• A few bugs caught by awesome Songbird users found in the beta release we pushed on Wednesday
• An office mouse infestation Ali discovered

Mice! Oh my!

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.

YABS on Songbird on OpenSolaris

I just noticed that the YABS Feather looks awesome on Songbird on OpenSolaris.  The color and style of the skin just fit really well in terms of the blue highlights matching with the blue OpenSolaris default theme.

YABS is, quite possibly, my mostest favouritest Songbird Feather.

Stuff for the other grommit residents: I installed a bunch of new themes to the grommit gallery, as well as turning on a bunch of new Gallery plugins. None of the defaults have changed, but if you play around with the album settings you should see some new features.

For some reason or another, I’m quite fond of the square thumbnails plugin. I notice between my new blog theme, my photoblog theme, and my new gallery theme… I seem to really be into grids, squares, and lines… the square thumbnails must fit nicely into those in a uniform space sort of way.

Rafael and I also discussed evangelism of OpenSolaris to Linux audiences. Rafael had recently presented at the Ontario Linuxfest, and I had previously presented at SVLUG. We tossed around the idea of presenting to an SF LUG.

The full photo album of the meetup is here.

this is a shot i took from the Petronas Towers’ SkyBridge in Kuala Lumpur back in March of 2007 when i was in Malaysia for a Tech Days conference. i think the blur is a little too narrow, but it generally achieves the effect. i think i probably should have cropped the skyline out since that sort of breaks the illusion of it being a model but this is otherwise a semi-decent attempt. the overhead shot is conducive to this effect since that’s how we usually look at models.

that being said, i wanted to try it on a head-on/street-level shot to see what my mind would make of it when trying to interpret the focus (or lack there-of). so here’s my second shot:

this is from our honeymoon last year, when Wendy and I were riding bikes through Kyoto. again, lots of sky – though the effect is okay since the sky is pretty uniformly washed out. the people really give it away here since i set the focus at Wendy’s level, and she’s clearly too detailed to be a toy person.

i know some people disparage this effect… i happen to really like it since it encourages perception of a landscape (especially an urban one such as Kuala Lumpur) as a model… and well, going off on mental tangents from there is enough to entertain my mind for at least a few hours. i’m not that into it that i want to go out and buy a tilt-shift lens or anything for my camera, so i’ll settle for cheap Photoshop tricks instead.

i dunno why. the camera shot is clearly off. but i love this photo. it’s classic Isis. she just can’t sit still for a photo, and needs to climb all over me instead.

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?).

more explicitly, she pointed me at the above picture. love how everyone is looking straight at the camera smiling happily while i goofily am looking off to the side…

lovely.

i should make a hackergotchi out of that.