that’s whacked

Philips & Songbird

Friday, Jan 8. 2010  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

By now you’ve seen the news about our partnership with Philips.  Big chunks of the team have been cranking pretty hard on this partner release and we’re super excited to ship some things we’ve been working on for a while, and to get Songbird into the hands of even more users. The feedback has already been tremendous; thanks to everyone for your support!

As you know we’re big believers in openness and as such we try to share our development plans and progress with you as regularly and freely as we can. This isn’t as straightforward when other companies are involved — especially large, global, public companies like Philips. So we apologise for not being able to talk openly, sooner, about this new relationship but we hope, even as a bit of a surprise, you can appreciate why this is a good thing for the company, the products, the platform, and all of our users. As always we’ll strive to give you an early heads up whenever we can.

While there’s obviously some special work we’ll do for Philips, we don’t think about this as one-off work.  Much of what we do for them, is work we’ve been planning  to do for all Songbird consumers.  For Philips, there’s certainly a custom feather and the add-ons that are important to them and their customers. We’re working to make sure that all of what we build is valueable for you and for partners … with as few exceptions as possible.

Our partnership with Philips is a great step for us — it drives distribution, revenue, and an even tighter connection to the CE side of the world. Of course the partnership means more features to consider and tradeoffs to balance – but in this case, that’s a great problem to have.  There is lots of overlap in desired features from both sides, so this probably means you’ll see some things accelerated, which is good news for all Songbird consumers. We know that users around the globe using the software and sending us their ideas ultimately results in a better experience for everyone. So keep your suggestions coming.

There’s no resting on this week’s milestone achievement, we’re working fast and furiously on the next release, which will hit early this year. Stay tuned for more as we move continue evolving plans and working through development.

Thanks again for all of your support!

Photos from MozCamp EU 2009

Tuesday, Oct 27. 2009  –  Category: OpenSource, Photos, Songbird

Finally got around to uploading my photos from MozCamp EU 2009 in Prague

Again, just want to say thanks and a huge shout-out to the Mozilla Europe gang.  They put on a great event.  One of the most socially inviting and warm conferences I’ve been to.

MozCamp EU 2009 (Prague)

Friday, Oct 9. 2009  –  Category: OpenSource

many thanks to the fine folks at Mozilla Europe for hosting a brilliant MozCamp EU 2009 conference. most people on PMO have summed up things already, but here are my few fleeting thoughts

• logistically, the conference went beautifully.  from the transit tickets upon arrival, to the boat trip cruise, to the transit ticket back to the airport thoughtfully tucked into the conference bag with directions on how to get back to the airport.  nice touch!
• i thought of this more as a “social” conference rather than an “educational” conference.  to be honest, most of what was presented was stuff i knew about already (JetPack, Thunderbird, etc.) but i was occasionally pleasantly surprised (Stratified Javascript <drooool>).
• i’d hoped for some more hands-on type talks in the Developer track, and indeed, i modeled my Songbird demo/talk on that presumption.  turns out i was wrong.  i hope folks who came to my Songbird talk at least found it useful.
• i loved loved loved LOVED getting to meet Mozilla and Songbird community folks i’d not yet met face to face before.  getting to meet our localiser-extraordinares Nukeador and Goofy was brilliant, and getting to meet AlfredKayser (one of our most prolific Featherers) was just great!
• generally just seeing old friends, and making new ones was a helluva lotta fun.  Prague is a great city to socialise in, and made for a great conference venue.

Songbird is looking for a few good Mozilla Developers

Wednesday, Jun 10. 2009  –  Category: Code, OpenSource, Songbird

Songbird has a few open positions for Mozilla developers. If you’re interested, or know of someone who is – please checkout the job description and apply for the job!

OSDC.tw: making conferences fun again

Sunday, Apr 19. 2009  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Songbird, Travel

I spent yesterday at OSDC.tw (Open Source Developers Conference, Taiwan), organised by Hsin-Chan Chien.  I presented Songbird, giving an intro to the app, talking about the ways it could be extended, and demo’ing the app and some of the extensions/Feathers available.  (If you look at the slides, there are a good number that I included that I didn’t get to speak to as I was trying to plan for the contingency of not having Internet and needing to fill in the demo time).

