mashTape @ mozdev
For Songbird 0.6 I built the SHOUTcast add-on, and for Songbird 0.7 I put together the Concerts add-on. Now that 0.7 is wrapping up and (knock on wood) I think I’m done with Concerts, it’s time to move onto my next add-on project…
For our next release my plans are to revisit and completely re-whack my very first Songbird add-on: mashTape. When I joined Songbird, one of the first things I thought was über-cool was going to be how simple it would be to pull this sort of contextual information into your media player from the web. Unfortunately, when I first joined Songbird - my XUL/JS was… well… about what you’d expect from someone who’d been doing systems/kernel development since undergrad. 
mashTape has been in need of some serious love for a few months now, so I’m looking forward to getting the chance to rewhack it. as part of that, i’m moving mashTape over to Mozdev, so you can find it’s new home at http://mashtape.mozdev.org
you can see webpage design is clearly not my forté, but, ATM, all i’m interested in is some solid good Mercurial extension hosting (and having access to their project-owners mailing list ;-)). maybe when i get some free time (hah), i’ll make a better webpage for it.
[tags: Songbird]
Add comment 2008 August 4, 12:11
OSCON Day 3
Day 3 (Friday) for me was … well… rough. I woke up feeling completely nauseous. Given that I had done a wee bit of drinking the night before, I was inclined to think it was alcohol-related. (Good thing I had that handy dandy hangover kit from Beerforge!)
After spending until the full 12:00 checkout time puking in the toilet, I was ready to write-off alcohol for the rest of my life. Many many many apologies to Eric Jung of Mozdev for ducking out in the middle of our lobby conversation to go throw up in the hotel lobby bathroom. Many apologies to the folks who also witnessed me puking off the side of a MAX platform (fortunately it was one near the airport which was all rock and weeds off the platform)… and apologies to the folks at the security line at the airport when I went rushing past to the bathroom to go puke… and to the folks on the plane who had to watch me rush to the bathroom three times en route (you might (or might not) be happy to know only two of those times resulted in puking, the third was mostly dry heaves).
At this point, I realised it might not be the alcohol. By the time I landed in SF and puked once more (sorry SFO deplaning passengers!), I was pretty sure it was food poisoning. Talking to my wife (who, unlike me, actually HAS medical training), my er… other symptons, definitely seemed to point to food poisoning.
Food poisoning is a really really really unbelievably shitty thing to have when you’re flying/traveling. And that’s all I have to say about that.
So in the end, after a couple days of being sick to my stomach - I’m pretty much all better.
And I take back my thoughts at writing off alcohol. Sweet sweet tasty beer.
(and one final apology to anyone reading this who gets offended by posts about puking)
[tags: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird]
2 comments 2008 July 28, 22:03
OSCON Day 2
Thursday was our second day in the booth. We had the usual booth traffic, answering lots of question re: Songbird, talking to folks who were pretty familiar with Songbird but were just waiting for a few more features before they would consider it 1.0. From the people I talked to, by far the biggest feature was smart playlists, followed by watch folders, and CD rip/burn.
Thursday was also the first day I actually went to some of the sessions; per my usual routine, I swung by the “State of” lightning talks, and as usual, they were MC’d by the excellent Josh Burkus, showing no signs of his sumo beat-down from the night before. I watched Mark Shuttleworth give his 5 minute overview of Bazaar (I had no idea he was into Bzr, go figure), followed by Brian King and his Mozdev summary which was great to hear. I continually think Mozdev is a fantastic resource for Mozilla application and add-on developers, but is under-marketed. Glynn gave an excellent round-up of OpenSolaris - the launch of the OpenSolaris distro and the continuing migration to Mercurial being the two big notable points. His slides were excellent and did a great job of not being text-heavy, and just illustrating his points. Those 3 lightning talks made me realise that one of the key elements to my public speaking that I lack is an Imperial accent (Mark, Brian, and Glynn posessing S. African, Irish, and Irish/Kiwi respectively). Sigh. The best part of the lightning talks were when Ken Drachnik (from Sun) was AWOL from his Glassfish talk (IIRC, due to a family emergency?), and Josh picked a random person (who happened to be Karl Fogel) to give the talk. Fogel did an amazing lightning talk… probably the best lightning talk I’ve ever seen, and it happened to be for a topic he knew nothing about! Ken’s slides were… well, quite frankly, awful. One of them had the usual Sun corporate slide footer proclaiming “Sun confidential/internal use only”, but that aside - they were just full of buzzwords and way way way too text heavy. Fogel did a hilarious job picking them apart.
