Posts filed under 'OpenSource'
catchup rambling
i propose starting a new trend in web 2.0. first there was blogging. then there was microblogging (aka twitter’ing). i propose to start time-batch concatenating micro-blogging, or twitter with a touch of both diarrhea and constipation if you will.
so here’s my spew of random micro-blogging-type thoughts, concatenated into one post.
psyched to be going to London for a week. looking forward to hopefully dropping by the LOSUG meeting while i’m there. would give my left nut to get tickets to the Arsenal/AC Milan Champions League game.
super-psyched about FOSDEM. little bit nervous to be presenting my first conference preso about Songbird. looking forward to moules et frites with timf, catching up with other various OpenSolaris folk, and meeting more of the Mozilla Community.
steak and bj day. seriously. i’m so in.
i’m so desperate to go up to the sierras. i haven’t gone snowboarding at all this winter, and its been dumping lately. sigh. brand new snowboard and everything.
work is keeping me so busy. feel like every day i finish 5 tasks only to add 7 more to the plate. i was expecting as much when i left Sun… and i love the work and my coworkers, but wow i could use a few days off.
had a shite day at the gym yesterday, couldn’t get up the V2 & V3 routes i was able to do two weeks ago. ugh. starting to get really psyched about climbing Cathedral Peak with jesse in june though. i think my strength is there, but i could definitely do with some sustained route-climbing to build up the endurance. should probably go out somewhere (diablo maybe?) to practice some trad placements in case my rusty.
isis is definitely getting worse. we’re taking her to the vet on saturday, but i suspect her time is near. she’s eating slower, and starting to strain so hard her body shakes a lot of the time she’s awake. her 10th birthday is in 10 days. bumming me out.
great to see benr, tamr, and to finally meet derek c at redmonk’s party a couple of nights ago. cheers to sogrady for a great party and for the beer.
i feel like i’m spending so much time in front of my computer lately, and not nearly enough time outdoors or with the dogs. gotta figure out this work/life balance thing.
3 comments February 8th, 2008
indulge me
… just finished my 11th day at work. between the customer preso, getting (and being present at) the songbird devcamp, a partner deadline, and getting OSCON/FOSDEM proposals submitted i’ve started to lose track of what day it is. this whole week i keep thinking it’s been friday everyday since i haven’t had a day off yet.
it seems like ages ago (when in fact it was only last week) that i did this interview with Agile Ajax about Songbird, so indulge me while i link it here.
i’ll pawn it off as claiming i want to link it here so i won’t lose it.
but i’d be lying. it’s the first interview i’ve done on Songbird, and i like Brian (the interviewer), so i’m linking it.
just found out some of the OpenSolaris crew (Sara, Patrick, and Joep) will be at FOSDEM as well, so it’ll be nice to see some familiar faces. it’s not obvious that there will be an OpenSolaris presence at FOSDEM - so that was nice to hear.
1 comment January 24th, 2008
FOSDEM 2008
Anyone going to FOSDEM this year? I’ll be presenting Songbird in the Mozilla DevRoom (and hopefully giving a lightning talk if it gets accepted). Anyone wanting to meetup to talk about Songbird, Mozilla, OpenSolaris - or just to go sample some awesome Belgium beer - drop me a note! Would love to meet up….
Add comment January 23rd, 2008
trademark and branding
sigh. it’s the issue that i never get to escape. it came up in OpenSolaris, and its starting to rear its head with Songbird. 
basically i’m trying to figure out how third parties (e.g. distributions such as Ubuntu or Debian) can have a package called “songbird” with our branding, logo, and artwork while protecting our trademarks from dilution, and potential infringement or malicious use.
i’m having some good discussion with various people from said distributions as well as POTI’s lawyers and hope to have something figured out soon… it’s definitely a thorny issue, as evidenced by Mozilla & Debian’s spat with Firefox^WIceweasel
thorny issues from all sides…. and really, at heart, it’s such a simple issue. our fans/users want to run a program called “songbird”, that has cute farting birds as its logo.
right now i’m leaning towards a policy allowing use of our logos/branding if a certain set of basic smoke tests pass successfully. but i haven’t yet vetted that with the lawyer - so i’m crossing my fingers hoping that’s strong enough.
3 comments January 23rd, 2008
a good day is….
… having a double espresso and then going to give a 3 hour customer/partner presentation without screwing up.
of course anytime you can give a 3 hour preso incorporating farting birds as your graphics should be considered a win.
after that, i endured a painful reminder of how much i don’t miss the 880 commute before i hit the rock gym where i finally nailed a V3 i’d been working on the past couple of times. in fact, i managed to sink two V3’s, making them the first two V3’s i’ve bagged! the first one involved a wicked dyno which i thought was going to wrench my right shoulder out of my socket, and second involved latching onto a little crimper with one fingernail and squeezing every millimeter of reach out of my armspan.
well i’m sore and starving - but feeling pretty good. t’was a good day indeed.
