UK Linux User Groups

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
• Hierarchical human readable storage structure
• Highly resilient
• Large volume capacity (TB’s)
• Manage independently from a Perl enabled workstation
• Manage long-term archives
• Multiple configuration files for multiple installations
• Perl installer and configurator
• Powered by rsync and OpenSSH
• Secure design
• Simple configuration file and format
• Standards compliant
• Stats and analysis tools built-in
• 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…

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".

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.

A new version of I-D, draft-brasher-ltasp-03.txt has been successfully submitted by Damian Brasher and posted to the IETF repository. Filename: draft-brasher-ltasp Revision: 03 Title: Long Term Archive Storage Protocol Creation_date: 2010-07-26 WG ID: Independent Submission Number_of_pages: 13 Abstract: Long-term archiving storage fundamentally begins with archive data Accumulation, then Geo-duplication and then Management. Using A->G->M, LTASP has been created to solve mid-range and below, long- term archiving requirements of the small-medium enterprise. Where tape has been deployed in the past, LTASP now offers an alternative solution designed to be more robust and manageable in the long term than network attached storage devices or simple disk storage alone. The IETF Secretariat.

Saw this recently on the Google blog:

App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.

via Official Google Blog: App Inventor for Android.

It looks really cool, and allows really quick generation of apps via a gui interface which is powered by MIT’s Open Blocks framework which sounds like a really cool way to get children and students into programming

I can’t wait to get my invite to try it out!

Not for the first time I find my blog content copied and hosted elsewhere. This time via http://sysadmin.im/.

Mostly I care little if people rehost my content. But when people claim to have written it (e.g. "Posted by Admin") I get annoyed.

No explicit contact details are posted, probably to avoid complaints.

Update: Fixed URL. Stupid do.tted.na.mes.

When I finished my first degree I spent a summer working for John Ashworth & Partners. It was a very interesting job and at the same time I learnt a lot about the paint industry and how poor most paint actually is.

One of the things they invented and I got to play with is ECOS*, their zero odour paint system. It is a 100% volatile organic free paint system. Basically it is a water based system that actually works.

The problem with ECOS is the same as the problem with Linux and a whole host of other things, it doesn't matter that you are vastly superior to the brand leader, the fact you are not brand leader make it almost impossible to sell the stuff.

Now I own my own home, I have to put my money where my mouth is and actually buy their paint to use on my own house. For the past few weeks I've been running down paint the house came with, soon I'll have to buy fresh and it's going to be UK invented, UK made, top quality stuff!

* Warning, the ECOS web site is a bit hippy and full of tree hugging nonsense, but the paint that is in the tins is brilliant stuff.

My Linksys router now serves the LAN with netboot images, allowing the simple installation of Debian GNU/Linux.

I updated /etc/dnsmasq.conf on the router itself to read:

# gPXE sends a 175 option. dhcp-match=gpxe,175 # serve the "undionly.kpxe" file by default. dhcp-boot=net:#gpxe,undionly.kpxe # which will then pull the config via HTTP dhcp-boot=http://static.steve.org.uk/netboot/gpxe.cfg

Then placed /tftproot/undionly.kpxe in place on the router. This combination of files causes:

• The machine to netboot via undionly.kpxe (think of this like pxelinux.0.)
• The file gpxe.cfg to be fetched via HTTP
• Which in turn loads a simple menu.conf file, again via HTTP
• At this point the user can select the flavour of Debian installer to run.

I have only one problem - it seems that adding the expected entry to boot locally fails:

MENU TITLE Netboot LABEL Local.Disk bootlocal 0

Update: After a fresh sleep and more trial and error I discovered this works:

LABEL Local.Boot KERNEL local/chain.c32 APPEND -

It gives a temporary warning about invalid sector number - but actually does boot locally by default, on both my EEEPC and my desktop machine.

If you want to snarf my netboot environment you are welcome to mirror :

• http://static.steve.org.uk/netboot/
• This is what I put on my router.

Why did I do this in the first place? I wanted to install Squeeze upon my EEEPC (now done.)

ObQuote: Nice Cross. How'd you get the blood off?

- Dead Like Me

So I sat in my seat for one final graduation ceremony. Decked out in a vile marriage of academic and clerical robes. There I was for one student in particular.
This particular student walked into chaplaincy for breakfast one day about three years ago. We spoke once or twice and then he had a very bad couple of weeks, he'd broken up with his girlfriend and decided to leave University. He rang me from home and told me that he had dropped out. His room was a state he said, his kitchen was covered in dirty pots, he was lonely and it was all getting on top of him.
I thought and prayed and then I asked him to come back. I told him I'd do my best to support him, and if he could stay till Christmas he might actually make it all the way through.
His Dad agreed to drive him back one Sunday afternoon, I agreed to meet him the other end and then once in, I helped him tidy his room and did his washing up and then he cooked a meal for both of us we sat and ate. And I, and my Free Church colleague did our best to support him over the next three years.
On Thursday I clapped as he crossed the stage in front of me. He got a First. He also has a fiancée. And he's doing a PhD.
I do the whole Christian thing, I do the telling people about Jesus and sometimes just occasionally I just help someone.
It was a fitting end to my job at the University of Southampton

Since buying an Android phone I have been starting to think about using it to read books. The screen isn’t bad, and it turns out that there is some good software out there

Aldiko is a fantastic program for reading free ePub books, so I am working my way through a few H. G. Wells books as they are now public domain and available directly through the program (along with many other free books). The software has good options for font styling, line spacing, page turning, black on white vs. white on black as well as quick shortcuts for changing the brightness.

