that’s whacked

euro trip photos

Friday, Feb 29. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos, Songbird

photo roundup time!

while i was in london last week, i fortunately found myself with one evening free. coincidentally, it happened to be the same night the London OpenSolaris User Group was meeting… so i dropped by and took some photos. it was great to see nick again, and to finally meet peter tribble.

this past weekend, i went to FOSDEM and ended up taking a few photos there as well. predominantly they are from the Mozilla DevRoom, with the exception of a few from the OpenSolaris booth, and a few from Mark Finkle’s talk (Mark is big-time and got a talk in the main track with a huge room separate from the DevRoom )

and on wednesday evening, Songbird hosted a get-together/social, which i lazily called MozzyBirdyXULy Type Meetup Social Thing, where i took more photos. some of them are from the Nest during the day, but most are from the evening social where we had folks from Mozilla, Songbird, Flickr, Wesabe, and Flock (did i miss anyone?).

#opensolaris-meeting

Thursday, Feb 28. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris General Members Meeting is on NOW

irc.freenode.net

#opensolaris-meeting

If you don’t have an IRC client, you can go to the web client glynn setup

FOSDEM 2008 thoughts

Wednesday, Feb 27. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

FOSDEM 2008 was, IMHO, a great success (and apparently not just MY humble opinion). The whole Mozilla presence there was amazing. On a personal note, it was great to meet and hang out with a bunch of the Mozilla crew. As always, it was great to see mfinkle and sethb who were about the only Mozilla folks I knew prior to FOSDEM. It was fantastic to meet all the TomTom crew (I think they sent 7 guys over), and to chat with thunder and andrew from TomTom for what seemed like hours talking about traveling and food.

It was also great to see the OpenSolaris crew, in the form of timsf, patrickf, sarad, and the webmink himself as always.

As to my specific talk, I had a 45 minute time slot to present Saturday evening, the last time slot @ the Mozilla DevRoom (the conference is split into different topical DevRooms/tracks). The Mozilla DevRoom was jokingly called “saunsa.fosdem.org” because it had about a 7 foot tall ceiling, no windows, no ventilation, and brick walls all around.

In other words, it was a brick oven. Yes, like the kind you cook pizzas in.

Toss in 50 to 120 geeks depending on the talk (max room capacity was 100) + laptops, and yeah… it turned into a sauna. When you opened the door to the room you were hit with a wall of humidity and heat.

My actual talk was titled “Songbird: Smashing the Silo (or how to build a music store in 34 minutes)” and mostly covered how to use the Webpage API to do rich media integrations with Songbird. The overall aim of my talk was to point out the more innovative and compelling features of Songbird (i.e. it’s more than just an open source iTunes). The last 7 or 8 minutes, I showed off the display panes, talked about media views, and talked about general music mashups and music meta information. I actually had 3 people come up the next day and say they’d played with Songbird and mashTape and other extensions that night (which is especially impressive given we partied all night @ the Mozilla 10th birthday party).

I see Brian also posted a wiki link to FOSDEM happenings wrt to Mozilla which has more blog entries and photos for Mozilla’s presence.

Tuesday, Feb 19. 2008  –  Category: Food, Football

I’ve been in London for some meetings this week, and it’s been absolutely great. The first thing I did of course was to buy 3 packs of Fruit Gums, which I prompted devoured. Being super gummy, this of course, led to two days of jaw pain and muscle ache.

Completely worth it

The meetings went really well, one of the things that was interesting was observing the agile development process in a large corporate environment. We’re on agile at Songbird, and it’s one thing to see it work well in a small group of 30 people, but to see it in place at a company of several thousand was pretty cool.

So far I’ve had some great food (screw all you who disparage British food – I love it), an insane amount of good beer, and for the first time in ages, I got to watch a Champions League match on TV at a reasonable hour in a pub full of cheering fans. (Yay Liverpool 2-0 over Inter!)

Tired of it all.

Thursday, Feb 14. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Sun

I was going to write a long-winded response to the ongoing trademark, naming cluster-fuck that is Indiana OpenSolaris, but frankly I’m tired. Instead I’ll give a +1 to benr’s response (yes I know it’s a cop-out, sorry).

I’m tired of Sun’s continuing ignorance in how to treat its open source community with some modicum of respect, I’m tired of Sun’s arrogance in taking upon itself to determine what’s best for the community (a community which Sun’s current executives are completely out of touch with). I’m tired of Sun executives not listening to the people in the trenches who work for them, who quite frankly, know a helluva lot more about this whole “open source” thing than they do. I’m tired of Sun not acting within the framework of the governance and constitution that it helped setup. I’m tired of Sun telling me it knows what’s best for me.

