Simon Willison’s Weblog

LUG Radio Live

26th June 2005

I’ve been very busy for the last three days. My last two exams (HCI and Marketing) were on Thursday evening and Friday morning respectively, followed by a celebratory barbecue. I was up at 7am on Saturday to get up to Wolverhampton for LUG Radio Live, then back to Bath again by 5.30pm for our graduation summer ball. Finally, I’m heading off to Denmark in the early hours of Monday morning for a week and a bit of camping and Roskilde Let’s hope it’s a bit drier than Glastonbury was.

LUG Radio Live was a huge success. I have no idea how many people showed up, but it was at least several hundred. I did a lightning talk on Greasemonkey (slides here) which seemed to go pretty well, and ended in a lively Q&A session. I’ve posted some of my photos from the event up on Flickr.

Mark Shuttleworth seamlessly combined a talk on Ubuntu, the importance of open source, collaborative development tools and what it’s like to go in to space. He’s a great speaker, and I thoroughly recommend seeing him talk if you ever get a chance. He also mentioned that he would be interesting in sponsoring a bounty towards the development of an open-source SubEthaEdit clone.

The LUG Radio team interviewed Ian Bell, the author of the original Elite. The most interesting revelation was that fitting the compiled Elite game in to 32K was actually easier than getting the uncompiled source code small enough to fit on the hosting architecture (they had to strip out all of the comments).

I met a bunch of interesting people and had a great time, even though I had to leave early to get back in time for the ball. Congratulations to all involved, and I look forward to going again next year.