10 years old!

happy 10th birthday mozilla!

i’d write something more meaningful, but why bother? mitchell already did that

Add comment March 31st, 2008

mashTape and APIs

Hacking on my mashTape extension has been a great way to find some wicked APIs and get the extension developer’s perspective on Songbird platform development. This morning’s hacking has made me realise we need a better way to allow extensions using display panes to set context for when their display pane should be visible. For instance, mashTape makes little sense when not listening to music. I’d love to be able to set something in my install.rdf, or in my display pane registration code to the effect of:

• Don’t show when “not playing”
• Don’t show in a non-media view (e.g. when I’m browsing the web, etc.)

I’ll have to think about it a little more and writeup a story/bug to figure out how I’d like to register this context for my display pane. Right now I’ve done it in mashTape through a combination of a tabbrowser select-tab listener, and a WebProgressListener, which seems like a lot of unnecessary work.

On the topic of APIs… I love Last.fm’s APIs, but it’s frustrating that their API for getting the artist bio information is incomplete. Perhaps it’s to drive traffic to their site (which is understandable), but I often get email requests to expose more of the bio information. Looking around, Freebase has got a wicked cool API, and they’ve somehow scraped Wikipedia’s great content into a bio/article for the artist. I’d love to use it… if only I could figure out how to get the bio! I played with their APIs for at least an hour this morning, and could grab all the information for everything except the “a.k.a.” and “bio/article” sections. Ugh.

Somehow I got from Freebase’s site over to DBpedia where they’ve built XML/RDF interfaces for Wikipedia’s content, and within 5 minutes I had a successful call to grab and parse out the full Wikipedia abstract text for artist bio, years active, etc. etc. I’m psyched. Now I just need to integrate that into mashTape and I should have a full artist bio.

6 comments March 30th, 2008

many thanks…

thanks to all who elected me to the new 2008-2009 term on the OGB.

i have the dubious honour of being the only non-Sun employee on the board. i hope that won’t play into my role or responsibilities, but it’ll certainly be interesting to see whether that has any influence on the dynamic at all.

i’m glad to see that we have some continuity with alanc, gman, and myself carrying through. i’m also happy to see some higher-level Sun representation with webmink on the board as well. i think plocher will bring some great knowledge and thoughts to the board. i value all the community experience that jimgris has, and i’m glad he’s finally on the board (he was the first runner-up last year), and having the ON tech lead, jbeck can only be good.

plus jbeck don’t take shit from no one.

update: I’ve gotten a number of congratulations from various people, but so far this one takes the cake:

<me>: i can’t believe i was elected again
<friend>: Oh, it makes sense that you were elected, but not that you ran!

1 comment March 28th, 2008

Enjoying the weather…

Char-siu enjoyed the gorgeous weekend weather as much as I did.

Add comment March 23rd, 2008

torchwood overload

can’t believe i watched all twelve current episodes of series 2 of Torchwood this weekend.

1 comment March 23rd, 2008

Isis and I

This is the last photo I took of us together, and was taken the night before she passed. She was always such a fidgety dog and would hardly ever sit still for a photo, let alone look directly at the camera. I took about 180 photos of her that night and the next morning, of which a few turned out well. This one required about 45 minutes of Photoshop to touch up and get it looking good.

2 comments March 21st, 2008

Songbird at OSCON

I got my talk, “Integrating Media & Web Experiences with Songbird” accepted for a 45 minute conference session at OSCON 2008.

woot! (it’s not often I get to blog ‘woot’ twice before 6am, but hey)

2 comments March 19th, 2008

Songbird on OpenSolaris, more progress

Just saw Alfred’s latest comment on bug 7800 which notes he’s got Songbird up and running on OpenSolaris, playing .mp3 files, natch.

woot!

/me needs to get his MacBook dual-booting with OpenSolaris again.

2 comments March 19th, 2008

Can a dog achieve enlightenment?

Isis passed peacefully this morning. I was up all night with her.. we video-conferenced with Wendy (who is still in Taiwan) and I’ll admit to shedding quite a few tears.

Isis has always hated going to the vet’s office, so we had our vet do a house-call. Isis went peacefully and comfortably in her own bed with her favourite sweater, with Char-siu sitting sad and confused nearby while I held her head.

She was 10 years old, and we only had her for 3 years - but she taught me a lifetime of lessons. The most important? One only needs the simple basics to lead a happy life: love, loyalty, friends, a warm bed, water, and some good beef jerky.

I’ll miss her immensely.

5 comments March 17th, 2008

3 years and 2 days.

That’s how long we’ve had Isis. She won us over within 5 minutes of meeting her. I remember when we went to go meet her and we swore we wouldn’t make any snap judgements and that we’d think about it for 24 hours before we decided to adopt a dog. As planned, we went to meet her, and walked away to think things over seriously. Half an hour later we found ourselves at a Petco buying a crate so we could go back and pick her up.

Anyone who’s met her over the years can hopefully attest to what a wonderful dog she’s been. She won the hearts of many a neighbour and coworker at Sun. I remember last June when we found out she had bladder cancer. The vet placed her at about 3-4 months to live. Instead, she’s hung in there for 9 months. I’m thankful for all the time we’ve had… I’ve had plenty of time to say goodbye.

I’m writing this on the plane as I cut my vacation short to come home to put Isis to sleep. I don’t know how to feel to be honest. When I got the email from my sister that Isis had taken a bad turn, it had a sense of inevitability. Wendy and I have been telling ourselves “any day now” for the past 6 months. Anyone who’s met Isis knows that she does anything for food (like most beagles), and we always told ourselves “when she stops eating”, that’s her time to go. She’s barely eating, barely drinking, and it seems she’s decided that now is her time to go. I’m gutted she’s finally leaving us now, but I’m bittersweetly happy that I’ll be able to hold her one last time and that I can be with her when she passes.

3 comments March 16th, 2008