After hearing that the Fail Whale article on Wikipedia was scheduled for early deletion, I felt compelled to help edit it to meet the standards of the Wikipedians — at least, the inclusionists.

It was — and still is — quite important to me to clarify the relationship between the picture of the whale, the name the community gave it, the personality projected by the community on it, and the @failwhale account created by @seanosteen.

Luckily, James Governor had written an article “The Designer Who Gave Us Fail Whale and Showing The Whale”:

I had assumed Twitter was using designs it had paid for for its Fail page, but apparently not. Courtesy of John Wilson’s comment on my last blog about Twitter, a couple of hours ago, came news the famous whale is a stock shot from here.

Yiying Lu is the fantastic designer behind the image we all see, and love, so much. Frankly I think Twitter should use more of their work to give us some variety, and also give Yiying a lot more credit. How about a service sleeping owl?

Thanks to James’ detective work and Kapanka’s edit, the Wikipedia article already linked to Yiying, but it lacked a lot of detail.

So, I sent Yiying a tweet and an SMS, and we ended up talking on Skype. I wish I’d recorded it, as she’s great interview talent. All I can do here is report the story:

Yiying was studying at UTS when she drew “Lifting a Dreamer”. To help support her studies, Yiying put it up on iStockPhoto not realising that the site was more for generic images — say, a mobile phone on a white background — than for personal works of art.

Yiying isn’t sure exactly when Twitter downloaded the picture, and so can’t nail down exactly what they paid for the license to use it, but estimates it was around USD$5-10.

Eventually, someone let Yiying know: “your whale is getting bigger! people see it every hour…”, she saw it on Twitter, and @tlimongello contacted Yiying from the USA to get her permission to put the Fail Whale on some T-shirts. @seanosteen had already registered failwhale.com for fan blog. After some discussion, Yiying set up the online store to meet community demand for Fail Whale memorabilia. She also deactivated the image on iStockPhoto to prevent further commercial use of the image.

To this date, nobody at Twitter has yet contacted Yiying. As of the last sightings of the Fail Whale — soon to be rare, about which I’ve got mixed feelings — the image remains unattributed. So, I’m delighted to spread the word about the true origins of the Fail Whale.

Back to that delightful mix of image, name, personality, and tribute persona, though: I think Yiying nailed it during our call when she said:

“This is a social object — it’s not only my thing. It’s my graphic, but how this graphic got famous… it’s the social power, the Twitter power.”

That Twitter power is now engaging with the artist, not just her image.

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Hello, Yiying! The creator of the “Fail Whale”

(The title is homage to a web site that used to exist. I can’t find it, now.)

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Nudi of the Day

To balance the karma, I’d like to post a quick reminder to everyone else that expressions in default arguments are calculated when the function is defined, not when it’s called. In Patrick’s code, for example, all objects created in the same running session got the same timestamp. Try this in the Python interactive prompt:

>>>import time
>>> def report(when=time.time()):
...     print when
...
>>> report()
1210294387.19
>>> time.sleep(5)
>>> report()
1210294387.19

Until the interpreter quits, you’ll always get the same timestamp. The correct way to go about this is to default to None or some other sentinel, then replace it inside the function:

>>> def report(when=None):
...     if when is None:
...         when = time.time()
...     print when
...
>>> report()
1210294762.29
>>> time.sleep(5)
>>> report()
1210294772.23

Now that you know about that blunder, you should be able to figure out what’s going on with this second classic blunder when using default arguments in Python:

>>> def spam(eggs=[]):
...     eggs.append("spam")
...     return eggs
...
>>> spam()
['spam']
>>> spam()
['spam', 'spam']
>>> spam()
['spam', 'spam', 'spam']
>>> spam()
['spam', 'spam', 'spam', 'spam']

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Default arguments in Python: two easy blunders

I tried it out, but couldn’t parse the response:

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 17 2008, 19:35:17)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import xmlrpclib, urllib2
>>> twittergram = xmlrpclib.Server("http://rpc.twittergram.com/RPC2/")
>>> content = urllib2.urlopen("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/704593.rss").read()
>>> twittergram.saveFeed('garthk', '*****', content)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py", line 1147, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py", line 1437, in __request
    verbose=self.__verbose
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py", line 1201, in request
    return self._parse_response(h.getfile(), sock)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py", line 1335, in _parse_response
    p.feed(response)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py", line 547, in feed
    self._parser.Parse(data, 0)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: mismatched tag: line 10, column 7

I’ll investigate later.

I’d love to wade into this kind of problem domain, perhaps using Google App Engine for hosting so I didn’t have to worry about usage spikes. Feed backup is a brilliant start. We also need to helping our followers find the feeds, and I’m sure more thought will yield more areas for funimprovement.

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Twitter Emergency Backup

I’m sure it’ll be back up soon, but ’twas nice to have a laugh before hitting the sack.

(Speaking of irony: I have 666 unread items in my feed reader’s Productivity folder…)

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Twitter’s Famous Last Words?

A poke around the Internet doesn’t show much other than other people complaining about the same problem. Some find the only way to solve the problem is to disable WPA. I’m not so sure that’s a smart idea. I hope there’s a fix for this in 10.5.2.

[If you're getting this on what you think is a Django-only feed, it's because the community feed administrators haven't yet updated their subscription to point to my Django posts only. Sorry about that.]

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Wireless network “appears compromised”

Zephyr big boy. Daddy big boy. Mummy big girl. Willow big chicken pox.

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Zephyr’s sense of humour, age 2.5

So far, so good, except for the database error (wp_categories doesn't exist) under WordPress 2.3…

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QuickPost Wordpress Plugin - Version .4 is now available

I always wondered what'd happen if one double-barrelled person married another double-barrelled person. Reg Drax here seems to be Exhibit A. 

Our kids are double-barrelled. To save them from Reg' fate, we carefuly chose their middle names so they could ditch the two surnames entirely if necessary. 

Thanks, Merlin! 

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax

It's all about timestamps. Feedparser returns timestamps in a standard time nine-tuple, asserting UTC. Django wants datetime objects. So, I'm trying to translate:

django_timestamp = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(time.mktime(feedparser_timestamp))

feedparser_timestamp = django_timestamp.utctimetuple()

This works fine for the majority of timestamps, but sometimes translating to datetime and back mutates the timestamp. In turn, that makes get-if-modified-since somewhat unreliable. Here are some examples, from my log file:

WARNING: (2004, 11, 19, 5, 13, 31, 4, 324, 0) => datetime.datetime(2004, 11, 19, 6, 13, 31) => (2004, 11, 19, 6, 13, 31, 4, 324, 0)

WARNING: (2005, 11, 2, 2, 17, 55, 2, 306, 0) => datetime.datetime(2005, 11, 2, 3, 17, 55) => (2005, 11, 2, 3, 17, 55, 2, 306, 0)

WARNING: (2006, 12, 13, 0, 21, 25, 2, 347, 0) => datetime.datetime(2006, 12, 13, 1, 21, 25) => (2006, 12, 13, 1, 21, 25, 2, 347, 0)

WARNING: (2004, 11, 14, 23, 55, 31, 6, 319, 0) => datetime.datetime(2004, 11, 15, 0, 55, 31) => (2004, 11, 15, 0, 55, 31, 0, 320, 0) 

I'm off by an hour. I smell a problem with daylight savings. I just wish I knew what to do about it. 

I've waved a dead chicken at this one all the ways I know how. Every change I make breaks the conversion entirely. So, I'm throwing this out to the community in the hope that someone can help me. 

This is a post from Deadly Bloody Serious.

Django vs feedparser on dates