Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog

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.

Mostly this week was bug fixes:

• #9866: Uninstall doesn’t remove themes
• #9902: Search w/in channel not being saved
• #9901: crash when downloading video from the Guide
• edit box acts strangely in the Guide
• loading bar doesn’t appear for the edit box
• error on search-more-items page with unicode queries

I did add a couple new features to the Guide and its API. The Guide now
displays “Subscribe in Miro” buttons if you’re visiting in a browser,
and the API allows one to rate channels and get recommendations. I
haven’t added the documentation about that to the wiki page yet, but
I’ll be doing it soon.

Last week I was working on getting the installer to pretend that an installed theme was attached (for https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/OpenCobrand) and #9866 (Uninstall doesn’t remove themes). I also fixed a bug in the Effortless Good update.rdf file which was preventing it from being upgraded. I added a bit of new UI to the Guide around the recommendations code so that people without ratings aren’t left out to dry. I also worked with Dean finishing up the cobrander. Hopefully we’ll release that soon.

This week I’ve been working on getting Flash to work in Miro on GTK. I’ve had no real progress, though. That’s what I’ll be working on this week as well.

I spent last week working.on bugs. I got through:

• #9554: –theme causes problems with the tray icon
• #9829: Long cobranded titles are cut off in the installer
• I Heart Miro breaks lots of extensions

This week I’ve been working on OpenCobrand which is a system for making cobranded builds a little more independent
of me and Dean and Jesse. The public builder works pretty well but I’m running into some
trouble with making the installer pick up the new theme.

At the moment, I’m try to use this Locate NSIS plugin to find the themes that are
installed. It’s working in my small tests, but not in the actual Miro
installer. I’m not confident that I’ll be able to get it fixed for a
1.2.3 release, but because it only affects cobranded builds NPR and I
were thinking we’d make a 1.2.3.1 “release” to the cobrander but not
publicize it.

Last week I:

• finished up the donation pitch
• fixed some bugs with I Heart Miro (didn’t work with extensions that
  used XMLHttpRequests, didn’t work with the Amazon MP3 store)
• fixed a couple bugs in Miro (#9554, #9829) and made some cobranded
  builds with those changes
• started working on #8517

I spent Wednesday and Thursday trying to track down and fix #9581, where the loading spinner wasn’t working after the transition to XULRunner 1.9. Something changed about the permissions system, so the parent frame couldn’t access a function in the child frame. The work around for this was to give the two functions which turn on/off the spinner permissions to access the child frame.

Friday was spent tracking down failures in the thumbnail test cases. It turns out it was a silly bug in the test cases themselves; they were referring to an outdated URL on http://www.getdemocracy.com/.

This week I’ve been working on finishing up a new first time page which hopefully I’ll have rolled out by the call in the morning. I also started working on an API for the Guide. I’m really excited about this particular feature; several people have asked for it and I it’ll be important for when we want more integration between Miro and the Guide.

In reverse order:
* Fixed a bug in the guide where the overall popularity rank was incorrectly calculated.
* changed the template used for the category/tag/language pages for popular/top-rated channels.
* released a new version of I Heart Miro which should prevent Amazon from thinking we’re buying Google ads and also fixed some cases where URLs incorrectly had our affiliate tag applied to them
* links between the recommendations page and the ‘all ratings’ page
* created a template to display all the channels a user has rated

Lat week, I did a little bit of work with cobranded builds, but that part of my work has been pretty quiet. I also added Firefox 3 support to iHeartMiro and put out the 1.1 release. We finally put out the new moderation interface, and I think it looks really good.

Matt got a new server up for the Guide (PCF5) and I spent Friday getting that set up to take over from PCF4 (the old server). It’s much faster than even PCF4 was, so it should be good for a while.

The rest of my time has been spent with personalized recommendations. It’s coming along well and hopefully you’ll all be able to see it soon.