UK Linux User Groups

The Ubuntu Software Center is making some rocking progress, but as everyone’s favorite Dr Vish suggests, it is only a container for other content, and we need to fix and improve the descriptions of apps inside Ubuntu to make it easier for users.

This is a wonderful contribution to Ubuntu. Want to get involved? Simple, check out Vish’s awesome post.

I find this somewhat overly optimistic.

The big news is that Perl 6 has grammars. Copying something that OCaml (camlp4) has had for over a decade. Arguably influenced by LISP which has had non-grammatical macros for decades. Being able to modify the grammar of a language is fantastic: see the bitmatch and micmatch projects. Welcome to the party, Perl 6 users. I wonder if one day we’ll see type inference, phantom types, the ability to get close to the metal, real GC, etc etc?

Earlier this week at GUADEC, the always affable Dave Neary presented his GNOME Census work. Unfortunately, I was not there to see it, but I read his excellent post on the topic.

One of the reactions from the survey was that Red Hat are responsible for 16% of the contributions to GNOME whereas Canonical are responsible for a measly 1%.

Of course, this has generated some flame, such as a particularly angry post from Greg DeKoenigsberg and the rather pithy response from Jeffrey Stedfast. Greg is clearly pissed, and Jeffrey is clearly pissed at Greg being pissed, and I suspect Greg is going to get even more pissed at Jeffrey being pissed. The worse thing is that they are both going to be pissed at me for this blog post.

First I want to put these figures in perspective and then I want to talk about how we read the figures we do have.

I think the GNOME Census report is excellent, and it provides some excellent visibility into contributions in GNOME, but it only takes into account upstream contributions to GNOME itself. What the report doesn’t take into account are upstream contributions that are built on the GNOME platform but (a) not part of official GNOME modules, and (b) hosted and developed elsewhere, such as Launchpad. As such, while the report is accurate for showing code and contributions accepted into GNOME, there are also many projects built on GNOME technology that are not taken into account due to non-inclusion in GNOME modules or being developed outside of GNOME infrastructure.

As a general rule, Canonical staff develop inside Launchpad. The reason is simple; Launchpad and Bazaar provide a powerful development environment that was also built by Canonical and we therefore have lots of internal skills and best practice based on these tools. Launchpad is also a fundamental component in Ubuntu development and all the software we develop ultimately ships in Ubuntu, so using the same development forge makes sense. Finally, the site is a Free Software and Open Source project, so there really no philosophical reason to move, testified by the 18,000+ Free Software projects happily using Launchpad already.

Canonical is actively developing upstream desktop software, but doing it in Launchpad. Some examples include:

• notify-osd
• Messaging Menu
• Application Indicators
• Indicator Applet
• Indicator Date Time Applet
• Sound Indicator
• Me Menu
• Indicator Global Menu
• Unity

This is by no means the full list, and is other work such as Simple Scan, the Hardware Drivers tool, Computer Janitor, and more. Many of these contributions (such as Application Indicators and Simple Scan) could bring real value to GNOME, but they have not been accepted. I know that the Canonical engineers who work on them would be delighted if they were included in GNOME.

The above list also doesn’t include significant upstream investment in other areas such as Upstart, Bazaar, Launchpad, and a full team building Ubuntu. I don’t want to turn this into a “who contributed more” competition, but I think for some to suggest Canonical is a bad citizen who is not contributing upstream code is unreasonable. To suggest that Canonical has limited code inside approved GNOME modules is fair.

So that was the first thing I wanted to clarify; Canonical does invest heavily in upstream work, but GNOME is not the only home for upstream contributions.

If there is one thing that the GNOME Census has really outlined is that we should all be proud of Red Hat and their contributions to GNOME. You only have to take a look at all the red items on this image to get a feeling for the wonderful work that Red Hat is doing inside GNOME. Novell too. Look the green items in there; Novell has done a wonderful job maintaining many modules inside GNOME. In fact, there are many companies investing inside GNOME modules and inside GNOME infrastructure. I don’t believe it would be fair to undermine these contributions in any way; they are testament to the ethos of those companies and their commitment to GNOME. All of the people working at those companies are doing good work within the spirit of Free Software.

Likewise, I don’t think it is fair to undermine Canonical’s contributions just because many of them exist outside of GNOME. Our engineers are also doing good work within the spirit of Free Software. I have never claimed for a second that Canonical are equal to Red Hat and Novell in terms of our accepted contributions in GNOME; it is clear that there are far few contributions from Canonical staff inside accepted GNOME modules, but this does not for a second mean that Canonical is not (a) producing upstream contributions and (b) heavily invested in the GNOME platform. Ubuntu, our primary product is a GNOME desktop, and the vast majority of our engineers are GNOME users and developers and they work every day on a GNOME based product.

