Will’s Miro dev blog

It’s been a good-ish week.

Nathan finished up his changes for bug 9077, they were merged into the trunk and 1.0 branches, and Janet did some testing and came up with bugs 9334 and 9335. I fixed 9334 but I think I’m going to skip 9335–it involves changing the padding for those items in the item view and I’m not wildly excited about doing that and I think the issue is cosmetic. We only implemented CC metadata at the item scope–not the feed scope, yet.

I worked my way through some bonehead issues I had caused, finished up the patch for bug 303645 and submitted it. I’m a little apprehensive about submitting a patch to Firefox, but … I’ll suck it up. The important thing is that this patch populates the enclosures array for each FeedEntry item. That was a pre-requisite for bug 400059. I’m working on that one now. As a side note, the folks on #developer on the Mozilla IRC channel have been really helpful.

On Friday, I went to lunch with Dean, Chris Blizzard and John Resig–that was really neat. A little hard to quell the star-struck feelings–hopefully I didn’t make a total ass of myself.

I created the “other packages” page for the download section of the getmiro web-site and changed around the download page, too.

I sent an email to Justin at Mozilla in response to his blog entry. I pointed him to the code for the timeline script and the script for migrating data from Trac to Bugzilla.

Looking forward to a Miro 1.1 release with all its libtorrent and CreativeCommons metadata goodness….

I’ve been super busy this past week.

I spent the brunt of my time on the Firefox patch. I’ve solved most of bug 303645, though the output isn’t pretty and it doesn’t support Yahoo’s MRSS or iTunes enclosures. I think I’ll have it figured out in the next couple of days and submitted to the Mozilla folks. Once I’ve populated the enclosures and they’re available in the FeedWriter, I can work on what we really want to do. I still need to figure out how to associate applications with different feed types. Mozilla froze the trunk today for the upcoming beta 2, so none of the changes I’ve done will be available until beta 3 at the earliest.

I spent several hours looking for enhancements or bugs that lend themselves to being small 1-5 day tasks for high school/college level people in the PSF section of the GHOP. I didn’t find any that I thought were promising. This is a bit unfortunate as it’d give us some good exposure, gets us some help, and would be good for the project. Still, there’s a certain amount of work that would need to be done to be part of the GHOP. The contest lasts until February, so I’m hoping I can figure something out before the end.

On Friday, Dean and I talked with Henri of CivicActions. They work with clients who produce content and we talked about various directions our groups can take to help each other. He’s particularly interested in how Miro could interact with mobile and embedded devices. I’m pretty interested in that, too. I plan on working on that when I get a Nokia n810. I’ve written about that in previous posts.

Also, I’ve been working with Nathan of Creative Commons to get Miro to understand and work with licensing metadata (bug 9077). He’s done most of the work so far; I’ve been providing feedback and working out the implementation issues. This is really useful since it allows content producers to embed licensing data in the feeds that Miro will display to users viewing the content.

And I’ve spent some time doing bug triage and talking with users about various issues, mostly related to packaging.

Current deadlines:

The CreativeCommons birthday is 12/15, so we need to have the 9077 work done by then.

The Mozilla folks told us that we need to get the patch done before the end of the month.

We were thinking of doing a Miro 1.1 release mid-month. I want to fix the packaging scripts so that we can name tags and branches Miro-x.y instead of Democracy-Player-x.y. I’ll probably look into that later this week.

Short status this week….

I took Wednesday through Saturday off.

On Monday, I fiddled with my Windows build environment and finally got it working (again) on Tuesday. I was having problems getting fasttypes to compile. I was getting all kinds of errors when going through the boost stuff. After some skulking through Google results regarding boost compilation problems, I decided to try installing Visual Studio 7.1 without installing the service pack. That worked super–though I’m not entirely sure why. I updated the WindowsBuildDocs page with new urls and tried to break up the instructions into something that’s more digestible.

I also continued to work on the Firefox patch.

I spent Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and part of Saturday watching new bugs, helping users out with 1.0 issues, continuing to build a Windows VM (I’ve almost got it working again) and working on Mediabar.

