Will's blog

Back in June I must have:

• disabled or uninstalled suexec
• upgraded apache without installing a new suexec
• done a debian upgrade that did something

Anyhow, comments are working again.

The United States Post Office increases the cost of postage periodically. They do faster than I use the stamps that I've bought. In the process of this, I ended up with first class stamps that have no value listed on them, so I had no idea how much they were worth.

Buried on the USPS web-site is this quick service guide that lists the values of all stamps that have no value listed on them. Hooray for search engines!

I was at OSCON last week and met many people some of whom I've known for several years (Ted, Steve, ...). I also met a bunch of people who I've followed for many years and some people I've worked with when doing the Firefox 3 work I did. It was really exciting to be there. I didn't attend any keynotes or sessions, but the conversations I had were well worth trekking all the way to Portland, OR and back. I also got to spend a week with my sister who lives in Portland.

On the flight there and back, I worked on PyBlosxom. I mostly concentrated getting better acquainted with nose and using nose and coverage to help guide my testing efforts. The results were phenomenal. I increased the test count from 53 or so to 207, I increased coverage from some low number to 57% and I discovered and fixed a bunch of bugs. Because I switched to git over svn, I was able to commit locally and manage the work I was doing. All very exciting.

Miro is coming along very nicely. We took the plunge to ditch the previous frontend for a new one that has fewer layers of indirection. The results so far are encouraging--I think it was absolutely the right thing to do. Incidentally, I blogged about OSCON on my Miro devblog.

In the last few months, I've thrown together several web-sites using werkzeug, sqlalchemy, and mako. I really like this stack since it doesn't involve a lot of infrastructure and the number of files and "things" involved is pretty small. I think this is going to be my preferred stack for webapps going forward.

Just before OSCON, I signed up with identi.ca. It's my first micro-blogging account. Mostly I wanted to see what micro-blogging was like and follow other OSCON attendees. OSCON had a _lot_ of back-channel conversations going on.

Just before signing up for an identi.ca account, I met Jack, who lives around the corner from where I live. I wish I had made the effort to contact him years ago.

I think that's about it. It's been an interesting few months.

I'm heading to Portland, OR for OSCON 2008 to help man the Mozilla booth at the Expo. I registered as an Expo attendee, but I'll be there (or near there) from the 19th through the 26th.

My primary purpose there is as a representative for Miro and talking to people about it. However, I'm also interested in meeting up with people working on:

• PyBlosxom things
• Miro and video podcasting things
• Python 2.6/3.0 testing, documentation, bug-fixing, ... things

If you're interested, too, ping me. I'm hanging out on the #oscon channel on irc.freenode.net and you can always get me by email or comments below.

I volunteered at ROFLCon yesterday and today. The whole experience was really surreal but fantastic! I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions I attended while "on duty" and the new friends I made. I also came home with a sticker that says "Bacon is a vegetable". That sums that up.

Sold the first guitar I ever bought today. I'm a little bummed about it because of the sentimental value it had, but I have to get rid of things to balance out getting new things. I'm trying to use mark and sweep garbage collection on my stuff. The unfortunate part is that I'm a very very slow CPU and it takes ages to do a single pass.

I spent the better part of my youth doing Oddessey of the Mind (which has gone through some difficulties and splintered as near as I can tell), programming, bicycling, and playing D&D.

D&D was both entertaining and also wildly educational. I was in a bunch of campaigns and we were studying architecture, history, military campaigns, meteorology, the middle ages, math, economics, sociology, philosophy and a variety of other topics to create worlds that were fresh, inventive and believable. As such, I, too, salute Gary Gygax on his way to the other planes.

As a side note, it's interesting to see the overlap between programmers and related people around my age and D&D players.

I got married last May and changed my name to my wife's name. This had two interesting consequences. First, it surprises many people when they find out and I have to have my memorized explanation ready to go. Second, changing your name is really scary. I've been waiting for a period of time where I'm not involved in any governmental anything including flying because I don't want to confuse someone because I'm half-way through a name change and get labeled a terrorist for the rest of my life.