So in a nutshell, this is my take: both Red Hat and Canonical invest heavily in Open Source development, but they do it in different ways and different places. The GNOME Census clearly outlines that within GNOME modules, Red Hat are doing far more, but that doesn’t mean that Canonical are sitting on their thumbs and doing nothing, far from it.

This evening I was mulling over a recurring desire for a simple, scalable, and robust replication filesystem. These days there are several out there, including Gluster.

For the past year I've personally been using chironfs for my replication needs - I have /shared mounted upon a number of machines and a write to it on any will be almost immediately reflected in the others.

This evening, when mulling over a performance problem with Gluster I was suddenly struck by the idea "Hey, Redis is fast. Right? How hard could it be?".

Although Redis is another one of those new-fangled key/value stores it has several other useful primitives, such as "SETS" and "LISTS". Imagine a filesystem which looks like this:

/ /srv /tmp /var/spool/tmp/

Couldn't we store those entries as members of a set? So we'd have:

SET ENTRIES:/ -> srv, tmp, var SET ENTRIES:/var/spool -> tmp SET ENTRIES:/var/spool/tmp -> (nil)

If you do that "readdir(path):" becomes merely "SMEMBERS entries:$path" ("SMEMBERS foo" being "members of the set named foo"). At this point you can add and remove directories with ease.

The next step, given an entry in a directory "/tmp", called "bob", is working out the most important things:

• Is /tmp/bob a directory?
  • Read the key DIRECTORIES:/tmp/bob - if that contains a value it is.
• What is the owner of /tmp/bob?
  • Read the key FILES:/tmp/bob:UID.
• If this is a file what is the size? What are the contents?
  • Read the key FILES:/tmp/bob:size for the size.
  • Read the key FILES:/tmp/bob:data for the contents.

So with a little creative thought you end up with a filesystem which is entirely stored in Redis. At this point you're thinking "Oooh shiny. Fast and shiny". But then you think "Redis has built in replication support..."

Not bad.

My code is a little rough and ready, using libfus2 & the hiredis C API for Redis. If there's interest I'll share it somewhere.

It should be noted that currently there are two limitations with Redis:

• All data must fit inside RAM.
• Master<->Slave replication is trivial, and is the only kind of replication you get.

In real terms the second limitation is the killer. You could connect to the Redis server on HostA from many locations - so you get a true replicated server. Given that the binary protocol is simple this might actually be practical in the real-world. My testing so far seems "fine", but I'll need to stress it some more to be sure.

Alternatively you could bind the filesystem to the redis server running upon localhost on multiple machines - one redis server would be the master, and the rest would be slaves. That gives you a filesystem which is read-only on all but one host, but if that master host is updated the slaves see it "immediately". (Does that setup even have a name? I'm thinking of master-write, slave-read, and that gets cumbersome.)

ObQuote: Please, please, please drive faster! -- Wanted

At the time of the European election last year, there was some debate in the blogosphere about the Green Party's attitude to science.  Holfordwatch picked up on a report which said that the Greens supported the continued use of "alternative medicine" in the NHS. Rational people, of course, gave up all idea of voting for them.

To their credit, the Greens responded to this by clarifying (and, actually, seeming to completely drop) some of these policies. In this Q&A in the Guardian, their press officer, Scott Redding, was asked:

If the balance of evidence suggests that a treatment does not perform any better than placebo, should it be supported by the NHS?
He replied:

The short answer is No. Our policy is that any medicine or treatment available on the NHS should be backed up by scientific evidence. Some new treatments, and some currently available on the NHS, will pass this test, others will not.
Of course, you might well think that it doesn't matter what the Green Party thinks on this as they'll never have the power to enact their policies. And you'd be right to think that.

But they do have an MP now. Caroline Lucas is the MP for Brighton Pavilion. And whilst she's not exactly driving government policy, she does have the same ways to make her views known as all other MPs, including signing Early Day Motions.

So, given the clear direction indicated by Scott Redding, it's disappointing to see the she has signed one of David Tredinnick's nonsense EDMs on homeopathy (as discussed previously on this blog).

On one hand, the Greens clearly say that they won't support medical treatments without scientific evidence to support them. And then their first ever MP goes and gives her support to something that is on a the same level as witchcraft. If I was one of the enlightened people who voted for her back in May, I'd be feeling pretty pissed off about now.

