Off to London for a Week

I’m heading to London to visit Canonical headquarters. We’ll be sprinting on the Web UI for Ubuntu One.

Amber and Lex are going to fly out to join me on Wednesday, and we’ll spend the weekend celebrating my 36th birthday.

Marc Lavallee:

Thank you for your recent email to the FEC’s Public Records Office. 1982- 1994 Federal Election Results can be sent to you free of charge in paper form. Please provide a mailing address if you are interested in obtaining these publications.

Marc Lavallee: FAIL

Zachery Bir:

“Thank you for your prompt reply. My mailing address is as follows:

Mr. Marc Lavallee
Washington, D.C.
Late-18th Century

Kindly hand-deliver, and my serving-man will give you a shiny tuppence.”

A Star is Born

It Started with a Picture

It all started with a picture. Well, twelve, to be exact. Our friends Suzi and Melissa have a framed set of monthly pictures of their daughter Jett from birth through one-year-old. “Hmm, yes. I’ll have to do that with Lex.”

When we got home from the hospital after he was born, we took our time getting into the groove of being new, sleep-deprived parents, but we also prepared. I printed out month abbreviations (Jan, Feb, Mar, &c) and two sets of numbers (0–9) in 250pt Helvetica. I also made a Week, a Month, and a Year.

We decided to document his first year in regular photos. Every day, we’d take the day’s date. Every Wednesday, we’d take a weekly photo. On the 30th of every month (or the last day of February), we’d take a monthly photo.

We’d take them no matter where we were, no matter what else was going on. When we visited family in Florida and took a side trip to Key West and forgot the numbers and months in Boynton Beach, I hand drew Oct and a few dates to get us through. Those numbers and months have been to Indiana, Florida, Vermont, and the Bahamas.

The Collection

We diligently tagged and sorted and arranged and uploaded the best using Aperture and FlickrExport, by ConnectedFlow. Flickr itself has (had?) no means to create a dynamic set based on tags, so I used dopiaza’s set generator to arrange Daily, Weekly, Monthly, and even Yearly sets by tag.

Once his first birthday came and went, and pictures were uploaded and the sets regenerated, I decided to make it into a little movie. iMovie integrates nicely with iPhoto and Aperture, but it doesn’t respect the sort order of any albums you might select (smart or otherwise). When I pulled in the one-per-day smart album I created, iMovie sorted by image name, which was useless as the pictures were taken with two different bodies and two different cards. So I exported them all, and imported them from the Finder. 359 photos goes into two minutes twenty-two seconds^[1] at about 0.39 seconds per photo. I added some titles and an end card, and boom, had something nice for the family to gaze at.

So, I tweeted it, and I blogged it, and I updated my Facebook status with it, and I sent an email to my family (who don’t all do RSS, or Twitter). After that, I had a bourbon and relaxed.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen thousand page views.

Saturday came, and I saw that my friend Jesús, a contributing editor at Gizmodo, updated his Facebook status to report that he just posted it. I was pretty excited so see how this would turn out. Wow, a couple hundred hits. A thousand. Five. I better tell Amber.

We started flipping back and forth between Gizmodo and YouTube. Both were generating comments. Most were appreciative. A few focused on and criticized the Election Day photo where we included an Obama-branded Vote sticker. Fifteen thousand. Twenty. Thirty. Our son was skirting Internet fame.

My dad had had trouble viewing the movie when I first sent out the link. I then got a followup email: “How in the hell did the “one year of Lex” which was posted 2 weeks [sic, actually days] ago, get so many views (35,000+)?” Good question, dad.

This morning, after the Gizmodo push, I got a request to do a short interview for AOL’s ParentDish site. The story went live this afternoon. Later on, we were contacted by some television folks about broadcasting the clip.

Since then, we’ve been following it on tweetmeme, wikio, and buzzfeed. Who knows where it will go from here?

As I go to bed now, between Gizmodo and YouTube, the video has had over 100,000 views^[3].

Updates

• [8/11] Made AOL’s homepage. (Snapshot)
• [8/12] 430k views on YouTube. Had a radio interview with Mix 1037.

Aggravatar

You’re a handsome devil. What’s your name?

It’s getting so a person doesn’t want to let the world outside his four walls know how he’s looking anymore. This morning, as I’m swaying gently in the hammock on the screened-in porch, I took a quick snap with Photo Booth:

Now, Photo Booth has a very convenient button for assigning the picture in question as your iChat Buddy Picture. Click, scale, click. Done and done.

For everything else, though. It’s a slog-fest of tabbing, clicking, finding, selecting, submitting. What an incredible hassle. But you, my loyal readers, are worth it. As are the various contacts who care about me in my various other online services. So, we copy the image, break out Acorn, crop it to a nice square, and save it out:

First, in an act of unbridled optimism, we update Gravatar. That optimism pays off a little bit by now. All three of GitHub, Bitbucket, and Stack Overflow use Gravatar for their account avatars. The optimism wears thin soon after, as you’re left to update the following on your own:

Skype, Gizmo, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Momentile, LinkedIn, Facebook, Launchpad, Dopplr, and Tripit. Am I missing any? Undoubtedly. Even some I probably use.

Why don’t these services get it?

If the mountain will not come to me, I will go to the mountain.

Philippe Casgrain created, and open sourced a project called AvatarManager that has all the potential to shore up these disparate, siloed services who each want their own damn copy of my pretty face. It at least (in principal) automates the above steps. The plans are there for plugins, though I’m not terribly thrilled with his use of mechanize for screen scraping. It seems plausible enough to use one of a number of HTTP libraries out there and poke values directly into these various services. The main pain point is: Enumerating the submission schemes and providing credentials for all these services. I’ve cloned his repo and will be playing with it a bit, as it’s becoming an overwhelming itch.

Bindwood

So, my first project at Canonical is working on a Firefox extension that will sync your bookmarks (and later other Places) to a local CouchDB instance.

I’ve called it Bindwood, borrowing a colorful English nickname for Ivy.

I’ve been collaborating with an English colleague, Stuart Langridge, on the project, and so far, I’m very pleased with what we’ve got working.

Since it’s a Firefox extension, it even works on Mac OS X, which is where I’ve been doing most of my development. It’s currently using some Places APIs that are 3.5 only, which should be fine since we’re targeting Karmic.

Ubuntu Ape

So, I’m leaving Slate Group, where I’ve been working for the past year on their new business site The Big Money. I’m moving on to Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux, to work on their Online Services team developing Ubuntu One.

It will be good to get back to Python as my primary language of choice, to be a part of a fully-distributed workforce[1] again, and to be working with newer, more cutting-edge technologies.

[1] Anyone in a partially-distributed work environment would do well to read The Pond. It struck painfully close to home for me. At Slate Group, I often felt like The Remote Guy™, working from home, while my colleagues shared the office in Arlington. At Socialtext, all the devs were remote, so everyone felt pressure to communicate clearly and timely.

Check Your Brand Upside Down

Target’s new brand, ‘up&up’ looks like a great retooling of their old, bland bulls-eye packaging.

I grabbed some baby wipes off the shelf, but upside down, and my first thought was, “Who’d call it ‘down and down’?”

Be careful how that new brand or logo looks when you can’t guarantee how it’s seen.