I checked in a minor overhaul of Mediabar. There are two big issues with Mediabar that need to be fixed that involve architecture changes (I’ve been talking about this for a month now). I figured since I’m overhauling the code for that, I might as well overhaul the code and fix namespace issues and tighten up the existing architecture to make it easier to fix the big issues. In the process of making the changes, I noticed the flv extraction code doesn’t work. I’m not sure how it’s supposed to do what it does, though, so I’m not sure if it’s something I did or something that was pre-existing or something I’m misunderstanding. When I work on Mediabar again, I’ll talk to NPR and Dean about how it should behave and what kinds of things it should be picking up and write it down into an ad hoc specification. On a side note, anyone have any idea how to do agile-like development with Firefox extensions? Where does the testing code go and how do you kick it off?

On Sunday, I got worried that I’m going to miss the deadline for the Firefox patch I’m working on. The work is under bug #400059 in the Mozilla Bugzilla db. I spent Monday and Tuesday working on adding enclosure detection to the FeedProcessor and then adding enclosure support to FeedWriter so that you can see enclosure links on the feed subscribe preview page. When I get this working, I’ll submit it as a patch against bug #303645. Making those changes paves the way towards adding support for distinguishing between video, audio and text feeds and supporting applications for handling those different feed types.

I will be off of email and IRC for the rest of the week but I’ll be studying.

I hope you all have pleasant holidays or work days (depending on where you live)!

One of the things I keep reading in comments of various Miro-related reviews is something along the lines of “there’s no good content”. I think that’s utter bunk. There’s a lot of good content listed in the Miro Guide. The channel starter packs that we added to the first page when you start up Miro 1.0 make this painfully clear. This doesn’t even include all the content that’s not even listed in the Miro Guide.

I don’t have cable tv anymore because it doesn’t make sense to waste my money on it.

I also don’t watch a ton of shows with Miro. However, here’s the list of shows I do watch (some of them while testing):

• Ask a Ninja (Add to Miro) - Occasionally there’s an annoying show, but mostly I think it’s pretty funny. I saw the Recipe For Disaster episode just before a family reunion–couldn’t have had better timing. I first discovered Ask a Ninja when one of the NPR programs I listen to periodically (I forget which one it was) had their movie critic off for the week and they played the audio from the Ask a Ninja episode reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. (Disclaimer: I have ninjas on my business card.)
• Make Zing :: Blog MAKE Podcast (Add to Miro) - I love this channel. The projects are really interesting and it covers a very wide variety of topics. Dean, my brother and I met Bre at PodCamp Boston 2 and my brother secretly thinks that the t-shirt cannon project was influenced by his story of kids launching potatoes at a river from a cannon in their chimney (long story–very odd).
• Galacticast (Add to Miro) - I met Casey at PodCamp Boston 2 and after hearing about Galacticast decided to look it up. It’s a great show!
• What you ought to know (Add to Miro) - The shows are almost all under 3 minutes long and they cover a variety of topics. It’s thoroughly educational in tiny bite-sized chunks.
• Wired Science | PBS (Add to Miro) - This is a great general science channel.
• WebbAlert (Add to Miro) - Morgan Webb and her crew do a really good job of distilling “tech news” down to a 5 to 6 minute program Monday through Thursday. I find watching this saves me the trouble of flipping through the series of blogs I used to flip through.
• Google Tech Talks (Add to Miro) - Some of the Google Tech Talks aren’t wildly interesting to me, but I’ve learned a lot from the ones I have watched. This channel is based on a Google Video search and so you’re going to want to set the Auto-download to OFF. Otherwise it’s likely you’ll pick up old videos you’ve already seen.
• Onion News Network (Add to Miro) - I usually test with ONN because it’s fantastic. The “Ninja parade slips through town unnoticed again” episode got a lot of play time on my systems–it makes me smile every time. (Disclaimer: I have ninjas on my business card.)

I think there’s a lot of other great content out there both to watch and to participate in.

So to people who shrug Miro and Internet video off because “there’s no good content” I say, “Buddy–this is 2007 and you’re missing the boat”.

What shows do you like and why? Toss your thoughts in the comments.

Update 11/16/2007: Fixed a grammar issue and somehow I managed to misspell Galacticast.

I did a bunch of release-management stuff, some minor bug triage work and some minor Gutsy work.

