Planet Miro

Will's blog: fast and loose cloc stats for Miro

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:24:33 +0000

Following Paul’s lead, here are some cloc stats for Miro in trunk:

willg@mercury:~/pcf/miro/trunk/tv$ perl /home/willg/Desktop/cloc.pl .
    3468 text files.
classified 3457 files
    1644 unique files.
    2763 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.04  T=20.0 s (35.2 files/s, 9438.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              286      9689     10059     53376 x   4.20 =      224179.20
C/C++ Header        265      7941     14412     31565 x   1.00 =       31565.00
C++                  83      5474      4591     27832 x   1.51 =       42026.32
C                     9      1159       889     13119 x   0.77 =       10101.63
Javascript           17       420       557      2699 x   1.48 =        3994.52
CSS                  11       391       476      2451 x   1.00 =        2451.00
IDL                   7        18         0       486 x   3.80 =        1846.80
XML                  13         2         3       275 x   1.90 =         522.50
Bourne Shell          8       136       319       248 x   3.81 =         944.88
make                  1         7         0        94 x   2.50 =         235.00
HTML                  4         2         2        67 x   1.90 =         127.30
DTD                   1         0         0         3 x   1.90 =           5.70
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                705     25239     31308    132215 x   2.41 =      317999.85
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Will's blog: status of trunk

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:50:50 +0000

Over the last week I’ve been coming up to speed on the architectural changes that occurred when Ben landed the new widget code. I’ve also been hooking up menu items to their respective behavior and fixing bugs on the Linux and Windows platforms. In many cases, I’ve been re-implementing the behavior using the new messaging system which has required me to read through the “old” code and figure out what the behavior used to be. Progress was slow at the beginning, but is picking up now.

You can see checkins progress in the Trac timeline.

There’s still a lot of work to do to get things working again, but things are progressing.

So, why all the trouble? Why not just leave it as is? Off the top of my head:

Miro’s UI is no longer rendered using HTML templates. w00t!
It looks like overall memory usage is lower by around 20%.
Memory usage of Miro when displaying feeds with lots of items scales much better.
Miro’s faster at displaying feeds with lots of items (where “lots” is defined as > 50).
Miro on Windows is no longer a XULRunner application; instead we’re embedding XULRunner for web-browsing. XULRunner is a great platform, but this change makes Miro a Python application on OSX, Linux and Windows and we can unify our toolset. That’s a huge win for us and reduces the amount of work it takes to maintain all three platforms.

Regarding the performance gains, I’m seeing those on Windows and Linux, but I definitely haven’t spent a lot of time doing rigorous measurements. Treat them as if they were wild unsubstantiated rumor. I haven’t used Miro on Mac OSX enough to notice anything there, yet.

Getting there…!

Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog: Some quick statistics on the Miro Guide codebase

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:41:21 +0000

     556 text files.
classified 538 files
     499 unique files.
     180 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.04  T=61.0 s (6.0 files/s, 772.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              185      4403      2428     25212 x   4.20 =      105890.40
HTML                 89       198        87      8411 x   1.90 =       15980.90
CSS                   4       616        24      2752 x   1.00 =        2752.00
Javascript            6       109       545       754 x   1.48 =        1115.92
SQL                  65        94       130       504 x   2.29 =        1154.16
XML                   6        10         0       359 x   1.90 =         682.10
Bourne Shell         12        54       135       274 x   3.81 =        1043.94
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                367      5484      3349     38266 x   3.36 =      128619.42
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Miro News Blog: Whitepaper: Sustainable Social Media Infrastructure

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:35:59 +0000

em { font-style: italic; } h3 { font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; color: #000; } h4 { font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; color: #000; }

The following document is best read in its PDF form.
Sustainable Social Media Infrastructure (PDF)

Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure

July 2, 2008. Successful non-profit technology organizations and what they can teach the foundation world.

Summary

A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.

The foundation world, largely absent from these success stories, should seize the opportunity to create new funding models for the next generation of long-term, public interest technology projects. Support for these types of organizations advances not only the public interest of an open and independent media, but also directly benefits many of the organizations and issues that foundations already fund. The potential social return on investment is enormous.

Two brief case studies are presented: the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) and the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia). Both organizations have built powerful social infrastructure and vibrant volunteer communities that serve millions of people every day.

Authors

Nicholas Reville (nicholas - at - pculture.org)
Co-Founder, Executive Director, Participatory Culture Foundation

Holmes Wilson (hw - at - pculture.org)
Co-Founder, Development Director, Participatory Culture Foundation

Firefox / Mozilla Case Study

Mozilla’s History

The Mozilla Foundation spun out of AOL in 2003 with a few million dollars in seed funding and an open codebase from what had been the Netscape web browser. Starting with just a few percent of global marketshare and facing Microsoft’s entrenched monopoly, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has steadily grown, now reaching over 20% marketshare for one of the most fundamental communication tools of our time, the web browser.

With savvy earned revenue partnerships, Mozilla now generates income of more than $65 million a year without compromising its 501c3 charitable mission. In just a few years, the organization has grown from being a grant recipient to becoming a granting organization. More importantly, it has become a wholly self-funded organization that is a staunch public defender of free and open communication and is built for the long-term.

Mozilla’s Mission

Mozilla’s mission is to promote open communication standards on the web. It accomplishes this goal by building open-source technology based on shared publicly-defined standards. Just as more traditional media openness advocacy projects focused on obscure FCC rules about media ownership and consolidation, the technical details of Mozilla’s work can be complex and hard to penetrate. However, the goals of the work are the same: protect free speech and enable equal access and a level playing field online. Mozilla is defining the future of communication; they are contributing to a new infrastructure for sharing thoughts and ideas that’s more open and inclusive than any the world has ever seen.

In addition to their public service, Mozilla is a uniquely open and transparent organization that capitalizes on the efforts of tens of thousands of people around the world. Volunteers write code, translate Firefox into dozens of languages, and do beta testing. Mozilla is able to have impact far beyond their own staff and resources because they have created a structure that leverages a huge community of contributors.

Mozilla’s Success

Mozilla’s achieves their mission in part through the marketplace: they’ve built a product that people love to use and which preserves freedom simply by being used. The remarkable success of Firefox means that for-profit companies have been forced to compete by making their products more open. This means that Mozilla’s work serves the entire internet, far beyond the 200 million active users of Firefox.

Their work to promote openness, web standards, and user empowerment almost singlehandedly saved the web from being controlled by proprietary Microsoft technology, a fate that appeared to be a near-inevitability just a few years ago. They have moved an entire industry.

Mozilla demonstrates that a modest one-time investment can create a permanent public institution that will protect free speech and support other organizations for the foreseeable future. The strategic one-time philanthropic support of AOL and Mitch Kapor has generated an incredible social return on investment. The foundation world should be hunting to find and build the next Mozilla.

Mozilla Key Takeaways

Online, a small amount of resources can serve millions of people.
Web-based organizations can become self-sustaining in a way that has never been possible offline. When creating a website or building software, costs do not rise linearly with the number of people served.
Successful social tech projects can quickly transition from being grant recipients to granting organizations.
Non-profits have competitive advantages in the marketplace: high levels of trust and credibility and volunteer communities can multiply the reach of the paid staff. Open-source software can create a better product than the proprietary competition.

Wikipedia / Wikimedia Case Study

Wikimedia History

The Wikipedia website began as a small spin-off of an online encyclopedia project. It’s open contribution model helped it grow so quickly that an organization was eventually formed to support the project, the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation has been funded by individual donations of users as well as small foundation grants.

With a tiny staff of about 10 people (now growing to 20), Wikimedia built one of the world’s most popular websites, more visited than Facebook, eBay and Microsoft.com, to name just a few examples. Wikipedia has– by a huge margin– the smallest paid staff of any top 10 global website.

The organization has also managed one of the most remarkable volunteer efforts the world has even seen. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have come together on the Wikipedia site to build the largest encyclopedia in human history with quality standards that, in tests, match or surpass Encyclopedia Britannica. Furthermore, Wikimedia has accomplished this feat in dozens of languages.

