LUGS ON TOUR OCR Raspberry Jamboree Linux Voice heads to the land of dark satanic mills in search of education, innovation and Pi. In the computing world, almost everything has an acronym associated with it, but OCR isn't one we hear very frequently. It stands for Oxford, Cambridge and RSA, though that tells you little. In fact, it's an exam board, and responsible for striking fear into the hearts of 16–18 year-olds across the UK. That should tell you a couple of things. Firstly, that the Raspberry Pi has been phenomenally successful at getting into education: the fact that this is the second year that a major exam board is running the event in Manchester says a lot about the impact of the Pi in schools. Secondly, it says that the event is going to have quite an academic feel to it. The event is run in partnership with the Education Innovation Conference and Exhibition. Last year the two events were run in different parts of the Manchester Central Convention Complex, but this year they combined into the main hall. This was slightly disturbing given that the Jamboree charged £20 entrance, yet the EICE was free despite giving access to the same area, and the same stands. Annoying though the price difference was, it did give the event a unified feel. The previous year, there was a Pi event and an education event. This year, it felt like there was just one. Alongside a myriad of stands for educational technology, you could see teachers learning Pi skills, and learning from the experts. While 2013's event was perhaps better for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, 2014 seemed better for teachers, and that is more important in this case. That's not to say that the event wasn't good for enthusiasts. The Raspberry Pi foundation were out in force, with Carrie Anne Philbin, Clive Beale, Alex Bradbury and Ben Nutall wandering the floor and meeting people, though the Uptons didn't make it as they were in America at the time. The Linux Voice team enjoyed meeting up with fellow Raspberry Pi-ers such as RasPi TV, Peter Green (of Raspbian fame) and Jack Kelly (organiser of the Manchester Raspberry Jam, www.mcrraspjam.org.uk), and there were plenty more people that we missed (such as the excellent folks at MagPi) because we foolishly went on the Thursday rather than the Friday. TELL US ABOUT YOUR LUG! Chances are that you are already a member of a Linux User Group (LUG). LUGs are all over the world and each one has its own unique selling point, which draws its members to meet and discuss their favourite topic. We want to know more about your LUG or hackspace, so please write to us at lugs@linuxvoice.com and we might send one of our roving reporters to your next LUG meeting. South Wales LUG Mark Einon writes from the land of our fathers. The South Wales Linux User Group (SWLUG) has been in existence for more than 15 years, in that time supporting local users of the Linux operating system and other Free Software. In April, SWLUG are adding to their usual long-running tradition of well-attended monthly meets in Cardiff and Carmarthen; this time organising a series of talks, starting on Saturday 26 April, 2.30–5pm at FoundersHub (foundershub.co.uk) in the centre of Cardiff. Expect at least four free and awesome main talks on diverse Linux topics such as kernel internals, hardware accelerated Linux routing, the MIT Athena project, and Linux security monitoring. There's also time to fit in a few lightning talks and a keysigning party – so don't forget some sort of official ID (driver's licence, passport etc) for the keysigning, along with your key details. The party will mainly follow the course laid out in www.cryptnet.net/fdp/crypto/ keysigning_party/en/keysigning_ party.html. If you can't make the afternoon talks in April, stalwart SWLUG members will still be partaking in the usual monthly pub-based meetings in both Cardiff (second Tuesday of the month at The City Arms, opposite the Millenium Stadium) and Carmarthen (third Tuesday of the month, at Yr Hen Dderwen on King Street), from 7.30pm or so where we're always happy to welcome anyone to join whatever their interest or experience level. Lots more details, further updates and ways to join in all the South Wales-based Linuxy action you can handle may be found via the website at www.swlug.org. There you can also find out about our mailing list, IRC channel and Google+ community where you can get involved at any time. Look out for the Eventbrite link to register for talk attendance and we hope to see you there! QCon London Spend a beautiful spring day in London with some of the world's smartest coder geeks. This was our first time at QCon London, and we can't believe we've missed an event like this for so long. But before you get too excited. It is expensive to attend. This is one of those professional events where you need to surreptitiously place a cost/benefit analysis chart where your boss can see it. The benefits are obvious. Some of the best developers in the world, working on some of the most cutting edge-projects, such as Spotify and Netflix, all in the same place and talking about the challenges they're facing and how they're solving them. Each talk we saw was inventive and engaging. But our highlight was Wednesday's keynote, presented by Perl maestro Damian Conway. Somehow, he was able to shoehorn John Conway's (no relation) automata from Game of Life into a talk about how programming languages are structured, how insane they can be, and how he's invented a own 24th century programming language based on Klingon, complete with throat-mangling Klingon pronunciation.