Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• we put out a beta on Saturday and things are looking awesome
• there's still a lot of work to do, we need help with testing and translations.

Janet:

• We did a beta release over the weekend. Huge number of Windows downloads (2000ish). OSX downloads (100ish). Source downloads (10ish).
• Some minor issues discovered so far--things are looking ok.
• Pulling in interns to do more testing on Miro.

Will:

• Worked on P1 bugs that were primarily TypeError issues and easily fixed with some defensive programming.
• Happy to have a beta channel---that'll solve a bunch of release testing issues.
• Going to switch gears and work on Miro User Manual stuff. Trying to write a comprehensive but concise manual. It needs to be concise because otherwise we'll spend tons of time writing and maintaining it. Planning to do a few manual-writing sprints like we did last cycle.

Paul:

• Worked on Miro Community project list page.
• Working on P1 bugs for Miro and Miro Community.

Rob:

• Tighten up the systems, make them more automated, make them more efficient.

Geoffrey:

• Worked on P1 bugs and trying to squeeze more performance from transcoding.

Kaz:

• Worked on P1 bugs

Jonas:

• Worked on Windows playback issues and some other beta bugs.

Asheesh:

• Interested in fixing Miro stuff to make it easier to bring in new contributors and also running some sprints

Ben:

• Worked on P1 bugs.

Order of business:

• More ui changes coming.
• RC on Friday. Focus on outstanding ui changes.
• Manual doesn't need to be totally up to date on release, so Will will updated a bunch of stuff, and probably put in stubs for bits.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 104 bugs/feature-requests created
• 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID
• 8 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 54 bugs marked FIXED
• 2 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

We've been working hard on Miro 4 for a while now. It's a very ambitious development cycle: we're implementing a lot of new features, we're fixing a lot of problems, we're improving performance, and we're fixing codebase and infrastructure issues. We've done a ton of work.

On Saturday, I put out a set of Miro 4.0 beta1 builds. We've switched into the release cycle for Miro 4.0. We're hoping to do a final release by the end of the month.

At this point, I don't think anyone's written much about Miro 4 or shown any screenshots of what it looks like right now. So here's some for your ogling:

Figure 1: The new standard view. You can also see changes in the sidebar on the left side, and filters on the top. You can also see in the sidebar the new Stores section which makes it easier to buy content from Amazon and other stores and pull it into Miro automatically.

Figure 2: The new list view. List view has an item details pane on the bottom so you can see the details of the item. If the selected item was a music item with cover art, the cover art would show up in the item details pane.

Figure 3: The new connect tab. This is where you configure DAAP-based sharing allowing you to stream media from Miro to other DAAP-supporting systems on your network. You can also sync with Android devices as well as any mass storage device (thumbdrive, external hard drive, ...).

There's a lot more, but I'm going to keep this short.

Builds are located on the nightlies page in the Sticky Files section.

Note that this is a beta release! There are still some problems and tweaks we're working on.

We could use any help we can get translating strings and testing builds.

Also, if you help with testing and translation, please let me know so I can gleefully add you to the credits where you rightfully belong!

w00t for beta releases and w00t for almost there!

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• things are stabilizing--if you've been waiting to test nightlies, now's a good time to jump in

Paul:

• worked on P1 bugs related to devices and ui changes
• worked on feed scraping for the Miro Guide and performance fixes
• worked on small bugs on Miro Community

Kaz:

• worked through P1 bugs related to list view

Jonas:

• worked on P1 bugs and other problems he's found while testing

Will:

• synced translations
• fixed 17120
• updated to libtorrent 0.15.6 on OSX and Windows

Ben:

• fixed a bunch of P1 issues
• spent a lot of time on metadata extraction issues
• fixing the video search widget issues

Order of business:

• We need to do more testing with external hard drives on all three platforms.
• Talked about download notification: We talked about the specific problem we're trying to solve and options for that.
• Things are feeling much more stable. We're going to wait until Janet has some time to catch up and figure out when the codefreeze should happen.
• Talked about making sure Miro works in 800x600 which touches on UI resizing issues.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 58 bugs/feature-requests created
• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 5 bugs marked INVALID
• 14 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 70 bugs marked FIXED
• 8 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

We (PCF) have a MediaWiki instance that we use for a variety of PCF projects. Since we set it up, we've been plagued with spam. The spam is always exactly the same kind of thing: an account is created, an image is uploaded, a new page is created with the image and a link to some crap url.

