As some of you may know, Morgan Lemmer (now Morgan Lemmer-Webber) and I recently got married and are now on our honeymoon in Montreal. More on that later, probably.

Anyway, between things I have been rereading Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen, which I originally consumed as part of a class on the ethics of globalization. It's a remarkably good book that I think I appreciate much more having aged a few years. Anyway, a good portion of the beginning of the book encompasses a general overview and evaluation of different ethical systems. At one point Sen is advocating for the value of using a large range of ethical systems rather than just using a static set of rules (like libertarianism) or a particular framework (like utilitarianism or John Rawls' "Theory of Justice" approach), and that the use of human rationality to evaluate ethical situations should be viewed positively rather than as a sign of failure. There's this particular paragraph:

There's an interesting choice here between "technocracy" and "democracy" in the selection of weights, which may be worth discussing a little. A choice procedure that relies on a democratic search for agreement or a consensus can be extremely messy, and many technocrats are sufficiently disgusted by its messiness to pine for some wonderful formula that would simply give us ready-made weights that are "just right." However, no such magic formula does, of course, exist, since the issue of weighting is one of valuation and judgment, and not one of some impersonal technology. [p. 79]

I'm pretty sure the net Sen was casting here aimed a bit wider than just the ethics and rules of sex, and yes... I'm aware that nerds relating everything to XKCD is such a goddamned cliche, but I can't help but think that Monroe summarized that paragraph pretty well in comic form.

Removing the contents of this post until I get tag filtering working on my blog. Don't feel it belongs on a planet. Working on that now.

So it's been a while since I updated this thing. Lots of stuff has been happening, so I might as well jump right into explaining what those things are.

Current and upcoming projects

Work

Working at the Participatory Culture Foundation continues to be great. Probably if you're reading this on Planet Miro or whatever you're already aware of this, but it's a recap from my perspective anyway.

Miro 2.0!

Miro 2.0 made it out the door, and the responses have been mostly positive. The general consensus is that it's everything people loved about Miro, but more stable and with a better interface. Which is great, because that's mostly what this release was about, and really matches my feelings and impressions from development as well. When I first started volunteering on Miro was when the user interface overhaul first started. While the overhaul of the interface is apparent from an aesthetic perspective, it should be emphasized how much of the codebase was really gutted and reworked. I'm really glad to have been part of this transition period because I think it's given me a lot of perspective and was a great learning experience.

So anyway, yeah. That's what I did while volunteering and for the first few months of fulltime PCF employment. Then my focus shifted…

Miroguide 3.0!

Yep, for the next couple months of development I switched to working on the Miro Guide, which also underwent a rather large facelift for its 3.0 release. Some things changed on the backend too, but not as much as with Miro 2.0.

There was a lot to learn though… although the Miro Guide uses the Django framework, it feels a bit closer to a Pylons application as it uses its own ORM for the database and a few other such things (mostly just the ORM though). I really enjoyed working on it and learning about it. Toward the end Paul Swartz came back to work on the application. Was quite enjoyable collaborating on things, and we even managed to move things over to git, which is awesome. (Miro also will be switching to git soon, and there's a conversation on the mailing list in case that's of interest to you.)

Anyway, Miro 2.0, Miroguide 3.0 and the new http://getmiro.com website all launched in the same week, so that was a bit exhausting, but it all went really well.

I'm not sure many people know, but the Miro Guide is AGPLv3. So yes, like Miro, the Miro Guide is genuine Free Software. There's been a lot of interest about free network services lately, so I'd like to try and make that more clear because I'm afraid many people who would be interested simply don't realize that. We'll probably do more advertisement of it soon once we get this git stuff all straightened out.

And speaking of free software and websites, that brings me to my current work duties…

Miro Local TV

Yep, Miro Local TV, which was announced a number of months ago. It's not in a state I'd consider presentable yet, but development is coming along. Multiple location-specific sites work and you can view videos, but it's still not ready to be shown off yet. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this shortly. (Indeed, I was actually writing a longer bit about a specific topic related to this in here, but I've decided it merits its own blogpost.)

The wedding and the wedding website

So, the wedding… coming up soon, less than three months away now. What can I say… Morgan has been more on top of this than I have. I hate to take up such stereotypical gender roles about it, but I guess that's the way it has worked out. Still, I've been working on a very specific piece of the wedding: the wedding website.

So, it took quite a while, but most of it is done and up. I'm quite pleased with the way it's turned out. Still two major pieces to put in place… gotta get the reception-music-submission stuff working, and have to put up a video of the animation I originally proposed to Morgan with in the first place. I've got the video ready.. just gotta get that stuff together.

Orgmode

Org-mode! Not really a project as much, but I recently switched over all my life and project planning over to using this wonderful piece of software. I was using PlannerMode previously, but I was finding that as the number of things happening in my life grew, the less the day-planner idea was working for me. I initially took interest in orgmode because I wanted to be able to ditribute some small amounts of todo lists and project outlines with my personal projects. And then using it was just been so nice that it's continued to take over my whole workflow. Anyway, I don't regret it. Orgmode is a wonderful example of user interfaces in plain text. I highly recommend watching the Google tech talk… it might make an orgmode user out of you too.

The GIMP class

Yep, I'm going to be teaching a class on the GIMP to students at Casa Aztlán. Or, at least, that's my expectation. We're still in the recruitment stage. It'll be a one night a week thing for six weeks, if enough students sign up for it to happen.

An unnamed animation

I am going to be working on an animation in collaboration with friend (and former boss) Robert Metrick, who makes some awesomely weird stuff. We're meeting on Monday (tomorrow) to start some brainstorming and plan it out. Not sure exactly what it's going to be yet, but I'm hoping it will be about a 4-6 month long project. Yes, as you are probably expecting, I am expecting to do the animation in Blender.

