Will's blog

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• should be pushed out soon

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• work is coming along nicely--probably done with development by the end of March.

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Luc:

• added support for running unit tests on osx
• made some other clean-ups in the mac build

Will:

• worked on Miro 3.1
• wrote an article for Gnome Journal
• continued research

Paul:

• spent some time on Miro Guide fixing bugs from django-refactor going live
• Miro Guide should be fine now for the Miro 3.0 launch
• continued working on Miro Community 1.0 stuff

Janet:

• continued working on eggplant tests for Miro
• tested other things

bugzilla

• 9 bugs/feature-requests created
• 9 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME

PyBlosxom 1.5 rc1 was released a month or so ago. Since then I haven't had much time to finish things up.

Spaetz kindly did the work to move PyBlosxom source code from svn on SourceForge to git on Gitorious. The plan is to move development to Gitorious and the web-site, documentation, bug-tracking, and things like that to a site on my server bluesock.org.

This enables people to fork PyBlosxom trivially and make the changes they need to make to get PyBlosxom working for them. This will result in more experimentation and work being done and reduce the problem of me and my decision making being a bottle neck in future PyBlosxom development.

The other big change that's happening partially in the PyBlosxom 1.5 timeframe and partially in future versions is the ecology for plugins. Previously, I ignored them and spent my time on PyBlosxom core stuff. Ryan was maintaining the plugins, but the infrastructure we had for plugin maintenance sucked. Going forward, plugins will fall into two categories:

• Maintained plugins will be in the plugins/ directory of the pyblosxom tarball. These plugins will have unit tests and will be versioned alongside PyBlosxom.
• Plugins maintained by other people will be indexed on the website in a registry, but one that will suck less than the current plugin registry.

The plugins that are currently in the contributed plugins pack will be split into those two groups.

PyBlosxom 1.5 is waiting on some more documentation changes, some more plugins work, and now some project infrastructure changes. I'll probably do another release candidate soon and suggest people start using that.

If you're interested in helping out, come hang out on IRC on freenode.net in the #pyblosxom channel. The conversations have been interesting over the last couple of months and have been instrumental in work getting done.

I'm a Miro developer employed by Participatory Culture Foundation. I wrote a post about me back in September of 2007 which covered a bit of what I do. A lot has changed since then as my role on the project has increased in scope and I've moved and various other things like that. This is an update.

What I do:

I'm involved in project management, release planning, release engineering, maintaining development infrastructure (bugzilla, git, wiki pages, documentation, build scripts, nightly builds, bogon deflector, syncing translations with Launchpad, ...), Ubuntu packaging, some testing, bug triage, user support, and I'm a liason between the Miro project and packagers and related projects.

I also do a lot of Miro development primarily on the Windows and Linux platforms. I keep track of bugs in Debian and Fedora and fix them upstream. I handle most of the incoming patches from contributors and try to help contributors where I can to make their lives easier.

I spend a ton of time on Miro work--probably between 60 and 80 hours a week.

How does telecommuting work:

I telecommute which makes it easier to work on Miro whenever I have a free moment (blessing and a curse). I work with the other Miro people through email, IRC, Bugzilla comments and weekly conference calls. We're all pretty autonomous and it works pretty well. I imagine this is in large part because we're such a small team. If the team grew, we'd have to adjust the way we do things accordingly.

Development setup:

I bought a Del 1420N with Ubuntu on it a couple of years ago and do all my development on that. I'm running a pretty stock Ubuntu Karmic with a bunch of virtual machines in Virtual Box to cover different versions of Ubuntu and Windows and also other Linux distributions. This is my primary development machine. It's yellow.

I also have:

• a Macbook running OSX 10.4 for nightly and release builds (work machine)
• an old Dell something running Windows XP for nightly and release builds (work machine)
• a Mac Mini running OSX 10.5 for OSX development (work machine)
• a Dell XPS M1210 laptop (terrible machine) for Windows testing (work machine)
• an AMD64 box I built for AMD64 builds and testing
• an ASUS EeePC 701 running Ubuntu Karmic UNR for testing on a netbook
• a circa 2002 Gateway laptop running Debian Testing for testing
• a Neuros Link (graciously donated by Neuros Technology) for testing

I'd really like to get a bigger monitor. The 1440x900 display I have now is small and cramped most of the time. I also need to build a better desk.

Ways you can get a hold of me:

irc: willkg on #miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net
email: will dot guaraldi at pculture dot org

Meet me for coffee:

I live in North Chelmsford, MA, USA. It's about 30-45 minutes from Boston. If you're in the area, I'd love to hang out for coffee. I head into Boston periodically for conferences and hanging out with family and friends. I'm definitely interested in hackfests or talking shop.

The rest of my world:

My web-site is at http://bluesock.org/~willg/. I curate Python Miro Community and Gnome Miro Community. I maintain PyBlosxom. I'm a member of the Free Software Foundation. I'm a lover, not a hater.

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• should be pushed out soon

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

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

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Janet:

• working on creating eggplant test cases from litmus test cases
• 25% of them are created now

Will:

• worked on Python Miro Community and Gnome Miro Community
• made source tree layout changes to master branch for Miro 3.1
• finished up User Manual for Miro 3.0

Paul:

• moved Miro Guide to a new server--faster, fewer errors, better performance
• worked on performance fixes and bug fixes for Miro Community

Ben:

• working on Miro 3.1 stuff

bugzilla

• 14 bugs/feature-requests created
• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 3 bugs marked FIXED
• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 3 bugs marked INVALID

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• we're ready for a release. srsly.
• making builds today and pushing it out over the next few days.

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Will:

• finishing up the user manual
• will talk to Nick about putting manual on getmiro.com

Luc:

• worked on 10.4 super weird issues
• blind fixes seem to be working--so that's good
• talked to perian folks--they're close to a release

Paul:

• mostly worked on sysadmin things
• changed the workflow for bug handling for Miro Community which should make it easier to get fixes in faster
• working with sys admins to move Miro Guide to a new server

Ben:

• really sick last week
• triaged crash reports from 3.0 rc3
• started organizing for 3.1 stuff

Janet:

• fell off the call
• continued regression testing testing Miro 3.0
• worked on User Manual for Miro 3.0

bugzilla

• 18 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID
• 4 bugs marked FIXED

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

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

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

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

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

This is the last call for translations for Miro 3.0.

Translations are done with the Launchpad translation interface.

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

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• rc2 is going well: 150 Windows downloads, 60 OSX downloads, 30 source downloads
• there are a few bugs we're still working on, then another release candidate

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Janet:

• continued testing Miro 3.0

Ben:

• worked on subtitle support issues on Windows
• looking into weird crashes that Nick saw
• looking into crashes on upgrade

Will:

• worked on some bugs
• worked on the miro user manual
• worked on python and gnome miro community

Luc:

• fixed some bugs that Janet found on Monday

Paul:

• worked on Miro Community stuff over the last week
• we have two designers working on the style sheets and html
• working with Morgan on an admin system refresh
• working on moving feed updates to a separate server with a queue

bugzilla

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

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

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

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

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

Don't go to PyCon unprepared!

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

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

1. I think it's really important to get this video out to a larger audience, and
2. it's really important to make it easier for users and developers to find video they're looking for.

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

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

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

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

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

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