I mentioned in my last post that I am now using Identi.ca. I'll be honest.. when I first set it up I didn't really think I'd use it. 140 character limit? And why have a microblog when you can just have, you know, a blog? And then I started using it and realized that it was really like public instant messaging or a global chatroom. And now I'm totally hooked.

I've been using it to send out updates on the guide by tagging those posts with #miroguide so that people doing testing can know what kind of changes are happening. Will has also been tagging with #miro quite a bit.

A lot of people have asked me... why Identi.ca? Why not Twitter? Indeed, Twitter does have a significantly bigger community. You can also sync up your identi.ca account with you twitter account, and indeed I do know a lot of people who have done that. But I'm simply not too interested in collecting my information into yet another walled garden. Identi.ca runs off of Laconi.ca, which is free software that anyone can run on their own server. And the people behind it are pushing for a standard that will allow for even further decentralization called OpenMicroBlogging (OMB). Admittedly, I haven't read the standard yet, but what I'm hoping is that this will allow for a setup that is closer to what we have both with email and XMPP/Jabber, where anyone can run a server and send messages to anyone on any other server. So, at this point there are a lot of people being snarky and responding with, "Well, not as many people are using it yet, so it really doesn't matter." Which is what people said about XMPP/Jabber in its infancy, while AIM was the proprietary, de-facto protocol. But now XMPP is the default standard... if you have LiveJournal, Facebook, GMail, you already have an XMPP account, whether you realize it or not. It's not really clear whether it will be the case or not, but hopefully the same will be the case with OMB.

I still think that the 140 character limit is a bit short. Though I could be wrong on that. I still think it would be better if it would be a bit longer, and if it were possible to use named links instead of having to resort to third party servers like bit.ly and tinyurl.com (this is the web after all, and almost any decent communications platform (including xmpp) supports web links). I think the biggest problem is that it might break twitter compatibility, but I guess that really doesn't bother me. If we're thinking of microblogging as like a public chat room, we can have a bit of a higher character limit and still be reasonable. But those are minor complaints.

So today identi.ca released a brand new version of the site running off of a new version of laconi.ca. It looks good, has a few bugs, but most importantly, it now supports groups. Think of it this way: a !group is like a subscribable #tag or a magical collective @person. If you mark a post with your !group, and all subscribers of the group will get that message, regardless of whether they are subscribed to you specifically. It's a great feature, and if I understand correctly, one people have been wishing for for a while... even in twitter land. ;)

So with that in mind, I set up a few new groups... !miro (which three of the miro developers have joined at this point already), !chiglug for the local Chicago GNU/Linux User Group, and of course I had to set up a !blender group. Group avatars aren't working yet apparently, but I'll upload them once they do. Well, what are you waiting for? Sign up! :)

I just joined Identi.ca, a microblogging service (similar to Twitter, but open source and better).

Currently using it so that people can track my work updates, probably? So if you're curious about updates to the Miro Guide, I'm going to be publishing them pretty regularly until the new release. I'm also going to be talking about my totally boring life. So, you know, if you wanted to know about those things, feel free to stalk me.

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.

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.

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.

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.