OLPC RetroScope

I have created a new OLPC XO activity called the RetroScope. It shows you live video, but with a zero to 10 second delay. It is super simple, but can be a lot of fun! Tech Summary This activity builds on the experimentation I did a year ago with the XO's camera, and is inspired by Nat's original idea for the RetroScope. The source is 109 lines of python, and is released under the MIT license:

git clone https://banshee-project.org/~gburt/retroscope.git

Installation

• Go to the Control Panel then Software update,

• expand Modify activity groups,
• enter this Group URL: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/Joyride
• and click Add and then Refresh.

When that's finished, you should see the RetroScope activity (and several others) available to be installed. RetroScoping After installation, you can launch RetroScope from Home: Enjoy!

A Talkative Banshee

I gave a talk about Banshee to the Chicago LUG a couple weeks ago. It went great – a good crowd, lots of questions and interest – and was a pleasure to communicate what Banshee is and how we're rocking. I started my presentation by running through the major features (the vertical list on the left), verbally going into detail about niceties, fun things, and usability features as I went. I then talked about project organization, history, measurements of our progress and growth, and how to learn more and get involved. And finally I spent some time alternating taking questions and demoing – an interactive process that generated more questions and demo opportunities. The time I spent putting together my slide deck was a good chance for introspection about the project and thinking about how to effectively convey my excitement to a diverse group of people. I'm quite happy with the resulting content and design, but look forward to tweaking it for new talks to different audiences, like a talk to a class at IIT I'll give next week.

Muinshee

I'm enjoying being in Provo, Utah this week at the beautiful Novell campus, with coworkers from all over, hacking away on projects of our choosing. I'm grateful to Novell for having the foresight to give us Hack Week, a time to explore and experiment - above and beyond our weekly ITO and official responsibilities. The amazing Brad Taylor, who just joined Novell last week, joined me in creating a Muine-like interface for Banshee. People love Muine's simple interface for queueing and playing songs. Our goal is to replicate that experience leveraging Banshee. In a day's work, we got things working well. The code will land in trunk soon, and therefore will be in Banshee 1.4. We've already started on our next Hack Week project, adding support for AirTunes to Banshee. We will be at the Utah Open Source Conference on Thursday and Friday doing it live. On Friday Aaron and Sandy are giving talks on Banshee and a11y.

A Thing of Beauty

Aaron improved the cover art display in Now Playing, adding a reflection, basic song info, and cross fading between cover art. It's gorgeous. We're heads-down working on all the features for Banshee 1.4, planned for mid-September. We have a lot on our plates, but features are starting to land, and we have quite a crew working around the clock and around the world to make 1.4 happen.

• Alan McGovern's patches to support RSS feeds that contain .torrent enclosures were committed.
• Chris Howie's patch adding awesome visualization support to Banshee via his OpenVP project is nearly ready.
• I committed some important building blocks for fast, slick device synchronization.
• Aaron committed Replay Gain playback support (analysis still to come).
• Scott Peterson and Aaron are working on directory watching.
• Bertrand Lorentz has Mirage, the really nifty accoustical analysis playlist generator, working for Banshee 1.2. He's also been doing a great job as Patch Master, making sure patches get the attention they need. He's also been fixing tons of bugs.
• Ruben Vermeersch has a patch nearly ready for optionally keeping filenames and folders synchronized with metadata.
• Andrew Conkling, our Bug Master, has been doing a super-human job of helping others with their bug reports and patches.
• Sandy Armstrong has been hacking on adding interactivity to the playing track info, so you'll be able to click the artist name, album, etc and do cool stuff.
• Alex Hixon, who previously did a ton of work with Audioscrobbler and DAAP, has been fixing some bugs.
• Bob Copeland's Rio Karma device support patch was committed.
• Félix Velasco, Peter de Kraker, and Christopher Halse Rogers have contributed a lot to the recent releases.

Banshee would not be what it is today without 64+ code contributors, 60+ translators, and countless others who have filed bugs, given support on IRC and the mailing list, and helped in other ways. If you want to get involved, please do!

Banshee 1.2.1 Planned for Tuesday

We're planning a Banshee 1.2.1 release for next Tuesday, primarily to ship updated translations. We have quite a few languages with good coverage, but it could be a lot better. Translators, please make sure Banshee is available in your language!

