Planet Banshee

Jorge Castro: Taking a different tack when it comes to growth.

2012-02-02T18:28:00+00:00

One of the “good problems” I think we have is there’s always things to do. As Charlie Kravetz points out, this can be a bad thing too.

I wanted to post this on Planet to get a better feel for what other people think.

I see my own participation in Xubuntu and Ubuntu development slowing down. Too many events, scheduled on top or close to each other, making it impossible to participate easily.

We are either scheduling too many things, or not checking calendars any more. In past years, it was quite easy to attend all the events held and still participate in development testing.

So for certain things I think we’re doing too much, which is why we’ve streamlined some of the IRC workshops to be shorter. However as I thought of a more detailed answer to Charlie’s concern I came up with the answer (I think).

I don’t think we have too many events, in fact, as we grow the number of events will grow, and our community will need to scale to match that. I am starting to realize that it’s not a bad thing that people can’t find the time to participate in everything.

The real problem isn’t that Charlie doesn’t scale, it’s that someone needs to have his back. So perhaps when events do clash we should look at which teams have what coverage in what events. For example, Charlie clearly needs to do ISO testing, but at the same time Xubuntu should have coverage in developer week because it’s really one of the best places to find new contributors that can …. help Charlie do ISO testing. Catch 22.

So maybe from a team level instead of an individual level we should be focusing on finding people who can jump in when a team is overtaxed for a week. For example, in hindsight maybe we could have done a better job helping Charlie find someone to cover developer week for Xubuntu. A forum thread, a planet post, a tweet, a mention on our Facebook page?

These are all things we could do to help the creaking an overburdened person might face. It’s a bummer that one person can’t scale, but at the same time having different people focusing on different individual things will probably be healthier in the long run.

Discuss!

Paul Cutler: Thank You EFF

Paul Cutler — 2012-01-26T03:26:47+00:00

For the last 8 years I’ve donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of my favorite non-profit organizations. The EFF continues to fight to protect our freedoms in the digital world – and for that I’m grateful.

Jorge Castro: Ubuntu Forums needs single sign on, looking for a PHP developer...

2012-01-20T09:33:01+00:00

I’m looking for a PHP/OpenID hero to help us in a bit of a bind we have on the forums.

The forums need a branding update, as well as an update to the vbulletin software they’re running. Unfortunately vbulletin doesn’t support openid(!). I know right.

In the past there was a bit of custom php that was done in order to enable Ubuntu users to use their Ubuntu Single Sign On account. This doesn’t work with the new version of vbulletin, and this is a blocker to the upgrade.

I’m in search of a volunteer(s) that can work with the Canonical IS team and the Forums Council to make this happen. Ideally you’d be comfortable with PHP and vbulletin already, and wouldn’t mind a brutal security review from the IS and security teams in Ubuntu, but hey, you’d be the guy that fixed logins on the forums, with all the fame (or infamy) and glory that it entails.

Feel free to ping me in the comments if you’re interested and I can link you up with the right people. The forums have always been a crucial element of Ubuntu’s success, and it’d be a great way to contribute if you’re looking for something to do.

The Banshee Blog: Banshee 2.3.4 released!

2012-01-19T16:17:22+00:00

Banshee 2.3.4 has been released! Banshee 2.3.4 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Alexander Kojevnikov: CodeSprint 2

Alexander Kojevnikov — 2012-01-15T04:21:58+00:00

Last weekend Interviewstreet conducted a second CodeSprint. The event had a format similar to the Google’s CodeJam: they gave you a bunch of problems and you had to program your way through as many of them as you could. There were a few differences though: the number of problems and the time given to solve them was higher (15 and 48h), they also ran solutions on their servers instead of just checking the output.

I managed to solve 5 problems and to rank 145th out of 1890 contestants, spending about 12h in total during the weekend. There were a few technical quirks in the process, but all in all I really enjoyed the sprint and was pleasantly surprised by the quality and the complexity of the problems.

