I've never foodblogged before, but today I am compelled to start. For today is Morgan's 25th birthday, and in honor of that I've created something so delicious it must be shared with the world. Behold:

Morgan's favorite tea is Celestial Seasoning's Vanilla Strawberry Rose Ceylon Black Tea. Also, Morgan alleges that her "favorite food group is cookies". (I'm pretty sure she's confused, as last time I'd checked cookies weren't a food group, but I guess I won't argue the point on her birthday.) I figured that a good gift this year would be to combine her two favorite tea with her favorite, *ahem*, food group. The result? Strawberry vanilla rose black tea cookies!

I adapted the recipe from the recipe for shortbread cookies from the excellent Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar's shortbread cookie recipe (so yes, these cookies are vegan too). I'm actually no good at baking, but these came out perfect, even despite the fact that I accidentally spilled a little bit of water into the dough (I had to bake them for a few minutes longer and I added about two tablespoons more flour to the mix, but they turned out just fine). I'm going to assume you aren't going to spill water into your cookies, so here's the recipe without that detail. (A good portion of the text is from VCIYCJ, which is a good book so far and is really what makes the recipe so awesome and idiot-proof.)

Strawberry Vanilla Rose Black Tea Cookies

Ingredients:

• 1 cup non-hydrogenated margarine, slightly softened
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 teaspoons rose water
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/3 cup cornstarch
• 1/4 cup dried strawberries, chopped, plus a dozen or so whole ones for decorating
• 1/4 cup loose black Ceylon tea (or 1/3 cup if you want a stronger tea flavor)

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a large cookie sheet.
2. In a small bowl, sift together flour and cornstarch. Set aside.
3. In a spice mill or small coffee grinder, grind the tea until it becomes a fine powder.
4. In a large bowl, beat the margarine and sugar together with an electric beater or even a standing electric mixer. Scrape the sides of the bowl frequently with a rubber spatula and beat the mixture until very light and creamy, about 5 minutes. Stir in the vanilla and rose water.
5. Add half of the sifted flour and cornstarch to the beaten margarine mixture, using the rubber spatula to fold in the flour first so that it doesn't fly all over the place when using the mixer beaters. Beat until mostly combined, then add the rest of the flour mixture along with the tea powder and chopped strawberries, using the spatula as before. Continue to stir until all the flour and cornstarch are absorbed and dough is crumbly yet soft and moist.
6. Knead dough together with hands for about one minute. Roll golf ball sized portions of the dough in your hands. Put a whole strawberry on top of each and press gently with your hand onto the greased cookie sheet.
7. Bake for about 10-14 minutes, until the shortbread begins to puff and the edges begin to turn a golden color.
8. Remove from oven and allow to cool on cookie sheet for about 5 minutes. Then use a spatula to transfer cookies to cooling rack to complete the cooling process.

And you're done! Delicious cookies await!

So, it's a bit strange writing about this since the film I'm about to talk about has been out for two months. I'm talking about Patent Absurdity, directed by Luca Lucarni, sponsored by the Free Software Foundation and with animations by... me!

Actually, it's kind of surprising that I haven't written about this sooner, considering the first several months of the year this is mostly what I did in my non-work hours. Unfortunately I sustained a wrist injury right around the release that stopped me from doing any typing outside of work hours up until just a couple of weeks ago (it's healing but I still need to wear braces). Anyway, that's a separate story, probably worth its own post.

The film gives what I think is a really solid and enjoyable to watch introduction to what software patents are, their history, and the dangers they pose to the entire software ecosystem. It elicited a very positive response when released at Libre Planet 2010, and everyone I know who has watched to it has spoken highly of it. It could be that sample's response has to do with the type of people I tend to associate with, but anyway... I'm convinced that it's a good and fairly accessible film (accessibility being something something that these kinds of productions don't always end up being).

So there actually four types of animations in the film. There are some very simple graph animations, a moving timeline of software patent history, a "wargames"-type animation (what's featured on that poster there), and an ending sequence that I won't spoil here. Of all of these the wargames sequence seemed to elicit the strongest reaction from people, which is good because that's also the piece that involved the most effort. All of the animations involved Inkscape and Blender in some form, but the wargames animation also made use of Blender's new Python API, which is awesome.

In fact, just this thursday I gave a talk on Blender and Python in Patent Absurdity at ChiPy. (Thanks to Carl Karsten for doing awesome video recording, as usual. :)) Giving a talk on the Python API in Blender at ChiPy is something I've wanted to do for a couple of years, so it was great to finally do it. And the audience reaction was very positive. As you can see in the video, there were a lot of questions, and I got a lot of positive feedback (and even more questions) after the talk ended. Suffice to say I'm rather happy with things.

