Dev call February 23rd, 2011

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

  • lots of flux in git-master, but the code is starting to stabilize

  • working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...

  • working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...

  • one week until code freeze

Janet:

  • spent the last couple of days testing device syncing support

  • having internet connectivity problems, a macbook with a broken backlight, and a dead laptop

  • tested subtitle support

  • worked on litmus tests for devices

Geoffrey:

  • merged transcoding branch

  • continued working on P1 bugs

Ben:

  • worked on P1 bugs, performance issues, and bunch of other things

Jonas:

  • worked on magnet uri support---has it working from the Download Item menu

Kaz:

  • worked on the new edit item menu

  • added import progress meter

Paul:

  • worked on ui overhaul bugs and device syncing bugs

Will:

  • subtitles have a lot of problems, so I'm working on those

  • spent a little time working with Miro on Windows

  • continuing to work on bugs

Order of business:

  • How do we extend our device support? We talked about adding a "report this device" button. Talked about putting together a form backed by a Google app to collect information from users.

  • git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are pretty unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made.

  • Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects. 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:

  • 74 bugs/feature-requests created

  • 6 bugs marked WORKSFORME

  • 6 bugs marked INVALID

  • 4 bugs marked DUPLICATE

  • 65 bugs marked FIXED

  • 2 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Python Miro Community year in review and fund drive 2011

Year in review

First off, let's talk about the year in review. I started Python Miro Community (Python Miro Community) a little over a year ago. In that time, Python Miro Community has grown to around 550 videos spanning the last few years, several local user groups, and a lot of conferences. Google Analytics says the site averages 150 unique visitors every day since I added Google Analytics. People end up at Python Miro Community from sites like Reddit and StackOverlfow and also searches at various search sites.

At this point, if you haven't visited the site or don't know what I'm talking about, please go take a look now.

http://python.mirocommunity.org/

This site has been been immensely useful to me. My knowledge of Python and what's going on in the greater Python community has grown leaps and bounds from watching videos I've discovered through Python Miro Community. Site usage statistics suggest that I'm not the only one.

Given that I spend 10-20 hours per month working on this site and that it's come this far, I think it's been a success.

The future looks good. If I continue putting in the effort that I'm putting in now, the site will continue to grow and will continue to become more useful to people as the corpus of video increases.

However, Miro Community (Miro Community) is switching to a tiered service model at which point my free ride ends and I think with some funding, we could improve this site to be a lot better than it is currently. So let's talk about funding.

Call for funding

I haven't had to pay anything for Participatory Culture Foundation (http://pculture.org/) to host PMC for the last year. This is in part because they've been ramping up the service to a point where it's commercially useful. This is also in part because I work for Participatory Culture Foundation and so they've let me slide. Going forward, the service level that PMC uses will cost $75 per month ($900 a year).

Carl and I have been talking about this site as the last mile for conference video. Conferences often have an A/V crew that spends a ton of time recording conference sessions, doing a lot of production and post-production work and then post the video somewhere on the Internet. There's conference video in a bunch of different places, it's often missing metadata that makes it discoverable (is that a word?), and a few months after the conference is over, the video doesn't get much play time. There are a bunch of things Carl and I want to do to improve this situation:

  1. Integrate `Universal Subtitles <http://universalsubtitles.org/>`__ into Python Miro Community.

    This allows the community to transcribe and translate videos using their browser. I doubt this will cause all videos to be translated, but I bet the more popular/useful ones will be. That could be huge! Further, since we'd be using Universal Subtitles, the subtitling widget would be available wherever the video is embedded--it won't be PMC-specific. This would do a lot towards making these videos accessible to a much larger audience.

  2. For videos that have transcriptions, use the transcriptions as part of the video search corpus.

    This would make it easier to find videos that talk about specific things that aren't covered in the description and tags. Further, we could provide the moment in time in the video where those terms were brought up.

  3. Implement an API in Miro Community upstream that allows us to automate data validation.

    Data validation so far has been a total pain in the ass because it has to be done by hand. With 550 videos, that's not feasible unless I spend a lot of time on it. An API would allow me to write scripts to automate the data validation and make the site data better.

    For example, the media file urls are out of date for a lot of the video right now. I wrote a script to validate them, but I only have access to the last 30 items in any of the RSS feeds. Thus I can't validate items in larger RSS feeds.

Additionally, I want to work on building playlists that connect videos between conferences. A playlist of David Beazley's GIL talks would be really interesting. A playlist of Django-related videos allowing someone to come up to speed with Django would be really helpful. A playlist of advanced Python topics could take someone familiar with Python and bump them up to a pro.

