that’s whacked

Best. Music. Ever. (okay, fine, 2007)

Tuesday, Jan 29. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

… at least according to the blogosphere. I’m talking about the Hype Machine Zeitgeist. They’ve published their listings for:

• 50 Best Songs
• 50 Best Bands
• 50 Best Albums

The best part is the 50 Best Songs totally rocks under Songbird thanks to Hype Machine’s use of Songbird’s Webpage API.

And in other news, we had one more Top 40 extension completion today with bx’s work porting the Faves extension to work under Songbird. Yay! More social bookmarky goodness!

Extension roundup…. yeehaw!

Monday, Jan 28. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

My extensions list installed in Songbird just keeps on growing… I’m loving the new extensions people are porting over to Songbird. Some of the new ones posted up so far (in alphabetical order):

• CustomizeGoogle — adds a bunch of neat-o options to configure and.. well, customise, Google. my favourite? “Remove Click Tracking” which means I can right click on the Google search result links and copy the URL and get a *real* URL rather than a google.com link forwarding URL. yay!
• Firebug — best. debugger. ever. seriously. Every extension developer who has to muck with Javascript owes ianloic a beer.
• FoxSaver — who *doesn’t* like cool screensavers? i’ve got this running on a box acting as a music jukebox, and pull photos and rss feeds when it goes idle. this only makes me want REAL full screen support for applications on the Mac even more.
• JSView — i can’t think how many times i’ve tried to view source only to have pages pull in external JS & CSS. the ability to view external Javascript and CSS source files saves me a ton of time when i’m copying^Wuh… leveraging source and examples from the web.
• Nightly Tester Tools — i’m actually looking at making this part of the first run bundle for nightly builds. the ability to selectively/individually override version compatibility for extensions is worth it alone.
• Shareaholic — if you’re a social fiend like i am, then having one-click (okay, two if you count the toolbar drop down) submission to all the big sites (digg, facebook, del.icio.us, etc.) rocks.
• Stylish — Greasemonkey for CSS. Ahhh beautiful – my favourite CSS is Dark Gray Google which makes google.com totally match Songbird’s rubberducky Feather.

an epic day, indeed…. and a renewed faith in customer service

Sunday, Jan 27. 2008  –  Category: Cars, Outdoors

wendy and i headed up to tahoe this weekend for a fun, weekend snowboarding. the snow promised to be fantastic with a storm having dumped fresh powder all thursday & friday.

we left saturday morning, and everything was going great until my engine imploded somewhere going up the donner pass. all of a sudden my power sapped, i heard a whooshing sound, and i was flooring the engine going about 30mph up the pass. initially i thought a vacuum tube had broken and i’d lost my turbo or something – but realised that full-throttle going 30mph in 2nd gear was something bigger than that. i nursed it up to the summit of the pass, gave much thanks when i saw the “steep descent/downhill next 5 miles” and brought the car limping into a gas station/mechanic in Truckee.

the service guy there asked me turn the engine on so he could hear what was wrong and had me immediately turn it off after 1 second. “i’ll save you the $95 diagnostic: your engine’s blown, it’ll need a rebuild. tow it to your favourite dealer or mechanic”.

ouch.

he pulled the oil dipstick and showed me metal flakes in the oil indicating something inside the engine went nuts and blew chunks. sigh.

we called some people, checked out our options, and eventually decided to tow the car to Incline Village, rent a U-Haul + auto trailer, and tow my Audi back to Oakland.

so this is normally where i’d be pissed and annoyed; but instead i was actually pretty happy and satisfied. i was expecting people around every corner trying to rip us off, instead what i got was the following…

i called AAA and asked for a tow to Incline Village, the operator said my basic membership only covered 5 miles, and each additional mile was $7. i got off the phone and asked the service guy how far from Truckee to Incline Village. he said about 20-25 miles so that would have been about a $140 tow! he then suggested upgrading to AAA Plus which would get me 100 miles of free towing.

i called AAA back and asked very clearly “my car is dead. i’m stuck and need a tow. can i upgrade to AAA Plus right now and have it take effect immediately for a further tow?”

3 minutes, and a credit card charge of $16.73 later, and i was AAA Plus member being told to expect a tow truck driver in the next 45 minutes. sweet! we were a little worried though because the U-Haul closed at 1pm (by this time it was 11:49).

5 minutes later, a tow truck showed up. 1 minute after that, i got an automated call from AAA saying to expect my driver in 5-10 minutes. awesome. @ 12:20, we were on our way – and the tow truck driver got us into the U-Haul right on the dot at 1pm…

… where the U-Haul guy was holding up shop waiting for us, having already gotten the truck and the trailer ready leaving enough room in the parking lot for the tow truck to unload my Audi.

we unloaded, got it secured on the trailer, and went upstairs to sign paperwork where he gave us a discount, gave us his card and said give him a call next time and he’d hook us up with Diamond Peak discount tickets. at 1:34 we were leaving the U-Haul on our way back to the Bay Area.

so, all in all – yes, the day sucked. yes the weekend sucked. my car needs a new engine. we didn’t get to snowboard. and i spent 10 hours driving up to Tahoe and back yesterday.

but because every single person whom we encountered: the mechanic, the AAA operator, the tow truck driver, and the U-Haul guy were so amazingly helpful, and sympathetic… i’m left surprisingly happy with a renewed faith in customer service.