Over the last month, Asheesh and I fiddled with MediaWiki configuration trying to strike a good balance between maximizing hassle-free contributions and minimizing spam. This most recent round was Asheesh's idea and it seems to be successful. Thus I'm documenting it here.

We installed the ConfirmEdit extension for MediaWiki. That gives us an additional addurl permission that MediaWiki doesn't have. I set this addurl permission to require a captcha and then I wrote my EmailConfirmedNonCaptcha captcha plugin for the ConfirmEdit extension.

The gist of the EmailConfirmedNonCaptcha plugin is that it always rejects the change with a nice message if the user isn't in the emailconfirmed group. That's it.

Now we have new user accounts created, but the accounts can't do anything because they're not made by humans and they're not confirming their email addresses. Thus this particular spam vector is dead in its tracks without hassling potential contributors.

I posted a "project page" with the code for the extension at http://pculture.org/wguaraldi/emailconfirmednoncaptcha/. But that disappeared when I left PCF. I moved the project over to https://github.com/willkg/ecnc on GitHub.

4/25/2011: Asheesh suggested I add some before and after screenshots.
4/25/2011 later: Correcting a totally lame thing I did by not mentioning that I worked with Asheesh on this. It was totally his idea. I just wrote it.
1/17/2012: I moved the project to github and updated the urls in this blog entry to reflect that.

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• things are stabilizing--if you've been waiting to test nightlies, now's a good time to jump in

Paul:

• worked on Miro P1 fixes
• working on Miro Guide and adding additional podcasts to the guide
• will be spending some time on Miro Community going forward

Jonas:

• worked on P1 ui-related issues
• wrote a Magent URI design doc

Geoffrey:

• worked on P1 ui-related and sharing-related issues

Kaz:

• caught up with P1 bugs
• going to spend time making metadata extraction unit tests

Ben:

• worked on P1 bugs
• going to work with Kaz on metadata extraction issues

Will:

• updated the PCF bug triage tool -- greasemonkey is so easy!
• tested Miro on Vista and Windows 7 and it's looking decent
• synced translations and worked on preventing spam in the wiki

Order of business:

• Several of us spent some time hunting for good quality podcast directories and other than the iTunes directory and Miro Guide, there isn't anything out there.
• Talked about when we're going to call this release done, when we're going to do a code freeze, and how we prioritize things over the next week.
• Talked about using the severity field to denote critical/blocker and everything else.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 70 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 2 bugs marked INVALID
• 10 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 80 bugs marked FIXED
• 5 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• lots of flux in git-master, but the code is stabilizing
• working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...
• working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...
• probably a release in May or June--we're working hard on it!

Paul:

• Worked on bugs across Miro: device bugs, ui bugs, sidebar bugs, ...

Will:

• Finished working on close/destroy implementation issues which took a while.
• Continuing to sync translations, run tests, peer review code, triage bugs and all that.
• Wrote up a bunch of bugs that were complex where i wasn't able to reproduce them several days later. It's possible there are flux issues involved, but this concerns me.

Ben:

• Worked on a bunch of bugs and got sidetracked into import progress updating issues.
• Planning to work on tableview selection issues going forward.
• Put in a request for better comments in the code and better checkin comments.

Kaz:

• Made changes to list view column sizing for OSX and GTK.
• Working on P1 bugs going forward. Half of the P1s are selection issues. Will coordinate with Ben on fixing them.

