invite codes, but we don't have anything planned like that right now.
AP: Speaking of server load, I've seen some discussion online or issues relating to capacity or what seemed like maybe capacity problems. Are you aware of any issues at the moment with capacity for Ubuntu One or is it, do you think it's working okay with a few teething problems? What is the perception of how that's working?
EM: We've had a big spike since the Karmic release, our number of users has trippled from what it was before the realease. And we've installed a bunch of new servers and brough up some new EZ2 machines and think we're coping with it pretty well. As we introduce bigger and bigger server pools and load balancers to different parts of the system, it's natural to discover bottlenecks in the backend. So one of the things that is a big, big focus for Lucid, we've talked about the music store, and that's a really cool new feature. Over half my team is reserved and set aside just to deal with quality of service, making sure we run the thing that's highly availible and that is there. There's been times when a server went down for a few minutes or we've had to figure out why aren't the load balancers picking things up properly. And so those back end server improvements aren't things that are super sexy and that we can convince people to buy because we're doing them, but if we don't do them, people will be disappointed because the service will just not feel reliable and they'll go away. So we're putting a lot of effort into making sure that it is there and reliable and working fast and dealing with the load of users.
AP: Would you consider for this Lucid cycle, given that this is a new feature and you're asking people to spend money in order to test this feature some system by which people can download free music or download cheap music or maybe you pay for us to download it because we're going to be testing something that every time we test it, we're generating revenue for you?
EM: So we haven't talked about that specifically, but I think we should clearly do something where the hosts of podcasts get free music.
No Speaker: Laughter
AP: I like that, that's a good answer and that's competant enough for me.
No Speaker: more laughter
SL: As do I, actually.
AP: Okay, that's uncomfortableIs there anything else that you wanted to say that's interesting or innovative about Ubuntu One?
EM: So I'm more than anything else exited about the work we've done with DesktopCouch, which is a very simple storage system that applications on the desktop can make use of, whether or not they want to have anything to do with Ubuntu One. If their users sign up for Ubuntu One, that application is sort of magically cloud enabled. I think that's really cool. We've just now started talking with various upstream app developers about it and so I want to put an invitation out there for anybody that works on an application, if you're interested in learning how you could make your application really seamlessly with very little work on your part sync across to different people's machines, sync up to the cloud and do online backups and all that stuff, come and talk to us on #ubuntuone in freenode or on the Ubuntu One users mailing list and we'll be happy to help you hook your app up into it. It's dead simple, it's like ten lines of code.
SL: To give an example, I was chatting today with a notable upstream who you would have heard of who decided to port his application from its current storage mechanism to using DesktopCouch for everything and it took him 20 minutes and he didn't even need to read the documentation. He just poked around the thing, ran pydoc a couple of times and then moved it over and that was it, done. He was hugely impressed, which I was quite gratified by obviously. And he came and said "I had no idea it would be that easy; I thought it would be quite complicated" and yeah, that's the message that we're trying to get across to people. This stuff, it really easy. And if it's not easy come and talk to us and we'll make it easy. If it's not easy it's my fault adn I should fix it, so come and talk to us.
EM: One of goals is that the cooles apps using Ubuntu One should not be written by us. So right now, of course, we're getting a lot of attention because we're the ones who are initially writing things that use these services, but the really exciting story is that these are there for other people to use too.
SL: Cool
AP: Thanks very much guys
No Speaker: Bumper music
CD: First there will be news and then there will be events. News:
LC: Some Fedora 12 users have been horified to learn that users can install software without root privleges by default. Only applications signed by the Fedora project can be installed, but some people are calling this a major security flaw.
TW: Yeah, it was a big argument about this on the Fedora bug tracker. Really kicked off. I think it was basically that they weren't happy that people can choose to install their own applications.
CD: Yeah, but they are signed.
TW: Yeah.
CD: I hadn't read the signed bit before.
TW: But that assumes that all the processes that go behind the Fedora repository are maintaining that and making sure the applications are secure, - are up to up to scratch as well. There's a whole heap of debate about it.
CD: It is an issue, but maybe we're being a little over the top with the security. Maybe.
