Will's blog

Back in October of 2010, I created a standing desk. A friend of mine bought a Sears workbench and was using that and while it was pretty cool looking, I wanted something I could more easily nail things into. I've been meaning to write about this for a while.

I bought some two-by-fours and plywood and built most of it with that and some scraps of wood I had lying around.

Since then, I built a stool to go with it and bought a shelf thing from Ikea that goes to the right of it.

I think it took a day to build the standing desk, though I've tweaked it a bit since I originally built it. It took a day to build my stool. Total cost in parts for both pieces was definitely under $100.

Result is this:

This set up has lots of horizontal space, is set at the right height for me, lets me sit when I'm weary and stand when I'm not, and has some storage capacity so I'm not surrounded by stuff.

"Wait! What's up with all those computers?", you might ask. Well, the computer breakdown is like this:

• one work laptop
• one laptop that I use for Skype/Vidyo for work
• one laptop I use for home stuff
• one desktop I use for home stuff and games
• one desktop that's the current PCF Windows build box for Miro
• one Macbook that's a backup PCF OSX build box for Miro

Then I have:

• one settop computer I'm not using at all
• one dead laptop

The dead computers should go away. The PCF build boxes will eventually be re-homed, too.

And that's the state of my desk!

Tim threw together a vagrant setup for Kitsune based on what Alex did in November. I went to give it a try but I'm using vagrant 0.8.10 and it died.

Important part of the error message was:

/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/net-ssh-2.1.4/lib/net/ssh/key_factory.rb:38:in
`read': Permission denied - /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys/vagrant
(Errno::EACCES)

Issue is documented at https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/235.

My fix was to do this:

saturn /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys> ls -al
total 24
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Jan 11 20:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 10 root root 4096 Jan 11 20:00 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  821 Jan 11 20:00 README.md
-rw-------  1 root root 1675 Jan 11 20:00 vagrant
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1464 Jan 11 20:00 vagrant.ppk
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  409 Jan 11 20:00 vagrant.pub
saturn /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys> sudo chmod 644 vagrant
saturn /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/vagrant-0.8.10/keys>

That fixed it for me. Figured I'd document it so that I could find it again when I bumped into it again.

Getting a job at PCF was a bit of a surreal experience. It was in July of 2007. I had just had a major health crisis, wrote a compiler, finished grad school, and got married. I bumped into Chris at a contra dance in Concord and on a lark and out of the clear blue sky, my wife asked if he knew anyone hiring Python developers. That's how I ended up at PCF.

That was a little over four years ago. It's been a really great four years. Working for PCF is pretty close to a dream job for me: I learned a ton of stuff, I worked on a lot of awesome software, and I worked with and met a lot of amazing people. The hardest part of the whole thing was that there were too many opportunities and I had to pick and choose between the ones I had time for. For example, I would have loved to continue working on the extension system, the fullscreen 10' interface, the text-based interface, DLNA support, dbus interface, ....

Thus, with so many things left undone, I'm kind of bummed that I'm leaving. Friday is my last day.

Next Tuesday, I start work at Mozilla in the webdev crew on the SUMO team.

It'll be weird to leave the desktop application world behind for the wild wild west of Internet applications. Having said that, you could say I'm returning to web development after a 10 year hiatus. A ton of stuff has changed since then (\cheapshot{except possibly Internet Explorer}). This time I'm working with people who know the HTTP related RFCs way better than I do. That's both exciting and daunting.

So if you're having Miro problems and send me an email, I'll probably direct you to someone else. Miro is a fast moving project and my knowledge of its dark secrets will ebb quickly.

The times they are a changing!

Miro status

• 4.1 roadmap
• We're working on Miro 4.1.

Will:

• talked with Janet about translations
• worked on gtk/gstreamer overhaul

Geoffrey:

• working on sharing feeds and podcasts--now merged
• fixed some bugs in Miro

Janet:

• testing devices
• talked with Nick about working out what 4.1 will look like
• worked on figuring out the future of the build boxes

Jonas:

• worked on WinSparkle-related changes

Kaz:

• fixing problems with the metadata extractor

Ben:

• away for a few days
• working on getting the gtk/gstreamer overhaul stuff Will did running. gstreamer on Windows seems to require directshow and that somehow requires 3d support which sucks on VirtualBox.
• will continue working on gtk/gstreamer overhaul
• will continue working on itemfilter branch

Order of business:

• We might do a 4.0.4, but only to fix issues with Miro Mobile.
• Talked about future of build boxes. Janet's been working on a wiki page for it at: http://develop.participatoryculture.org/index.php/BuildBoxHosting
• Talked about process questions:
  • moving the Miro repository to Github
    • Will and Paul will work on moving the Miro repository to Github
  • Ben wants to start doing one-on-one developer chats
  • we want to change workflows to require more peer review
    • Ben will create a peer review qiki page
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

Miro status

• 4.1 roadmap
• We're working on Miro 4.1.

Will:

• committed gtk/gstreamer overhaul changes
• fixed nightly build issues and tweaked scripts to be more similar
• planning to work with Ben on the rest of the overhaul stuff

Janet:

• Universal subtitles testing. Catching up on tests and things.
• Tested Miro device support and sync support.
• Tested WinSparkle changes for Windows XP issues.

