that’s whacked

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.

Add-on-Con & Mozilla’s Open House

Thursday, Dec 11. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

After yesterday’s Ubuntu Developer Summit, I headed over to the Mozilla Open House w/ the Ubuntu Mozilla-team guys. T’was good to hang out with the Moz folks… there was some interesting conversation over add-on versioning, the FF3.1 release train, AMO policies, and backwards/forwards-compatibility. Though really the best part of the night was getting to play with Mary Colvig‘s new golden retriever, CJ. Here are the rest of the photos from the open house..

Today was spent at the first annual Add-on-Con. I watched the opening keynote panel, Brian King’s talk, Mark Finkle’s talk, the panel on cross-platform add-on development, and the lightning talks. Photos are here.. Thanks to Brian & Mark both for pimping Songbird in their talks

Brian’s talk was really interesting… especially where he mentions the future of AMO and has slides covering some of its upcoming roadmap. 1 billion add-ons is a phenomenal number. I definitely recommend flipping through his slides.

One of the cool things I saw at today’s talks was Yoono’s XUL/JS Profiler add-on for Firefox. In fact, I thought it was so cool I took advantage of the follow-up Internet Explorer session to port it to Songbird. The XPI for Songbird is here.

first commit!

Thursday, Dec 4. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

yay… just got my first commit to Mozilla’s mozilla-central repo in! this was for bmo bug 354857, and to be honest… was a patch i stole from matt anyway. you can see it’s a pretty small one-liner, but it’s still nice to get something committed.

one of the things i’ve been working trying to work on is getting Songbird’s XULRunner patches upstreamed as much as possible back to mozilla-central. from my discussions with various distribution maintainers, our #1 roadblock to getting Songbird into distros is the reluctance to ship multiple XULRunners. unfortunately, upstreaming is… non-trivial. some of the patches are pretty Songbird-specific, and will need to be massaged to be more generalised for any app. additionally some of the other patches need to be brought up to date for mozilla-central’s tip.

i’ve only managed to get two up so far (i’ve been tracking the status on Songbird’s wiki). these have, by far, been the two easiest patches – but they’ve been a good exercise to familiarise myself with the review and commit process that Mozilla follows. hopefully i can start tackling some of the more complex ones now.

i <3 mountain view

Tuesday, Dec 2. 2008  –  Category: OpenSource, Songbird

well, <3 may be a strong wordemoticon. but it’s certainly an alright place to spend a few days… which is what i’ll be doing for the next week or so.

this friday & saturday i’ll be at FOSSCamp. as with any unconference there isn’t a set agenda…

next wednesday i’ll be dropping by the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Jaunty Jackalope planning along with preed. i’m looking forward to seeing Jorge again, and meeting the rest of the Ubuntu MozillaTeam. hopefully we’ll make some progress on the packaging of Songbird in Ubuntu.

wednesday evening, since i’m down in mountain view anyway, i plan on swinging by the Mozilla Open House at the MoCo offices.

and lastly, on thursday i’ll be at Add-on-Con. should be a cool extremely-focused conference (on cross-browser add-on development), and i’m looking forward to quite a few of the talks.