In this post I will explain how I solved those 5 problems; it’s mostly for myself, to straighten the thoughts out, as it was a bit chaotic and stressful during the contest.

If you are interested in solutions make sure to check out the official CodeSprint website, they should have them available in a couple of days.

Picking Cards

Links: problem, solution

Sort cards by their number, then take them one by one. On step n the number of ways is multiplied by the number of cards at the beginning of the deck with c_i ≤ n. If this number is 0, it’s impossible to pick up all the cards.

The brute-force approach is O(N²) and could be too slow. To speed it up, we keep track of the last m : c_m ≤ n and start from there. As m is never decreased the overall complexity is O(N).

Coin Tosses

Links: problem, solution

On each toss we either have a head or a tail, so the expected number of remaining tosses T(n, m) = 1 + ½ × [T(n, m+1) + T(n, 0)]. We could try a dynamic programming approach, but the formula is cyclic.

However, for m = 0 the expected number of tosses can be expressed analytically: T(n, 0) = 2ⁿ⁺¹ – 2 (proof). Add the boundary condition T(n, n) = 0 and memoisation, and you have a solution.

Fraud Prevention

Links: problem, solution

One of the company-sponsored problems. We want to normalise email and street addresses and to keep two hashes with the combination of the normalised values and the deal IDs as keys. For each key we keep a list of credit cards along with order IDs. Then we process orders one by one and check all possible cases (see the source code comments).

I found this problem a bit uninteresting for a contest — it’s tedious and, uhm, un-algorithmic. However it would probably make a decent interview questions with all its practicalities.

Subsequence Weighting

Links: problem, solution

Generalisation of the Longest increasing subsequence problem. The algorithm is very similar: take each value one by one and maintain values (and cumulative weights) of the last elements of subsequences of certain weight. After we process all values, the last element will have the maximal weight.

One complication is that we need a data structure with efficient insertion, deletion, search and traversal times. One possibility is to use a red-black tree (as implemented by std::set) and augment it so that all nodes form a doubly-linked list. Also, unlike with the LIS algorithm, each insertion can lead to many deletions (see lines 74-82).

With such a data structure, the running time is still at O(n log n).

That was my favourite question, and the one I spent the most time on, even though in retrospect it doesn’t look all that complex.

Quora Nearby

Links: problem, solution

Another company-sponsored problem. A pity N was quite small and the brute-force approach actually worked. Higher limits would require a clever data structure, such as the k-d tree and would make the problem much harder and more interesting.

First we read all topics and questions and create a vector of all topics (ID and co-ordinates) and a map of topic IDs to the lists of question IDs.

Topic queries are straight-forward: we sort topics by distance (and IDs, in case the distance is the same) and print the first m IDs.

For queries it’s a bit more involving: again, we sort topics by distance, then check all associated questions using our map. The complication is that we need to check all questions for topics with the same distance, and include those with higher IDs.

Please never mind the code for this problem, my solution was accepted literally 5 minutes before the contest ended, as you can imagine I was a bit in a hurry.

Big thanks to the Interviewstreet team for a great weekend!

Alexander Kojevnikov: muspy API

Alexander Kojevnikov — 2012-01-15T04:21:28+00:00

muspy is a website that notifies you when your favourite artists release new albums. muspy is free software released under GNU AGPL.

Today I’m happy to announce the availability of the muspy API. The API allows you to create and modify user accounts, to manage the list of artists you want to follow and to receive their releases.

Someone is already working on an iPhone app that will use the API, expect more news on this front soon!

Jorge Castro: Yo.

2012-01-11T14:54:41+00:00

I also love Ubuntu. \o/

Jorge Castro: See you at SCALE!

2012-01-05T15:23:01+00:00

I can’t wait to see some people I haven’t seen in years at SCALE, and meet a bunch of new people!

Come find me and Clint, we’ll be doing talks about juju and Ubuntu Cloud all weekend, as well as answering questions the entire time. I’m easy to find, look for a Red Wings hat and an Ubuntu shirt.

