Dear all... Kindly disregard my last post. It shouldn't have appeared in the feeds.

Besides, < 1000ms is not exactly bad for a webapp on a small-assed virtual server. It's the static files (CSS and JS) that are killing load times.

Jono William Aloycius O'Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and general all-round grand bloke today announced the Ubuntu rebranding. I've known about this for a while, because the Canonical brand is being refreshed too and we as a company were shown the new designs and asked for comments a few weeks back. However, this is a chance for me to say thank you to the people who put together the new logos, themes and so on publicly.

Y'see, thank you is something that I don't think gets said enough in the open source world. Of all the things that annoy me about OSS development, this is one of the ones near the top of the list. Everyone who works on Ubuntu, be they Canonical employees or community contributors, works very, very hard to produce a distro that every Ubuntu member can be proud of. But - and I think this is a basic law of nature - the loudest voices we hear are always the ones who hate it, hate what Ubuntu stands for, hate that it's not free enough (for them), hate that Mark has a vision and is dedicated to pushing towards realising that vision.

What you don't see a lot of - or at least don't see as prominently, because let's face it it's easier to jump on the haters bandwagon than it is to stand up to them - is people just saying "thank you" or "thank you for doing an awesome job."

So, to everyone who was involved in the rebranding work - and that doesn't just mean Canonical employees; the community have been involved in this too (though I don't know the details of who exactly):

Thank you

(And let's be clear, this is in no way intended to diminish all the positive comments that I've been seeing. Also, constructive criticisms are a good thing, especially since the new designs are not completely locked down.)

Hello.

If you've been here before you'll have noticed that I've changed things a bit; moved the furniture around, repainted the skirting boards, stripped the old wallpaper and removed the artex from the ceiling. Hope you like it.

I've gone for a much simpler, more stripped-back look-and-feel this time around. I'm not interested in having a cluttered blog, and I've got plans to add some extra things to this site in the not-too-distant future. The idea is to keep a nice clean aesthetic throughout the entire site, which is going to become much more of a showcase for my photography work than anything else.

Yes, I'll still post about Ubuntu and Launchpad here, but this site is primarily about me the photographer, not me the developer. If I feel that I have a lot to say here about the developer side of my life then I might think about setting up another blog to deal with it.

For those of you who want technical details about what's changed, well, there's not all that much. The site uses a lot more of the Frabjous codebase now than it used to - there was a lot of duplication of code in the grahambinns.com tree, so I've cleaned that up - and I've added a few things to Frabjous whilst I was working on the retheme and upgrade, which is nice and mutally beneficial.

Anyway, I'm aware that there will likely be bugs in the new version of the site that crop up over the next few days, so please do let me know if you come across any.

Today is the 29th anniversary of my birth. I can provide Paypal account details if you want to send me money.

Anyway, I appear to have caused some confusion by stating on twitter that I have now started my 30th year, and that my 29th year has ended, so I feel I should explain. Here comes the working:

1. Birthdays are zero-indexed. On the day of my birth I was 0 years old (please, don't tell me that I was 9 months old. I can't be bothered to argue with you).
2. My first birthday came at the end of my first year of life, from Feb 9^th 1981 to Feb 9^th 1982. My second came in 1983, after my second year of life, and so on.
3. Therefore, the year from Feb 9^th 2009 to Feb 9^th 2010 was the twenty-ninth year of my life.
4. Therefore I am now 29 years old.
5. Therefore, my 30th year of life runs from now until 9^th Feb 2011.

I hope that's clarified it for everyone. Yes, this makes sense.

So, first off, brain is better than it was early Friday morning, though I still have a head full of snot, so everything smells of the kind of old, forgotten dustiness you find in attics.

More brain-dumpery, I'm afraid, since I can't be bothered to make this into anything coherent.

Alan Bell replied to my last post with the following comment:

So the software developer box doesn't quite fit, the photographer box doesn't quite fit, the writer box doesn't quite fit. I suggest a Graham Binns shaped box, blog about whatever the heck you want to.

A good suggestion, and one which deserves a reply.

The fact is that I'm not trying to get into a box so much as I'm trying to control which aspect of me people come across when they search for me on the web. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down to trying to make my website work for me as a sort of photography business card, i.e.: Look here, this is me, this is what I do, this is my creative process as a photographer.

Now, granted, I've come only lately to the photography game, but the fact of the matter is that in my head there's been a shift in how I perceive myself. Now I'm a (admittedly inexperienced) photographer who can write and who can hack, rather than a hacker or writer who can take a decent photograph. I need that to be reflected in my blog, or at least my website, because I intend to make money out of this photography gig (though I'm not betting on making a living out of it; I've no intention of giving up the day job and I've every intention of being a full-time developer for a long time yet).

This might seem a bit weird to a lot of the people reading this blog, because so many blogs out there on the web are about what the author is thinking rather than about who or what the author is.

Think of it this way. If you, in the course of your daily life, were given business card of, say, a landscape gardener, and told "check out my website if you want to see what I'm capable of," you might be a little confused to go to www.myfirstlandscape.com and see, on the front page, an essay about - to pick a topic at random (honest) - the pros and cons of Ubuntu changing its default search for Firefox from Google to Yahoo. It would have no relevance to you in the context in which you're viewing the site (as the potential customer of a landscape gardener). It would detract from the basic purpose of the site, which should be to sell the author's abilities in landscaping.

And that's why I'm thinking of moving all my other stuff - the writing, open source and other general blather - onto a different blog, maybe on a different domain or maybe on a subdomain of grahambinns.com, whichever suits best. I've spent some time this weekend hacking multiple site support into the Frabjous blog engine (very simple thanks to Django) so I'm at least in a position to use my existing infrastructure should I decide to go down that route.