TW: I think there's an argument to say that trusted users could be able to install stuff without root privleges. You should be able to assign a group of people you might want to be able to do that. But in a corporation, for example, you want to be able to audit what people are installing and make sure they're not installing something that will breach all your various corporate rules and regulations. I know Fedora isn't aimed at that market at the moment, but what goes into Fedora eventually makes it into Red Hat and therefore into the enterprise. But apparently they have just had a big blog post and a mailing list discussion about it and they are going to reverse that move. It was new in Fedora 12, which came out like a week ago and they're already going to decide to back track.
CD: The power of the community, good stuff.
LC: Yeah, right.
No Speaker: music
TW: The distinctly not evil Google have announced a preview of their Chrome operating system. The open source preview essentially puts the Chrome browser on top of Linux, though it won't be possible to run other applications.
LC: I haven't looked at this, but I don't quite get it.
TW: What don't you get?
LC: Why would you bother installing something that's just a browser?
CD: Well, Google are putting everything out on the cloud. So you won't have anything on your laptop. You'll just have something that can run a browswer and everything will be out there.
TW: And the idea is that it sort of runs on a netbook or other portable device and you don't need a big powerful computer, you can have something that uses next to no processing power and next to no storage. So you can have solid state storage and a small one at that. And save power, get longer battery life out of things.
CD: I think it's going to be a good thing for computing in general, actually. Because it's going to in theory give computing to those who don't necessarily want to get into the guts of it and can't cope with "It doesn't work, what do I do?"
LC: It's-
TW: Go on, sorry Laura
LC: It's good in theory, but it doesn't allow you to have other applications running.
TW: I'm sure there's got to be a way around it. I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to do it.
CD: But a lot of people don't want other applications. They just want something to, as we said, play a bit of music, surf the net, do a bit of wordprocessing and that's about it.
LC: 'Til their internet connection goes down.
CD: Well that is the issue. We're quite spoiled in this country. I mean, we're quite spoiled in this country. I went to the States last year and everything was done on the cloud here and I went to the States and there was no wifi in the hotel and I wasn't going to pay the data rate, so I had nothing, apart from a little box of wizardry that did nothing.
LC: I wasn't thinking we aren't that spoilt here, either, as cloud reliable.
TW: Well in this house in particular.
LC: This house in particular.
TW: Canonical have also announced that they're contributing developers to Google to work on this project, so that's quite interesting. Hopefully it will integrate quite nicely with Ubuntu Services as well.
No Speaker: music
CD: Microsoft have been withdrawn a tool for loading Windows 7 onto a USB stick after it was found to have incoropated GPL code. The program, developed by a third party, will now be rereleased with the necessary source code available.
TW: Yeah, good move Microsoft, well done. They put their hands up to it quite quickly and said "yeah, we'll sort this out".
CD: It's good to see.
TW: The open source project was hosted on CodePlex, which is Microsoft's open source hosing service so there's a little bit of an irony there. I can imagine whoever the subcontractor is has gotten their wrists slapped quite significantly, but
LC: Yeah
TW: Yeah, it was a good response and they did the right thing.
No Speaker: music
LC: Droidcamp is on Tuesday, the first of December, from 9:30 in the morning at The Crypt in St. James Church in Clerkenwell in London. And it's free to go.
TW: Do you know what it is?
LC: I have no idea.
CD: It's Droidcamp. You know, as in Android?
TW: Android, as in the mobile operating system or?
CD: Indeed
LC: Aww, I was thinking robots
TW: Yeah, like Robot Wars.
CD: Well, the thing that follows on the day after, in a different location is Droidcon. In a differnet location, it's actually at the Skills Matter eXchange which is in Goswell Road in London, that's not free.
TW: That's quite significantly not free.
LC: Yeah
CD: It looks like a good event, if you're into that sort of stuff. Certainly if I was out of contract and could afford an Android phone, I might actually go along because I'm very interestly.
TW: Well, I would suggest that on the Droidcamp on the Tuesday that you build robots that can then force their way in, all lasers blazing, into Droidcon on the following day and get in for free.
LC: I think it's robots.
TW: That's my mind.
CD: We'll put some links on the show notes to the websites.
LC: And if somebody goes they can tell us which of us are right.
