News You Can Bruise for 2010 October 16

Well, my cool gallery-generation script doesn't work anymore because Maverick got rid of I stopped using F-Spot [see UPDATE below], but here are the photos from yesterday. What happened was a few days ago Mark Hansen sent me a donation for Beautiful Soup. I saw that Mark had a ucla.edu address and as a UCLA alum myself, I was curious and went to investigate. Pretty awesome guy—professor of statistics, spam poetry on his webpage. "[M]y time will be split between the Research and Development Group at the New York Times..."

So I emailed Mark and asked when he would be in New York next. He said he would be in New York starting Thursday! Okay then. Yesterday I went to the Times building (near Times Square, strangely enough) and had lunch with Mark and with Jer Thorp, in the second best corporate cafeteria I've ever eaten in, not that I've eaten in very many.

Great conversation and then a little tour of (selected floors of) the Times building, which you can see a bit of in the pictures. Don't miss the "Page One" room, a room dedicated to a single ritual, where the editors gather every day at 4 PM to decide what goes on the next day's front page.

But, you may ask, what is this picture I've embedded align="right" in this entry, this photo of me standing in front of some screens? Well, I'm looking at Movable Type, a 2007 piece of digital art by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. It's on public display in the Times lobby. It shows a constantly changing tableau of sentences, photo captions, crossword puzzle clues, etc. from the latest edition of the NYT. And it turns out that the "custom software" mentioned in the artist's statement includes Beautiful Soup! Yes, the New York Times is using my software to scrape its own data stores for use in a work of art. I did not begin this week expecting to learn that!

[UPDATE] I should be more precise in my language, especially since I work for Canonical. Maverick did not "get rid of" F-Spot. It was moved from "main" to "universe", and replaced by Shotwell. Shotwell is much better, except that when you tell it to export photos to a directory, it exports only the photos themselves and no extra metadata or thumbnails.