But on the flip side…

I’m tired of all the armchair-lawyers on ogb-discuss asserting they know more about trademark law than Sun’s lawyers, I’m tired of all the trolls who agitate for immediate heavy-handed responses without thinking through the ramifications of their actions. I’m tired of so-called user experts telling me they know what’s best for me too. I’m tired of idiots on the mailing lists painting Sun employees with a broad brush and slagging the very people who backed them up and supported the same ideas as them.

Yes. Sun fucked up (and continues to). Who hasn’t? Is a response warranted? Yes, I think so. Should that response be petty and childish? Sure, if we (the OGB and the OpenSolaris community, by extension) want to be perceived as petty and childish too.

So my general plea to Sun executives is: Listen to the very people you have tasked with helping you to understand what open source is, and how to develop an open and transparent developer community. You have smart people working for you and with you.

My general plea to the rest of the OpenSolaris community is: Have some empathy and take 30 seconds before you hit Send or Reply All and try to understand the other side’s view. Personal insults and accusations are unwarranted.

Okay that was more long-winded than I wanted to type. I’m off to recuperate with a bowl of pho, and a pint.

passport bummer

Monday, Feb 11. 2008  –  Category: Travel

just realised last night that my passport is at the vietnamese consulate in san francisco awaiting visa approval for our trip to vietnam.

this is somewhat problematic since i need it to go to london this weekend. hrm.

fosdem and me

Sunday, Feb 10. 2008  –  Category: Food, OpenSource, Songbird

where i’ll be @ FOSDEM:

• i’m giving a 45 minute talk on Songbird in the Mozilla DevRoom Saturday @ 18:15
• i’m giving a 15 minute lightning talk on Songbird Sunday @ 17:20
• i’ll be at the Friday night beer event. presumably i’ll be drinking beer. which means, look for the asian guy rocking the awesome asian blush
• i’ll be at the Mozilla dinner Saturday night.
• i’ll be hanging out variously in the Mozilla DevRoom and the main room. i’d love to meet folks, grab lunch, drink beer, whatever.
• at all other times i plan on stuffing myself with moules et frites, chocolate, stroopwafel, and beer.

catchup rambling

Friday, Feb 8. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Outdoors, Pets, Songbird

i propose starting a new trend in web 2.0. first there was blogging. then there was microblogging (aka twitter’ing). i propose to start time-batch concatenating micro-blogging, or twitter with a touch of both diarrhea and constipation if you will.

so here’s my spew of random micro-blogging-type thoughts, concatenated into one post.

• psyched to be going to London for a week. looking forward to hopefully dropping by the LOSUG meeting while i’m there. would give my left nut to get tickets to the Arsenal/AC Milan Champions League game.

• super-psyched about FOSDEM. little bit nervous to be presenting my first conference preso about Songbird. looking forward to moules et frites with timf, catching up with other various OpenSolaris folk, and meeting more of the Mozilla Community.

• steak and bj day. seriously. i’m so in.

• i’m so desperate to go up to the sierras. i haven’t gone snowboarding at all this winter, and its been dumping lately. sigh. brand new snowboard and everything.

• work is keeping me so busy. feel like every day i finish 5 tasks only to add 7 more to the plate. i was expecting as much when i left Sun… and i love the work and my coworkers, but wow i could use a few days off.

• had a shite day at the gym yesterday, couldn’t get up the V2 & V3 routes i was able to do two weeks ago. ugh. starting to get really psyched about climbing Cathedral Peak with jesse in june though. i think my strength is there, but i could definitely do with some sustained route-climbing to build up the endurance. should probably go out somewhere (diablo maybe?) to practice some trad placements in case my rusty.

• isis is definitely getting worse. we’re taking her to the vet on saturday, but i suspect her time is near. she’s eating slower, and starting to strain so hard her body shakes a lot of the time she’s awake. her 10th birthday is in 10 days. bumming me out.

• great to see benr, tamr, and to finally meet derek c at redmonk’s party a couple of nights ago. cheers to sogrady for a great party and for the beer.

• i feel like i’m spending so much time in front of my computer lately, and not nearly enough time outdoors or with the dogs. gotta figure out this work/life balance thing.

Songbird Development 101

Tuesday, Feb 5. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been working on this “Songbird Development 101″ slidedeck for the past few weeks as kind of the general intro to Songbird development. it, at a very high level, introduces the terminology we use for the various UI components, and covers (at an even higher level) extension development, Feathers creation, and webpage API development.

It also has an absurd amount of links to various helpful (IMO, anyway) resources.

More importantly, it has 10 images of farting birds in it.

poot!

Songbird Lightning Talk @ FOSDEM

Monday, Feb 4. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

w00t. Songbird got a 15 minute lightning talk slot at FOSDEM, so I’ll be be doing my infomercial lightning talk pitch then.

15 minutes is actually pretty good. i’m more used to 5 minute lightning talks. still wish I had bmc’s ability to talk at high velocity. i could probably present War & Peace in 15 minutes then.