that’s whacked

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.

for the last time, i’m not at Sun anymore

Tuesday, Apr 29. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource

From Dave Neary’s nicely written blog… to Theodore, I’m not at Sun anymore.

I left 7 months ago, while still in my first term on the OGB, and I was re-elected as a community member who does not work for Sun.

I did drink the kool-aid for 4.5 years… but I’d like to think I still think for myself and have independent thoughts.

kthxbai!

DemoCampSanFrancisco

Thursday, Apr 3. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

I was just talking to a couple of fellow Birders who are going to DemoCampVictoria tonight, which got me wondering….

… why isn’t there a DemoCampSanFrancisco? I’d love to have one. Anyone in the Bay Area interested? This place is such a hotbed of innovation, surely we can get people together for 10 minute real-world demos of stuff, no?

Leave a comment if you’re interested. This should be something complete open – no restrictions, focus, etc. software… hardware… world-conquering robots… artwork… music… whatever. What do people think?

10 years old!

Monday, Mar 31. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

happy 10th birthday mozilla!

i’d write something more meaningful, but why bother? mitchell already did that

Songbird at OSCON

Wednesday, Mar 19. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

I got my talk, “Integrating Media & Web Experiences with Songbird” accepted for a 45 minute conference session at OSCON 2008.

woot! (it’s not often I get to blog ‘woot’ twice before 6am, but hey)

euro trip photos

Friday, Feb 29. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Photos, Songbird

photo roundup time!

while i was in london last week, i fortunately found myself with one evening free. coincidentally, it happened to be the same night the London OpenSolaris User Group was meeting… so i dropped by and took some photos. it was great to see nick again, and to finally meet peter tribble.

this past weekend, i went to FOSDEM and ended up taking a few photos there as well. predominantly they are from the Mozilla DevRoom, with the exception of a few from the OpenSolaris booth, and a few from Mark Finkle’s talk (Mark is big-time and got a talk in the main track with a huge room separate from the DevRoom )

and on wednesday evening, Songbird hosted a get-together/social, which i lazily called MozzyBirdyXULy Type Meetup Social Thing, where i took more photos. some of them are from the Nest during the day, but most are from the evening social where we had folks from Mozilla, Songbird, Flickr, Wesabe, and Flock (did i miss anyone?).

FOSDEM 2008 thoughts

Wednesday, Feb 27. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

FOSDEM 2008 was, IMHO, a great success (and apparently not just MY humble opinion). The whole Mozilla presence there was amazing. On a personal note, it was great to meet and hang out with a bunch of the Mozilla crew. As always, it was great to see mfinkle and sethb who were about the only Mozilla folks I knew prior to FOSDEM. It was fantastic to meet all the TomTom crew (I think they sent 7 guys over), and to chat with thunder and andrew from TomTom for what seemed like hours talking about traveling and food.

It was also great to see the OpenSolaris crew, in the form of timsf, patrickf, sarad, and the webmink himself as always.

As to my specific talk, I had a 45 minute time slot to present Saturday evening, the last time slot @ the Mozilla DevRoom (the conference is split into different topical DevRooms/tracks). The Mozilla DevRoom was jokingly called “saunsa.fosdem.org” because it had about a 7 foot tall ceiling, no windows, no ventilation, and brick walls all around.

In other words, it was a brick oven. Yes, like the kind you cook pizzas in.

Toss in 50 to 120 geeks depending on the talk (max room capacity was 100) + laptops, and yeah… it turned into a sauna. When you opened the door to the room you were hit with a wall of humidity and heat.

My actual talk was titled “Songbird: Smashing the Silo (or how to build a music store in 34 minutes)” and mostly covered how to use the Webpage API to do rich media integrations with Songbird. The overall aim of my talk was to point out the more innovative and compelling features of Songbird (i.e. it’s more than just an open source iTunes). The last 7 or 8 minutes, I showed off the display panes, talked about media views, and talked about general music mashups and music meta information. I actually had 3 people come up the next day and say they’d played with Songbird and mashTape and other extensions that night (which is especially impressive given we partied all night @ the Mozilla 10th birthday party).

I see Brian also posted a wiki link to FOSDEM happenings wrt to Mozilla which has more blog entries and photos for Mozilla’s presence.

Tired of it all.

Thursday, Feb 14. 2008  –  Category: OpenSolaris, OpenSource, Sun

I was going to write a long-winded response to the ongoing trademark, naming cluster-fuck that is Indiana OpenSolaris, but frankly I’m tired. Instead I’ll give a +1 to benr’s response (yes I know it’s a cop-out, sorry).

I’m tired of Sun’s continuing ignorance in how to treat its open source community with some modicum of respect, I’m tired of Sun’s arrogance in taking upon itself to determine what’s best for the community (a community which Sun’s current executives are completely out of touch with). I’m tired of Sun executives not listening to the people in the trenches who work for them, who quite frankly, know a helluva lot more about this whole “open source” thing than they do. I’m tired of Sun not acting within the framework of the governance and constitution that it helped setup. I’m tired of Sun telling me it knows what’s best for me.

But on the flip side…

I’m tired of all the armchair-lawyers on ogb-discuss asserting they know more about trademark law than Sun’s lawyers, I’m tired of all the trolls who agitate for immediate heavy-handed responses without thinking through the ramifications of their actions. I’m tired of so-called user experts telling me they know what’s best for me too. I’m tired of idiots on the mailing lists painting Sun employees with a broad brush and slagging the very people who backed them up and supported the same ideas as them.

Yes. Sun fucked up (and continues to). Who hasn’t? Is a response warranted? Yes, I think so. Should that response be petty and childish? Sure, if we (the OGB and the OpenSolaris community, by extension) want to be perceived as petty and childish too.

So my general plea to Sun executives is: Listen to the very people you have tasked with helping you to understand what open source is, and how to develop an open and transparent developer community. You have smart people working for you and with you.

My general plea to the rest of the OpenSolaris community is: Have some empathy and take 30 seconds before you hit Send or Reply All and try to understand the other side’s view. Personal insults and accusations are unwarranted.

Okay that was more long-winded than I wanted to type. I’m off to recuperate with a bowl of pho, and a pint.