Wikimedia Mission

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to bring people together to create and freely share information. Their volunteer community is meritocratic and very open. The Wikipedia website is, of course, free to anyone, and has become an essential source of knowledge for people around the world. The project is not something that for-profit companies have been able to duplicate, despite many expensive efforts.

Wikimedia’s Success

The success of Wikipedia is simply stunning. It is an incredibly deep, broad, and well curated source of free public information. The community of volunteers that creates the site is active, vibrant, and devoted to their cause.

With very little initial investment and an extremely small staff to this day, Wikipedia has blossomed into one of the most remarkable institutions for free public knowledge that the world has ever seen.

The Wikimedia Foundation takes a different approach to sustainability than Mozilla, but has a similarly compelling long-term model. Wikimedia has very publicly stated that they will only accept paid advertising on their site as a last resort, even though it could easily fund their organization. For them, the mission must come first: unbiased, non-commercial information free to the world. But with such an incredible ratio of costs to services provided, Wikipedia can live forever as an institution support by individual and foundation donors.

It may be tempting to see Wikipedia as just another website. But by any broad measure, Wikipedia is playing a historic role in the development of humanity (both by organizing such tremendous quantities of human knowledge, and by demonstrating the potential of collaboration and collective understanding that the digital age contains). It offers one of the highest social returns on investment available in the philanthropy world today, but did not emerge from traditional foundation funding sources.

Wikimedia Key Takeaways

Non-profit projects online can build vibrant collaborative communities of volunteers and evangelists that would have been extremely difficult and very expensive to organize offline.
Tiny amounts of money can let smart projects reach enormous audiences.
Avoiding some types of revenue can help protect the credibility and therefore success of certain non-profit tech projects. Revenue requirements relative to people served may be so small that perpetual grant support is the best long-term strategy.

Lessons for Philanthropy

The Social Good Opportunity

Public-interest organizations can create innovative and central pieces of the global communications infrastructure. When they do so, they are able to build freedom and openness into the entire system.

There are opportunities to permanently protect communication rights and resources by creating sustainable organizations that will survive for the long-term.

Social returns on investment (impact per philanthropic dollar) can vastly exceed almost any traditional grant funding projects, by even traditional metrics.

The internet is quickly becoming the most powerful communication medium the world has ever seen. For the public interest to be protected and represented, we must build sustainable internet-oriented organizations.

What needs to happen in the foundation world to seize these opportunities?

Foundations need venture-style funding teams that have capacity to quickly evaluate non-profit tech proposals. These teams should be staffed with individuals with backgrounds in successful tech projects.
General staffing criteria at foundations must recognize the importance of new media. Professional development around tech and media should also be offered.
Funding of social tech projects must have an outcome-based perspective and an appreciation of scale. Is a proposed project capable of reaching a mass-scale? Can the project realistically become self-funding? How many people are being reached per dollar invested?
Seeking out scalable, high-impact projects will naturally mean addressing needs that for-profit companies are actively trying to address. If the project adds compelling value to the public interest (e.g. Mozilla Firefox vs. Microsoft Internet Explorer), this competition should be seen as indicative of high potential impact, not as a duplication of effort.

Appendix A: Mozilla and Firefox Supporting Materials

the open web is a social movement
by David Eaves

Excerpt:
“This social movement is different in that, so far, it has been able to derive its power from a narrow set of people – mostly coders – who by volunteering their labour, have given the movement neither political power, nor economic power, but hard consumer power. This power has enabled projects like Mozilla to out-create, out-innovate, and out-perform the largest, best financed, and most successful software and IT companies in the world. As such, it does not need to rely on persuading government to create structural changes the way past social movements have. It has simply been able to force change though its market position.”

The Mozilla Manifesto

Excerpt:
“The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet. We have worked together since 1998 to ensure that the Internet is developed in a way that benefits everyone.”

Appendix B: Wikimedia and Wikipedia Supporting Materials

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus
by Clay Shirky

Excerpt:
“If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”

Wikimedia Statement of Purpose

Excerpt:
“The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”

About the Participatory Culture Foundation

The Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) is a 501c3 non-profit organization that builds the open internet television distribution tool Miro (getmiro.com).

Miro is used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to connect to creators of internet video. The mission of PCF is to build a television system that is more open than ever before. We strive to eliminate gatekeepers, corporate control, and centralization as we work towards a new vision of open media where everyone can create, curate and participate.

This paper is released into the public domain.

Team Miro: This American Summer live on IRC TODAY, July 1

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 06:01:51 +0000

This is the second in a new series of blog posts featuring interesting and independent creators making an impact with online video. Accompanying each post will be a live chat interview. This one will be held Tuesday, July 1 at 4:30pm EST (20:30 UTC — see below for more details).

Alex, David and Danbee are three MIT students with an awesome new web show called This American Summer. They’re driving a van all over the country and recording their adventures for all of us to see. They really do a great job learning and showing what the rest of the country is like, and for those of us who live on the geographical (and sometimes ideological) edges of the country, their experiences are both enlightening and entertaining. The best part, though, is the stories of the towns and the people they encounter. You can subscribe to their program in Miro by clicking here.

The three personalities, like the show they produce, can be funny, thought-provoking, and endearing. We’re glad to have their support (shout-out to the Miro subscribe button!), and we’re proud to announce that we’ll be discussing their program with them live on IRC this upcoming Tuesday. Once again, that’s:

This American Summer live on IRC

Tuesday, July 1 at 4:30 PM EST (20:30 UTC)

Chat here or at #miro-event on irc.freenode.org

Miro News Blog: NYC Video Flash Mob Tonight @ 7 (Monday)

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:06:08 +0000

What: Video Flash Mob
When: Tonight @ 7 PM EDT (Monday)
Where:New York, Outside Grand Central (E 42nd St), across the street and under the pedestrian bridge
Bring: Video Camera or Digi Cam
More Deets: here

The folks behind This American Summer are organizing an NYC Video Flash Mob tonight. New York has had some serious issues regarding the right to shoot photos and video in public places. Luckily, the draconian rules eventually revised. So this event is basically a reassertion of our right to make public recordings.

I’ll be there with a few Miro shirts (to give away) and a video camera — feel free to join me.

Miro News Blog: Miro vs. MoveOn.org dancehall sing-off. Dutty eh!

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:54:14 +0000

We were at a conference in New York and I found out that Adam Green from MoveOn.org likes to sing Shaggy. I just overheard his girlfriend and a friend talking about it and started laughing to myself becuase *I* really like to sing Sean Paul.

So, obviously, I challenged him to a singing duel. Miro Sean Paul vs. MoveOn Shaggy. Venue of his choice.

He wanted to see some video of what I was about before accepting, so we sent him a litttle somethin (.mp4). Here’s what he’s working with.

May the best .org win! You all have my back, right?

Miro News Blog: PBS puts Miro Links in their Podcast Directory

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:37:27 +0000

PBS recently added 1-click Miro subscribe links to their video podcasts. We’re really enthusiastic about this development, as one of our goals is to encourage traditional broadcasters to offer open alternatives to their online viewers.

PBS sets the tone for public broadcasters around the world, and so we hope this is just a sign of things to come. Cheers to PBS, and thanks to Jesse Patel (our Business Development Director) for helping make this happen!

Note: If you have a video RSS feed and would like to offer your viewers Miro 1-click subscribe buttons, you can use our 1-click subscribe button creation tool.

Note II: If you have connections to a traditional broadcaster and are interested in seeing them move in a more open direction, please get in touch: dean at pculture d org

Will's blog: trunk about to be _very_ broken

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:47:20 +0000

Just as a word of warning, if all goes well, Ben will be merging into trunk what he and others have been working on over the last few months in the next day or so. When that happens, trunk will become very broken and will remain that way for possibly a week as folks work on stabilizing the new user interface code and reimplementing a bunch of features… silly things like being able to play videos.