I passed a bunch of email back and forth with BDK and James regarding problems between Miro and the sun-java*-plugin packages on Gutsy and Feisty (bug 8444 and now bug 9064). BDK looked into it further but in the end either the test we’re using to determine whether the problem exists or not is bogus or we didn’t fix the issue. Regardless, after much discussion it was decided that the package conflicts were worse than the problem so we removed the conflicts for 1.0 final.

I got in touch with Dean’s friend Ben (not to be confused with BDK or my brother Ben), and he and I are going to go through our Gutsy and Feisty packaging and fix any outstanding issues (like bug 8716). I think this is pretty cool and hope that this is the first of many Boston-area Miro hack-fests.

I also worked on Mediabar. I’ve been doing a pass at cleaning up namespace issues and code cleanup. After I’m done with that, I’ll work on the tab rearchitecture and the rss discovery problems. Neil and I traded some email and he’s eager to work on things again. I’m currently the bottleneck on further Mediabar progress–I’ll be spending the rest of the week fixing that. I want to get back to working on the Firefox patch, too and get that done ASAP.

On a side note, I was selected for the Nokia n810 device program. I want to look into porting Miro over to the device and do some other development, too. It’ll be a good system for figuring out how Miro could work on “smaller devices” and what a slimmed down version of Miro can do. I also want to look into what it would take to get Miro working with Conduit so that Linux users can move video content to their n810 and other portable video playing devices.

As a side note, I live in Somerville, MA. If anyone (users, testers, developers, …) is interested in getting together to triage bugs, working out issues, fix problems, add features, … let me know. I’m totally game for hack-fests and getting together.

Miro 1.0 has been released! Yay!

I’ve only been with PCF since July (or maybe it was June–I forget), but since I came on board we’ve been working hard on stability and honing the feature set. Working on stability is hard because there are a near infinite number of combinations of library versions, video card drivers, operating systems, … out there and all of them are slightly different. Writing software that works on multiple platforms is non-trivial. It’s a huge testament to the community of users and testers and developers that Miro is at the point it’s at now.

One thing about 1.0 that I want to mention is that this is a snapshot in time of a continually evolving piece of software. If you look at Bugzilla, there are dozens of interesting features that we’re all interested in that range from starting Miro as a daemon process to viewing video as it’s downloading.

Chris, Nick and Ben are working on post-1.0 development already. There’s been discussions on the develop mailing list regarding reworking the user interface to use native widgets and make it much faster and more responsive. Paul is continuing work on the Miro Guide. Janet is working on making community testing easier for everyone involved and produce better testing data. I’m switching off to work on Mediabar. Dean and the Team Miro folks are working on honing the documentation and they’re doing a fantastic job of testing and identifying issues for release candidates and versions.

Miro development is moving along and its momentum is a direct result of us all working towards a common goal: building an Internet video player using Open Source and open standards that will enable the current generation of media content to flourish.

One other thing I want to mention is that we ditched the conflicts between the miro package and the sun-java*-plugin packages for Gutsy and Feisty. The problem between the packages still exists and it’s intermittent, but several conversations with people caused me to rethink adding the conflicts. So this doesn’t fix anything–it’s just trading one set of problems for another, however I’ve come around to agree that the conflict is more of a pain in the ass than occasional intermittent crashes.

I mothered the 0.9.9.9 release on Wednesday, which went really smoothly, and then the 0.9.9.9.1 release on Thursday, which sucked and took two days to sort out. I had problems doing svn checkouts on the Windows build box (took in excess of 1.5 hours for a single checkout) and then problems with the windows-xul setup.py script which had bugs when the version number contains more than four pieces. I had some help from Nassar working that out, but it sucked up most of my time and I didn’t really get much else accomplished.

Over the weekend, I helped out a few users who were having problems with 0.9.9.9 on Gutsy.

On Monday, I worked on Mediabar and continued building a new Windows XP vm.

Today I worked on legal stuff, bug triage (making sure I’ve got all the things I need to get done for 1.0 done) and Windows XP vm stuff.

Overall it was a week short on getting things accomplished and long on random problems and wasted time. Frustrating.

I plan on working on Mediabar and Firefox 3.0 patch work in the foreseeable future. I’ll probably be avoiding IRC for a while.

We released 0.9.9.9 yesterday and it took us 5 or 6 hours from tagging the branch to releasing builds. That’s pretty cool and makes for a smooth release. Also, I didn’t screw anything up this time.

