Naming nits

It’s Songbird, not SongBird.

It’s OpenSolaris, not Open Solaris.

(yeah yeah, I realise I’m hardly qualified to be the grammar nazi, but those two do bug me)

5 comments April 22nd, 2008

ghostbusters!

Yeah yeah, I’m a movie-themed Media Views kick apparently…

I threw together a derivative of yesterday’s Attack of the Clones Media View, this time titled Ghostbusters

This one views all the broken tracks in your library, e.g. those tracks who have been deleted from the filesystem or renamed and are no longer valid entries.

Add comment April 18th, 2008

attack of the clones!

half the fun of making an add-on is coming up with the name… so here’s my newest:

Attack of the Clones!

i got tired of replying to all the Songbird posts asking for the ability to remove library duplicates with “it’d be a simple add-on to write”. i finally decided to write it. i also wanted to play with our new media views feature, so i implemented this as media view.

once you’ve installed this in Songbird, go to your library and then click on the Media Views button (button the right of the search toolbar) and select “Attack of the Clones!”. the media items it will show you are all the duplicates in your library. you can select individual ones and the XUL label above the playlist widget will show the full path. simply find the ones you want to remove and right-click to remove them (from the library… i don’t remove from the filesystem)

update: duh. whoops, forgot to actually link to the damn thing. here it is! thanks mark!

3 comments April 17th, 2008

french celtic rock?

bizarrely intriguing.

i came across Bézèd’h’s Ton jour viendra album clicking through Jamendo yesterday and have found it pretty catchy.

the french celtic rock sound is definitely unique. and hey, it’s creative commons licensed with 192kbps MP3 and Ogg Vorbis torrents available. now this is what we’re always harping about as the Open Media Web.

rockin’.

i sent $10 their way. the best part?

Donation to the artist Bézèd'h       9.50 USD
Promotion on Jamendo.com    0.44 USD
Tax     0.06 USD
Total with taxes    10 USD

how awesome is that? Bézèd’h gets $9.50! that shit ain’t happening on iTunes, i can tell you that much.

3 comments April 16th, 2008

yay history meme!

originally from planet gnome but it looks like the meme jumped worlds over to planet mozilla where i found it from dan mills (of weave fame).

wonder if it’ll jump worlds over to planet opensolaris too.. ?

[stevel@grommit:~] 501$ uname -a
SunOS grommit 5.11 snv_75 i86pc i386 i86pc
[stevel@grommit:~] 502$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
87 ls
81 cd
41 vim
38 ll
22 cat
18 svcs
14 java
12 svcadm
11 su
10 ps

1 comment April 14th, 2008

Songbird 0.5 final on OpenSolaris

Alfred just built a Songbird 0.5 final build for OpenSolaris… his blog contains all the salient links for download and such.

I’ve been playing with it on my Thinkpad running snv_81 and it works a treat. In fact, it seems to work better than Songbird on my MacBook does. If my Thinkpad weren’t a beast to carry around, I might start to use it more. Maybe I should finally figure out how to BootCamp my MacBook into SXCE now.

Three cheers to Alfred for getting the 0.5 final built! I’m working on getting it hosted at the Songbird site now. We’ve not previously had a place to put up contributor builds, so this is kind of blazing the path for us there and helping us define a lot of stuff we need to do for the future anyway.

Along those lines, I proposed a topic for the upcoming OpenSolaris Developer Summit where the four of us (alfred, ken mays, albert lee (a.k.a. triskelios), and myself) could talk about and show off Songbird a bit. Obviously, I have a slight bias given I work at POTI - which is why I’ve coerced the other 3 into joining me so I sound like less of a corporate tool.

I’m hoping the four of us combined can swing a decent demo, while I hope Alfred can say a few words on working with the Songbird project devs. He’s in the unique situation of working for a huge corporation (Sun), contributing to an upstream open source project (Songbird) which is itself downstream from a huge open source project (Mozilla). Certainly I think Alfred has had some great interactions with the Songbird devs in terms of test, code review, patch submission, etc. that might be insightful as we work to open up the OpenSolaris developer contribution process. I know I’m curious to hear his thoughts anyway.

1 comment April 7th, 2008

DemoCampSanFrancisco

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?

Add comment April 3rd, 2008

self-serving?

is it self-serving of me to want to show/talk about/demo Songbird on OpenSolaris at the devsummit coming up in May?

i thought about it long and hard, and decided yeah - it was perhaps a bit self-serving for me to push that as an agenda item. people might view it as abuse of the fact that i’m both an OGB member and work at Songbird.

to that end, i’ve put it up on the agenda anyway and volunteered ken mays, alfred peng, and triskelios to demo it ;-). i put myself at the end of the list since i’d rather those guys did it (especially alfred since he tackled much of the hard build system work, and albert for getting an initial port/patch up). i might say a few words about the integration/code review process of getting it back upstream into Songbird, but nothing too much.

but enough about that. i’ll bring stickers! wonderful farting gaseous stickers!

2 comments April 3rd, 2008

10 years old!

happy 10th birthday mozilla!

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

Add comment March 31st, 2008

mashTape and APIs

Hacking on my mashTape extension has been a great way to find some wicked APIs and get the extension developer’s perspective on Songbird platform development. This morning’s hacking has made me realise we need a better way to allow extensions using display panes to set context for when their display pane should be visible. For instance, mashTape makes little sense when not listening to music. I’d love to be able to set something in my install.rdf, or in my display pane registration code to the effect of:

• Don’t show when “not playing”
• Don’t show in a non-media view (e.g. when I’m browsing the web, etc.)

I’ll have to think about it a little more and writeup a story/bug to figure out how I’d like to register this context for my display pane. Right now I’ve done it in mashTape through a combination of a tabbrowser select-tab listener, and a WebProgressListener, which seems like a lot of unnecessary work.

On the topic of APIs… I love Last.fm’s APIs, but it’s frustrating that their API for getting the artist bio information is incomplete. Perhaps it’s to drive traffic to their site (which is understandable), but I often get email requests to expose more of the bio information. Looking around, Freebase has got a wicked cool API, and they’ve somehow scraped Wikipedia’s great content into a bio/article for the artist. I’d love to use it… if only I could figure out how to get the bio! I played with their APIs for at least an hour this morning, and could grab all the information for everything except the “a.k.a.” and “bio/article” sections. Ugh.

Somehow I got from Freebase’s site over to DBpedia where they’ve built XML/RDF interfaces for Wikipedia’s content, and within 5 minutes I had a successful call to grab and parse out the full Wikipedia abstract text for artist bio, years active, etc. etc. I’m psyched. Now I just need to integrate that into mashTape and I should have a full artist bio.

6 comments March 30th, 2008