TW: OSSWatch are holding two workshops on Monday, the seventh of December, in Oxford. One on "Open Source, Open Development, Open Innovation" and the other on "01cBuilding an Engaged Community". We'll put a link in the show notes, but I know Mark Johnson from Hampshire LUG is talking at at least one of those.
CD: All these events during the week, can't make them.
TW: I know, it's crazy isn't it.
CD: And finally FOSDEM in February, 6th and 7th, next year in the University Libre, Brussels.And we'll se you there
TW: Hopefully.
No Speaker: Bumper Music
AP: This is Dave and me here at UDS with Jono and Stuart, Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge, who some of our listeners might have heard of, they did a little podcast some time ago called Lugradio. And, yeah, so you have a new podcast coming out. Tell us all about it
JB: We have. It's called Shot of Jaq. And the basic story of it is when we finished doing Lugradio, we went for about 3 months I think it was and I called him up one day and said "I kinda miss doing Lugradio"
AP: Withdrawal symptoms.
JB: Yeah, well we'd decided it was the right time to stop doing Lugradio. We felt like we'd reached the end of the mile.
SL: There comes a point in every week where you think "Oh, I must talk about taht on the show" and then you think "aww, we haven't got a show"
AP: How disappointing. That must really let you down.
JB: It started out as like phone calls. He'd answer the phone, he'd go "Hello, welcome to Lugradio", it'd be a bit weird. So then yeah and we basically, probably about 3 or 4 months ago. We'd had the idea of doing something and we put it on ice because we got really busy. I'd moved to the US, he was busy with work, I was busy with work. And independently we were thinking like wouldn't it be cool to do a new thing.
SL: It was great. And I was at OSSCON and I got talking to a couple people there, Ilan Rabinovitch who does SCALE and Dave Neary from Gnome -with a pig under his arm-, and they said "Why is there no more Lugradio?" and I said you know and gave the whole thing about how we thought it was the right time and so on. And they said well it would be interesting if you did something different. And this idea started to form in my head about doing something that was not Lugradio, a lot more punchy and short. And I spoke to Jono about it and he basically independently had come up with the exact same idea so we thought this was clearly fate.
JB: So the thing we found about it was that Lugradio was very long. At first it was, you know, a half hour or an hour and then it turned into sometimes like a two hour marathon. And we wanted to make something - that's why it's called Shot of Jaq. It's no longer than 10 minutes. It's a completely different formula in terms of how it works.
SL: Each show is an independent shot. 10 minutes lon on an independent subject. We won't ramble -too much.
AP: So what kinda subjects are you going to cover?
JB: It's still open source, it's the same subjects that we would cover in Lugradio. It's open source and stuff that intrests us, technology. It's not just going to be Linux, it's not just going to be free culture stuff. So for example we're going to have one on Twitter and ARM as well. These are relevent, but-
SL: Subjects that people like us are interested in, basically.
AP: So is it an opinion based thin or a news thing?
JB: It's a bit of both actually.
SL: It's a combination of the two. One of the real drivers we had is that we wanted it to be rather better researched than Lugradio. People would occasionally -
JB: Any research is better research.
SL: People would occasionally say not without a grain truth in it that we would not research Lugradio incredibly well.
JB: They were right.
SL: And something we've tried to do quite differently for Shot of Jaq is pick one subject and actually know about it before hand.
JB: Yeah.
SL: So the discussion is a lot more concentrated, a lot more relevent.
JB: So it's, we have an analogy in, when we started Lugradio it was always we wanted to make Top Gear. The goal was to make something like Top Gear. It's about, Top Gear is about cars, anyone who lives outside of England is probably less familiar with Top Gear. Top Gear was a motoring show and it started out really boring and then it turned into this fun thing where they did stupid things with cars. We wanted to do that for Lugradio, we wanted it to be fun, but also relevent to the demographic it was targeted towards. Whereas with Shot of Jaq, in my mind, and I think it's the same with Aq as well, is The Daily Show. That's what we're going for.
SL: The overall vibe, the mise en scene of the show
AP: Get you
SL: I know, isn't it good.
JB: You wrote that on a cereal packet.