One thing I have yet to figure out though, is buying eBooks.

Sure, there are loads of places out there that sell them, many including their own software (available for Android) for reading the books with DRM. However it is almost impossible to work out which ones use which DRM systems, and what the restrictions are on them (some may even be per-book)

Why am I worried about DRM? Well, what if I want to read the book on a train on a laptop, or what if my phone dies and I get a different phone? Can I transfer it to another device? What if I decide to buy a hardware eBook reader? Will I be able to copy my books to it and read them there?

I haven’t even addressed the idea of lending the book to my wife without giving her my phone.

DRM worries me greatly, and so I doubt I will buy an eBook anytime soon unless it comes without DRM (but no sites make it very clear that they are DRM-free). Why can’t they come to the same conclusions as online music distributors and realise that DRM-free means more sales?

I guess it is paper books for the forseeeable future

As of this morning I'm a published author on CPAN!

Thus far I have only a single module to my name, but that will most likely change in the future:

CGI::Session::Driver::redis

A module for storing (CGI) session data within a Redis database.

A while back I setup a dynamic website which was 100% redis backed, using my redis backports for lenny, and realised I needed somewhere to store the session data too. Hence this module.

I'll create a .deb package of the module, and stick it alongside the redis server.

ObQuote:I like to keep this handy... for close encounters.

Aliens

I've been interesting in running Linux upon my router for a long time, but I never had a really compelling reason to do so. The potential for brickage was always too high to make me want to experiment for the sake of it.

However last night I installed Gargoyle upon my Linksys WRT53GL. Although I have no single compelling reason to do so there were a few things on my mind which made me risk it:

Syslog

I thought it would be nice to log things to my desktop machine.

QoS

I often run rsync to mirror my photographs, videos, and files, to off-site locations. These are then replicated via chironfs.

Being able to use QoS to prioritise SSH traffic, which is the transport I use for rsync, means I don't suffer from laggy connections.

Graphing & Statistics

Having statistics and traffic information is interesting.

Since I've only just installed it I've not had too much opportunity to experiment with it - and my initial forays were not so productive. For example "opkg install tcpdump" failed as the root filesystem wasn't big enough.

However which was to update the router to function as PXE server. I installed the tftpd server:

opkg install tftpd-hpa

Then I added this to /etc/dnsmasq.conf:

dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,router.my.flat,192.168.1.1

Only after I'd done this did I realise two things:

• I don't have the space on the router to host the pxelinux.0 file, and the associated Debian netboot installer.
• Chances are I could just use the built-in TFTP support of dnsmasq. ("enable-tftp" + "tftp-root=/tmp/tftproot".)

Tomorrow, (after visiting the dentist. Uggh) I will experiment with this further. Right now it looks like I have two options:

• NFS mount the TFTP root, but keep both DHCP+TFTPD running upon the router.
• Configure the router to load the files from another machine, by updating dnsmasq.conf to read: dhcp-boot=pxelinux.0,random.host.name,192.168.1.xx.

Either way I have to store the files upon another host, due to the constrained space on the router's filsystem. So the question becomes "Which service should I run externally: TFPTD or NFS?".

Running TFTPD, upon my desktop, seems smaller, less of a security risk, and neater. Running TFTPD also avoids issues if I reboot both the router and my desktop at the same time as a stalling NFS mount could prevent a timely router-boot.

ObQuote: Looking for a secret door. Places like this always have a secret door.

- St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold

Finally – All that hard work has paid off and the release is available!

Fix Pack 7.0.0.1 (V7.0 Fix Pack 1) for WebSphere Message Broker v7.0 is now available.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg24027267

You can see what is new in 7.0.0.1 by looking in the Information Center

• Simplicity and productivity
  • User-defined patterns
  • Solar Pattern Authoring sample
  • Service Access from WebSphere MQ: one-way pattern
  • Using a subflow as a user-defined node
• Universal connectivity for SOA
  • New CORBARequest node
  • New CICSRequest node
  • New WebSphere MQ File Transfer Edition nodes
  • New DatabaseInput node
  • New SecurityPEP node
  • JMS transport for SOAP nodes
  • Querying WSDL with ?wsdl
  • HTTP nodes can use the embedded listener in an execution group
  • New HTTP Timeout terminal on HTTPInput and SOAPInput nodes
  • Securing the connection to IMS™ by using SSL
  • Propagating security credentials to IMS
  • Closing unused connections to Enterprise Information Systems
  • Propagating security credentials to SAP
• New WS-Trust V1.3 compliant security token server (STS) support for message flow security

I’m not a superstitious person but this observation has got me thinking about triangles again. DIASER, as you may know, is a long-term archive system, disaster recovery, in beta-2 phase. Does this bar chart say anything to you?

