KLEPAS.ORG

Yesterday’s entry regard­ing the great Aus­tralian Fire­wall was prob­a­bly less inter­est­ing for anyone outside of Aus­tralia. The post was the result of a quick letter of concern that needed writing and con­se­quently pub­lish­ing (it’ll prob­a­bly do more good online than in the inbox of the Min­is­ter I sent it to). That out of the way, I’ve been meaning to write about my time in England, in par­tic­u­lar the visit to LugRa­dio Live ’08 UK.

LugRadio Live

LugRa­dio was the premier open source/free soft­ware podcast fea­tur­ing the Internet’s Jono Bacon, famous web devel­oper Stuart ‘Aq’ Lan­gridge, and sysad­mins Adam Sweet and Chris Proctor. The second season ended with a weekend live record­ing and con­fer­ence, ‘LugRadio Live’, in Wolver­hamp­ton, UK.

Fol­low­ing the initial announce­ment that LugRa­dio were to con­clude their show at the end of season five (to the dismay of the many lis­ten­ers includ­ing myself), this year’s LugRa­dio Live (LRL) in the UK was to be the last ever given the podcast had come to an end. It was there­fore a must attend.

LugRa­dio Live was lit­er­ally a rocking event—rock music blared from the speak­ers half the time and there was a true “Chinny Raccoon” (LugRadio’s mascot), a custom made raccoon outfit as worn by Ben Thorp. Both the exhi­bi­tions and talks were all of a high calibre of which Bruno Bord’s talk “Baguette on Snails” prob­a­bly being the top high­light. The show—the final episode of LugRadio—was of course also a good laugh, and for those who were by chance bored Bytemark’s portably gaming center ensured there was some­thing to kill time with.

Of course the news is that due to the strong per­sua­sion of fans LRL will con­tinue to run annu­ally despite the con­clu­sion of the podcast. Given it’s the premier open source/free soft­ware event in the UK, it would have been a great loss to the com­mu­nity if this just past LRL was indeed the final one. To get a feel for what the event is like check out Flickr photos and make sure you try to make it next year.

Record­ings of the talks should make their way online within the next few weeks. I pre­sented on the Tango Desktop Project—particularly on the re-​licensing into the public domain. I was orig­i­nally going to demon­strate the cre­ation of Tango-​styled icons but decided in the last minute to alter the focus of the pre­sen­ta­tion. I think I dis­ap­pointed some people with the move—if I make it to next year’s LRL I’ll submit another paper.

Silverback

I suspect that the word would have trav­eled far across the Inter­tubes that Sil­ver­back is now out and avail­able (it was even men­tioned by Leisa Reichelt at GUADEC), so I won’t mention it for long here. Sil­ver­back is a USD $49.95 program by Clear­left that turns a Mac into a mini portable usabil­ity testing lab—for the price it’s a must-​have for anyone working in the fields of usabil­ity and acces­si­bil­ity in the soft­ware & web pro­duc­tion indus­try. Although it doesn’t give you the amount of data that a spe­cialised usabil­ity testing lab might provide, Sil­ver­back doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, it’s as portable as your Mac and suits every use case I’ve ever needed.

I did run into a small issue regard­ing licens­ing after my pur­chase: I used a friend’s credit card and with no option to pur­chase the license for another, my friend whose name was the credit card holder was the sub­se­quent recip­i­ent licensee—not myself. For tax­a­tion pur­poses and simply for the sake of cor­rect­ness I started a dis­cus­sion on Clearleft’s Get​Sat​is​fac​tion.com pages regard­ing the issue. I received an email response within thirty-​six hours of the post and had the issue sorted out in no time. Thanks to Sophie over at Clear­left for the help.

There are a number of reviews of Silverback—by Jonathan Christo­pher, .net mag­a­zine, and graph­iceyedea—check them out if you’re uncon­vinced and oth­er­wise have a great weekend.