Following that I had my 50 minute session on Songbird. I focused mostly on the idea of building media/web mashups, incorporating dynamic web content into media player add-ons to deliver really cool contextual information. I showed my usual mashTape, and Flickr add-ons. To show webpage integrations I showed my music explorr page, and ian’s wicked cool Google Maps mashup. Lastly I showed some cool Media Views (one of our new features since FOSDEM which was the last big event I demo’d Songbird at) including pvh’s cool new Bubbles view, as well as his Metrics view. I think I had about 25ish people in the audience, of which about 6 or 7 got engaged and asked questions during or after the talk, so I’m reasonably happy with that turnout.
After my talk, we did some more booth duty, and then had some really good hallway discussion about the state of XULRunner with some Mozdev, ActiveState/Komodo, and MailCo guys.
By this point I was already pretty exhausted, having spent most of my morning fretting about my talk. I wandered back by our booth which was already packed up (thanks to Allyson for steadfastly holding down the fort!), and met up with some of my fellow OpenSolaris folks (my fellow OGB members gman, alanc, and plocher, and comay) where we headed out for a quick bite to eat and some ruminating upon the state of OpenSolaris and its community. After a very
pleasant (or so I thought at the time) dinner, we headed over to the Bossanova Ballroom for our grand fiesta: the Beerforge Party.
Beerforge was the bash we (Songbird, Mozilla, OpenSourcery, Jive, Vidoop, & OSL) had been planning for the past few months. It was great to finally meet Ulili & Thomas from Mozilla & OpenSourcery, and as far as I can tell - the party was a success. It seemed like people enjoyed the scene, the food, and certainly the drinks (shout out to Vidoop for the open bar!).
Post-Beerforge, the OpenSourcery guys clearly hadn’t had enough, and hosted their own after-after-after party at their office around the corner. Much drinking and Spy Hunter playing commenced.
[tags: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird]
Add comment 2008 July 28, 21:57
plocher vs. jörg sumo wrestle
and now… the photos you’ve been waiting:
John Plocher vs. Jörg Schilling sumo wrestling at the Sun OSCON party…
schilling: “beware the schilly!”
plocher: “hey. i just used the star option to untie your shoelaces”
[tags: OpenSolaris]
Add comment 2008 July 28, 21:48
OSCON Day 1
You can find my photos from the second day of OSCON here.
Woke up early and headed in to catch Tim O’Reilly’s keynote where he made some awesome points on data-lockdown, loss of data-portability freedom, and the programmable web which pretty much made my point for me for my Songbird talk the next day. 
After that, we headed down to the booth (which Jay Patel had freaking awesomely setup the night before for us - thanks Jay!) I spent most of my day here at the booth answering questions, talking about Songbird, and of course selling our t-shirts (proceeds went to the Mozilla Foundation). The booth was fantastic, it was great talking to a ton of people about Songbird. We heard a bunch of great feedback and talked to a lot of people who were familiar with it, had run it in the past, and were just waiting for it to get to 1.0. I also had a lot of great discussion with Moz, MailCo, and Miro guys. I’ll post a separate blog of some of the issues and topics we talked about.
I got to see a ton of familiar friends on the floor… Intel Dave, and Intel Max, my many friends and fellow OGB members from Sun, all the folks from MindTouch Deki, and of course a ton of folks from Mozilla & Mozdev.
That evening I went to the Mozdev BOF where we chatted about extension development, and some tricks and tools for building extensions. Following that I attended the Mindtouch party for a bit to say hi and chat with Deki folks, and then ended my night at the Sun party.
Highlights from the Sun party were the copious gin & tonics, just barely losing to gman in air hockey (10-9! damnit!), watching plocher and joerg schilling sumo wrestle (it was close, but I think plocher won), and watching Postgres (Josh) & MySQL (Monty) sumo wrestle (MySQL schooled Postgres).