I’m an employee of PCF so it’s my job to work on Miro (and the other things I work on). However, I’m just one guy and time is a limited resource. There’s no way I can triage, identify and fix all bugs. I appreciate all the help that I can get. I had a bunch of help this release.

I wanted to thank the following people for the time they spent submitting quality bugs, sending in patches, and helping me fix issues:

• Simon from dbus-python who walked me through fixing the dbus-python deprecation issue and reviewed the code changes I made.
• Markus who helped me with a variety of Gutsy and Gutsy packaging issues.
• Paul who noticed our README was out of date and suggested changes.
• Matthias who helped with Gutsy and Feisty packaging issues.
• Gotz who helped with packaging issues.
• Stéphane who helped with packaging issues.
• Marco who helped with packaging issues.

If there’s anyone else that helped out that I’ve forgotten, I apologize. Please kick me and/or comment below.

We’re well on the path to a solid 1.0. When 1.0 is finally out, we start working through the architecture changes required for many of the features that have been suggested.

This week I spent time on:

• gutsy-related issues
• gutsy packaging issues
• dbus-python deprecation warning (6226)
• sun-java*-plugin problems with Miro and gtkmozembed (8444)
• problems with mismatched gtkmozembed between compiling and linking
• tagging and releasing rc1 and rc2
• triaging all bugs assigned to me

Also, Dean and I went to PodCamp Boston 2 this weekend. Talking to people about Miro resulted in one of three possibilities:

1. the person was really psyched about Miro, uses it frequently/all-the-time and had some questions about future development
2. the person thought Miro was neat, but either hadn’t used it or thought it was still called Democracy Player
3. the person was wholly uninterested in Miro and didn’t really see the point of having another media player in the space alongside players like FireAnt and Joost

The first group was really exciting to talk to. Dean and I tried to hook this group into Team Miro and other Miro-related activities. Mostly I just basked in the warm glow of a happy user–things have been cold and miserable recently.

The second group was interesting and most people in this group asked the important questions. I think connecting with this group was the most important thing I did over the weekend.

The third group wasn’t really all that exciting to talk to. Their priorities don’t match ours and I suspect most of them just feel hassled by the fact that there’s another media player to think about.

I also spent time listening to what terms people used for “video media feeds”. I heard “vidcast”, “video cast”, and “video podcast” most often, I think. Just some more data in the “what the hell should we call this thing”? bucket.

After 0.9.9.9-rc2 and 0.9.9.9 final, I’m going to be spending all my time on mediabar and the Firefox extension. If I don’t do that, I’m not going to meet the deadlines.

I want to clarify the situation with Miro and the sun-java6-plugin package.

Prior to 0.9.9.9, if you had the sun-java6-plugin installed and you install Miro, then Miro would crash on startup. For 0.9.9.9, we added a conflict with the sun-java6-plugin package. That means that in order to install Miro, you will have to uninstall the sun-java6-plugin.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack for this fix in the last couple of days–and for good reason: this sucks for users who have that plugin installed. I definitely understand the frustration and we don’t consider this a final solution. (As a philosophical note, most development solutions are not final–most things can be changed if a better feasible option is found and implemented.)

The bottom line is that if you use the sun-java6-plugin plugin, you can’t use Miro. Adding the conflict line to the package makes it more user-friendly when installing Miro because then you’re not stuck in a situation where you have installed Miro, it crashes on startup, and you have no clue why.

We’re interested in a real solution for this problem. Details of the problem are in these bugs:

• bug 5092
• bug 8444
• bug 9064

If you have feasible ideas, add them in the comments on bug 9064 or comment here.

I got a Mozilla Bugzilla account and commented on the bugs that Alex Faaborg created to track changes we want to make for Firefox 3.0. We’ve got a couple of months to do the changes, but Alex said that Chris said that he’d like to see it as an extension first. I’m not sure we can do that, but I plan on looking into it.

I spent an hour finishing up the Bugzilla timeline script that I’ve been working on over the last month or so and made it public. You can see it at http://bugzilla.pculture.org/timeline.cgi.