SL: Back of a match book. The overall mise en scene of the show. Someones going to write in and say "he's not using the word mise en scene correctly now".
AP: Yeah, we have those kind of listeners.
SL: The overall vibe of the show is The Daily Show. You know, short, punchy, satirical, well informed.
JB: Yeah.
DW: Okay, so you can't be expected to be an authority on subjects, on everything you wish to talk about-
SL: Speak for yourself.
JB: Speak for yourself, pal.
DW: So can you tell me about the registrars on an ARM processor and things like that?
JB: It's not that deep. So using that as an example, that shot, which we've already recorded, is basically talking about are ARM, there's a lot of hype around ARM, is it worth it? Now in Lugradio what we'd do is we'd sit there and we'd ramble on about it for about 15 minutes with absolutely no research or justification. Just basically some opinion that we'd pulled out of our [beep]. You're going to have to beep that aren't you?
SL: I was being really careful.
JB: Problem is that no one is going to know what you beeped. It wasn't, it was a very not nice.
DW: Okay, moving on.
JB: Anyway, moving on.
AP: It's all in the edit.
JB: Yes.
DW: Thanks Ciemon.
JB: So with Lugradio, we'd pull it out of the air. With Shot of Jaq, we actually do research. So we work together and go and find research and put it together and reference the research in the show as well.
SL: We're still going to lean to some extent towards the social aspects of technology. We're not going to be talking about ARM registers or how to recompile your kernel or anything, but the notion of whether recomiling your kernel is important in this day in age is more our __.
DW: The point I was really leaning towards is will the show format consistently be you two or do you think you might have an external authority getting involved.
SL: Answer unclear, try again later.So right now, it's going to be the two of us. We, again drawing from The Daily Show analogy, the thing I'm quite keen to do and we've talked about, but this isn't planned for a while yet, is the idea of having correspondants. So on The Daily Show there are these 4 or 5 commedians who are regularly on there. And they all have commedy like correspondents. So they have like the "Senior Black Correspondant" and the "Senior English Correspondant" and whatever else. And that kind of thing is always on The Daily Show. And we like the idea of having regular people who come onto Shot of Jaq and maybe talk about something. Because the structure of the show is that we read a monologue, we write a monologue.
AP: So you're prescripting, how much of it are you prescripting?
JB: Like the first minute.
SL: What we do is to introduce the topic, summarize current developments, the way the world is, and then pose a question for discussion that bit is prescripted. And then the rest of it is not prescripted.
AP: Now, one of the things about Lugradio that I think helped it, that helped the whole dynamic of the show is the fact that you were four guys sat in Jono's bedroom recording locally. Now Jono's based in San Francisco and you're based in England so how are you going to record and how are you going to bring that together and keep that similar sort of dynamic?
SL: Well, we were worried about that, to be honest with you.
JB: That was the reason why we were always put off from doing something.
SL: But we actually sat down and tried the voice over IP stuff and it's surprising how much we can get back into the mindset of sitting in the same room. And if we both hold a cup of tea, even if we're not in the same room, it feels rather inclusive, still.
AP: You have to squash up really tight in your own house. Feel like you're in Jono's bedroom. Put some socks, your washing hanging around.
SL: I have to go stand outside in my own back garden and have a cigarette, things like that.
AP: So how often are these episodes going to come out and when does it start?
JB: Twice a week.
DW: Wow.
JB: Yeah, there's going to be 2 episodes a week. They don't take long to record, of course because they're only 10 minutes. They don't require a lot of editing, it's just one take. We basically sit down and we prepare for each show, so we write the opening script for each episode and then we switch it on. We've done a couple so far just to prep.
SL: First show comes out on the-
JB: Next week.
AP: So when this episode comes out, it will probably already be out.
JB: Our first show comes out Tuesday of next week.
SL: Which is the...
JB: Twenty-something
SL: right, of November.
DW: So, one thing that really interests me is the name. How did that come about? Who is Jaq?
SL: That's Bacon.
JB: So, yeah...
SL: He's right, but it's still Bacon's idea.
JB: Trying to think of a name, right, because it's short and it's snappy. It was absolutely not going to be Lugradio, obviously, because it's not Lugradio. So like sitting around one day and it's Jono and Aq and I was writing it down and it said Jaq. And then I was thinking Jaq and then Shot of Jaq.