Here’s our post about our talks.

Jorge Castro: bbiab

2011-12-24T02:22:03+00:00

Happy Holidays everyone, I’ll see you all in 2012, I’m off to get on a boat and explore the Caribbean.

Jorge Castro: GNOME Boxes looking for Debian/Ubuntu help...

2011-12-22T21:54:23+00:00

Zeeshan sends along that he’s looking for help bring GNOME Boxes to Ubuntu and Debian.

If you read any of my previous blog entries, you must be now familiar with this ‘express installation’ concept we have in Boxes. Its pretty neat actually, you just set a few options at the beginning and then you can leave Boxes (or your machine) and when you are back, everything is setup for you automatically in a new box.

I have invested a lot of time/efforts on this already and will be spending a lot more time in future as well but I am just one man so can not possibly cover all operating systems out there. That is why I am asking for help from anyone who will be interested in adding express installation support for Ubuntu and Debian while I focus on Fedora and Windows variants. Oh and if you are interested in adding support for some other distribution/OS, that contribution will also be more than welcomed.

In any case, happy hacking!

If you’re interested in doing this (it would be great to get Boxes in 12.04) let me know. You’ll likely need to link up with the Desktop Team, I can help get you talking to the right people if you want to rock this.

The Banshee Blog: Banshee 2.3.3 released!

2011-12-22T02:34:18+00:00

Banshee 2.3.3 has been released! Banshee 2.3.3 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Jorge Castro: The $43 Ikea Galant Standing Desk mod

2011-12-09T21:53:56+00:00

I’m on holiday and my parents are in town, so I was chatting with my dad about how to modify one of my Ikea Galant corners into a standing desk. Since standing desks are all the rage I’ve been thinking about modifying my desk (instead of spending money on a new one, though they are nice.)

Some of these mods include lifting up the legs, but my dad was concerned about how stable that would be, even though the cinder block mod looks like a nice easy solution.

So, instead of lifting the legs we wondered if we could leave the Galant frame alone on the ground, and just lift the top of the desk instead. So, we put our heads together, and then measured the frame of the desk. We went with 8 x 2x10 pieces of wood and then stood them on wideways on top of the frame. We needed some screws and L things to keep it solid and then we just reused the holes in the Galant:

And my dad proud of the final product:

It’s 43 inches tall. In hindsight I wasn’t expecting the bottom part to be so visible, otherwise we would have made the front there one piece of wood, but slicing up 2 boards into 16” pieces was cheap and easy to disassemble and assemble. I will likely make a little cloth skirt thing up front to hide that, after I figure out how to recable everything. After that it’ll be the ambient lighting but not while I live in this apartment, though that will be the final goal.

Anyway I hope this is useful to people as it’s been great for me so far and is cheap. We took the extra wood and made little side shelves too. The metal thing you see line tied to the bottom of the frame is an extra long power strip that we suspend upside down under the desk (a nice way to keep cables off the ground).

It took about 3 hours to finish with all the family bikeshedding and going to Home Depot included.

Nelson Marques: Erendriel the return of the psycho…

2011-12-02T20:25:44+00:00

“They burn his crops, shattered his farm and killed his wife… Ketheriel is back for revenge!” – taken from the Chronicles of Henchmen (Tome IV – Ketheriel, the return of the psycho), the sacred Codex that exalted the deeds of the bravest cut-throat adventurers of Henchmen (the best TBC guild on Grim Batol).

Erendriel - Protection Paladin of "Lethal Industry"

Ketheriel disappeared after 3 long months of wipes in the Sunwell Plateau (M’uru) at 1/3%… He was later revived on Cataclysm as Erendriel of Grim Batol and rejoined the ranks of Lethal Industry which holds many of the veterans from Henchmen.

Erendriel – The return of the psycho – Part II

Nelson Marques: Carnage on Banshee

2011-12-01T17:52:15+00:00

I just did maintenance on Banshee repositories and cleaned them up. This involved brutal carnage on the project configuration files! If something is broken from your branches, then update them, and for God’s sake if it’s important for you, please let me know. I’m on openSUSE Connect, so my contacts are available for everyone.

