Archive for June, 2009

Lightening talks

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

On Saturday at about the same time the lightening talks were going on at the Open Video Conference, I came home and had my own lightening dialog.

It struck about 400m from my house, tearing up the road.

It traveled through the ground and found the phone lines, blowing off the front cover and frying the wires on all the boxes along the road.

fried telephone box

When it got to my house, it scorched the wall and box where it connects to the house phone lines.

It passed along the line, to the router, taking that out for good.

It even went from the router and damaged the ethernet port of the pc that was connected.

Lesson learned: unplug when the lightening comes.

2.5-svn testing focus

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

We are about to start looking for more help testing the nightly builds for 2.5-svn and I wanted to give a few more details about things that have changed and areas to focus on with the testing.

The most obvious change is the reorganization of the Library.  Instead of Library, New and Individual Downloads, you will now be presented with Video, Audio, Other and Downloading.

The video and audio main view has filters for All, Unwatched and Non-feed items to make it easier to find your downloaded shows.

There are also significant changes to the audio playback ui.  Audio playback no longer displays a blank window.  Instead the interface remains active and the progress bar on the chrome displays the playing file.


Speed and the database changes

Both Ben and Will and Nicholas have mentioned this in past posts.  Ben redid the way the database is loaded and stored.  He’s given us some solid startup speed improvements.  He has also mostly given up on pickles, so in general the items are plain and readable.  If you are a db junkie, you can finally see inside to the data guts of miro.

Because of the big database changes, we have finally started backing up the old database prior to any upgrades.  This should make you feel a bit more secure about testing nightly builds because it’s a lot easier to go back without data loss.

The Database Backup page has been updated to give instructions on where and how to find the database and return to an earlier version if necessary.