No, not much. See the whole picture here. From the news you will know that on Tuesday 12th January 2010 a massive earthquake hit Haiti. On 20th April 2010 the BP oil rig explosion occurred. Both locations of these disasters are near, or within, the Bermuda triangle region. The exact location of the Bermuda triangle is open to interpretation. Take a look at the Wikipedia page. Statistics are just statistics and open to misinterpretation; however the graphs above display distinct rise in user activity by March 2010 and now the BP oil disaster has occurred there is a massive drop. Furthermore there was a huge drop in activity in September 2009 shortly after a significant vulnerability in the Linux kernel was discovered on the 13th September 2009. Am I seeing what is not there? Of course, there are many more variables to take into account, so quite possibly. However, it is very possible that the world news affects how different types of software are consumed at any given time. The main point of this is the mind bending, reality law breaking, thought that my life may well have been affected, indirectly, by the Bermuda triangle without even leaving my cosy rural UK based office. The Franco-Bulgarian philosopher; Tzvetan Todorov, states how the breach of our laws of reality might be described in literature, I like it.

– Damian

My nearly-four-years-old Renault Clio was due a bit of tender loving care.  The rear door lock had stopped being able to lock the doors, a small piece of plastic fell off the front driver’s side door and, the one that tipped it,  the driver side wing mirror was shattered; someone hit it in a car park – thanks!

I booked my car in to Renault Romford, dropped it in before work, and waited for a call back letting me know what everything was going to cost.  The call arrived and the suggested shopping list was a little longer than I expected.

• Rear engine mount starting to split – £103.00
• Front disks and pads should be replaced – £245.60
• Coolant and brake fluid drain and refill – £49.99
• Air conditioning service – £79.99
• Replacing the bit of plastic that fell off – £7.76
• Replacing the mirror – £27.87
• Replacing the rear door handle – £365.68 – wait, what?

I totally accept that most of the stuff in that list falls under the categories of “normal wear and tear” and “you broke it”, but things like a door handle should reasonably last the lifetime of the car.  It’s not like it’s even the most commonly used door.  Had this been the driver’s door, I might have grumbled a bit but understood.

I asked Renault Romford to replace the glass, replace the bit of plastic and service the aircon, explaining that I would sort out the brakes etc next month and would call Renault UK Customer services to talk to them about the rear door handle.

Renault UK customers service have still not contacted me, despite Tweets, emails and a telephone message asking them to do so.

I got a call yesterday saying my car was ready to be picked up, and that I owed them some £450.00.  I was confused.  They’d changed the rear door lock, despite me very explicitly saying that I was going to talk to Renault customer services about it.  Opinions were exchanged, we agreed this was most likely a misunderstanding.

I went to pick up my car this morning.  The car would not be released to me unless I paid in full.  In other words, I have paid hundreds of pounds for parts and work I didn’t ask to be done.

Insult to injury?  Hell, yes.  The didn’t replace the tiny piece of plastic that fell off the front door, one of the three things I did very specifically ask them to fix.

THERE’S A HOLE IN MY DOOR, DEAR RENAULT.   And I’m hundreds of pounds out of pocket.

For centralised authentication and authorisation, LDAP is the de-facto standard. Whether in its pure form on Unix or in Active Directory guise on Windows, everyone uses it.

What many people don't realise is that you can store all sorts of useful (and not so useful) information in LDAP. One field which can be useful is the "manager" attribute. One of our customers use that and so we've written a small script to graph it using the excellent Graphviz tool.

read more

We seem to be quite good at turning up to technical events such as LUG meetings, technical conferences and other self-organised events and telling everyone how great Ubuntu is. However we seem to spend a lot of time preaching to the converted, speaking to people who already run Ubuntu or some other distro, rather than ‘converting’ people who have little or no exposure to Ubuntu.

Amber Graner recently wrote about her experience evangelising and advocating at a local Goat Festival. She was also interviewed about this on the Full Circle Magazine podcast recently.

When I heard about this it made me think that it’s something we should think about. Not specifically Goat festivals, but non-technical events. I wanted to canvass the group to see what events people might want to have a presence at. I’m not (at this point) asking for volunteers, but just ideas of events where people go and we might be able to have a stand where we could talk to people about Ubuntu and how they might want to use it.

These could be non-technical business events, they might relate to a specific sector such as education, or they could be cultural events like festivals. Anything goes really. I’ll start the ball rolling with a fairly generic example that pretty much anyone here can do:-

Village Fêtes

These attract families from all walks of life, and would be a great opportunity to have a public stand at little or no cost to run. Other attractions could include simple games (always popular at Fêtes) with prizes perhaps donated by community members, sponsors or (if willing/possible) Canonical. With summer coming it would be a great opportunity to get geeks outside in the sunshine and show off what we have to offer.

What events local to you would you like to see a stand at?

Also posted on the UK LoCo mailing list, so some responses may appear there too.