minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• should be pushed out soon

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• work is coming along nicely--probably 3 to 4 weeks of development

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Janet:

• working on creating eggplant test cases from litmus test cases

• 25% of them are created now

Will:

• worked on Python Miro Community and Gnome Miro Community

• made source tree layout changes to master branch for Miro 3.1

• finished up User Manual for Miro 3.0

Paul:

• moved Miro Guide to a new server--faster, fewer errors, better performance

• worked on performance fixes and bug fixes for Miro Community

Ben:

• working on Miro 3.1 stuff

bugzilla

• 14 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 3 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 3 bugs marked INVALID

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• we're ready for a release. srsly.

• making builds today and pushing it out over the next few days.

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Will:

• finishing up the user manual

• will talk to Nick about putting manual on getmiro.com

Luc:

• worked on 10.4 super weird issues

• blind fixes seem to be working--so that's good

• talked to perian folks--they're close to a release

Paul:

• mostly worked on sysadmin things

• changed the workflow for bug handling for Miro Community which should make it easier to get fixes in faster

• working with sys admins to move Miro Guide to a new server

Ben:

• really sick last week

• triaged crash reports from 3.0 rc3

• started organizing for 3.1 stuff

Janet:

• fell off the call

• continued regression testing testing Miro 3.0

• worked on User Manual for Miro 3.0

bugzilla

• 18 bugs/feature-requests created

• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 1 bugs marked INVALID

• 4 bugs marked FIXED

PyCon 2010 is over and the PyCon AV crew is working on taking the video they've recorded, editing it, and posting it. As they post it to the Pycon blip.tv feed, I'm pulling it into Python Miro Community. You can keep track of my status here (RSS).

I sent an email to the Cambridge Python Meetup (Cambridge, MA, USA) asking if they still record video and if so, where it gets posted.

Nate Aune sent me a link to the PloneTV feed. I'm in the process of pulling those videos in.

One thing I've noticed while curating Python Miro Community is that the quality of the image and audio make a huge difference in the usefulness of the video after the event. It's a huge project with a lot of finicky bits to reliably create great video.

Many many props to Carl Karsten, the PyCon-AV team, and all the other people out there doing this work. It allows these presentations to live beyond a moment in time and reach a much larger audience.

This is the last call for translations for Miro 3.0.

Translations are done with the Launchpad translation interface.

If you do translation work or know someone else who does, take some time today (Monday, February 22nd, 2010) to help improve the translations for Miro 3.0.

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• rc2 is going well: 150 Windows downloads, 60 OSX downloads, 30 source downloads

• there are a few bugs we're still working on, then another release candidate

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Janet:

• continued testing Miro 3.0

Ben:

• worked on subtitle support issues on Windows

• looking into weird crashes that Nick saw

• looking into crashes on upgrade

Will:

• worked on some bugs

• worked on the miro user manual

• worked on python and gnome miro community

Luc:

• fixed some bugs that Janet found on Monday

Paul:

• worked on Miro Community stuff over the last week

• we have two designers working on the style sheets and html

• working with Morgan on an admin system refresh

• working on moving feed updates to a separate server with a queue

bugzilla

• 24 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked

• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 13 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

If you're one of the lucky people going to PyCon 2010, you might want to spend some time coming up to speed on some of the talks being given.

Interested in the GIL? David Beazley is giving a talk on the inner workings of the Python GIL. He's given several GIL-related presentations before: Asynchronous vs. Threaded Python, Mindblowing Python GIL, and Changes to the GIL in Python 3.

Interested in documentation? Wesleay J. Chun is giving a talk on writing books using Python and Open Source Software. This will likely talk about Sphinx. Take some time to watch Brandon Rhodes talk about Sphinx at PyAtl.

Interested in PyPy? Maciej Fijalkowski is giving a talk on the speed of PyPy. Take some time to watch the PyPy status talk from PyCon 2009.

Don't go to PyCon unprepared!

Today I'm releasing Python Miro Community. This site is a Miro Community focused on Python. It brings together videos from Python conferences, local user groups, screencasts, and tutorials.

I'm working on it in my spare time because:

1. I think it's really important to get this video out to a larger audience, and

2. it's really important to make it easier for users and developers to find video they're looking for.

This site helps on both fronts. The first in that it collects video into one place without re-hosting it. The second in that I'm curating the site and through better descriptions and tags, the video becomes more findable.

