I'm moving this week. That's why I haven't been online much or doing any work on Miro, PyBlosxom or other things I usually work on.

It gets better! After I'm done moving, I'm heading up to my parents' place while we have work done on the house. I'll be there for a couple of weeks. I'll have Internet access and will be working, but my cell phone doesn't get reception up there, so I'll be out of touch in a different way.

Assuming all goes well, I'll be back home and everything will be totally groovy in September.

For the last month, I've been going through the house-buying process. Today we found out we were approved for a mortgage and so now we're all set.

Thus, it's official: PCF-Boston will be moving and will become PCF-Chelmsford.

I plan to continue co-working, but I'll be doing it in the Chelmsford/Lowell area. ^[1]

There are a few ramifications. The first is that it'll be harder to take me out for a cup of coffee if you're in the Boston area. The second is that I probably won't be going into the FSF offices to help with mailings anymore. The third is that there will likely be a period of a few days in the middle of August when the build boxes will be down and there won't be any nightlies.

One of the big boons is that my office will double in space which should make it easier to get more things done since I'll have room for additional equipment, monitors, and such. And I'll have more space to produce podcasts and screencasts and such.

As a sidenote, the house-buying process is fricking insane. And not in a good way. Thank goodness for gscan2pdf, Gimp, Thunderbird, Postfix, Debian, Ubuntu, and the dozen smaller bits that made my side of the paper-pushing much much easier.

[1] Where "continue" is defined as "start coworking again which I haven't done in a long time because I just haven't had time to organize things".

I just got back from the Open Video conference and it was really inpsiring and really awesome. From when I arrived in NYC late Thursday night to when I left this morning, the time flew by. I met a variety of people who have a stake in the Open Video game: producers, directors, creators, distributors, publishers, companies, representatives, individuals, codec hackers, renderer hackers, player hackers, site builders, community builders, independent journalists, movers, shakers, ...

I met a co-worker I've worked closely with for some months, but never met (and didn't realize who he was until after he was introduced). 7 out of 10 (or so) PCF staff were all there--the largest number of PCF staff in one place I've been a part of. Ben, Paul and I were able to do some Miro work and talk about issues we're having pushing 2.5 out the door. I met with Jean-Baptiste from VideoLAN (they make VLC) and talked about their impending 1.0 release (I scored a pre-release tarball and already started working on upgrading Miro on Windows to use VLC 1.0). I talked about metadata with a few people and I talked about problems with torrents in RSS enclosures with Kevin and Nathan (I'm pretty sure that's his name) Michael from LimeWire on things they're working on that have a lot of synergy with things we're working on. I talked with Joe Born from Neuros Technology about work I did in March on the Neuros Link and how we should go forward working out issues that Miro has when running on the Link (it runs well, but could use some ui tlc). Seeing what people are thinking about and doing with HTML 5 video tag was great.

It was a really productive conference for me. It's really clear what role Miro plays in the future of Open Video on the web. It'll be exciting to be a part of the future unfolding.

6/23/2009: I met Michael from LimeWire--not Nathan.

My jury duty trial finished up yesterday freeing me up for going to the Open Video Conference. The conference schedule looks pretty interesting. I'll try to hit development related things as much as possible.

Sunday is going to be a hackfest day--looking forward to seeing other Miro devs and devs from related projects and working on the future of Open Video.

If you're at the conference, say hi!

Discovered that O'Reilly has a thing called Ignite which sounds just like Pecha Kucha. In regards to the Boston versions of both of these events, the most recent Ignite - Boston has video recordings of the presentations.

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.