Oh yeah, and I've also released the Patent Absurdity animation sources along with a full README (HTML export here). While Patent Absurdity is released as CC BY-ND 3.0, I've released all the data (including the Blender and Inkscape files) for the animations as free culture under CC BY-SA 3.0 and the Python files as free software under the GNU GPLv3. So in case you wanted to see how those things work, you are fully free to modify, distribute and tinker with them... free as in freedom. :)

So I just switched this entire blog over to Zine. I'm pretty excited about the move... I've spent a good chunk of time reading through Zine's guts, and I've liked what I've seen so far. The code is clean, the plugin system looks pretty nice, and it was really easy to move my data over.

Prior to this I'd been running my own homerolled blog on here. Nothing fancy, just your bare-bones Django blog. When I originally wrote that thing I had just redesigned Dustycloud.org to be a kind of more permanent home to my projects, and I knew I needed a blog. At that point, I couldn't find anything else that seemed like the kind of thing I wanted and was also written in Python and Django (at that point, I wanted this entire site to be Django-only). Well, time has passed, and I'm running and writing framework-free or not-necessarily-Django WSGI applications, and it turns out there is a blogging system that really truly resembles the kind of system I want, so I've made that switch. Aside from having generally nice looking internals, Zine uses Jinja2 for templating (my favorite templating system!) and permits reStructured Text based posts (which is what most of the posts in my old blog used). Anyway, it only took me a couple of hours to move both my data and templates over. It feels nice to know that if I put effort into making a bugfix or enhancement, that bugfix or enhancement could affect more users than just me.

Anyway, apparently I overlooked one thing in the transition... if your RSS reader shows all my posts as new again, that's why. Also, the proper feed link is no longer /blog/feed/ but rather /blog/feed.atom, so consider updating your links. I've added a redirect, so if you don't it shouldn't be a problem, but it's nice to use the *correct* link.

Edit: Sorry especially for the spamming caused by the switch of permalinks, planets. :(

Yesterday was Morgan and I's first year anniversary. One year ago, we were married.

Not much more to say I guess. Being married isn't much different than living together before marriage, except that now it's clearer that we're in this together for the long haul.

As evidence to that sort of thing... a little over a year ago I mentioned that we may be moving. It's no longer a "may be moving" thing... I'm happy to say that Morgan got into grad school at Northern Illinois University, so we're moving to DeKalb, Illinois. There are a lot of things I'm going to miss about Chicago, most especially my friends and the marvelous tech scene here (marvelous enough that almost all of my friends in Chicago are part of the tech scene here). But no need to get terribly weepy-eyed... I'll actually be back fairly frequently for usergroup meetings and the like. Plus, there are a few things to look forward to in DeKalb... like really, really cheap rent.

Here's to many more happy years to come. :)

I just got back from Djangocon, which was pretty awesome. I was once again on the video team, much like at PyCon. Now that I've got traveling and such out of the way I can return to working on personal projects in my "spare time".

And hey, one of those spare projects turned out to be making some contributions to Miro. Pretty much just minor GTK-X11 specific fixes or enhancements thus far. I'm hoping to return to more Miro hacking in a serious way in the future, but of course I'm not working for the PCF full-time any more, and I notice that the kind of things I'll likely be working on will be a bit different: it really will be more scratch-an-itch style development. Working on serious projects would probably require more full-time dedication than I'm able to give at the moment.

Which actually leads me to another point. Free software and free culture projects all require funding. I tend to think that if you reap the benefits of these kinds of projects, and especially if you really believe in them, then you should consider putting your money toward them. Think of it in terms of the Lessig Challenge: how much money do you put toward media distribution companies, proprietary software vendors, etc whose policies and actions you object to? We do live within a capitalist system, and that means the best way to vote toward change is often to vote with your dollar. (There are other ways to vote of course, you can vote with your effort and time too. Generally the best option is to do both.) So putting your money toward things projects you believe in, even when that "purchase" won't result in an immediate result, is something I think everyone should do.

One such project is subtitle translations in Miro. The PCF is trying to raise funds toward this, and I think it's a great opportunity to tackle accessibility in open video, which hasn't really been covered yet... I'd really like to see this bar make it all the way:

I wouldn't stop there either. What organizations do you really believe in? Various groups could use your support, in especially what has been a terribly difficult year for nonprofits. A sample of groups that I think are important and worth joining or donating to in the free culture / free software sphere: Creative Commons, GNOME, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation... these are all important groups that need your help.

As for media, support independent artists, especially those that use free culture licenses like Jim's Big Ego, Professor Kliq, Brad Sucks, or any one of the many awesome artists on Jamendo or Magnatune. The Blender Foundation is creating a new Open Movie, Project Durian. They're very close to meeting their pre-order goals... of course, they could still use some help, and the more orders the better (at the moment, if you preorder, you can get your name in the credits). That's a great project in particular because it funds Blender development, helps create an awesome movie, and even releases all the source files under free licenses. They have other items in their E-Shop, too. When you buy hardware, try to buy devices that are free software friendly. There's loads you can do in the realm of media and technology.

