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.

2 comments August 28th, 2008

best firefox 3 launch press article ever

seriously. i love firefox as much as the next guy… but this article cracked me up.

i love the accompanying photo - but is that really the best accompanying photo they found to run it with?

screenshot here in case the article changes:

5 comments June 18th, 2008

overstuffage

i’m packing for this weekend’s camping/climbing trip and my pack is exploding - and i’m not even bringing a tent. i’m trying to go light… minimal food, no tent (just a tarp + pad + sleeping bag). fortunately the weather looks good (all sun, no Tuolumne™ showers in store, and lows in the 40’s, possibly 30’s depending on elevation)… and yet my pack is stuffed.

it’s hard to go minimal when you’re packing climbing pro. i’m sitting here staring at a 2.5″ piece thinking “hrm, i can probably skip this” while the other voice in my head is picturing me pumped staring at a 2.5″ crack thinking “darn, that extra 2.5″ piece sure would be handy right about now”. i tend to err on the side of caution (okay okay fine, i probably don’t need 10 slings), but… well… it’s my life, right?

the “luxuries” i intend on packing: toothbrush and cards

cards are awesome. they’re fun… by yourself you’ve got solitaire, with groups you’ve got other games, they make a decent fire starter, and if worse comes to worse, you’ve got a place to scribble down your dying man’s last thoughts. (wonder what card i would choose to right on? probably ace of spades… how unimaginative)

Add comment June 18th, 2008

i’m a craigslist and climbing junkie

i’ve been craigslisting stuff like mad lately… old snowboards, old furniture, basically anything i can find in the basement that we’re not using i’ve put up on craigslist. it culminated this weekend with me selling my Audi A4 (which, mind you, was NOT in the basement)

i was hugely bummed when my A4 blew, but i’m glad i found a good home for it. the guy who bought it clearly knew cars, knew about VW/Audi’s, and is going to rebuild the engine himself and get it running again. that helped assuage my conscience a bit for selling my first car i ever loved (the ‘87 Thunderbird i totalled in high school doesn’t count)

zac, jaime, and i went to Castle Rock State Park on Saturday and climbed Castle Rock Falls. i’ve climbed it once before, but this was the first time i lead the main falls climb (100 feet of 5.8ish) up the face. i’d forgotten how beautiful and aesthetic a climb it was… we got out there early in the morning and soaked up the sun and had a great time. this was the first time i’d been belayed by zac on a lead climb, but it felt pretty good and pretty comfortable…. so hopefully we’re all good for next weekend’s climb up Cathedral Peak.

i’m really really psyched to go to Cathedral. i’m determined that this year will be the first year that doesn’t end in disaster of some kind. cross your fingers for me.

3 comments June 16th, 2008

euro and beer

two of my favourite things in the world… and they go hand in hand.

for what it’s worth - my money is on portugal or the dutch. if i had to choose one, i’d say the portuguese. but, given that england ain’t in it (curse you steve mcclaren!), i’m rooting for the dutch. (how can you not root for a team willing to go out and duel it in oranje?)

the dutch proved themselves well today with a sweet 3-0 drubbing of italy.

i’m loving this weather we’ve been having the past few days. wendy and i just got the house re-landscaped, so we have a beautiful gorgeous house… which reeks of mulch/compost. especially nice with the heat wave… mmm… chicken manure anybody? i spent a good chunk of saturday fighting the good fight against our bamboo jungle in the backyard. we have a gorgeous bamboo grove, and i wanted to pull out some of the dead bamboo in the middle. i got whipped quite a few times by some harsh slaps of bamboo for my trouble, but managed to thin out the grove a bit.

saturday night we had dinner at a wonderful Chinese Muslim restaurant that had fantastic food, but served no beer. (name/location left out to save one of the few restaurants that’s gone above and beyond the call of duty and deserved their tip) i went and asked the manager if i could go next door to the Chinese supermarket and bring in some beer. without skipping a beat, he told me to bring in a 6 pack and he’d put it in teapots and bring it to our table. 7 minutes and $5 later (really! $5!!!) i had a frosty 6 pack of Tsingtao. 3 minutes after that, we were pouring ice cold beer from a Chinese teapot. we left a big tip for those guys.

on sunday, zac, jaime, and i did some climbing at the local gym in preparation for our attack on Cathedral Peak coming up in a couple of weeks. we’re planning to hit up Castle Rock for some leader belay review for zac to make sure everything goes smoothly this year. i’m hoping this will be the year i finally tackle Cathedral with enough time to also do Eichorn’s Pinnacle at the top.

3 comments June 9th, 2008

yay history meme!

originally from planet gnome but it looks like the meme jumped worlds over to planet mozilla where i found it from dan mills (of weave fame).

wonder if it’ll jump worlds over to planet opensolaris too.. ?

