RIP Gene

As Geoff posted, Gene Saunders just passed away recently. I never met him in person, but only knew him from our SecularLiberalGeeks list, where I always appreciated (and got a great laugh) out of his views, links, and commentary he passed on.

He’ll be missed.

[tags: Sun]

Add comment 2008 September 29, 14:03

Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?

… that provocative question is the title for InfoWorld’s latest article here. I saw the article come through on one of the lists I’m on, and well… it’s crap.. the author tries to pass it off as an objective article debating the future of Solaris. To present both sides, he gives:

• 14 paraphrased paragraphs fed to him by the Linux Foundation executive director detailing why Linux is better.

• 4 paragraphs from a Sun marketing director on why Solaris is better.

hrm.

Here’s the thing…. I like both Linux and OpenSolaris. I’m not sure why all this animosity has to exist? What does (Linux Foundation Executive Director) Jim Zemlin have against OpenSolaris that makes him make unfounded claims^Wlies for? I’d be much happier if we went head to head on technology instead of FUD (which, I might point out, is something Linux-heads used to decry Microsoft for). In fact, may I point to an article from May of 2007 in Businessweek where none other than Jim Zemlin himself asks Microsoft to stop engaging in FUD (though that particular FUD was around IP and patents).

Perhaps Jim is scared because his empty claims that nobody uses DTrace or ZFS are just that… empty.

I was at the office today listening to my coworkers talking about improving the performance of Songbird, and how we can optimise things like our database interactions. What amazing tool are we using to do this? Shark & DTrace. What platform are we doing this on? Mac OS X. What platforms benefit from this work? Every other platform… our Linux builds, our Windows builds, and yes… even the OpenSolaris builds built by our community.

I was at the Toronto MozCamp last weekend and Mozilla developers there were talking about how they use DTrace to profile and improve performance of Firefox and XULRunner. I’m willing to bet anything that they aren’t doing that on OpenSolaris (correct me if I’m wrong mfinkle).

So uh… yeah, sorry Jim. But none of the people I cited above are “Sun Microsystems sales representatives”. The technology is good. Don’t spread your own FUD about how nobody is using it, or how it has no traction when you have nothing to back that claim up. I bet a helluva lot more people are using DTrace than SystemTap. Here’s the thing… when you spread baseless slander like that instead of actually talking about your own technologies, and citing concrete technical reasons why they are better (why not talk about LVM, or SystemTap?), then you just sound like …. well, like one of those Sun sales reps you just slagged.

My favourite bit was where he suggests Sun should GPL DTrace & ZFS instead. In two consecutive paragraphs, Jim goes from (paraphrased): “Nobody even uses that stuff, we have competing technology!” to “Sun should give it to us.”. Nice, really slick there Jim.

Continuing in this vein of poorly-written drivel, the article then goes on into why OpenSolaris is better, saying ‘”I think Solaris is absolutely a great OS,” says Neil Wilson, a former Sun employee who later left the OpenDS project. Solaris is “absolutely far superior to Linux for the cases where the hardware support is there,” he adds.’ This is… might I venture, more of the same unsubstantiated crap. Only here at least it’s one sentence instead of 14 paragraphs. Say WHY it’s better, instead of just a random quote with no basis or facts to back it up.

I’d like to see us move away from this kind of crap-journalism to more objective articles grounded in technical facts and benchmarks than just ghost-written pieces by directors peppered with random quotes.

[tags: OpenSolaris]

2 comments 2008 September 25, 21:31

World Affairs…. in Football Kit

Here are the two 2008-2009 football jerseys for two of the largest teams in the English Premiership. Newcastle United is sponsored by Northern Rock, while Manchester United is sponsored by AIG.

Northern Rock, back in February of 2008, due to heavy losses sustained from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, was taken over by the British Government.

AIG, just this week, due to heavy losses sustained from the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, was taken over by the U.S. government.