[tags: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird]
1 comment 2008 July 24, 17:23
OSCON Day 0
You can find photos from the first day here
To recap, on the first day I attended John Resig’s talk on “Secrets of JS Libraries” (I saved a local copy of the slides, but forgot where he put the PDF online) which was great. I think it was probably tough for him given the disparity of skill sets in the audience… I’m glad I didn’t have to do a 4 hour preso 
After jeresig’s talk, I was coerced was happy to be involved in an OpenSolaris podcast with David Comay, Glynn Foster, and Barton George. We discussed contribution and governance issues, as well as package contributions and maintenance.
After my podcast and some time spent working on my slides, we ended up at Jax with a bunch of other Mozilla & Python dudes where I finally got a chance to meet with Justin Erenkrantz (who ran for the OGB this term) where we chatted about OpenSolaris amongst other stuff.
After dinner, I headed out to Teardrop, a brilliant cocktail lounge with a couple of Moz folks, Mikeal Rogers & Jay Patel. Mikeal & Clint’s work on a UI automation test framework for Mozilla/XUL apps sounds really promising, and I’m looking forward to checking it out (obviously for our own QA automation, but I’m also wondering if it’d be a cheap easy way to do external scripting of Songbird’s UI with it)
[tags: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird]
Add comment 2008 July 24, 17:08
really need a 4th
went down to Castle Rock State Park this afternoon with Jaime & Zac again. we went back to a place i haven’t been in almost 6 years: The Underworld. spooky sounding name for a great secluded bit of rock.
i’ve decided i want to make one more trip back up to Shasta to climb at Castle Crags (yes confusing, Castle Crags & Castle Rock are two very different places - but i love them both). there is this fantastic (3 out of 3 stars on rock quality) 5.8ish 8-pitch 1000 foot climb that i’m dying to do.
minor problem: we have 3 climbers. we need a 4th, and more specifically - we need a 4th who can comfortably lead 5.8/5.9 trad (sorry no bolts). anyone around in september sometime and fancy a weekend trip up to Mt. Shasta?
Billy Goat’s Tavern in Shasta (a short 10 minute drive away after the climb) is a fantastic post-climb brew+burger.
1 comment 2008 July 19, 20:29
SHOUTcast add-on, now more international friendly
I just pushed version 0.5.0 of the SHOUTcast Directory add-on for Songbird which adds a preference feature for allowing users to type in a comma-delimited list of genres. Interestingly, I knew this would be a requested feature when we pushed 0.4.8 in conjunction with Songbird 0.6, but I didn’t know how much. Turns out a lot of international folks wanted to be able to list different language genres, and that this missing feature was a lot more popular than I expected.
Anyway, version 0.5.0 supports this now. Time to get back to my OSCON prep…
[tags: Songbird]
Add comment 2008 July 18, 22:53
you say goodbye, i say hello
or rather, i guess i should be saying “good to see you again”.
the OpenSolaris fan inside of me is sad to see my good friend Patrick Finch leave Sun. having seen his expertise and impact from both inside Sun and outside Sun, he will be missed greatly. Patrick has always been one of the most well-thought-out and eloquent supporters of OpenSolaris (as much as it pains me to admit that a Liverpool FC fan can be eloquent, I’ll concede that he is indeed eloquent). he’s had a huge impact on open source strategy at Sun, and i’m bummed that Sun and OpenSolaris shall no longer have his services (hopefully we’ll always have his support though).
the Songbird and Mozilla fan inside of me is super-psyched and happy to say that Patrick is joining Mozilla though! he’ll be joining as their European marketing manager, and i have no doubt that he will totally rock at his new gig. i’m looking forward to seeing Patrick at many more conferences and get-togethers in the future, chatting about how Songbird and Mozilla can do more and collaborate more to build our Mozilla posse, and, of course, continually discussing EPL, UEFA, and all things football (though preferably English).
so to all my friends @ Mozilla & Songbird - give a warm welcome and shout-out to Patrick.
[tags: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird]
1 comment 2008 July 14, 21:11
yay for scm-migration
The scm-migration-dev team (in charge of getting ON moved to Mercurial) did its tools putback today. Congratulations to the entire team. That’s a huge huge huge step to the upcoming migration to Mercurial.
Wish I coulda been there for the celebratory drinks.
[tags: OpenSolaris]
Add comment 2008 July 10, 19:18
| Previous Posts |