I started the name-changing process a couple of weeks ago. I'm now William Kahn-Greene. I kept Guaraldi as my "maiden name"--I have no idea what the equivalent term is for men. I've spent the greater part of the last two weeks without "proper documentation"--that's been scary. Thank goodness for telecommuting!

As an aside, I can't wait for my idiot government to get over this terrorist panic. I can't imagine the next fear-craze to sweep the nation. I secretly hope it's global warming or something similar that has more useful consequences like energy usage overhaul and fewer consequences like transforming into a police state and war-mongering.

It was a pretty wild year for me. I had a massive health crisis at the beginning of the year, wrote an almost-working compiler for a functional language using SML targetting SPIM, finished up grad school, got married, landed a job at Participatory Culture Foundation, made a lot of new friends, mentored a GSoC project, helped out with GHOP, started the big push for PyBlosxom 2.0, released a new version of Bee Careful, Marvin under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and submitted my first patch for Firefox 3.0.

I started the Nomadic Telecommuting Herd which has regular meetings, but hasn't extended beyond Chris and I, yet. I'll push this more at some point in the spring when it's more fun to go outside.

I also joined a few projects that I haven't been able to get to yet like the Python docs project and Geyser. I'm interested in helping out both of them, but haven't found the time yet.

This year I want to tame the firehose, get some good work done, participate more in other projects, possibly learn C++ and reach out to other people in the area (Somerville, MA, USA) to get together and hack more. I'd also like to get a new laptop, but the longer I wait, the better the possibilities become.

Went out to lunch with Chris, John and Dean (who I don't think I has a blog). That was pretty cool. We talked about a bunch of stuff and the hamburgers at Christopher's in Porter Square (Cambridge, MA, USA) are really good.

I continued working on adding enclosure viewing support to the subscribe preview page in Firefox 3.0. I've almost got Yahoo MRSS support in. Mental note: one wastes less time if one double-checks the tests to make sure they're testing correctly. Oops.

I'm doing some minor mentoring for GHOP mostly on PyBlosxom related tasks. I'm on both of the mailing lists for GHOP-PSF and it's hard to keep in mind that the people working on these tasks are students in high school and early undergrad. It's like an army of really able, but not very experienced, bodies hungrily munching large bites out of project todo items. PyBlosxom had 4 tasks in last week and 4 in this week. It's great because the help is fantastic and it's forcing me to get around to work on organizing the project and development for PyBlosxom 2.0.

If you're in high school or college and want to do some Python-related work, definitely take a look at GHOP! If you're a Pythonista or Pythoneer and have some spare cycles, definitely come help us mentor. If you have a Python project and need help with screencasts, documentation, testing and other small tasks, take a look at GHOP. Titus has more on his blog.

PyBlosxom 2.0 is going to be a huge overhaul from PyBlosxom 1.4. I'm getting lots of help from the people who hang out on #pyblosxom on IRC, Ryan, Michael and various other people who pop on, ask questions and help identify issues. Progress is excellent so far.

In PCF land, I have a blog focused on PCF work and Miro development. It's at http://pculture.org/devblogs/wguaraldi. I figured I'd keep it separate. It runs on WordPress so that's giving me some WordPress experience.

Whoever fixed NetworkManager for Ubuntu Gutsy should get a gold star. I did an update on 12/4 and picked up a new set of packages and my perpetual wireless networking problems all went away. Bless you!

Also, if you've got young children in your life, definitely take a look at Bee Careful Marvin. It's geared towards children up to around 6 or so. You can get a professionally printed version at Lulu, but you can also download a PDF for free. It's released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license and "the source" is all at that link. Print it out, copy it, give it to your young friends, translate it, rewrite it with Star Wars dialogue, ....