that’s whacked

more last.fm goodness

Wednesday, Dec 31. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been working on some more on hooking up the various Last.fm radio streams into a directory of sorts.  Here’s a couple screenshots of what I’ve got so far:

In both screenshots you can see I’m logged in, with shortcuts to the 4 user stations (Your Library, Your Loved Tracks, Your Neighbourhood, and Your Recommendations) at the top right.

The right hand side is currently where I’m tracking a bunch of results… namely your most recently listened to stations, Last.fm recommended artist stations, your top tags’ stations, your top artist’s stations, as well as your friends and neighbours’ stations.

The main content area currently has a big honkin’ search box, and lets you search by artists, tags, and groups.

The first screenshot shows my Last.fm recommended artists on the right hand side, and on the left hand side it shows the results of searching for “killers”.  Every station has a quick “Play” link to immediately start playing the radio station… or you can click on the name/photo, and it’ll take you to a detail page, which is what I’ve shown in the second screenshot.

The detail page varies slightly depending on what you’re looking at:

• For artists, it will show the top tags applied to that artist, as well as artists Last.fm thinks are similar.
• For tags, it will show similar/related tags, as well as the top artists tagged with that tag.
• For users (which are the result of searching for a group, or when you click on your friends/neighbours in the right hand nav), it will show their top tags and top artists.
• In all views, clicking on the large detail photo/name of the station will take you off to the Last.fm webpage for that station for more information.

The UI undoubtedly needs polish and the eye of someone with better design skills than I… so I expect it’ll undergo some visual redesign as I get more feedback… but so far I’m quite pleased with this.  This extension is written all in JS, with all the UI done in HTML + jQuery, so it’s been quite easy to throw together (with fancy animations, natch).

last.fm radio

Monday, Dec 29. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

Since Ian left, I took over his prototype work on Last.fm radio support in Songbird.  I know I’ve said before that I  ♥ Last.fm, but I’ll say it again.. their use of semantic web technologies is fantastic…

Anyway, so far we’ve got support for the lastfm:// protocol, as well as support for redirection urls of the form http://last.fm/listen/*, so all the “Play your library” links, etc. you encounter as you browse Last.fm just work.  It’s hugely satisfying to just browse around the Last.fm site and click my friend’s radio stations and have them start playing inside of Songbird.

Some points of note from the screenshot:

• The previous-track, shuffle and repeat buttons become disabled.
• The Last.fm “Radio station” icon, and station name are displayed in the faceplate.
• “Now listening” works, and tracks you listen to on radio stations are scrobbled to your history.
• Last.fm is awesome and recognises the Songbird app ID as well as the fact that I’m tuned to my library’s radio station.
• EPSON has really annoying lame ads that prompt you to enter (redundant) user information that tricks you into clicking things in order to launch a pop-up.  BOOOO EPSON.

YABS on Songbird on OpenSolaris

Wednesday, Dec 17. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Photos, Songbird, Sun

YABS on Songbird on OpenSolaris

I just noticed that the YABS Feather looks awesome on Songbird on OpenSolaris.  The color and style of the skin just fit really well in terms of the blue highlights matching with the blue OpenSolaris default theme.

YABS is, quite possibly, my mostest favouritest Songbird Feather.

Add-on-Con & Mozilla’s Open House

Thursday, Dec 11. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

After yesterday’s Ubuntu Developer Summit, I headed over to the Mozilla Open House w/ the Ubuntu Mozilla-team guys. T’was good to hang out with the Moz folks… there was some interesting conversation over add-on versioning, the FF3.1 release train, AMO policies, and backwards/forwards-compatibility. Though really the best part of the night was getting to play with Mary Colvig’s new golden retriever, CJ. Here are the rest of the photos from the open house..

Today was spent at the first annual Add-on-Con. I watched the opening keynote panel, Brian King’s talk, Mark Finkle’s talk, the panel on cross-platform add-on development, and the lightning talks. Photos are here.. Thanks to Brian & Mark both for pimping Songbird in their talks

Brian’s talk was really interesting… especially where he mentions the future of AMO and has slides covering some of its upcoming roadmap. 1 billion add-ons is a phenomenal number. I definitely recommend flipping through his slides.

One of the cool things I saw at today’s talks was Yoono’s XUL/JS Profiler add-on for Firefox. In fact, I thought it was so cool I took advantage of the follow-up Internet Explorer session to port it to Songbird. The XPI for Songbird is here.

Ubuntu & Songbird, sitting in a tree…..