PyCon

Not much to say about PyCon except that I will indeed be there, and helping with the video recording. Maybe I'll see you there as well? We might do a Miro sprint there… not sure if anyone would be interested?

FOSSGaming.org

I registered the domain name fossgaming.org after a long conversation on Identi.ca (that also lead to the creation of the !fossgaming group). Basically, free and open source software is coming along really well in almost all areas, but not as much in the game development department.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with this totally. I am planning to put up planet.fossgaming.org in the next couple of weeks with Feedjack (and you are right, the dns has not even been set up for that yet) in an effort to get more free software game developers talking to each other. Aside from that, I'm hoping to help with steering this, but I won't be able to invest that much time into it myself for at least the next couple of months. I'm hoping to help foster a community that can make some headway on its own, and then in a couple months I'll be able to jump in more myself. Maybe things don't work that way though, so its possible that this won't really make it that far until after the wedding. We'll see.

If you have thoughts on it, or are interested in helping this project along, contact me; I'm happy to offload some of this work.

Pumping Station One

Pumping Station One is a Hackerspace (think YMCA for nerds) that is starting to really come together in Chicago. Looks like they might be moving in in April. I became a member and attended the last meeting. I probably won't be too heavily involved here for a bit, but I'm excited to see this start to take off. I might even do some co-working from here.

The diet

I've mentioned that I started focusing on my health again. Well, 2.5 months into this diet, I've lost more than 30 pounds, so things are going really well. I'm mostly following the Hacker's Diet (dieting through engineering, management and statistics). I'm counting calories and biking. The effects are noticable, and I'm feeling better with each passing day. I'm actually using orgmode to track my diet, which is working out extremely well… maybe I'll make a post with more details on this later.

Summary and life bits

Are we moving?

So, moving… one of the reasons I took my current job was the possibility that we might be moving depending on what happens with Morgan and grad school. At this point, we still don't know, though it is looking increasingly likely that we'll be around Chicago for at least another year. Otherwise, we might move to either Philadelphia or Boston. I'll update when I know more.

Busier than ever, but better than ever (and no more projects)

Clearly, things are busy, but I'm keeping it together and I think I'm happier than I've ever been. But I've hit the limits of what I can do here. Everything I have now is fairly manageable, but if I tacked on anything more it probably wouldn't be, so… I won't.

Sorry this post was so long. But now you know.

Long time in coming, but http://wedding.dustycloud.org is actually up now. Probably the best looking website I've designed (note: by that I mean graphic design, and I don't do the graphic design for any of the PCF projects; that stuff is done by an incredibly talented fellow, Morgan Knutson). Complete with the sketchy mess that I try to pass off as my style.

I've got a few bits to put up left. Will update with more information as I go.

So a few months ago, I installed Ubuntu on my younger brother John's computer. A couple of days ago he sent me a rough draft of an essay he was writing for his English class. He asked me a few questions, and I answered those, but this writing is all his. I'll let you read it for yourself.

Have you found a document that is in a format that your word processor doesn't recognize? Are you bored of the games you have? Do you have a computer? If you are or have any of these things, Ubuntu Linux is the thing for you! It's great for computer geeks and people who just use the computer. It even is good for people who have little patience or can't tell when the computer is about to crash. It's a user friendly form of Linux.

Linux is nearly virus free. As long as you only download open source programs, there is little to no chance of viruses. This is thanks to real computer geeks and programmers. If it is open source, programmers can look at a code and find any virus ware imputed on the code, they then delete that part of the code.

How can one word processor understand so many formats like .doc or .odt? And how are there so many of them? Each format has its one unique code. If you open a .odt in .doc format, the writing will look like gibberish or a bunch of numbers. That's because it interprets the information differently. Luckily a group of people were clever enough to make a word processor that can type in all the formats and read all the formats. This is free open source and comes with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is for geeks and laypersons alike. For the geeks who know how to navigate the command line and through it, manipulate virtually any part software of the computer. You could even use Python, the very easy yet complex programing language of Ubuntu and really all of Linux, is used in the command line. It can be used to create new tools. These new tools can then be used to create more complex tools. Python is complex and flexible enough to keep geeks with many years of practice involved while still allowing laypersons to create a simple tic-tac-toe game with one or two days of brother-to-brother or sister-to-sister lessons.

There is one special thing called a split hard drive. A split hard drive allows you to have four operating systems on one hard drive. You can download Ubuntu with a free CD. You can make this simply by going to Ubuntu's website going to the downloads page, pick the latest version, and then follow the instructions. After you copy the image on the CD, restart the computer. Just follow the instructions and go through the installation processes. Within 30 minutes to an hour you're ready. If you need help, ask your neighborhood geek. Printers are instantly installed, and it comes with a built in multi-instant messenger.

Ubuntu Linux is the practical solution to your virus problems. Windows, mac, or other non-open source operating and system is still recommended due to certain things not being compatible with Linux. This, as mentioned before, can be fixed by making your hard drive into a split hard drive. If you're a geek there are millions of possibilities. If you're a layperson who likes the user friendliness of Windows, Ubuntu still has this with out the slowness of Windows. Go on and get Ubuntu free today!

As you could guess, I'm brimming with pride. There are some errors, but I don't even live in the same city as my brother, so this has mostly come out of his own experiences after a bit of guidance from me. And obviously there's more to learn but for a twelve year old who has only been running GNU/Linux for a few months I'm just plain impressed by how much he gets it.

In sum, I'm excited both for my brother and for the increasing accessibility of free and open source software, both in product and in spirit.

Edit: John gave me his final version of the essay, so I replaced the old one with this one, as promised.