Will’s Miro dev blog

It was an exciting week:

• Bought a new laptop (Dell 1420n with Ubuntu Gutsy on it, 4 GB of memory and BRIGHT YELLOW)
• Spent a couple of days switching to the new laptop and getting VNC working on my desktop machine
• Worked on bugs 9614, 9627 and 3067–9627 took me a while to figure out
• Centralized the list of projects for internships, GSOC, et al — see it at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/CommunityProjects
• Toyed with Hardy Heron alpha 5 for a few hours to get a feel for where we are with that; turns out Miro 1.1.2 is in the Hardy repositories, so that’s a good sign

This coming week I’m planning to:

• Work on 1.2 bugs starting with mine and continuing with Nassar’s
• Take a look at the two-stage problem with the subscribe.getmiro.com site

I want to send HUGE thank yous to the following people:

• mutantmonkey for the patch which disables the x screensaver for GTKX11 when watching movies in fullscreen — this is awesome!
• Njaal for the patch so that Miro will automatically stop seeding torrents when a specified ratio is reached in bug 8793
• Sid for the excellent bug report for 9627
• elmargol for help with bug 9614
• Uwe from Debian and Christopher from Ubuntu for the work they’re doing and the help they give us on packaging

Also, I’d like to apologize for posting my last status so late. I back-dated it, so it probably showed up on the planet pretty low.

I installed Hardy Heron alpha 5 in a VM and Miro doesn’t compile on it. Amongst other things, Hardy uses Firefox 3, so it’s likely we’ll have to make some code changes to account for that. I only spent 20 minutes with Hardy and Miro to see where things are at–no clue how much work is going to be involved.

I’d love to get someone(s) to help with working out the issues with Miro on Hardy before Hardy releases. If you’re interested in helping, leave a comment here, send me an email, or find me on IRC.

If no one helps out, then I’ll probably deal with supporting Hardy after Hardy is released.

It was a pretty slow week.

• I spent some time trying to implement 5403 and 8619 on Mac OSX, but then discovered that Luc must use some gui builder tool that I don’t have. So I ended up passing those two bugs off to him.
• I spent some time doing bug triage.
• I fixed a few problems from code flux.
• I worked on 9521 for a few days. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought it was partially because it touches sections of the code I haven’t touched yet. Nassar thinks it’s probably not something we want to bother with. I think I might be able to implement it, but I think it’ll take a week to get it right. I think we should defer it to a future version.

Things I’m planning on doing this week:

• Possibly continue working on 9521 depending on the call.
• The two-stage installer bug is still out there and I have access to pcf3 now, so I think I can solve it. I sent an email to plans regarding that subscribe.getmiro.com site being all kinds of bit-rotty and whether I should spend time fixing it, but didn’t get any replies.
• We got a patch for bug 8793 for implementing ratio restrictions for torrents for GTKX11. The bulk of the patch is the glade code for GTKX11; the actual code is pretty trivial. I’d like to look into this and probably apply it.
• Check out Miro on Ubuntu Hardy (which is in alpha 4 now) and get a feel for where it’s at.

This actually covers two weeks of work because I was in Florida for a bit in between.

Things I did:

• implemented 5403 and 8619 for GTKX11 and Windows
• worked on Mediabar specs (briefly)
• went to the Worcester office to hang out with the Nicks
• bought a Mac mini for Boston devs
• wrote a blog entry about the Firefox 3 work I did so it’s clearer as to what I was working on and how it impacts Miro
• did a 1.1.2 release which contains the exception text for OpenSSL and GPL co-existence (though it’s not entirely clear if I did this right)
• did some bug-fixing on GTKX11 to get the timebar and video information displaying correctly
• did some re-working of the theme I’m using on my devblog so it’s less annoying–still needs some help, though

Things I’m working on this week:

• finishing up work on bugs 5403 and 8619 (though I may end up giving up–I’m not really following where oid comes from in the strings)
• go through the bugs and do some more light triage work and start marking bugs that look bite-sized as such

A little under two weeks ago patches for bugs 303645, 400061 and 400064 landed in the Firefox trunk. These patches add video/audio podcast-related enhancements to the upcoming Firefox 3. Firefox 3’s feed preview page now distinguishes video and audio podcast feeds from “regular feeds”. It will also show all enclosures in the feed with information about the enclosure.

It’s really exciting for these features to be in Firefox 3. These enhancements reduce the interface divide between Firefox and video/audio podcast consuming applications like Miro, iTunes and others. Amongst other things, it’s hugely beneficial to Miro users who use Firefox.

Here’s what the feed preview page looks like in Firefox 2 on Ubuntu Gutsy:

Here’s what the feed preview page will look like in Firefox 3 on Ubuntu Gutsy:

I’m really excited that this is going in. At a bare minimum, it means I have to spend a lot less time fishing through view source finding enclosures.

This is my first contribution to Firefox and my first time working with Mozilla developers and other Firefox contributors. There was a lot of material to come up to speed on including build process, testing procedures, who’s in charge of what, getting reviews done, …

I want to give a shout out to Mike Beltzner who was really patient and incredibly helpful in getting the functionality landed. Also to Robert Sayre and Myk Melez who reviewed the code and suggested changes and fixes that made it much better. Also to Alex Faaborg who kicked off this mini-project back in October. And lastly all the people on #developers on IRC who helped me with issues I was having: Ventnor, biese, bz, gavin, Pike, _FrnchFrgg_ and others–Thank you all!

It was neat in that the patches landed just before the beta 3 codefreeze on my birthday. Having said that, there were a bunch of problems with the patches, many of which were sorted out and fixed by other people. Sorry about that–crappy organization on my part.

I also want to point out that this is a huge advantage that open source has over non-open source: I, as a person external to the project, can still participate in a meaningful way and help implement the functionality that matters to me. That’s very empowering.

Sidenote: That show is What You Ought To Know. It’s a fun show–worth subscribing to.

I really didn’t like the theme I had. Trying out a new one….