… and wendy’s happy because i think this qualifies as a settlement to our running debate as to whose car we should sell to buy the Audi TT we want as our next car. i think we’re going to sell the A4.

indulge me

Thursday, Jan 24. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

… just finished my 11th day at work. between the customer preso, getting (and being present at) the songbird devcamp, a partner deadline, and getting OSCON/FOSDEM proposals submitted i’ve started to lose track of what day it is. this whole week i keep thinking it’s been friday everyday since i haven’t had a day off yet.

it seems like ages ago (when in fact it was only last week) that i did this interview with Agile Ajax about Songbird, so indulge me while i link it here.

i’ll pawn it off as claiming i want to link it here so i won’t lose it.

but i’d be lying. it’s the first interview i’ve done on Songbird, and i like Brian (the interviewer), so i’m linking it.

just found out some of the OpenSolaris crew (Sara, Patrick, and Joep) will be at FOSDEM as well, so it’ll be nice to see some familiar faces. it’s not obvious that there will be an OpenSolaris presence at FOSDEM – so that was nice to hear.

FOSDEM 2008

Wednesday, Jan 23. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

Anyone going to FOSDEM this year? I’ll be presenting Songbird in the Mozilla DevRoom (and hopefully giving a lightning talk if it gets accepted). Anyone wanting to meetup to talk about Songbird, Mozilla, OpenSolaris – or just to go sample some awesome Belgium beer – drop me a note! Would love to meet up….

trademark and branding

Wednesday, Jan 23. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

sigh. it’s the issue that i never get to escape. it came up in OpenSolaris, and its starting to rear its head with Songbird.

basically i’m trying to figure out how third parties (e.g. distributions such as Ubuntu or Debian) can have a package called “songbird” with our branding, logo, and artwork while protecting our trademarks from dilution, and potential infringement or malicious use.

i’m having some good discussion with various people from said distributions as well as POTI’s lawyers and hope to have something figured out soon… it’s definitely a thorny issue, as evidenced by Mozilla & Debian’s spat with Firefox^WIceweasel

thorny issues from all sides…. and really, at heart, it’s such a simple issue. our fans/users want to run a program called “songbird”, that has cute farting birds as its logo.

right now i’m leaning towards a policy allowing use of our logos/branding if a certain set of basic smoke tests pass successfully. but i haven’t yet vetted that with the lawyer – so i’m crossing my fingers hoping that’s strong enough.

a good day is….

Tuesday, Jan 22. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

… having a double espresso and then going to give a 3 hour customer/partner presentation without screwing up.

of course anytime you can give a 3 hour preso incorporating farting birds as your graphics should be considered a win.

after that, i endured a painful reminder of how much i don’t miss the 880 commute before i hit the rock gym where i finally nailed a V3 i’d been working on the past couple of times. in fact, i managed to sink two V3′s, making them the first two V3′s i’ve bagged! the first one involved a wicked dyno which i thought was going to wrench my right shoulder out of my socket, and second involved latching onto a little crimper with one fingernail and squeezing every millimeter of reach out of my armspan.

well i’m sore and starving – but feeling pretty good. t’was a good day indeed.

songbird devcamp over!

Sunday, Jan 20. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

devcamp is…. over. wow. what a weekend. i know i’m exhausted.

we had about 15-20ish developers come by on saturday, and another 6 or 7 come by on sunday. aside from the wifi hiccups saturday morning, and gregg finding a box staple in his lasagna (ugh. sorry gregg), i think it was a big success.

there was hacking (w00t. at least 4 extensions got significant development work done). there was socialising. there was beer. oh boy there was lots of beer. tons of food too.

t’was great to meet the me.dium guys, the foxsaver guys, fabricio (the xspf player guy who totally got us a Cmd-Q patch for Mac, yay!), JB the VLC guy, and everybody else i’m forgetting to recall because i’m a little buzzed.

many thanks to the birders who came and helped answer people’s questions, and lead the sessions on saturday.

and one last to all the folks who followed along on the webcam, and joined in via IRC.

we’ll have to definitely do this again.

grumpy and crappy morning

Friday, Jan 18. 2008  –  Category: Cars

so far this day has gone stellar and it’s only 8:37am. wendy got paged at 4 o’clock in the f-ing morning because her patient had hiccups.

hiccups?!?!?

seriously. wtf.

my carpool ride into work was a Land Rover (nice) with a girl blasting crazy loud evangelical christian music (which is just wonderful when you’re groggy and tired ).

normally i try to be painfully polite on my carpool rides. i know i’m getting a free ride into work. but damnit, she’s getting free toll and a faster drive in too. it works both ways. everybody is supposed to be polite and conscientious of each other. this is why people are generally quiet, and the radio is tuned to NPR

i tried to tune it out by putting on my headphones and browsing facebook/digg on my iPhone… to which the driver told me that i “was being rude, and if i wanted to read – there was a Bible next to me”

seriously. again, wtf.

i couldn’t help it, i was just too grumpy and tired and sleepy.

sorry. i don’t read fiction.

we then sat in strained awkward silence for the rest of the 20 minute drive into work.

to top it all off, once i got into the city, Peets had no soy milk. sigh

vimperator

Thursday, Jan 17. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

best. firefox extension. ever.

seriously. i’ve been using this all day and love it. between Witch, Quicksilver, and now Vimperator, my hands seldom need to touch a mouse now.

if only i could find a keyboard way to move a window without having to use the mouse. oh well.