Entertainer Media Center

I've been working, in my spare time, on a really fun Django project. It's allowed me to play with some of the Django toys that I haven't really gotten around to playing with recently. One of the things I've been doing is building my app with good ... [More] tools, and one of things I've been doing in building my tools is using custom django management commands. Out of this process came a tool that I thought might be beneficial to share with others: django-fabric. Fabric is a command line tool similar to the popular development tool Capistrano. However, it's more lightweight, uses python, and doesn't assume anything about your environment (language, vcs, etc.). I've been using it so much recently that I built a django command for it. To use it, download, install, and add to your INSTALLED_APPS. Create a fabfile, which is just a python file with your deployment instructions in them. You'll need to add that file (by name) as settings.FABFILE. Then, manage.py fab <command>. For more information, see the Fabric documentation. For Ubuntu users, Fabric can be installed by adding my PPA repository and installing from there. I'll be adding the django-fabric packange there too, once I get it to a stable point. [Less]

I’ve just finished the final mock exam for the courses I’m currently revising for. I have two exams on Friday, both of them are three hours long, with a break of one and a half hours in between. Revision is going well at the moment and I think I’ll get my target results. The one thing [...]

I am now convinced that the only (decent) way to get better at writing code is to get the code you've already written reviewed by someone else, and to review someone else's code. I've seen enough code reviews from both sides to realize the amazing ... [More] investment in a developer by participating in a code review with them. Many eyes make all bugs shallow. -Linus' Law Let me 'splain. No. Let Me Sum Up First of all, if your code review ever results in the following, you're doing it wrong: shouting matches, gunshot wounds, spitwads, homocide, suicide, genocide, or insecticide. Before doing a code review, take a gander at the Ubuntu Code of Conduct". It's a great guideline for open source development in general, and it's best to adhere to these guidelines in code reviews specifically. The purpose of the code review is the betterment of code, reviewer, and reviewee. It's been almost a year since I first started hacking on Entertainer. It started as a hobby toy application, with a few young developers. In that time, we have implemented various procedures and code standards. Only recently did I submit some code for review that I realized how insightful these same developers have become, all from code reviews. Why Review Code? As I've started reviewing code from other Launchpad developers, and talking with experienced code reviewers, I have seen a few schools of thought on the "why" of code reviews. The first reason to review code is to check for potential bugs. What's great about this is that if you're following TDD, or any test-driven methodology, checking the quality of the tests is a great indicator to see the functionality of the cade you're reviewing. Another reason for code reviews are to doublecheck implementation details. This is helpful when reviewing an area of the code that you're not familiar with. Ask the reviewee plenty of questions. Often, in answering these questions, a reviewee might see issues in their own code. When introducing mandatory code reviews, the process is a little awkward at first. Why wouldn't it be. You're probably used to just writing code and committing it. Introducing code reviews means many more steps required to get your code into the mainline. But how confident are you in the code your fellow developer is? What happens when you have to work on their code? If you've reviewed that code, you'll probably understand the code in at least some capacity. [Less]

Yeah, yeah, we missed our milestone deadline of 9-26-08, but we’re close to getting 0.2 finished. For those of you looking for a lot of new flashiness and cool user interface features, I’m afraid 0.2 won’t have a ton to offer. With some contributions from new developers, we have added some features like a photo slideshow [...]

The Entertainer Media Center is featured in the 2008 FLOSS Media Center State of the Art report. You can download the report from here We are in the top 10 “most prominent FLOSS projects” for media center which is a really good result for such a young project.

I’ve been working on implementing translation support for the Entertainer Media Center over the last couple of weeks and it finally got merged into the main source code branch today. YAY! The translation work will be done through launchpad’s ... [More] translation web interface once rockstar gets it set up at http://translations.launchpad.net/entertainer Unfortunately I won’t be able to help [...] [Less]

Mark Shuttleworth announced at OSCON 2008 that Launchpad will be open source within 12 months. This is good news. A lot of people have whinged about Launchpad's lack of open source status as the reason they don't use Launchpad for their project ... [More] hosting (although it does seem that they are quite alright posting projects to Google Code). What people don't realize is that many of Launchpad's elements are already open source. Recently, Canonical helped the Gnome community set up a "Bazaar Playground," a server which contains Bazaar branches created from the trunk and branches of Gnome's various Subversion repositories. This allows all the Gnome hackers to give Bazaar a test run and find out how wonderful their workflow can become using Bazaar. Everything from this project is available as open source software. I thought I'd post about the software used in the playground, as well as other software that can be used tho achieve similar functionality of Launchpad. Bazaar and Friends (Plugins) Obviously, Bazaar is the big part of this mix. If you're setting up a bazaar playground, it makes sense to that you'd need Bazaar. However, one of the great strengths of Bazaar is in its plugins. In this case, the bzr-svn plugin that will allow you to create bzr branches from an svn repository and push and pull from it just like you would any bzr parent branch. It's an excellent starting point for getting comfortable with bazaar without completely dumping subversion. It was a good transition for me as well, because I wasn't quite willing to commit (no pun intended) to bazaar when I first tried it out. Without bzr-svn, I wouldn't have been able to give bazaar a fair chance in working with my stable projects. Loggerhead I've never liked the Loggerhead name, but it's a great little piece of software. Loggerhead is a web viewer for bzr branches. A good example of what loggerhead looks like can be found here. It's always helpful to be able post a url for a specific revision, a diff between revisions, etc. The Gnome theme for Loggerhead took more work than expected, and so work is planned for making Loggerhead more easily themable in the future. Patch Queue Manager PQM has seriously changed the way that I feel about merge management. Just like Ian Clatworthy points out in his paper "Community-Agile Software Guidance", trunk should be release quality all the time. PQM makes it IMPOSSIBLE to break trunk, so trunk is always reliable. The basic idea of PQM is to take the whole queue of approved branches and merge them automatically if they pass all the tests. This leaves out the human error of merging, and keeps the quality of trunk up, so that development time isn't wasted trying to figure out who broke trunk, why, and how to fix it. Bundle Buggy The more I see and use Bundle Buggy, the more impressed I am with it. The code review voting is a new feature in Launchpad, but the Bazaar developers have been tracking code reviews and votes on the mailing list for quite some time. Bundle Buggy detects emails prefixed with [MERGE] (usually sent from bzr send), and tracks the comments made about the patch, until it has received the right amount of votes from the right people. All of this can be managed from the mailing list, so it doesn't require too much interaction for the review and merge process. The last thing that I would like to point out is that, while you can still build an infrastructure close to that of Launchpad, you still can't just up and build a community around your project. While I've blogged about this before, Launchpad is about building communities of people around open source. So sure, you can use tools that work together similar to Launchpad, but do you really want to put your project in a corner of the internet where not many people will find it? [Less]

At Bazcamp this weekend, I had many interesting conversations with a few Bazcampers about Launchpad and Bazaar. The original reason was that I was brainstorming stories for next month's NCLUG talk about Launchpad and Bazaar. As I talked about ... [More] workflows and processes, I started wondering how many other Launchpad and/or Bazaar success stories there were from the community, and how many utter fails have you had (and how can they be fixed). So, lazyweb, send me your success stories, your gripes, your flames and other adventures with Launchpad and Bazaar. If the stories are too long to leave in comments, send me your emails at paul at eventuallyanyway dot com. [Less]

I started writing this post last night after my wife fell asleep (a common occurrence). It was about Twitter, and why I twittered. The basic idea was that I enjoyed the micro-blogging because it was closer to a a real conversation than reading ... [More] someone's blog and posting comments. It's more of a round table where you select who sits at your table. It was personal, and I enjoy that. I've strengthened already existing acquaintances, and created new ones. For something that initially seemed like such a novelty, it's become a great tool. Then, this afternoon, after a 2 hour outage of Twitter, a few friends/coworkers pointed me at Identi.ca, which is a fully open source micro-blogging site. I usually just ignored the Twitter clones, because no one I knew had switched. However, it seemed that a few people I was quite interested in "following" had moved to Identi.ca and, as mindless as it sounds, I tweeted because of those around me. So I naturally I got an Identi.ca account. As I've been using Identi.ca, I've found a problem with it. It has no public facing API. This is absolutely tragic, as that's the only way I use Twitter. I have a little app called gTwitter that keeps me up to date. It crashes often, and I'm not fond of the Mono backend, but it did the job, and stayed out of my way. While Identi.ca apparently allows updating through a Jabber client, I can't get it to work. It has, however, been sending me updates from those I'm subscribed to, through IM. I hate that though, because it's an interruption I don't need. In defense of Identi.ca, these features ARE planned. It is also an open source app, so any user (including myself) could build these features, and the sky is the limit at that point. You certainly can't say that about Twitter. I just won't jump ship completely until after the features are there. I've got a little side project I've been putting 5-10 hours a week into (and less recently, as we're moving), but one of the high priorities I've been been working on is a public facing API. As far as I'm concerned, your web site is stuck in 1.0 world unless a user can easily write an external CRUD app with your database as its backend. It doesn't have to be fancy, maybe just a simple REST interface. The new internet is about mashups and using data in creative ways. A public API is THE secret sauce to successful web sites today. [Less]

Elliot Murphy and John Arbash Meinel were kind enough to invite me to co-write This Week in Bazaar. This week covers using bazaar in your build process. It was quite fun, and quite informative to chat with Elliot and John. Thanks to both of them Go read it!