I don't normally jump onto blogging memes like this, but the "book meme" one going on over at Planet Gnome seems like a pretty good one. I'm going to slack for a minute from the work I'm doing to hop in.

• Grab the nearest book.

• Open it to page 56.

• Find the fifth sentence.

• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

  "The story reel becomes the core of your animation production and provides your first chance go get a feel for timing and action."

From Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish, by Roland Hess (aka Harkyman). I've been finishing it over the last week. Really good stuff. A more advanced book about Blender that's half tech and half project management.

And now, back to work!

EDIT: Oops, there was a book closer to me that I didn't see, so bonus sentence:

"As you can see, using these principles of relative velocity and acceleration allows you to calculate the resultant kinematic properties of any point on your rigid body at any given time by knowing what the center of mass of the body is doing along with how the body is rotating."

From Physics for Game Developers by David M Bourg. That's a pretty fancy sentence.. too bad I haven't read this book yet. It's been festering on my shelf since I got it as a gift from O'Reilly for competing (but not finishing) in the web framework rumble in the 2008 Flourish Conference. A book I haven't read for a competition I didn't finish... now I feel doubly bad.

So as I mentioned briefly in my last post, I started work at the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) this month, mostly to work on Miro. Anyone who knows me probably can guess that a job working on free and open source software, especially related to media, and in Python, is a huge dream come true.

I had mentioned that I was to give a talk at ChiPy about Miro. And talk I did... there's even a recording of my talk available to watch. (The angle's a bit weird to look at, and you're mostly looking at my emacs buffer, but the talk itself is interesting, I think.)

However, that talk is mostly directed at a programming audience, and since this blog is read by some non-programming friends and family, I figured I should write up some explanation of why I'm so hyped about working here.

So first of all, Miro itself is awesome. It's a free and open source internet television player. There's tons of content for it... tons of content... all available on the Miro Guide. (The Miro Guide is itself a really cool project. And yes, it's programmed in Django.)

Part of why Miro matters so much is that it's built on open standards. There are some other internet video players out there, but they often rely on proprietary schemas. I like to think that Miro is kind of like the Firefox of internet TV.

It's also really enjoyable to use. You know, there's that thing.

So for about three months primary to joining the PCF fulltime, I was a volunteer to Miro's codebase. It's been great, partly because I've been able to hit the ground running, but also because during that time I came to really enjoy working on Miro's codebase. Which is part of what makes being hired on to work at the Participatory Culture Foundation so cool... I already knew I enjoyed working on Miro. And now I get to work on it fulltime. Not to mention that all of the people at the PCF are super nice, super fun to work with, super smart, and super productive (giving me a good challenge to try and keep up...).

There's also the fact that the Participatory Culture Foundation has a very clear and noble mission. Aside from just working on technology to consume media, the PCF is interested in helping to inform people on how to make internet television, as well as educating people about issues related to Open Video (something the PCF takes seriously). So overall, this is a very morally fulfilling organization to work for, and they've got other cool things in the works. So, what can I say? I'm super happy to be where I am now.

By the way, I'm now syndicated on Planet Miro. Hello, Planet Miro! I guess Will already beat me to introducing me to the Planet Miro scene, or whatever :).

I'm giving a talk tonight on Miro, which I've mentioned before, at ChiPy. Details are on teh wiki, but might as well duplicate them here:

Chipy's October Meeting will be our best ever.

Location: Skinny Corp, 4043 N. Ravenswood Ave. Suite 106

Date: Thursday, Oct 9th, ~7pm

Topics:

• Chris Webber: Miro, a free, open source internet tv & video player
• KumarMcMillan - freebase, a free collaborative database with a rich API

I know of a few other people who will probably be giving talks but didn't update the wiki or announce on list. Also, you should come since I've been hired by the Participatory Culture Foundation to work on Miro full-time, so you can find out all about it!

What's that? I forgot to mention that I've changed jobs? Well, if you come to the talk you'll find out more! I'll update my blog to talk about it this weekend, but if you come tonight you won't have to wait as long! :)

Edit: Also, SkinnyCorp people are the cool people who run Threadless, which I know a couple people who read this blog are fans of. So visiting their office is one more reason to come!

