DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM!!

"It is the duty, and ought to be the pleasure, of age and experience to warn and instruct youth and to come to the aid of inexperience." -- William Cobbett, ~1829 This weekend (13th / 14th August) we (Linux Outlaws and Ubuntu UK Podcast) are holding Oggcamp 11 at Farnham Maltings in Surrey, UK. OggCamp ...

“It is the duty, and ought to be the pleasure, of age and experience
to warn and instruct youth and to come to the aid of inexperience.”
— William Cobbett, ~1829

This weekend (13th / 14th August) we (Linux Outlaws and Ubuntu UK Podcast) are holding Oggcamp 11 at Farnham Maltings in Surrey, UK.

OggCamp is a free semi-unconference two-day event about technology, open source, music, art, politics, community, creativity and more! People are welcome to come along and give talks about subjects that interest them.

This is our third such free event, the first being in Wolverhampton in 2009, and the second last year in Liverpool. This time we’re down South in the beautiful town of Farnham. I’m so excited I could pop!

The event is the culmination of planning and co-operation between the presenters of both podcasts and a huge team of dedicated community contributors. It’s been made possible by some fantastic sponsors without whom we just couldn’t run the event.

Bytemark came on board very early on in the project, in fact they approached us before we even started soliciting for sponsors. They’ve been extremely generous in helping us pay the considerable cost for the hire of the venue. Consider them the next time you’re looking for robust hosting, a VPS or dedicated servers.

Conversely Canonical are our most recent sponsor, also providing us with generous financial help. We’ve used the money from Canonical in various ways, rather than one big thing, which will make the event even more awesome than it already is. Canonical have also supplied us with some great Ubuntu branded merchandise from their online store.

Ex-LUGRadio presenter Chris Procter (and all-round nice guy) has consistently provided support for OggCamp over the years, and this year is no exception. Under the banner of LUG.org.uk, provider of technical services to UK Linux User Groups, Chris has once again donated funds to help make OggCamp 11 happen.

BitFolk are good friends of the show and generously provide a free VPS for the Ubuntu UK Local Community Team. Once again they’ve come up trumps and are sponsoring the Saturday evening event at this years OggCamp. BitFolk have made it possible for us to hire a room and bar on Saturday night so everyone can wind down after a great day geeking out. Check them out if you’re looking for a high quality, reliable and well run VPS.

Google should need no introduction! They’re generously supporting OggCamp 11 for which we are very grateful!

Prolific and diverse publisher Apress have once again provided us with some excellent books from their extensive line-up. The books cover current topics we’re certain will interest many OggCamp attendees. Along with other merchandise we’ve been given, these will be entered into a raffle, tickets will be available at the venue.

Once again we’re delighted to have O’Reilly on board to support OggCamp 11. O’Reilly should be on site (which is convenient for them, given they have an office only a few hundred yards away) selling books at superb prices. They’re also generously giving us liquid sustenance at lunchtime to help keep attendees nicely lubricated!

Finally we’re happy once more to announce our friends and fellow podcasters at Linux Format who are the Media Partner for OggCamp 11! The guys from Linux Format have been awesome in promoting the event in their magazine with this great full page advert. Click to see the full size PDF, or buy the magazine and see it in print!

I’m really looking forward to this years OggCamp, and hope to see many of my ‘Internet friends’ there! Plus it’s a full moon, so anything could happen!

...of tickets for OggCamp! We've released a hundred more tickets after the last two hundred went in under a week! Our third OggCamp will be held on the 13th & 14th August at Farnham Maltings in Surrey, UK. We're really looking forward to this! It's a great venue, and we're eager to get people ...

…of tickets for OggCamp!

We’ve released a hundred more tickets after the last two hundred went in under a week!

Our third OggCamp will be held on the 13th & 14th August at Farnham Maltings in Surrey, UK. We’re really looking forward to this! It’s a great venue, and we’re eager to get people in the community to come along and talk about stuff that interests them! Can’t wait!

Apologies if you've seen this before. I'm re-posting this to ensure that anyone who wants to comment can do before the change is made. Contact details are below under 'Feedback'. The license of content of the Ubuntu Wiki has always been publically listed as copyright Canonical Ltd. Working with the Ubuntu Community Council, Canonical ...

Apologies if you’ve seen this before. I’m re-posting this to ensure that anyone who wants to comment can do before the change is made. Contact details are below under ‘Feedback’.

The license of content of the Ubuntu Wiki has always been publically listed as copyright Canonical Ltd. Working with the Ubuntu Community Council, Canonical has decided to transition the content in the Ubuntu Wiki to the the CC-BY-SA license. This license is a free culture license and is the same license used both by the Ubuntu Documentation wiki since 2007 and by Wikipedia.

If you are happy with the idea of this transition for the content you have provided, you do not need to do anything. If you have problems or issues, please read the feedback section below and contact us.

The rest of this message provides a rationale, details, and information on providing feedback.

Decision

After discussion among the Ubuntu Community Council, it has been decided that the material on the Ubuntu wiki should be licensed under a free license, CC-by-SA. The Ubuntu wiki will be changed to make this clear to those creating or editing pages, and of course external links from the Wiki to material under other licences will continue to be welcome.

This decision is not intended in any way to underestimate the value of contributions, but rather to ensure that the material on the wiki complies with the same standards of openness as the Ubuntu project as a whole.

Rationale

The Ubuntu wiki is a collaborative resource, and the product of the Ubuntu community as a whole. Its content, put together by many contributors with different knowledge and points of view, is immensely valuable to us all. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no clear definition of what rights contributors to the content retain over the material that they post, or the extent to which other persons are entitled to copy or modify the material. For example, it would be very useful to ensure that community contributed content may be shared by many teams without complex licensing issues, ensuring that those working on content can concentrate on producing the best information possible rather than legal negotiations.