Thursday, Dec 11. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

I’ve spent the past two days down in Mountain View.  Yesterday I spent some time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit meeting with the great guys from the Ubuntu Mozilla-team to see about integrating Songbird into Ubuntu (ideally Jaunty, but we’ll see).  It’s a pretty common request from our Ubuntu users to get a Songbird .deb into Ubuntu’s repositories so users can easily ‘apt-get install songbird’.  Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as simply taking the GetDeb.net Songbird package and plopping that into an apt repo.

There are concerns from both the Ubuntu & Songbird side.  I’ll try to cover some of the major ones here:

• Security updates and backports for XULRunner. Ubuntu has XULRunner already… Firefox uses it in fact.  They want Songbird to use the system XULRunner so they only have to sustain and maintain one copy of XULRunner.  As it is currently, Songbird has its own private patched copy of XULRunner, which means the Ubuntu Mozilla-team would need to backport security fixes to both the system XULRunner and Songbird’s XULRunner.
• So why doesn’t Ubuntu just use Songbird’s XULRunner for both Firefox & Songbird?  Agreements with Mozilla.  In order to use the Firefox branding and trademarks, Ubuntu needs to maintain an approved XULRunner build that Mozilla blesses.  Putting in Songbird’s patches may regress Firefox which would lead to bad user impressions of Firefox and thus taint Mozilla & Firefox’s brand and image.
• Supporting Releases.  This is somewhat related to the security/backporting issue… but POTI (the company developing Songbird) only supports the most recently released version of Songbird.  We release roughly every 3 months… quite frequently!  So, we just released Songbird 1.0 last week.  If a XULRunner exploit comes out, we won’t back-port it Songbird 0.7 or 0.6 which we released earlier this year.  Ubuntu has a release guarantee which more or less means they would need to support a release or two back… not to mention their LTS (long term support) policy which means they’d be supporting ancient versions of Songbird which we (POTI) wouldn’t even think once (let alone twice) about supporting.

Putting a Songbird package into the universe would allow for users to be able to install it, whilst allowing Ubuntu to have some more leeway in terms of having a less-restrictive sustaining guarantee.  It’s definitely a nascent idea at the moment, but hopefully we’ll make some progress on proceeding down this path so that Songbird will be a one command install away for Ubuntu users… stay tuned.

Update: My wording was perhaps poor… I didn’t mean to give the impression that there is not security in universe, or that security policies are somehow lax vs. main.  Specifically, universe might be a better option than main because instead of having to backport individual patches to the supported-release version (as would have to happen in main), we could instead just rev to the latest Songbird release (thus shifting some of the maintenance from the Ubuntu Mozilla-team over to the Songbird developers).  This doesn’t alleviate all concerns though as we still need to ensure we have a process for keeping Songbird packages in universe up to date.

Update 2: I’ve had it pointed out that my wording on “into universe instead of main” was also confusing.  Prior to Wednesday, I didn’t realise the difference between universe & main (not being an Ubuntu user myself).. and was under the impression that it was just a single level of packages/repositories… hence the “instead of” wording.  Certainly asac and the Ubuntu guys undoubtedly had been planning universe all along.

FOSSCamp

Friday, Dec 5. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

Aside from 2 hours spent idling on 880 today, I spent most of the day at FOSSCamp… congrats to Jorge of Ubuntu for putting together a great unconference. I sat in on a session led by Jono regarding how distributions (with a bias towards Ubuntu of course) could facilitate less fearful (my emphasis, not his) experimentation with packages by users. He raised some good points that were inhibiting users from trying out new programs because of how programs wouldn’t (or couldn’t) necessarily clean up after themselves. From the OpenSolaris perspective, IPS + ZFS snapshots obviously solves this quite easily… it was interesting to see people discussing various solutions that seemed more like workarounds to me. Honestly - it seems better/less-work to just port ZFS (or implement filesystem-level snapshots on Reiser/ext3/etc.) and use that.

After a lunch break graciously provided by Google, I sat in on an interesting session about open source business models. This was sort of a free-form session that had the potential to be really interesting, though the 1 hour was not nearly enough. We spent half an hour listing open-source companies that were successful (monetarily speaking) and a few that weren’t). We then classified them into various classifications of business models (acquisition, consulting, support, carrier/affiliate/referral, etc.) and then tried to break it down into pros and cons and general thoughts about each business model. It was an interesting exercise, and it was interesting to discuss some companies (big and small) that have tried (or are trying) with multiple models (Sun being an oft-repeated example).