Geoffrey:

• Worked on a bunch of P1 bugs for ui stuff, crashing bugs, daap bugs, and some other things.

Jonas:

• Worked on P1 bugs.

Janet:

• Doing a lot of Miro testing.
• Focusing on verifying bug fixes. When she does this, she adds additional tests to Sikuli and Litmus so we'll catch regression issues.
• Fixing Sikuli tests in regards to ui changes.

Order of business:

• git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are probably unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made. If you're interested in testing, but don't want to test bleeding edge, then it's worth waiting until we hit the release candidate portion of the dev cycle. We're currently thinking that'll be in a couple of weeks.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 78 bugs/feature-requests created
• 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 4 bugs marked INVALID
• 10 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 2 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 79 bugs marked FIXED
• 4 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Miro Community 1.2 status

• Miro Community 1.2 has shipped! Congratulations to the MC team!

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• lots of flux in git-master, but the code is stabilizing
• working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...
• working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...
• probably a release in May or June--we're working hard on it!

Will:

• Ubuntu Natty releases on April 28th. I've spent some time already making sure that Miro works on Natty and we have a helper script already. I'm planning to wait until it's out before I spend a ton of time fixing issues.
• I want to set up a second PPA for testing on Ubuntu Maverick and Natty. That'll alleviate issues people are having with missing dependencies when testing Miro on Ubuntu. Planning to wait until the release candidate cycle to set this PPA up.
• I'm mostly done with the new Add Files dialog, but there are some outstanding issues I'm still working on.
• I plan to do my work on Windows for the next week.

Paul:

• Worked on ui tickets all week.
• Waiting on log files for device-related issues.
• Spent time on Miro Guide getting a development server going so that he can spend some time on Miro Guide stuff.

Kaz:

• Working on issues in local branches.
• Working mostly on OSX next week.

Jonas:

• Worked on P1 issues.

Geoffrey:

• Working on sort ui issues for standard view.
• No big issues--mostly just cruising through bugs.

Ben:

• Worked on bugs--got a bunch of P1 bugs done.

Janet:

• Caught a cold and feels icky.
• Working on testing Miro and Universal Subtitles things. Feels like the current round of bugs are smaller and less "this whole thing is totally broken".

Order of business:

• Talked about where we're at with Miro 4.0. Lot of newly created bugs over the last week, but we're done with new features. Bugs are getting smaller and more specific. We're getting close to a release candidate.
• Talked about setting up a miro-testing PPA for Ubuntu Maverick and Natty. We're going to wait on this until the release candidate phase.
• Talked about the plan for Natty. We've done some testing already and some setup and Miro looks ok so far. When Natty releases (April 28th), one or more of us will upgrade and do more granular testing. Will is working on an appindicator support extension. At some point Will plans to look at what things we can do to fit into the Unity and GNOME 3 interfaces better, too.
• git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are probably unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made. If you're interested in testing, but don't want to test bleeding edge, then it's worth waiting until we hit the release candidate portion of the dev cycle. We're currently thinking that'll be in a couple of weeks.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 69 bugs/feature-requests created
• 12 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 56 bugs marked FIXED
• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INVALID

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• lots of flux in git-master, but the code is stabilizing
• working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...
• working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...
• probably a release in May or June--we're working hard on it!

Will:

• Spent most of the time on BD. Long drama, but it should be fine now. I spent most of the time addressing privacy issues, but also did some restructuring as well.
• Worked on upsizing issues with conversions. Pretty sure I have it fixed, but since the changes are pervasive, I want to do more testing. I didn't have to do anything crazy like I had feared last week, so that's good.