Furthermore, consistent with Ubuntu’s philosophy, it is important that material created for use on the Ubuntu wiki be available for other communities outside ours to benefit from. Using an open license on the Ubuntu wiki allows other communities to re-use material which may be useful to them under terms which are widely recognised in the free software community.

Feedback

We would again like to make a good-faith attempt to ensure that contributors of existing material are happy with this change. We invite any contributors who have any questions or concerns about this plan to contact us at . Given that the re-licensing of http://help.ubuntu.com/community was fairly uncontroversial and since the aim to re-license the Ubuntu wiki at some point later has not brought up any objections, we hope that contributors will welcome it.

In the absence of a substantial number of objections, this change will be made to the Ubuntu wiki after approximately one month.

More details can be found here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WikiLicensing

Many thanks for your contributions to the Ubuntu Wiki, and we hope that you will continue to help!

Exceptions

If you want to license a code snippet on the wiki under another open source license, please specify the relevant license in the snippet itself. In the event that no license is specified, the license applicable to the code snippet would be the same as that applicable to any other material on the wiki.

Originally sent by Elizabeth Krumbach to the ubuntu-news-team mailing list on Tue Feb 15 21:52:06 UTC 2011

On Christmas day 1981 I awoke with the usual excitement of any 9 year old boy. I clearly remember going downstairs and being told not to go into the lounge because my Dad was busy setting up my main Christmas present. In those days we'd get a main present and some other smaller presents. ...

On Christmas day 1981 I awoke with the usual excitement of any 9 year old boy. I clearly remember going downstairs and being told not to go into the lounge because my Dad was busy setting up my main Christmas present. In those days we’d get a main present and some other smaller presents. My parents weren’t well off, we lived in a typical 3 bedroom semi in Southern England and got by as best we could.

After breakfast in the kitchen we were eventually allowed to go into the lounge to open some presents. What greeted me was the device that propelled me into the world of computing. My parents has bought me a Sinclair ZX81.

The reason we weren’t allowed into the lounge was because my Dad had got up early to go and set it up, connecting it to the family TV. He spent most of the early morning typing in some code from a manual or magazine (I forget which) so I’d have something to play with right away.

I remember with great fondness spending much of the day, and following year playing with my very first computer. I would avidly buy magazines and type in the listings. I’d borrow books from my local library and interpret the TRS-80 or other generic BASIC programs into something my little ZX81 could do.

The family got sick of me monopolising the main TV in the house, and eventually got hold of an old one for me to use in the kitchen. I spent much of my pre-teen years sat on a stool in the kitchen about 3 inches from a 23″ TV on the kitchen breakfast bar, with my ZX81 on a shelf below. My brother and sister would have friends round and I was pretty much always there, typing in some code or trying to get something to load from a tape cassette. Such happy days.

I’d frequently be amazed at the raw computing power in my hands. One day I had to go to my Dads work because school was closed. I took my ZX81 with me and wrote a dating application. It stored vital details about individuals in a database and could find your perfect mate based on a simple questionnaire I typed up on an electronic typewriter in my Dads office. He passed it round the people in the office, getting them to fill it in and I processed the results, telling them who matched who. It felt like the office workers were amazed at my computing prowess, but secretly they probably fixed their answers to make my code look good.

A while later I outgrew the ZX81 and its wobbly 16K RAM-pack and lusted after more powerful devices. We were not well off so I couldn’t afford the next generation device, the Sinclair Spectrum, but I saw one for sale, second hand, in a record shop nearby. I begged and pleaded with my Mum to get it for me, and eventually she got the funds together to buy it for me. It was the best £20 I’ve ever begged her to spend!

It was a 16K Spectrum with a rubber keyboard, all packaged in the original polystyrene box with a cardboard sleeve. There was an orange covered manual, power supply, cables and that was about it.

There was also one cassette that came in the box, labelled “Horizons”. It contained some demonstrations of what the Spectrum could do, a couple of simple games and a version of Conways Game of Life. That tape got a lot of use until I saved up enough to buy some ‘real’ games.

The nearest town to where I grew up had very few stores where you could buy games. Martins the Newsagent in Farnborough had a decent enough collection of software. I would go in religiously on a Saturday to see what new titles were available, pocket money in hand to splurge on the latest £1.99 or £2.99 tapes.

There’s a fairly small number of games compatible with the 16K Spectrum and I probably owned most of them. Many an hour was spent on Ultimate’s titles like Cookie, Trans-Am and Pssst! One day I bought Ant Attack and was dismayed to discover it was a 48K title, so wouldn’t even load on my lowly 16K speccy.

I saw an advert in Sinclair User magazine for a RAM upgrade kit from an outfit called Video Vault. The 16K spectrum had a bunch of slots into which more RAM could be inserted to bring it up to the full compliment of 48K. I saved up the cash to buy the RAM, and sent it off. I think it cost me £30 which was a fair amount for a 11 year old kid with a sweets and games habit

I remember clearly reading and re-reading the cassette liner for Ant Attack, day after day until the memory finally arrived. Once installed I spent many a happy day playing my new 48K titles and expanded my game collection to occupy most of the spare storage space in the kitchen!

Eventually I moved on from the Spectrum 48K to a 128K +2 then later an Amstrad CPC 464 which I sold to buy my first PC, an Epson 8086. Since then I’ve owned more computers than I dare to think about, all growing in size, speed, capacity and capability with each iteration.

It’s been a great 30 years with computers in my life, and I can only imagine what the next 30 years will be like. Thanks Dad for setting me on this road, and thanks too to Sir Clive Sinclair for designing the first computer I ever owned.