I applied to be a member of the GNOME Foundation two days ago and today I was accepted. I'm excited and happy that I was accepted. I hope that my work on GNOME Miro Community helps the greater GNOME community.

We're having some problems with our servers. This is affecting our bugzilla instance, some of our web-sites, and some of the development infrastructure.

I'm not really sure what the specifics are, but I do know we've got top people working on it. Top people!

Hopefully it'll get resolved soon.

The article I wrote for GNOME Journal about GNOME Miro Community went live yesterday. You can read it here. It's a great introduction to why I created GNOME Miro Community, what can be done with it, and how you can help. Many thanks to Sumana and Paul for their help with getting it published!

While working on that article and the screenshot, I fixed a few templates and some of the CSS (with the help of Parker from OpenHatch). There should be RSS feed links on all of the listing pages now. Additionally, I did a pass through all the videos and removed ones that have disappeared.

Sumana pointed out that in order to submit a video to the site, you had to be logged in. That was a mistake--I really apologize. In order for this site to be useful to as many people as possible, it's important not to have barriers to video submission like that. If you balked at having to sign in while submitting a video, please try again.

There are two kinds of videos I'm really interested in adding to the site:

• up-to-date videos showing GNOME Shell, GNOME Activity Journal, and Zeitgeist that show new functionality added recently and specify which version is being demonstrated,

• howto, tutorial and screencast videos for important things that need more of a spotlight; for example, accessibility

If you have anything that fills these needs, submit a video or send me an email!

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• released!

Miro 3.0.1 status (roadmap)

• Luc is working on bug 13120

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• planned feature freeze for April 30th

• work is progressing

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• work is progressing

Janet:

• biggest feedback for MVC release is that there isn't a Linux version

• only one minor issue and one bizarre issue for Miro 3.0 release so far--we're doing really well

• worked on testing for Miro regressions

• working with interns on testing and testing test tools

• continuing to implement eggplant tests and also move to selenium-rc and looking into sikuli

Luc:

• working on bug 13120--it's totally bizarre

• worked on Miro Video Converter, too

Paul:

• working on Miro Community

• working on finishing up the admin changes

• planning to do a feature freeze for 1.0 soon

Will:

• GNOME Miro Community article for GNOME Journal was released yesterday

• worked on switching us over to Launchpad PPA for Miro releases for Ubuntu

bugzilla

• 20 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 4 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 2 bugs marked INVALID

We pushed out Miro 3.0 today. There are still some minor things to do like Ubuntu packages (I'll work on that Friday), version updates on the web-site, .... Still, it's really great to finally get the release out the door.

This release has some great features in it:

• subtitle support

• lots of performance fixes

• fixes to the database layer reducing disk i/o

• context menu item and system preference for playing videos externally (thank you Jason Woofenden!)

• support for media keys on Ubuntu/Linux

• a ton of bug fixes

• and we wrote a Miro User Manual

Also important, but not something you would see direct evidence of, we did a lot of work on infrastructure and process for developing Miro:

• Janet set up an automated ui test system

• we fixed our unit test framework to work on Windows

• we added 40 unit tests and updated/fixed a lot more

• we tweaked our testing and release processes to increase quality

• we switched from svn to git

• we re-wrote our nightly build scripts

• we reworked binary kits so they're versioned and in separate repositories

• we continued cleaning up and working on documentation

• we continued cleaning up our codebase using pylint to identify issues

• we worked on removing code complexity and dead code; ditched some pyrex code; ditched support for xine

We're working hard to make sure that this and future releases are good quality releases. We're working hard to make sure that the four of us can keep pushing Miro in new directions and provide better support for Miro users. We're working hard to do more with less.

We're very excited about this release--it feels really good.

We've also already started on Miro 3.1 development. You can follow the roadmap here.

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• release today or tomorrow

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• coming along--changed dev schedule to end of april

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Luc:

• worked on video conversion project

• wrote about it in the wiki at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/MiroVideoConversions

• started implementing bits of it in a separate branch

• looked over Miro Video Converter code

• conversion project might land in 3.1

Paul:

• continued working on Miro Community 1.0 bugs

• working on Twitter and Facebook support

Ben:

• worked through Miro 3.1 bugs

• did some work on VLC problems, but is of the opinion we should switch to gstreamer

Will:

• did the last set of Miro 3.0 release builds

• went to LibrePlanet; talked to a lot of people about stuff

• implemented Language preference in master branch

Janet:

• tested Miro 3.0 builds, Miro Video Converter, and Miro Community

bugzilla

• 9 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 2 bugs marked INVALID

• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 2 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 3 bugs marked FIXED

minutes

Miro 3.0 status (roadmap) (was Miro 2.6)

• soon

• going to cherry-pick a bunch of fixes in master back to the 3.0 branch

• Perian is very close to a 1.2.1 release--this fixes some issues on OSX

Miro 3.1 status (roadmap)

• work is coming along nicely

Miro Community 1.0 status (roadmap)

• coming along

Luc:

• worked on 3.1 issues

• worked on transcoding issues for MiroVideoConverter project

Paul:

• reworked Miro Community infrastructure to make it easier to build new Miro Communities and have them up and running immediately

• worked on the new admin interface

• started working on video series feature

Janet:

• worked on some stuff, but I couldn't hear her

Ben:

• worked on reworking urls for search feeds issue

Will:

• spent a lot of time researching

• did some 3.1 work

bugzilla

• 8 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 3 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked WORKSFORME

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:

Meet me for coffee:

I live in Massachusetts 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.