Banshee 1.2 Released

A month and a half after 1.0, we are happy to announce the release of Banshee 1.2, packed with new features and tons of bug fixes and improvements. Several of these features were things we had in Banshee 0.13.2 or before, but are new to the Banshee 1.x series. Big new features and fixes:

• 10-band Equalizer
• Internet Radio
• Music Recommendations
• DAAP Client
• Playlist Importing (.pls, .m3u)
• Multi-Artist (Compilation) Album Support
• Manual Reordering of Playlists and Play Queue
• Amarok migration (including ratings, playcounts, and podcasts)

Recommendations based on what's playing on internet radio station And a host of smaller features and fixes, including:

• More robust parsing of podcast (RSS) files
• Find and use cover art from the album folder (cover.jpg, etc)
• Add Last.fm as a cover art provider
• The last playback source is used when the Play Queue is empty
• Better performance (start up time, memory usage, searching, etc)
• Disable the screensaver when in fullscreen mode
• Much improved performance and UI for automatic cover art fetching
• Fix issues with importing and playing files in folders named Music*
• Over 80 bugs were fixed since 1.0

We had been hoping to get library folder watching in for 1.2, but wasn't finished in time. Read the release notes for the full scoop! Digg It!

New York's Finest?

A NYPD officer intentionally, violently battered a random, non-aggresive bicylist to the ground in front of a crowd of onlookers last Friday. This makes me incredibly angry. Is this the kind of bicycle-friendly city Mayor Bloomberg is trying to create? One where innocent cyclists are threatened not only by dangerous roads and traffic, piston-produced pollution, but by the police? Watch the entire video on YouTube to see it for yourself. Even if you aren't a fan of bicycling, critical mass, young people, etc - nobody deserves to be treated like this. Digg It!

Freedom and Autonomy for Network Services

Nearly a year ago I posted some thoughts on freedom for network services. In March the FSF invited a group to Boston to explore this topic. The meeting was at once a brain storming session and a cognitive map-reduce on the ideas generated. Today we have launched a site called autonomo.us, and a draft statement, the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It reads in part:

Developers of network service software are encouraged to:

• Use the GNU Affero GPL, a license designed specifically for network service software, to ensure that users of services have the ability to examine the source or implement their own service.
• Develop freely-licensed alternatives to existing popular but non-Free network services.
• Develop software that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users.

The notes from the original meeting (collaboratively taken with Gobby) are quite interesting, and go into much more detail on many things. It has been a pleasure to be a part of this effort, and I hope we can help move the discussion and mainstream thought on network services to be freedom and principle focused, learning from and leveraging the free software and free culture movements. Thanks to the FSF and Mako for starting this process!

More Humor

On Politics Discussing the madness here in Turkey - youtube is completely blocked - with Aaron and Miguel tonight, finally put to words, in the dialect of our times, what I'd been thinking all week: On Tabs The tab meme on pgo is pretty hilarious. Very surprised how many people are horrified, and I feel it's my duty to share a sampling of the 21 comments from my post:

I want to die

this is great stuff. you can really feel how the gnome 3 announcement creates an incentive for innovation. rock on guys.

This is literally a NIGHTWARE, thhe usability of Gnome applications (Totem, Nautilus, etc) being plain slaughtered within a few days :-( I seriously wish they removed the whole tab widget from GTK+ to prevent this sort of bullshit from happening.

I wish GNOME wasn't becoming so KDE-ish.

A couple people even commented in horror after I'd commented about the reality of it all.

Tabtastic Banshee

By outrageous amounts of popular demand (and feature pressure from Totem), we are pleased to announce tab support in Banshee! You can open your Music Library in one tab, your yummy Apple device in another, and be watching a video in another, all at the same time! I'm really excited about this new direction that GNOME is taking. I can't wait for tab support in Gnometris.

Banshee BoF

Upon arriving at the conference today, we were told we'd missed our Birds of a Feather session. Turns out they changed the schedule, and the printed ones they gave everybody are out of date. BUT, we talked them into giving us back our spot, so: The Banshee BoF is on for 2:30pm in the x-large room!

Banshee Momentum

We're planning a Banshee 1.2 release for early July, before GUADEC. It should be a really great release, including multi-artist album fixes, internet radio, library directory watching, recommendations, and probably a couple other big items. You can grab Banshee from svn trunk to test the latest changes - internet radio and multi-artist support are already committed - and to contribute by reporting and fixing bugs, translating Banshee, or writing some new code. If you haven't tried Banshee 1.0 yet, you should!