If you’re tracking trunk or using nightlies, you should seriously consider waiting a week to update.

You might ask, “Gah! What a bunch of idiots! Why are they doing this?!” The answer is that the widget overhaul is very badly needed and it’ll fix one of several big performance issues that Miro currently has. It’s a big change and it’ll cause a big mess for a short while, but it’s going to make a big big big difference.

In order to do this quickly, we’ll be focusing pretty hard on getting trunk working again for a while. My apologies if any of us seem like we’re dropping off the face of the earth or ignoring questions, concerns, …

Team Miro: Food for Thought –or– Recapping our Ryan is Hungry Event

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:29:06 +0000

Well, the Team Miro wiki is being extra finicky right now so I can’t paste the transcripts of the event just yet, but now would be a good time to go over how things went on Tuesday for those that couldn’t make it…

Technical difficulties aside (freenode blocked our embedded IRC on the website at the worst possible moment) I thought this was a really interesting chat with Jay and Ryanne. Spirits were high, and the adrenaline rush that followed a few panicked emails between Ryanne and myself had somewhat subsided by the time everyone started chatting at about 5pm. We talked about why they started Ryan is Hungry, favorite episodes, how they decide what to tape, and neither confirmed nor denied the existence of super-secret projects in the future ; )

More episodes are in the works, and I know I’ll be keeping an eye on their Miro channel as time goes by. Jay also mentioned they’ll be doing some workshops in Washington D.C. sometime this summer, so I’d definitely check out their blog for updates if you’re in the area.

Kyle, Parker and myself (also interns) will be coordinating future events in the Video Creator series we’ve got cooked up for this summer, which will of course be mentioned on this blog and the Team Miro mailing list as well.

And just in case you’re wondering, no I haven’t forgot about the Get Satisfaction page I so highly lauded weeks ago – I’m still working on the fine details as far as stylizing our embedded wigets for the website. This is in part due to some borked local configs I had going on in my system and finding out I’m definitely a CSS white-belt when it comes to working with a preexisting web-site. No worries though. With time, and the help of great Miro content I’m sure my Kung-Fu will reign supreme.

Edit: Transcript Link

Miro News Blog: Miro Can Now Run off your USB

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:28:08 +0000

Today we’re happy to announce that we’ve launched the first portable version of Miro. Our U3 version of Miro can run off any U3 compatible Sandisk USB drive. This is a great new option for Miro users who want to bring their videos, and Miro, with them to play anywhere.

If you have a Sandisk USB, you can download this version of Miro here.

In the future, we hope to make Miro even more broadly portable, to support numerous platforms and to develop some killer features to take full advantage of the portability this offers.

Will's blog: at FUDCON 10 — come meet me!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 17:39:57 +0000

I’m at FUDCON10 right now (Thursday, 6/19/2008). I’m interested in meeting people here and talking about Miro and Fedora TV. If you’re here, come find me. I’m currently hanging out in the main FUDCON room in the corner all by myself.

Miro News Blog: Podcast Detection: My Favorite Firefox 3 Feature

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:30:13 +0000

You may have noticed by now that I’m a big fan of Firefox 3. And congratulations to the Mozilla community for passing 8 million downloads in their first 24 hours! Amazing.

I’ve been holding off on talking about my favorite new Firefox feature because I wanted to wait until you all had Firefox 3. The new feature lets Firefox detect enclosures in RSS feeds and send them to your favorite audio or video podcasting client. This lets you click on an RSS feed and have it get sent to Miro if it’s video, iTunes if it’s audio, and a desktop news reader if it’s text.

The new feed preview pane sums it up. (Click to enlarge.)

This is my favorite feature, of course, because it makes for a much smoother connection from web browsing to subscribing in Miro. And maybe the best part is that it was developed for Firefox 3 by the Miro team! It’s a perfect example of how open-source organizations can work together to give everyone a better experience. Here’s developer Will Guaraldi’s writeup of the new feature.

Miro News Blog: New flash drive version of Miro

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:40:28 +0000

We’ve recently created a version of Miro that can run directly from a U3 USB drive. Get it here:

Miro U3 Download Page

This version is very handy for folks who keep everything on a USB drive and move from computer to computer. Miro will store all the video you download, your channel subscriptions, and your settings on the drive; just pop it in and run the app. It’s also a good way to get your videos from a desktop computer to a tv-connected computer, without copying files over.

Will's blog: review flag; contributing patches

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:25:51 +0000

We’ve had a few people contributing patches for the Miro codebase. I decided it was time to add a review flag like Mozilla has in their Bugzilla instance. This makes it easier for us to keep track of attachments that are waiting on reviews.

As such, I added a “review” flag to our Bugzilla instance for attachments.

I thought I’d talk a little bit about contributing patches.

Guess what? You’re a happy Miro user except for one little thing that really annoys you. You head on up to the Miro Bugzilla bug-tracker to see if this is a bug/feature that someone else has reported already. Wow–turns out it has been reported. Not only that, but there’s been some analysis done and some speculation as to a good attack vector for fixing the problem.

So you roll up your sleeves, add a comment on the bug stating you’re going to work on it, set yourself as “assigned”, dust off your favorite editor, skim through the Miro development wiki for the svn repository information and build instructions, and get to work.

A few hours later you’ve got it working on your machine. You run:

svn diff > bugid.patch

to generate a .patch file containing the changes you’ve made.

You visit the bug in the Miro Bugzilla bug-tracker, find the bug you were working on, and click on “add attachment”. You’ll see the following screen:

Deftly, you upload the patch, click on the “patch” checkbox, select “?” from the Review flag dropdown and type in will.guaraldi@pculture.org in the Requestee box.

Then you press the “submit” button!

Will (that’s me) gets an email stating that there’s an attachment waiting for review. I add it to my queue of things to look into. If it’s not something I know anything about, I’ll find someone else who can look at it. Then someone will add a comment to the bug reviewing the patch and … the rest is iterations on that.

If you’re interested in helping out, we’ve been tagging bugs that we think are good for people new to the codebase as “bitesized”. You can see a list of them here.

bdk: Git == awesome

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:32:30 +0000

This week I started off by trying to get the item list to render. Several times along the way I decided that the rendering an item was way too complex for the tools that we had, so I developed some new classes to try to simplify things.

A lot of them had to do with laying out things and in particular laying out things without something to draw to. I made a class to handle text layout that’s sort of a trimmed down version of pango or NSLayoutManager. Also, a Font class that gives a few metrics. A Button class to size native (or non-native on windows) buttons. And finally a Layout class, which gives a higher level interface to all of the above.

The buttons are working out pretty cool. On OS X we use a NSButtonCell, so it’s as native as you can get. On GTK we get the user’s current style then use it to render buttons — I’m pretty sure this is what Firefox 3 is doing. You could argue that this is not quite “native”, but I can’t tell the difference. On windows we just render our own, which you could say is native for that platform

I got buttons working around Thursday. On Friday I had to take a trip to DC. It seems like a lot of folks were talking about git-svn, so I decided to give it a try. Fetching the source from subversion was a pretty awful experience, but after that things were pretty awesome. I was committing changesets while driving down route 15, then checking them in to our server when I got an internet connection.

The last tool I developed was a box-packing system for rendering cells. For a while I was trying to calculate things by hand, but the layout there is really too complicated for that. Now we use some basic hboxes/vboxes and alignments and it works pretty well. I’m feeling like the system that is in place now is basically what we need and it’s only going to need tweaking rather than creating new stuff.

The last thing I did was add download progress bars. They are still a work in progress, but when I first saw the info updating every 0.5 seconds it made me want to jump for joy.

Miro News Blog: Best Browser Alive

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:01:12 +0000

Firefox 3 has launched! In addition to being the fastest browser on the planet, it’s simply a joy to use. For example, the new auto-complete system for URLs, aka ‘the awesome bar’, is almost as revolutionary as tabbed browsing. It already drives me crazy to use other browsers that don’t have it.

Today is also Download Day: Firefox will set a world record for the most downloads of software in a 24 hour period. You’d be crazy not to download Firefox now.

