Dusty Cloud Brainstorms

Leaving 2008 and Entering 2009: Reflections and Projections

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:29:08 -0000

Well here we are, and 2008 is coming to a close. Sitting here between one year and another... I suppose this is a good time to reflect on things. I haven't talked enough about what I've done the last year, so I guess now is a good time to talk about that as well as what I see happening in this coming year. Not resolutions as much as expectations.

So, 2008 was a busy year... at the end of 2007, I proposed to Morgan, and so 2008 involved a lot of wedding planning (admittedly, more of that burden has been on Morgan's shoulders than on mine). Most of the difficult bits are planned now, and at the end of June 2009, we should be married. That's one thing which I'll be working on at the beginning of 2009... the wedding website. I still haven't gotten to it. I have a due date for the end of January. Well, at least I know what I'll be spending my weekends on during that month.

Speaking of which, I project I'll be leaving the shared hosting world and moving to my own virtual server for this website. Webfaction has been great... it was really refreshing to use a shared hosting service that actually felt like it respected developers. But I feel like my needs have outgrown that, and so I got an account on Linode. Not sure if I'm keeping the webfaction stuff for something else yet or not (I'd better decide soon), but I'm really looking forward to not using a control panel any more and to be able to put up whatever services I want, how I want, from the command line.

This last year I've also begun working on my artwork again, after a long hiatus during the three years in which I was both working fulltime and going to school fulltime. There have been some stills I have been working on, most of which I have not bothered to put up yet (I need to really put up a nice, basic image gallery on here). But the real thing I was hoping to work on in 2009 was a series of animations using the animation engine I developed to propose to Morgan. I still think that's something worth working on, but it slowly became apparent to me that I really should get a better sense of how the rest of the software world thinks about doing animation before I return to working on my engine.

Hence, I've had a renewed interest in Blender; I even actually completed my first actually-good-enough-to-be-considered-a-finished-project still image, titled A Fear of Flight (which I suppose I never really mentioned in my blog... ah well). People seemed to like it, minus the fact that I kind of skipped adding a background. They're right... I really don't know anything about creating backgrounds, just characters. So that's something I'll have to work on.

Probably not a big surprise to say that the next project is actually an animation in Blender. I've decided to created an animated version adapted from a reworking of the intro to SuperTux we had talked about while I was actually still involved in that project. I already had enough of an idea of the story and the characters, and it's short enough of a scene that it should be possible. I've begun planning out the project, and I've already storyboarded it. If my time estimations are right, it should be possible for me to get it done sometime between August and September. The wedding website has to be done first though... meanwhile I am waiting for my copies of Creature Factory and Learn Character Animation Using Blender to arrive. I've benefitted a lot from the other blender training dvds, and I think I'm finally coming to the point where I have enough skills to pull a decent animation off, and I think after watching these I'll be fairly ready.

In addition, last year I started paying a lot more attention to my health. I've recently begun focusing on changing my diet quite a bit, and I've actually come to discover that I am really enjoying the changes that I'm making. Someone asked in the comments of my last post if I am a vegetarian... the answer is no, since I do eat meat still, but increasingly less so. That's both for health reasons as well as responding to some pretty compelling arguments about lowering or eliminating the amount of meat in one's diet. But there have been more adjustments than that... I'm also generally just eating a lot healthier. In the last couple weeks I've been weeding fried food out of my diet, and I gave up drinking soda. But I've been eating and drinking so many other interesting (and healthier) things that I don't really regret it. I look forward to returning to outdoor biking again when spring comes around, too.

Lastly, there's no way I can end this post without mentioning the shift in my employment and programming activities. Since I began using Linux in 2001, it has been a dream of mine to be able to work on a significant free software project as my full time job. I didn't expect that to come true, but in 2008 I came on full time working for the PCF. I came on at an exciting time... Miro's architecture has gone through a major overhaul over these last many months. The new release is coming so close, and now it's clear enough how worth it all that work has been. I look forward to being part of all that advancement in the year to come.

So, a lot has happened, and a lot is on the horizon. Life has been a lot of things lately, but boring is not one of them. I'm anticipating that to be the same with the coming year as well.

Goodbye 2008. Hello 2009.

Mushiki Love

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:28:07 -0000

Miro 2.0 is shaping up pretty fast, but I'm actually working on the Miro Guide presently. New versions of both should be launching pretty close to each other, if not at the same time. I'm pretty confident in a super-awesome-release. But between that, the holidays, the upcoming wedding, and my efforts to improve my Blender skills, things are pretty busy.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with the title of this post. I am going to go on a bit of a random rant.

I've recently been playing with food dehydration, fermentation, pickling, and other forms of food preservation that don't require refrigeration. (No reason other than it's just a really interesting thing to learn about.) In the process of experimenting on how to make my own vegetarian teriyaki jerky using tofu, tempeh, and seitan (the tofu and tempeh turned out to be the most interesting... seitan was a bit too brittle for my taste, though it was the one that looked most like beef jerky) I ended up wandering the aisles of the local asian grocery store to refresh my supply of those ingredients. I ended up impulsively picking up a bamboo steamer (a Mushiki). I didn't know how it worked... I just bought it. It was only 6 bucks. It may have been the best impulsive 6 bucks I ever spent.

I had a pot that it fit perfectly over. I put some water on to boil, chopped up some vegetables, tossed in some extra firm tofu and vegetarian fake duck (really just seasoned, canned Seitan). Put it over the pot to steam for 5 minutes. I was surprised at how fast and effortless it all was. Anyway, put the food into a bowl and poured some teriyaki sauce over top. Mixed it up, dug in.

I was totally astonished at how delicious the vegetables were. I have never enjoyed vegetables so much in all my life. It wasn't a complex meal, it was healthy, and it was totally delicious. And oddly enough, I was full.

The next night I chopped up a banana and an apricot, threw in a raspberry and a cherry, and steamed it all for 5 minutes. I almost fell over. It was the most delicious desert I had ever eaten. No added sugar or anything.. was just fantastic on its own.

Since then I have also steamed and eaten: a leek bun, a red bean bun, and some edamame. All fantastic.

Not really much more to this post than that. I am just astounded that I have never played with this form of cooking until now.

Book Meme

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:17:59 -0000

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.

Working It at the PCF

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:28:02 -0000

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 :).

ChiPy Talk on Miro Tonight

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:46:49 -0000

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!