It seems to have been a week of minor annoyances. Particularly with regard to this website. For some bizarre and as yet unknown reason the VM upon which this site resides keeps losing track of time, by up to ten hours. The upshot of this - and I haven't been able to track down exactly why yet but it's either Django's DateTimeFields or, more likely, PostgreSQL's datetime handling - is that every time you try to access a blog post by date you get a big fat 404. I'm starting to get the distinct feeling that I'm going to have to re-image the machine at some point, but I'm loathe to do that unless there's no way to fix whatever it is that's going wrong.

Other minor annoyances have mostly been self-related. I've spent most of the week working on some cool new features for Launchpad but, due to the fact that we're in code freeze at the moment because this is Launchpad 2.2.4 release week, I haven't been able to land anything. Add to that the usual frustration that comes with doing anything that requires a particularly intricate piece of UI work and you find me feeling not unlike I've repeatedly smashing myself on the head with a potato masher.

On the other hand, doing all this cool Launchpad Javascript work has given me a new appreciation for just how much fun Javascript can be when done right. I've tended to avoid Javascript most of the time because I found it non-intuitive and, coming from a background of object-oriented languages, a bit weird. You see, Javascript's a prototype-based language, which when observed in a certain way makes it look as though the developers were adding object orientation as an afterthought and, worse, going the wrong way about doing it.

But whether that's true or not (and I have no idea whether it is) the simple fact is that you can't observe Javascript as an object-oriented language because it isn't one, at least not in the purest sense. If you lose that particular conceit and actually treat it as what it is then you fairly quickly realise that:

• Javascript is extremely good at what it does - that's why it's been around for so long and hasn't been superseded by anything remotely convincing (and don't go saying Flash here because if you do I'll reach into the internet and slap you).
• Most of the problems with Javascript are due to inconsistencies in different browsers' JS engines - which is why doing anything with IE7 and Firefox is only marginally less painful that hitting yourself in the nuts with a lump hammer.

Anyway, all this fooling around with Javascript, fun as it's been, has led me to thinking about how to include it in my blog engine (because if there's technology you've no choice but to use it, right? Yeah, that's going to end well). I've got some ideas - many of which include using the code provided by the awesome LAZR-JS library, which in turn uses YUI 3. I wasn't a fan of YUI to begin with - it's big and complicated and more heavyweight than I need for most things - but after two weeks of solid YUI work I've come to really like it.

So, watch this space for news of things that I'm trying to do. You probably won't notice them at first because high on my list of things to do is write a better interface for blogging rather than using the existing Django admin interface. Whilst django.contrib.admin is awesome in a lot of ways it's not the most user friendly thing ever (I'm writing this in gvim using It's All Text for a reason you know), so I aim to improve it to the point where it's on a par with the latest Wordpress UI (not that I'm setting the bar high or anything).

But before that, I have to do other things, which I'll talk about in a separate post. In the meantime, if you're looking to do interesting things with Javascript, take a look at LAZR-JS. I can't guarantee it'll be useful, but it may well be instructive.

I don't often blog here about work, mainly because

1. It's not (at the moment) open source (it will be come July, never you fear).
2. The people who aren't reading this blog for open source-related stuff (which to be fair is probably a reasonably high proportion; after all I've done a lot of photography and rant-blogging over the last six months or so) don't really care.
3. When I do blog about Launchpad I do it over at the Launchpad blog.

But the last two Launchpad development cycles have been particularly awesome for the Launchpad Bugs team. We've got a set of goals for Launchpad 3.0 (the version which is going to be open sourced in July) and until January-ish we weren't doing hugely well at getting them done. There's a lot of work to do in Launchpad at the best of times; sometimes other concerns get in the way and the stuff you wanted to get done this cycle because it's targeted to the next major release gets pushed out by critical bugs or long-standing bugs or some other thing which occupies your time.

But at the start of our February development cycle our estimable team leader, Bjorn Tillenius wrote a script that would take our list of goals, subdivided by user story and turn it into a wiki page. The effect has been awesome, and this cycle we've managed to get so much done that we've pretty much blown the socks off our own and everyone else's expectations.

Gavin and I have done a huge amount of work on getting bug activity logs working properly (with a little more to come next cycle to make things really, really awesome); Tom and Abel have done masses of work on official bug tags and Michael, who's actually nominally a member of the Soyuz team, for which we'll forgive him, has worked really hard to add one of the first bits of javascripty coolness to the bug tracker, with the excellent new "mark as duplicate" functionality.