And does anyone honestly believe it’s a coincidence that Firefox 3 is launching exactly one week after release of Tha Carter III?

The best rapper alive and the best browser alive both use incredible skill and intelligence, but what truly carries them to greatness is passion that comes from putting their heart at the center of everything they do. It’s absolutely true.

Here’s the Microsoft dis track from Carter III: Lil’ Wayne - Playin’ With Fire.

“So you got so many diamonds,
you wear all the finest clothes,
and your grill is shining,
as you’re driving down the street of gold,
but you can’t blame me if I set this stage on fire.”

Miro News Blog: Spotlight on Video Creators: Ryan Is Hungry

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:31:55 +0000

This is the first in a new series of blog posts featuring interesting and independent creators making an impact with online video. Accompanying each posts will be a live chat interview, the first of which will be held tomorrow at 4:30pm EST (20:30 UTC — see below for more details). I’d also like to take this time to introduce myself: my name is Chris Markman, one of the Miro Summer Interns. I’ll be one of the folks regularly coordinating these events.

Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson of Ryan is Hungry are a couple of “green geeks” eager to inspire. Both creators are ex-tv producers/editors and co-founders of NODE101 – making for a transitional story strikingly similar to that of Miro, the free and open-source internet tv and video player. Featuring these two in this first installment seemed like a no-brainer, and I’d channel anyone to view their Miro Channel and tell me otherwise!

The basic premise behind the show may be familiar, but if you’re like me you can’t get enough of the great online info about sustainability. More importantly, this one is different. It lives in a space where Cinéma Vérité meets Documentary and the two collide into an amazing, thought provoking self-produced program that stays true to its claim; they say do-it-yourself and follow through. Episodes include a wide range of topics and pace, from Urban Farming to Solar Decathlons, and are packed with useful information, practical tips and world changing ideas.

Similarly, their website itself points toward this same ethic. Both in their utilization of the Show in a Box WordPress Plugins developed by the community they also co-founded and in the inclusion the media using the open source video codec Ogg Theora. These leafy greens are ready for harvest, so dig in!

Meet Jay and Ryanne tomorrow!

This Tuesday, June 17th Team Miro will be hosting a live IRC chat with Jay and Ryanne @ 4:30PM EDT / 20:30 UCT. Field and vote for your favorite questions before event with the Live Question Tool and grab a transcript after the event on our Wiki. Watch and participate from our website or navigate your IRC client to #miro on irc.freenode.org.

Update: A transcript of this event is now available via the Team Miro Wiki. I also wrote a brief summary in my most recent blog post here.

Team Miro: An Epiphany of Sorts

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:30:38 +0000

As I eluded to in my last blog post, we’re trying to work a regular series of posts into the Miro blog profiling those who either create or publish video content.

A week and almost a dozen emails later, I’ve got bumpkus.

I’ve received a few (two) responses to my initial inquiries and none to my follow-ups.

At first I thought maybe people weren’t interested, but then I thought some more about it and it occurred to me that if I had a video related site, I’d be stoked about the prospect of having my site both featured in the guide and profiled in a pretty well read blog…for free.

That’s when it dawned on me, maybe I just suck.

Team Miro: Videos from the public domain

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:37:44 +0000

Hello, I’m Parker, working on the Open Video Project for the summer.

There are a handful of obstacles that stand in the way of a truly open video environment, and we’re working on addressing all of them. One category of these obstacles is technological, and Miro already does a great job overcoming those problems; Miro can play almost every kind of video, and sticks to the open standards in terms of RSS feeds and the like. Another set of problems that open video faces is legal. As any observer of the music industry for the past few years can tell you, copyright laws were not written with digital technologies in mind, and people are still ironing out those issues.

Some video creators are not waiting for copyright law to catch up to the state of technology, and are releasing their videos under liberal licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses. Many prominent video creators have chosen this path, including those behind Boing Boing TV, TED Talks, and geekbrief.tv. Some of the most popular content on the Miro Guide, though, is not subject to copyright at all, because it is in the public domain.

The public domain content on Miro is either so old that it has fallen out of copyright, like the Archive Classic Movies channel or the Classic Cartoons channel, or it is produced by an organization that claims no copyright on their work, like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab channel. Various laws, especially those that have extended the length of copyright terms, have weakened the public domain, but it’s still a valuable source of cultural work. And not only are Miro’s public domain channels chock-full of interesting and classic materials, but because they are completely free of copyright restrictions, everything can be remixed, reconfigured, and reworked to your heart’s content!

Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog: git-svn on the Miro repository

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:08:46 +0000

Some of us have been talking about Git on IRC the past week. I spent today (well mostly my laptop spent the day) importing the Miro SVN respository into a Git repository with git-svn. Just importing all the history took about 4 hours, although I think a lot of that was spent just doing the downloading. The initial checkout was 1.7GB,
with 1.3GB of that taken up by Git bookkeeping. After a repacking,
that number dropped to 865M, with 457MB being bookkeeping. Not too
shabby, considering having a branch, a tag, and trunk all checked out with SVN take up 2.4GB and don’t have all the history immediately available.

I haven’t really used it for development yet, just copied my outstanding changes from my old checkout. We’ll see how that goes
next week.

Team Miro: Recapping Tuesday’s Event(s)

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 22:00:40 +0000

While our discussion on the 10th had a smaller turnout than the previous week, we still managed to cover a lot of ground in terms of content control and filtering within the MiroGuide. Participants explored the possibilities of adopting various systems found in other online media outlets and their feasibility.

Though opinions were varied, I think one thing we all agreed upon was the necessity of user input or feedback within the system, whether it be “flagging” or sorting. This is undoubtedly a continuing debate, but for those interested the chat is an excellent look into the history of Miro’s relationship with the subject.

This coming Tuesday (June 17th) we have a live chat interview planned with the duo from Ryan is Hungry, so take a gander at their channel, watch some really cool videos, post a question and vote for your favorite with the Live Question Tool, and mark your calendars! This is the first interview in a series I’m heading that will focus on Content Creators, so look forward to a more detailed profile very, very soon! That’s 4:30PM EDT / 20:30 UCT!

Miro Testing Blog: Guinness World Records

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:25:21 +0000

It feels like every aspect of my digital life has recently become cleaner, clearer, fresher, better.

I just updated to Firefox 3 RC3 today. I am so psyched to be part of their world record setting download day. I’ve also been running Ubuntu Hardy for a few weeks now, and of course I have been testing our nightly builds of Miro.

Each project just gets better with each release.

Sometimes it hard to tell how far you’ve come, when each change comes in small increments as opposed to big jumps. So the other day - I downloaded Democracy 0.8.5.3 and installed it. That was the latest version when I first joined up with PCF almost two years ago.

Democracy Player 0.8.5.3

Passing through a plethora of database, ui, torrent client and preference changes, the update to the latest nightly was flawless. Here is a sneak peak of what we have been working on.

2008/06/13-nightly build: Have I ever mentioned my huge love for the dev team at PCF?

So this is where we are right now. Want to know what’s in there? There is a draft copy of the release notes for 1.5 that outlines the changes and bug fixes in the current branch.

We’d love to know how it works for you - so backup up your database, and help us fine tune the next level of internet video.

bdk: Themes and fonts

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:35:35 +0000

The first part of the week I spent working on the finishing touches with the tab list. I did some more backend changes on OS X, then workeded on adding the playlist list and the static tabs list. That went pretty smoothly.

After that I started working on the right hand side. I started working on code to handle switching displays in and out there, but there’s still more work to be done there. Mostly I started working on rendering items in the display. I got pretty far in that before I realized how badly we would interfact with some linux themes.

At that point I sent out an email to the list and tried to come up with some ideas on how we can work things. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to try this system:

1) Whenever the style gets set on our Window object, we check to see if we think our style is compatible with the user’s theme. Right now it’s fairly braindead. It just checks if the background is white or a really light shade of gray. If the check fails, then we don’t modify the style for widgets, and we don’t mess with the background for a widget in the custom drawing code. We do still draw things like the bubbles next to the feed tabs though.

2) When we draw things we pass in the current background color and text color to the drawing code. This lets us use the right color for the theme’s background. It especially helps when the user has a tab on the left-hand side selected.

It’s not the most elegant way of dealing with themes, but it works fine with all but one of my themes on Ubuntu.

The last thing I worked on was text handling. The initial motivation was to deal with the user changing their system font size. Then I realized that we would have to deal with resizing things based on the current font settings. Finally I realized that our text system could be really improved by adding some simple layout management similar to NSLayoutManager or PangoLayout. I just finished that today.

Next week I’m going to keep working on the item list. I think that I’ve finally dealt with all the side issues and can just work on getting everything to look good. I’m also going to be helping Andrew figure out the new system so that he can tweak things here and there.

I keep feeling psyched about the widgets branch. Take a look at this screenshot showing of it resizing the interface based on the user’s large font size. Still need to work on the video controls, but oh well…

Team Miro: Checking Out the Competition

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:46:59 +0000

In the name of research, I have been watching videos on Hulu this past week. While in Europe, I tried using it once through Hotspot Shield, just like TechCrunch taught me. But the videos had awkward pauses and it was hardly enjoyable.

So now that I’ve been in the US, the promised land of Internet TV, the situation has really improved! I have a great selection of entertainment at my fingertips, simply for having the ‘right’ IP address. Although things may be working well for me know, I know that when I go back in a few months, I will get demoted again. Thanks a lot Hulu!

The cool thing about Miro is that it doesn’t discriminate against certain viewers. That’s why I will continue using it when I return to my home country, along with the old school TV channels that are available online, such as CNN.

I appreciate content providers who make their videos easily accessible through legal and free channels such as Miro. Even Flavor of Love has earned my respect - who knew!

Team Miro: Reminder: Tuesday Team Miro Chat @ 4:30PM EDT (20:30 UTC) - Topic: Explicit Content and Censorship

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 18:20:07 +0000

What: Miro Chat. Post a question now!
When: June 3rd @ 4:30 PM EDT (20:30 UTC)
Where: Our Website or #miro on irc.freenode.net
For More info and Transcripts of the Event: Wiki

In our continuing series of focused weekly chat meetings, today the debate will center on the handling of explicit or “adult” content in Miro, specifically the MiroGuide system.

This is a opportunity to have your voice heard on the matter and help our developers make decisions based on the feedback provided. That being said, we cannot guarantee the viability of any one idea over another until individuals begin coding and resources are limited.

Transparency and openness are one of our core assets as a community and really what sets Miro apart from a majority of online video distribution software platforms. Please take a moment today to join us, post in our Live Question Tool, or leave a comment on our blog.

As always, transcripts of the event will be made available on our Wiki to those who cannot attend.

Team Miro: Open Video!

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:50:54 +0000

Hey! I’m Aditi, another one of the PCF summer interns. To expand a bit on the quick blurb found on the about page, I’m a Politics major at NYU, and, like Chris said before, I’m also a huge fan of this Internet thing. Not this Internet, though…

Right now, I’m primarily working on setting up the open video website. We want to push for open video standards, rather than restricting viewers to “walled gardens,” without much participation, such as Joost and YouTube (though I hear participation’s starting to change at YouTube!) In addition, at some point in the future, we’re aiming to have a conference dedicated to open video. Keep your ears peeled for updates!

Team Miro: Recapping Tuesday’s dev chat

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 19:27:54 +0000

As a summer intern at the PCF, I was responsible for organizing last week’s chat event. I’m proud to say that it was a great success. About twenty people attended, some of whom were active and asking great questions. In my first blog post of many, I’ll detail the process behind organizing Tuesday’s event, and how it could have been done better.

Planning started approximately a week prior to the event. I drafted the mass email and blog post advertising the session on a legal pad during the week, but didn’t have them ready for users’ eyes until the weekend. I would have liked to get the date/time out there a little earlier… I will make sure to keep this in mind for the next event. Giving only one day’s notice is probably responsible for the absence of many users who would have otherwise attended.

We chose the Live Question Tool for question entries. It was a perfect match for this type of event; it almost seemed as if it was designed for it! The tool accepts prior submission of questions and, as the name implies, live submission while the event is in progress. I couldn’t have asked for a better means of taking questions.

Last week’s featured guest ,Will Guaraldi did a great job responding to the several questions that were posed to him (transcript available on our Wiki ).

As far as IRC discussions go, the session was structured and under control. Operator privileges were unnecessary, as everyone was self-moderated and respectful. Hopefully we get a larger audience next time around (the discussions are weekly, held Tuesday’s at 4:30 EST), and I thank everyone who attended on Tuesday!

Team Miro: A Glimpse Into The Future

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 06:39:50 +0000

There’s been a lot of forward momentum building behind Miro lately and if our recent Webware win is any indicator of things to come, we’re in for a really great year.

While Miro has some great technical and aesthetic changes coming with the next iteration, we’re trying not to limit this inertia strictly to the client and are making some pretty sweeping changes elsewhere.

What this means for Miro fans is not only a friendlier, more interactive experience across our offerings, but a more responsive and transparent PCF. These changes come primarily in two areas:

Design: A number of our sites will be getting make overs so you definitely want to check back often to see the changes.
Communication: Chris has already talked a little about what we’re doing with Get Satisfaction and Kyle has hinted a little to how we’ll be blowing up IRC, you can also expect more frequent updates to our mailing lists, blogs, and Facebook group.

Lastly, we’re planning on starting a series of posts on the main blog profiling video creators and publishers in conjunction with the channel features we’re already doing using the Miro Guide.

I’ll be posting more about it this week but if you know anyone that would be interested in the free publicity (or are interested yourself), feel free to email me directly at rick.kenney[at]pculture.org.

Team Miro: (Helping You Get More) Satisfaction

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:04:21 +0000

Hello world! This is PCF Summer Intern Chris reporting in for duty As Vilja mentioned in her last post, I’ll be posting here on a regular basis with details on all the fantastic developments we the Interns are cooking up.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with our section in the about page on the website, but I thought now would be a good time to tell you a little more about myself. I’m somewhat unique in our group in that my background is primarily in Screen Studies with a heavy dose of filmmaking on the side. Beyond that, I’m also a huge fan of this Internet thing and one of those kooky Web 2.0 Librarians in training (obligatory shout-out to Simmons GSLIS).

As hinted in a number of forum posts toward the end of our most recent Chat Event, we’re about ready to switch to GetSatisfaction, a new breed of problem-solving community oriented Webware, to replace our previous forums software.

If you’re a user of Twitter, you might already be familiar with the system, but for everyone else here’s a great page that explains how it works. And if you’re really interested, why not check out this New York Times article on the company as well.

Don’t worry about your pending question or comment stuck in the old forum software! It will still be available to our team of moderators as we make the transition. Overall, we hope this switch will enable us to better answer your questions, comments and suggestions – and we hope you’ll agree. Mick Jagger would be proud.

Will's blog: June 3rd chat — follow-up and some more answers

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:23:40 +0000

I was the Q&A person for the June 3rd chat yesterday and I thought I’d post some follow-up and answer some of the questions we didn’t get to.

Follow-up

First off, I thought the chat went well and it was neat to talk to a bunch of people I’d probably never talked to before. It seems that the predominant theme was “when are features landing?” and “what’s coming up?” It’s a little hard to answer those questions because I’ve been pretty focused on the next release that I haven’t been involved in planning beyond that.

Now to answer some questions that we didn’t have time for.

How long have you worked for PCF? What did you do before Miro?

I’ve been working at PCF since August 2007. This is in many ways my dream job with my only issue being that I wished I either earned a bit more money or had a lower cost of living. Other than that, I’m doing what I love doing, I get to hang out with some really great people, and the stuff we’re working on is really important to me.