DW: See, these things always come across much better when you have to explain them.
JB: That's the reason it's spelled in a kinda French looking way.
SL: J-A-Q kinda thing. And then because they're the individual shots you've got the whole idea of trying to drive discussion from each individual episode.
AP: And what tools do you use for recording and editing, I assum you're using Jokosher?
JB: Hah. Uuuh. So what we're doing is. We took the propriatory in Lugradio and we dialed it up a notch.
No Speaker: laughter
JB: So what we're doing is we're recording. The way it works, is we have, because we're obviously in separate countries, we're using Skype which is about the best thing you can use to have a coversation. And then we record each microphone feed locally.
SL: So we're not actually recording Skype.
AP: You're using it as a medium for communication.
DW: It's a sync mechanism.
JB: So we can hear each other and see each other because we have the video switched on. And then the first show we did, the trial run that we did, we actually did in Jokosher and it all worked perfectly. The problem we had was that the compression, as we talked about at Oggcamp, the compression was just not as good. So for now we're going to do it on Cubase just to get the quality. Because I don't want to sacrifice the quality for the purpose of tools.
AP: So Aq just records his WAV file and compresses it and sends it over to you and you edit it together.
JB: So we record the show. So what we do is we have some notes while we're recording the show that we both look at while we're recording. We finish recording a show. He then has a OGG file or a WAV file.
SL: Whichever one it is, I forget.
JB: Whatever. And then he basically dumps it into Ubuntu One. And then it appears on my desktop.
SL: Into a shared folder.
JB: And then I grab it from Ubuntu One.
AP: We should do that.
SL: And then Jono copies it onto a USB keyring and walks over to his Mac. Which I admit is the last hurdle in the process.
AP: So there should be an Ubuntu One client really for the Mac, shouldn't there?
SL: If someone wants to write one I'm all about helping people deploy it.
JB: The Mac's not plugged in.
SL: Mac's not plugged into the network. But the thing that impressed us both was that with the exception of the audio compression stuff, Jokosher worked.
JB: Perfectly. Without a hitch. It didn't crash, it didn't fall out, whatever.
SL: And you can write deployments.
DW: So you've written the actual Jokosher, have you?
SL: No, it works!
AP: So, where can people get it and are you on iTunes and Twitter and all that kind of malarky, how can people find out more?
JB: Shotofjaq.org is where it will be. The cool thing is when you there, you'll be able to listen to it from your webbrowser. And instead of people leaving, like the most fun thing about Lugradio was hearing what people thought afterwards. People who rabidly disagreed with us in, most cases. So what happened with that is we asked them to go to the forum. So instead of doing that. We were thinking people should really just post comments on a blog entry. So each entry on the website is a new episode. So they can just go there, listen to it and leave comments. And then we have a twitter feet as well, shotofjaq, we have an identica feed, shotofjaq. As for iTunes we haven't hit that.
SL: I need to sort that out
AP: You can't submit it until youv'e got an episode, unfortunately,
JB: It helps to have, you know, content first.
SL: And I need to find someone whose got iTunes to actually help me out with it.
DW: The thing that I'm really looking forward to, not so much the content, but the jingle. Because you had a pretty good jingle going on with Lugradio.
JB: Yeah, well. A bit of pressure on that you know. Because I just wrote that song for my nephew and didn't thinkg anything of it. And then of course it.
SL: It became world famous.
JB: And then it, you know was on Lugradio. So I stood there in my studio, thinking what am I going to write now, with a bass guitar, worried, and I knocked something up. And of course everyone's going to hate it at first, if anyone liked Lugradio, but I think it's got some groove to it. I'm quite happy with it.Well, all the best. And we'll catch up with you when you've churned out 5,000 episodes in a couple of years and do Shot of Jaq Live.
No Speaker: laughter
DW: Can you imagine, basically the whole world jumping into Wolverhampton for a 10 minute episode?
JB: Yeah, if it's going to be somewhere, it's not going to be Wolverhampton.
AP: Thanks guys.
DW: Thank you for your time.
JB: Thanks.
No Speaker: bumper music
LC: