Will's blog

Miro is nearing a 2.5 release candidate. There are only a couple of things we're waiting on now like a VLC 1.0 release. I'm hoping for a release candidate as late as next week and a final a week or two after that depending on how well the release candidate works for people.

If you're a Miro translator, the strings are frozen and we sure could use your help getting up-to-date accurate translations for Miro 2.5. If you know someone who's done Miro translations in the past, let them know that we're rapidly approaching the 2.5 release.

As a reminder, Miro 2.5 is the "trunk series" on Launchpad. Don't translate the Miro 2.0 series--changes there won't be carried over to trunk unless you do it yourself. The Miro trunk series translations page is here.

Now for the gripe. In the last week, Launchpad did an update which changes the translations pages and they no longer tell you the last updated date for individual translations. That's a real drag. I used that field to figure out whether or not to export translations from Launchpad and import them into Miro and to watch translation activity. Grumble grumble grumble.

I'm subscribed to all downstream Miro bugs in the Fedora bug-tracker. I'm also subscribed to all downstream Miro bugs in the Debian bug tracking system. It helps a lot to triangulate issues with external component versions and the myriad of other problems that come with developing an application that runs on Linux distributions.

Today, Rudd-O, who I've never met, ranted on the state of the Miro codebase in bug 494505 in the Fedora bug-tracker. I responded with this https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=494505#c13.

I thought I should blog about that since I really don't blog enough about the whos and the whys and the hows of Miro development.

After Miro 1.2, we decided to embark on some serious rewrites to fix big problems with the way Miro was structured. Thus each major version since Miro 1.2 has involved signficant overhaul.

Miro 2.0 saw a re-write of the ui. In doing so, we rewrote the Windows platform code which used to be a XULRunner application but is now a Python application using GTK. The ui rewrite fixed a lot of internal codebase problems, but the primary use case was to fix performance problems when displaying feeds with lots of items in them. Display isn't perfect, but it scales a lot better now. As a side note, it's not that we didn't like XULRunner, it's that we wanted to merge the windows and gtk-x11 platforms to make it easier to develop going forward.

Miro 2.5 (not quite out yet, but hopefully soon!) involved a re-write of the data storage code. It is a good thing to do in general, but the primary use case here was to fix performance problems with startup. No longer does Miro need to load the whole database to load the ui; now it can do it in parts. This speeds up Miro startup for a lot of people especially those with large databases. As an added bonus, the database is a regular relational database which other programs can access to see Miro managed media and metadata.

We don't have plans for the next version yet, but there's still a lot of stuff to re-write and make better. The downloading code needs refactoring. The feedparsing code needs good regression tests and once we have good regression tests, it should get refactored. There's a lot of code that needs to be documented and cleaned up. We need to add support for new standards and specifications. We need to add support for really important features like subtitles. We want to build a plugin framework allowing people to extend Miro in their own ways to meet their needs.

That's what we're working on, but there's no way we can do it all at once. We could use your help. If you can't contribute code, contribute funding for someone else to dedicate the time to work on code.

We are all Miro users. We are all Miro evangelists. We are all Miro testers. We are all Miro developers. Miro was made by you and me for you and me. Long live Free Software and Open Video!

I adopted a line of Miro code today. Her name is Zowwee Kahn-Greene. She's pretty cute. :)

If you want to adopt-a-line, you can do so at the Miro Adoption Center.

I just got back from the Open Video conference and it was really inpsiring and really awesome. From when I arrived in NYC late Thursday night to when I left this morning, the time flew by. I met a variety of people who have a stake in the Open Video game: producers, directors, creators, distributors, publishers, companies, representatives, individuals, codec hackers, renderer hackers, player hackers, site builders, community builders, independent journalists, movers, shakers, ...

I met a co-worker I've worked closely with for some months, but never met (and didn't realize who he was until after he was introduced). 7 out of 10 (or so) PCF staff were all there--the largest number of PCF staff in one place I've been a part of. Ben, Paul and I were able to do some Miro work and talk about issues we're having pushing 2.5 out the door. I met with Jean-Baptiste from VideoLAN (they make VLC) and talked about their impending 1.0 release (I scored a pre-release tarball and already started working on upgrading Miro on Windows to use VLC 1.0). I talked about metadata with a few people and I talked about problems with torrents in RSS enclosures with Kevin and Nathan (I'm pretty sure that's his name) Michael from LimeWire on things they're working on that have a lot of synergy with things we're working on. I talked with Joe Born from Neuros Technology about work I did in March on the Neuros Link and how we should go forward working out issues that Miro has when running on the Link (it runs well, but could use some ui tlc). Seeing what people are thinking about and doing with HTML 5 video tag was great.

It was a really productive conference for me. It's really clear what role Miro plays in the future of Open Video on the web. It'll be exciting to be a part of the future unfolding.

6/23/2009: I met Michael from LimeWire--not Nathan.

When I upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty, I noticed that git svn things were painfully slow. I had looked into this before, but couldn't remember how I found the answer or what it was. After skimming through thousands of lines of IRC logs, I re-rediscovered what I discovered the first time.

  rm -rf .git/svn
  git svn rebase --all

I found it at this site (oebfare.com).

My jury duty trial finished up yesterday freeing me up for going to the Open Video Conference. The conference schedule looks pretty interesting. I'll try to hit development related things as much as possible.

Sunday is going to be a hackfest day--looking forward to seeing other Miro devs and devs from related projects and working on the future of Open Video.

If you're at the conference, say hi!

I work at Participatory Culture Foundation and I have a work blog there that I use primarily for blogging about things related to PCF, Miro development, Miro-related development and other things of that ilk. It's on a WordPress system.

I decided after a while that having two blogs sucked. Also, I don't like Wordpress. Also also, I was getting crazy amounts of comment spam on my work blog.

As such, I did a couple of pushes to finish up PyBlosxom 1.5 enough so that I could write a tags plugin that I like so that I could migrate. Then I wrote a Wordpress to PyBlosxom migration script and the result is that I'm now blogging here for all Miro related things. Since it's easier to blog here, I'll probably be talking more about Miro-land. w00t!

I spent a few hours throwing together a new tags plugin that makes use of the new commandline features of code in PyBlosxom trunk (which will be PyBlosxom 1.5). Then I spent a while adding tags to all my entries.

I'm still mulling over my choice of tags, but I imagine I'll hone it into a set I'm happy with over time.

Also, I used :: as a tag separator, but I think I'd recommend something that doesn't require a shift key to enter. Perhaps ;; or //.

Tag information is stored in two dicts that are pickled and thrown in a file. It seems to be pretty fast to load for my blog (~500 entries). I picked pickle because it was easy, but if it turns out to be a problem, I'd be game for other storage formats.

I've been waiting for tags support before I did more blogging. Now that I've got tags support, I plan to move my work blog here. That'll make things easier and get me off WordPress.

Discovered that O'Reilly has a thing called Ignite which sounds just like Pecha Kucha. In regards to the Boston versions of both of these events, the most recent Ignite - Boston has video recordings of the presentations.

I finished up some additional work and I'm at a testing stage for PyBlosxom. I want to do some more testing and some documentation then it'll be ready for testing releases.

Also, I spent a couple of minutes upgrading my blog to use 1.5 in trunk. Bumped into bunch of weird issues with the comments plugin, but otherwise it was really smooth.