There's tons you can do outside of technology, too. Morgan and I get all our groceries from the local farmers' market, from our local CSA, and from independent grocers. When we go out to eat, we go to independent restaurants instead of chains. The Eat Well Guide is a fantastic directory for finding ethical sources of food near you (especially consider joining a Community Supported Agriculture program... it's a cheap and easy way to get fresh, local and organic food at your door every week).

Maybe not everything I've listed here meets what you believe in, but probably something does. Just remember that your time, effort and money are all incredibly important resources, and how you use them will change the world, either in ways you believe in or ways you don't. So invest wisely.

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! :)

Up until recently I was using ejabberd for my XMPP server on dustycloud.org. It worked pretty well, was easy enough to set up, etc. Unfortunately it was also a total memory hog, sucking up more than 120MB of the memory on my tiny VPS. Given I was running the smallest Linode server possible (actually, I just upgraded to the second smallest today, which was pretty painless) this was making it rather difficult for me to add new services and sites.

After a very helpful conversation on identi.ca, I decided to make the switch to Prosody. I'm glad to say it was quite painless: after installing the .deb off their site, making a couple lines of changes to their bundled config file, and running their ejabberd2prosody.lua script, things are running smooth. Prosody only takes about 15 megabytes of memory (including what's cached). Nice!

One word of advice: ejabberd2prosody.lua isn't bundled with Prosody's .deb files currently, so you have to run it from source. The "migrated database" that it creates is set up relative to the script's own path it seems, so you'll have to move the database it creates out of the source directory into /var/lib/prosody. After I figured that out, everything was smooth!

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.

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.

If an unchanging life is a boring life, then I certainly haven't had much time for boredom as of late. I've microblogged about these changes plenty, but a blog post of normal length is probably in order.

I've mentioned on here already about getting married and etc. That hasn't been too huge of a change moving from unmarried to married life though. When you live together for long enough, the kind of changes that marriage brings are more in the realm of civil benefits and how you sign documents than anything else. There is, of course, the promise of permanence. Yet that's mostly a seal on a document it felt like we signed a long time ago. It is comforting to have, though.

The other big change has been a change in employment. A budget shortfall means I'm no longer working at the Participatory Culture Foundation. No animosity there... while I was sad to go, I understand that it needed to happen, and I am still on great terms with everyone there. I expect to continue to work on the Miro family of projects. I'm in a bit of a transition period, but I suspect I will simply be returning to the work capacity of a volunteer as I was before being hired at the PCF. Things need to settle again before I can do anything though, so we'll see. (In the meanwhile in PCF land, Paul Swartz took over the work I was doing on Miro Community TV, and it's coming out great. I expect to run a Blender-related instance of it myself soon.)

So, between jobs I did a small amount of contracting. I got positive feedback for the work I did. It is nice to know then that I have the capacity to do this if it is necessary, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't worrying so much. At this point in my life at least, I prefer being employed as part of an organization. Maybe at some point in the future that will change. In the meanwhile, I'm extremely giddy to report that am employed at an organization... and an incredible one at that! I accepted a position as a software engineer at Creative Commons! How awesome is that?

Last week I spent doing "homework", reading up on the various technologies used at CC, the numerous projects in place, and so on. This week I have actually flown in to San Francisco (I am writing this from my hotel right now, actually). I spent yesterday going over this stack with Nathan in person and reviewing what the "glorious future" is supposed to be (read: a cleanup in code and architecture). Today I will begin working toward that glorious future, to which much work has already been done. Exciting!

Anyway, I'm grateful for the fact that I have been able to move from one incredibly awesome and socially positive organization to another without too much of a difficult transition period. To be able to put your daily effort toward something you truly believe in is rather rare, so I consider myself quite lucky. I come mostly from a free software background as in terms of these philosophical issues, but I said often when giving talks on Miro that I am especially interested in the areas where free software and free culture intersect. And now I'll be able to directly work to progress the free culture movement by working with and on free software. Which is several levels of fantastic.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, no, we are not moving to San Francisco... not in the immediate future, anyway. Early Saturday morning I will be flying back to Chicago so I can do work from our messy, messy apartment.

Speaking of which, I thought San Francisco was going to be all unbearably warm and etc. I was rather incorrect. It appears that in flying out I ducked the worst of a very modest heatwave in Chicago. So, fancy that.

I've actually been writing quite a lot and doing some rather interesting things. Unfortunately, I haven't really found much time to update here, so here's a brief recap of stuff:

• I've done some blogging over on the Creative Commons Labs blog. I plan to do more soon, but for now there's a post called Understanding the State of Sanity via Whiteboards and Ascii Art and CC.Engine and Web Non-Frameworks.

• I've participated in the PyCon video recording crew again.

• I've given a number of talks at ChiPy, but the only one I am going to bother linking to is this this talk on Git and GitPython.

• I suggested that the Durian Project should run a sprint (I'm credited as "cwebb" in that post). They did, and it was a stellar success, by their own words. Sadly, I was recording video at PyCon and was thus unable to participate. I'd like to write more about why this is significant soon beyond what is immediately obvious... hopefully I'll find some time.