Banshee

openSUSE 11.4
openSUSE 12.1
openSUSE Factory
openSUSE Tumbleweed

Banshee:Unstable

openSUSE 12.1
openSUSE Factory
openSUSE Tumbleweed

Banshee:EL6 (Enterprise Linux 6)

CentOS 6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Scientific Linux 6
Currently waiting for Mono:EL6 to have some more submissions…

The Banshee Blog: Banshee 2.3.2 released!

2011-12-01T02:13:39+00:00

Banshee 2.3.2 has been released! Banshee 2.3.2 is part of the 2.3 development series leading up to 2.4, scheduled for March 2012.. Read the release notes for more info. Get it now!

Paul Cutler: Alan Moore & the Guy Fawkes Mask

Paul Cutler — 2011-11-27T15:25:43+00:00

Alan Moore talk to The Guardian about V for Vendetta and the use of the Guy Fawkes mask he created for V for Vendetta and its use by Occupy.

It is an irony noted with relish by critics of the protests – one also glumly acknowledged by many of the protesters – that the purchase of so many Vendetta masks has become a lucrative little side-earner for Time Warner, the media company that owns the rights to Moore’s creation. Efforts have been made to avoid feeding the conglomerate more cash, the Anonymous group reportedly starting to import masks direct from factories in China to circumvent corporate pockets; last year, demonstrators at a “Free Julian Assange” event in Madrid wore cardboard replicas, apparently self-made. But more than 100,000 of the £4-£7 masks sell every year, according to the manufacturers, with a cut always going to Time Warner. Does that irk Moore?

“I find it comical, watching Time Warner try to walk this precarious tightrope.” Through contacts in the comics industry, he explains, he has heard that boosted sales of the masks have become a troubling issue for the company. “It’s a bit embarrassing to be a corporation that seems to be profiting from an anti-corporate protest. It’s not really anything that they want to be associated with. And yet they really don’t like turning down money – it goes against all of their instincts.” Moore chuckles. “I find it more funny than irksome.”

Oh, poor Time Warner and your moral dilemmas. If only that was the least of your troubles.

Jorge Castro: Up the Irons!

2011-11-27T01:51:09+00:00

I met Nicko McBrain, drummer for Iron Maiden tonight!!

Jorge Castro: IRC Workshops for 12.04.

2011-11-25T21:38:59+00:00

Thanks to the Ubuntu Classroom team session at UDS we’ve got all the IRC Workshops planned already, along with spiffy ads to spread around.

After much discussion we have decided to “focus” the IRC workshops. Instead of one long week we’re smushing them up to just three days for each “week” but make the days longer to hit more time zones. So they will be from Tuesday to Thursday. Don’t worry, it’s the same amount of content, just concentrated.

And for OpenWeek we’re likely going to move to 30 minute sessions by default (though we can adjust this), which will mean instructors will have to be more prepared ahead of time. So, less typing wasting time, more time pasting in prepared material and answering user questions. No change for the Global Jam, keep rocking that!

Here’s a banner to plop on your blog!

Jorge Castro: UDS Group Photos now available.

2011-11-23T17:51:36+00:00

Sciri has it up on his blog:

Jorge Castro: Our first Charm School!

2011-11-22T18:41:00+00:00

We’re holding a Charm School on IRC.

juju Charm School is a virtual event where a juju expert is available to answer questions about writing your own juju charms. The intended audience are people who deploy software and want to contribute charms to the wider devops community to make deploying in the public and private cloud easy.

Attendees are more than welcome to:

Ask questions about juju and charms
Ask for help modifying existing scripts and make charms out of them
Ask for peer review on existing charms you might be working on.

Though not required, we recommend that you have |juju installed and configured if you want to get deep into the event.

Jorge Castro: Florida, land of sunshine and awesome people.

