Planet Miro

Will's blog: Miro 2.5 schedule, translations, and Launchpad griping

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:23:00 +0000

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.

Will's blog: Thoughts after commenting on someone's frustrations in Fedora bug 494505

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:01:00 +0000

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!

Will's blog: Adopted a line

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:55:00 +0000

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.

Miro News Blog: The Open Video Conference was awesome.

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:21:09 +0000

creative commons photos from flickr users ekai and ccLearn

Big congratulations to Dean and Elizabeth and Ben and all the other folks that worked so hard organizing the Open Video Conference this weekend. It was *fantastic*. There were wonderful speakers and more than 700 participants, a surge of interest in open video that was way beyond what we expected when we started working on this a year ago.

Best of all, it felt less like a conference and more like the start of a real movement; everyone was palpably excited. What makes open source, open standards, and open sharing so fun to work on is that we’re all building pieces of an open vision of the world, with each part working together. The Open Video Conference wasn’t a trade show of proprietary products– it was a huddle for everyone on Team Open to get ready for the next big push.

Will's blog: Open Video Conference was awesome!

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:33:00 +0000

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.

Miro Testing Blog: Lightening talks

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:49:35 +0000

On Saturday at about the same time the lightening talks were going on at the Open Video Conference, I came home and had my own lightening dialog.

It struck about 400m from my house, tearing up the road.

It traveled through the ground and found the phone lines, blowing off the front cover and frying the wires on all the boxes along the road.

When it got to my house, it scorched the wall and box where it connects to the house phone lines.

It passed along the line, to the router, taking that out for good.

It even went from the router and damaged the ethernet port of the pc that was connected.

Lesson learned: unplug when the lightening comes.

Will's blog: When git-svn is painfully slow...

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 03:58:00 +0000

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).

Will's blog: I'll be at the Open Video Conference

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:33:00 +0000

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!

Will's blog: Moved Miro stuff over

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:31:00 +0000

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!

Chris's blog: Development As XKCD

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 03:14:08 +0000

As some of you may know, Morgan Lemmer (now Morgan Lemmer-Webber) and I recently got married and are now on our honeymoon in Montreal. More on that later, probably.

Anyway, between things I have been rereading Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen, which I originally consumed as part of a class on the ethics of globalization. It's a remarkably good book that I think I appreciate much more having aged a few years. Anyway, a good portion of the beginning of the book encompasses a general overview and evaluation of different ethical systems. At one point Sen is advocating for the value of using a large range of ethical systems rather than just using a static set of rules (like libertarianism) or a particular framework (like utilitarianism or John Rawls' "Theory of Justice" approach), and that the use of human rationality to evaluate ethical situations should be viewed positively rather than as a sign of failure. There's this particular paragraph:

There's an interesting choice here between "technocracy" and "democracy" in the selection of weights, which may be worth discussing a little. A choice procedure that relies on a democratic search for agreement or a consensus can be extremely messy, and many technocrats are sufficiently disgusted by its messiness to pine for some wonderful formula that would simply give us ready-made weights that are "just right." However, no such magic formula does, of course, exist, since the issue of weighting is one of valuation and judgment, and not one of some impersonal technology. [p. 79]

I'm pretty sure the net Sen was casting here aimed a bit wider than just the ethics and rules of sex, and yes... I'm aware that nerds relating everything to XKCD is such a goddamned cliche, but I can't help but think that Monroe summarized that paragraph pretty well in comic form.

Miro News Blog: Getting 2.5 ready for launch

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:17:14 +0000

Our next release, Miro-2.5 is getting closer to launch and we are looking for people to help us test the lastest nightly builds.

As Nicholas mentioned before, this release has some serious speed and memory improvements. Much of this was accomplished by changes to the database. To make testing less risky, we have implemented automatic database backups prior to upgrade. Check out the Database Backup page on the testing blog for more details on backup and restore.

A few more of the upcoming features such as library organization changes and improvements to the audio experience are listed here.

Help us prepare another successful release of Miro!

Download for Windows — Download for Mac — Download Source

Test Miro: Use the latest pre-release version — and if you’ve got some time to help us run a few tests, running the regression tests makes it easier to track the testing coverage.

Download the most current testing version of Miro 2.5
(optional) Back up your Miro database… better safe than sorry.
Install your pre-release.
Help us run tests. Get started with the easy to follow guide for testing miro.

Translate Miro: As many of you know, Miro and the Miro Guide are 100% volunteer translated. If you know any non-English languages, then we’d love to have you translate and/or refine the existing translations. Instructions for helping translate >>

Miro Testing Blog: 2.5-svn testing focus

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:54:09 +0000

We are about to start looking for more help testing the nightly builds for 2.5-svn and I wanted to give a few more details about things that have changed and areas to focus on with the testing.

The most obvious change is the reorganization of the Library. Instead of Library, New and Individual Downloads, you will now be presented with Video, Audio, Other and Downloading.

The video and audio main view has filters for All, Unwatched and Non-feed items to make it easier to find your downloaded shows.

There are also significant changes to the audio playback ui. Audio playback no longer displays a blank window. Instead the interface remains active and the progress bar on the chrome displays the playing file.

Speed and the database changes

Both Ben and Will and Nicholas have mentioned this in past posts. Ben redid the way the database is loaded and stored. He’s given us some solid startup speed improvements. He has also mostly given up on pickles, so in general the items are plain and readable. If you are a db junkie, you can finally see inside to the data guts of miro.

Because of the big database changes, we have finally started backing up the old database prior to any upgrades. This should make you feel a bit more secure about testing nightly builds because it’s a lot easier to go back without data loss.

The Database Backup page has been updated to give instructions on where and how to find the database and return to an earlier version if necessary.

Miro Testing Blog: Gender Bender

Mon, 25 May 2009 12:19:40 +0000

Recently I read the post woman and mozilla, concerning the contributions of women in the FLOSS world. It set me thinking about differences between contributions of men vs woman to miro testing.

From observations of the bug list and regression tests, I’d say that we have a greater percentage of men who regularly download nightly builds and provide feedback in the form of bug reports. However, from litmus, I can see that people who more regularly run the regression test cases are woman.

We should bust the stereotypes that woman are less assertive men won’t follow the instructions. We’re gearing up for another round of testing pretty soon, so when the call comes to help:

Men: read the directions!
Woman: write some bugs!

Miro Testing Blog: Miro Guide testing with Selenium Core

Wed, 20 May 2009 08:51:32 +0000

One aspect of testing Miro has just gotten a lot more fun!

Yesterday Paul released and update to the Miro Guide. A portion of the testing of the guide updates was accomplished using a few automated test suites driven by Selenium Core. We chose to use selenium core because we wanted to integrate with our existing test case management tool, litmus as well as allow everyone to be able to participate in the testing.

This testing is for the miro test channel guide, which is where the development takes place before updating to the live guide. It would be great to get more volunteers and a greater variety of browsers tested. If you just want to give it a spin, you can open the test suites directly in your browser of choice:

FrontPageNav: checks the basic links and layout of the guides main page.
Register User Actions:logs into a test account verifies some of the actions of a logged in user.
Submit Feed: error checking of the submit feed form.

There are a few more test suites, and if you want to participate in guide testing, the best thing to do is to go to Litmus select the testchannelguide2.parti… test run, enter your configuration, select the selenium (automated) test group and follow the very simple instructions. Testing via litmus will allow us to track the tests run, errors and browser used.

It would be great to get some feedback from others familiar with using selenium. If you would like to get involved in the test creation process, here is a page with much more details about miro guide testing with selenium.

Miro News Blog: working on speed for miro 2.1

Mon, 04 May 2009 18:52:09 +0000

Miro 2.1 will feature a much faster database architecture that speeds up Miro launch time, time to switch between different screens in the application, and even decreases the time it takes to quit. Snappy!

Here’s some early performance measurements compared to the current version. What you see on your machine will vary based on your operating system and how many videos and feeds you have in Miro, but it looks like things are about twice as fast in a lot of cases. Hard core Miro users with thousands of items could see speedups of 4 times or more. Here’s some techy details from bdk, who has been spearheading the changes.

Will's blog: Adopt a line of Miro code!

Fri, 01 May 2009 17:30:00 +0000

Participatory Culture Foundation is the non-profit organization I work for working to build a distribution system for video and audio on the Internet that has no bottlenecks, no filter points, uses open standards, and Free Software.

Most of the software that we write is written in Python. Miro, an Internet video player, is written in Python and runs on a variety of platforms. Miro Guide and Miro LocalTV are both systems that are written in Python using Django. Miro Fullscreen is written in Python using Clutter.

Python has made it possible for a very very small group of us to tackle such a large project with very limited resources.

Earlier this week, we launched our Adopt a Line of Code, a fundraising campaign to help us fund the work we're doing. No one has ever done a fundraising campaign like this before. We think it could be a good model for other Open Source and Free Software projects to raise funds.

Take a moment to check out the Adoption Center and adopt your very own line of code! Support us in our work to make video open for everyone.

Miro News Blog: Meet Orim: The Miro Monster

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 18:53:24 +0000

One of the cute buddies that you might get if you adopt a line of code will look like Orim, Miro’s official anti-mascot. Orim is a skeptical little monster with a suspicious resemblance to Miro’s logo.