Cycles like this remind me of why I do this job: the software is great and getting better all the time, the company is fantastic and is easily the best employer I've ever had and the people I work with are some of the smartest, coolest, craziest froods I've ever had the pleasure of working with.

Thanks, guys. I see no reason why next cycle can't be even more awesome than this one.

(Your usual programme of ranting and photography will return shortly.)

It's interesting how the number of people subscribing to this blog dropped by almost half after I published this mosiac of my photos from the anti Prop8 protest in Boston and this rant about the Bishop of Lancaster. In actual fact it looks like FeedBurner can no longer see the number of Livejournal-based subscribers to this feed (whether LJ reports them correctly or not I don't know without seeing a sample request), but the correlation is amusing (and a nice way to illustrate how you can prove anything, including the stick-up-the-arse-ness of people, with statistics).

Anyway...

I had entirely intended to write this as a 2008 end-of-year ooh-look-what-I-did post. Then 2008 stopped happening and 2009 started happening and I thought I could write it as a ooh-look-what-I'm-going-to-do post. Then I decided that it was too much fun having a holiday from work and blogging and, well, pretty much everything else, and I stopped trying to write it and enjoyed not doing much for a week or so.

Of course, that doesn't get anything done in the end, so I figured I'd better finish this off before it got even more out of date and I came back to it wondering what on earth I'd been on about in the first place.

As one year rolls inexorably into another I've been thinking, for the most part, at least, about identity, specifically mine: where I am with certain aspects of my identity (which I'm using as a high-falutin' way of saying "what I'm doing with my life") and where I want them to go.

Identity as a writer

When it comes to writing I think I've had a pretty good year, though I've written very little compared to previous years. I'm less frustrated with my writing than I was, perhaps because I've focussed less upon it than in the past. For the first time ever I've published a story, The Girl, Death (albiet on my own website, true) for all and sundry to read. Now that that particularly silly mental obstacle is out of the way I can think more about actually writing things than about whether or not people will like them.

I don't expect to have a huge amount of time to write in the coming year, mainly because there are so many other things that I want to do (on which subjects more shortly) but I do expect that, when I write, I'll be more relaxed about telling the story I want to tell; I certainly won't be worrying every second about how I can never finish the story because everyone will hate it (nobody, so far, has hated the last one).

Identity as a photographer

Roughly this time last year I started my Three hundred and sixty-odd days of 2008 photography project. Like all similarly-named projects the idea was to take (and post) one photo for each day of 2008 (or near enough anyway, given that I started a couple of days late). Whilst I haven't managed to get round to uploading all of the photos to my Flickr stream (partly because I'm lazy, partly because I fell behind in the processing of them) I did manage to capture the majority of, or at least bits of the where-I-was-at-the-time-ness of 2008, on camera. It was an exhausting exercise, and since this year I'd like to do things that are more and varied (quite aside from arranging my wedding) I don't think I'll be attempting anything on nearly as grand a scale in 2009. There will be something photography-project wise this year; I just don't know what it is yet (though I have some ideas).

Separately from the idea of some kind of overarching project, I want to push myself further as a photographer. I blogged a while back about wanting to photograph more people. Whilst my request for subjects didn't yield many responses (probably because it didn't get read by many people for starters) it did yield some, and I intend to take the people who offered their services as models up on their offers some time in the next year.

I've been viewing and loving the work of people like Bert Stephani, LIME, Katie Lee and Dave Hobby for much of the last year, and I think it's about time that I did something with all the inspiration and ideas that they've given me. Even if the work that I produce from that inspiration is derivative in the beginning it will, hopefully at least, eventually lead to a style of my own as time goes by (in much the same way as emulating your writing heroes eventually leads to you finding your own voice). As usual, I'll post the results of my experiments in trying-to-be-good-at-what-I-do to Flickr or somewhere similar. As much as possible I'll make them available under a Creative Commons license, though depending on who's in the images the licenses may vary.

People have asked me whether I want to start moving into the realm of the semi-pro photographer, and I suppose that in some ways I do (for example, I bought myself an insanely expensive Nikon 70-200mm lens as an end-of-year present; I'd like to at least pay for some of its value through using it). Truthfully, though, I'm more interested in becoming a better artist than I am in becoming rich through my photography. Money is nice, but it's a means to an end; having money for the sake of having money is a silly game to play, especially in this day and age. I may consider selling some of my work as prints in the future, but I don't think I'm at that level yet (and besides, I think I'd need a bigger audience for that to really work).

As far as the quality of my photography goes, I know I'm getting better. I'm more comfortable behind the camera and I'm happier with the results than I was in January 2008. I want to continue to grow and learn, though - otherwise what's the point?

