that’s whacked

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.

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!

Growing more (beautiful) plumage…

Monday, Apr 20. 2009  –  Category: Linkage, Songbird

It’s been a while since we’ve featured some of the new and creative add-ons Songbird’s add-on developer community have been cranking out lately… in fact, I can’t recall if we’ve done this since post-1.0! Clearly a situation that needs to be rectified… and hence today’s post calling out some of the awesome Feathers that work in the latest 1.1.2 builds. For regular subscribers to the new add-ons RSS feed (which I highly recommend subscribing to in order to stay on top of all the new add-ons) these won’t be anything new… but for Songbird newcomers, hopefully this will turn you on to some cool new Feathers and inspire you to maybe create your own!

• YABS continues to be the most popular Feather.. easily one of the nicest of the “dark” Feathers, it’s a complete package featuring mashTape, Pure Player, and LyricMaster skinning (check out the add-on page for a complete list of all the extensions atreiu made look good with this Feather). In addition to Pure Player, he’s got Medium & Mini Player layouts incorporated too!
• Sparkle is right up there as the a long-running “dark” Feather favourite. Schwadegan just recently added LyricMaster support to this gorgeous whimsical Feather.
• NABS is the “light” Feather counterpart to YABS. Feature-for-feature, it stacks right up there with YABS… some people just prefer something lighter.
• Spotbird brings Spotify’s subtle and aerodynamic gray rubber look into Songbird. It looks particularly awesome when you have andreas.f’s accompanying Spotbird Artist Browser add-on media view installed with it.
• Aerofirebird is for the Vista users out there who want a uniform look and feel for Songbird and Firefox. It utilises Firefox’s L&F and uses native Vista borders giving you the “glass” effects.
• Pure Player is a different take on your regular Feather. It adds a new layout somewhere in between the Main Player and the Mini Player. Featuring ratings, album art, and hover-overlaid player controls, it’s a gorgeous efficient use of space. What’s particularly cool is that Feathers can supply Pure Player skins so you can, in effect, skin your own Pure Player!
• BlackfuZZ only further shows how much Songbird users like an awesome “dark” Feather. Incorporating Pure Player, Mini Player, and Medium Player skins, this Feather features contrasting light and dark themes, clean angular lines and a really slick volume bar.
• euphoria is a light Feather with some gorgeous light-reflected lime-green highlights. Sounds a little strange at first, but the colour combination looks really great. The default album artwork image looks particularly awesome in Media Flow. This features Mini Player and Pure Player layouts, and skins mashTape, Media Flow, and LyricMaster for completeness.
• Walnut2 brings in the lux with some really well done wood-grain finishing. For fans of woodies, it’s particularly nostalgic. One of the more complete Feathers, this skins mashTape, MediaFlow, SHOUTcast, LyricMaster, etc. and incorporates the usual Mini and Medium Player layouts.

That’s all for today’s post… I’ll be covering some of the wicked new extensions that you may or may not have heard of in my next post!

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

Eggy Coincidence?

Sunday, Apr 12. 2009  –  Category: Food, Songbird

Woke up this morning feeling a hankering for the Chinese thousand year old eggs (yeah, those black ones that you eat with rice porridge). And this was before I even realised it was Easter

Last.fm Radio release!

Tuesday, Mar 24. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

It’s official… after many beers weeks of development, we’re ready to release Last.fm Radio support for Songbird.  If you haven’t gotten the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler add-on update yet you should be getting it soon… (or you can go install it manually from the add-ons site).

Here’s a few of the features provided by the new Last.fm radio support:

• Geolocates your IP and presents the most popular artists & tags from your country on Last.fm on the homepage (in case you were wondering why certain artists may appear there)
• Last.fm webpage links for “Play <foo> radio” get redirected to use the Songbird Last.fm Radio support
• Dynamic links on the sidebar for your Last.fm favourite/most played artists (based on your scrobbling history)
• Links on the sidebar for your friends and neighbours’ stations
• Dynamic links on the sidebar for your Last.fm stations based on your Songbird library’s highest rated and highest playcount artists.
• Click around and explore artist, tags, and Last.fm users
• Easily jump off to station webpages to read more from Last.fm
• When you authenticate with the extension it logs you in for both scrobbling and the Last.fm webpage

Last.fm tagging

Thursday, Mar 19. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

In the week and a half since we shipped Songbird 1.1, what have we been up to?  Well besides grandly horking a whole ton of iPods (sorry sorry sorry!), we’ve also been planning and scheming on some cool new stuff for the future.  Quite frankly, while doing performance and feature parity stuff is always good – we wanted to work on something innovative and different. Matt did a bunch of awesome mockups and threw up a planning doc on the wiki for anyone interesting in seeing what our [very rough] plans are.

Anyway, if you take a look you’ll see a big part of it revolves around activities, e.g. actions the user does to interact with their music.  We’re talking things like:

• rating songs
• making playlists
• adding new tracks to their collection
• tagging songs
• etc.

Anyway, let’s not dwell on what happened yesterday.  Instead, let’s focus on what we’re doing today.  We’ve been thinking about what sorts of activities make sense, how people would want to share them and consume their different friends’ activities.  I happened to be fixing a couple of Last.fm Radio bugs today (random tangent: we should be pushing this live next week!), when it occurred to me we could do something neat with Last.fm tagging.  Long story short, I was able to throw together something quick today that seems to do the job:

It throws a tag icon into the love/ban area of the faceplate, and when clicking it pops up a gratuitously-translucent panel allowing you to see the Last.fm tags applied (both by yourself and other Last.fm users).  You can add new tags, as well as delete any personal tags you’ve tagged the track with.