I really can't do this without funding, though.

Ultimately, I'd love to raise $3000 which would go towards paying for the Miro Community service and also fund work on some/many/all of the above projects. I had talked about this a little in my last status report but I hadn't figured out how it was going to work.

In the next few days, I'm going to set up a Pledgie project and update the templates on Python Miro Community so that every page has the Pledgie project badge at the top. At that point, I encourage everyone to check out the site and if they like what they're seeing, to pledge $5. Anyone who donates gets their name on the Donors list that will probably be on the About page.

Also, if there are companies that are interested in sponsoring Python Miro Community for a year, I'd be really interesting in talking to you.

Dev call February 16th, 2011

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

  • lots of flux in git-master, but the code is starting to stabilize

  • working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...

  • working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...

Will:

  • Did a bunch of stuff last week.

  • I'm sitting on a couple of ui overhaul enhancements, but they're pretty minor. After those, I'll be working on P1 bugs.

Ben:

  • Working on performance issues. There are several places that are problematic that still need work.

  • Hasn't really looked at the roadmap in a while.

  • Now has a working Macbook.

Geoffrey:

  • Doing great!

  • Finishing up work on transcoding, but it's under control. It's tight timing-wise, but he's pretty sure he'll hit a March 1st code freeze.

Kaz:

  • Still working on a few new ui things. Both should be pretty doable and shouldn't take a lot of time.

  • Still has a few tweaks to do and implementation of things on OSX.

  • Overall is in good shape for the code freeze as long as nothing substantial comes up.

Jonas:

  • Working on magnet uri related changes. There are a lot of problems and it's not clear how much work there is to do for this.

  • Ben agreed to work with Jonas on magnet uri stuff.

Janet:

  • Sikuli rc2 came out and it's awesome. Now we can execute tests on Linux and Windows.

  • Needs ui overhaul bugs finished in order to continue working on Sikuli test cases.

Paul:

  • Paul's mic doesn't work, but we think he's doing ok.

Asheesh:

  • Miro Community 1.2 is the awesome! Life in Miro Community is all pina coladas and sunshine.

  • Excited for a MC 1.2 release in the very near future.

Order of business:

  • Where are we at?

    • Unfinished ui overhaul bugs are blocking Janet from writing tests.

    • Magnet URI project might be big--we'll know more soon.

    • Transcoding should be working by March 1st, but it's tight timing-wise.

    • WindowsServer problem is probably going to take serious time to work out.

    • There are still some unresolved performance issues.

  • Otherwise everyone thinks we're doing ok regarding the March 1st code freeze except me. I'm concerned that the continued state of flux suggests we're not going to make it or we're not going to have a March 1st Miro that's stable.

  • git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are pretty unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made.

  • Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects. 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:

  • 71 bugs/feature-requests created

  • 10 bugs marked WORKSFORME

  • 3 bugs marked INVALID

  • 12 bugs marked DUPLICATE

  • 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

  • 54 bugs marked FIXED

  • 7 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Dev call February 9th, 2011

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

  • lots of flux in git-master, but the code is starting to stabilize

  • working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...

  • working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...

Janet:

  • writing up lots of bugs as she builds new Sikuli test cases

  • waiting on Sikuli release

Will:

  • fixed the torrent directory bug

  • working on reworking fastresume--going carefully to make sure i'm not creating new problems

  • Windows build box keeps hanging at night which blows, but I'm going to keep kicking this can down the road as much as possible

  • haven't spent much time on Windows recently, but will spend more time on it soon

Paul:

  • working on implementing ui overhaul tickets

Geoffrey:

  • worked on transcoding for streaming between Miro and other systems

  • worked on DAAP code

Kaz:

  • reworked scrolling for views to fix a bunch of problems

  • working on saving display state between Miro runs

Jonas:

  • worked on shuffle/repeat work and making it save per display between Miro runs

  • working on support for magnet uris

Ben:

  • worked on infolist fixes

  • noticed some things in the interface is still slow and is going to look at them in the near-term

Order of business:

  • Talked a little bit about the strings and code freezes.

  • Talked about the downloading tab sorting and how downloads flick around. Janet's going to write up a bug for it.

  • Migrating fastresumedata. Will will test to see if a 3.5.1 to 4.0 upgrade with ditching fast resume data is ok, but otherwise plans to dump the fastresume data.

  • git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are pretty unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made.

  • PCF is looking to hire a System Administrator. See the jobs page for more details.

  • Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects. 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:

  • 63 bugs/feature-requests created

  • 8 bugs marked WORKSFORME

  • 1 bugs marked INVALID

  • 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE

  • 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

  • 46 bugs marked FIXED

  • 8 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Dev call February 2nd, 2011

Note: I'm changing the way I denote the date so it's not ambiguous. Sorry about that.

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

  • lots of flux in git-master, but the code is starting to stabilize

  • working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...

  • working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...

Nick:

  • Morgan's family had the flu last week which is why ui overhaul related questions are taking a while to get answered.

Ben:

  • Worked on sorting and playlists.

  • Planning to work on new InfoList issues.

Janet:

  • Lost internet connection for most of the week.

  • Worked on sikuli tests--most of them are done now.

  • Implementing tests in sikuli has uncovered lots of issues.

Geoffrey:

  • Continuing to work on sharing and other things on his plate.

Kaz:

  • Worked on views and metadata stuff.

Paul:

  • Worked on device syncing.

  • Worked on ui overhaul bugs. Updated the sidebar.

Jonas:

  • Worked on shuffle/repeat and playback.

Asheesh:

  • Working hard on Miro Community 1.2--hopefully will have a beta out this week.

Will:

  • Windows build box keeps hanging. Seems like it's predominantly related to when the cron job to build the nightly kicks off, but it's hung at other times, too. Hopefully we can get through this dev cycle before we have to replace the Windows build box because that'll take a chunk of time to do.

  • Investigating libtorrent issues of which there are several and they're complicated.

  • Looking at storing fast resume as a downloader-specific thing and storing it in files rather than the Miro sqlite database.

Order of business:

  • Welcome Jonas! This is the largest group of Miro developers we've ever had (6). Hopefully we can keep this group going forward, but it depends on funding.

  • Talked about how to fix the handling of the fastresume data for torrents. Will is going to change the downloader so that it's not passing this data to the Miro process and instead is managing it itself in files.

  • Talked about magnet uri support. Will thinks this is a big project and is hesitant to do it because of its bigness. So we assigned it to Jonas because he's new and isn't scared of anything, yet.

  • git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are pretty unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made.

  • PCF is looking to hire a System Administrator. See the jobs page for more details.

  • Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects. 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:

  • 69 bugs/feature-requests created

  • 3 bugs marked WORKSFORME

  • 1 bugs marked INVALID

  • 7 bugs marked DUPLICATE

  • 2 bugs marked WONTFIX

  • 41 bugs marked FIXED

  • 6 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Blog update

I updated my blog to use PyBlosxom from git master HEAD as well as updates to plugins that are now part of the PyBlosxom core. There have been a bunch of bugfixes, so my blog works a lot better now. I also abandoned a bunch of home-made plugins for their suped-up equivalents in PyBlosxom core.

I wrote a script that grabs my identi.ca dents and generates local entries for them. I figured most people probably don't follow me on identi.ca (which is a shame), so I'll bring it here.

Then I spent about 30 minutes tweaking the CSS to make the blog look a little better. It's not super, but it's good enough for now.

Dev call 01/26/2011

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

  • working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...

  • working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...

Ben:

  • Landed InfoList performance changes.

  • Going to work on bug fixes.

Geoff:

  • Merged the sharing stuff.

  • Spent time fixing things that were broken.

  • Will continue working on fixing broken things.

  • Planning to work on transcoding next--that's the last big thing on his list for Miro 4.0.

Kaz:

  • Hoping to push the new view menu soon.

  • Add metadata versioning.

  • Working on showing item metadata scanning progress.

  • Working on custom widgets for list view headers.

Will:

  • Spent some time getting Miro running MeeGo.

  • Spent some time working on switching Miro on Windows to gstreamer--too much work, so I'm going to defer it until a future version.

  • Is it me or is our repository not git bisectable now? How can we fix this?

Asheesh:

  • Working on a MC 1.2 and hoping to fix it by next Wednesday.

  • Working with Rob to deploy patch to MC servers which tells us how long Apache is taking to render certain pages.

Paul:

  • Worked on device stuff and the new connect section.

  • Working on ui tickets.

Order of business:

  • Talked about ItemInfo, ItemSource, and ItemHandler

  • Talked about ui overhaul and those bits should be going faster now. New design work should be landing in tickets in the next few days.

  • Talked about how git bisect doesn't work now. Kaz said he has steps to work around that. He's going to send an email about how he's working around the problem.

  • git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are pretty unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made.