I spent a day or so pushing out rc0 and honing our ReleaseProcess documentation. I also did a pass through our bugs for low hanging fruit that we’ve been sitting on after looking at the LaunchPad bugs for Miro. I had problems with the Windows build machine which Matt helped me through.

Then I wrote some blog entries about our Gutsy situation so that users and developers knew what the status was. I worked on the gutsy packaging. BDK and I had an svn issue where he did an svn cp ... (r5515) and that wiped out my changes (r5512, r5513, and r5514). We’re not entirely sure what happened.

I conversed with an unhappy and frustrated user who doesn’t like that we’ve set up Miro to conflict with sun-java6-plugin. No one thinks it’s an ideal solution, but it’s the best one we’ve got right now. After talking about it on #miro-hackers, BDK created a bug to revisit the java plugin situation for 1.0. I’m going to see if I can find anyone at Mozilla that would know whether you can embed gtkmozembed without the plugins (I think that’s the right question to ask–if not, poke me). The current consensus is that there’s nothing we can do, but it sure would be nice to find out that we’re wrong and the magic pixie in the sky can come down and make the problem go away.

Earlier today we released 0.9.9.9-rc0 gutsy package in a new gutsy repository. It’s my first packaging experience. Our README for it is really good; I made some minor updates while I was fiddling with things.

Also, I thought PodCamp was last weekend–turns out it’s next weekend. That was confusing. I figured it out after traveling on the T, getting there, puzzling about why no one else was there, calling my wife to see if I was in the wrong place, sighing deeply when I found out I’m at the right physical location but the wrong chronological location, and then taking the T home. The good thing that came out of this is that I got to test my raincoat which I had just waterproofed–it works pretty well.

I spent Sunday upgrading my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy and trying to reproduce some of the gutsy bugs we’ve got–I haven’t been able to. It’s likely there are other things involved that I’m not aware of yet.

I’m going to spend some time to upgrade my desktop to Gutsy as well and then build virtual machines for Dapper, Feisty and Gutsy. So then we’ll have another person who can cover Ubuntu releases and testing and such.

Update 10/24/2007: I forgot to talk about the Mediabar Firefox extension… I haven’t touched it in at least two weeks–possibly more. It has some big issues that need to be figured out, but I’ve been spending time on other things. I do want to get it fixed up because it is a useful extension. I’ll try to find some time for it in the next week or so.

It’s been a wild couple of days. I finished up the rc0 release for Windows and Mac OSX on Saturday, spent Sunday upgrading my laptop from Feisty to Gutsy and then on Monday we had some quirky subversion collisions.

We’ve worked out some/most of the issues with the Ubuntu packaging for Miro and build a package for Gutsy. This package is available in the Miro repositories.

Things to note:

1. This package is release candidate 0 for version 0.9.9.9. If you are at all squeamish about testing software in a beta state, you should wait for the 0.9.9.9 final release which will be sometime this week or next week.
2. Back up your ~/.miro directory BEFORE installing and using this package. If there were issues, you want to be able to go back to your previous Miro state.
3. Miro conflicts with sun-java6-plugin. You can’t have both installed at the same time. This is a workaround for problems we’re having with the sun-java6-plugin, gtkmozembed, and Miro. If this is a problem for you, you should wait until the 0.9.9.9 final release. It’s possible we’ll have a different fix for it by then, but it’s more likely that this will happen in version 1.0 or later. If you know how to set up gtkmozembed so that it doesn’t load plugins, let us know.

Instructions:

If you follow the directions at http://www.getmiro.com/download/ubuntu.php but use:

deb http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/pculture.org/miro/linux/repositories/ubuntu gutsy/

as the line to add, then you’ll pick up the Miro repository for Gutsy.

What to do if things don’t work:

Let us know if you have any problems. Good ways to do this would be:

• add to an existing bug report or create a new bug report in our Bugzilla system, and/or
• comment here (but make sure I have some way to reply to you)
• hop on #miro on irc.freenode.net and let us know.

And if it worked great, we’d love to know that, too.

Someone (possibly Janet) created a gutsy keyword in Bugzilla, so I went through and tagged all the bugs that I think are gutsy related with the gutsy keyword: http://bugzilla.pculture.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=gutsy.

There are a few other issues floating around that are related to our feisty packaging–I’m going to try to fix those while I’m fiddling with packaging.