What struck me about the conference was the community feel.  This is easily up there with FISL and FOSDEM as one of the best conferences I’ve been to.  It was grass-roots organised, staffed by volunteers, and though it had some corporate sponsors, it didn’t feel corporate in any way.  There were (IIRC) 230 attendees, with two talks going on any given time over the 2 day weekend (with in-depth tutorials on Friday).  While this is a far cry from the thousands of people at OSCON and multitudes of talks going on at any given time… but IMHO, it was far far better.  Having only two talks at a time ensures that each talk has a good # of attendees (avoiding the OSCON scenario of talks with only 5 or 10 attendees which sucks).  OSDC.tw also really fostered more of a community feel; I saw people chatting and meeting new people, hanging out and discussing technology and having Q&A over tea-time.  Having the regularly scheduled tea-time breaks in one central area really fosters a nice sense of community as well.

In addition to my talk Sunday morning, I got to meet Tim and Bob of the Mozilla Taiwan Community, and went to lunch with clkao, gugod, obra, and a few other folks.  During the afternoon I had a discussion in IRC (#osdc.tw on Freenode) with some folks on ZFS, and ended up giving a lightning talk in conjunction with in2.  She gave some quick slides and introduced ZFS in Chinese, and I followed up with a rapid-fire 5 minute demo (managed to throw up a Virtualbox install of OpenSolaris (snv_101b) quickly) of snapshots, cloning, rollbacks, sends and receives.  My demo was particularly well-illustrated when I accidentally rm -rf’d an SVN directory before snapshotting. 

I also saw Rasmus’s talk on PHP performance and scaling… his example of profiling and optimising Laconica was particularly interesting given our use of Laconica for Songbird’s murmuration project.  But the best talk of the day, by far, was Yusuke Kawasaki’s talk on JSAR (Javascript Augmented Reality).  I can’t even begin to describe his demo of Air Xiaolongbao and Air Pudding, but it was very akin to his hilarious Air Yakiniku video on YouTube.

After the conference we had a great speaker dinner… I can’t think of any other conference where every speaker could get together afterwards and have a big dinner.  I got to chat some more with obra, xdite and met Paul Bakaus (the undisputed and renowned jQuery UI world expert ).

I’m really hoping I’ll be able to attend OSDC.tw 2010 next year, and I’d certainly encourage anyone organising conferences to pursue this sort of community grass-roots feel.  It was a far far cry from the huge corporate conference feel, and if anything felt more like a huge user-group get-together.

Update: Photos from Yusuke’s talk here, and photos from dinner here

Dear Sun, learn to trust your own community.

Thursday, Jan 15. 2009  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Sun

Dear Sun,

I feel like we have trust issues.  Everytime I think we start to be good, and do good things… you go and do something to turn a good thing bad.  Let’s take this latest case of your “Free CD” button at the top of the OpenSolaris.org homepage.  I know you meant well… but see, you actually came out looking like… well, kind of an asshat jerk.

I’m really disappointed that you have, yet again, chosen to blatantly disregard the community process setup by the OpenSolaris Governing Board, in partnership with Sun representatives themselves.

To be clear, I think a free CD button is not a bad idea.  While I disagree with the current page (let’s throw a big blank looking page with a login that doesn’t use the same login as the previous page!), I think the concept isn’t bad.  I’m all for furthering adoption of OpenSolaris technologies.

What I think is a huge wad of community FAIL is how you’ve trampled all over the process that you yourself helped setup.  I’m of course, talking about the website review process.  The OGB chartered the Website Community Group to own the homepage.  Informally, the Website CG was given the responsibility (on behalf of the entire OpenSolaris.org membership) of updating the homepage with fresh content.

You’ve screwed up quite a few times before… the first time resulted in the establishment of a Website Editorial Board (which became a Review Committee) to review changes made to the homepage of OpenSolaris.org.  The second time resulted in Sun having a “Sponsored Links” section of the homepage where it could freely publish content without having it go through review.  Through both of these incidents, we communicated with you via the Sun/OGB liason, and worked out a policy and process agreeable to all parties.

We know the review process works because the Website CG (courtesy of content leader Michelle Olson) formulates, reviews, and publishes content every month in a timely and successful fashion.  The Website CG follows the process, and gets things done.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m finding it harder and harder to trust you these days with respect to anything that might require community input.  For every good thing you do with open source (GPL OpenOffice?  Great!), you shoots itself in the foot on others (sh*t on the community?  Boo!).

So here’s an open letter to the nameless executives pulling the puppet strings from behind the curtain: please… just follow the process that YOU agreed to.  It’s not hard.  It’s quite easy.  Your own employees are quite familiar with it.  Trust your employees, your engineers, and better yet… start to trust in your community.  You’d receive far less backlash and hate if you actually played by the rules that you yourself laid down.

Love,

Your biggest fan, Steve.

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.

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.

OSCON Day 3

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

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)

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.