I've been back from Barcelona for about a week now, but between getting used to the routine of working every day and overcoming some tropical disease or other that I picked up whilst I was over there (I keep telling people it was the Coughing Pig Death and there's a moment where they actually believe me, which is fun) I've not had time to blog much about it.

And then I came to actually blog about it and I realised that if you're a Planet Ubuntu or Planet Ubuntu UK reader you'll have read most of what I've got to say on the subject of UDS and AllHands already (Empathy and Banshee by default (maybe), Android on Ubuntu, Scott James Remnant is insane and wants your machine to have booted before you even switch it on, etc.), and if you aren't a reader of either of those planets then you probably don't really care about any of that anyway, so I decided to not actually bother saying it. You can always go and find it if you want to, because you're smart and savvy people.

So suffice it to say that Barcelona was an interestingly manic place, though not somewhere that I think I'd want to spend oodleplexes of time once I'd done all the touristy bits. You can see some of the photos I took on the one day that I did any serious tourism - with the camera and one lense and nothing else, because nothing says "hey, I've got some expensive gear here" than lugging around a Stealth Reporter 650 bag as you wander, your spine crooked from the weight, down La Rambla - on my Flickr stream.

The week before UDS, that of Canonical AllHands and, before that, SomeHands (which I didn't attend) was spent out in the back of the Spanish beyond at the La Mola conference centre, which is slap dab in the middle of an area that is half forest, half golf course, and which has buildings with turfed-over roofs, a swimming pool that was empty apart from some scummy water and a couple of pissed-off-looking frogs, and a three-hundred-year-old chapel-cum-hall-cum-terracey-thing in which the assembled cognoscenti sweltered for plenary sessions every morning and afternoon. I later appropriated the terrace for a very brief and rather rushed portrait shoot with my good and at-a-slight-angle-to-the-universe friend Michelle, the results of which will appear once I've got round to finishing the editing (having a tropical plague plays merry hob with your sense of contrast, I've discovered).

And that about covers What I Did on My Holidays. Except it doesn't really tell you anything at all because I can't fit into one blog post - or even into several - just how much I enjoyed AllHands. UDS is something that I've grown used to, I suppose - the people are always astounding and scarily smart (or in some cases just scary) - but AllHands is something really special, because when you're at one you realise that every single person that you work alongside is awesome at what they do and at the top of their game to boot, and that's something that I think's bloody hard to find in any other company on the planet (though I confess I'm biased).

And now it's twenty-to-two in the morning and I'm not sleeping again (which makes this the fourth time this week that I've seen two AM when I didn't want to and which might end up making it the third time this week that I've watched the sun rise), so I'm going to go and find a warm drink and hope that tiredness will drop on me in a sort of fluffy lump. On the other hand, I could suddenly get a second wind and start writing the story that's knocking about in my skull, which as usual is the result of two or more things smacking into each other when some neuron or other in the thing that I tentatively call a brain misfired.

Sleep tight, folks. May the morning bring you happy things.

Very quick post because I'm supposed to be going out to photograph most of London (this may be an exaggeration; we'll see) before too long. Of course, it would have helped if I'd actually done some organising of said photo walk; that may cause problems.

It's been a good, if very tiring week. We - that is, the Launchpad team - have managed to squeeze a lot of learning into five days, and I think it's fair to say that we've proved our quality as developers and as a development team as a whole. I hope that I'll be able to take at least two things home from this two week epic:

1. You couldn't wish for a better team to develop software with.
2. I really do actually fit into it; they're not going to suddenly suss me out and send me back to doing PHP pages.

In other news, I went to Piracy vs Obscurity - an evening with Neil Gaiman last night with a few colleagues. The talk was held in a (very pretty) church crypt and was everything that I was hoping for. It actually encouraged me to perform the butt-in-chair motion that Mur Lafferty has been talking about for years; maybe I will manage something for Halloween this year after all.

A final note on the Gaiman subject should go to my friend Michelle, who was pretty made up to have come out of the evening with a signed copy of The Graveyard Book and a hug from Neil himself. Not a bad evening, all told.

Right. Off to capture London's soul. I'm sure you'll see the results later, if I can rely on this fairly flaky hotel wi-fi to withstand the upload.

A cliché of a title, I know, but it's late and I'm past being able to think about it.

