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 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, ....

Back in 2005, S and I wrote a children's book called Bee Careful, Marvin. We did the entire thing by hand using free/open source software (Ubuntu, Scribus, the Gimp, ...) and self-published it on Lulu.

After two years, I finally got around to updating the book. I updated the license to a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, moved the licensing text to the end, added a dedication page and updated the colophon. I also put all the "source" in version control using Bazaar and built a Trac instance to manage it and any other books S and I write going foward. The Trac instance is at http://bluesock.org/~willg/marvin/.

The "source" is under a disjunctive set of licenses: GNU General Public License 3.0 or later and Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. People can choose which one fits their needs better.

The book is free--I encourage anyone to download it, purchase it, copy it, give it to a friend, give it to a child, translate it, adjust the layout, ... Light user testing has suggested it appeals to children between 2 and 4 years of age.

It took forever to get around to figuring out how to manage the pieces, but I'm pretty happy with what we've got set up. We're currently working on the next book... hopefully we'll get it done by the end of the year.

I had to install the following on a fresh Gutsy install to get Galcon working:

sudo apt-get install python2.4 libsdl-ttf2.0-0 libsdl-mixer1.2 \
    libsdl-image1.2

Figured I'd mention it here. I don't have a Galcon Forums account and don't really feel like creating one. If someone else has a Forums account, post the above in case other Gutsy-users are having problems.

Work has been pretty busy. I've been doing release manager stuff, working on Gutsy packaging issues, puzzling over an intermittent problem between the sun-java6-plugin and Miro, working on a Firefox extension, and working on a patch for Firefox 3.0.

I went to some of the after-hours activities for the GNOME Summit Boston. I'm going to PodCamp Boston this weekend.

I was writing my todo list management application in Django, but then decided to switch it to Pylons. Now I'm thinking I may just go a much easier route and implement it in web.py. A year ago, I wrote a wiki system that was code-friendly using web.py in three hours which included the amount of time it took to learn how web.py worked.

PyBlosxom work for version 2.0 has slowed considerably. I just haven't had much time to spend on it. A bunch of us are hanging out in #pyblosxom on irc.freenode.net and we're talking about things more often. I met paulproteus in real life during the GNOME Summit Boston. I'm trying to figure out how to create multi-page output using docutils. There was some development in that arena over the summer, some of it due to a GSoC project. I need to spend some more time to figure out what's available now in SVN, how to use it, and whether it'll fix my problem.

I've upgraded all my machines to Gutsy. It's nice--the fonts seem to be much easier to read on both my laptop and my desktop with an LCD.

That about covers it. It's been a low-Python high-JavaScript month.

I ordered a Seagate Barracuda Ultra ATA/100 drive from Amazon.com the other day and it arrived today. I opened it up to discover it's a PATA drive. However, I thought I ordered an ATA drive and not a PATA drive.... Long story short after an hour of researching and finally calling up a friend who does hardware work, I discovered that "they" renamed ATA to PATA so that it won't be confused with SATA. No one sent me the memo.

I was at Tag's Hardware in Porter Square (Cambridge, MA, USA) to buy Poly-acrylic for some shelves I'm putting up and they're selling decent bookshelves for $20.00. We bought one--it's pretty sturdy and it folds up for moving/storage/whatever. They probably have more left if you're in the area and interested.

I've been working through PyBlosxom stuff. I updated the web-site to use PyBlosxom 2.0-dev (in trunk). We worked through entry caching plans on the mailing list and implemented most of them. We've also been discussing and working through template variable syntax and semantics. I've been adding new unit tests and using tests to help work out the design issues. The testing framework has made it so much easier to do development work.

I've been writing a todo-list-tracking application in Django. I'm hitting a point where it's half-implemented, but I'm thinking I may switch back to Pylons because it's Paste-friendly and easier to deal with.

Bunch more stuff, but it'll be in separate entries.

My mother made great granola growing up. I think she got the recipe from her mother. I know my sister makes it, too--it's good stuff.

I keep losing the recipe, though, so I figured I'd post it in my blog. I'm not an aspiring chef, this isn't my hobby, and I don't watch the Food Channel. So... this is probably a once-only recipe blogging experience.

• 4 cups - rolled oats
• 1 1/2 cups - shredded unsweetened coconut ¹
• 1 cup - wheat germ
• 1 cup - chopped nuts ²
• 1 cup - unsalted hulled sunflower seeds
• 1/2 cup - sesame seeds

• 1 cup - honey
• 1 cup - oil ³
• 1 teaspoon - vanilla extract

[1] - I find it difficult to find shredded unsweetened coconut in the grocery store, but I can usually find it at a gormet, organic, or health food store pretty easily. On the flip side, I don't get around to frequenting those kinds of stores often, so I just go with the shredded sweetened coconut. YMMV.

[2] - Walnuts, pecans, and almonds are fine. I haven't tried other kinds of nuts, but I think most nuts will do.

[3] - Vegetable oil is good. I think it'd probably be fine with sesame seed oil and some of the other oils. Olive oil is probably a bad choice since it's got a pretty distinct non-granola flavour.

1. Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees. I don't follow this step... I heat the oven to 300 degrees. However, when I moved in my oven had no markings on the dial so I wrote them in with a Sharpie and it's not clear to me that my markings match up with reality. YMMV, but the key is not to burn your granola.
2. Mix all the dry ingredients in a big bowl. Sometimes I throw other stuff in, too--whatever I have lying around: flax seeds, wire-cut oats, extra sesame seeds, ...
3. Heat the honey in a small pot and mix in the oil and the vanilla. You just have to heat it enough such that the honey and oil mix.
4. Mix it all in the big bowl.
5. Spoon the granola onto a couple of baking pans that are 1 inch deep and like 9x13. If they're cookie sheets you're going to have a hell of a time stirring the granola--it'll get everywhere.
6. Spread the granola out so that it's not too thick anywhere.
7. Put the pans in the oven.
8. Every 5 to 10 minutes, take the pans out of the oven, stir the granola around and then put them back in. I swap which pan is on top and which is on bottom because my oven is hotten on the bottom than the top. Bake for no more than 30 minutes total.
9. Your granola is done when it's toasty brown. Your granola is overdone if it's dark brown and/or black.
10. I take it out, leave the pans on the stove to cool, and do some other stuff for 45 minutes. Then I take a spatula, break up the granola, and in the messiest possible way pour it into large yogurt containers.

Sometimes I throw in dried fruit like raisens in.

That's it!