[stevel@grommit:~] 501$ uname -a
SunOS grommit 5.11 snv_75 i86pc i386 i86pc
[stevel@grommit:~] 502$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
87 ls
81 cd
41 vim
38 ll
22 cat
18 svcs
14 java
12 svcadm
11 su
10 ps

1 comment April 14th, 2008

what’s going on…

…. cue sounds of 4 Non Blondes

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks since I left Sun. I’ve spent 2 weeks at Songbird now, and am starting to feel like less of the retarded-idiot-who-knows-nothing now. It’s been a challenge switching between two completely different jobs at two completely different companies. But damn if the commute to SF isn’t a helluva lot nicer (and a lot more fun…. riding a skateboard is orders of magnitude better than sitting idling spitting out noxious fumes on 880). Seriously, I don’t drive my car on weekdays anymore…. and that is just lovely.

I’ve been using a MacBook the past couple of weeks and I’m starting to adjust, but I still miss my Solaris environment. This is the first time I’ve used a Mac since busting out on Oregon Trail (”Your party has died of starvation”) in the third grade, so it’s been a while.

WE’S HATES THESE @)#(@)(#*%)@# KEYBINDINGS, YES WE’S DO

Seriously… hate ‘em. Just hate ‘em. The lack of virtual desktops and ZFS is a bummer too. Apparently the next release of MacOS fixes those though (though what’s up with ZFS read-only??), so I await that patiently.

Job wise, it’s been different. We’re pushing for a new developer release soon with a whole new accompanying developer portal. We’re really trying to push for developer adoption with the extensions and web page APIs we’ve been working on. I’ve been goofing off learning the webpage APIs (that brings up an interesting discussion I had with my boss: is it “webpage” or “web page”? wikipedia claims both are valid). It’s pretty awesome stuff - the interaction between the media library and the web is really starting to come together. More importantly, it’s not just an iTunes clone - the level of interaction available is a lot more two-way and dynamic than what you can do with iTunes.

Plus: it’s f-ing open. yeah, suck on that - closed proprietary DRM’d up-the-wazoo iTunes.

So that’s what’s new in the world of work.

Wendy and I are in Hawaii this week for her annual OMFS meeting, so I’ve been working in the hotel room trying not to stare out the window at the ocean and surfers. Fun, neh.

We’re going parasailing this afternoon and snorkeling tomorrow - so I’m looking forward to that. More importantly, we’re going to Nobu for dinner tonight: mmmmmm… as Campbell’s would say, that’s “mmm mmm good”

3 comments October 12th, 2007

twitter schmitter

so i confess. i totally don’t get the whole “micro-blogging” thing on twitter. i guess it’s convenient for blogging random little snippets here and there from your phone - but seriously, i swear, half the people i know doing so are doing it from their iPhones (yeah you Sara), or their otherwise keyboard-enabled smart phone and could just as easily blog it on their main blog.

is it for status updates of what people are doing?

am i going to twitter “taking a piss. why do people miss?”?

or “cleaning up my dog’s puke cause they ate dog poop and grass”?

i totally don’t get it.

/me ain’t hip. (and not just cause i emote with IRC actions either)

so here’s my micro blog: “woke up today totally into the idea of green t-shirts. need to get more somehow”

7 comments September 20th, 2007

“We only part to meet again”

I’m leaving Sun.

It’s been a gut-wrenching decision, but I got an offer to join a startup in SF that was just too interesting and exciting to pass up.

What’s more important is what I’m not leaving. I’m certainly not leaving the OpenSolaris community (while my participation may dial down somewhat, I still fully intend on being active in the lists, and serving in the OGB.) I’m not leaving the many many friends I’ve made in the past 4+ years working at Sun.

I believe very strongly in OpenSolaris; I believe that it will succeed, and that it will be a disruptive influence in both the proprietary/closed software world, as well as the open source world. I’m sad that I won’t have the opportunity to work on it as my day job anymore, but I will still eagerly participate and watch the progress from the outside as a non-Sun participant and contributor now.

It’s sad, and a little scary to leave a place that I’ve not only become comfortable at - but one that I love. I’ve loved working at Sun, I’ve had a blast, learned an immense amount of stuff, worked with some of the smartest people I know, and gotten to work on one of the coolest open source projects around.

I guess I feel that sometimes you have to spread your wings, leave the nest for a bit, and find a new nest.

16 comments September 17th, 2007

really? can you?

Got a postcard in the mail the other day from Team in Training saying they could get ME into the sold-out Nike Women’s Marathon.

I’d be impressed if they could. It’s tempting to try.

Add comment July 9th, 2007