Banshee 1.0 Released!

We have released Banshee 1.0, with all the great features we've blogged about in Alpha 1 through RC1. And we have an awesome new website! I'm loving using Banshee 1.0 every day, rediscovering my music library (and album art!), discovering new music on Last.fm, and enjoying podcasts and video podcasts I never knew existed. Don't forget to come to our BoF, lightning talk, and main talk at GUADEC 2008! Digg It!

Some Banshee Bragging Rights

According to Pulse, Banshee is currently the #2 GNOME project "kicking ass and taking names", and Aaron is one of the top 12 GNOME hackers you should buy a drink. We're both currently in the top 15 bug closers. Our Ohloh page says we have a "large, active development team", "increasing year-over-year development activity", are valued at $3,782,339 USD, and our commit activity is off the charts. We've been on the front page of digg twice in the last months, getting over 530 and 670 diggs. And having a little over 50 people in #banshee was a good day not long ago, but we're at 79 right now. Thanks to our contributors, community, and Novell for being so supportive. Look out for Banshee 1.0!

Banshee 1.0 Release Candidate 1

We have released Banshee 1.0 Release Candidate 1 just over a week after Beta 2, and with over 24 bugs fixed and a few last minute features.

• View the release notes
• Banshee 1.0 RC 1 Source (bz2)
• openSUSE 10.3 users can
• Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1
• Ubuntu users should go to the Banshee team's PPA
• Note: you might get Beta 2 until RC 1 packages are up

Banshee 1.0 is right around the corner. We are now string and feature frozen until its release, so translators, please update your translations! Digg It!

Two Weeks in Istanbul

Just confirmed my flight to Istanbul to attend GUADEC! I'm arriving a day early and staying almost a week afterward, so if there are any adventurers or locals who want to hang out, share accommodations, show me around, or take a mini beach vacation, I'd love to hear from you! I'm really looking forward to veggie moussaka, hummus, coffee, seeing friends, and making new ones. Aaron and I missed the call-for-papers so we aren't booked for a normal speaking slot. Does anybody know what we can do at this point to either speak or hold one or more Banshee sessions? Is there a waiting list for speaker cancellations, or a BoF signup, etc? Thanks! (BTW, you can follow me on twitter! I know, I'm just making your day!)

Improved Podcasting

I just committed a patch to Banshee's podcasting that lets you filter on new items with a single click. By default, the New Items filter will be selected. Items are marked old after being played, or manually by pressing y. This functionality will be in the next release, but you can run it today and help us test for 1.0 by building Banshee from svn. Since this patch has what I consider an aweseomly slick keybinding, I'll remind you of some of our other useful (and awesome) key bindings:

/       focus/select text in search bar
q       queue the selected tracks (works for podcasts!)
y       mark the selected podcast tracks as old
j/k     scroll selection down/up in the filter or track lists
space   pause/play
enter   play
ctrl-d  bookmark playing item at current position
F2      rename the selected source

Future podcast features will include playlist and smart playlist support, and some awesome ideas we have for an integrated podcast directory. Stay tuned!

Guadec Videos in Banshee

Building on the work Thomas and others have done getting the GUADEC 2007 videos online, I have created a RSS feed of the videos. Here is Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 subscribed to the feed and downloading two talks and streaming James' talk at the same time: RSS Video Podcast:

Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 Released

We just released Banshee 1.0 Beta 2, with a ton of bug fixes and some sweet new features! This is hot on the heels of Beta 1, released just over two weeks ago, and is the fifth release in the series leading up to 1.0.

• View the release notes
• Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 Source (bz2)
• openSUSE 10.3 users can
• Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1
• Ubuntu users should go to the Banshee team's PPA
• Note: you might get Beta 1 until Beta 2 packages are up

You can now use Banshee to subscribe to, browse, and search your favorite audio and video podcasts.
Banshee displaying, streaming, and downloading podcasts You don't even have to wait for episodes to download to enjoy them; Banshee will happily stream the audio or video. And of course, your podcasts and subscriptions from Banshee 0.13.2 and before are migrated for you, and any podcast files in your Music Library moved into the Podcast source. Also new in this release is Auto Rip. After enabling it in Preferences, CDs will be automatically imported as soon as metadata is loaded for them and it's confirmed they're not already in your Library. The last big feature is we have integrated with Brasero, the powerful disc burning application, for audio CD burning. Check out the release notes for download info, more screenshots, updated dependency list, and the list of contributors. As always, you can chat with us in #banshee, e-mail us at banshee-list, and learn more about Banshee on our wiki. Digg It!