I’ve copied over the debian-feisty packaging to debian-gutsy in the repository. Today I’m working on getting the kinks out of building, going through all the files to make sure they work, and testing the resulting package.

Once I get to a point where the resulting package is building and stable on both of my machines, I’ll post the packages for other people to test.

That’s where I am with things. I imagine this will be an all-day thing.

I’ll post something here when I have a 0.9.9.9-rc0 gutsy package ready for testing and solicit help in regards to testing from the people who have been posting bugs.

Any thoughts, suggestions, et al–comment below.

Here’s the current state of Miro on Gutsy:

• we don’t have a Gutsy package of Miro for 0.9.9.1 (the current release)
• Gutsy does work with what will become Miro 0.9.9.9 (the very soon-to-be released release)

The first Miro version we plan on supporting for Gutsy is 0.9.9.9 which will be released soon–probably in the next week if all goes well. We have been testing with Gutsy over the last month and we have instructions for building Miro on Gutsy in Trac. I want to emphasize that Miro 0.9.9.9 will work nicely on Gutsy and the primary issue here is a packaging one.

The Gutsy universe repository has a Miro 0.9.8 package in it. I’ve tested it on my Gutsy box and it works for me, however it’s missing a lot of the fixes that we’ve made for 0.9.9.9 which should alleviate problems with Miro and specific video cards. So if it works for you, then that’s great, but if it doesn’t, then you’re going to have to wait until 0.9.9.9.

I plan on making a pass through Bugzilla and make sure any outstanding Gutsy issues are resolved. Additionally, I’ll take a pass through LaunchPad and make sure we catch any bugs that didn’t get reported upstream to us.

We’ll be tagging our repository for 0.9.9.9 rc1 soon–hopefully today and have an rc1 out by tomorrow for Windows and Mac OSX. We’ll get a Gutsy rc1 out as soon as we can, but it’ll probably take a few days.

If you want to help out with testing rc1, let me know and I’ll be sure to point you in the right direction and/or watch the Miro Testing blog.

If you have any problems, please write up a bug in Bugzilla, comment on an existing bug with additional information, and/or hop on #miro on irc.freenode.net and let us know.

If you have any thoughts, please comment here and if the plan changes at all, I’ll post an update.

As an aside, Gutsy is a great Ubuntu release–I’m running it on one of my machines already and look forward to upgrading my other machine.

Got my first spam comment on the blog. The current tally (as of this writing) is 1 real comment, 1 reply from me to the real comment, 1 trackback, and 1 spam. I think that qualifies as a full count.

I spent the last week pawning bugs off on other people while I come up to speed with Firefox development. Alex Faaborg wrote a blog entry about Firefox and Miro which piqued our interest. The result of the conversations around that blog entry launched me into Firefox development.

My first impression is that Mozilla has a massive code base. They’ve got a lot of code for a lot of products and they’re managing it with an intricate series of make files and scripts. It has taken a while to come up to speed and I’m still spending time figuring things out. I’ve written some loose notes about getting started with Firefox development on my other blog. As a side note, it’s tough having two blogs.

Today Alex formalized the issues into bug 400059.

I spent Saturday at the Ubuntu Massachusetts Install Fest which went fantastically. I talked to a bunch of people about Miro, Ubuntu and Free Software. Most people I talked to either hadn’t heard of Miro at all or had heard of it, but didn’t realize we had changed the name. I’m not sure what that means in the grand scheme of things, but everyone was pretty interested in the current state of the project.

This coming Friday is the start of PodCamp Boston 2. Dean, possibly Chris, and I are going to attend some/many/most of the days and talk to people about the Miro ecosystem. Dean’s also talked to Chris Brogan about making the sessions available as a feed somewhere so that we can turn it into a channel and put it on the Miro Guide. I’m not a big fan of tech evangelism, but I think telling people about the Miro ecosystem is generally a good thing for everyone involved. It’s good for us for the obvious reasons. It’s good for content producers because it’s important for them to understand the publishing side of the equation and that they don’t have to be tied down to a host/publisher. It’s important for the rest of the world because the more people realize they have options, the more those options continue to exist and the less likely it is that unpopular voices are muted. That’s some serious stuff.

