that’s whacked

OSCON Day 2

Monday, Jul 28. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

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.

plocher vs. jörg sumo wrestle

Monday, Jul 28. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

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”

OSCON Day 1

Thursday, Jul 24. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

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).

OSCON Day 0

Thursday, Jul 24. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

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)

you say goodbye, i say hello

Monday, Jul 14. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird

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.

yay for scm-migration

Thursday, Jul 10. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

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.

busy busy busy

Tuesday, May 20. 2008  –  Category: Food, OpenSolaris, Songbird

man, it’s been a hectic past week. i’ve been swamped at work with my usual stuff plus building a cool Shoutcast directory add-on for Songbird that i’m hoping will make it out wiht Songbird 0.6 in a couple of weeks.

we’re close to launching our new developer wiki, and our new add-ons site which i’m super psyched about. our current add-ons site has…. some issues, and our new one looks fantabulous. plus i’m hoping once we get that out, our nest team can turn some eyes over to figuring out just wtf is going on with our translation/localisation site. man, that site needs love more than vanilla ice.

to all my p.o.o.-lovin’ friends, one of the things the new Songbird add-ons site will have is support for other platforms… including both OpenSolaris x86 & SPARC. so you guys who have emailed me asking how you can install add-ons will some love soon enough. even you SPARC desktop users… seriously.

in more fun news, we’ve been talking with our friends @ mozilla (hi mary!) for a few weeks, and are now planning an über cool party with a bunch of other peeps at OSCON for july. we’re still working out the details, but it promises to be pretty rad.

in other random personal news, i finally got the ‘stevel’ username on twitter. cheer. twitter customer service FTW.

alright, that’s all. i’m off to go make more ice cream sandwiches. many thanks to danielle and henry, you guys rock. anyone who gets invited over for dinner and brings champagne, lychees, fresh ice cream, and cookies either truly loves us or wants us to die a beautiful yummy death. regardless of what your motives were, dessert was (and continues to be, with the leftovers) delicious.

opensolaris jobs!

Friday, May 16. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

it’s nice to see the opensolaris-jobs list being used. jim put a link to all 3 jobs posted, hence my link to his blog post since i’m too lazy to copy and paste ‘em directly here.

what jim didn’t mention though is how kick ass the OpenSolaris Engineering team is. seriously, i encourage any qualified people to apply for those jobs. the team is fantastic, completely supportive, and is still to this date, the best team i’ve ever worked with. (at Songbird, i’m a team of one… and… well, let’s face it – i ain’t got nothing on the Tonic/OpenSolaris Engineering team).

… and to whomever is lucky enough to land the SysAdmin role… well… i’m sorry, you have my profoundest apologies for anything and everything i was responsible for. really, truly, sorry.

updated rtorrent & libtorrent packages for Solaris

Thursday, May 8. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris

was helping out a friend and updated my rtorrent/libtorrent packages for Solaris. as before, there are three packages, SFWsigc++, SFWtorrent, and SFWrtorrent.

these install, per the companion CD convention, to /opt/sfw

• SFWsigc++-2.0.17.pkg (1.8MB)
• SFWtorrent-0.12.2.pkg (17MB)
• SFWrtorrent-0.8.2.pkg *(1.8MB)

enjoy..

OpenSolaris build support landed in Songbird!

Wednesday, May 7. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, Songbird

woot woot poot poot!

preed just landed (here, and here) alfred’s last two remaining patches for bug 7800: Songbird would be even more cross-platform with OpenSolaris/Solaris support!

so as of now, OpenSolaris support is a first-class citisen in the Songbird SVN repo. while we won’t be able provide QA coverage, i’m bringing up a machine here with OpenSolaris 2008.05 that i hope to turn into a buildbot so we can at least monitor and know when checkins break the OpenSolaris build.

needless to say, i’m pretty psyched at my two favourite open source projects getting it on.

but what’s really cool is go take a look at bug 7800… i mentioned this at our session at the DevSummit on Sunday: this was a fantastic example of an external contributor working directly via forums and via our Bugzilla, getting code review, updating patches, etc. etc. the list of patches and comments is probably our longest yet actually.