At this point I broke off to have a session about visualising digital media collections. This is something I’m pretty interested in to try and break the spreadsheet style of navigating and interacting with my music collection. I’ve done one experiment with ♪Photo, and am interested in doing some more, so I wanted to chat with some folks to see different ways people interact with their media libraries. Dan Mosedale of Mozilla Messaging fame was there and brought up some interesting points on how interacting with mail contacts shared some interesting organisational challenges with media. We talked some about music recommendation services, and anti-recommendation services (more on this later). mpt of Ubuntu offered up some good thoughts on trying to classify artists by similarity … perhaps either by visual organisation (e.g. visual ordering), or as a way to influence playback. Dan mentioned it would be interesting to choose moods of music for playback (citing Tangerine as a similar model) so that he could play ‘upbeat’ or ‘mellow’ music based on properties like BPM.

At this point, Chris Blizzard wandered in… it was great to meet him finally after reading many of his blog entries from Planet Mozilla. From here we diverged into showing off a few other features of the newly launched Songbird 1.0, resulting in Chris installing it for the first time. Yay!

From there we went next door for Dan’s talk on Mozilla Messaging where there were some good (and opposite end-of-the-spectrum) questions from Ubuntu folks interested in Thunderbird on the enterprise, and Thunderbird on mobile devices.

At the end of that session Jorge brought a few folks over who had just installed Songbird for the first time who had some really great praise and comments for us. It’s super gratifying to have someone come up who has just installed Songbird for the first time and gets it… especially having worked so hard on it for the past year. We got lots of warm praise and supportive words for getting Songbird into Ubuntu’s repositories.

To that end, I’m really looking forward to going back down to Google again on Wednesday to meet with Jorge and the rest of the Ubuntu MozillaTeam to go about seeing what we can do to resolve that.

first commit!

Thursday, Dec 4. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

yay… just got my first commit to Mozilla’s mozilla-central repo in! this was for bmo bug 354857, and to be honest… was a patch i stole from matt anyway. you can see it’s a pretty small one-liner, but it’s still nice to get something committed.

one of the things i’ve been working trying to work on is getting Songbird’s XULRunner patches upstreamed as much as possible back to mozilla-central. from my discussions with various distribution maintainers, our #1 roadblock to getting Songbird into distros is the reluctance to ship multiple XULRunners. unfortunately, upstreaming is… non-trivial. some of the patches are pretty Songbird-specific, and will need to be massaged to be more generalised for any app. additionally some of the other patches need to be brought up to date for mozilla-central’s tip.

i’ve only managed to get two up so far (i’ve been tracking the status on Songbird’s wiki). these have, by far, been the two easiest patches - but they’ve been a good exercise to familiarise myself with the review and commit process that Mozilla follows. hopefully i can start tackling some of the more complex ones now.

i <3 mountain view

Tuesday, Dec 2. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

well, <3 may be a strong wordemoticon. but it’s certainly an alright place to spend a few days… which is what i’ll be doing for the next week or so.

this friday & saturday i’ll be at FOSSCamp. as with any unconference there isn’t a set agenda…

next wednesday i’ll be dropping by the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Jaunty Jackalope planning along with preed. i’m looking forward to seeing Jorge again, and meeting the rest of the Ubuntu MozillaTeam. hopefully we’ll make some progress on the packaging of Songbird in Ubuntu.

wednesday evening, since i’m down in mountain view anyway, i plan on swinging by the Mozilla Open House at the MoCo offices.

and lastly, on thursday i’ll be at Add-on-Con. should be a cool extremely-focused conference (on cross-browser add-on development), and i’m looking forward to quite a few of the talks.

Songbird 1.0!

Tuesday, Dec 2. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

We launched 1.0!

Alfred built Songbird 1.0 packages and tarballs for OpenSolaris (SPARC & x86), which I’ve linked off our contributed builds page. Hopefully they’ll find their way into a pkg repository near you soon.

photos and re-designs

Wednesday, Nov 26. 2008  –  Category: Grommit, Photos

Personal stuff first: On a whim, I bought stevel.me and decided to keep a photoblog using Wordpress and YAPB. I also reorganised my photo gallery.

Stuff for the other grommit residents: I installed a bunch of new themes to the grommit gallery, as well as turning on a bunch of new Gallery plugins. None of the defaults have changed, but if you play around with the album settings you should see some new features.

For some reason or another, I’m quite fond of the square thumbnails plugin. I notice between my new blog theme, my photoblog theme, and my new gallery theme… I seem to really be into grids, squares, and lines… the square thumbnails must fit nicely into those in a uniform space sort of way.