Identity as a software developer

Let's face it, being a Launchpad developer is the best job I've ever had. I've been with Canonical for eighteen months now and I'm loving every minute of it. Launchpad is going from strength to strength and (as I've said to just about anyone who's ever asked me) you couldn't ask to work with better bunch of developers.

Launchpad will be open sourced in July, and I'm both happy about it (because after all I love freedom) and a little scared (because a part of me keeps thinking that once we go open source I'll no longer be necessary, though I suspect that's nonsense).

I honestly and genuinely want Launchpad to be the best that it can be and I can only see Open Sourcing it being a great help in continuing that. The Launchpad user community has some phenomenal brains in it; I can only see that having some of them looking at the code will make our work that much easier (even if they don't contribute patches; having someone going "WTF?" at odd code can be a great help, which is why I love code reviews so much).

I'm really looking forward to what we have in store for Launchpad in 2009. I think the users will love it, too.

Identity as a FOSS contributor

This has been growing on my mind for most of the past year. Although I'm working for a company that backs one of the most popular Linux distributions I don't contribute an enormous amount to open source projects, besides filing the occasional bug.

If there's one thing that working with people like Daniel, Jorge and Jono (besides that it's a good idea to practice before you play a gig - or indeed to know the songs you're going to play) is that all OSS projects need help, not just with bug hunting but with documentation, too.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to step up my contributions to the various FOSS projects that I use this year. I don't know that I'll always have enough domain nouse to be able to contribute a patch to fix a bug but at least I can help with triaging and isolating the bugs.

Identity as a human being

I'm getting married in 347 days(!). I can't imagine at the moment just how crazy things are going to get as we go through the year, but I'd like to think that my fiancée and I can deal with it.

When it comes to this time next year and I'm writing the next iteration of this post I want to look back and be able to say that I every hour of 2009 full of minutes.

Of course, only time will tell.

Matt Revell has started posting a series of interviews with the Launchpad Development Team. His interview of yours truly, Meet Graham Binns, is the first up:

Matthew: What can we go and look at that you've done on Launchpad?

Graham: The bugs pages :)!

Actually, a great deal of my work is work you don't get to see. Although I do some UI work (I'm working on something pretty cool at the moment that should hopefully appear in either Launchpad 2.1.11 or 2.1.12) the majority of what I do is back-end. In particular, I've been responsible for developing the way Launchpad interacts with other bug trackers like Bugzilla and Trac.

A cliché of a title, I know, but it's late and I'm past being able to think about it.

Yes, dear readers, I'm off on my travels again. Tomorrow I'm off to London (rather stupidly I've got to fly from Manchester to Gatwick because there's no train journey that would get me to London from Lancaster in less than six hours and with less then 5 changes). I'll be there for two weeks (I would come back in the middle weekend but for the aforementioned train nonsense) for a Launchpad sprint / conference / summit / thing. After that I'm back home for a week and then I'm going to Lexington, MA, for more work-related things (though as yet I'm kind of fuzzy on what exactly I'll be doing there).

This is one of the things that I both hate and love about my job. On the one hand I'm going to be away from my home (my new home, incidentally, into which we moved only a week ago) for three weeks out of the next four. There's so much to do in terms of unpacking and arranging and getting used to the place and I'm just going to end up leaving my fiancé to do all the hard work. On top of that we're in the midst of arranging our wedding - there will be a trying-on of wedding dresses whilst I'm away - and though I know it's traditional for the bloke to not be involved (flaming stupid tradition if you ask me) I've really enjoyed being involved so far; I'm going to miss whatever gets done while I'm away.

On the other hand I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks in the company of an amazingly smart and talented bunch of people with whom I get on extremely well. We'll be concentrating on how to make Launchpad even cooler and easier to work with and I'm sure we'll have a great time. I'm sure I'll enjoy it, I just wish I didn't have to go through this period of not enjoying the idea of it first.

There are some highlights to the next couple of weeks, though:

• I'm going to the ORG event Piracy v Obscurity - an evening with Neil Gaiman on Friday.
• I'll be at the London Intrepid Ibex release party Thursday week.
• On Friday week I'll be attending a signing by Neil Gaiman of his new book, The Graveyard Book (yes, I'm aware that this may make me look like a fanboy).
• On Saturday I'll be doing a photo walk around London with some friends from Canonical. I love photographing London; it's full of interesting people and places and atmosphere, and it's going to be even more fun going round it with a bunch of like-minded people.

So when you think about it, working for Canonical's not all bad.