I had hoped that, at least, the Green Party would prove themselves to be above the lies and spin that characterise so much of British politics. I'm really disappointed to see those hopes dashed.

Update: Lucas has received a lot of comment over this on Twitter in the last few hours. She has posted what I can only assume is supposed to be an explanation for her actions:

EDM is about lack of BMA's consultation & argues that local NHS better placed to know patient needs, based on objective clinical assessment
It's nonsense of course. Tredinnick is a well-known parliamentary advocate for homeopathy. His EDM is purely about supporting the provision of quackery on the NHS. Tredinnick is deliberately inventing scientific controversy where none exists. The science is settled. Homeopathy does not work.

If patients have been told that homeopathy is worth investigating, then their doctors should make it clear to them that they have been misled. Doctors should not be encouraging this delusion.

Why would someone write Python and mix tabs and spaces. Do you really want to have random arbitrary bugs … grr….

:%s/^I/    //g

Grr. grr. grr. stupid programmer. Grr.. That’s my final moan. honest.

One thing that really annoys me is when I come to look at the log file and I see something like :

blah blah did blah blah blah foo blah random comment fish blah some data which spans many lines or does it?

This is bad, as I’ve got absolutely no idea where the messages are from (so have to grep around a code base), and I’ve no idea WHEN they were made. At best I can look at timestamps on this file and figure out a timeframe (assuming logrotate is in use so there is a definite (must be after X timestamp)).

What’s far better from a maintenance point of view :

2010/07/29 09:33 filewhatever.py:355 blah blah blah did blah blah

2010/07/29 09:34 filewhatever.py:355 blah blah blah did blah blah

2010/07/29 09:35 filewhatever.py:355 data received from x is {{{hello world…. }}}

Changes are :

1. Date and time stamps (in python: datetime.datetime.now())
2. Recording where the message came from (see the ‘inspect’ python module – inspect.stack()[1][1] for calling file, and inspect.stack()[1][2] for the line number, or debug_backtrace() in PHP)
3. Wrapping any interesting output (e.g. from a remote service) in obvious delimiters (e.g. {{{ and }}} )  - without e.g. timestamps or some other common line prefix, I’ve no way of knowing what’s from where, especially if the output spreads over many lines.

Other good ideas :

1. Different severities of log message (classic: debug, info, error type annotation with appropriate filtering).
2. Make sure logrotate is in use, or a simple shell script via cron, to stop the log file growing too large and causing problems.
3. Stop writing your own logging mechanisms and use ones provided by the system (e.g. Python has a logger built in which does all of the above and more)

EOR - EndOfRant

Changes: Important tla (AGM) description updated throughout documentation for a more granular meaning, based on changes in IETF-ID LTASP http://bit.ly/aATkDF DIASER is for long term digital archive storage, it securely…

1) Accumulates
2) Geo-Duplicates
3) Manages

• Engineered storage architecture
• Exists and operates in dedicated user accounts
• Flat, human readable storage structure
• Highly resilient and robust
• Large volume capacity (TB’s)
• Low operational and maintenance overheads
• Manage independently from a Perl enabled workstation
• Manage long-term archives
• Migratable nodes
• Multiple configuration files for multiple installations
• Perl installer and configurator
• Powered by rsync and OpenSSH
• Repair tool
• Scalable
• Secure design
• Simple configuration file and format
• Standards compliant
• Stats and analysis tools built-in
• Straightforward upgrade procedure
• Use commodity disks for robust storage
• UTC Time Zone compensation mechanism
• Works with existing backup infrastructures
• 3 replicating storage nodes

Back to the drawing board…

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the same room to work on bugs, translations, documentation, testing and more. And they did, all over the world, as can be seen here.

To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked five topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:

• Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
• Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
• Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience.
• Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
• Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
• Packaging – packaging software for Ubuntu users to install with a clock.
• Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.

With six primary methods of getting involved, there is something for everyone in this rocking global event.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to the LoCo Directory by following these instructions.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

I have always been a fan of helping in any way I can to encourage people to support small organizations and businesses who are doing their best to be successful by working hard and providing a friendly, honest service.

For the earlier part of this week I am in The Hague at GUADEC, and I stumbled across a small espresso shop that is the embodiment of these kinds of small business. It is impeccably clean, the food is awesome, the coffee is fantastic, it is good value, and the guy who runs the shop is the definition of kind and welcoming. Oh, and it has great wi-fi too.