I gave a talk at ChiPy, the Chicago Python usergroup, tonight; my work, Imaginary Landscape, hosted. It was a really good meeting. Ian Bicking gave a talk on how to write a web app without a framework (which was also kind of a peek into how to build your own python web framework), Peter Fein gave a talk on his Factory module (a really neat approach to simplifying redundant code), and I gave a talk on the OpenMoko phone. We always advertise the current ChiPy meeting as going to be "our best meeting ever", but I really do think this was one of the best ones. That's not just me being conceited (although I might be a little bit, it's hard for me to tell), I thought all the talks went well.

I did think this was the best talk I've given though. Honestly, I wasn't going to do it this month because I didn't think I was prepared enough... I was going to wait until I had thrown together some example applications. But instead it was a bit more ad-hoc... I just described the phone and the history of it, and then gave a brief tutorial of how to make a phone call by entering lines into the interpreter one by one. I promised that it would be less than ten lines of code, and it was (it was seven), but I noted that if we hadn't already turned on the antenna (and it was turned on before I opened the interpreter), I would have needed an additional four, bringing the number to eleven. Well anyway, when I finally entered the last line (with the phone number of an audience member as an argument) there was silence for a moment... and then when his phone rang, well that's when the room started buzzing with excitement.

I've been meaning to write about the OpenMoko phone on here for a while, and why I think it matters, but maybe I can just post the talk... Carl Karsten was kind enough to record it, and we might try to upload it to blip.tv next week. I've been talking about how it would be kind of nice to start a ChiPy videocast, a channel one could watch with Miro and stuff. Sounds like that might happen.

Har har, I really liked this comic. Actually, I've really liked pretty much all of Stephen Greenberg's comics so far. But I've really been jonesing for some good political cartoons anyway.

I've also been reading If You See Something lately, which is by the guy who did Alien Loves Predator. It's kind an editorial cartoony thing. Sometimes political, sometimes weird, but generally all news related.

Also, people are excited about Chrome, and I thought this comicy thing was pretty good.

I was just talking about the work I've been doing on Miro, and now there's an article featuring Miro on LifeHacker. Nice! It's a pretty good overview as well.

You might consider digging the article, if you're into that kind of stuff.

If you read Planet Miro, you may have noticed that I was recognized in Will's blog for the volunteering I've been doing on Miro. I've been planning on mentioning my participation for some time on here, so this seems like a good time for me to do so.

It's been fun. But most of all, it's something I feel is really important. Television is the most consumed medium in modern western culture, and with the internet, there's a chance to shift it away from its original place of control by just a small number of megacorporations toward something that's as democratic as the web. There are a lot of IP-TV systems emerging, but Miro's the only one that really takes open and decentralized video playing seriously.

That's still a pretty vague explanation for why I think this is so important. Hopefully I'll find some time to really flesh out this reasoning soon, because it really does matter to me. In the meanwhile I can tell you that there's a lot of really exciting development happening in SVN trunk, including an entire user interface overhaul. We're switching the codebase from a lot of embedded HTML to actual widgetry. I guarantee that Linux/GTK has never looked better, and the code is getting a lot cleaner too with significantly less fragmentation across platforms. It's also faster and more featureful. Right now though, we're still in the process of reimplementing a lot of the old code. I wouldn't run from trunk right now, especially because it changes the database in a way that makes it incompatible with the last stable release. So if you upgrade to the development code, you're stuck with it. Don't worry, SVN is evolving at an astonishingly fast rate. It's already more enjoyable for me to run SVN than the last stable release, but I really should re-emphasize the fact that there are still a lot of important features missing.

The Miro people also sent me a t-shirt for the volunteering I've done. I picked the pretty one with the bird, and it's already one of my favorites in my collection. I might buy the exploding TV one soon too.

This has been really fun. It's nice to work on an application that's not web related and which is used by a lot of people. And everyone from the core Miro team has been really great to work with.

2.0's gonna be awesome. You'll see.