Down and Out in Chicago

I'm a big fan of Cory Doctorow, the person, the advocate, and the author. He's extremely eloquent, funny, and grounded. I got the chance to meet Cory tonight at a reading of his latest book, Little Brother — which is fantastic; I couldn't put it down. I gave Cory a Banshee shirt and told him about our upcoming 1.0, since he's a GNU/Linux user (his words and his actions speak volumes) and he popped into #banshee a while back. Anyway, if you haven't seen Cory speak, he's able to explain difficult, technical issues to non-techies in a way that they can understand and makes geeks proud. I'm happy to have finally met him.

F-Spot Summer of Code

I am excited to be mentoring Andrew Wytyczak-Partyka this summer as part of GSoC. Andrew will create a library implementing the Digital Photo Access Protocol (DPAP) and integrate it into F-Spot. I'm not familiar with DPAP, so any experts please feel free to give us pointers. Andrew previously did work on face recognition for F-Spot/GSoC. I see he's already been added to Planet GNOME, so you should be hearing from him before too long. Work officially starts on May 26. F-Spot was lucky enough to get three SoC students this year. The other two are Ruben Vermeersch working on the sidebar and possibly GEGL integration, and Vasiliy Kirilichev working on color profile support. It's great to see F-Spot getting this much attention. I'm also looking forward to seeing the results of Cosimo Cecchi's work on GNOME media integration. Thanks to Google for creating and sponsoring the SoC, and to Novell for giving many of its engineers, including me, time to participate.

Banshee Podcast Support Coming in Beta 2

First, a quick note to people using the Ubuntu Banshee 1.0 PPA packages. Unfortunately, the packager messed up and at first released packages without iPod or MTP support. And now it has come to my attention (via comments and bugs from disappointed users) that the packages include the podcast extension, when it is pre-alpha and should not have been included. Hopefully the Ubuntu guys will get fixed packages out soon, and be more careful with packaging in the future. Jorge is working to make things right. We do expect to have the podcast extension ready by Beta 2. And Beta 2 will have auto-rip support which I just committed last night. After enabling it in your Preferences, whenever you insert a CD it will automatically begin importing it, if it's not already in your library and if MusicBrainz information can be found for it. Very useful if you are ripping many CDs.

Banshee 1.0 Beta 1 Released

We have just released Banshee 1.0 Beta 1, aka 0.99.1! This release adds some major features and lots of polish.

• View the release notes
• Banshee 1.0 Beta 1 Source (bz2)
• openSUSE 10.3 users can
• Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1

MTP and iPod device support have landed! Both MTP and iPod support album artwork, on-the-fly transcoding (converting between file formats), and video support! Banshee playing music, showing cover art, and transferring to an MTP device Other features and fixes include:

• Fullscreen video playback (go to Now Playing and press f or hit the Fullscreen button)
• Extensions can be enabled and disabled in the new Mange Extensions tab within your Preferences.
• Banshee can be scripted using Boo
• Improved gstreamer error handling (for missing files, codecs, etc)
• A bug with play counts, introduced in Alpha 3, has been fixed
• Writing metadata to file was not working in the Alphas, is fixed
• Issues with the play queue should all be resolved
• Limiting smart playlists by file size or duration works
• Shuffle and repeat are automatically disabled while playing Last.fm

Default Smart Playlists

This release also features default smart playlists, created for new users and users with zero smart playlists. There is a more extensive list of predefined smart playlists, including the defaults, available in the New Smart Playlist dialog. Thanks to Aaron Bockover, Alexander Hixon, Bertrand Lorentz, Christopher Rogers, Scott Peterson, Sebastian Dröge, and Wouter Bolsterlee for code contributions for this release, and to Daniel Nylander (sv), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Jordi Mas (ca), and Wouter Bolsterlee (nl) for updated translations! And to Jorge Castro for testing and release notes help, and Michael Monreal and Andrew Conkling for testing and bugzilla work! You can follow the posts of Banshee contributors on Planet Banshee. We are a friendly, vibrant community and always glad to have people join us! If you have been wanting to contribute back to free software and GNOME, I think you'll find Banshee's code and C# a pleasure to work in, and a healthy amount of support and encouragement from a very active community. Join us on our mailing list, in our IRC chatroom, and on our wiki! Digg It!

