Summary

What is it?

This page presents the process of the making of my presentation for LugRadio Live 2006, that will happen on July, 22nd-23rd in Wolverhampton, U.K.

What will it be about?

I intend to build statistics about the swearing and other profanities you can hear during LugRadio episodes. That's the reason why my talk is entitled This talk *may* contain swearing.

Log

2007-02-12 - Videos!

Unexpectedly, the video of my talk is finally available on Archive.org. Kudos for Sooz, I hope it was worth the wait!

2006-07-26 - Done!

Last weekend I have been at the lovely city of Wolverhampton to attend LugRadio Live. On saturday, 4.30pm, I entered the Beard arenaroom and performed my talk. Apart from small font / image size issue, it went just fine. I must say this talk had quite a good success, and I've been congratulated by many people from the Lugradio community. At some point, it has been a little bit too much for my "not-so-self-confident-general-attitude", and I got a bit bored by these congratulations.

I may have been rude towards some persons, and I'm sorry about that. Just imagine that: You are Brian, and the crowd swears blind you are the Messiah. That's pretty much the way I felt. My talk was nothing but silly statistics about swearing, and nothing revolutionary from the Free Software Perspective. But neuro told me the right way: "In fact your talk was nothing but interesting for the community, and that's the reason why it was so popular". He also said my timing was well done, and that I've built my "little story" in a way people have been captivated by it. He was the only one to bring me an explanation to this success, and I'm glad he did. Otherwise I would still be struggling to prove that I was no Messiah, and just Brian, of Nazareth. Well... I'm still not the Messiah, but at least I know why people went on cheering me with loud "BRUUUUUUNO" all day long.

Back to the topic. I'm proud to announce that the LugRadioSWearing project is now to be released - 1.0 version - under the GPL License. That's weird, you know, because releasing it as a Free Software would allow people to actually *use* it, or even modify it for their own need. And I have absolutely no clue on HOW this could be USED by anyone for any purpose at all...
The release will include data files, the actual data I've used to build the graphics and charts.

You may eventually been interested in browsing the talk itself. It's a S5 presentation, and thus I've included a tar.gz archive for your offline pleasure.

2006-07-17: The last rush!

From July 14th (bank holiday in France) to tonight, I've manage to make big progress in the making of the talk, both from the data collect (now the episode 15 is complete) and the data analysis (now all of my charts are ready to rock). I've decided to freeze the data collect to the Episode 16. That'll be 10 episodes transcribed, I think it's enough to be interesting enough. One more episode to go, then, and I'll have to rush to complete the S5 slideshow.

I've polished the python program too, and I think I may release a 1.0.0 version after the LRL. It might be a badly written, there may be lots of bugs and miscodings, but it just works fine for me. Indeed, I do hesitate: could I possibly make a live demo of the scripts during the talk? Technically, I thin so, but I don't think I could have enough time.

2006-07-06: Hurry up!

Hey! LRL is really close now. Got to hurry up. I've completed transcripts until ep11, and started ep12. I've started to write down my talk using s5 application/file format, and it's improving every time I'm working on it. The drawback is: I've so many things to say, that'll have to cut it down a bit if I want to last no more than 30 minutes.
By the way, I don't know if you have noticed, but my talk has been scheduled at 17:30 on Saturday, 22nd. That is to say, right before the LugRadio Live and Unleashed - live recording of a LugRadio episode. The saturday's schedule is absolutely evil: When I'm looking at it, I want to watch every talk on every stage. How will I be able to make a choice?

2006-04-18: Ewwww, so late again

Just finished s3e9 transcript. I need so much time.

2006-03-07: Late, late, late again

A bit late on the episode transcript, but I put higher priorities on private life than on geeking around. Anyway, Episode 8 is complete, so #9 and #10 are just waiting to be grilled.

2006-02-04: Data collection status

You may want to know how far I am of the episode transcript. Here's the report.
The episode transcript takes a long time, and as soon as I have finished one, yet another is being released. And then I have to listen to it a couple of time, and then listen to it again to collect the data. All right, enough talk, let's dive into the next one!

2006-01-30: New episode, new speaker

Since Matt was doing his homework last week, and wasn't recording the episode, it was Adam Sweet who replaced him. Problem: when he swears, which letter should I use? "A" is for Aq, quite clearly. Using "S" would wipe sparkes out, and I don't want to forget all the good things he's done and said.

So I've decided to use the letter "D" to count Drinky's swearwords.

By the way. This week show is fucking long. More than 91 minutes. Bastards, it'll take me hours to complete.

2006-01-11: Improving and bits of code

I've reorganised this web page a bit. Now the log is up front. Meanwhile, I've posted draft version of the software. It's my first Python application, so please be nice! I would really like you to comment on my code, and help me improving it.

2006-01-10: Opening!

This very page is opened. I'm working on the project for a few days, so I'll sum up my roadmap, what's been done, and what's to be done.

Roadmap:
Done

2006-01-06: Confirmed

[time machine mode = On]Today I've been confirmed as a LRL'06 speaker. That's freaking me out, to be honest.

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Status

My goal is to transcribe as many episodes as possible to get the largest amount of data.

Episode transcription

Talk

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Code

Source history

The latest version is 1.0. it includes the actual data I've been using for the talk, located in the ./data/ directory. Any comment, suggestion, bug report is welcome.

Running the program

Running the program is as simple as :

$ python lrsw.py

It fetches files in ./data directory, reads and parse the lines and spits out the summary of each episode.

Note : a data file matches a pattern s[number]e[number].txt

You may eventually want to import it through a python console. help(LRSW.lrsw) shall provide a little help, but don't expect much documentation.

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The Talk

You can browse the whole talk online (better seen with full screen on), or if you want to download it, just check this tar.gz archive out!

If you want to download the video of this talk, you may have to go to Archive.org, get a big book, and wait for hours to complete. Enjoy!


About

Who are you, anyway?

How did you get this fucking idea?

Well, it happened last year (2005), when the four large gents announced the first LugRadio Live. I have been the first to say "I'll be there" on the forums, and I really wanted to participate in a way or another, and not just attending to it. The guys first said any kind of talk was welcome. I thought: "Well, I'm not a specialist in anything related to computing, just an average web-developer", so I didn't really know what to do. Then I had this idea to count and make charts about swearing on LR. But I didn't do it. For *two* reasons:

  1. I didn't know if I was able to perform such a presentation in front of an unknown public, in English.
  2. When I saw the increasing list of impressive speakers announced (including Simon Willison, Rufus Pollock, Gervase Merkham, Mark Shuttleworth), my idea of presenting bad language on LR appeared more and more silly / ridiculous / out of topic.

The LugRadio Live happened, I went there, in Wolves', and it was hell of a fun. Of course. When I saw some lightening talks and other presentations, I felt better: even if the general mood was relaxed and trivial, the topics were really serious ; and seriously developed. My stupid idea was somehow interesting, but couldn't happen - Yet.

Then I went to Amsterdam, in October, to attend the EUROOSCON, and especially Damian Conway's and Jeff Waugh's talks reminded me my stupid idea. If people were able to perform non-sense or funny talks at an official and important convention, I couldn't see any reason why I couldn't make it for LugRadio Live. LugRadio has the reputation of being a "relaxed" show ; I don't think there could be a better place to make fun with bad language.

So here I am.

How can I help you?

My domain name is jehaisleprintemps.net. If you're not a spam bot, you may be able to recompose my email adress, because my first name is bruno.

If you see in the python scripts any glitch/bug to eradicate or any improvement, don't hesitate. Or you'd just want to drop me a line for some reason, please be nice!

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