Orim was created by Maurine Brower, the mother of PCF intern and volunteer Jason Brower. Maurine runs Homespun Harvest where you can buy your very own handmade Miro monster. They are awesome.

Also look for Orim sneaking around on the front of our website and in the Miro Guide. PCF coder Chris Webber drew this depiction of Orim preparing to deal what we can only assume will be a fatal blow to traditional top-down television:

Will's blog: Jaunty packages released

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 22:58:00 +0000

I finished up a set of Miro 2.0.4 packages for Jaunty for amd64 and i386, pushed them out, and updated our download instructions page.

Two things to clarify:

In the Ubuntu universe repository are Miro 2.0.3 packages, but these packages have a backported patch from Miro 2.0.4 so they're essentially equivalent to the 2.0.4 packages I just built.
I put out PCF-built packages because we support Ubuntu and not because Iain and others aren't doing a fantastic job packaging Miro for Ubuntu.

I'm sorry it took so long, but I was gone most of last week, so I was a bit late to the party.

I'm currently working on getting Miro in trunk to work with Jaunty... there are a few other issues that need to be worked out still.

Instructions for installing the PCF-built Miro 2.0.4 packages are at http://www.getmiro.com/download/for-ubuntu/ .

Going forward I'll continue to build packages for Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty. I'm no longer building packages for older versions of Ubuntu.

Miro News Blog: Adopt a Line of Miro Code!

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:40:50 +0000

Today we are launching what I think is a brand new model for funding open-source projects; we’re asking our users to adopt a line of Miro source code to help us keep improving the software. It’s a little bit like Tamagochi pets meets Open Source. Check out the new Miro Adoption Center >>

Not coincidentally, we are launching this new effort at a very important time for Miro. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the number of Miro users triple with the release of Miro 2.0. But during that same time, the foundations that fund non-profit organizations like ours have seen their endowments drop dramatically, and they are giving less. As a result, we are facing a very serious budget challenge this year. I want to seize this moment to turn our funding model completely on its head.

Having our users ‘adopt’ lines of code means that they will come to own and support Miro in a more direct way than ever before. As a non-profit, we have a social and public mission built into our organization. As free and open-source software, the tools we create are open for anyone to change and reuse. It would be incredible to have a truly bottom up funding base as well.

To make it all possible, we have created the all-new and very cute Miro Adoption Center, where you can adopt a line of Miro code for just $4 a month. When you adopt, you’ll get: an official adoption page, a cute image of your line of code (watch it grow over the year), badges for your blog or website, and your name will be listed in the ‘about’ box in every copy of Miro (more than 5 million downloads a year).

Please take a moment to check out the Adoption Center and make a little tiny piece of Miro your own!

Will's blog: me from april 18th through 25th and a call for help

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:07:00 +0000

Me for the next week

I'm going on a service trip for a week to help out rebuilding and such. When I get back, I'll be spending quality time with Miro on Ubuntu Jaunty, Python 2.6 and a bunch of other support issues that have popped up and I'll be back on Miro development duty helping Ben and Luc with the changes going into Miro 2.1.

Call for help

Also, if you are technical and use Gentoo, Arch Linux, or OpenSUSE, toss me a line either in the comments below, on #miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net or by email at will.guaraldi at pculture dot org. I'd really like to get help on supporting these three systems better for Miro--I just can't do it myself.

Miro News Blog: Doing Open Subtitles Like an Open CDDB

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:20:08 +0000

CDDB is the automated system that your computer uses to list track names, artist info, and cover art for CD’s that you pop into your drive. We want to do something similar for videos and subtitles.

We’ve been toying with the following idea: you’re watching a video—you notice that Miro’s “subtitles” button is glowing. This means there are subtitles available in a language that you speak; clicking the button pops the subtitles over your video (holding the button displays all the different languages available and subtitle versions).

In our scenario, the subtitles wouldn’t necessarily be served from a single centralized server, or even from the same location as the videos themselves. Miro (or your preferred video player) would automatically search many different subtitle repositories and find subs for everything from individual YouTube videos to episodes of Democracy Now!

The search for subtitles would be based on a number of criteria: a hash from the video file, the video title, the originating URI of the file, and so forth. We’d prioritize the data and make an educated guess—it wouldn’t be perfect, but we think it could work pretty reliably. Of course, however we do this, it will be in a totally open and decentralized way, not just a centralized service — we want every video player (and even a Firefox extension) to be able to automatically find/display subtitles for things you’re watching.

So back to reality—right this second, Miro has admittedly poor support for basic subtitles. We’re fixing that for Miro 2.1, and once that’s done we can work on the interesting stuff…

I’ve been doing some research on this idea and want to double check with all of you readers, in order to make sure I’m not missing any good distributed subtitle systems or protocols that are currently out there.

The thing I’ve found that seems closest is: http://opensubtitles.org/.

OpenSubtitles Advantages:

They’ve have a basic API/protocol for doing hash and title based searching for video subtitles
They already have some users, but I didn’t research too closely how much traction they have overall.
They’re the closest thing (I can find) that does what we want to do.

Potential OpenSubtitles Disadvantages:

I didn’t find an open source implementation of the server.
It is a centralized service, and their server is the core.
You must register your application (useragent) before their API will work w/ your app.

If I’m wrong on any of the above, please feel free to correct me (for the record, I haven’t reached out to them yet, will definitely be doing so—it’s always easier to work together on stuff like this) . If my assumptions are correct, then they’re are about 50% of the way to where we want to ultimately go (here’s the OpenSubtitles Dev FAQ for anyone who is interested). Does anyone know of someone else closer?

Also of possible interest for this project is URIplay. They’re developing a protocol for retrieving metadata for audiovisual media, based on the URI. The URIplay FAQ puts them squarely in line with our goals for a completely decentralized, openly documented, and open source system.

Feedback and advice are much appreciated, as we’re not trying to reinvent any wheels here. We believe a system like what we’re describing could be revolutionary. If you’ve got any input or would like to be involved in designing such a system, please leave a comment or contact me directly: dean at pculture.org.

Note: We aren’t tackling the issue of creating transcripts/subtitles here. People are already making subtitles, and we can improve that once people have a simple way to find/display available subtitles.

Will's blog: db changes garner no response

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:38:00 +0000

I'm surprised that Ben's post didn't garner any response. I thought there was a significant number of people chomping at the bit for these db changes.

If you're one of the people that was looking forward to these changes but wasn't aware they were happening, then definitely take a look at trunk. If there are use-cases you have that you don't think are going to be handled, let us know as soon as possible.

bdk: 2.1 Database Love

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:31:26 +0000

Long time no post. But I think this is a nice time to send one out. Been working a lot on changing how the database gets stored on disk. The first big project is less reliance on the pickle module. I’ll let the terminal session speak for itself.

ben@pitpat:~/miro-dev-home/.miro$ sqlite3 sqlitedb
SQLite version 3.5.9
sqlite> .tables
channel_folder              playlist
channel_guide               playlist_folder
directory_feed_impl         remote_downloader
directory_watch_feed_impl   rss_feed_impl
feed                        rss_multi_feed_impl
field_impl                  scraper_feed_impl
file_item                   search_downloads_feed_impl
http_auth_password          search_feed_impl
icon_cache                  single_feed_impl
item                        taborder_order
manual_feed_impl            theme_history
miro_version                widgets_frontend_state

sqlite> SELECT origURL, title, feed.id FROM feed, rss_feed_impl fi WHERE fi.ufeed_id = feed.id;
http://feeds.miroguide.com/miroguide/new  New in Miro Previews  12
http://feeds.miroguide.com/miroguide/fea  Featured Channel Pre  13
http://www.linktv.org/rss/hq/globalpulse  Global Pulse          15
http://ewheel.democracynow.org/rss.xml    Democracy Now! Video  193
http://feeds.pbs.org/pbs/wgbh/nova-video  NOVA Vodcast | PBS    277

sqlite> SELECT f.title, i.entry_title FROM rss_feed_impl as f, item as i WHERE
...> i.feed_id = f.ufeed_id AND f.ufeed_id=193;
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Monday, March 23, 2009
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Friday, March 20, 2009
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Thursday, March 19, 2009
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Thursday, August 21, 2008
Democracy Now! Video Torrents  Democracy Now! Wednesday, August 20, 200

Miro News Blog: Apply Now: ‘09-’10 VISTA Position with PCF

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:00:35 +0000

In addition to our summer PCF internship, we’re excited to announce an AmeriCorps*VISTA based position, which is centered around working with our Miro Local TV partners (namely, public broadcasting affiliates and community TV centers from around the US).

What: VISTA Position @ PCF
When: Mid-July 2009 to July 2010
Where: Boston or NYC
Wage: Living Stipend/Educational Award/Health Care
See eligibility requirements below.

This is a very unique opportunity to work as part of the PCF team for a full year. Read on to find out more about how a VISTA position works, and details on what you would be doing.

About the Miro Local TV Project

Due to media consolidation and disintegrating business models, traditional local journalism is on the decline. As a result, mainstream media is failing the needs of American towns and cities for a local discourse that articulates common identities and informs the democratic process. Citizen journalism could fill this void, but citizen journalists constantly struggle for audience, reach, and relevance.

Miro Local TV (MLTV) will create a series of community-based video hubs to connect local creators, public access stations, and the community of viewers. With these new hubs and the relationships that they form, vibrant local communities of video can flourish. Quite simply, we can create an active, citizen-driven, online television world for individual cities and towns.

MLTV will focus on five communities in the first year. Each hub will be a local website (e.g. worcestervideo.org) where people can watch and submit video. A partnership with the local public access station will ground an outreach effort to connect creators and creative organizations to residents that are eager to engage with local news and information. MLTV will provide tools for syndication (in and out), ways to geographically code and gather local content from across the internet, and custom local versions of the open source video player, Miro.

Your Responsibilities, as a VISTA Member

a. Aiding in the development of outreach guidelines with our Outreach Director.

b. Managing relationships with partner community access and public television stations.

c. Co-developing and publishing training materials for partner organizations to use to learn to use the Miro Local TV web software.

d. Assisting organizations in the initial setup and customization of their Community Video Hub.

e. Outreach to potential community partners for the larger, second year of the project which will begin in fall 2009.

Your Skills

We would be able to make efficient use of a range of skills for this position, and to some extent will adapt the position based on the degree of technical proficiency of the candidate. By far, the most important criteria for us are demonstrated intelligence, professionalism, and responsibility. More specifically, we will look for the following:

a. Proficiency with use of modern internet tools and services (eg. email, word processing, etc).

b. Ability to write clearly and simply, including the ability to explain technical concepts and software instructions in plain english.

c. Strong and positive communication skills both for internal communication with our team and communication and support for partner organizations.

d. Ability to listen and synthesize diverse demands.

What Unique Benefits and Experiences do you Gain?

PCF is one of the leading software development non-profits in the world. Our hiring process is strict, our positions are very desirable, and the resulting team that we have assembled is world-class.

Above all, being a member of our team offers access to this wealth of human resources— professionals that are leaders in their field, that are well connected to other organizations and companies, and who are happy to offer their knowledge and experience to each other.

The VISTA member will have full access to our staff and our technical resources. In addition, the member will be invited to technical and media conferences that staff participate in at various times during the year.

The Specifics of Being a VISTA Member

The VISTA position is available in both Boston and New York City — you will technically be a volunteer, but will receive a living stipend, educational award, and health care coverage. More information on the CTC VISTA program.

VISTA Member Benefits

In return for your service, AmeriCorps*VISTA and the CTC VISTA Project has many benefits, some more valuable than others:

* ~$11,000/year living allowance. This amount varies based upon the community in which you serve.
* $4,725 Education Award or $1,200 stipend paid at the successful completion of your year of service
* Student loan deferment or forbearance on qualified loans
* Health benefits and prescription drug coverage
* Serve as part of a national team, facilitated by the CTC VISTA Project, to share resources, experience and advice
* The opportunity to gain high-level experience, skills and access within the nonprofit sector. Many of our alumni have gone on to full-time employment within their organization or another as a result of their service within the CTC VISTA Project

Eligibility

AmeriCorps*VISTA candidates must be a U.S. citizen, U.S. national, or lawful permanent resident, be team-oriented, and be willing to take on a wide range of challenges. Some listings may require college degrees or previous work experience. You must be at least 17 years old. There is no upper age limit, and many AmeriCorps*VISTA members bring significant work and life experiences to their assignment. Self-initiative, flexibility and organizational skills are a must.

How to Apply

Send your application directly to jobs [at] pculture.org with “VISTA Position” somewhere in the subject line. Please include: brief bio, statement of interest, and a resume. We’ll be interviewing candidates over the coming weeks.

Will's blog: notes for remote control support for mirofullscreen on linux

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:20:00 +0000

I spent the greater part of today adding remote control support to the Miro Fullscreen project. I thought I'd do a write up on it because there are a lot of pieces involved and it took me ages to figure it out and I'm paranoid I'll forget.

Quick caveats:

I'm doing this on Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10). If you want to translate this to your favorite distribution, feel free to add any notes in the comments.
If you're using OSX or Windows and want to know how to get things working there, I have no idea how to do it and that's not going to be covered here.
I used a StreamZap remote and didn't try it with other remotes.
This is a set of notes; it's not a good essay and I'm definitely not an expert.

Requirements

I installed three packages: lirc, python-pylirc, and gnome-lirc-properties.

sudo apt-get install lirc python-pylirc gnome-lirc-properties

LIRC

lirc has a web-site at http://lirc.org/. I had no idea what I was looking at while wandering aimlessly through that site. I think the important pages are these:

http://www.lirc.org/html/configure.html - covers the .lircrc file format
http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/streamzap/lircd.conf.streamzap - covers the codes for the StreamZap; there are other code pages at http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/

python-pylirc

The only useful site I could find for this project was at http://pylirc.mccabe.nu/. It says that Paul Hummer took over the project and moved it to http://pylirc.ironlionsoftware.com/, but that's a dead link. I found Paul's blog at http://theironlion.net/blog/. He uses tagging on his blog, but there's only one article tagged as pylirc2 at http://theironlion.net/tag/pylirc2/. I couldn't find anything useful about pylirc, the project, its status, or what's going on. Paul suggests he was going to add LIRC support to Entertainer, but it doesn't look like he ever did that.

Anyhow, so I ended up going with the documentation on http://pylirc.mccabe.nu/ and that seemed to work out ok.

gnome-lirc-properties

I don't know if I really needed gnome-lirc-properties.

The .lircrc file

So you install the three (or two--depending on whether gnome-lirc-properties is really needed) packages and you create a .lircrc file like this:

begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = MUTE 
    config = n
end
begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = VOL_UP
    config = Up 
end
begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = VOL_DOWN
    config = Down 
end
begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = UP 
    config = Up 
end
...

where prog is the string you pass to pylirc.init, button comes from the remote control lirc file and config is the string you add handling for in your application.

the Python code

The sample code at http://pylirc.mccabe.nu/?/article/articleview/Documentation/1426&themex=public gave me enough of an idea on how it worked to implement the code in Miro Fullscreen.

In closing

Hope that's useful to someone at some point.

Will's blog: Name Change

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:37:00 +0000

So... A little over a year ago, I changed my name. But I never really followed through on all the things I should have followed through on.

Today I finally got around to switching it on IRC. So I'm now willkg instead of willguaraldi.

Figured I'd mention it so there's less confusion.

Chris's blog: Watching the Watchmen

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 08:37:27 +0000

Removing the contents of this post until I get tag filtering working on my blog. Don't feel it belongs on a planet. Working on that now.

Miro News Blog: Summer @ PCF: Seeking Miro Content/Conference Intern

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:54:28 +0000

Great opportunity: summer PCF internship in New York City. You’ll be focusing primarily on content discovery, promotion, and outreach for Miro Guide. Also, we’ll need a lot of help coordinating the Open Video Conference, which is slated for June 19-20. This internship is guaranteed to be dynamic, fast paced, challenging, and exciting.

You must be: sharp, tech savvy, highly articulate, and self-motivated. Also, please have good taste in online and independent media. Finally, be ready to work hard.

Badass secret workbase: we’ve got some amazing space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s not all ours, in fact I’m the only PCF’er working from the space, but it IS pure awesome. It used to be an auto-shop, but it has been converted with a loft, woodshop, lounge, and other essential goodies. Everyone there is working on something cool: startups, tech non-profits (Fred from Creative Commons is there), freelance design, and so on. A guaranteed highlight of your summer.

Your commitment: We’d like you to commit 40 hours per week, some of which would be from the Brooklyn workspace. This position is unpaid, but I know a lot of schools offer credit for this type of thing — some schools even offer stipends to students working unpaid internships (ask your nearest guidance counselor).

What You’ll be Doing

Wrangling for the Open Video Conference: This is going to mean working with Elizabeth Stark, Ben Moskowitz, and me on pretty much every aspect of the conference. Projects may include: interfacing with speakers and participants to help them coordinate their travel, blogging announcements, working with conference partners/sponsors, helping us wrangle a volunteer crew for the conference itself, and lots more. It’ll be a super dynamic fast paced thing — should be a lot of fun.

Content/marketing work with Miro: You’ll be doing some serious content curation in the Miro Guide. So finding and promoting really awesome internet video, establishing relationships with creators, and so on. Ultimately, we’d like to refactor our curatorial process —leveraging user opinion, 3rd party tastemakers, and other sources of content discovery— Ideally, you’re capable of helping us with that refactoring. This is the position of a lifetime for a serious video junkie (the guide has over a million unique users a month).

Lemme at it!

If this sounds like you, please send me (dean at pculture.org) an email with: super brief bio, statement of interest, and a resume. It’ll really help if you have specific examples of projects you’ve been involved with, so also include URL’s (just make sure you mention what your role was).

Note: the start date is flexible — let us know when you’re available.

Miro News Blog: Sita Sings the Blues, a Fantastic Free Film.

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:09:25 +0000

For those of you who haven’t seen Sita Sings the Blues yet, the film combines a modern breakup story with a fantastic musical retelling of the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu text. My favorite moments involved three shadow puppets, voiced by modern Indians, who retell the story based on their sometimes shaky memories of it. Watch Sita Sings the Blues, here.

Sita Sings the Blues

Miro News Blog: Open Video Conference (June 19-20): Website Launch

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:47:05 +0000

The Open Video Conference website just launched!

Open Video Conference
June 19-20, 2009
New York City
40 Washington Square South @ NYU Law School

We’re busy lining up amazing speakers, video and remix art, technical workshops, video workshops, film screenings, and more (we’ll be announcing the lineup on an ongoing basis, stay tuned). We’ll make sure it’s engaging and exciting for a very broad-based audience, not just technical folks. Ultimately, the focus is on freedom of expression, decentralization, transparency, and how we can pave the way for open innovation in the online video space.

Things to do on the site:

Sign up for the email list (in the sidebar)
Propose a talk, demo, screening, workshop, etc (March 19 deadline)
Sign up for early-bird registration (it’ll save you some cash!)
Follow us on RSS, Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, etc. (all in the sidebar)

Who is organizing this thing?

The conference is a production of Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance.

Miro News Blog: Norway’s Public Broadcaster Embraces P2P, Recommends Miro

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:41:51 +0000

A year ago, NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, ran a highly successful distribution test, making high-resolution, full length, DRM-free programming available over Bittorrent. The experiment made their viewers very happy, and also saved NRK tens of thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.

Yesterday, NRK continued on their highly innovative path and launched a Bittorrent tracker themselves. During their first experiment, they used Amazon.com’s tracker. Now that they run their own server, they will have extra detailed statistics and metrics about who is downloading and sharing their programming. They say:

“By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.”

The television show they launched with is called, “Der ingen skulle tru at nokon kunne bu.” It’s a six episode series about people living in remote places in Norway. When announcing the newly downloadable program, they recommended Miro as the easiest way to watch.

The folks at NRK I’ve been in touch with say they’ll keep innovating and that they’re working on adding more programming. NRK penetrates 25% of the Norwegian population (roughly one million viewers), and so their reach with this effort is significant.

Also, we’ll be working, with NRK, on a custom branded version of Miro — we’ll keep you posted.

Miro News Blog: 1 Million Users!

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:00:38 +0000

Last Saturday we passed the mark of one million users within a month! It makes me want to end every sentence with an exclamation point! But I won’t, because I care.

The precise number as of yesterday, was 1,045,437 within the prior month, up from 277,272 the month before. This number came from Google Analytics for www.miroguide.com, the home page for Miro. Given that 99% of visits to Miro Guide come through the Miro client, this approximates Miro users pretty well.

As you might imagine, we’re pretty happy about this. But we still have a ton of work in front of us. The product has a lot of room for improvement, and we need to increase our revenue significantly in order to stay competitive.

With regard to revenue, we’re looking at a few options including selling independent content and sponsorships. If you know (a) independent filmmakers looking for outlets or (b) sponsors with a good fit for Miro, please contact me at jessep [at] pculture.org.

Miro News Blog: Miro 2.0.2 Released: More translations and bug fixes

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:00:40 +0000

We’ve just released Miro 2.0.2, which is translated into more languages and has many bug fixes. Full details are in the release notes. As always, you can download Miro here.

We strive to make Miro accessible to as many people around the world as possible– if you speak a non-English language, we would love your help translating Miro, the Miro Guide, and our website. It’s surprisingly easy to jump in and do a little bit. You can get started here.

Chris's blog: Life Update March 2009: Full Speed Ahead

Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:26:40 +0000

So it's been a while since I updated this thing. Lots of stuff has been happening, so I might as well jump right into explaining what those things are.

Current and upcoming projects

Work

Working at the Participatory Culture Foundation continues to be great. Probably if you're reading this on Planet Miro or whatever you're already aware of this, but it's a recap from my perspective anyway.

Miro 2.0!

Miro 2.0 made it out the door, and the responses have been mostly positive. The general consensus is that it's everything people loved about Miro, but more stable and with a better interface. Which is great, because that's mostly what this release was about, and really matches my feelings and impressions from development as well. When I first started volunteering on Miro was when the user interface overhaul first started. While the overhaul of the interface is apparent from an aesthetic perspective, it should be emphasized how much of the codebase was really gutted and reworked. I'm really glad to have been part of this transition period because I think it's given me a lot of perspective and was a great learning experience.

So anyway, yeah. That's what I did while volunteering and for the first few months of fulltime PCF employment. Then my focus shifted…

Miroguide 3.0!

Yep, for the next couple months of development I switched to working on the Miro Guide, which also underwent a rather large facelift for its 3.0 release. Some things changed on the backend too, but not as much as with Miro 2.0.

There was a lot to learn though… although the Miro Guide uses the Django framework, it feels a bit closer to a Pylons application as it uses its own ORM for the database and a few other such things (mostly just the ORM though). I really enjoyed working on it and learning about it. Toward the end Paul Swartz came back to work on the application. Was quite enjoyable collaborating on things, and we even managed to move things over to git, which is awesome. (Miro also will be switching to git soon, and there's a conversation on the mailing list in case that's of interest to you.)

Anyway, Miro 2.0, Miroguide 3.0 and the new http://getmiro.com website all launched in the same week, so that was a bit exhausting, but it all went really well.

I'm not sure many people know, but the Miro Guide is AGPLv3. So yes, like Miro, the Miro Guide is genuine Free Software. There's been a lot of interest about free network services lately, so I'd like to try and make that more clear because I'm afraid many people who would be interested simply don't realize that. We'll probably do more advertisement of it soon once we get this git stuff all straightened out.

And speaking of free software and websites, that brings me to my current work duties…

Miro Local TV

Yep, Miro Local TV, which was announced a number of months ago. It's not in a state I'd consider presentable yet, but development is coming along. Multiple location-specific sites work and you can view videos, but it's still not ready to be shown off yet. Hopefully I'll have more to say about this shortly. (Indeed, I was actually writing a longer bit about a specific topic related to this in here, but I've decided it merits its own blogpost.)

The wedding and the wedding website

So, the wedding… coming up soon, less than three months away now. What can I say… Morgan has been more on top of this than I have. I hate to take up such stereotypical gender roles about it, but I guess that's the way it has worked out. Still, I've been working on a very specific piece of the wedding: the wedding website.

So, it took quite a while, but most of it is done and up. I'm quite pleased with the way it's turned out. Still two major pieces to put in place… gotta get the reception-music-submission stuff working, and have to put up a video of the animation I originally proposed to Morgan with in the first place. I've got the video ready.. just gotta get that stuff together.

Orgmode

Org-mode! Not really a project as much, but I recently switched over all my life and project planning over to using this wonderful piece of software. I was using PlannerMode previously, but I was finding that as the number of things happening in my life grew, the less the day-planner idea was working for me. I initially took interest in orgmode because I wanted to be able to ditribute some small amounts of todo lists and project outlines with my personal projects. And then using it was just been so nice that it's continued to take over my whole workflow. Anyway, I don't regret it. Orgmode is a wonderful example of user interfaces in plain text. I highly recommend watching the Google tech talk… it might make an orgmode user out of you too.

The GIMP class

Yep, I'm going to be teaching a class on the GIMP to students at Casa Aztlán. Or, at least, that's my expectation. We're still in the recruitment stage. It'll be a one night a week thing for six weeks, if enough students sign up for it to happen.

An unnamed animation

I am going to be working on an animation in collaboration with friend (and former boss) Robert Metrick, who makes some awesomely weird stuff. We're meeting on Monday (tomorrow) to start some brainstorming and plan it out. Not sure exactly what it's going to be yet, but I'm hoping it will be about a 4-6 month long project. Yes, as you are probably expecting, I am expecting to do the animation in Blender.

PyCon

Not much to say about PyCon except that I will indeed be there, and helping with the video recording. Maybe I'll see you there as well? We might do a Miro sprint there… not sure if anyone would be interested?

FOSSGaming.org

I registered the domain name fossgaming.org after a long conversation on Identi.ca (that also lead to the creation of the !fossgaming group). Basically, free and open source software is coming along really well in almost all areas, but not as much in the game development department.

I'm not sure what's going to happen with this totally. I am planning to put up planet.fossgaming.org in the next couple of weeks with Feedjack (and you are right, the dns has not even been set up for that yet) in an effort to get more free software game developers talking to each other. Aside from that, I'm hoping to help with steering this, but I won't be able to invest that much time into it myself for at least the next couple of months. I'm hoping to help foster a community that can make some headway on its own, and then in a couple months I'll be able to jump in more myself. Maybe things don't work that way though, so its possible that this won't really make it that far until after the wedding. We'll see.

If you have thoughts on it, or are interested in helping this project along, contact me; I'm happy to offload some of this work.

Pumping Station One

Pumping Station One is a Hackerspace (think YMCA for nerds) that is starting to really come together in Chicago. Looks like they might be moving in in April. I became a member and attended the last meeting. I probably won't be too heavily involved here for a bit, but I'm excited to see this start to take off. I might even do some co-working from here.

The diet

I've mentioned that I started focusing on my health again. Well, 2.5 months into this diet, I've lost more than 30 pounds, so things are going really well. I'm mostly following the Hacker's Diet (dieting through engineering, management and statistics). I'm counting calories and biking. The effects are noticable, and I'm feeling better with each passing day. I'm actually using orgmode to track my diet, which is working out extremely well… maybe I'll make a post with more details on this later.

Summary and life bits

Are we moving?

So, moving… one of the reasons I took my current job was the possibility that we might be moving depending on what happens with Morgan and grad school. At this point, we still don't know, though it is looking increasingly likely that we'll be around Chicago for at least another year. Otherwise, we might move to either Philadelphia or Boston. I'll update when I know more.

Busier than ever, but better than ever (and no more projects)

Clearly, things are busy, but I'm keeping it together and I think I'm happier than I've ever been. But I've hit the limits of what I can do here. Everything I have now is fairly manageable, but if I tacked on anything more it probably wouldn't be, so… I won't.

Sorry this post was so long. But now you know.

Miro News Blog: Help Us: Weed Out Non-HD Feeds

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 18:36:02 +0000

It’s annoying when you find an obviously non-HD channel marked as HD! That’s why we’ve got a flagging system — anyone can mark a channel so moderators can clean things up.

What is HD? - Technically it means a resolution of 1080×720 or higher. We’re somewhat lenient, when it comes down to it, but will become stricter as more and more true HD content comes online. Shows should have more than 90% HD content (occasional non-HD videos mixed in is OK), in order to be marked as HD.

How Can You Help? - Just tag stuff that is obviously not HD. Our moderators will check out the stuff that gets the most flags, and if it’s under the minimum requirement, we’ll pull it out of the HD section.

Miro Testing Blog: 2.0.2 Pre-release testing

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:54:23 +0000

Update:

I updated the links below to point to the 2009-03-05 nightly builds which contain updated translations. Thanks to everyone who has contributed via Launchpad.

After numerous non-ascii character induced headaches - we have a set of nightly builds posted that we believe are worthy of being called 2.0.2.

This is a bug-fix update for 2.0.1 that also contains additional search engines like 5min.com, metavid.org, Everyzing.com, and returns DailyMotion to the list. It also contains an updated version of libtorrent and it has some Windows startup fixes.

Please give us a hand testing these builds: windows, os x, source. You own exploratory testing leading to some good bug reports is appreciated as well as any regression testing via litmus.

Here is is the list of bug fixes from the Release Notes (draft):

Bug Fixes:

#11385 support for both libtorrent 0.13 and 0.14
#11413 single quote and double quote translation into Miro 2.0
#11423 Delete unused icon cache files
#11430 ValueError: Multiple default guides!
#11432 EOFError loading config
#11456 FIXED ‘Show More’ crashes with UnicodeDecodeError
#11460 Non-UTF8 locales break things
#11477 Miro shows no videos in a specific invalid feed
#11478 TypeError: NoneType object is unsubscriptable
#11479 AttributeError: ‘AppController’ object has no attribute ‘pausedDownloaders’
#11474 Can’t process cookie expiration. Thanks Uwe!
#11022 “File name:” string is bold. Thanks Zach!
#11245 OPML import/export issues with non-ascii filenames
#11525 migrating folders with non-ascii characters
#11527 watched directories with non-ascii characters
#11528 playback fails for items in directories with non-ascii characters
#11544 handling for site type in subscriptions
#11546 pause all does not pause queued downloads
#11435 re-worked xine driver code so that it respects xine-driver property
#11522 error loading windll.winhttp
#11539 OSX crash when migrating to directory with non-ascii characters
#11557 non-ascii directory names are not displayed properly in Folder panel of preferences
#11575 non-ascii movies dir - startup check dir name mangled
#11435 miro should obey .xine/config
#11522 Error loading windll.winhttp
#11546 Pause All does not pause queued downloads
#11554 first time startup search, non-ascii directory
#11560 crash when updated torrent that is in a folder with other files
#11568 Miro_Downloader Crashes on Launch

Updates:

updated translations synced from LaunchPad on 2/24/2009
#11516 Updated to libtorrent 0.14.2

New Features:

#11518 Added metavid.org search support. Thanks Uwe!
#11461 Added 5min.com search support. Thanks Uwe!
#3858 Added EveryZing search support. Thanks Uwe!
#11458 Added vimeo.com url scraping support. Thanks Uwe!

Chris's blog: Wedding website is up

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 19:44:51 +0000

Long time in coming, but http://wedding.dustycloud.org is actually up now. Probably the best looking website I've designed (note: by that I mean graphic design, and I don't do the graphic design for any of the PCF projects; that stuff is done by an incredibly talented fellow, Morgan Knutson). Complete with the sketchy mess that I try to pass off as my style.

I've got a few bits to put up left. Will update with more information as I go.

Miro News Blog: Having an interesting Miro story?

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:57:05 +0000

Attention: Miro Users, social, cultural and political media/RSS/BitTorrent fans, and all the historicists and ethnographers in us — we’re trying to gather stories on how Miro or video RSS feeds have been or are used in different ways, different places, and different communities. It’s a truism that new media technologies, like RSS feeds, have and continue to change the way people communicate, opening up a digital world of infinite possibilities. Since Miro is distributed throughout the world and enables cross-cultural and social communication across any distance, we hope there are many uses of Miro that we don’t know about or simply need to be reminded of. Do you have a story about how Miro or RSS is used to communicate?

The internet itself makes it possible for lovers to communicate before they even know each other. What has Miro or RSS or BitTorrent enabled — does anyone have a feed of their own life that they share with their family 2-3 continents away? Are there cross-cultural exchanges, connected by language, cultural tradition, social habit?

A teacher named Scott is using Miro to help teach special-education and developmentally disabled students because as he says, “The ideal is to have a video/audio jukebox that can display all of the multimedia resources in one place, and in a format that is most likely to keep the students actively engaged.” Scott and others — we have a big educational initiative coming soon and will be posted about here, would love to hear what works best for you and your students.

Here’s an example that is unrelated to Miro directly, but related to the power of RSS — there is a small town in Europe (somewhere!) that has a community internet portal which broadcasts uploaded content as their local public channel. Can anyone tell me where this small town is?

This is our attempt at a distributed history gathering of Miro stories — if you have any information on how Miro is being used out there, please send them to me directly at tyc at pculture dot org or put them here in the comments for everyone to see (better!).

Miro News Blog: Open Video Conference: June 19th & 20th in New York

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:37:36 +0000

With great enthusiasm, I announce the upcoming Open Video Conference, slated for June 19th and 20th in New York City. PCF is co-organizing the conference along with the Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance.

Open Video Conference
June 19-20, 2009
New York City
40 Washington Square South (NYU Law School)

We’ll have a full website up for the conference soon!

About the Conference

The conference will feature talks from internet luminaries, panels and discussions, screenings of video art, and demonstrations of the newest internet video technology. We expect more than 400 participants.

Bring together stakeholders in the online video space (video makers, coders, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, etc.) for cross-pollination and development of the Open Video movement.
Raise public interest and awareness around the Principles for an Open Video Ecosystem, a community effort to define best practices in online video.
Raise the public profile of video creators and artists.
Foster a narrative — why do these video artists and creators value openness? How does it affect their work?

Why is Open Video Important?

YouTube and other online video applications are rightly celebrated for empowering end-users; however, online video lacks some of the essential qualities that make text and images on the web such ubiquitous and powerful tools for free speech and technical innovation. Email, blogs, and other staples of the open web rely on ubiquitous and interoperable technologies that have low barriers to entry; they are massively decentralized and resistant to censorship or regulation. Video, meanwhile, relies on centralized distribution and proprietary technologies which can threaten cultural discourse and innovation.

Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and participation in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for bottom-up innovation and greater protection for free speech online. Many organizations are already taking steps to change the nature of video on the web: Mozilla is moving to support open video formats in Firefox, the Participatory Culture Foundation promotes open source and standards in video publishing and distribution, and Wikipedia has increased its focus on the open Theora codec.

A very important end note: Open Video is more than just having a functional open source video codec. It’s all the legal and social norms surrounding online video. It’s the ability to attach the license of your choice to videos you publish. It’s about media consolidation, aggregation, and decentralization. It’s about fair use. In short, it’s about a LOT of things, and that’s why this conference is guaranteed to be very stimulating.

Will's blog: Who's part of the team?

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:29:00 +0000

I saw the Our wonderful team post just now. The PCF staff is great and, but "the team" constitutes a much larger group of great people without whom the magic could never happen.

There are hackers like Uwe, Nathan, Zach, Michael and others who have sent in patches that add new features, add test cases, and fix bugs.

There are testers like Keith, Pan, Sedat, Robbt, Sumana, and dozens of others whose work directly impacts the quality of Miro.

There are bug reporters who spend their time helping us work out complex problems that result in fixes and better experiences for future users. Some of these bug reports and comments are simply awe-inspiring.

There are translators like Karl, Lukasz, and Sedat who through their efforts have done some great translation work and also fixed issues smoothing the path for other translators.

There are packagers like Uwe (Debian), Iain (Ubuntu), Christian (Ubuntu), Alex (Fedora) and others that I'm either forgetting or haven't interacted with who package Miro for other distributions, send bugs and fixes upstream to us, and help us generalize the code so that it works on as many systems as possible.

There are developers of libraries that Miro uses like Arvid who works on libtorrent, lurks on our bug system and IRC, and helps us with libtorrent issues.

There are developers and members of other projects that are actively seeking areas where we can help each other build better things like Nathan and Asheesh from Creative Commons, Gabriel Burt from Banshee, and Chris Blizzard, Aza Dotzler, and others from Mozilla.

There are thousands of users who use Miro, find and report issues, tell their friends about Miro, wax on about the importance of an open Internet and open media distribution, and give feedback that molds future versions of Miro.

There are thousands of content producers who benefit from and add to the infrastructure that we're helping to facilitate.

This massive group of people is the team. The best part is that the team is getting bigger and better every day.

Miro News Blog: Our wonderful team

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:49:56 +0000

Like a bumblebee’s wings, the PCF staff appears far too small to lift a complicated, cross-platform app like Miro off the ground. But like a bumblebee’s heart, our team pumps out mostly love and magic, making anything possible.

You can’t underestimate how much of a difference it makes when people are working on something that they really believe it. Without our mission holding up our organization and bringing together our community, there’s just no way we’d be able to do what we do.

Will's blog: what I use Miro for

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:57:00 +0000

One thing I've been meaning to write a post about was to list the things I use Miro for. There are probably other ways to do them, but that's outside the scope of this post.

Keeping track of government
President Obama's weekly address and key speeches - http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/speeches.xml
Metavid - http://metavid.org/wiki/

The metavid one is really interesting. From their site:

"Metavid is a community driven archive of legislative video from both houses of the U.S. Congress, spanning from early 2006 to the present. This archive is searchable by speaker name, spoken text, date, metadata we've scraped from outside sources and user contributions. Metavid is video wiki where users improve its accuracy by fixing transcripts and annotating speeches."
I can subscribe to an RSS feed of anything that has to do with "Kerry" or "Kennedy". It's ultra-convenient, fascinating and a really awesome use of the all these technologies.
Continuing education
Open Courseware Consortium - http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html
MIT OCW - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Video and audio lectures and other course materials to learn subjects you didn't have time to take in college. The MIT OCW is a great site, but any of the other groups that participate in the Open Courseware Consortium are also really useful.
Learning a new application
InkScape - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Screencastersheathenxorg
The Gimp - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/meetthegimp
Blender - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheBlenderShow
Microsoft Office on the Mac - http://mac.microsoft.com/macoffice/videos/en-us/xml/videopodcast.xml
...

There are lots of podcasts out there that walk you through using specific applications to do the things you need to do. Watching how someone does something tends to be a lot easier to understand than reading about someone doing something.
Learning new libraries, APIs, toolkits, whatever, ...
Git - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gitcasts
CSS - http://feeds.feedburner.com/CSS-Tricks-Screencasts
...

Any time I need to come up to speed on something programming related (toolkits, utilities, APIs, libraries, ...), I almost always do a Video Search on YouTube and Google Video. I go through the results and download the videos that seem relevant to what I'm doing. Often I tweak the search terms and search again. Doing this brings up tutorials, demos, presentations, tech talks, and a variety of other interesting bits. This greatly adds to what I can gather by looking through the project web-site and forums because it's distilled in a different way.
Keeping up with projects, communities, conventions, meetups ...
Ubuntu Developer Videos - http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/ubuntudevelopers/uploads?orderby=updated
Fedora TV - https://fedorahosted.org/releases/f/e/fedoratv/fedora-tv.xml
BSD Conferences - http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?vq=bsdconferences&alt=rss
...

These are useful to watch because you can see where these projects are going, who's involved, and what they're working on.

I'd love to know what other things people use Miro for. Add your uses in the comments.

Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog: New Guide!

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:16:46 +0000

As I’m sure anyone who reads this blog has noticed, Chris Webber and I released the brand-spanking-new version of the Miro Guide. I’m incredibly proud of the work that we did on it, and I hope that you all like it too.

Translations: With a brand-new site come a bunch of new strings. At the moment, the most-translated language (Slovenian) still has 116 untranslated strings. If you’ve got some time, please sign up for Launchpad and translate some strings!

Features: Although I’ve got a bunch of ideas for where I want the Guide to go, I also want to hear from you! Will turned on voting in Bugzilla, so go vote for your favorite features. If you don’t see it there, feel free to add it to the list; maybe other people want it, too.

Miro News Blog: Miro 2.0 is here!

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:34:30 +0000

I am thrilled to announce the release of Miro 2.0! This is a huge update of Miro, the Miro Guide, and the GetMiro website.

Download Miro 2.0 Now

Miro 2 has an all-new interface and lots of new features– but for me it’s less of a collection of new stuff and more of a rethinking of the whole Miro experience. I’m really proud of what we’ve built and I think it will definitely advance our mission to spread open video to more people.

In a nutshell, here’s what’s new:

A beautiful, all-new widget based interface (see it in action here)
Browse while you watch– pop out any video to an external window (our number one requested feature)
Miro is now faster, more responsive, and uses less memory
You can add streaming sites like Hulu to your sidebar (note: streaming with Flash only works in Windows and OSX)
You can add download sites like Archive.org or legaltorrents.com to your sidebar and download to Miro with a single click
Improved playlists
New compact, sortable list view
Better audio support

…and a few days ago we launched the all-new Miro Guide that looks beautiful and works with Miro 2.0 (for example, the Guide is now starting to list some streaming sites).

Check out the Miro Feature List and detailed release notes for more.

But remember, we are not a company!

Miro is created by a non-profit organization and volunteers around the world. To realize our vision of a more open and democratic internet video world, you need to get involved.

How can you help the most?

Tell your friends! Since we can’t afford to buy our way into their hearts, we need you to tell them about Miro, why open media is important, and help them get started.
Translate! Only about 40% of Miro users are in English speaking countries. We need your help to translate Miro, our website, and the Miro Guide. Details are on our new Volunteer Page.
Test and code! Got chops? Join in.
Help new users– you can answer questions and join the community conversation here: Miro discussion forums.

Miro News Blog: Just Launched: Miro Guide 3.0

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 17:27:43 +0000

The brand new Miro Guide just went up yesterday — it looks beautiful and is packed full of new features. This new version of the Miro Guide is also the beginning of a new effort to make MiroGuide.com work really well as a stand-alone web guide to video podcasts (competing with a site like Odeo, for example). More on that soon.

Here’s what the new guide looks like, read on to find out more about the new features…

New Features in Miro Guide 3.0

Add Sites: Now that websites are easy to add to the Miro sidebar, we’re putting them in the guide
Previewing Videos: Now most videos can be previewed directly in the guide
Language Settings: Users have more control over which language channels they see.
Infinite Scrolling: Just scroll to the bottom of a list and more results will automagically load.
Better Sharing: It’s easier to share videos you like with people you like.
Beautiful Interface: The design has been redone from the ground up.

The new guide is a big improvement, and it will be getting even better with: more social features, more sites, audio content, and more. If you’d like to make any suggestions about things you want to see, please leave a comment here or on GetSatisfaction. And with all these changes the site text has changed almost completely and we need help translating the interface.

Check out the Miro Guide >>

Miro News Blog: Miro 2.0 Release Candidate 3 (the last one! we’re pretty sure!)

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 05:07:05 +0000

Alright.

We have one last, and we hope final final release candidate before Miro 2.0 bursts onto the scene. This is your last chance to help us find tragic flaws and your last chance to get a sneak peak before it’s officially launched and your last chance to help us translate for this version.

Download Miro 2.0 RC3 — Download for Windows — Download for Mac — Download Source

Translating Miro: As many of you know, Miro and the Miro Guide are 100% volunteer translated. If you know any non-English languages, then we’d love to have you translate and/or refine the existing translations. Instructions for helping translate >>

Testing Miro: Using the latest pre-release version of Miro is really fun — and if you’ve got some time to help us run a few tests, we’d be really happy. Testing Steps:

Download the pre-release version of Miro 2.0 (Windows, Mac, Linux).
(optional) Back up your Miro database… better safe than sorry.
Install your pre-release.
Help us run Litmus tests. Janet has an easy to follow guide for testing with Litmus.

Thanks everyone and get ready for a big launch!

p.s. You may have noticed that the all new Miro Guide is going live tonight. We wanted to get it in place before Miro 2.0 is released so that we don’t have too many things changing at once.

Will's blog: Miro 2.0 rc3 released!

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 02:47:00 +0000

I tagged and built Miro 2.0 rc3 builds and placed them in the sticky section of the nightlies page.

