Je Hais Le Printemps

It's quite a tradition, now : the 2008 edition of Lugradio Live has been a total success. about twenty speakers talked on three tracks about various very interesting topics during a fantastic week-end (sun was even briefly involved!).

Once again, it's been a pleasure to meet my good friends from oversea, and even meet people I've never met ; some of them being stars in FLOSS, the others being totally unknown, but everyone being so friendly that it was very... Lugradio-ish, if you see what I mean.

A few clouds in this blue sky, however ; on saturday, the manager of the venuebar that was inside the venue, the Lighthouse, bounced Russ and Jen, apparently because they brought their baby with them ; and Xalior had words with the same manager, who apparently pushed a little bit aggressively a friend of his, Penny. She was on a wheelchair, by the way. This kind of attitude is really not in the spirit of a party. I assume that something went really wrong at this very moment and it let me a bad taste in my mouth. Well... maybe it was a bit because of the karaoke, too.

Boo.

Talking about my "talk" about Baguette on Snails, everything went pretty well, apart from the fact that I forgot one of my power jokes, unfortunately. Okay, so, for those who were there, and for the others:

In baguette on snails virtual machine, if you want to exit, you just have to type in "surrender" at prompt, and the VM says "RUN AWAY!"

As usual, I almost died 10 minutes before being on stage. Normal stuff. Move along.

picture by JonTheNiceGuy, CC-BY-SA licensed.

Baguette on Snails is my framework of choice
- Aq.

Laughing out loud. The slides and the source code I used for this talk will soon be available online. The python code will be published under the terms of a Free license, even if I doubt that anyone would take any advantage from it.

The biggest laugh on the week-end was definitely the sudden apparition of a giant furry racoon, nicknamed "Chinny". Underneath it, the true-and-only-one mrben, who also bravely accepted to climb on stage for the Gong-a-thong sequence, wearing only his underpants, the gloves and feet of this Racoon...

It was absolutely hilarious to see Jono watching Ben it this "suit"... Unforgettable.

In my humble opinion, also, between Tux and the Chinny Racoon... I'm quite sure that the Racoon is the toughest guy, don't you think?

No kidding, the super-mega-big-fucking-great-news, was the announcement that, even if the regular show actually stops, there will be another Lugradio Live next year!!! Seriously, I assumed that an informal meeting would have been planned on a yearly basis, but the fact that the four large gents received tons of emails begging for a Live event convinced them to do so. I think there is a need for this sort of "expo", as a counterpart of "normal" floss-based-events.

The Lugradio Live is a perfect mix of "serious" talks and some stupid presentations I've been part of. The FLOSS community apparently wants this kind of 50/50 funny/serious yearly event. Please note that the other less "rock&roll-styled" conferences are still needed too ; there's enough room for any kind of expo.

As far as I can tell, I'll be there next year. And you can count on me to push you to be there too. Yes. You too.

Lugradio Live UK'2009. Bring it on.