So, I wanted to share with all my friends who are visiting GUADEC too to come and support this guy’s small business, drink some coffee and leach his Internet.

The address is: 7 o’clock Espressobar, Wagenstraat 187 2512 AW Den Haag and if you are walking back to the hotel before you walk over the small bridge you will see it on the left with a big Coca-Cola sign above it.

More details on the website.

As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points. (It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)

Tony Whitmore (@tonywhitmore) blogged about The Quest for Originality which got me thinking about the podcast that we make with @ciemon, @daviey and @lauracowen.

Over the weekend at OrgCon there was some discussion of originality. The subject was brought up when talking about the creative business, with original works being “worth” something, perhaps more than a digital facsimile of some work. So for example a concert is a one off live event is worth paying for, whereas an MP3 is “worth” less because in part it’s easily duplicated and thus lacks originality. (I’ve paraphrased and perhaps twisted the meaning of the discussion to suit this post, but I’m sure you know what I mean).

I guess there’s a couple of things that I think of in relation to being original. There’s originality with reference to the ‘competition’ and originality in terms of us not being stale over time. Both require some effort to achieve, and in my mind we should be doing both.

Competition in podcasting is hard to define. People have a finite amount of time in their lives to listen to podcasts, so we’re competing with other things people would rather be doing, like spending time with family, programming .. or whatever else our listeners do in their ‘spare’ time. People also listen during a commute, jog or some otherwise ‘dead’ air-time. So we have to be compelling or people will do ‘other things’ than listen.

People thus have a limited amount of time to listen to podcasts, and will thus only consume a limited number of shows. I doubt anyone listens to every FLOSS/Linux podcast, but I’m sure most people have tried them all to see which they prefer. So we need to appeal to people if we want people to listen to the show.

I do want people to listen to the show by the way. Whilst we do this for fun (and no financial profit), if nobody downloaded the show I think we’d probably stop doing it. The idea of being on stage to the sound of one hand clapping doesn’t appeal (to me at least). Others are happy to continue making a show no matter how many people listen.

There are of course other podcasts which do pretty much the same as us, Tuxradar and Full Circle Magazine are two good examples with a similar format, but with their own style. Then there’s the likes of Linux Action Show, Linux Outlaws and The Linux Link Tech Show who all have their own style and niche. Every podcast is clearly different, with presenters having their own expression, shows of varying duration, different personalities, quality and frequency. None (including ours) are perfect, all are serving a segment of the market successfully.

Within our own podcast we’ve evolved slightly over the 2.5 seasons we’ve been running, but for the most part the format has stuck. We have introduced new segment ideas, and refined various elements of the show, but in general we’ve stuck with a formula that works for us, and gets us some listeners.

Right now each episode gets downloaded about 5K times in the week after release with a long tail of 13 weeks to hit 10K downloads. After a year each episode hits around 18K and after two years each episode hits around 32K downloads. Clearly as with every podcast, we have no idea how many of those downloads translate into listens. We’re not so naive to think they all do, but we don’t know what the proportion of downloads to listens is, and I don’t think we ever will do. On that subject, for the record, I don’t think we need to do any kind of survey or tracking to try to figure that number out. I’m personally happy to know that some thousands of people download it and some of them listen to it.

When we started I think we had some original concepts compared to others within our space. We’re family friendly, (usually) well prepared, not North-American (not that being American is a problem, but many FLOSS/Linux podcasts come from there, so it’s nice to have one with a non-American ‘accent’ in my opinion), (mostly) above average audio quality, (generally) on time with a regular schedule and made by contributors to the Ubuntu project rather than bystanders. Whilst other podcasts had some of those elements, not many had all.

Since then we’ve perhaps stagnated, and whilst we have introduced new concepts and made changes at the ‘backend’ to streamline the way we produce the show, we haven’t had much in the way of revolutionary changes that the listeners would notice. The big question is I guess is ‘should we?’.

We could do as Linux Outlaws and TLLTS do and have a live part of the show. We tried this in the past but technical barriers (like Tony having a crap internet connection) stymed that. It’s also tricky in that we take tea breaks and eat cake between segments, rather than record it in one go. We could open the show up to have callers phone-in now we have a nice telephony setup. Maybe we should drop the ‘season’ system and just produce a show constantly with no breaks. We could change the duration, presenters, format, style or any other part of the content, but again, ‘should we?’.