I’m going to assume “What did you do before Miro?” means “What did you do before working at PCF?” Prior to PCF, I spent 2 years getting a Masters at Northeastern University CCIS in programming language design/theory and software engineering. Prior to that, I worked in the financial services industry at ByAllAccounts, I worked as a contractor for Tallan at Ingram Micro on their international web-site system, and various other software developer positions before that. I’ve been programming for probably 20 years now in various forms, but this is my first FOSS job and the first job where I’ve worked with XULRunner and GNU/Linux-stack components like Gtk+, GStreamer, Xine, Glade, DBus, Glib, GObject, … It’s been great!

shoestring: Video metadata: any plans to see miro actually writing it to the files/being able to edit it?

We’ve talked about making ui changes to allow for changing “metadata” of content, specifically name, filename, tags, … It hasn’t happened yet, though. I think it’s one of many things waiting for the great widget overhaul.

Miro can export feed information to OPML format, but this doesn’t include metadata about content. I don’t know offhand if there are plans to add that or not. There are plans on building an API to allow programs like MythTV and Elisa and other systems like that access to Miro data. That hasn’t happened yet, either. In this case, I think it just needs someone to work on it.

Evan: Is it possible to install miro without bittorrent? I know this question is weird, but in some (many?) companies bittorrent is banned … yet the company is ok with limited internet video usage.

We don’t have builds that don’t have bittorrent in them. It would take some work to decouple Miro from libtorrent and/or disable it and then it sounds like we’d have to provide a separate set of libtorrent-less builds. I don’t think that’s a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s going to happen without a champion who can do the work.

will: (seed question) What do you do when you’re not working on Miro-related things?

A little silly answering my own seed questions, but … so it goes.

Lately all I’ve been doing is Miro-related things. We’re pushing really hard on the next release. We’re really excited about it and we think it’s another big milestone in Miro’s life.

This year, I’m a backup admin for GSoC for the PSF thought I haven’t actually had to do much (yet).

I’ve been trying to finish up work on version 2.0 of PyBlosxom for the last 6 months but haven’t found time and energy to get there. I’ve been able to make some progress, but it seems to be on a permanent back-seat.

I’d really like to help Mozilla on their embedding efforts. I’d also really like to get more involved in gstreamer, Python 3000 and a bunch of other projects.

Epilogue

I think that’s about it. Given that the chat went pretty well all things considered, there will probably be another one in the future and probably more after that.

bdk: Data structures are important (or maybe I’ve just wasted my week)

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 02:34:51 +0000

This week I spent the entire time working on the tablist and more generally the table API. I got drag and drop working after a day or two, then I spent almost all of the rest of the week changing the way we access the data that goes in our TableModel classes.

In some ways that means that I didn’t get much done, but I just kept thinking how important it is that we get a things working really fast. We want to support things like rendering a feed with 1000 or maybe even 10,000 items in it, so there’s a lot of motivation to make sure that we have fast data structures in place.

The main problem is how access each individual row. I started using the equivelent of GTK’s RowReference class. This is like an index that gets updated whenever a row gets added or removed. It’s probably the simplest in terms of what the programmer has to think about, but it’s quite inefficient since we need to update them whenever things are inserted or removed. The next try was using Tree Paths, which is basically just an index that doesn’t get updated. This was probably an improvement, but then I realized that GTK implements it’s model classes with linked lists and whenever we used one of the tree paths we were iterating through the list. So if we wanted to access each row in the list it was O(n^2) time, which is shameful. Finally I settled on an using Tree iterators, which is basically a pointer to a node in a linked list. This is the fastest way to access things and I realized that, like RowReferences, they don’t get invalidated when other rows are added/removed. So it seems like definitely the way to go.

I may spend one more day trying to work on the model classes on OS X. Unlike GTK we have to roll our own there and the current design could use a couple improvements.

The other thing I did this week was work on those startup tweaks that we talked about. I made it so that we don’t re-download thumbnails on startup and implemented a queue for updating feeds. Both changes seem to be working ok so far.

This week I hope to get a lot of visible changes to the widgets branch. Now that the behind the scenes table code seems pretty complete it means I can work on the fun part of rendering things.

Team Miro: Greetings from the Summer Team!

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:31:18 +0000

This summer, I’m part of an energetic group of students working on PCF’s Summer Team’08. We’re a bunch of talented Miro enthusiasts, who are generating fresh ideas and creative solutions, which will lead us to a more famous and more fabulous Miro.

At PCF, transparency is a key value. Communication serves as a tool for keeping the public informed, but even more importantly, we would like to encourage dialogue in the Miro community.

That’s why members of the Summer Team will be blogging on a weekly basis about their on-going projects and experiences with Miro. I’ll be in charge of coordinating the effort, but also blogging my heart out.

Stay tuned!

Miro News Blog: Chat with Miro Developer - Today 4:30 EDT (20:30 UTC)

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:46:54 +0000

In less than an hour (4:30 EDT), we have a live Q&A session with Will Guaraldi, who is a full time Miro developer.

You can post and vote on questions here, starting any time.

Join the chat room or go to #miro on irc.freenode.net

Details and transcripts will be on the wiki.

Kyle Hunt, a PCF summer intern, has organized today’s chat session.

We’ll be doing this sort of thing more often (with all sorts of people and topics), so keep your eyes peeled.

Team Miro: Live chat with a Miro developer!

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:28:59 +0000

What: Miro Chat. Post a question now! (see below)
When: June 3rd @ 4:30 PM EST (20:30 UTC)
Where: http://www.getmiro.com/forum/?Page=chat or #miro on irc.freenode.net
Wiki page: http://www.getmiro.com/wiki/index.php/WeeklyMeeting

This Tuesday we will be hosting the first in a series of weekly chat meetings. Join us this week at our grand opening event, as a Software Developer for the Participatory Culture Foundation responds to your questions regarding the development of Miro. Future sessions may feature people not directly tied to PCF; we’ll cover a wide variety of different topics.

Join the chat at: http://www.getmiro.com/forum/?Page=chat OR #miro at irc.freenode.net if you’re on IRC.

We will be using the Live Question Tool to organize and select questions. Please post any questions you have for Will now at the MiroChatJune3 instance, available at the following link: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/questions/MiroChatJune3.

Miro News Blog: “Steal this Film” blazes trails in open distribution and raw footage sharing.

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:37:18 +0000

Not many shoestring-budget documentary films get seen by 4.86 million people.

It helps that “Steal this Film” covers the war between Hollywood and a prevailing mode of online video distribution, and that the film’s logo stood in for the pirate ship on the front page of the world’s favorite torrent site when it launched.

But given that geek-specific content often blazes trails for other genres (examples include digg.com, the blogosphere, or the internet itself– take your pick) it’s not unreasonable to see Steal this Film as a model for documentary distribution. The film’s success hints at a new funding model too. A donation solicitation that filmmakers consider rudimentary (or maybe they said “half-assed”, I don’t remember) managed to net a pretty significant amount of Euro.

(In every conversation I have with documentary makers, reaching tons of people online and having them pay you is the Holy Grail. So STF’s experiments are a big deal).

And now, with Steal This Footage, they’re pushing forward on another frontier that will be (and I’m sure about this) hugely important to documentary film: footage sharing and collaborative creation. You can download each unedited interview, browse by transcript, and download full-quality footage via Bittorrent that you can re-use in your film (everything is under an open license). Check out Elizabeth Eisenstein discussing the printing press as disruptive technology. Or subscribe in the Miro Guide.

They have more interviews they’d like to put up, and need help doing transcriptions. I should note that these folks are good Miro friends–one of the filmmakers was the first community member to submit a patch to Miro. So if you want to show some volunteer love, drop a line to peers@stealthisfilm.com.

bdk: Tablist is so close

Wed, 28 May 2008 14:04:22 +0000

Last week I worked on getting the tablist to work right. I would say I’m about 90% of the way through it. I have the channel tabs almost working, the only thing needed is drag and drop. Once I implement that, then I’ll work on getting playlist tabs and the static tabs, neither of those should be very hard since at that point all the platform-specific code will be in place.

