A neat visualization of the work that the Federated Media Tech team (including me) has done over the last 14 months:

I put this together this afternoon using code_swarm. Andy uploaded it to Vimeo so the world can see: FM has tech!

Here’s a little explanation of what you are seeing:

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

In our case, red dots are PHP files, blue dots are HTML, CSS, and JS files, and turquoise dots are media files.

I’ve been a little disappointed with Gutsy Gibbon, the latest release of Ubuntu. I’m not sure if it’s the older hardware I’m running, but things seem a little flakier. For starters, the upgrade process locked up about 1/3 of the way through. And this time I wasn’t working on the computer at the same time.

When I rebooted, I got to the Gnome login screen and logged in, but it didn’t go any further than that. I was able to set things so I could log in to a terminal instead, and I continued the installation using dpkg --configure -a (I think). That seems to have completed the process, but now I’ve got several lingering problems that I didn’t have with Feisty.

First, my ThinkPad X23 doesn’t resume out of suspend anymore. The fans and hard drive start spinning, the LCD backlights flash on and then off, but the “moon” light just blinks and blinks and blinks. I tend to use suspend regularly whenever I shut the screen, so this is totally cramping my style. Googling around reveals that I’m not alone (and that it might be a problem with the kernel—I’m running 2.6.22-14-generic), but the suggested fixes I tried had no effect.

Occasionally when I login, I can’t click on anything. I can move the mouse cursor, but I can’t do anything with it. I’m not sure if this is because I’m clicking on the Firefox icon in the top panel too quickly or not, but pretty much all I can do when this happens is Ctrl+Alt+Bksp and re-login. This has occurred 3-4 times.

Selecting justified text in Firefox (e.g. in my blog) makes the text wiggle back and forth by a pixel or two. WTF? I’m wondering if these issues are all Gnome 2.20 related? Here’s a screencast I took to illustrate what I’m talking about:

Finally the Live Comment Preview plugin I use for displaying comments as they’re typed delays the appearance of the characters I’m typing so drastically that composing that way is not usable.

So I’m checking Boing Boing for the umpteenth time tonight (in the middle of a casual project), when I see a new post about Maker Faire Austin: “Adventures in Time” teaser film. The accompanying screengrab looks interesting enough, so I clickthrough and start watching the video.

A lot of the footage looks like it came from the recent Maker Faire in San Mateo—the one that I experienced with my dad and Stephanie last May.

So they’re showing all of the familiar exhibits, and I’m wondering whether there’ll be any mention of the rubber band cars I’ve heard so much about—the ones that the husband of my mom’s college roommate, Mike Rigsby, will be demoing at Maker Faire Austin, and that my dad is building a life-size version of.

Update: here’s the original video of my dad and his car:

I was on vacation (from work and blog reading) when he began posting about the construction of the car in earnest (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6 with original video), so I didn’t read about it until after I got back. Definitely check out parts 4 and 5, where he describes some of the initial structural failures and his subsequent engineering solutions.

Of course I’ve been meaning to blog about it, especially after seeing the work of art that is the car’s chair:

Serendipitously seeing my dad on a video linked to from Boing Boing was just the impetus I needed to finally write a post.

Shameless plug: if you’re going to be around for Maker Faire Austin, Mike Rigsby, my dad (Brian Watt), and the human-sized rubber band powered car he built will be on hand for test drives. Definitely check it out!

Since I’ve gotten phone calls and emails from as far away as Texas and Ohio (about the flooding in Northern California), I thought I’d go out and do a little citizen journalism.

This is what my way to work looks like as of this evening:

And here’s a video showing the fuller extent of the flooded Laguna de Santa Rosa:

The hot topic at Webzine was videoblogging (aka vlogging), which is funny because video as a medium seems about as far from the traditional print ‘zines as one can get. Behold the synergizing power of the internets.

Thus some of the videobloggers at the conference had set up a studio in the spirit of a Real World™ confessional booth—complete with a green screen and everything. But being the shy text blogger that I am, I wasn’t going out of my way to speak in front of a camera. Except that in the middle of a panel on podcasting someone nabbed me–she was tall and blond–and I found myself trying to construct coherent sentences in front of a camera lens (about whatever I wanted) while the discussion was booming below.

Tonight I discovered the end result. I was included in a compilation of several other confessors from Webzine. Click the thumbnail below to see my 42 seconds of fame.

What I said:

My name is Justin Watt and my URL is justinsomnia.org. I’m a personal blogger. I also do web production for O’Reilly Media in Sebastopol, California. I recently moved to California from North Carolina. Blogging is a great way to keep in touch with family members and friends. I got started back in college, talking about things that I was reading online in other blogs. There are a lot of conversations you can have with people who are right in front of you. There are a lot of conversations you can have with people who are out in the world in other places, other times. Blogs are a great way to have an asynchronous conversation. That’s me.

The best part is, they replaced the green screen behind me with a screenshot of my blog! Which happens to show my liveblogging post of the Webzine conference. How meta!