There is the danger that we could break something that didn’t need fixing. Perhaps it is broken and we just don’t know that. Perhaps we’re in danger of burning out on a treadmill to churn out episodes that we don’t enjoy, if we don’t change. I don’t know. Do you?

                          

Sometimes I write things that are for myself, and later decide to release on the off-chance other people might be interested.

I've hated procmail for a long time, but it is extremely flexible, and for the longest time I figured since I'd got things working the way I wanted there was little point changing.

When it comes to procmail there are few alternatives:

• Exim filters.
• Maildrop.
• Email::Filter

Unfortunately both Exim and Email::Filter suffer from a lack of "pipe" support. To be more specific Exim filters and Email::Filter allow you to pipe an incoming message to an external program - but they regard that as the end of the delivery process.

So, for example, you cannot receive a message (on STDIN), pipe it through crm114, then process that updated message. (i.e. The output of crm114).

Maildrop does allow pipes, but suffers from other problems which makes me "not like it".

My own approach is to have a simple mail-sieve command which is configured thusly:

set maildir=/home/steve/Maildir set logfile=/home/.trash.d/mail-sieve.log # # Null-senders # Return-Path: /<>/ save .Automated.bounces/ # # Spam filter # filter /usr/bin/crm -u /home/steve/.crm /usr/share/crm114/mailreaver.crm # # Spam? # X-CRM114-Status: /SPAM/ save .CRM.Spam/ X-CRM114-Status: /Unsure/ save .CRM.Unsure/ # # People / Lists # From: /foo@example.com/ save .people.foo/ From: /bar@example.com/ save .people.bar/ .. .. # # Domains # To: /steve.org.uk$/ save .steve.org.uk/ To: /debian-administration.org$/ save .debian-administration.org.personal/ # # All done. # save .inbox.unfiled/

On the one hand this is simple, readable, and complete enough for myself. On the other hand if I were going to make it releasable I think I'd probably want to add both conditionals and the ability to match upon multiple header values.

Getting there would probably involve something like this on the ~/.mail-filter side :

if ( ( From: /foo@example.com ) || ( From: /bar@example.com ) ) { save .people.example.com/ exit } # ps. remind me how much I hate parsers and lexers?

That starts to look very much like Exim's filter language, at which point I think "why should I bother". Pragmatically the simplest solution would be to add a "Filter" primitive to Email::Filter - and pretend I understood the nasty "Exit" settings.

ObQuote: Andre, we don't use profanity or double negatives here at True Directions. - "But I'm a Cheerleader".

• VIVID - Inbindable Volume
  '...The multiple screens journey through the Brutalist space of an empty library interior which unfolds in an assemblage of tracking shots...'

This Article got me thinkinghttp://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/article.php/3894671 (http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/article.php/3894671) I think it is wrong...very wrong. So many times there has been a brick wall in the development of semiconductors that has been quickly supplanted as per market needs. I don't believe for a moment that Flash memory is any different. Also the article seems to assume a limiting form factor (such as placing the flash in a Hard Drive like enclosure) Why should this be the case. Hard Drive Form factors are a result of the mechanics inside. Once SSD becomes commonplace we can ditch this and put flash chips in any arrangement we like. Already there are SSD netbooks with the SSD on a PCB. Why not place it on a PCI-E card complete with a storage controller and be done with the Hard Drive form factor altogether. Arguably it gets better cooling that way as well. Sure there will need to be some SSD drives in standard 3.5 and 2.5 inch form factors with SATA or SAS interfaces to be retrofitted in existing equipment but why is everyone making the assumption that always needs to be the case ?

So I arranged to take my car in Saturday to have the bit-of-plastic-on-the-driver’s-door fitted. I turn up, chap at the desk expected me and was very helpful.

Him> Ahh yes, part’s right here, shouldn’t take a mo to fit, I’ll just get some tools.

Me> Super thanks.

<fx>fiddling with the door happens</fx>

Him> Just going to make a phonecall, this isn’t looking how I expected

Me> It doesn’t look like a door with a well understood piece of plastic missing, I didn’t say.

Me> Uhh, sure.

<fx>phone call happens</fx>

Him> Sorry, but it looks like I can’t fit this part.

Me> You can’t fit this part.

Him> No, I think the inside door panel needs to be removed.

Me> The inside door panel needs to be removed, you think.

Him> Yes, and I’m not qualified.

Me> You’re not qualified. Super. Thanks.

I still have a hole in my door.

Meanwhile, 75cm toward the rear of my car….

