that’s whacked

Last.fm Radio release!

Tuesday, Mar 24. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

It’s official… after many beers weeks of development, we’re ready to release Last.fm Radio support for Songbird.  If you haven’t gotten the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler add-on update yet you should be getting it soon… (or you can go install it manually from the add-ons site).

Here’s a few of the features provided by the new Last.fm radio support:

• Geolocates your IP and presents the most popular artists & tags from your country on Last.fm on the homepage (in case you were wondering why certain artists may appear there)
• Last.fm webpage links for “Play <foo> radio” get redirected to use the Songbird Last.fm Radio support
• Dynamic links on the sidebar for your Last.fm favourite/most played artists (based on your scrobbling history)
• Links on the sidebar for your friends and neighbours’ stations
• Dynamic links on the sidebar for your Last.fm stations based on your Songbird library’s highest rated and highest playcount artists.
• Click around and explore artist, tags, and Last.fm users
• Easily jump off to station webpages to read more from Last.fm
• When you authenticate with the extension it logs you in for both scrobbling and the Last.fm webpage

Note that due to recent changes Last.fm has made (recently being today), only US, UK, and Germany users can listen to radio for free.  Users in other countries will have to pay €3.00/month to Last.fm to listen to Last.fm Radio.  Sorry, but it’s their service and nothing we can control.

Trust funds for the families of the slain Oakland cops

Monday, Mar 23. 2009  –  Category: Linkage

I live in Oakland, and our neighbourhood was pretty rocked this weekend by the murder of the 4 (or 3, depending on your classification of life vs. death) Oakland police officers.  This is the highest # of police officers slain in a day in the department’s history.

There’s not much I can say really.  It’s f-’d up, and I’m pretty saddened by the events that happened.

The OPD just setup trust funds for the families of the slain officers.  We’ll be putting some money in, and I hope you will too.

Last.fm tagging

Thursday, Mar 19. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

In the week and a half since we shipped Songbird 1.1, what have we been up to?  Well besides grandly horking a whole ton of iPods (sorry sorry sorry!), we’ve also been planning and scheming on some cool new stuff for the future.  Quite frankly, while doing performance and feature parity stuff is always good – we wanted to work on something innovative and different. Matt did a bunch of awesome mockups and threw up a planning doc on the wiki for anyone interesting in seeing what our [very rough] plans are.

Anyway, if you take a look you’ll see a big part of it revolves around activities, e.g. actions the user does to interact with their music.  We’re talking things like:

• rating songs
• making playlists
• adding new tracks to their collection
• tagging songs
• etc.

We’re looking to build something that can socialise these sorts of behaviours more and share them with a group.  It’s the online equivalent of you coming over to my house, and me saying “Check out this new album I found the other day, I’ve been listening to it on repeat all day.” Not only that, it’s also about the subsequent interaction and discussion we have…. e.g. you saying “OMG. Vanilla Ice? You’ve been listening to that all day??” and then you calling up all my other friends to tell them what a loser I am.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on what happened yesterday.  Instead, let’s focus on what we’re doing today.  We’ve been thinking about what sorts of activities make sense, how people would want to share them and consume their different friends’ activities.  I happened to be fixing a couple of Last.fm Radio bugs today (random tangent: we should be pushing this live next week!), when it occurred to me we could do something neat with Last.fm tagging.  Long story short, I was able to throw together something quick today that seems to do the job:

It throws a tag icon into the love/ban area of the faceplate, and when clicking it pops up a gratuitously-translucent panel allowing you to see the Last.fm tags applied (both by yourself and other Last.fm users).  You can add new tags, as well as delete any personal tags you’ve tagged the track with.

Ultimately it’d be nice to commit these tags into the Songbird local library so you can neat things like arbitrarily sort or filter your library based on tags but that’ll require some more bird-side work.

For now, this is a cheap and easy tagging solution that gives me a “tagging” action that we can make use of for our larger plan of socialising Songbird interactions.  The work has been committed to SVN and should be available in tonight’s nightly add-ons build.

Dovecot 1.1.11 + managesieve + CMU Sieve Solaris pkgs

Wednesday, Mar 11. 2009  –  Category: Grommit, OpenSolaris

I’d been looking for a good way to do server-side mail filtering with client side configuration… and short of some lame CGI interfaces to editing your .procmailrc, I hadn’t found much until I discovered Sieve a few days ago.  To skip a long and boring story, I rebuilt a bunch of packages (yay for JDS’s spec build system) for the following:

• Dovecot IMAP server (1.1.11)
• Dovecot’s CMU Sieve plugin (1.1.6)
• Dovecot’s managesieve plugin (0.10.5)

Quick summary: Dovecot is a wicked awesome IMAP server.  Sieve provides a way of doing mail filtering.  managesieve is an protocol to allow users to modify their sieve filters via the IMAP protocol.

I use Roundcube Webmail on my server, and there is a super-nice Roundcube Managesieve plugin available.

So I built and installed my Dovecot packages, installed the Roundcube Managesieve plugin, and I’m off and flying with awesome client-configurable mail filtering while allowing the mail filtering itself to be done server-side.

I’ve made the packages available here (14 MB download).  This SVr4 pkg contains SFEdovecot, SFEdovecot-cmusieve, SFEdovecot-managesieve, and the SFEdovecot-root (configuration files) packages.

cliKball Growl/tray notifications

Monday, Mar 9. 2009  –  Category: Code

I made a small patch to cliKball’s Firefox extension to use the nsIAlertService to provide system notifications of new items/comments.  On the Mac this uses Growl notifications, on Windows it theoretically uses system tray notifications – though I haven’t tested it.

Download the following browserOverlay.js and drop it on top of your Firefox’s extension directory for the cliKball extension.  On my Mac, that’s:

~/Library/Application Settings/Firefox/Profiles/*.default/extensions/addon@happyfunlink.com/chrome/content

browserOverlay.js

This was patched against version 0.2.31.1235091994 of the extension.  Caveat emptor, buyer beware, no guarantees, etc. etc.

cliKball

Friday, Mar 6. 2009  –  Category: Linkage, Musings

I’ve been enthusiastically using cliKball a lot lately, and have become a big enough fan, I actually sent out a few invitations to friends to use it too.  I don’t normally do this (honestly, I tend to get annoyed at all the “Join my new Web 2.0 service!” invites I typically get), but cliKball has been so super cool, I succumbed to the invite thing.

Apologies to any friends I sent invites to that won’t use the service… to the few folks I sent invites to: it was only because you guys make prodigious use of bookmarks, or always have interesting stuff to share with me…

cliKball is sort of a del.icio.us + Twitter, all in one… it sits, unobtrusively, in your Firefox browser – and when you add a bookmark, all your followers see it (and your comments), and everyone can follow and have a conversation directly in the browser about it.  There are a bunch of us at Songbird who have started using it, mostly for sharing inane things we find hilarious, but I’m starting to find it useful for more serious things now too.  And in the vein of all things Webby, it’s got ATOM/RSS feeds… which I’m looking to pull into my blog at somepoint soon.

Anyway – go sign up.. I’m stevel on it.