Pre-release release notes are at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Changes since rc2:

updated translations as of today
bug 11329: decimal value for movie duration is never correct in channel view
bug 11327: os x crash, windows error - when selecting item (non-ascii) to share
bug 11149: New OSX DMG Background to replace current one
bug 11296: 'show more' jumps back to top of list on 'Single Items' and 'New'
bug 11322: File "miro\feedupdate.pyc", line 67, in update_finished KeyError: 26
bug 11262: python 2.6 support (preliminary and untested)
bug 11317: os x - crash after added torrent feed then selecting channel tab.
bug 11354: "Global name 'time' is not defined" death on laptop
bug 11348: os -x - automatic update failure
bug 11357: list view for new tab broken
bug 11027: Changing default guide on windows: AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'url'
bug 11321: ValueError: I/O operation on closed file
bug 6179: Wrong Language (only some work done on this one)
bug 11360: os x r9142 - update notification is show release notes text.
bug 11362: Dissmising detached external playback dialog freezes Miro
OSX crashers and memory leaks
probably some other things I’m missing

The new Miro Guide will be launching very soon now. When that's released, the second browser bar you see in Miro will go away.

I've synced translations, so rc3 has the latest translations. I will sync them one more time before we do a release. If you’re a translator, we sure could use your help! See more at https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy.

We think this release candidate is release-worthy. Assuming testers don't hit any snags, there shouldn't be any changes between now and the final Miro 2.0 release. We're planning to follow Miro 2.0 with a 2.0.1 release in the near future to get the most updated translations and to fix minor issues that pop up.

To Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid users: Some day I’ll get to learning how PPA works. When that happens, we’ll start building release candidate builds for the Ubuntu versions we support. Until then, you’ll have to download the tarball and build it yourself. If someone can spare some time to help us with this, I’d be much obliged.

Barring snags with this release candidate, we're looking at a full on Miro 2.0 release some time in the next few days. Getting really super close now!

Miro News Blog: YouTube’s Fair Use Massacre

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:19:30 +0000

Take a brilliant parody video, strip out the audio, and only a husk remains — Fatal Farm’s redux of the Golden Girls intro is a perfect example. It was one of my favorites: clearly a parody, clearly protected as a legal remix under the fair use doctrine, yet still singled out and, for all intents and purposes, ruined.

Unfortunately, droves of videos are being ruined this way, or being removed from YouTube entirely — the EFF calls the past two weeks a Fair Use Massacre. Fair use is an exception to copyright that legitimizes certain types of remixing and reuse, specifically for purposes of criticism, education, parody, news reporting, scholarship, and so on.

While takedowns of fair use videos have been happening on YouTube for a long time, the recent shift into high gear is due to bad blood between Warner and YouTube. Warner has deployed YouTube’s automated media ID’ing software to locate instances of their copyrighted material and scrubbing all positive matches for audio from the video sharing service. The unfortunate side effect is that remixes, parodies, personal a cappella performances, and clear cut cases of fair use are being swept up along with the more egregiously infringing material.

What can we do about this?

Kevin Driscoll notes that many users are migrating to other services, and suggests we figure out a way to massively reupload and/or mirror videos that have been taken down. The EFF says they’re willing to defend users who make DMCA counterclaims (to get their videos working again).

One thing is clear to us: this will remain a problem as long as one video website is as dominant as YouTube. Further decentralization and openness in video are critical pieces to this complex puzzle.

Note: If you’re interested in the limitations of fair use, see the Center for Social Media’s code of best practices for fair use in online video.

Miro News Blog: Miro Two Release Candidate Two

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:26:40 +0000

We’ve just posted Miro Release Candidate 2– a last minute change before the first RC created a bunch of playback problems on Windows. Also, YouTube change some things that made YouTube downloading stop working. Those problems and some others are fixed in this version (details here). We’re getting close!

Download Miro 2.0 RC2 — Download for Windows — Download for Mac — Download Source

Miro 2 will bring lots of new features and a brand new interface— try it out and let us know if you see anything wrong.

As Dean mentioned last week, we need more volunteers to help with translating and testing. Here’s how you can get involved:

Testing Miro: Using the latest pre-release version of Miro is really fun — and if you’ve got some time to help us run a few tests, we’d be really happy. Testing Steps:

Download the pre-release version of Miro 2.0 (Windows, Mac, Linux).
(optional) Back up your Miro database… better safe than sorry.
Install your pre-release.
Help us run Litmus tests. Janet has an easy to follow guide for testing with Litmus.

Thanks!

Will's blog: Miro 2.0 rc2 released!

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 22:23:00 +0000

I tagged and built Miro 2.0 rc2 builds and placed them in the sticky section of the nightlies page.

Pre-release release notes are at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Changes since rc1:

updated translations as of today
bug 11260: hover controls on OSX
bug 10552: memory leaks in Windows
bug 10299: re-enabled DailyMotion search (but it downloads 80x60 flv files so it still sucks)
bug 11269: audio visualisation still present when playing video on Windows
bug 11178: interface "hangs" when playing audio files
bug 11272: removing folders dialog didn't show information about child feeds
bug 11267: errors when searching on OSX
bug 11266: videos play on OSX after dragging a video file onto Miro
bug 11275, 11301: toolbar for watched folders no longer shows irrelevant functionality
bug 11268: fix the save resume time functionality in regards to videos that have finished playback
bug 11291: make sure pop in/out label is hidden/shown along with icon
probably some other things I'm missing

When we release Miro 2.0, we'll also be releasing a new version of the Miro Guide web-site. Amongst other things, this will remove the second browser bar that you see.

Also, prior to releasing Miro 2.0, I'll sync translations from Launchpad. If you're a translator, we sure could use your help! https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy

There are still some outstanding issues that are blocking Miro 2.0, so we're still working. You can see the existing set of bugs to fix here.

To Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid users: Some day I'll get to learning how PPA works. When that happens, we'll start building release candidate builds for the Ubuntu versions we support. Until then, you'll have to download the tarball and build it yourself. If someone can spare some time to help us with this, I'd be much obliged.

Almost there!

Miro News Blog: Miro 2.0 Release Candidate

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:38:49 +0000

The new Miro is almost ready— we’ve just posted a Release Candidate for Miro 2.0. That means it’s close to what we think will be the final version but we want some help making sure we haven’t missed any serious bugs.

Download Miro 2.0 RC1 — Download for Windows — Download for Mac — Download Source

There’s lots of new features and a brand new interface— try it out and let us know if you see anything wrong.

As Dean mentioned last week, we need more volunteers to help with translating and testing. Here’s how you can get involved:

Testing Miro: Using the latest pre-release version of Miro is really fun — and if you’ve got some time to help us run a few tests, we’d be really happy. Testing Steps:

Download the pre-release version of Miro 2.0 (Windows, Mac, Linux).
(optional) Back up your Miro database… better safe than sorry.
Install your pre-release.
Help us run Litmus tests. Janet has an easy to follow guide for testing with Litmus.

Thanks!

Note: there is an issue with YouTube downloads on every version of Miro. It should be fixed for RC2.

Miro News Blog: YouTube Download Issue

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:34:09 +0000

YouTube seems to have changed their back end again, so downloads might not be working. We should have this fixed in the next day or so for the 2.0 branch and will put some download links up when it’s ready.

For Miro 1.2.8 users, you’re going to need to update to 2.0 to get this fix — sorry for the wait.

This might be the excuse we need to flesh out the plugin system we’ve been wanting to build. Then we could keep users updated without needing to re-release the entire application (and anyone else could build add-ons too, which would be amazing).

Miro Testing Blog: Miro 2.0 Release Candidate Testing

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:56:48 +0000

Last night Will posted the Miro 2.0-rc1 build onto the Miro nightly builds page. I thought I would provide some information about downloads, bugs and what has changed within Miro since we had asked for more widespread testing with the January 20th build.

For the 20090120-nightly build, there have been more than 8000 downloads on os x, about 1600 on windows and 230 source downloads.

This is a huge amount of downloads for just a nightly build. That number coupled with the actual number of serious bugs that were reported has given us a lot of confidence to move forward. So thanks.

Bugs fixed in the last 10 days

There have been 58 bugs fixed in the last 10 days. All but four (4) of them we considered priority 1 or 2 tickets. There were 49 bugs opened in the past 10 days and 20 of them remain open. However those that remain are mostly lower priority tickets.

There has been huge momentum towards getting this release finished. The developers have been doing a fantastic job fixing the bugs as they have been reported. We still need your continued participation to be sure that we get all critical bugs found and resolved.

So please, download and test Miro 2.0-rc1 today. If you find any bugs, please check the 2.0 bug list for duplicates and comment there before making a new report.

Will's blog: Miro 2.0 rc1 released!

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:32:00 +0000

I built and posted Miro 2.0 rc1 builds in the sticky section of the nightlies page (http://pculture.org/nightlies).

We have a set of pre-release 2.0 release notes that still need updating but are pretty up-to-date at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Please post any bugs to http://bugzilla.pculture.org/ with the version as 2.0-rc1. Please include as much information as possible. See GoodBugReports for more details.

To put this in some context, this is a HUGE release for us. We've been working hard on Miro 2.0 since May or thereabouts. It's good to get to the end of the development cycle. At the same time, there are things we're leaving on the table that we'll address in future versions.

Last call for translation help--if you're a translator and familiar with Launchpad, we could use your help! https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy.

I want to send a huge thank you for all the people who have contributed to Miro development thus far especially people I've worked with like Alex, Uwe, Keith, Pan, Robbt, Sedat, Lukasz, Arvid, Elmargol, and others.

Also, thank you to my life partner, Sadie, who has put up with me fixing bugs and doing a release candidate on my birthday.