2011-11-20T19:12:00+00:00

Ok so I started making a list of people to thank but it started to get long and then I realized that if I missed someone it would be even worse, so I am sticking to one person:

Chris Johnston

He works on summit.ubuntu.com, the loco directory, and status.ubuntu.com. He’s basically an infrastructure ninja.

Jorge Castro: Chucktallica

2011-11-15T21:01:06+00:00

Jorge Castro: Ask Mark, Wednesday, 23 November, 1500UTC

2011-11-15T18:38:00+00:00

Every Ubuntu Open Week we have a session called “Ask Mark”, where Mark Shuttleworth answers questions from the community in IRC.

Due to scheduling conflicts this didn’t happen last Open Week, so we’re holding a special standalone event on IRC where people can ask Mark questions.

Ask Mark will take place in #ubuntu-classroom at 1500UTC on Freenode. You’ll need to join that channel, and #ubuntu-classroom-chat, where you will ask questions, which will then get passed onto a bot and onto Mark.

Some tips for asking questions:

Mark operates at a macro level of the project, so questions like “How do I get Flash to work?” or “Why did you pick this specific version of the kernel to ship in 11.10” he’s likely to not know the answer to that. So unless you want a “Go ask the person who runs that team” answer try to ask questions about Ubuntu at a higher level than asking about plumbing.
Make your question count - put some thought into it, plenty of people will be asking good questions, so don’t waste an opportunity by asking something like “Where can I download 11.10?”
Here are the archives of the past sessions if you want to see what has been asked before if you want an answer.
It can get chaotic with the amount of people asking questions, so please be patient.

Here’s the classroom wiki page with information on how to participate if you need more detail. Hope to see you there!

Nelson Marques: Banshee 2.2.1 on Banshee stable repository…

2011-11-13T18:24:19+00:00

I’ve submitted on release date the update to Banshee 2.2.1 to GNOME:Apps which was declined because of a few issues on the ChangeLog. Issues corrected (typo and added a comment for .xz BuildRequires), resubmitted and accepted.

Once the update was accepted on GNOME:Apps, I’ve submitted and accepted the very same update to Banshee stable repository which now provides Banshee 2.2.1 that delivers 29 bug fixes (since Banshee 2.2.0). It should auto-update once the packages rebuild.

During the last days I’ve also done some extensive bug triage in bugzilla.novell.com regarding Banshee, and we’re now with 14 bugs open. I’ve cleared a few with the help and knowledge of upstream, some were deprecated and related to no longer supported products (ex: openSUSE 11.2).

Changes introduced in Banshee Repositories

At Gabriel Burt’s request, I’ve branched all Mono packages from Banshee to Banshee:Unstable and removed the Banshee repository as a source to grab dependencies. So Banshee:Unstable now provides all the stuff (auto-updates from changes in Banshee main repository).
I’ve created a Banshee:EL6 repository to provide Banshee for Enterprise Linux 6, which should source the Mono packages required from Mono:EL6 repository (work being done), thus we will provide soon enough Banshee for Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL, CentOS and Scientific Linux 6).

TODO List

Prepare a maintenance submission for openSUSE 12.1 to update for Banshee 2.2.1 which delivers 29 bug fixes, some critical (bnc#727999)
Update Banshee:Unstable to Banshee 2.3.1, the latest development release;
Populate Mono:EL6 witht he Mono packages required to build Banshee for Enterprise Linux 6;
Continue the bug triage massacre on bugzilla.novell.org;

Jorge Castro: I'm as transparent as aluminum.

2011-11-13T03:23:00+00:00

We try hard in Ubuntu to be transparent. We publish our blueprints on our plans before we even get to UDS:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-p
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-o
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/sprints/uds-n
Each session at UDS has an associated etherpad: http://summit.ubuntu.com/ on the schedule, the plenaries are streamed live on http://video.ubuntu.com/live/. Some select sessions are video’ed and put on the Youtube channel, though we don’t have the resources to tape them all.
Every single team’s goals is outlined on status.ubuntu.com.

and so on. Our teams provide IRC transcripts of all their meetings. Here’s the entire history of the Desktop Team’s meetings, and here’s the set from the Kernel team. And here’s a set from the Release Team. All our meetings are open to the public, and people are encouraged to participate.