• I've been coding a whole bunch of things. One of the things maybe that I'll get up soon is a simple cgit-like git web interface called wsgit. Although, Will has been working on that more recently than I have, because he's awesome. (He's also been working on curating Python Miro Community... have you seen that?) I've been working on a number of other smaller wsgi applications that hopefully I can better announce (and get to a publicly usable state) soon.

• I've been hanging out at Pumping Station One, local Chicago hackerspace.

• I won a weekend challenge on the BlenderArtists forums.

As for that last one, there's no "real" prize for winning a Blender weekend challenge other than suggesting the title of the next contest, but this may be one of the thing I am most proud of anyway, because I think the final product came out really well. It is the first piece I've finished in Blender that I feel really happy with. More importantly, I redid the piece a bit after the contest. We got it printed and Morgan framed it, and we gave it to my father for Christmas. This was important to me, as my father is the one who got me interested in cartooning and animation at an early age in the first place.

There's an even much bigger thing I've been working on that's almost ready for public viewing and consumption, but it's not ready for viewing yet. But I promise I'll blog here when it is instead of waiting for an overwhelming blogpost. :)

In the meanwhile, my identi.ca account is where it's at.

After a long period of waiting, Morgan and I both were able to pick up our Nokia N900 phones. We've both been waiting for these for a long time, and I'm happy to say that acquiring the device spoiled my weekend in the sense that I had plenty of things I had scheduled to do but found myself unable to do because there was too much to explore on the device. As for the phones themselves, I'll summarize briefly (then go into details later): usability wise the N900 phones are an absolute joy; free software wise the phones are not completely ideal but are mostly quite good and in that sense are probably your tentative best bet. (That last statement is quite loaded... I'll qualify it as I go.)

The primary competitors against the N900 in the free software space are the OpenMoko phones (Freerunner, and to a lesser extent the 1973), the android phones (G1 & Droid), and the Palm Pre.

Going over these briefly, the OpenMoko phones are by far the most free in every respect (I even have one, the 1973). I'd like to say that I thought the project was not dead, but considering production has ceased and the community seems largely exhausted, I am afraid it may be. There is some chance that production will start again, and maybe OpenMoko as a company will itself rebound and begin production of a new model based on sales of its WikiReader. But at the moment, I am not crossing my fingers. At worst, I do not think the time and resources were a bad investment: it demonstrated interest in a free software friendly phone and I suspect that the FreeSmartphone.org project was partly the inspiration for ofono (both are d-bus based). And though the hardware and software stacks both have issues, you can now use the one of these devices as a phone. But for the moment, the OpenMoko phones look to have a very uncertain future, and so (unfortunately) I would not put them in my "best bet" category.

Then there's the Android phones (or more specifically, the developer G1). The version you buy in a store is actually locked down to where you don't have root access, however it is possible to buy a G1 developer version (which is more expensive in the short term but cheaper when you factor in not being tied into an unnecessarily expensive plan), though you have to register as a developer first. Like the N900, the phone is not entirely ideal as in terms of providing a free software environment as it does come bundled with some proprietary pieces, but also like the N900 and Maemo, these devices and Android are still mostly free software at their foundation. There is a fundamental difference between Maemo and Android, however: aside from the Linux kernel, there is very little on the Android platform that may resemble what you have on your desktop... Google has developed a completely separate stack that is built on a Java VM for Android, and so in that sense Android is on its own little free software island: very little free software can be shared and come in, and very little free software can come out and be shared with the general free software desktop. Despite this, it is still a mostly free software platform, and before the N900 was publicly announced Morgan and I were on the verge of buying a couple of the developer versions.

Then there's the Palm Pre... I have heard this mentioned repeatedly as a free software option, but looking at it I don't see much worthwhile. As far as I can tell, the core of WebOS is itself proprietary, and while the system may be running the Linux kernel, it has at least as many blobs as the G1 and the N900 do, on top of having some sort of disturbing phone-home unfeature that sounds like a privacy nightmare. You also have to jailbreak the device to gain root access, and although Palm seems okay with this, jailbreaking as a requirement does not seem like a good first state considering other phones that don't require such an absurd step. Despite this, some freesmartphone.org hackers are considering the device as a possible option for an FSO port. However, that's the best this device has going for it free software wise to the best of my knowledge. Unless the FSO pulls through with a good port to the Pre, I don't consider it much of a free software option.