Paul:

• Back from vacation.
• Continued working on installer changes.
• Worked on Puppet scripts for dev server for Miro Community.

Kaz:

• Continued working on metadata extractor/priority code.

Jonas:

• Continued working on WinSparkle support for Miro on Windows.

Geoffrey:

• Worked on sharing podcasts and bugfixes for sharing changes.

Ben:

• Worked on hybrid view bits.
• Worked on building a new Windows vm for Windows overhaul stuff.

Order of business:

• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

Miro status

• 4.1 roadmap
• We're working on Miro 4.1.

Will:

• continued working on windows overhaul stuff
• should have my side of stuff checked in by the end of this week
• will create bugs for the outstanding issues

Janet:

• tested 4.0.3 for the 4.0.3 release
• continued to test Miro Mobile
• hoping to work on Miro 4.1 testing
• sounds like we're going to do a Miro 4.0.4 release

Jonas:

• working on winsparkle support for better seamless updating on Windows

Kaz:

• working on the metadata overhaul
• working on EchoNest support

Ben:

• worked on hybrid view functionality--almost done
• worked on separating columns for different views
• worked on podcast view
• worked on extension infrastructure to make it better

Order of business:

• We talked about the particulars of how WinSparkle deals with an unresponsive Miro.
• We talked about extensions and how we want to develop the infrastructure going forward.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

Miro status

• 4.0.3 roadmap
• 4.1 roadmap
• We're working on Miro 4.0.3 and 4.1.

Will:

• Helped Rob with bugzilla upgrade tests--we're probably upgrading soon.
• Continued working on the Windows overhaul. Webkitgtk looks like a showstopper because it doesn't support Flash/plugins, so I'm going to pass browser upgrade work to Ben. I'm now working on the GStreamer upgrade and keeping gtk at the same version.
• Last day at the end of August, but I'll hang out on IRC.

Geoffrey:

• Fixed YouTube downloads.
• Implemented push notifications for client side for DAAP.
• Fixed some regressions for push notifications on the server side.

Ben:

• Worked on item filter branch.
• Got a new computer and is setting it up.
• Continuing to work on hybrid view.

Paul:

• ... (his skype was broken)

Order of business:

• Will will be handing things off to other people.
• 4.0.3 planning
  • YouTube fix, miro mobile fix
  • Will will take the release hat, build builds, write an email and get Janet to test tonight for a hopeful release tomorrow
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 13 bugs/feature-requests created
• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 13 bugs marked FIXED

PyOhio 2011 happened last weekend. I'm currently working with Carl at Next Day Video to get the videos they're posting to the blip.tv feed into Python Miro Community.

I'm using a similar process to what we used with PyCon 2011 videos, but we don't have to figure it out on the fly this time around, so things are going much smoother.

As of now, there are three videos posted with more coming as they're uploaded and work their way through the workflow.

• Data-Transfer Objects are a Disease. Meet the cure.
• Using Fabric - from a sysadmin's perspective
• Aspen: A Next-generation Web Framework

If you have some spare time, please consider helping out with subtitling the videos. Whenever a video is subtitled, it becomes accessible to a much wider audience. If you help out with subtitling, please let me know so that I can thank you.

Miro status

• 4.1 roadmap
• We're now working on Miro 4.1.

Kaz:

• working on re-implementing metadata bits

Jonas:

• working on winsparkle support for Miro on Windows

Geoffrey:

• working on drag and drop enhancements

Paul:

• working on auto-fill options for device syncing
• working on getting new zugo installer into Miro on Windows

Ben:

• working on OSX Lion support
• reworked filename type code

Janet:

• working on adding and tweaking regression tests
• working on testing the Miro Mobile app
• working on testing Universal Subtitles

Will:

• built new linux build box
• working on gstreamer/webkit/gtk overhaul

Order of business:

• talked about 4.0.2.1 which will have OSX Lion support and will fix the French translation; we're hoping to get it out this week.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 35 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 5 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked INVALID

It's been a while since the last status post on the status of Python Miro Community. The reasons are many, but mostly because I've been blocked on other things and hadn't really finished anything. Boo.

To recap, Python Miro Community is a curated index of Python-related video from around the Internet including Python-related conference sessions. Catch the sessions you missed, show sessions to your colleagues, and remind yourself why you really want to be attending these conferences in person.

Anyhow, it's been a slow few months. Most of the PyCon 2011 videos are posted with the exceptions of the lightning talks which I still have to watch and fill out the descriptions for.

Miro Community released 1.2.1 which allows me to do rss feeds that exceed the 30-video maximum they have. That allows me to run my script which verifies download urls. The PyCon 2011 category was fine.

The PyCon 2010 category was not fine. Of the 120 videos in the category, over 60 of them had bad download urls. This really bothers me. I don't know why the urls are going sour. I've fixed all the ones in the PyCon 2011 category and will monitor them going forward periodically.

I still need to go through the other categories.

Carl kicked me into using GitHub for PMC related things. That's at https://github.com/willkg/pmc. I'm slowly (very slowly) adding scripts I use to run the site as well as documentation covering workflow and other things. Going forward, I'll be using GitHub to coordinate and organize everything.

The other thing I need to do is move my todo items from my org-mode file over to the issues tracker. That'll make it easier for other people to help if they're so inclined.

That's where things are at.