Feeling a little world-weary tonight. An afternoon spent battling with Launchpad's ec2 test facility and a gym workout that didn't go as well as planned (I really need a trainer - or at least a workout buddy - to make me do things some times, and I don't have either) have left me drained and a touch on the grumpy side.

You have been warned.

And again, I'm going through one of those phases where I'm not picking up and working with a camera much. Oh, I'm shooting bits and pieces here and there for the Countdown project, which I'm going to have to turn into videos some time in the new year because right now I just don't have the time, but I'm not shooting anything serious. It's all just frivolous shooting. Well, not frivolous but... I guess 'unimportant' would be the right word. It's keeping the muscle memory going - here's the ISO control, there's the shutter release, there's the bracket function, that sort of thing - but it's not challenging me creatively and it's making a part of my inner brain itch like nobody's business.

I've got some grand ideas written down, and I keep fleshing them out - more on that as and when I get round to actually carrying them out. That I've imposed a photoshoot moratorium on myself until the new year - because trust me, organising a wedding and holding down a programming job are quite enough to be getting on with - doesn't help matters, but at least I know that when the new year rolls around I'll be able to start sending out casting calls, talking to potential subjects and organising teams to be able to put these things together.

A part of me worries that the ideas are a little too grand - one of them calls for no less than eight different fashion styles in the same series, and the change in style extends to the location, too - but if I don't aim high now I'll never do it later.

On the slightly less complex side of things I'm working on a project that's not even embryonic yet - I'm still waiting for it to be a Zygote (okay, let's discard that metaphor before it goes any further, shall we?) - but, should it work out will be extremely simple, at least technically, though I suspect there will be a lot of work to do with regard to getting subjects and other parties involved.

All of which, of course, tells you bugger all about anything. Maybe in a couple of weeks I'll be able to tell you more.

My 2009 is pretty booked up. Work to do and a wedding in less than five weeks mean that I don't have too much time left over to breathe or eat or sleep or anything.

2010, however, is the year that I do this:

Courtesy of Matt Jones, via Warren Ellis.

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?