Now to the N900 and Maemo 5. Briefly on usability and aesthetics: it certainly holds up in this regard. I've felt that every aspect of the device felt really well thought through and comfortable from a user perspective, and Morgan seems to think the same. This is good in several senses: it means that the device is likely to have broad enough of appeal to be sustainable as in terms of sales (which matters to free software enthusiasts as it means the device and hopefully similarly free successors are likely to continue to be produced) and it also shows that a device with broad appeal based on primarily free desktop components is possible. Maemo 5 uses GTK, Clutter, Hildon, and QT for interface rendering, as well as D-Bus, PulseAudio, Telepathy, and many other components behind the scenes, all pieces that you probably are running if you have a free software desktop running on your machine. This means that existing free software applications are more likely possible to run natively or be ported to run without extrordinary difficulty. This isn't a perfect scenario: getting an application to look native on the device will likely require significant modifications for many programs, introducing a risk of forking. Even so, assuming both the N900 and the Android phones were to suddenly be discontinued, a GNU/Linux desktop user will have felt more benefits and less loss in terms of the free software surrounding the N900 than the Android phones.

As for distribution and packaging, the N900's default install (and current only option) is Debian-based, but not Debian itself. Unfortunately due to what seems to be a mix of hardware-specific optimization goals and a desire to separate the "flash-updatable" portion of the system from user-installed and updated sections of the system, all non-core packages are set to install in /opt/ instead of /usr/, which means that packages are pretty grossly incompatible with those directly from Debian. This is referred to as the "Opt Problem", and it is clear that many people are unhappy about it. Aside from the binary blobs, this is my biggest disappointment with the machine... I would really prefer to run vanilla Debian and have access to Debian's full repository of packages rather than having to wait for the ones I want to be ported over or port them over myself. At any rate, the machine has a slot for microsd cards, and I suspect it won't be long until it will be possible to boot vanilla Debian from there.

When the N900 phone was announced, there was an appeal directly to "software freedom lovers" which gave the impression that this phone would be yours, you are welcome and encouraged to hack it. I am glad to say that this is true. All I had to do was install rootsh and I had root access to the device... yes, real actual root access. And though I haven't done it, it also appears to be fairly easy to flash the machine. I should note that Morgan and I didn't purchase a special "developer" version of the phone either... the phones Morgan and I bought were purchased directly from the physical Nokia store here in Chicago. As I am typing this, I am simultaneously ssh'ed into the phone over my local wifi, installing packages via apt-get.

All that being said, unfortunately there are certainly a good number of components which are non-free. Nokia is upfront about what those components are but also gives some pretty stupid reasons for why. (Battery damage, really? As for safety, surely people could intentionally do much worse without needing access to the source code. That's silly.)

I really haven't talked much about using the device, mainly because my post here was concerned with freedom. All I will say is that I doubt you will be disappointed in using it... the machine feels very polished out of the box and it is clear that a lot of effort was put into making the user interface clear, intuitive, and beautiful. And it has succeeded in those regards marvelously. And as in terms of freedom, the phone is not perfect, but I am convinced for the moment that it is the best bet we have.

But hopefully Intel will show off some Moblin-enabled phone soon, and it will end up being more free software friendly than even the N900 is (which is still a huge leap forward for a mainstream phone). And at that point maybe you could swap installing Moblin on one and Maemo on the other. Because free software is awesome.

Edit: Pieter Colpaert points out that you only need to check the community updates to see that the OpenMoko community is not, in fact, exhausted. I hope that he is right. It is possible that my perspective is tainted because I have a much earlier model, the Neo 1973. Using that phone involved a lot of manual time trying to tweak things as everyone else had moved to the Freerunner (only a thousand or so of the 1973 were made, apparently), and between projects I didn't have time to figure out how to manually update alsa state files every time the freerunner community updated and broke mine. The community update post does show that there is life in the community. That said, I suspect there won't be much as in terms of new adoptions in the community until a new OpenMoko model is announced, so I fear that the OpenMoko community may be fighting brain drain. I could be wrong. I'd like to be. And I'd certainly love to hear of a new model being published. Maybe the success of these other partly free software friendly devices will raise interest in investing in a new OpenMoko device, which has always been fully free software oriented.

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.

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.

I just got back from Djangocon, which was pretty awesome. I was once again on the video team, much like at PyCon. Now that I've got traveling and such out of the way I can return to working on personal projects in my "spare time".

And hey, one of those spare projects turned out to be making some contributions to Miro. Pretty much just minor GTK-X11 specific fixes or enhancements thus far. I'm hoping to return to more Miro hacking in a serious way in the future, but of course I'm not working for the PCF full-time any more, and I notice that the kind of things I'll likely be working on will be a bit different: it really will be more scratch-an-itch style development. Working on serious projects would probably require more full-time dedication than I'm able to give at the moment.

Which actually leads me to another point. Free software and free culture projects all require funding. I tend to think that if you reap the benefits of these kinds of projects, and especially if you really believe in them, then you should consider putting your money toward them. Think of it in terms of the Lessig Challenge: how much money do you put toward media distribution companies, proprietary software vendors, etc whose policies and actions you object to? We do live within a capitalist system, and that means the best way to vote toward change is often to vote with your dollar. (There are other ways to vote of course, you can vote with your effort and time too. Generally the best option is to do both.) So putting your money toward things projects you believe in, even when that "purchase" won't result in an immediate result, is something I think everyone should do.