Yes, dear readers, I'm off on my travels again. Tomorrow I'm off to London (rather stupidly I've got to fly from Manchester to Gatwick because there's no train journey that would get me to London from Lancaster in less than six hours and with less then 5 changes). I'll be there for two weeks (I would come back in the middle weekend but for the aforementioned train nonsense) for a Launchpad sprint / conference / summit / thing. After that I'm back home for a week and then I'm going to Lexington, MA, for more work-related things (though as yet I'm kind of fuzzy on what exactly I'll be doing there).

This is one of the things that I both hate and love about my job. On the one hand I'm going to be away from my home (my new home, incidentally, into which we moved only a week ago) for three weeks out of the next four. There's so much to do in terms of unpacking and arranging and getting used to the place and I'm just going to end up leaving my fiancé to do all the hard work. On top of that we're in the midst of arranging our wedding - there will be a trying-on of wedding dresses whilst I'm away - and though I know it's traditional for the bloke to not be involved (flaming stupid tradition if you ask me) I've really enjoyed being involved so far; I'm going to miss whatever gets done while I'm away.

On the other hand I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks in the company of an amazingly smart and talented bunch of people with whom I get on extremely well. We'll be concentrating on how to make Launchpad even cooler and easier to work with and I'm sure we'll have a great time. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I just wish I didn't have to go through this period of not enjoying the idea of it first.

There are some highlights to the next couple of weeks, though:

• I'm going to the ORG event Piracy v Obscurity - an evening with Neil Gaiman on Friday.
• I'll be at the London Intrepid Ibex release party Thursday week.
• On Friday week I'll be attending a signing by Neil Gaiman of his new book, The Graveyard Book (yes, I'm aware that this may make me look like a fanboy).
• On Saturday I'll be doing a photo walk around London with some friends from Canonical. I love photographing London; it's full of interesting people and places and atmosphere, and it's going to be even more fun going round it with a bunch of like-minded people.

So when you think about it, working for Canonical's not all bad.

Mark Shuttleworth, spaceman, ideas man, Ubuntu founder and fearless leader at Canonical Towers announced yesterday that Launchpad will be open sourced within the next 12 months.

This is pretty cool news. With Launchpad, we make a big deal of supporting free and open-source software. Our aim is to provide a central platform through which people and projects can collaborate to produce the best possible products. We're working hard on creating easy-to-use APIs so that people can do everything they can in the Launchpad web interface programmatically, and we're doing a lot of work with upstream bugtrackers to allow us to sync bugs, statuses and comments with them as efficiently as possible.

But the one thing that we hear more often than anything else (except, perhaps, "git is better than bzr," which I'll leave for another day) is "I won't use Launchpad because it's not Open Source." There's a lot of accusations of hypocrisy towards Launchpad: if it's not Open Source how can it, without being deeply hypocritical, aim to become a central point for the development of Open Source software?

I can see people's argument there, though I disagree with them that not having an Open Source platform fundamentally prevents you from supporting open source development because, well, we're doing it anyway. Hopefully this will go some way towards convincing them that we really do mean what we say about being a major part of the Open Source community.

And I confess there's a measure of personal satisfaction in this. No longer (or at least after we've actually made the Open Source release) will I be treated like some sort of mildly infectious Typhoid Mary by otherwise perfectly pleasant people (usually from the FSF, I find) because I develop closed-source software (this happened a few times at UDS in Prague and really started to grate on me).

I confess, though, that when I read the news I did think "so, will I be out of a job in eighteen months time?" I'm sure Mark wouldn't do that, though... Right?

Due to enormous demand the Canonical shop is now offering a second printing of the Hardy Heron T-Shirt, this time on sand-coloured cotton.

From the shop:

Due to unprecedented demand, we are producing a second edition Hardy Heron t-shirt. This edition is very similar to the limited edition t-shirt in design, but rather than including the heron image from the wallpaper of the beta release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it includes the heron which is featured on the current Ubuntu desktop wallpaper (a slight difference in the position of the colours used, but different enough to keep the first chocolate coloured 500 as limited edition). Plus this is a sand coloured t-shirt, which is 100% cotton. Can't wait until they arrive? Pre-order yours now.

Since I managed not to order a first edition version I've put in my preorder for the second. Sadly, it won't arrive before I go to UDS in a couple of weeks, but I'll survive. I have another, more sekrit T-shirt that I'll be taking with me, of which more, doubtless, anon...