Up until this cycle, Mark Shuttleworth has done an open Question and Answer session on IRC every 6 months for the past 5 years. And it’s not just Mark, we’ve subjected Rick Spencer (current head of engineering management at Canonical) and Matt Zimmerman (CTO for Canonical for years), as well as Kate Stewart (release manager) to open user questions on IRC.

(Mark was on holiday during openweek this cycle, but we’ll make it up to you).

We do try our best to respond to user ideas on Brainstorm, but for obvious reasons we cant’t scale so well at that, so we do our best to hit the top ideas every 6 months.

Despite these efforts, it can be frustrating to hear that Ubuntu is making decisions without input from “the outside”. How do you think we can improve our transparency?

IMO I think we do a decent job of being transparent, and people who follow Ubuntu know what to follow, but this might not be so obvious to people who are new. So maybe we’re awesome at being transparent, but not so much at communicating, which is fine, we can fix that.

For my part, this cycle I’m going to put my personal TODO list out there in the public. I used to use my own internal GTD-like thing but I’ved moved to Trello so here’s my every day TODO list:

My general Community team board - this is my every day stuff. Everything from claiming my expenses to hanging out with Clint.
My plans for cloud.ubuntu.com
Our plans for IRC classrooms

Immediately you’ll notice that my TODO list totally doesn’t match my assigned blueprints. That’s because after UDS I went on a trip immediately and then we had a holiday on Friday, so at this time my TODO list and my assigned blueprints don’t match. And you’ll also notice that my user page on status.ubuntu.com isn’t updated yet. It will be up to me to update all of these to make sense. So yeah, you can see how behind I am, I haven’t even consolidated my tasks from UDS with my TODO list yet. On some of these TODOs you’ll see that I share them with other people.

And you can follow along with me as I work on this cycle. Follow my trello boards, find me on IRC, follow me on G+, follow my status reports, whatever works for you. I am going to make a concerted effort to make what I do as public as possible. I’ve outlined some ways that other teams outline their progress. Like I said, I think we do a decent job of being open, but maybe we need to do a better job at making that obvious to people, how can we improve this?

Jorge Castro: Power blues got you down?

2011-11-13T01:36:50+00:00

Colin King has started a wiki page with kernels that include a proposed fix to the infamous power regression bug.

If you’re experiencing this, follow the instructions on the page and report back by adding your laptop to the page.

Many thanks to Matthew Garrett for the proposed fix and for explaining the entire EFI/power thing to me at the bar at UDS. It’s always good to hang out with an OG at a conference.

Nelson Marques: Banshee 2.2.0 for RHEL6 and clones… (soon!)

2011-11-12T16:37:25+00:00

My $dayjob requirements are around Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which took me to make a subscription of RHEL6 to use also for personal purposes on one of my laptops. Since RHEL is somehow limited in providing the stuff I want to use, I need to build some of my applications which are provided by RHEL (ex: transmission, banshee, etc).

Red Hat’s stance towards Mono leaves no doubts, sad thing… But where Red Hat fails to meet my needs, SUSE delievers, and OBS (openSUSE Build Service) takes no prisoners, even if it’s to help delivering Banshee to a competitors platform. So here’s the nice thing… I’ve created a new sub-project under Banshee in OBS on Banshee:RHEL on which I will provide builds of Banshee (the same provided by Banshee:Unstable for openSUSE), and to be a gent to many users out there, I’ve expanded the functionality of this repository to CentOS 6 and Scientific Linux 6, thus delivering custom builds of Banshee latest release to this platforms.