One such project is subtitle translations in Miro. The PCF is trying to raise funds toward this, and I think it's a great opportunity to tackle accessibility in open video, which hasn't really been covered yet... I'd really like to see this bar make it all the way:

I wouldn't stop there either. What organizations do you really believe in? Various groups could use your support, in especially what has been a terribly difficult year for nonprofits. A sample of groups that I think are important and worth joining or donating to in the free culture / free software sphere: Creative Commons, GNOME, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation... these are all important groups that need your help.

As for media, support independent artists, especially those that use free culture licenses like Jim's Big Ego, Professor Kliq, Brad Sucks, or any one of the many awesome artists on Jamendo or Magnatune. The Blender Foundation is creating a new Open Movie, Project Durian. They're very close to meeting their pre-order goals... of course, they could still use some help, and the more orders the better (at the moment, if you preorder, you can get your name in the credits). That's a great project in particular because it funds Blender development, helps create an awesome movie, and even releases all the source files under free licenses. They have other items in their E-Shop, too. When you buy hardware, try to buy devices that are free software friendly. There's loads you can do in the realm of media and technology.

There's tons you can do outside of technology, too. Morgan and I get all our groceries from the local farmers' market, from our local CSA, and from independent grocers. When we go out to eat, we go to independent restaurants instead of chains. The Eat Well Guide is a fantastic directory for finding ethical sources of food near you (especially consider joining a Community Supported Agriculture program... it's a cheap and easy way to get fresh, local and organic food at your door every week).

Maybe not everything I've listed here meets what you believe in, but probably something does. Just remember that your time, effort and money are all incredibly important resources, and how you use them will change the world, either in ways you believe in or ways you don't. So invest wisely.

If an unchanging life is a boring life, then I certainly haven't had much time for boredom as of late. I've microblogged about these changes plenty, but a blog post of normal length is probably in order.

I've mentioned on here already about getting married and etc. That hasn't been too huge of a change moving from unmarried to married life though. When you live together for long enough, the kind of changes that marriage brings are more in the realm of civil benefits and how you sign documents than anything else. There is, of course, the promise of permanence. Yet that's mostly a seal on a document it felt like we signed a long time ago. It is comforting to have, though.

The other big change has been a change in employment. A budget shortfall means I'm no longer working at the Participatory Culture Foundation. No animosity there... while I was sad to go, I understand that it needed to happen, and I am still on great terms with everyone there. I expect to continue to work on the Miro family of projects. I'm in a bit of a transition period, but I suspect I will simply be returning to the work capacity of a volunteer as I was before being hired at the PCF. Things need to settle again before I can do anything though, so we'll see. (In the meanwhile in PCF land, Paul Swartz took over the work I was doing on Miro Community TV, and it's coming out great. I expect to run a Blender-related instance of it myself soon.)

So, between jobs I did a small amount of contracting. I got positive feedback for the work I did. It is nice to know then that I have the capacity to do this if it is necessary, but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I wasn't worrying so much. At this point in my life at least, I prefer being employed as part of an organization. Maybe at some point in the future that will change. In the meanwhile, I'm extremely giddy to report that am employed at an organization... and an incredible one at that! I accepted a position as a software engineer at Creative Commons! How awesome is that?

Last week I spent doing "homework", reading up on the various technologies used at CC, the numerous projects in place, and so on. This week I have actually flown in to San Francisco (I am writing this from my hotel right now, actually). I spent yesterday going over this stack with Nathan in person and reviewing what the "glorious future" is supposed to be (read: a cleanup in code and architecture). Today I will begin working toward that glorious future, to which much work has already been done. Exciting!

Anyway, I'm grateful for the fact that I have been able to move from one incredibly awesome and socially positive organization to another without too much of a difficult transition period. To be able to put your daily effort toward something you truly believe in is rather rare, so I consider myself quite lucky. I come mostly from a free software background as in terms of these philosophical issues, but I said often when giving talks on Miro that I am especially interested in the areas where free software and free culture intersect. And now I'll be able to directly work to progress the free culture movement by working with and on free software. Which is several levels of fantastic.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, no, we are not moving to San Francisco... not in the immediate future, anyway. Early Saturday morning I will be flying back to Chicago so I can do work from our messy, messy apartment.

Speaking of which, I thought San Francisco was going to be all unbearably warm and etc. I was rather incorrect. It appears that in flying out I ducked the worst of a very modest heatwave in Chicago. So, fancy that.

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.

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.

Up until recently I was using ejabberd for my XMPP server on dustycloud.org. It worked pretty well, was easy enough to set up, etc. Unfortunately it was also a total memory hog, sucking up more than 120MB of the memory on my tiny VPS. Given I was running the smallest Linode server possible (actually, I just upgraded to the second smallest today, which was pretty painless) this was making it rather difficult for me to add new services and sites.

