that’s whacked » 2008

Archive for May, 2008

Bugzilla DekiWiki extension

One of the things we’ve been tackling at Songbird is migrating from our existing three (yes, 3) wiki systems and integrating them all into one system. Our two old public wikis were stale, decrepit, and unloved. In fact, none of us knew the admin password for one of them - and it seemed like we all had to edit through mig or mattc’s account. Craziness.

Anyway, we’re big fans of Mozilla (duh), so we started following avidly when Eric blogged about MDC moving to DekiWiki.

With all the nest work we’ve got lined up, we figured we might as well migrate the content and flip our DekiWiki live rather than blocking it on skinning/theming it, so last week we made our wiki live, and I moved all our developer site content over to it.

One of the things I’ve been screwing around with lately is learning DekiScript; I figured I’d start with a simple Bugzilla extension. I just posted it to the DekiWiki site in the hopes that it will be useful to others. Basically it lets me do:

{{ bugzilla.link(7800) }}

which will create a link to the Bugzilla link, update it to reflect state of the bug (~~strikethrough~~ represents a closed bug), and give it a title/tooltip with the summary of the bug. You can see it in action here on my test page or here on our Feathers update guide.

I’m a huge fan of DekiWiki’s extensibility… granted, writing extensions in XML/DekiScript is something new and different… I keep tripping up over it, but it’s been an interesting exercise and it’s always fun learning something new.

7 comments May 30th, 2008

Creative Commons Technology Summit

We’re big CC fans over here at Songbird, so I’m looking forward to attending CC’s first Technology Summit on June 18th over at the Googleplex in Mountain View.

I’m going to be participating in a panel covering “Digital Asset Management on the Web & the Desktop” (wow that’s a mouthful) if anyone feels like throwing tomatoes at me from the crowd.

3 comments May 27th, 2008

glorious double

spent lunchtime @ kate’s today shouting and screaming at the TV rooting for my team. i can’t believe yet another CL final went to PK’s, and it was a real nail biter all the way to the end.

the game was fantastic… scholesy’s little backheel to wes brown for a fantastic cross to ronaldo’s headed goal was an absolutely sublime move, and rooney’s huge huge cross to ronaldo was fantastic. it definitely wasn’t a boring match, thankfully - though the pitch looked shitty (leading to van der sar’s slip up on lampard’s goal, and terry’s botched PK).

so that wraps up an awesome season for manu - a glorious double. what to do now that manu’s season is over? hrm. the USA has some intriguing finals coming up against England, Argentina, & Spain. those should be great, and i guess i can get back to following our local Earthquakes & MLS.

2 comments May 21st, 2008

busy busy busy

man, it’s been a hectic past week. i’ve been swamped at work with my usual stuff plus building a cool Shoutcast directory add-on for Songbird that i’m hoping will make it out wiht Songbird 0.6 in a couple of weeks.

we’re close to launching our new developer wiki, and our new add-ons site which i’m super psyched about. our current add-ons site has…. some issues, and our new one looks fantabulous. plus i’m hoping once we get that out, our nest team can turn some eyes over to figuring out just wtf is going on with our translation/localisation site. man, that site needs love more than vanilla ice.

to all my p.o.o.-lovin’ friends, one of the things the new Songbird add-ons site will have is support for other platforms… including both OpenSolaris x86 & SPARC. so you guys who have emailed me asking how you can install add-ons will some love soon enough. even you SPARC desktop users… seriously.

in more fun news, we’ve been talking with our friends @ mozilla (hi mary!) for a few weeks, and are now planning an über cool party with a bunch of other peeps at OSCON for july. we’re still working out the details, but it promises to be pretty rad.

in other random personal news, i finally got the ’stevel’ username on twitter. cheer. twitter customer service FTW.

alright, that’s all. i’m off to go make more ice cream sandwiches. many thanks to danielle and henry, you guys rock. anyone who gets invited over for dinner and brings champagne, lychees, fresh ice cream, and cookies either truly loves us or wants us to die a beautiful yummy death. regardless of what your motives were, dessert was (and continues to be, with the leftovers) delicious.

1 comment May 20th, 2008

opensolaris jobs!

it’s nice to see the opensolaris-jobs list being used. jim put a link to all 3 jobs posted, hence my link to his blog post since i’m too lazy to copy and paste ‘em directly here.

what jim didn’t mention though is how kick ass the OpenSolaris Engineering team is. seriously, i encourage any qualified people to apply for those jobs. the team is fantastic, completely supportive, and is still to this date, the best team i’ve ever worked with. (at Songbird, i’m a team of one… and… well, let’s face it - i ain’t got nothing on the Tonic/OpenSolaris Engineering team).

… and to whomever is lucky enough to land the SysAdmin role… well… i’m sorry, you have my profoundest apologies for anything and everything i was responsible for. really, truly, sorry.

1 comment May 16th, 2008

best song i’ve heard this week

YouTube video here: Lily Allen - Alfie

seriously had me cracking up when i heard this on 1.FM’s Trance stream just now.

Ooooo deary me,
My little brother’s in his bedroom smoking weed,
I tell him he should get up cause it’s nearly half past three.
He can’t be bothered ’cause he’s high on THC.
I ask him very nicely if he’d like a cup of tea,
I can’t even see him cause his room is so smokey,
Don’t understand how one can watch so much TV,
My baby brother Alfie how I wish that you could see.

1 comment May 16th, 2008

awesome animation vid

thanks to pvh (fellow birder) for sending me this video… an animation all done via wall painting

it’s unbelievably awesome

Add comment May 13th, 2008

updated rtorrent & libtorrent packages for Solaris

was helping out a friend and updated my rtorrent/libtorrent packages for Solaris. as before, there are three packages, SFWsigc++, SFWtorrent, and SFWrtorrent.

these install, per the companion CD convention, to /opt/sfw

enjoy..

5 comments May 8th, 2008

OpenSolaris build support landed in Songbird!

woot woot poot poot!

preed just landed (here, and here) alfred’s last two remaining patches for bug 7800: Songbird would be even more cross-platform with OpenSolaris/Solaris support!

so as of now, OpenSolaris support is a first-class citisen in the Songbird SVN repo. while we won’t be able provide QA coverage, i’m bringing up a machine here with OpenSolaris 2008.05 that i hope to turn into a buildbot so we can at least monitor and know when checkins break the OpenSolaris build.

needless to say, i’m pretty psyched at my two favourite open source projects getting it on.

but what’s really cool is go take a look at bug 7800… i mentioned this at our session at the DevSummit on Sunday: this was a fantastic example of an external contributor working directly via forums and via our Bugzilla, getting code review, updating patches, etc. etc. the list of patches and comments is probably our longest yet actually.

Add comment May 7th, 2008

OSDevCon schedule up!

Dirk just mailed out the notifications of acceptance to the various speakers for OSDevCon, and posted the schedule up on the website.

This was my first experience being on a program committee to help select speakers, and I have to say it was fun. It was great to see submissions from so many people I know from the community, and there were definitely some hard selections to be made (I think we had FOUR people submit IPS/packaging proposals!!)

Anyway, glad to see a good mix of some knowledgable Sun folks, as well as some focus on other aspects of OpenSolaris that don’t get enough attention IMHO (Testing & Localisation/Translation).

Plus… boat trip! Seriously! That would be the only conference I’ve ever seen with a boat trip + dinner. I’m jealous I can’t make it.