You may recall that Renault Romford mistakenly did work I didn’t ask them to do, then insisted I pay for said work or I couldn’t have my car back.  I decided to take them up on their offer to simply undo the work and put back the faulty door mechanism and then give me a full refund.

Me> I’ve decided to take you up on your offer to simply undo the work and put back the faulty door mechanism and then give me a full refund.

Renault Romford> We can’t, we’ve thrown the old parts away.

Me> You’ve thrown the old parts away. Can I have a refund?

Renault Romford> I’ll need to call customer services for you….

I’ve had no call from Renault UK Customer services today, I left messages, Yvonne’s been a bit busy.

Still, nice to know I’m dealing with a reputable professional company, and not some east-end railway-arch crook.

So I arranged to take my car in Saturday to have the bit-of-plastic-on-the-driver’s-door fitted. I turn up, chap at the desk expected me and was very helpful.

Him> Ahh yes, part’s right here, shouldn’t take a mo to fit, I’ll just get some tools.

Me> Super thanks.

<fx>fiddling with the door happens</fx>

Him> Just going to make a phonecall, this isn’t looking how I expected

Me> It doesn’t look like a door with a well understood piece of plastic missing, I didn’t say.

Me> Uhh, sure.

<fx>phone call happens</fx>

Him> Sorry, but it looks like I can’t fit this part.

Me> You can’t fit this part.

Him> No, I think the inside door panel needs to be removed.

Me> The inside door panel needs to be removed, you think.

Him> Yes, and I’m not qualified.

Me> You’re not qualified. Super. Thanks.

I still have a hole in my door.

Meanwhile, 75cm toward the rear of my car….

You may recall that Renault Romford mistakenly did work I didn’t ask them to do, then insisted I pay for said work or I couldn’t have my car back.  I decided to take them up on their offer to simply undo the work and put back the faulty door mechanism and then give me a full refund.

Me> I’ve decided to take you up on your offer to simply undo the work and put back the faulty door mechanism and then give me a full refund.

Renault Romford> We can’t, we’ve thrown the old parts away.

Me> You’ve thrown the old parts away. Can I have a refund?

Renault Romford> I’ll need to call customer services for you….

I’ve had no call from Renault UK Customer services today, I left messages, Yvonne’s been a bit busy.

Still, nice to know I’m dealing with a reputable professional company, and not some east-end railway-arch crook.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the things that I do in my free time and why I do them. Over the last year, the course I have been studying has taken up a lot of evenings and weekends, as well as nibbling away at a few days of annual leave. Despite this I’ve kept up my work on the Ubuntu Podcast and contributed to the organisation of two OggCamp events. However, other activities have been less lucky: I’ve hardly seen some good friends and my two godchildren recently and there were a few months when I hadn’t picked up my camera at all.

One of the problems I’ve been mulling over is that of originality. Our Ubuntu Podcast is a successful show by most metrics, but we’re not the only Ubuntu/Linux/FLOSS podcast, not by a long stretch. Some are very different, stylistically, from our own. Others are more similar and I have found myself wondering if there’s any point in having several shows that share similarities. If podcasting really is radio that anyone can do, then what is the point of you doing it? If you’re not doing anything original, anything different, if other people can do it, why continue? Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The same thing applies to photography. I’m not a professional photographer, but I’ve enjoyed developing my skills over the last few years. I went on my first photo walk at the weekend, and couldn’t help feeling that twenty photographers walking them same route would come out with pretty much the same photos. Similarly, taking photos of well-known views or places seems pointless when you can find high quality images of the same thing on Flickr. There seems little point or challenge in taking photos which others can easily take too. If there are people making better photos of the same subject than you, why carry on making them?

Is this just trying to avoid being judged and found a failure? To compare your photographic efforts with those of someone who had access to the same scene and come out second best can’t be a nice feeling. If someone starts an Ubuntu or Linux-related podcast, rather than seeing them as a kindred spirit, I can’t help but feel it is a threat or increased competition; that they might do what we do better than us, that our listeners prefer the newcomer.

All this leads me towards the question of motivation. Why do I continue to work on the podcast and spend my time trying to take better photographs? If one can’t make something original, why make anything at all? A lot of my interest in learning how to do something new. The idea of doing a live podcast appeals because it’s a new experience. I’d like to photograph more and varied subjects; to feel I have acquired some new skills. If one finds the process rewarding or fun, or it serves a bigger, grander purpose then that on its own should be enough. Like anything worth doing, it’s difficult to be good at it. If you happen to strike on an original idea on the way, you’re very lucky.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below.