The 3rd and final day of the Birmingham Bug Jam, and it was much quieter this time around. Myself, Quentin, John Pinner and Chris "Baggers" were the only ones here to start. Chris was hardcore and actually spent the night in Linux Emporium though I don't know if he actually got any bugs triaged. Hellocatfood, from IRC, joined us later in the afternoon and got he managed to get a few hours of bug triaging in.
We set up the webcam stream so that the bug hunters in London could interact with us, and kudos to them (and Tim Williams) for setting up another webcam stream from London. We had two-way communication which really added to the atmosphere, and made it feel more of a global event. Having comments being shouted from London, and us laughing back made us really feel that we were part of a larger group, working together to the same ends. There were also others that joined in from home via the webcam and IRC.
Food wise, we had more tasty food this time a huge pizza that had to be halved so it fitted in the oven, burgers, and chocolate cake. Washed down by beers provided by Chris.
Chris got distracted again and started to juggle some penguins.
I felt that I got more bug triaging done today then yesterday. I felt more confident posting comments and changing status'.
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It's Saturday and we're hunting bugs in Birmingham! The day kicked off around 10 O'Clock at Linux Emporium (facilities kindly provided by John Pinner) with everyone getting stuck into bugs on Launchpad. Mez gave a quick how-to on bug triaging to a few of us. Unfortunately it seemed that everyone else on the interest was being just as enthusiastic and the Launchpad servers couldn't handle the load. The Canonical monkeys got it sorted eventually so we got back to bug zapping.
Tim Williams of Autotrain and SBLug set up the room with a streaming webcam, so that the whole world can watch - and listen! - to our bug hunting. This essentially meant we spent a good while irritating the London Bug Jammers by eating tasty lasagne, chocolate cake, drinking beer and juggling penguins.
I only managed to triage about 9 bugs today, it's still very much early days for me but I still think I helped. Most of the triaging I did was to file the bugs against what I thought was the correct package, and changing the status, asking for more info. Quentin and Nick were able to actually have a more in-depth stab at the bugs, because we had a wide variety available in the Linux Emporiums office, reporting back more specific information that should hopefully help developers when they come to fix the bugs.
Mez and Zeth also spent a bit of time interviewing the bug jammers for a podcast they are preparing to release.
Later in the day we had a surprise visit from Henrik Omma who helped me understand a little more about Launchpad, and helped me by setting a few bugs to "wishlist".
Hopefully tomorrow I will be more confident with setting bug status, and asking for more information.
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There has been a flurry of discussion on various mailing lists recently with the hopeful creation of two hackerspaces in the UK.
A hacker space is a place where people (mainly geeks) can come and use the facilities on offer to collaborate, hack and learn. Usually it's technology based, so there is wifi, computers, and electronics gear but this is not the limit of what could go on. Small grass-roots organisations could use the meeting rooms, people could learn to sew or even build machines and art there. Anything could happen, it just needs a place to nucleate all the talent of the city.
It all started off with a suggestion, from Jonty Wareing, to start a Hacker Space in London on the Open Rights Group Discuss mailing list. Almost immediately a Google mailing list was set up, and more people started getting interested. There are now 80 members of the mailing list and have a meeting planned in a few weeks date to be confirmed. The London crew have since gone even further and have set up a limited company called the Hackerspace Foundation!
The London Hacker space discussion then spawned an offshoot here in Birmingham, with Antonio Roberts setting up another mailing list to try and start a hacker space in Birmingham! Our mailing list is currently at a membership of 25 people, not too shabby for about 3 days! But we need more people willing to get involved, to build momentum, to build a place for us to hack and collaborate in.
If you are interested please join the Google Mailing list for your area:
Say hello and join in the discussions!
For the Birmimgham group a meet-o-matic has been set up, so we can organise a date to meet. Visit meet-o-matic and put in the dates you are available. I will be closing the meet-o-matic on Thursday and announcing the best date for the meeting. The meeting is likely to be held at The Bull Inn (Birmimgham City Centre)(map) It has free wifi, good beer and a nice atmosphere.
Got all that? Good! Now blog, twitter and tell people, friends, family, artists and enemies. As we said we need people to do this, people willing to get their hands dirty.
Goodbye, and see you on the other side!
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Hi Mum! Look at me! I'm on the interwebs.
My mum has figured out how to subscribe to RSS feeds. Well done Mum.
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Now that Birmingham is complete, I did a video party render of all the GPS tracks I could get a hold of for the Birmingham area.
Here is the result
This is the slow version, a higher (time) resolution version is available from here.
This video represents an enormous amount of raw data 398MB. That is also just the GPS data. It doesn't show the ways and points-of-interest associated with them, which is what gets rendered by OSM and is viewable on the website.
Hope you like the video.
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