Ultimately it’d be nice to commit these tags into the Songbird local library so you can neat things like arbitrarily sort or filter your library based on tags but that’ll require some more bird-side work.

For now, this is a cheap and easy tagging solution that gives me a “tagging” action that we can make use of for our larger plan of socialising Songbird interactions.  The work has been committed to SVN and should be available in tonight’s nightly add-ons build.

Last.fm Radio update

Friday, Feb 20. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

For folks following the development of the Last.fm/Audioscrobbler add-on… I’ve been working on adding Last.fm Radio support. Check out the screenshot here for a glimpse of the latest revision.

As always, your feedback is appreciated… if you’re running a 1.2.0a nightly, please take it out for a test (XPI) and let me know your thoughts. This is still fairly alpha since it hasn’t had much exposure or proper QA testing – hence the 1.2.0a requirement.

If you find any good bugs, feel free to post a comment to this entry for now.

Update: This won’t work if your Songbird language is set to anything other than English (US) for now. As the UI gets finalised, I’ll get the extension localised.

Update 2: Several people are reporting duplicate Radio nodes… d’oh. I’m looking into it now.

MozBot Google BotModule

Saturday, Jan 17. 2009  –  Category: Songbird

Partly for fun, I threw together a MozBot to hang out in #songbird this week.  One of the things I ended up doing was making a minor re-write of the Google.bm BotModule to use Google’s AJAX/REST API (available via the REST::Google::Search CPAN module) since the previously used SOAP API has been deprecated.

For anyone interested, you can grab the code here.

Update: I forgot to mention, this Google BotModule includes the totally awesome GoogleFight feature.    Sadly, we use this on #songbird way too often.

7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me

Tuesday, Jan 6. 2009  –  Category: Musings, Songbird

… I was tagged!  (by way of @SaraD (blog), who came from @sogrady (blog), and an undoubtedly longer (and more famous) path from there…)

So, 7 things you may or may not know about me….  I believe in open communication and transparency… especially when I’m drunk, so it’s hard to think of seven things I haven’t blabbed about (whether I should have or not) previously…

1. I was investigated by the FBI.  A story I’d rather not get into on a webpage, but will instead save for some other time when we’re having a drink.  (Hah, the rules don’t say I have to get into details… but suffice to say, it involved AT&T, a phone system exploit and Fry’s Electronics.  Plus I was like 12 at the time.)
2. Between the ages of 8 and 20, I refused to eat avocado believing myself to be allergic to it.  Within my first two weeks of arriving in the states, I had avocado twice (once raw, and once in guacamole).  I threw up both times.  I fully believed myself to be incapable of eating avocado for the next 12 years until I accidentally ate some guac in a carne asada burrito in Rosarito, Mexico on a long drive for tacos.  God bless Rosarito.
3. I used to run a bulletin board system (BBS) way back in the day.  It was called “The Nebuolic Cheese”, and it ran Waffle and had a UUCP feed from sbay.org.  That’s right… you can send email VIA THE INTERNETS.  It was awesome and amazing and here’s my proof. (It’s an old sbay.org guide, with my BBS as the example map entry).
4. I was expelled from high school.  This one involved an Apple Macintosh computer lab, a system administrator who stupidly had a wall mirror behind his desk, and a high school student who happened to have an assigned seat facing the mirror and who learned to read passwords in a backwards keyboard.
5. I saved every college rejection letter I got (and I got quite a few…. I was only accepted into one college, see #4 above).  I took them to UCSD with me and everytime I got stressed or hated school I pulled them out for inspiration.  To this day I still have them.  No, I don’t look at them anymore.
6. I have an absolutely awful sense of direction.  If we’re lost, don’t look to me to be any help unless I have my iPhone on me and am getting reception.  What’s worse is I don’t actually care.  I’m quite happy to be lost and wander around aimlessly.  I blame this on living in San Diego for 6 years.  You don’t need to have a sense of direction because you always know where the ocean is (thereby knowing which way is West).
7. My hair was permed in the 3rd grade.  Really.  I don’t know why, my mum wanted to do it.  The embarassing photographic proof is at my parents house somewhere.  I think I threw it in a closet.

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

1. Geoff Arnold (@geoffarnold), blog – because he has been my mentor in work and in life, and is the friend I would most describe as a wise sage. Geoff responded!
2. Patrick Finch (@patrickf), blog – because he has a skill I covet: managing to tie pretty much any topic back to football, plus he’s like a good writer and stuff. Patrick responded!
3. Tim Foster (@timfoster), blog – because though I only met him in real life once, I feel like I stalk him via his blog, he’s a super nice guy, and am intrigued to see if there is an evil side to him. Tim responded!
4. Ryan Tomayko (@rtomayko), blog – because he sits next to me at work and is automatically intriguing because he is the first person I met outside of a large corporation who knew SOG.
5. Esther Ko (no twitter! OMG!), blog – because she’s a great writer and should blog more.
6. Mark Finkle (@mfinkle), blog – because his blog has one of the best domain names I’ve seen, and I don’t actually know if I’ve seen him blog personal stuff before and wonder if he would.  Plus I haven’t seen this meme on PMO yet. Mark responded!
7. Brian King (@brianking), blog – because I keep meaning to ask him what ‘pogovor’ means and I’m trying to double my chances of getting this meme to cross onto PMO.