Feel ratty beyond belief right now: really cruddy front-brain headache, eyes stinging, that kind of thing. And this is just a cold; annoying as hell and it makes it hard to think. This may be brain-dumpy in the extreme.

But thinking I am, a bit, about what to do with grahambinns.com. It doesn't serve its purpose anymore because I don't know what its purpose is anymore. I thought, long ago, it'd be a blog about writing, but then I stopped doing so much of that. It started to be a blog about software development, but never really grew into that role because I don't talk that much about it and the Open Source community by and large makes me want to scream with frustration (the subject of another rant. Not here, not now). Then I thought it would be a blog about photography but though I made some inroads there I didn't make enough; lack of dedication to the cause there; something I need to change in 2010.

But here's the thing. I want to make something of myself as a photographer (yes, yes, I've got past saying "I want to be a photographer" because I already am a photographer whether I thought so before or not. If I'm going to do that I want to be blogging about it all, the failures, the successes, the pitfalls, the ideas, the crazy, wild-eyed, midnight shoots in dodgy parts of London (probably not, but you never know). And that just doesn't gel anymore with what this blog as been about for the last five years (well, five years on February 17th).

So, what to do? Start over with a new blog? Migrate the non-photography content away from here and over to somewhere else? Rethink things entirely?

It's about identity. When people Google me, who do I want them to see? Do I want them to see me as a photographer or me as a hacker / hack / musicial hack / internet crusty? This blog is currently the top result on Google UK for my name, followed by some weird crap about finding my phone number and then something about a Maj. Gen. in the British army. And the Youtube clip from UDS Jaunty.

So keeping the site is a good idea. What to keep on it though? I think photography. I think that, when you go to grahambinns.com you should see me as a photographer, that side of me, not the developer side of me, because when I'm in public - unless I'm with the hacker crowd anyway - I'll say, if I'm asked, that I'm a photographer. It just comes out; can't stop it. I don't always add the "but my day job is as a software developer" corollary any more, which is empowering in itself.

Maybe that's what needs to happen; I need to separate those two identities so that they don't bash into each other.

Something that Ariana Osborne said a while back rings true:

If you want to sell something online, you’ve got to make a network online. You’ve got to go places and talk to people, yes – but unless you are struck by lucky lightning, you’ve also got to give those people something they can link and remember and pass along to other people.  And, for most of us, that “business card” if you will, is our homepage.  In theory, that homepage should be something people can bookmark to remember us by – but if it’s a static page there’s a very good chance that people will forget why they bookmarked it in the first place.  So most of us – by accident or with some thought – have created a blog of some fashion.

Maybe I need to get something to help me sleep. Yes, that seems quite likely too.

I figured I'd try to make this photography lark start to pay (or at least try to). First step for the person who wants to make something pay and wants to feel like he's doing something without actually doing something? Business cards, of course, fresh from Moo (click to embiggen).

(They do have a phone number on them, but it's blanked out for the purposes of this image. I'm working on sorting out a number that I'm happy to disseminate to the whole wide web).

Five times, now, I've tried writing this post. Five times I've not been able to complete it, mainly because every single time I did it I found myself hedging around the point because I was too embarrassed to actually write it and put it out there for the consideration of you, the cognoscenti. So this, the sixth time round, I'm going to just write it and have done with it and see what happens, come what may. So here goes:

Any of you want to be a photographic model for me, or want to be photographed for any reason?

Here's my thinking, in bullet points (because once again not using bullet points led to much wandering about and not getting to the point on my part):

Premises:

1. I've been doing serious but non-professional photography for over a year now.
2. I'm reasonable at it (shush, Bacon).
3. I want to get better.
4. I would also like to do some professional work in the future (though I'm not in a rush yet).
5. To do 4 I need to build up a portfolio of work.
6. Though I already have a portfolio of sorts, it's not got all that much in it in the way of people shots; portraits, head shots and the like.
7. 6 Needs to be rectified if I'm going to do 5 and therefore achieve 4.
8. To be able to do 7 and therefore 5 and by extension 4, I need people to photograph.
9. Therefore, it follows that I need to advertise somewhat.

... and so we find ourselves here.

So, if you want to be photographed or you know someone who wants to be photographed or you just fancy offering your services to me as a model if we happen to be geographically co-incidental at some point in the future, please let me know. You can leave me a comment here, send me a Flickrmail (if you're on Flickr, of course) or email me at AT .

As far as remuneration is concerned, well, here's the deal:

• I'm not going to ask for money, except, perhaps, to cover costs (so, if you want me to shoot you for something specific, like a present for someone, I might ask you to contribute towards the cost of printing, since we'd want the work to look the best it could).
• I'm happy to provide you with prints of the best work to come out of more experimental sessions (i.e. ones where you act as a model for me) free of charge (this, I've discovered, is known as Time For Prints). Additionally, I'll happily provide you with a CD or DVD of the work.

Above all, I want this to be fun. I want everyone involved to enjoy themselves, so if you do want to help me out then let's make sure we have a good time doing it.

Mark Shuttleworth, spaceman, ideas man, Ubuntu founder and fearless leader at Canonical Towers announced yesterday that Launchpad will be open sourced within the next 12 months.

This is pretty cool news. With Launchpad, we make a big deal of supporting free and open-source software. Our aim is to provide a central platform through which people and projects can collaborate to produce the best possible products. We're working hard on creating easy-to-use APIs so that people can do everything they can in the Launchpad web interface programmatically, and we're doing a lot of work with upstream bugtrackers to allow us to sync bugs, statuses and comments with them as efficiently as possible.

But the one thing that we hear more often than anything else (except, perhaps, "git is better than bzr," which I'll leave for another day) is "I won't use Launchpad because it's not Open Source." There's a lot of accusations of hypocrisy towards Launchpad: if it's not Open Source how can it, without being deeply hypocritical, aim to become a central point for the development of Open Source software?

I can see people's argument there, though I disagree with them that not having an Open Source platform fundamentally prevents you from supporting open source development because, well, we're doing it anyway. Hopefully this will go some way towards convincing them that we really do mean what we say about being a major part of the Open Source community.

And I confess there's a measure of personal satisfaction in this. No longer (or at least after we've actually made the Open Source release) will I be treated like some sort of mildly infectious Typhoid Mary by otherwise perfectly pleasant people (usually from the FSF, I find) because I develop closed-source software (this happened a few times at UDS in Prague and really started to grate on me).

I confess, though, that when I read the news I did think "so, will I be out of a job in eighteen months time?" I'm sure Mark wouldn't do that, though... Right?

Graham Binns posted a photo:

Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008, day 174

I was trying to illustrate the duality of personality here, but I don't think it quite worked.

Actually, that's rubbish. This was accidental, but I thought that it might almost work to illustrate the duality of personality. It's not subtle enough for that, though.