First, when I got there, I noticed that the Muslims coming in were having their bags searched, while the (mostly white) people going into another exhibition were not. I went through their side, and was redirected through the “Muslim channel” only when I told management which exhibition I was there for (i.e. they were not going to search me because I am white). Not only did they scan my bag, they insisted on scanning my umbrella as well! I complained to one of the security staff on the way out, and was told that the reason was because there had been a stabbing at the event on Saturday, and that is why the management had insisted on searching everyone. However, since that incident really was a one-off, and stabbings (particularly fatal ones) involving Muslims in London are really not that common, was it really necessary to scan everyone, rather than scan bags randomly? After all, any racist nut could have brought a bag in the other lane and left it in the exhibition. I intend to write to the management, insha Allah.

Next complaint is that there was almost no food available at the event, other than the standard contract catering establishments in the concourse, most of which were not halaal. The excuse was that, last year, these same establishments had complained that the in-hall catering had deprived them of business. Worse, a search of the GPU website has only four hits for “food”, none of which is a warning that there would be almost no halaal catering at the event. People do not go to an all-day event and not expect there not to be any food available. If they could not provide it, they should have given directions to where the nearest facilities were; if there were none nearby (and I suspect that was the case), they should have found another venue.

Third, the exhibition hall was noisy beyond belief. I really struggled to hold conversations with some of the people I met, and talking above the general noise and that caused by the nasheed concert and skateboarding spectators really made my throat hurt. This and the catering situation should make the organisers seriously consider finding a more civilised venue for next year’s GPU, even if it has to be smaller. I suggest Olympia, which is in the middle of town and not way out in east London (on a day when most of the north-south rail links across east London were closed for engineering, and only the Docklands was open) and there are halaal restaurants within easy reach (i.e. in Shepherds’ Bush, and there are Persian restaurants nearby; not sure how halal they are).

Fourth, the timekeeping was abysmal. The one talk I really wanted to get to was by ENGAGE, the new media monitoring group, and that was originally scheduled for 3pm, but had to be put back, supposedly because the end of British Summer Time had thrown everything out of kilter. Sorry, but the move from BST to GMT adds an extra hour to Sunday, rather than removing it as is the case in the Spring. How could they justify everything being an hour late because an extra hour had been added to the night? And if there had been problems, they should have put out a revised timetable.

As an aside, the Policy Exchange (the Tory think-tank based around the clique David Cameron belongs to) circulated a dossier (Word document) encouraging people not to speak at the event, which included among its evidence material sourced from David Gaubatz of the “Society of Americans for National Existence”, which made a lame attempt to penetrate Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, USA, which was documented by Tariq Nelson (hat tip: Islamophobia Watch, although the story traces to Politics Home. This same organisation calls for “adherence to Shari’a” to be punishable by 20 years in prison, and for the US Congress to declare war on the Muslim Umma; their definition of “adherence to Shari’a” is:

“Shari’a” shall be defined as any set of rules, precepts, instructions, or edicts which are said to emanate directly or indirectly from the god of Allah or the prophet Mohammed and which include directly or indirectly the encouragement of any person to support in any way the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the US Constitution or the destruction of the national existence of the United States of America. Any rule, precept, instruction, or edict arising from the extant rulings of any of the five authoritative schools of Islamic jurisprudence (the Hanafi, the Maliki, the Shafi’i, the Hanbali, or the Ja’afariya school or fiqh) are prima facie Shari’a without any further evidentiary showing.

So, Policy Exchange, an organisation close to the leadership of the Tory party, circulated a dossier citing “evidence” source from a bunch of discredited Muslim-hating cranks in the USA. They should really be exposed and humiliated for this. However, one of the speakers attacked in that dossier is the rabbi from Neturei Karta, and I do not see why that organisation seems to be represented at one Muslim event after another when they are thoroughly unrepresentative of their own community. Can people not see that Jews, including those with pro-Palestinian sympathies (like Independent Jewish Voices), would have no more sympathy for a Jewish rabbi who participates in an Iranian Holocaust denial conference than we would have for the likes of Massimo “Abdul-Hadi” Palazzi? Who do they think they are fooling? Anyway, why do Muslim events have to have speeches from priests and rabbis? I can understand the utility of having a couple of politicians making a few blandishments, but how often do our imams get to address conferences of other religions?

Anyway, I really do hope that attending these events does not become a tiresome necessity if you want to work in the Muslim media, because they are noisy and, unless you like the person giving the particular talk or nasheed concert that’s on at any given moment, somewhat tedious. The event should be scaled down, there should be food readily available, there should be keynote talks from noted scholars or imams of various persuasions rather than a lengthy list of quarter-hour slots, and it should be in a less noisy and more accessible venue than ExCeL. However, I am glad I went, I made some worthwhile connections and saw some old friends I hadn’t seen in a while, but I really do not know if I would pay money to go to another if I could not get a free ticket and the circumstances of the event were the same as yesterday.

Personally, I am not too fond of English-language commercial nasheed, and when I came across a stall selling CDs of nasheeds and Sufi qasida readings, I asked if they had any with just the qasidas and no English nasheeds or even translations of the qasidas, but they had none, because apparently the brothers in the tariqa wouldn’t buy them (and why would they, when they sing them every week?). I found the sun a bit bright, and it made taking good pictures difficult as there was a lot of contrast. However, it was nice to have so many Muslims in one public space for an afternoon.

