Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog

In the initial commit of syncing support for Miro, we only support a limited number of devices.  However, we’d love to have more!  If you want to get your device supported, here’s what I need:

• The name of the device
• The name the device sends over USB
• The USB vendor and product IDs
• The path(s) where audio/video files are stored (if there are specific locations)
• What audio MIME types the device supports
• The Miro conversion name for your device OR if we don’t support it there either, the resolution and supported video MIME types.

Earlier this afternoon, I tagged Miro Community 1.0!  Someone will be writing a blog post soon with pictures and good descriptions about what’s changed.

We’re in the process of migrating the sites to 1.0 right now, so if you don’t see any new features right away, don’t fret!  You’ll get them very soon.

As part of Miro Community and the Miro Guide refactoring, some stand-alone sets of code have gotten factored out into their own Git repositories.  We haven’t really made a big deal of it, but they might be useful to other people in the Django community.

• djpagetabs is a templatetag library which implements the nice page number list you see at the top of Miro Guide listings pages.  It works on top of Django’s built-in pagination support.
• djvideo is a templatetag library which embeds videos into Django templates.  It tries to use the best support it can, from the <video> tag for supported browsers/formats to Flowplayer to built-in plugins.
• djpubsubhubbub is an app to subscribe/get updates from PubSubHubBub hubs for Atom/RSS feeds.  I haven’t integrated it with the Guide yet, but it should both reduce the load on the Guide and make updates faster for supported feeds.

They’re all under a BSD license, same as Django, so you can use them wherever you can use Django.

The past few weeks, I’ve been refactoring the Guide to interact more normally with the rest of the Django ecosystem.  This has touched a lot of code, and while unit tests are helpful, they aren’t everything.

That’s why I need you, loyal readers!  The new branch is online at http://testchannelguide.participatoryculture.org/ and ready for you to poke at it.  It’s a slightly older copy of of the database, so if you’ve recently created an account on MiroGuide.com, your account may not be there.

If you run into problems (problems being anything that doesn’t work like it does on MiroGuide.com), just post a comment here and I’ll get to it as soon as I can!

As I’m sure anyone who reads this blog has noticed, Chris Webber and I released the brand-spanking-new version of the Miro Guide.  I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did on it, and I hope that you all like it too.

Translations: With a brand-new site come a bunch of new strings.  At the moment, the most-translated language (Slovenian) still has 116 untranslated strings.  If you’ve got some time, please sign up for Launchpad and translate some strings!

Features: Although I’ve got a bunch of ideas for where I want the Guide to go, I also want to hear from you!  Will turned on voting in Bugzilla, so go vote for your favorite features.  If you don’t see it there, feel free to add it to the list; maybe other people want it, too.

I got through 11 bugs this week, 10 of which were for Miro.  #10896 (Newly Available badge displayed too frequently) and #10988 (Chicklets don’t update counts for folders) were the hardest because I didn’t know much about the new messaging system.  Working on them was good, though, because now I know a lot more

Today I started working on Guide stuff again.  We’ve got 3 (really 2) P1 bugs that have so far eluded debugging and fixing.  I added some pretty verbose debugging in for #10993 (Feed Updater Running?) so hopefully that will generate something useful.  I also put up some new code for #10972 (Fix the Miro Guide Feeds) which hopefully will limit the number of new items that Miro tries to download.

I’ll be helping Chris out with Guide stuff next week, assuming no new cobranding bugs pop up.  I have one outstanding enhancement for the cobrander (uploading files to OSUOSL) but that’s lower-priority than MG3 stuff.

I didn’t work New Year’s Eve, but I had a great time hanging out with my girlfriend and her family.

The rest of the week has been spent working on Miro Guide 3.0.  I got through 4 bugs (#11005, #10977, #10997, #10996) and sent two more (#10965 and #10958) to Dean for review.  I spent yesterday and today cleaning up the templates and template-related code to remove stuff we’re not using.  I also fixed about a third of the failing MG test cases, the ones that were simple to fix.  There are more where the functionality has actually changed (ChannelSearchTest in particular) and so the tests need a more thorough updating.

I took a leave of absence the past four months to travel around the United States and Europe.  (Check out my personal blog for those tales).  I’m happy to say that I’m back to work on the Miro Guide along with Chris Webber.  We’re working on the redesign and it’s looking great.

     556 text files.
classified 538 files
     499 unique files.
     180 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.04  T=61.0 s (6.0 files/s, 772.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              185      4403      2428     25212 x   4.20 =      105890.40
HTML                 89       198        87      8411 x   1.90 =       15980.90
CSS                   4       616        24      2752 x   1.00 =        2752.00
Javascript            6       109       545       754 x   1.48 =        1115.92
SQL                  65        94       130       504 x   2.29 =        1154.16
XML                   6        10         0       359 x   1.90 =         682.10
Bourne Shell         12        54       135       274 x   3.81 =        1043.94
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                367      5484      3349     38266 x   3.36 =      128619.42
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some of us have been talking about Git on IRC the past week. I spent today (well mostly my laptop spent the day) importing the Miro SVN respository into a Git repository with git-svn. Just importing all the history took about 4 hours, although I think a lot of that was spent just doing the downloading. The initial checkout was 1.7GB,
with 1.3GB of that taken up by Git bookkeeping. After a repacking,
that number dropped to 865M, with 457MB being bookkeeping. Not too
shabby, considering having a branch, a tag, and trunk all checked out with SVN take up 2.4GB and don’t have all the history immediately available.

I haven’t really used it for development yet, just copied my outstanding changes from my old checkout. We’ll see how that goes
next week.