After a very helpful conversation on identi.ca, I decided to make the switch to Prosody. I'm glad to say it was quite painless: after installing the .deb off their site, making a couple lines of changes to their bundled config file, and running their ejabberd2prosody.lua script, things are running smooth. Prosody only takes about 15 megabytes of memory (including what's cached). Nice!

One word of advice: ejabberd2prosody.lua isn't bundled with Prosody's .deb files currently, so you have to run it from source. The "migrated database" that it creates is set up relative to the script's own path it seems, so you'll have to move the database it creates out of the source directory into /var/lib/prosody. After I figured that out, everything was smooth!

I've actually been writing quite a lot and doing some rather interesting things. Unfortunately, I haven't really found much time to update here, so here's a brief recap of stuff:

• I've done some blogging over on the Creative Commons Labs blog. I plan to do more soon, but for now there's a post called Understanding the State of Sanity via Whiteboards and Ascii Art and CC.Engine and Web Non-Frameworks.

• I've participated in the PyCon video recording crew again.

• I've given a number of talks at ChiPy, but the only one I am going to bother linking to is this this talk on Git and GitPython.

• I suggested that the Durian Project should run a sprint (I'm credited as "cwebb" in that post). They did, and it was a stellar success, by their own words. Sadly, I was recording video at PyCon and was thus unable to participate. I'd like to write more about why this is significant soon beyond what is immediately obvious... hopefully I'll find some time.

• I've been coding a whole bunch of things. One of the things maybe that I'll get up soon is a simple cgit-like git web interface called wsgit. Although, Will has been working on that more recently than I have, because he's awesome. (He's also been working on curating Python Miro Community... have you seen that?) I've been working on a number of other smaller wsgi applications that hopefully I can better announce (and get to a publicly usable state) soon.

• I've been hanging out at Pumping Station One, local Chicago hackerspace.

• I won a weekend challenge on the BlenderArtists forums.

As for that last one, there's no "real" prize for winning a Blender weekend challenge other than suggesting the title of the next contest, but this may be one of the thing I am most proud of anyway, because I think the final product came out really well. It is the first piece I've finished in Blender that I feel really happy with. More importantly, I redid the piece a bit after the contest. We got it printed and Morgan framed it, and we gave it to my father for Christmas. This was important to me, as my father is the one who got me interested in cartooning and animation at an early age in the first place.

There's an even much bigger thing I've been working on that's almost ready for public viewing and consumption, but it's not ready for viewing yet. But I promise I'll blog here when it is instead of waiting for an overwhelming blogpost. :)

In the meanwhile, my identi.ca account is where it's at.

After a long period of waiting, Morgan and I both were able to pick up our Nokia N900 phones. We've both been waiting for these for a long time, and I'm happy to say that acquiring the device spoiled my weekend in the sense that I had plenty of things I had scheduled to do but found myself unable to do because there was too much to explore on the device. As for the phones themselves, I'll summarize briefly (then go into details later): usability wise the N900 phones are an absolute joy; free software wise the phones are not completely ideal but are mostly quite good and in that sense are probably your tentative best bet. (That last statement is quite loaded... I'll qualify it as I go.)

The primary competitors against the N900 in the free software space are the OpenMoko phones (Freerunner, and to a lesser extent the 1973), the android phones (G1 & Droid), and the Palm Pre.

Going over these briefly, the OpenMoko phones are by far the most free in every respect (I even have one, the 1973). I'd like to say that I thought the project was not dead, but considering production has ceased and the community seems largely exhausted, I am afraid it may be. There is some chance that production will start again, and maybe OpenMoko as a company will itself rebound and begin production of a new model based on sales of its WikiReader. But at the moment, I am not crossing my fingers. At worst, I do not think the time and resources were a bad investment: it demonstrated interest in a free software friendly phone and I suspect that the FreeSmartphone.org project was partly the inspiration for ofono (both are d-bus based). And though the hardware and software stacks both have issues, you can now use the one of these devices as a phone. But for the moment, the OpenMoko phones look to have a very uncertain future, and so (unfortunately) I would not put them in my "best bet" category.

Then there's the Android phones (or more specifically, the developer G1). The version you buy in a store is actually locked down to where you don't have root access, however it is possible to buy a G1 developer version (which is more expensive in the short term but cheaper when you factor in not being tied into an unnecessarily expensive plan), though you have to register as a developer first. Like the N900, the phone is not entirely ideal as in terms of providing a free software environment as it does come bundled with some proprietary pieces, but also like the N900 and Maemo, these devices and Android are still mostly free software at their foundation. There is a fundamental difference between Maemo and Android, however: aside from the Linux kernel, there is very little on the Android platform that may resemble what you have on your desktop... Google has developed a completely separate stack that is built on a Java VM for Android, and so in that sense Android is on its own little free software island: very little free software can be shared and come in, and very little free software can come out and be shared with the general free software desktop. Despite this, it is still a mostly free software platform, and before the N900 was publicly announced Morgan and I were on the verge of buying a couple of the developer versions.