Add comment January 22nd, 2008
songbird devcamp over!
devcamp is…. over. wow. what a weekend. i know i’m exhausted.
we had about 15-20ish developers come by on saturday, and another 6 or 7 come by on sunday. aside from the wifi hiccups saturday morning, and gregg finding a box staple in his lasagna (ugh. sorry gregg), i think it was a big success.
there was hacking (w00t. at least 4 extensions got significant development work done). there was socialising. there was beer. oh boy there was lots of beer. tons of food too.
t’was great to meet the me.dium guys, the foxsaver guys, fabricio (the xspf player guy who totally got us a Cmd-Q patch for Mac, yay!), JB the VLC guy, and everybody else i’m forgetting to recall because i’m a little buzzed.
many thanks to the birders who came and helped answer people’s questions, and lead the sessions on saturday.
and one last
we’ll have to definitely do this again.
Add comment January 20th, 2008
dd-wrt
Like most geeks, I’d heard of dd-wrt. But, I’d never used it… mostly because I had two excellent WR850g Motorola routers whose stock firmware allowed me to setup a WDS network with the two devices.
Lately I’ve been going through the house trying to find unnecessary things to unplug (yeah yeah, those PG&E ads running late night on Chinese TV are starting to influence me I guess), so my thoughts turned to the two routers. The main reason I have two of them is to ensure I had enough signal coverage in all parts of the house. I started googling for mods I could do, and lo and behold… it turns out that dd-wrt is compatible with the WR850g too.
Damn. Well, I have two of ‘em - so what the hell. I flashed one of them up to the dd-wrt v2.3 SP2, and upped the transmit power to 80mW (from the default 28mW, and it’s plugged into a high gain antenna) and the one router provides excellent coverage throughout the entire house now, and I can happily unplug the second router.
Now my aim is to bring that second router with another high gain antenna down to my parents house which also had crappy wireless coverage and hopefully remedy that.
Add comment January 16th, 2008
better living through open source
i came across osliving a while ago (and actually emailed the author to see if Songbird could be listed), but hadn’t visited the site in a couple of months. i stumbled across it again yesterday, and wow - it looks great. his redesign is really nice… very nice clean simple layout, with immediate clear navigation and categorisation.
props to andrew on a site well done.
Add comment January 15th, 2008
Closed processes and development in an open source world
I just read an interesting article on Linux.com criticising two examples of poor showing in the open source world, one revolving around a KDE icon theme, and the other around GIMP’s UI team.
Certainly I see some parallels in any open source project, both OpenSolaris & Songbird included.
First: my opinions. You didn’t ask for them, but you’ll get them anyway. Blogs rule like that. For the two examples cited in the article, I actually have differing opinions.
For the icon example, I disagree with the Oxygen project and agree with the writer. The icon developers gave up any rights they had to restrict redistribution with their license they published under. The derivative theme was well within its rights to redistribute the Oxygen icons.
For the GIMP UI example, I actually agree with the GIMP UI team. I think they way in which they phrased it could have been better. Perhaps instead of “I am afraid that I do not have positions open at the moment.”, he could have expanded and invited the volunteer to submit his work for review and inclusion without necessarily being a part of the formal GIMP UI team. While some people may disagree with me, I think UI work benefits from having a core team of people with a shared set of goals and design aesthetic. Adding another team member could alter that dynamic and/or add more overhead to the team.
Anyway - these are pertinent issues to both communities in which I participate in. OpenSolaris perhaps more than Songbird - since Songbird has no internal/closed repositories of source. But one prime example of a project people complain about is installation, or packaging - and I know I’ll probably get heat for this, but I think doing closed development is not that bad. The packaging project took some heat for doing its initial prototyping and development (I know I had at least one debate with sch about it ;-)) between its team members before opening up and publishing its work. But given the conflict that can arise between people deriving work prematurely (e.g. the Oxygen case), or even just the issue of it being a design-in-progress (let alone a work-in-progress) means its often easier to be more agile and develop the core of the project between team members (whether that’s internal to Sun or involving external members).
Open source your work when you are ready - not when people ask you to
When you are ready for people to hack on your code, make derived works, and submit features and bugs - then you are ready for open source development. If you aren’t ready for those, then don’t. Open sourcing code isn’t free (assuming you care about your open source community - throwing code over the wall, as always, is cheap and easy - and you get what you pay for). If you want a thriving community then you have to be ready to spend time to cultivate it. If you’d rather be hacking on code to get something initially out - then you shouldn’t publish it initially.
1 comment November 4th, 2007
theo’s response to the dual licensing gpl/bsd controversy
it was interesting to read theo’s response. my first thought was “wow… he was totally not inflammatory and incensed”.
anyway, he had some interesting points - some of which we (OpenSolaris) might want to keep in mind as we think about future licensing directions.
more interestingly he drew the conclusion that the BSD community was (is?) at as much risk of being locked out of future changes by the GPL community as they are from the commercial/proprietary community (if not more).
2 comments September 1st, 2007
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