One interesting thing is that the more I work with the widgets branch, the more I realize that once we switch over we can simplify the database a lot. For example, when I was working with drag and drop, I realized a lot of the book-keeping we do in the TabOrder views can just be thrown out. Also a lot of the data that’s setup in onRestore() isn’t needed anymore (like if a feed is blinking, or if it’s parent is expanded). I really like that since it can simplify moving to not having the database in memory.

Next week I’m going to finish up on the tab list, then I guess I’ll move to the items list.

Will's blog: Miro hackfest in Boston

Thu, 22 May 2008 16:21:33 +0000

I live in Somerville, MA, USA and I’d like to organize a Miro hackfest in or near Boston. Possible topics for that hackfest include:

cleaning up and improving the gtkx11 platform interface, gstreamer/xine use, …
working on bitesized bugs and working on unittests
hacking together an interface for Elisa or MythTV
testing out the fledgling Mozilla embedded API with the gtkx11 interface
sorting out packaging issues
other things?

I was thinking we’d do the hackfest sometime in June. Possibly as part of FUDCon10 or in the vicinity.

If you’re interested and/or have ideas, find me on IRC, email me, comment below, or send me telepathic messages of hope.

Miro News Blog: YouTomb Blows Up!

Wed, 21 May 2008 01:22:00 +0000

YouTomb is a project that I helped start, along with some friends at MIT Free Culture. It recently exploded on many of the major tech blogs (TechCrunch, Gizmodo, CNet, Wired.com, among others).

The project began after YouTube announced their automatic flagging system, for sniffing out potentially infringing content.

An automated scanning system cannot possibly differentiate between fair use and copyright violation with 100% accuracy (humans can’t either, but that’s a different story). As a result, it’s unavoidable that some totally legitimate, possibly interesting, videos are disappearing from the web entirely. YouTomb’s purpose is to shed light on some of the material that is taken down.

Currently, YouTomb has a compact range of features, but we’ll be steadily adding new ones to make it a more effective tool for highlighting copywrongs.

Miro News Blog: The Product Launch of the Year

Mon, 19 May 2008 19:42:34 +0000

The most important product launch of the year is just a few weeks away. It’s a web browser called Firefox– ever heard of it?

The first release candidate for Firefox 3 came out this weekend. The final version is expected to ship next month and it’s a remarkable leap forward. Web browsers are the interface that connects us to the most profound technology of our time, the internet. As browsers change, so does the world. I’ve been using the nightly builds of Firefox 3 for the past several months and it’s easily the best browsing experience I’ve ever had. In addition to being the world’s fastest browser, Firefox has a number of big brilliant improvements and dozens of refinements that make every function feel smoother and easier.

Even with smaller market share than Internet Explorer, Firefox is already the most influential web browser and has almost singlehandedly saved us from an internet experience controlled by Microsoft (sounds implausible? look at what’s happened in South Korea). Instead of that fate, even Internet Explorer is now competing to implement open standards. Firefox fights a huge uphill battle against a pre-installed browser on a near-monopoly operating system. Firefox’s current 20-something percent market share is already an amazing achievement and with Firefox 3 it’s going to get a whole lot bigger.

PCF as an organization and I as an individual have lots of relationships with Mozilla: we’ve contributed code, they’ve donated to us, I’ve done paid and unpaid consulting, they’ve given staff time, promotional support, and lots of love. If either of us were typical companies, that would be a disclaimer, but instead it’s a proud partnership between two non-profit projects that are working alongside each other to make global communication more free and open than ever. We couldn’t be more proud to work with the Firefox team and it’s an extra special thrill to have built a feature that’s part of Firefox 3 (more on that soon).

The vast majority of people in the press, in business, in government, and even in public interest groups don’t have any idea how powerful open source software can be; it just doesn’t fit into their current frameworks of how the world operates. When Firefox 3 takes off like a rocket, a lot of folks will realize that new models of organization and economics are now possible that were never possible before.

Will's blog: gstreamer gconfvideosink sink, unittests, new ui stuff

Sat, 17 May 2008 18:27:11 +0000

(r6949, bug 9908) gstreamer renderer uses gconfvideosink now–much better video output
(lots of revisions) new user interface
(lots of revisions) Windows ui looks and acts like Mac OSX ui
(bunch of revisions) all unit tests pass

Am I missing anything? Let me know in the comments.

Will's blog: firefox 3 and enclosures (recap)

Sat, 17 May 2008 18:03:43 +0000

Back in December and January, I worked on some patches for Firefox 3 that enhanced the feed preview page. I wrote a post about it back then… but I’m updating that post with recent screenshots and a better description of the work. The previous post was mostly about how great FOSS is.

The patches fell into two big features. First, I added enclosure detection to the FeedProcessor and then modified FeedWriter to show enclosures alongside the entries. This has two huge benefits: it allows you to easily tell if the feed has enclosures and it allows you to see what they are, how big, what type of media, …

Second, I modified Firefox so that it allows you to associate video podcasts with an application, audio podcasts with another application, and all other kinds of feeds with a third application. The benefit here is that you can send media podcasts to an application that handles that well (*cough*Miro*cough*) and regular news feeds to a different application that handles that well.

Screenshot of Firefox 2 feed preview page:

Screenshot of Firefox 3 feed preview page:

Of the two features, I hear the most comments about the first one mostly along the lines of, “I’m so glad I don’t have to view source to see the enclosures anymore!” The second feature isn’t as immediately exciting. The implementation of distinguishing feeds is intentionally simple and there are a lot of corner cases where it doesn’t work very well. Also, there aren’t many applications that can really take advantage of it. I expect this second feature to flourish as Firefox development continues and video/audio podcasting evolves.

Miro News Blog: Vidoop and Polvi donate to Miro

Wed, 14 May 2008 18:58:26 +0000

Alex Polvi, friend of Miro and a community marketer for Mozilla, has won a Vidoop contest called How do you identify? with a very cute video (see below). Vidoop is a company that takes a cool approach to internet logins, with an OpenID service that gives you one universal login and an option for image grid based identification (take a look). Alex is donating his $1000 prize to Miro and Vidoop is matching that. Thanks so much guys!

Here’s Alex’s winning video (with a shout-out to Miro):

bdk: Customizing the Controls

Wed, 14 May 2008 11:38:55 +0000

This week I mostly spent adding support for custom buttons and sliders to the widget branches. It went along well enough, right now there’s playback buttons and a progress slider. I think the volume slider will be trivial to add, I might have it before the dev call. The system seems like it’s working pretty nice and it’s easy to customize.

Once I get the first pass done, I’m going to take a bit to make sure that they are accessible. This mostly means making sure they accept focus and respond to keyboard input. I think this will be very easy on GTK, but I don’t really know how it works on OS X, so that might take a bit of time.

After that I think I’ll work on dialog boxes for a bit, which shouldn’t take long, then move on to the left-hand tab bar.

Overall the widgets port seems to be moving steadily but surely every week. It’s really satisfying to click on the play button and see my debugging printout. Also, the new UI looks really nice, I can’t wait to release it to the world.

Miro News Blog: We have tons of free time and we’re looking for the mouse.

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:53:55 +0000

An excellent speech by Clay Shirky about participation with culture: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. He begins with the point that the amount of effort that goes into Wikipedia is tiny compared to the surplus of free time people have.

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”

“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”

…

“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”

bdk: Widgets widgets widgets

Wed, 07 May 2008 03:57:52 +0000

This week I kept chugging along at the widgets branch. The begining of the week I spent trying to get the windows port to build since I was basically replacing the entire build process. I also needed to rewrite my GTK/XULRunner focus fixing code in C++. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but when I added a second thread to the mix subclassing windows procedures gave me segfaults. I think it has to do with the python GIL, but I don’t really know why.

Right now I have code working on all platforms that displays a window with a web browser inside. Now I’m working on layout code, which mostly means coding vboxes/hboxes/alignments on cocoa.