Since we don’t have some of this components available on OBS to build Banshee, mainly Mono packaged for RHEL and clones, I’ve decided accomplish this repository doing the following:

The mono stack used is provided by Fedora 17 (currently rawhide) source rpms (I will have to follow Fedora packaging, but that’s cool, Fedora packaging is remarkable and nicely accomplished, easy task);
The dependencies no present on OBS and that are provided by Red Hat el6 RPMs are rebuilt based on Red Hat source rpms (ex: giflib);
The dependencies not provided by OBS and Red Hat el6 SRPMS are taken from Fedora latest release (ex: libunwind);

For the start this is how things will be done. With more time in the future I’m planning to make a Mono repository for RHEL and clones on OBS providing all the Mono stack based on Fedora packaging and once it’s complete, I’ll just source this repository for Banshee:RHEL and will remove the current packages from Mono (will happen in a few months).

I’m looking for testers for CentOS 6 and Scientific Linux 6, for RHEL I’ll test them myself. If you think you can help or if you find bugs, please file them on bugzilla.novell.com against Banshee and I’ll triage them.

Alexander Kojevnikov: Improved Last.fm import in muspy

Alexander Kojevnikov — 2011-11-10T08:20:46+00:00

muspy is a free / open-source album release notification service.

To make it easier to populate the list of artists you want to follow, muspy allows to import top artists from your Last.fm account. Today this function became more flexible: in addition to getting overall top artists, it can now import most frequently listened artists in the last 12, 6 and 3 months and 1 week.

I also lifted the limit on the number of artists that can be imported from 200 to 500, and increased the number selected by default from 50 to 100.

Do you have a feature that you want to see in muspy? Let me know! Alternatively, feel free to fork muspy on GitHub and to send your pull requests.

If you are a music lover and never tried muspy before, give it a go! With muspy you will not miss an album release ever again.

Alexander Kojevnikov: muspy is now free software

Alexander Kojevnikov — 2011-11-10T08:04:58+00:00

muspy is an album release notification service, you give it a list of your favourite artists and it sends you a notice (by email or RSS) as soon as they have new releases.

I wrote muspy 3 years ago to scratch a personal itch — I was spending too much time online checking if bands I’m into have something new; but was still missing many releases.

muspy was initially developed for Google App Engine, which was the hot new thing back then. In retrospect, while working with App Engine was extremely educational and a lot of fun, it wasn’t a very good fit. The recent announcement on the price increase was the last straw — I decided to re-write it in vanilla Django and to host it myself.

I’m also releasing the source code under GNU AGPL in the hope that it will be beneficial for the service and for its users.

Major changes since the previous version:

Track release groups instead of releases

This was the most frequently requested feature, there were too many duplicate releases for some artists, release groups make everything much cleaner. This change was also the reason why the new version is almost a complete rewrite.
Stars are off by default for new releases

muspy allows to star individual releases, starred releases show up on top of the sorted list of releases. This feature wasn’t used by many which resulted in all releases being starred for most users. Now stars are off for new releases, if you want to star, you have to do it manually on the website. I migrated stars only for users with S < min(R, 40) / 2, where S is the number of starred releases and R is the total number of releases for all artists you follow.
Speed

It used to take more than a week to check all artists for new releases, now the checking cycle is much shorter. Things like importing from Last.fm or adding a comma-separated list of artists should also be significantly faster.
Blog

I will be blogging about muspy here instead of on the website itself. Feel free to subscribe to the full feed or just to the muspy category.

Other than that, muspy remains pretty much the same. I migrated all the data but I encourage you to go the old site at muspy.appspot.com and to check if everything was migrated correctly. Please note that the old site’s background processes are not running and it will be taken down in a month or two.

Now that muspy is free and open-source, don’t hesitate to look at the code, tweak it and suggest improvements. Git and GitHub make it too damn easy!

And if you never used muspy before, give it a try!

Jorge Castro: Power user's team 12.04 roadmap.

2011-11-03T14:34:33+00:00

Like all superhero movies, it’s back, this time with James Gifford driving the effort to help document “hot rodding” tips for power users. Here’s his proposal for a 12.04 roadmap.

And here’s the wiki page

Feel free to dive in!