  • PCF is looking to hire another Miro developer and a System Administrator. See the jobs page for more details.

  • Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects. 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:

  • 59 bugs/feature-requests created

  • 6 bugs marked WORKSFORME

  • 1 bugs marked INVALID

  • 9 bugs marked DUPLICATE

  • 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

  • 31 bugs marked FIXED

  • 7 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Python Miro Community status: 01-22-2011

I took a hiatus from all things computer-related from the end of November through December on account of a new member of the family showing up. I'm back now and I've slimmed down the list of things I'm involved in so that things like Python Miro Community can get more of my spare time.

What is Python Miro Community?

Before I get too much further, Python Miro Community is a web-site that indexes Python-related videos regardless of where those videos exist on the Internet. For the most part, we're collecting and indexing conference videos: PyCon, DjangoCon, KiwiPycon, PyOhio, PyCon AU, .... For each video I pull as much metadata as I can. This makes the videos searchable and more useful for people looking for stuff.

Added KiwiPyCon 2009 videos

Over the last week, I pulled in the KiwiPyCon 2009 videos. I also talked with Tim about KiwiPyCon 2010 videos. I'm looking forward to posting those as well. I don't know what the estimated timeframe looks like, yet.

Current queue of things to do

My queue of things to do is pretty much the same as it was in November:

  • checking feeds for valid enclosures

  • importing a few lightning talks I've been sitting on

  • DjangoConf EU

  • Kiwi PyCon

  • PyCon APAC 2010

  • PyCon India

  • fixing video listing templates so they're all listing videos the "long way"

  • converting Python Basics and Advanced Python to playlists

  • keeping an eye on Universal Subtitles--looking forward to adding that to the site

Writing scripts for automated data checking turns out to be impossible to do without getting some additional functionality into Miro Community. I've created some bugs for the features I need, but I think I'm going to have to implement them myself on account of the MC crew being very short-staffed. That's fine, except I haven't had time to do it, yet.

One thing in that list that I'm really excited about is adding support for Universal Subtitles. I think that'll:

  1. kick ass

  2. potentially add a lot of value to the conference video

Going to need to get some funding

Also, Miro Community is soon switching to a tiered service model. Between costs for running PMC going up (zero dollars per month to some amount per month) and PMC really needing more of my time, I'm considering doing a fund-raising month possibly with a KickStarter project. The other possibility is to add ads to the site, but I'm pretty sick of advertising and I can't imagine any of you like it much either. If you have any thoughts on that, let me know.

Exciting things

I'm seeing an increasing number of hits coming from StackOverflow. I think it's really exciting that people are helping other people learn by sending them links to videos.

That's it for this status report!

Dev call 01/19/2011

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

  • working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...

  • working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...

Will:

  • upgraded libtorrent 0.15.5

  • will work on gstreamer switch next

Ben:

  • continuing to work on performance fixes--wrote a bunch of unit tests and now it's a matter of integrating it into the widget frontend

Geoffrey:

  • looking into Bonjour on Windows. Apple ships a big metapackage (printing services) that includes the core libraries. Pidgin open source project advises you to install the library.

  • looking at ways to detect whether the user has installed the printing services.

  • started looking into transcoding and working through the technical issues.

  • going to start wrapping things up in the daap branch and get ready to merge it into master.

Paul:

  • fixed a bunch of item-overhaul related bugs.

  • added amazon store support

Janet:

  • sent out a hitlist of bugs that should get fixed to make testing easier

  • sikuli is the awesome!

Asheesh:

  • sprint on MC 1.2 stuff

  • sprint on Duke bug fixing

  • planning to focus on performance issues

Kaz:

  • worked on the view menu which is basically working

Official business:

  • Should we switch Miro on Windows to use gstreamer? Worth trying out and if it gets too hard, we can defer it.

  • Should we switch Miro on Windows to use webkit? Worth trying out and if it gets too hard, we can defer it.

  • Talked about short-term solutions for keeping us all on the same page. Worth doing a check-in/check-out on IRC using a tag.

  • Talked about moving our git repositories elsewhere. Benefits are that we don't have to host it and deal with hosting work. Asheesh is going to look into this.

  • git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are pretty unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made.

  • PCF is looking to hire another Miro developer and a System Administrator. See the jobs page for more details.

  • Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects. 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

  • 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME

  • 2 bugs marked INVALID

  • 5 bugs marked DUPLICATE

  • 2 bugs marked WONTFIX

  • 19 bugs marked FIXED

  • 1 bugs marked INCOMPLETE