It's not finished--it's an ongoing project that I'll continue to work on. My ultimate goal is to connect with Python video producers like Carl Karsten (whose work is phenomenal), conference A/V people, local user group A/V people, and all those people out there making screencasts, tutorials and project status videos to make sure Python Miro Community stays relevant and continues to helps creators and consumers.

It's free. I'm doing this in my spare time, Participatory Culture Foundation (the non-profit behind Miro) is providing the server and resources to host the site, and the video on the site is available for free on the Internet.

Spend some time today to take a look at the site, browse the PyCon 2009 and DjangoCon 2009 videos, spend some time honing your Python skills with either the Python basics or Python advanced tracks, follow along with the ChiPy or PyAtl local user groups, and see what's out there.

Love it? Hate it? Let me know in the comments.

Thank you to Carl Karsten and Steve Holden for their help pulling this site together!

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• we released a 3.0 rc1 and it's looking really good

• we're planning to do an rc2, get wider testing, and possibly do a release next week

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• we're working on 1.0 now--probably a 4-6 week dev cycle

Paul:

• fixed a couple of bugs with comments

• fixed some other bugs with RSS feeds

• fixed the disk space problem on Monday

• working on moving thumbnails to S3

Janet:

• we did the Miro 3.0 rc1 release on thursday

• did regression testing on Windows

• blogged release on Miro Testing site and sent an email to the mailing list

• we've had around 100 downloads of rc1

• we're ready for blogging it on the main blog

• excited about 3.0--things are really coming together

Will:

• busy week

• did bugzilla housekeeping

• wants to upgrade bugzilla to the latest version

• did some basic Miro extensions work

Old wiki page about extensions: https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/extensionsystem. There is also an old (obsolete) section in the journey about extensions: https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/thejourney.

Luc:

• fixed some minor issues in master

• working on fixing the downloader daemon shutdown slowness

• +1 on doing an rc2

• thinking about playback-during-download for a future release

• wants to get unit tests working on OSX

Ben:

• checked in some more changes into master that should go out with 3.0 and suggests we do another RC.

• still working on vlc-related fixes

bugzilla

• 17 bugs/feature-requests created

• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 10 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked INVALID

• 1 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

PyBlosxom uses Sphinx for documentation now. I was having problems with using -- for em-dash and it not showing up like an em-dash in the HTML output.

The docutils FAQ says to use the actual unicode character for emdash. I don't really want to do that because I'm not sure about what happens when the source files are opened up by a non-unicode-friendly text editor.

Turns out that doesn't matter because Sphinx allows -- for en-dash and --- for em-dash. Is this something that should get added to the Sphinx documentation?

Today I read You can't crowdsource software. The title sums up what it's about.

I've had this experience with Miro. We occassionally get patches from non-PCF people but most of the work is done by PCF. We've spent a lot of time and effort over the last few years on getting more code contributors and reducing the barriers to entry. We haven't had much success.

However, there's a lot of other "stuff" that goes into developing an application and the article only focuses on code. Some of this "stuff" can be successfully crowdsourced without a lot of effort. For example, Miro crowdsources all of our strings translation work through Launchpad.

I work on another project called PyBlosxom. We have a core group of developers (right now this is me) who do the bulk of the core code work. I do some plugin work, but the bulk of the plugin work is done by users of PyBlosxom many of whom have never touched the core code. For PyBlosxom, plugin development is crowdsourced.

The article suggests that it's a waste of time to help bring new contributors come up to speed and contribute because they often don't contribute much. That conclusion really concerns me. How can we get more people helping out if we're not working on getting people to help out?

Jono Bacon wrote an article titled Project Awesome Opportunity which talks about a few projects that are reducing the barriers to contributing and making it a lot easier. It's very Launchpad-centric, though.

OpenHatch is a startup working on building the next generation of contributors and connecting contributors to projects that need help. They're wrestling with how to effectively fix these problems, but without tying the fix to a project development silo (e.g. Launchpad, GitHub, ...). I think that's really important.

I think systems like these will reduce the effort in getting contributors and make it easier to crowdsource code contribution.

And if you, dear reader, are looking for a project to help out on that's written in Python and need someone to mentor you, let me know.

Update:

February 5th, 2010: I should clarify I think the article is fine. I don't think the conclusion that code contribution doesn't crowdsource well is poorly formed or anything like that. Just that the implications aren't great.