David Johnson's Blog

After missing LUGRadio Live last year, I decided to go along this year. There were a few really good talks, the first of which was Thomas Vander Stichele’s Flumotion talk (I’ve since played with Flumotion and a post on that will be forthcoming). Also good was Scott James Remnant’s ‘Ten Really Cool Things’, which included a look at Compiz Fusion (born from the re-merging of Beryl into Compiz) – I normally fail to be impressed by 3D eye-candy as it usually serves no useful purpose, but some of the stuff in Compiz Fusion looks cool and actually useful usability-wise. It was also good to hear from Becky Hogge about the work the Open Rights Group has been doing since it was formed; it seems they are doing some really useful stuff and my £5 a month is being put to good use. I tend to be wary of new groups that pop-up and request money since in the past one well-known UK-based group (which I won’t name) started taking money and then did nothing useful or productive at all – they just sat around having AGMs and forming work-groups that never did any work. Anyway, there were lots more talks I would have liked to see, but the scheduling was far from ideal – in a few of the time-slots I wanted to see all three talks that were happening. Also for many of the talks the titles weren’t even published in the printed schedule on the day, making it somewhat difficult to choose what to see. I’m hoping there will be some audio or video of the KDE4, ‘I am a Lawyer’, ‘Free Software Rocks’, Google and BBC talks. There were some cool talks in the somewhat cringeworthy-yet-unmissable Gong ‘a’ Thong event (yes it included both a gong and a thong…) but there were also some really dull ones too. Perhaps next time the audience can have the power to cut-short talks like in The Comedy Store’s Gong Show.

I thought the exhibition area was very disappointing, with many notable projects and groups being unrepresented. Certainly there seemed to be more exhibitors at LRL2005… I guess clashing with the end of aKademy didn’t help. There were also very few well-known speakers – now I know well-known speakers don’t necessarily make for better talks, but it was just something that I noticed fairly quickly from looking at the schedule. Again, in 2005, there were several well-known speakers.

OK so I’ve given LRL a bit of a kicking for a few things, but there were some more good things too. The venue was pretty good and although the sunlight coming through the roof of the atrium area made it difficult to read slides, it did make it a very pleasant place to sit. The location was pretty good too – right near the railway station so easy to find and make a quick getaway from. The Friday-night meet up at the Hogs Head was also good, with several real ales to choose from and a free (and fairly substantial) buffet.

Unfortunately getting home from the event proved difficult, as a four hour journey was made to take eight hours by the rather inept handling of a technical fault on a Virgin Train (after sitting on a broken-down train for three hours, they finally arranged coaches for us). I was not very happy and won’t be losing any sleep over them losing their franchise.

Anyway, overall LRL2007 was a good event and I’ll probably go along next year. Unfortunately all my photos are pretty rubbish (I can either spend my time running around getting good shots or I can focus on enjoying the event – I chose to enjoy the event) but I’ve uploaded them to my photo album anyway.