Finally, happy birthday to me! w00t!

Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog: Weekly Status Update: 1/21-27

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:22:29 +0000

I got through 11 bugs this week, 10 of which were for Miro. #10896 (Newly Available badge displayed too frequently) and #10988 (Chicklets don’t update counts for folders) were the hardest because I didn’t know much about the new messaging system. Working on them was good, though, because now I know a lot more

Today I started working on Guide stuff again. We’ve got 3 (really 2) P1 bugs that have so far eluded debugging and fixing. I added some pretty verbose debugging in for #10993 (Feed Updater Running?) so hopefully that will generate something useful. I also put up some new code for #10972 (Fix the Miro Guide Feeds) which hopefully will limit the number of new items that Miro tries to download.

I’ll be helping Chris out with Guide stuff next week, assuming no new cobranding bugs pop up. I have one outstanding enhancement for the cobrander (uploading files to OSUOSL) but that’s lower-priority than MG3 stuff.

Will's blog: Miro needs your translation help! (update 1)

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:59:00 +0000

I imported translation updates today. Anything done in since the 22nd should be available in tonight's nightlies.

Since I originally posted this cry for help four days ago, twelve of the languages have been edited.

We now have four completed translations:

German
Finnish
Slovenian
Norwegian Nynorsk

Bravo!

We've got five more that are getting close:

Norwegian Bokmal
Polish
French
Swedish
Spanish

The rest of the languages have more than 100 untranslated strings.

If there's anything I can do to help you out, let me know. If you know anyone else that can help with translations, I sure would appreciate the help!

https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer

Chris's blog: In Which My Twelve Year Old Brother Reviews GNU/Linux and Ubuntu

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 00:47:29 +0000

So a few months ago, I installed Ubuntu on my younger brother John's computer. A couple of days ago he sent me a rough draft of an essay he was writing for his English class. He asked me a few questions, and I answered those, but this writing is all his. I'll let you read it for yourself.

Have you found a document that is in a format that your word processor doesn't recognize? Are you bored of the games you have? Do you have a computer? If you are or have any of these things, Ubuntu Linux is the thing for you! It's great for computer geeks and people who just use the computer. It even is good for people who have little patience or can't tell when the computer is about to crash. It's a user friendly form of Linux.

Linux is nearly virus free. As long as you only download open source programs, there is little to no chance of viruses. This is thanks to real computer geeks and programmers. If it is open source, programmers can look at a code and find any virus ware imputed on the code, they then delete that part of the code.

How can one word processor understand so many formats like .doc or .odt? And how are there so many of them? Each format has its one unique code. If you open a .odt in .doc format, the writing will look like gibberish or a bunch of numbers. That's because it interprets the information differently. Luckily a group of people were clever enough to make a word processor that can type in all the formats and read all the formats. This is free open source and comes with Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is for geeks and laypersons alike. For the geeks who know how to navigate the command line and through it, manipulate virtually any part software of the computer. You could even use Python, the very easy yet complex programing language of Ubuntu and really all of Linux, is used in the command line. It can be used to create new tools. These new tools can then be used to create more complex tools. Python is complex and flexible enough to keep geeks with many years of practice involved while still allowing laypersons to create a simple tic-tac-toe game with one or two days of brother-to-brother or sister-to-sister lessons.

There is one special thing called a split hard drive. A split hard drive allows you to have four operating systems on one hard drive. You can download Ubuntu with a free CD. You can make this simply by going to Ubuntu's website going to the downloads page, pick the latest version, and then follow the instructions. After you copy the image on the CD, restart the computer. Just follow the instructions and go through the installation processes. Within 30 minutes to an hour you're ready. If you need help, ask your neighborhood geek. Printers are instantly installed, and it comes with a built in multi-instant messenger.

Ubuntu Linux is the practical solution to your virus problems. Windows, mac, or other non-open source operating and system is still recommended due to certain things not being compatible with Linux. This, as mentioned before, can be fixed by making your hard drive into a split hard drive. If you're a geek there are millions of possibilities. If you're a layperson who likes the user friendliness of Windows, Ubuntu still has this with out the slowness of Windows. Go on and get Ubuntu free today!

As you could guess, I'm brimming with pride. There are some errors, but I don't even live in the same city as my brother, so this has mostly come out of his own experiences after a bit of guidance from me. And obviously there's more to learn but for a twelve year old who has only been running GNU/Linux for a few months I'm just plain impressed by how much he gets it.

In sum, I'm excited both for my brother and for the increasing accessibility of free and open source software, both in product and in spirit.

Edit: John gave me his final version of the essay, so I replaced the old one with this one, as promised.

Chris's blog: Miro and ChiGlug groups on Identi.ca

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 23:12:52 +0000

I mentioned in my last post that I am now using Identi.ca. I'll be honest.. when I first set it up I didn't really think I'd use it. 140 character limit? And why have a microblog when you can just have, you know, a blog? And then I started using it and realized that it was really like public instant messaging or a global chatroom. And now I'm totally hooked.

I've been using it to send out updates on the guide by tagging those posts with #miroguide so that people doing testing can know what kind of changes are happening. Will has also been tagging with #miro quite a bit.

A lot of people have asked me... why Identi.ca? Why not Twitter? Indeed, Twitter does have a significantly bigger community. You can also sync up your identi.ca account with you twitter account, and indeed I do know a lot of people who have done that. But I'm simply not too interested in collecting my information into yet another walled garden. Identi.ca runs off of Laconi.ca, which is free software that anyone can run on their own server. And the people behind it are pushing for a standard that will allow for even further decentralization called OpenMicroBlogging (OMB). Admittedly, I haven't read the standard yet, but what I'm hoping is that this will allow for a setup that is closer to what we have both with email and XMPP/Jabber, where anyone can run a server and send messages to anyone on any other server. So, at this point there are a lot of people being snarky and responding with, "Well, not as many people are using it yet, so it really doesn't matter." Which is what people said about XMPP/Jabber in its infancy, while AIM was the proprietary, de-facto protocol. But now XMPP is the default standard... if you have LiveJournal, Facebook, GMail, you already have an XMPP account, whether you realize it or not. It's not really clear whether it will be the case or not, but hopefully the same will be the case with OMB.

I still think that the 140 character limit is a bit short. Though I could be wrong on that. I still think it would be better if it would be a bit longer, and if it were possible to use named links instead of having to resort to third party servers like bit.ly and tinyurl.com (this is the web after all, and almost any decent communications platform (including xmpp) supports web links). I think the biggest problem is that it might break twitter compatibility, but I guess that really doesn't bother me. If we're thinking of microblogging as like a public chat room, we can have a bit of a higher character limit and still be reasonable. But those are minor complaints.

So today identi.ca released a brand new version of the site running off of a new version of laconi.ca. It looks good, has a few bugs, but most importantly, it now supports groups. Think of it this way: a !group is like a subscribable #tag or a magical collective @person. If you mark a post with your !group, and all subscribers of the group will get that message, regardless of whether they are subscribed to you specifically. It's a great feature, and if I understand correctly, one people have been wishing for for a while... even in twitter land. ;)

So with that in mind, I set up a few new groups... !miro (which three of the miro developers have joined at this point already), !chiglug for the local Chicago GNU/Linux User Group, and of course I had to set up a !blender group. Group avatars aren't working yet apparently, but I'll upload them once they do. Well, what are you waiting for? Sign up! :)

Will's blog: Miro needs your translation help!

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:52:00 +0000

We've been pushing hard on Miro 2.0 development for a long time now. So far I've avoided making release date predictions, but looking at the Bugzilla queue and the rate at which we're finishing things, we're probably looking at a Miro 2.0 release in the next 3 or 4 weeks.

One thing that we desperately need help with is translation work. All translation work is done in Launchpad at https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer. You can see the status of translations there, too. Right now it looks something like this:

language    # untranslated strings
--------    ----------------------
German      0 (Go German!)
Slovenian   28
Polish      39
Swedish     58
French      66

The rest of the languages have more than 100 untranslated strings.

I want to thank Lukasz, who's been working on the Polish translations, for helping an enormous amount in the last few weeks. He's identified and helped me fix a bunch of problems with the strings and also worked to make the strings easier to translate. Thank you!

If you can translate strings and/or have done Launchpad translations before, we need your help. We've got a 3 or 4 week window between now (January 22nd 2009) and a release. It's not a lot of time, but hopefully it's enough time for us all to get translations into a better state.

If you have any questions or find any problems, let me know.

Will's blog: parasite with miro on Linux

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:17:00 +0000

I saw Chip's blog entry announcing Parasite yesterday and checked it out. I had problems getting it to work with Miro, but he has since fixed the bug I was bumping into.

I think this will be a really useful tool, so I'm doing a short write up of how to use Parasite with Miro.

Grab Parasite from git compile and install it. Instructions are on the Parasite web-site.
When you run make install It'll install libgtkparasite.so into /usr/local/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/ .

Launch Miro like this:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/ GTK_MODULES=parasite ./run.sh

That'll launch Miro with Parasite showing you the widget hierarchy and widget properties and all that.

There's a screencast on the Parasite site that shows off more things you can do.