U2 Barcelona 2009 – People behind the scenes

Since June 5th I have been doing security for U2′s upcoming concerts at Camp Nou Barcelona on the first leg of their 360 tour.

I have to admit that before this I wasn’t an avid U2 fan, but after working with and talking to them and their staff/friends/colleagues, and of course, watching them perform live night after night in what has to be the most amazing stage/show that I have ever seen in my life, I am a new convert.

I have exchanged emails and Facebook names with some very special people who I have met and become friends with. I won’t mention names as their position is less important to me than who they are as people. I also managed to help out a few of them with my knowledge of Barcelona which was nice. Again, no details, but it makes me feel good knowing I could help in some small way.

One of the unsung heroes of everything that is U2 is Gavin Friday, the self confessed “aesthetic midwife” of the band. Gavin is an artist in his own right, and invented the nickname for his childhood friend Bono. Just look for him in wikipedia and visit his website to get an idea of just how many projects he has been involved in.
Every day I see him on stage, in the dressing rooms, advising the band on everything from clothes to stage position.
Gavin is very approachable, always says hello and will chat with everybody (when he’s got time).

U2 are down-to-earth. The band and close friends really do care about people, I have seen it for my own eyes, something that really surprised me when you know just how rich, famous and successful they are.

Last night they invited fans from the street to come in and walk around the stage with holding masks of Aung San Suu Kyi as U2 are promoting awareness of her house arrest. The fans got to be stage-side for a few songs as well before going up on stage.

I thought this was a great gesture for the people who wait outside just for a glimpse of their favourite artists.

As I said, U2 and Gavin Friday are always thinking of other people.

sidux non-free firmware removal alienating users

Well, you all know how much I rant about this, but there you go. Even sidux users are ranting about non-free firmware being removed from the .30 kernel by slh.

The OFTC irc network on the #sidux and #smxi channels are producing quite a lot of discussion regarding these removals, and I think that sidux will alienate a lot of its userbase because of this. Just the same as Debian is doing.

I’ll say it again, it’s 2009, leave the politics out of Linux!

Just build a system that works out-of-the-box.

It used to be that there were excuses for leaving out non-free firmware/modules/drivers etc, based on performance. Well now it has flipped as users are reporting poor hardware performance with the non-free firmware removed.

I’ll be following this closely, as I am happy that it’s not just me who has a problem with this philosophy. I tried to explain my point to a Debian user once, and just got a condescending reply basically hinting that I know little about Debian and its philosophy. Now more and more Debian/sidux users feel the same as I do.

http://gnuski.blogspot.com/2009/06/2630-kernel-and-sidux.html

On top of this, the average sidux user knows Linux, we aren’t talking Ubuntu newbies here.

By the way, if you want Debian, but with all firmware out of the box, get Dreamlinux. Its current release (3.5) uses the Lenny “stable” repos, but the new DL 4.0 will again be based on “Testing” (Squeeze).

Linus Torvalds switched to Gnome

Well, if one of KDE’s biggest advocates, (right up to having flame wars with Gnome developers) has jumped from Kde to Gnome, what the hell went wrong with Kde 4 ??

From http://www.computerworld.com

Another open-source project that underwent a big change was KDE with Version 4.0. They released a lot of fundamental architectural changes with 4.0, and it received some negative reviews. As a KDE user, how has this impacted you? I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster, I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn’t do what I want it to do. But the whole “break everything” model is painful for users, and they can choose to use something else.

I realize the reason for the 4.0 release, but I think they did it badly. They did so may changes, it was a half-baked release. It may turn out to be the right decision in the end, and I will retry KDE, but I suspect I’m not the only person they lost.

I got the update through Fedora, and there was a mismatch from KDE 3 to KDE 4.0. The desktop was not as functional, and it was just a bad experience for me. I’ll revisit it when I reinstall the next machine, which tends to be every six to eight months.

The GNOME people are talking about doing major surgery, so it could also go the other way.