The first day is over, and what a day it was. The great talks I listened to were Sarah Ewen - Taking about Linux, Sony and the Playstation, Scott James Remnant of Cannonical - Talking about Edgy Eft, Michael Meeks of Novel - Talking about Open Office and Simon Phipps of Sun - Talking about The Zen of Free.

All were great talks, I wont go into detail about them as the talks should be made available on the net for download so keep checking LUG Radio's Site if your interested. There were many other talks going on which I shall have to catch up on when the content is online, the reason I missed them is because there are so many speakers they have to speak at the same time as other speakers in different rooms.

The venue, Wolverhamton Student Union was much better than last years Molenux Football grounds that had no openable windows. This place had air conditioning, if only it was turned on. Still at least a few windows and doors could be left open which helped a bit. Just as last year the choice of drinks were abismol. No beer just larger, cider, Guiness (Irish Stout) and the usual array of nancy kids drinks like WKD or a Vodka and Coke. Guiness it was then but coke after that. This year actually had a dedicated time set aside for a lunch break which was a welcome change, last year meant walking out in the middle of some interesting talk to get food.

LRL Live and Unleashed (the actual live recording of LUG Radio) was good as always, many laughs were had, many a beard was shaved. One minor negative point was that the speech and music was terribly distorted. I only hope it wasn't recorded like that.

Can't wait for the second half of it tommorow

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Well what better time to blog about LUG radio live then whilst at LUG Radio live? This is my first mobile blog entry and I'm writing it on my Nokia 770 whilst making use of my uni's free wifi (as LRL is actually held at my uni ). So far the day has been great (I'm now halfway through the day), I have seen some great talks which I will blog about later when I have a proper keyboard to write on as I'm rather fond of my fingers so this is only going to be a short post. LRL 06 is far better than last year, apart from having one more day to enjoy the venue is much better too. More later, I'm off to watch the mass debate now

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I have owned a DS since a few weeks after it was on sale in the UK. The DS is a great handheld, without a doubt the best on the market. However I got rid of mine (only because I quite fancied getting a DS lite). I went a few months without a DS missing a few great titles being released.



On June the 23rd UK release date I could wait no longer! I made a special trip into town to get my pre-ordered DS lite which I bought with two games, Brain Training and Metroid prime. I have been putting of this post for some time because I wanted the novelty factor to wear off before writing about it to make it as unbiased as I can (also this is going to be a lengthy post and I like to put those off for as long as I can ).

The DS lite is a DS that's smaller, lighter, has a much brighter screen and is much nicer looking. Apart from that it's repositioned some of the buttons and the mic for a clearer layout. Is it worth the upgrade though? That really does depend on how much £99 is worth to you. The DS lite's screen is fantastic and is reason enough alone for an upgrade in my opinion. The colours now look as they should, not dull and washed away as they have been on every past Nintendo handheld. If you have ever used an emulator for a GBA or DS (or seen screenshots) and compared what you see on your screen to what you see on your handheld, the results have always been disappointing until now. The DS lite bring the brightness and vibrancy of colour that a TFT monitor bears. There's not much more to say about the DS lite since the rest of the improvements, size, weight and look are all obviously a good thing. The DS lite rivals and, in my opinion, beats the sleak look of the PSP.

On to the games I got with the DS lite which are of course the main reason of purchase!

Read More...

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Everyone seems to be banging on about Python in the Linux community and with good reason. I have dabbled with Python but never created anything that really did anything so I decided to create a very simple CLI based chat server/client. Python makes handling socket's very easy and the whole program is just over 100 lines of code. I decided however that I wanted to learn more about building GUI apps via event driven programming, using Glade to design the GUI and GTK via PyGTK as the toolkit. So using a guide as reference titled GUI - The Pythonic Way (BTW the code in the guide does not run and has many bugs but I was interested in the information regarding how to use Glade and GTK with Python not the code to hack a calculator ) I created a basic calculator which to my surprise was very easy to do and rather fun and quick being only 91 lines of programming. The Calculator is now available from the Programming Page.

Having heard about how Python can run on other OS's my next stop was Windows. Don't worry I didn't leave Linux to do this, just emulated WinXP using VMware. Amazingly after installing Python, GTK, PyGTK and PyCairo. All I had to do was start the program and that was it, it was working fine under Windows with no modifications to the code which is very impressive, esp as it's the first time I have created a GUI app and had it run on more than one OS.



I shall certainly be experimenting more with Python, one day I might even hack something useful

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