Then there's the Palm Pre... I have heard this mentioned repeatedly as a free software option, but looking at it I don't see much worthwhile. As far as I can tell, the core of WebOS is itself proprietary, and while the system may be running the Linux kernel, it has at least as many blobs as the G1 and the N900 do, on top of having some sort of disturbing phone-home unfeature that sounds like a privacy nightmare. You also have to jailbreak the device to gain root access, and although Palm seems okay with this, jailbreaking as a requirement does not seem like a good first state considering other phones that don't require such an absurd step. Despite this, some freesmartphone.org hackers are considering the device as a possible option for an FSO port. However, that's the best this device has going for it free software wise to the best of my knowledge. Unless the FSO pulls through with a good port to the Pre, I don't consider it much of a free software option.

Now to the N900 and Maemo 5. Briefly on usability and aesthetics: it certainly holds up in this regard. I've felt that every aspect of the device felt really well thought through and comfortable from a user perspective, and Morgan seems to think the same. This is good in several senses: it means that the device is likely to have broad enough of appeal to be sustainable as in terms of sales (which matters to free software enthusiasts as it means the device and hopefully similarly free successors are likely to continue to be produced) and it also shows that a device with broad appeal based on primarily free desktop components is possible. Maemo 5 uses GTK, Clutter, Hildon, and QT for interface rendering, as well as D-Bus, PulseAudio, Telepathy, and many other components behind the scenes, all pieces that you probably are running if you have a free software desktop running on your machine. This means that existing free software applications are more likely possible to run natively or be ported to run without extrordinary difficulty. This isn't a perfect scenario: getting an application to look native on the device will likely require significant modifications for many programs, introducing a risk of forking. Even so, assuming both the N900 and the Android phones were to suddenly be discontinued, a GNU/Linux desktop user will have felt more benefits and less loss in terms of the free software surrounding the N900 than the Android phones.

As for distribution and packaging, the N900's default install (and current only option) is Debian-based, but not Debian itself. Unfortunately due to what seems to be a mix of hardware-specific optimization goals and a desire to separate the "flash-updatable" portion of the system from user-installed and updated sections of the system, all non-core packages are set to install in /opt/ instead of /usr/, which means that packages are pretty grossly incompatible with those directly from Debian. This is referred to as the "Opt Problem", and it is clear that many people are unhappy about it. Aside from the binary blobs, this is my biggest disappointment with the machine... I would really prefer to run vanilla Debian and have access to Debian's full repository of packages rather than having to wait for the ones I want to be ported over or port them over myself. At any rate, the machine has a slot for microsd cards, and I suspect it won't be long until it will be possible to boot vanilla Debian from there.

When the N900 phone was announced, there was an appeal directly to "software freedom lovers" which gave the impression that this phone would be yours, you are welcome and encouraged to hack it. I am glad to say that this is true. All I had to do was install rootsh and I had root access to the device... yes, real actual root access. And though I haven't done it, it also appears to be fairly easy to flash the machine. I should note that Morgan and I didn't purchase a special "developer" version of the phone either... the phones Morgan and I bought were purchased directly from the physical Nokia store here in Chicago. As I am typing this, I am simultaneously ssh'ed into the phone over my local wifi, installing packages via apt-get.

All that being said, unfortunately there are certainly a good number of components which are non-free. Nokia is upfront about what those components are but also gives some pretty stupid reasons for why. (Battery damage, really? As for safety, surely people could intentionally do much worse without needing access to the source code. That's silly.)

I really haven't talked much about using the device, mainly because my post here was concerned with freedom. All I will say is that I doubt you will be disappointed in using it... the machine feels very polished out of the box and it is clear that a lot of effort was put into making the user interface clear, intuitive, and beautiful. And it has succeeded in those regards marvelously. And as in terms of freedom, the phone is not perfect, but I am convinced for the moment that it is the best bet we have.

But hopefully Intel will show off some Moblin-enabled phone soon, and it will end up being more free software friendly than even the N900 is (which is still a huge leap forward for a mainstream phone). And at that point maybe you could swap installing Moblin on one and Maemo on the other. Because free software is awesome.

Edit: Pieter Colpaert points out that you only need to check the community updates to see that the OpenMoko community is not, in fact, exhausted. I hope that he is right. It is possible that my perspective is tainted because I have a much earlier model, the Neo 1973. Using that phone involved a lot of manual time trying to tweak things as everyone else had moved to the Freerunner (only a thousand or so of the 1973 were made, apparently), and between projects I didn't have time to figure out how to manually update alsa state files every time the freerunner community updated and broke mine. The community update post does show that there is life in the community. That said, I suspect there won't be much as in terms of new adoptions in the community until a new OpenMoko model is announced, so I fear that the OpenMoko community may be fighting brain drain. I could be wrong. I'd like to be. And I'd certainly love to hear of a new model being published. Maybe the success of these other partly free software friendly devices will raise interest in investing in a new OpenMoko device, which has always been fully free software oriented.