We should have more foreign governments competing in the English Premiership…. maybe eventually we can all just play some footy to decide world affairs instead of having stupid wars?

[tags: Football]

2 comments 2008 September 17, 21:07

Toronto MozCamp

Can’t believe I forgot to blog it, but I’ll be in Toronto for the MozCamp/DeveloperDay event next Monday and Tuesday. If you’re around, come by the Seneca campus for a couple of days of good talks and workshops. I’m really looking forward to the workshops to do some cool add-on building.

[tags: Songbird]

Add comment 2008 September 9, 21:39

translating mashTape

I’ve just uploaded a pre-release of mashtape 0.2.0pre to BabelZilla to try and get some localisations ready so that when mashTape 0.2.0 ships with the next Songbird release, it’ll be available in some languages other than English.

If you’re on BabelZilla, I could use some help localising mashTape - you can sign up to help localise it here. (you must be logged into BabelZilla)

[tags: Songbird]

4 comments 2008 September 8, 22:51

more mashTape screenies

I’ve made a bunch of good progress on mashTape this week, finishing up the RSS & video providers today, and adding a bunch of new RSS providers. The number of sources mashTape now has by default includes: * Last.fm (artist bio, photo, and tags) * Freebase (discography, band members) * MusicBrainz (related links) * Flickr (photos) * Google News (rss) * Google Blog Search (rss) * Yahoo News (rss) * MTV News (rss) * Hype Machine (rss) * Digg (rss) * YouTube (music video) * Yahoo Music (music video)

Here are a bunch of screenies of how the interface is currently looking. Obviously nothing is finalised, but all the data hookups are more or less functional. There are no preferences hooked up yet, but I hope to work on that soon.

[tags: Songbird]

2 comments 2008 September 3, 20:14

mashTape revamp

komi and i have been re-whacking mashTape for our next Songbird release. for anyone interested in following along, you can pull my in-development versions from my handy dandy Mozdev Mercurial repo @ http://hg.mozdev.org/mashtape

at any given moment, it may be working or broken; but as of right now (35:c885f305f9a6), it’s working… and working quite well. the visual design hasn’t been finalised yet; komi is working through more wireframe ideas, and i’ll start implementing those tomorrow - but i’ve got some basics in and working in order to test my functional pieces.

specifically, i’ve got my architecture in place for add-ons to provide additional XPCOM components of their own as drop-in service providers. the new mashTape has a few different classes of providers:

• artist bio (e.g. Wikipedia, Last.fm, AMG..)
• RSS feeds (e.g. Digg, Google News..)
• photos (e.g. Flickr, SmugMug..)
• flash/video (e.g. YouTube, Yahoo Music Videos..)

so far i’ve implemented a Last.fm artist bio provider, Flickr & SmugMug photo providers, and Digg & Google News RSS providers. the new mashTape will allow users to more dynamically configure which service providers they want to see (and disable ones the user doesn’t care about). as part of the new mashTape redesign, i’m making more use of iframes and JS libraries within the XUL tab panel to get some nice animation effects (cheaper too!). you can see this if you try out the in-development release… the Flickr pane animates considerably smoother now with significantly reduced CPU load.

the screenshots don’t do the new Flickr pane justice, but here are some obligatory screenshots:

if you have any comments, i’d love to hear ‘em.

[tags: Musings]

2 comments 2008 August 28, 21:42

Web Media History

In previous versions of Songbird we had a “Web Media History” node that was basically a media library of all the media you encountered on the web. It was somewhat confusing to new users, so we took it out of Songbird 0.7. Past users of Songbird seem to be missing it though, so I built a quick add-on this morning to re-enable the node.

Right now there isn’t an icon that makes it look good in Gonzo, but komi assures me he’ll fix that

You can download it here

[tags: Media Web, Songbird]

Add comment 2008 August 12, 11:42

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]

3 comments 2008 July 28, 22:03