On Wednesday, I downloaded my first paid-for ebook: An Introduction to Social Constructionism by Vivien Burr. I’d just finished reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, which I found free on the Kindle Store when I installed the Kindle for Android app on my phone. I wasn’t sure whether I’d happily read a whole book from my phone but we seemed to get on pretty well, even reading from a small, backlit screen.

I rather like the crisp freshness of physical new books and the battered usedness of secondhand books, with their mysterious inscriptions from owners (or libraries) past. I also quite like having physical books on shelves; I grew up in a household full of bookcases and I’m easily distracted, when visiting friends, by the contents of their bookcases. But our current small house can’t really take many more shelves.

I’ve found that having a pile of books-to-read by my bed doesn’t actually make me read them any more quickly. And the weight and bulk of them prevents me carrying one around with me on the off-chance that I might have a spare moment to read it. I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl whenever and wherever I had the chance: on the train, on the station platform, on car journeys, at my in-laws, in the living-room waiting for tea, in the kitchen whilst cooking tea, in bed, in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. In short, anywhere I had my phone and some free time. And I carry my phone everywhere.

The problem with my phone is that it’s not that comfortable to hold for a long time and I’m a bit wary of straining my eyes focusing on such a small, backlit screen. Handily the Kindle automatically syncs your reading position (in the book; not your posture) to the Amazon server and your other registered Kindle devices. So if I had a Kindle, I could read it at home or on the train, and then, when I don’t have the Kindle with me (eg waiting to be served at the takeaway), I could carry on reading the same book from my phone.

So a Kindle is now on my Amazon wishlist. I’m not keen on the closedness of it as a system but I do like the user experience. Just got to patiently wait for my birthday to come round now…

If you’ve come here to watch and rate a 3-minute BBC film on the environment and energy, please click this link:  http://www.lauracowen.co.uk/film.html

Thank you for your time!

Before I start, I should declare a potential conflict of interest: Tony Whitmore is my other half, and has been for the past 12+ years.

That doesn’t mean I blindly think he’s great at everything even when he isn’t. He has his faults. And he does daft things at times, like occasionally forgetting to press Record when we do an Ubuntu-UK Podcast show; though even then, he’s usually planned for such an eventuality (he has a backup recording of the stream running on his VPS).

He’s quite good at planning.

The first time I met his family, his brother Mark joked that we probably had a written schedule for meeting their grandparents and other family members. Mark was wrong. It wasn’t a joke. We actually did. Tony’s Sunday roast dinners used to get their own Gantt chart.

The brilliant fun that is OggCamp probably wouldn’t have come about without Tony’s planning ability. As fellow UUPC-founder Alan Pope says “the podcast would almost certainly not exist” either. That’s not to say that Tony has done either of those things alone. Alan, who came up with the original idea for UUPC, is probably the creative genius of the project – coming up with a lot of the content ideas over the past 4 years and typically thinking up wacky ideas on his 50 mile drive to our house to record the show. OggCamp’s organising team is pretty big and varies from year to year but Tony’s hand is usually firmly on the budget, making sure we break even (for which I’m sure we’re all grateful as the event is financially underwritten by the individuals on the two podcast teams).

Alan, and all the HantsLUG guys we’ve known since moving to Hampshire, would probably agree that Tony’s planning and his lists are pretty epic but it generally gets things done (except when trying to get his phone to work at FOSDEM).

I think the thing that impresses me most, though, is that once he’s decided to do something, he gets on and does it to his best ability and that thing is pretty much always a success. Things like:

 

His latest project is too young yet to judge its overall success but I have faith because he has form. Last month, he set up Tony Whitmore Weddings, his new wedding photography business. He’s always enjoyed photography, crafting photos with technical precision and artistic flare. Inspired by our friend James Hodgson‘s Christmas present to us, Tony decided to set himself a photo project a couple of years ago where he had to take enough photos in 12 months that he could produce a calender to give as Christmas presents the following year. On the back of that calender, he got his first wedding photographer gig.

As usual, he practised and did a lot of research, including watching tutorials by the awesome Jasmine Star. Jasmine’s focus is only partly on the photography; she talks a lot about the business side of being a wedding photographer. And at the start of this year, Tony decided he was going to give it a go. He went on Jasmine’s course when she came to London in July, and he attended a few of the free courses offered by the HMRC.