One other thing that bothered me was the amount of litter that was left behind; once all the attendees had moved on from the steps up to the gallery, there was a whole lot of litter, including pamphlets and copies of the Muslim News, which was there for anyone to tread on. I am always careful to avoid dropping written matter on the floor, let alone treading on it, and I have heard that some Muslim cities have women who go round picking up abandoned newspapers and other written material in case they contain any sacred wording (names of Allah, extracts from the Qur’an and so on) which could be desecrated by people walking on them. Perhaps this is partly the fault of the amount of loose paper which gets handed out at all of these gatherings, but why can’t Muslims be more careful when with religious writings? If you don’t want it, either don’t take it, or recycle it or burn it.

LugRadio Live 2008 pictures

Last Saturday I went to what was billed as the last ever LugRadio performance. LugRadio is (or rather was) a podcast produced by the Wolverhampton Linux Users’ Group, and since 2005 they have been putting on a live show every year. I have been to all of them except last year’s. Of course, they make a conference out of it, inviting various speakers over the years who have included Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu), Bill Thompson from the BBC, Jeremy Allison (originator of Samba, which allows Windows file shares to be used from Linux) and representatives of Sony and even Microsoft. This year I decided to go as it was the last ever; I only went to the first day, as I didn’t think I could afford a room for the night (even if I could get one at short notice).

I got there just after midday, so I missed the first hour, and turned up ten minutes late at Emma Jane Hogbin’s talk “Form an Orderly Queue, Ladies” (she gave a similar talk at the LugRadio event in San Francisco a few months ago, and there’s a video of it here), which was all about making Linux and open source generally appeal to women. When I got there she was going through the “HOWTO encourage female participation”, which she summarised as “don’t be a dick, do encourage participation”. She went on to describe her HICKteck conference (a rural technology conference in Canada) in which she managed to get women as half, or almost half, of the speakers, and suggested that the culture should move towards attracting older people and those with craft interests (the latter especially tend to be female). All very interesting stuff, but there was an assumption that male behaviour was what pushed women away, or even a perception of it as unfeminine, rather than simple lack of interest in technology, other than as end users, among women and particularly females of school and college age. The elephant in the room, of course, was that there were no other female speakers on the bill that day, which means none actually giving a talk about a topic other then including women in open source; I found the repeated use of the word “vagina” to mean “woman” off-putting. It is derogatory to refer to people as sexual organs, male or female.

Next I went to hear Jeremy Allison give an hour-long talk on Samba, which described the origins of the software back in the early 1990s and the various battles with Microsoft and the chancers who tried to sell their code, even though it was open and free, to a big Unix vendor in California, through to the more recent patent issues. Very informative, no surprises. Next I saw Robert Collins who spoke on Bazaar, the distributed source code management system, which was of great interest to me as I’ve recently started using a similar program to manage some software I develop. He showed us how easy it was to import and commit code to a Bazaar-based repository (not very well, as he chose Mozilla, which has a huge number of files, rather than a smaller one which might have been more suitable for the demonstration). The first two questions involved comparisons with other distributed source code management systems, namely Git and Mercurial, which I use. On the latter, he said that at a recent conference he had come across many people whose projects used Git and Bazaar but only two using Mercurial, which is surprising since Mozilla, Java, NetBeans, ALSA (the Linux sound system) and Dovecot (the web server) use Mercurial. He also brought up the issue of the manner of encoding filenames in Mercurial repositories making it clash with a filename size limit in Windows, but since the problem involves the encoding of capital letters as two characters, there is a good chance that most projects will not run up against it unless they really have long filenames with lots of capital letters in them, and most do not. Admittedly it’s a problem and should be fixed, and probably will be before long, but for most projects it is not a show-stopper.

Finally, there was the live show. This is my third LugRadio; I saw the shows in 2005 and 2006 but not last year, and I reviewed both the shows I saw (2005, 2006), and this show was one of the good ones - good natured, a lot of on-topic content, a bit more mature than the 2005 show (well, the guys are older after all, and one or two of the original presenters have gone). There was a discussion of what might give open source a big break, and of the finest moments in the history of LugRadio, and awards (fluffy penguins) for the people who had come furthest (I think someone from New Zealand got it in the end) and for people who had helped make the show possible. The only thing which spoiled it was that the sound did not reach the back of the audience very well, and behind them were exhibitors clearing up, and talking, so anyone with less than perfect hearing could not hear what the presenters were saying very well because of the echoes and background noise. I suggested having another Live even if the monthly podcasts were to end, which went down very well with the audience. Perhaps, if there’s a next time, they could have speaker units further back as well as right at the front; perhaps they could also have the exhbitors clear up about twenty minutes after the Live show finishes, so people can do some last minute book buying before heading home.

Finally, I must say something about the venue, which was in something called the Lighthouse, which is an exhibition hall with a couple of small cinemas (which doubled as lecture theatres for this event). The Atrium, where the live show, some of the talks and the exhibitions were, is marvellous - a cobble-floored, glass-roofted building which is very well-lit (on a good day at least) and a well-used bit of fine Victorian industrial architecture. All in all, I very much enjoyed my day and I’m glad I went; despite the criticisms I’ve made of LugRadio in the past, there is nothing really to match it, which does not mean nobody could, just that nobody has. Linux Outlaws, who had a stall at this event, got a very positive write-up in a group survey in Linux Format last autumn, so perhaps they will pick up the baton, and maybe next year we’ll have a live event from them instead. Given their theme, I suggest calling it the “Open Rodeo”.