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.

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!