Paul:

• spent some time fixing Miro Guide issues, mostly django errors
• worked on P1 bugs, mostly ui stuff

Jonas:

• continued working on P1 bugs
• added support for hex-encoded magnet URIs

Geoffrey:

• working on P1 bugs, particularly ui bugs

Ben:

• working on P1 bugs
• finished up keyboard shortcut issues--should be pretty solid now

Janet:

• spent a bunch of time with sikuli tests and Miro
• worked on testing Universal Subtitles
• working on testing things and writing new tests so we continue to increase the regression tests

Order of business:

• Talked about where we're at with Miro 4.0. Lot of newly created bugs over the last week, but we're pretty much done with new features. Seems like we're just working on bugs now. Getting close to a point where we could do a release candidate.
• git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are probably unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made. If you're interested in testing, but don't want to test bleeding edge, then it's worth waiting until we hit the release candidate portion of the dev cycle. We're currently thinking that'll be in a couple of weeks.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 80 bugs/feature-requests created
• 3 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 3 bugs marked INVALID
• 2 bugs marked ---
• 12 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 2 bugs marked WONTFIX
• 54 bugs marked FIXED
• 2 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

Podcasts come and go. I thought I'd do an update on things I watch and list the podcasts I'm currently testing with.

• The Ben Heck Show (Add to Miro) - TBHS is really fun to watch, educational, and really fun to watch. Ben spends each episode on a project such as a Super Can Cooler, a Portal Shirt, a Portable CNC Router, ... It's just fascinating.
• Lawrence Lessig's blip.tv (Add to Miro) - Lawrence Lessig talks about corruption of money in politics and occasionally about copyright reform.
• Wait wait... don't tell me! (Add to Miro) - "Wait wait... don't tell me!" is a radio show that I like listening to on the weekends, but I often miss it. So I subscribe to the podcast and get to listen to it when it's convenient for me.
• Onion News Network (Add to Miro) - ONN is just too funny. The videos are short, so they download quickly. The content is fantastic. They produce new content with great frequency. It's a great podcast to test with.
• Python Miro Community (Add to Miro) - This is the New feed for Python Miro Community. This is a site that has a curated index of Python-related videos around the Internet. It has conference videos from conferences like the various PyCons, DjangoCons, and PyOhio. Since I program primarily in Python, this feed helps me continue my Python education. It's an invaluable resource. (I also run the site.)

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• lots of flux in git-master, but the code is stabilizing
• working on metadata support, device syncing, performance enhancements, extensions, streaming to other devices (ipad, ...), ...
• working on project infrastructure: wiki, nightlies, nightly runs of unit tests, ...
• probably a release in April or May--we're working hard on it!

Janet:

• worked on testing over the week
• worked on sikuli tests now that the ui is more stable
• feels that things are finally coming together

Will:

• worked on an upgrade problem with torrent directories
• implemented Import Media dialog -- will talk to Nick about this to figure out UI issues
• strings are still in flux, so it's not stable enough for translations
• working on conversion bugs now

Paul:

• worked on P1 bugs
• working on P1 bugs assigned to admin and taking bugs from other people

Kaz:

• worked on scrolling issues and selection issues
• working on a bunch of P1 miscellaneous bugs

Ben:

• worked on a ton of P1 bugs
• did a bunch of ui stuff: item details pane, standard view, conversion item renderer

Jonas:

• finished up magnet uri support
• working on P1 bugs

Order of business:

• Talked about how Miro does conversions and reworking it to fix some problems.
• Talked about where we're at with Miro 4.0. Things are looking good. Bug data suggests we've reached a point of inflection where we're fixing bugs faster than new bugs are coming in. There are still a fair amount of P1 bugs to do, but it seems manageable.
• git master is in pretty heavy flux right now and because of that nightlies are probably unstable--use them at your own risk. This will sort itself over time when there are fewer massive changes being made. If you're interested in testing, but don't want to test bleeding edge, then it's worth waiting until we hit the release candidate portion of the dev cycle. We're currently thinking that'll be in a couple of weeks.
• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.
• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 34 bugs/feature-requests created
• 5 bugs marked DUPLICATE
• 47 bugs marked FIXED
• 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME
• 1 bugs marked INCOMPLETE