Last weekend, he launched his business website (with logo kindly donated by my new cousin Jeff and his funky graphic design skills) and Facebook page, and he already has not only a reasonable portfolio but also bookings for future weddings.

I think he’s amazing – but then I would. I don’t think I’m alone, though, in having a huge amount of admiration for what he achieves when he sets his mind to something.

Roger Light (@ralight) has just posted on his blog that Facebook are using MQTT for their new messaging system and, specifically, they seem to be using some part of Roger’s Mosquitto project in it.

So why is this a big deal to me?

Last weekend was the third OggCamp conference, OggCamp 11, at the Farnham Maltings in Surrey. Two years ago, at the first OggCamp (a one-day event at the Connaught Hotel in Wolverhampton), we invited Andy Stanford-Clark (@andysc) to be our opening keynote speaker. Andy co-invented the MQTT messaging protocol about 10 years earlier and, while there was a server implementation of MQTT (Really Small Message Broker; RSMB) that you could download for free from IBM’s website, it was proprietary and there was no open source implementation available.

Andy wrote a new presentation, especially for OggCamp, describing the geeky innards of his Twittering house (as seen earlier that year on the BBC). The presentation was a fantastic kickstart to the day and (somewhat predictably for a conference with its foundations firmly in the open source world) Andy was questioned about what bits of his home automation system were built on open source software and open standards. The one significant part of the system that was proprietary was RSMB (the core part that enabled all the parts of his house to communicate).

Then OggCamp started, we had a good time, and we went home exhausted but happy.

And then, just two weeks later, Roger announced that he’d registered a new project called Mosquitto (as in MosQuiTTo) on Launchpad. He’d been inspired by Andy’s talk at OggCamp to write an open source alternative to RSMB. Within what seemed like days he had a working bit of code which was taken up and tested by others in the open source community and hardware-hacking communities like Homecamp.

I cannot claim any credit at all for all the hard work that Roger and others put in developing and testing Mosquitto. I’ve always been proud, though, that Mosquitto was born at OggCamp – we played our small part in helping connect the previously mostly corporate/business MQTT with the open source communities.

That Facebook announced they were adopting MQTT for their new messaging system the day before OggCamp 11 meant we could vicariously revel in Roger’s glory while we tried to find out just whether Facebook had adopted his code or their own implementation. The answer seems to be somewhere between the two.

And while I’m proud for OggCamp (of course), I’m also excited for Roger in his own right that his name is now in the licence agreement of apps from the mighty Facebook – that kind of recognition for your hard work must be such an amazing feeling!

It’s just one short week until OggCamp 11! Each year we’ve done this event, it’s grown. This year has a really special feeling about it.

It’s brilliant that there are people who have taken the event name literally and are camping for the weekend. Hopefully the weather will favour them! The Farnham Maltings venue has a really nice feel to it and is ideally located for the park and pubs. The attendees at OggCamp really make the event what it is and the best bit (well, one of them) as an organiser is seeing everyone arriving at the venue on Saturday morning!

We’ve got three stages, two of which are being run as an unconference. That means that the wonderful OggCampers volunteer talks and others vote for the ones they’d like to see most! We’ve had some really great talks submitted this way in the past. It sounds a bit chaotic and it is, but it works! We’ll be using CampFire Manager by Jon Spriggs to schedule these talks for the first time this year so you’ll be able to propose and vote for talks by txt msg and see the schedule up on the digital displays around the venue.

Our main stage schedule is basically complete. The Ubuntu Podcast team will be joining forces with the Linux Outlaws for the traditional live podcast recording. There will be a panel discussion and a raffle (of course) too! Our wonderful main stage speakers include:

We’ve got some exhibitors, including

We’ve also got some surprises planned for the weekend which you’ll only find out about by being there. If you want to come along and join in some or all of the weekend’s activities, you can. It’s free. That’s right, it doesn’t cost a penny. There are a few tickets left and you can get your hands on them here: http://oggcamp11.eventbrite.com

It’s free thanks to our lovely sponsors:

This week is always the quickest of the whole process. Before we know it we’ll be standing in the William Cobbett pub sharing a drink or two with the lovely OggCampers on Friday night and won’t touch the ground until after the Sunday night drinks! The plan for the weekend (and lots more information) is available on the OggCamp website.

One of the best parts of the weekend is meeting people who listen to the show, so please say hello! See you there!