I think I’m going to spend the coming week continuing work on the Firefox patch and poking around with the Firefox code base. I suspect things will slow down a bit as I start asking more questions and waiting for answers. That’ll give me time to continue working on the Mediabar.

As a side note, I’m now using Firefox 3.0 dev–it’s pretty interesting.

Update 10-21-2007: I got this weekend confused with next weekend. Not quite sure how I did that. Next weekend (26th-28th) is PodCamp and FOSSCamp. It was a good thing, too, because I spent this weekend pushing out 0.9.9.9 rc0 and upgrading my laptop to Gutsy.

It’s been a really really busy week. I put Mediabar down and played catch-up with Miro and infrastructure.

I fixed (or at least think I fixed) a few UDE-type errors (#8705, #8706, #8699, #8820, #8737), passed a bug to BDK, passed a bug to Chris, and I think I may have passed a bug to Nassar, too.

We didn’t previously have any official policy regarding contributions from non-PCF employees. I spent some time putting together a policy for handling code contributions and also for checking code into the SVN repository. I’ve talked with Ben and Chris about it so far and ironed out some issues. I think it’s pretty decent now. https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/TheRules

I spent some time going through all the code and adding GPL/Copyright headers to files that didn’t already have them. I haven’t done this to XML, XUL, or DTD files–I think I’m going to leave them be. Part of the reason is that there are a lot of them. The other part of the reason is that they’re in a bunch of different markups and I’m not wildly psyched about trying to jam GPL/Copyright headers into them in such a way that it doesn’t screw up how those files are used in the code.

I finished up an “alpha” version of the timeline script for Bugzilla. It needs some more work and it has some bugs, so it’s not quite ready for prime time. I hope to have this done by the end of the week, but finding time to work on it has been difficult.

Dean is talking to contarc/Jay about skinning Bugzilla and making other changes. In order for that to work well, I needed to re-work things so we can manage the changes we’re making to Bugzilla better. I spent today fixing my changes to meet the Bugzilla recommended method for changes and checked everything into SVN.

It’ll be really nice to have a better Bugzilla, but we need to make sure that it meets the needs of the developers and testers as well as the rest of the community. I’ve heard a lot of opinions about what it should and shouldn’t look like and that concerns me. While we’re pushing to get Miro 1.0 and Mediabar 1.0 out the door, I don’t think we should be spending gobs of time on changing minor things in Bugzilla unless the changes are necessary to fix some real problem we all agree exists.

On Sunday, Dean, Chris and I met up with Asheesh from Creative Commons and SJ from OLPC and talked about the world as it revolves around Miro and other things. It was really interesting stuff, but also pretty overwhelming. Then we went to a GNOME Summit bar thing.

I’m planning on switching back to Mediabar stuff tomorrow (Wednesday). I need to finish the tab-friendly re-architecture and I need to figure out how to deal with the recent rss-download issue Neil bumped into. Then there’s a lot of little stuff that needs to be done. My rough guess is that I’ll be working on Mediabar for another couple of weeks with some time spent on Miro and Bugzilla.

I think I’m going to lay low on IRC for the next week–I need to be talking less and doing more. My queue of things to do is starting to get too big for me to wrap my head around and I’m starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.

Wired has an article today, Entrepeneur Aims to Overthrow TV, Not Get Rich. PCF’s mission is a huge reason of why I’m working here–it really appealed to me and I really believe in it.

The GNOME folks are meeting in Boston for the Boston GNOME Summit 2007. I met up with Asheesh (who turned out to be a PyBlosxom user I’ve known for a while) last night and talked with Stefan from Nokia about Miro, gstreamer, and the possibilities of porting Miro to the Nokia Internet tablets.

Tonight, Dean, Chris and I met up with Asheesh (Creative Commons) and SJ (OLPC) and talked about Miro in relation to Creative Commons and OLPC. After that, we headed over to Flat Top Johnny’s and talked with more of the people who were here for the GNOME Summit.

Most of the people I talked to knew about Miro–that was neat. There’s a lot of interest in Miro and its future directions. In many ways it’s really exciting, but in some ways it’s really daunting. How do you choose between the myriad of interesting future directions? We’ve got a limited number of people working on Miro, so we can’t choose them all–at least, not for the next version after 1.0. It’s a good spot to be in, but at the same time, a little depressing since it would be a lot of fun to do everything.