Also this week I talked with you all and several people on IRC about different ways to make background tasks less noticable. I’m pretty excited to get that stuff into 1.5, seems like it’s not too much work and it could have a nice payoff in terms of user experience.

Miro News Blog: Miro coming to Hong Kong

Thu, 01 May 2008 06:03:09 +0000

I’m heading to Hong Kong next week, and I’d love to meet with anyone who has an interest in Miro or is working on related projects. I’ll be in Hong Kong from Friday, May 9th through Wednesday May 14. Please let me know if you’d like to meet up or send me email intros to relevant people. My plan thus far: conduct business, meet people, eat dim sum.

My email is jessep [at] pculture.org.

Miro News Blog: Summer Marketing Internships @ PCulture and Miro

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:43:29 +0000

We have a great Summer Team in the works, and are excited to announce that we have space for 1-2 additional marketing / outreach interns. These are unpaid positions, but offer great experience with one of the most popular open-source programs in the world and a unique, fast-growing non-profit.

PCF has an office in Worcester, MA, but most of our staff works from home around the world and we expect the same will be true of our interns– you don’t have to live in Worcester. We will expect you to work 30 hours a week for at least 9 weeks and to file a weekly progress report. Following your internship, we will happily serve as job references and provide written recommendations.

Members of the summer team will focus on some of the following:

Engaging the blogosphere and general press
Improving user support and help systems
Fundraising
Web development and design
Open video outreach and education
Sustainability and business development

TO APPLY: If you are driven, self-motivated, and want to sharpen your marketing and outreach skills, please email jobs (at) pculture.org. Include a resume and a brief note about why you would like to work for us.

p.s. If your school gives credit for internships, we’re happy to work with you to make this count for credit.

bdk: Widgets Moving Along

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 03:26:40 +0000

This week I continued my work on the widgets work. I checked in code to the widgets branch to handle basic startup/shutdown and open a window. It’s very simple, but it’s pretty cool to see that window pop up and miroguide.com show up.

At the begining of the week I implemented it in portable and on OS X. The GTK/X11 implementation was about 2 hours or so. The windows implementation on the other hand is going to be a real pain and requires basically trashing setup.py and rewriting it from the bottom up.

That brings me to one thing I want to talk about on the call. If I’m going to be basically starting over with our setup script, I’d like to talk about using mingw as our main C compiler. I’ve been thinking about how much of a pain it was to add support for the vista function calls and how it would have been a ton easier if we were using mingw. I’m pretty sure mingw has supported the calls for quite a while, and if it hadn’t it’s so much easier to upgrade it’s win32api package than it is to install a new microsoft SDK. It’s been especially on my mind because I tried to install visual c++ 2008 express and it completely ruined my build environment. I’d love so much to get rid of microsoft tools and just use free ones.

The main reason that we’re not using it is that the python docs say you should use the visual c++ 2003 to build python extensions. I’ve done a ton of reading about it and it seems like the reason is complications from using a different C runtime DLL. Python uses msvcr71.dll, but things compiled from mingw use msvcrt.dll. Using different C runtimes can cause problems in a couple of ways. The main one is trying to share data (for example a FILE pointer) from one runtime to another will cause very bad things to happen. Then there’s more subtle errors, for example atexit() callbacks will only fire from one runtime. However, all of the errors don’t seem to happen in practice so often. It seems like the main reason that people try not to mix compilers for peace of mind. But the gtk DLLs are linked to msvcrt.dll, so it seems like we can’t get total peace of mind in any case.

Anyways, I’m not really sure of the ramifications, I’d love to talk on the call about what people think about this.

Miro News Blog: What happens when someone else controls what you already bought

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:50:27 +0000

A lot of the anti-DRM discussion tends to focus on how much of a pain in the ass DRM is when customers buy content and want to use it on different computers or other devices. But an even bigger problem hits when a company inevitably decides to switch to a different DRM system, goes out of business, or discontinues a service. last100 has a great post about 5 Companies that Sold Customers Down the DRM River. It’s a word of warning to anyone considering buying content with DRM.

Will's blog: Hardy packages

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:57:06 +0000

I updated my AMD64 machine to Hardy today and built a set of Miro 1.2.3 packages for Hardy AMD64. Going forward, I’ll continue to build packages for Gutsy and Hardy for both i386 and AMD64 platforms.

Miro 1.2.3 is the last release I’ll be doing packages for Dapper and Feisty.

If someone could help out by maintaining and testing packages for those two platforms and any others that we don’t cover, that’d be really great. Let me know in the comments, by email, or on IRC.

Will's blog: Miro and GStreamer on gtkx11

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:04:06 +0000

GStreamer has a lot of momentum behind it now and a lot of work has gone into it over the last year and it’s really paying off. As such, Miro 1.5 (the next version) will be the first version of Miro which defaults to the GStreamer renderer instead of the xine renderer. I’m excited about this change and in the future we’ll be able to drop support for xine which is one less complexity to deal with.

If you’re using the GStreamer renderer in Miro with either trunk or Miro 1.2.3 and discover any problems, let me know. It helps to write up a bug, but if you’re loathe to do that, comment here. Make sure you test with totem-gstreamer or some other GStreamer movie player as well and report those results–that helps us determine whether the problem lies with Miro or possibly elsewhere.

There are probably going to be a few rough edges in the switch and I could use any help I can get with them.

Miro Testing Blog: How to backup your data prior to testing

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:00:36 +0000

I think many people are hesitant to jump into testing because everyone knows that the nightly builds are by definition, unstable, and people already have their channels set up just as they like them.

There are two ways you can preserve and restore your data prior to starting a test run, OPML export, or by copying off your database.

Export Channels OPML

This option is built into miro and can be accomplished as easily as going to the Channels menu and selecting Export Channels (OPML)… . This will create a list of your channels and channel folders that you save off to your system. You can then import the list at any time using the Channels menu and selecting Import Channels (OPML)… .

Using this, will only save off your channel list. If you delete your database, and start over with a clean system, Importing the channels via OPML will not preserve the downloaded, watched or unwatched status of videos in each channel.

Database Backup and Restore

Currently database backup is still a manual process and the location varies with your operating system.

Windows XP: C:\\Documents and Settings\(you)\Application Data\Participatory Culture Foundation \Miro\Support\sqlitedb
Vista: C:\\Users\(you)\AppData\Roaming\Participatory Culture Foundation\Miro\Support\sqlitedb
OS X: /Users/(you)/Library/Application Support/Miro/sqlitedb
GTKX11: ~yourhome/.miro/sqlitedb

Just copy your sqlitedb file to a safe location on your system. If something goes wrong during testing - you can do a fresh install, copy your database back to the original location, restart Miro and be back up and running.

* Note: If you migrated your movie storage - restoring the old db would cause it to lose track of those items.

I hope these two options make you feel a little more comfortable about diving in to some of the testing builds. If anyone out there wants to help make the backup / restore process a little less manual - reply to this post.

Miro Testing Blog: Global Happy Hour

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:33:08 +0000

Leading up to the 1.2.3 release, I was really happy to see that some new people signed up and helped us with the regression testing.

New testers like jan.s, fixitguy, fox.box, tbutterfoss and strash joined some of our regular testers like i_therain, sedatg and elmargol to help get this release out. I also received some emails from a few people who didn’t get a chance this time, but would still like to in the future.

Right now is a really exciting time to be part of the Miro QA team. As a Webware 100 winner, it is official: We ARE are one of the coolest apps in town. If you would like to be part of the Miro QA team you should do these three things:

Go to the QA wiki to browse our to do list.
Sign up for the tester mailing list to stay up to date on our activities.
Join us for a global chat on the Miro chat channel (or join irc.freenode.org #miro) this Friday at 7:00 PM GMT. This is 9:00 PM CEST, 8:00 PM BST, 3:00 PM EST, 12:00 PM PST.

I can’t really buy anyone a beer from here, but you can BYO. I’d love to meet you, answer any questions you might have and share ideas about how we can continue to improve Miro QA.