Banshee at LugRadio Live

Aaron and I gave a 30 minute talk on Banshee to a packed room at LugRadio Live last Saturday. Media Archive did a great job of filming the talks and getting them on DVD by the end of the conference. I ripped the DVD and posted the video on Google Video and as a 114MB Ogg/Theora file. I really enjoyed hanging out with Chris Toshok, Dave Camp, Erinn Clark, Sandy Armstrong, Ryan Paul, Zonker, Steve and Ian from Songbird, and tons of other cool people. Our community is full of friendly, social people. Zonker and Aaron did a great job getting hundreds of awesome Banshee shirts for us: Photo CC-BY-SA by Ian McKellar I'm hoping to make it to Penguicon in Detroit this weekend, though I think I'm getting sick, so at this point I think it's not happening. Jorge says he can give my Banshee talk for me, and hopefully we can get some shirts there.

Banshee Media Player

Banshee is now the Banshee Media Player. With the release of 1.0 Alpha 2 we've added support for video management and playback! It works, looks, and feels great. Our goal with trunk has always been to fix fundamental design issues and create a well-organized, flexible, and powerful code base. And video support has proven to us that we've been successful. We were able to add video management with very little code and playlists, smart playlists, searching, queuing, and bookmarks all just work. We also have a wonderful new source called Now Playing. It sits at the top of your source list and is where video playback happens. And the idea, coming in Alpha 3, is when you're playing audio you'll find visualizations, Last.fm recommendations, and other contextual information there. Aaron goes into more detail about features, running the latest from svn, and more on his blog.

Subvocalization

My friend Michael Callahan (no, really, he is my close friend) and his team have been working hard for years on the Audeo, a device that sits on your neck and understands the electrical signals it can pick up from your nerve/vocal cord activity - even if you're subvocalizing. From the start, it's been a project to improve the quality of life for people with ALS and similar health issues, but they're expanding their vision in all sorts of awesome ways - including demonstrating the first subvocalized telephone call. Michael is a fantastic person doing amazing work, and he's getting recognition, from winning big grants to doing the Tour de Web - on BoingBoing, TechCrunch, and Netscape-creator Marc Andreessen's blog just in the last two days. That's got to be over a million viewers. Says Marc:

I have a feeling that someday, this may be up there with "Come here, Watson, I need you."

I wonder if Marc knows that Michael is doing his work at his alma mater. If you have read Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (it's free, CC-BYNDNC), or have seen Michael's demonstrations, you can't help but be excited by this.

Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1

Aaron and I are tremendously excited to announce the release of Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1. User Focused We have a ton of new features - a slick artist/album browser, a play queue, powerful search, better Last.fm radio, an equalizer, and continuous playback from a given playlist or source, even if you browse another playlist or check what's on Last.fm. And things are faster - much faster - thanks to using SQLite to do the heavy lifting. Visit the release notes for more pretty pictures and details about this release, including missing features and running it alongside Banshee 0.13.2 or earlier. Developer Friendly Banshee's source tree is better organized than ever. And with tools like MonoDevelop, working on Banshee is fun. Two of MonoDevelop's many features, autocompletion and jump to class/method-declaration, are especially valuable to people new to Banshee development. If you want to tweak Banshee, fix a bug, write an extension, or just explore the code, I encourage you to install MonoDevelop and get started building trunk. We have a vibrant community ready to help you on our mailing list and on IRC in #banshee. For those running openSUSE 10.3: Digg it

A Reason to Hope

I'm thrilled that my close friend Barack Obama is inspiring others like he has inspired me. I'm thrilled to have a president

• who leads with hope and unity, not fear and divisions,
• who improves on JFK's "ask not" line with "we invest in you, you invest in your country",
• who is as consistent with his positions and demeanor as he is with his beautiful website and branding.
• who finds the time to vote against giving the telecoms immunity for spying on us, unlike Senator Clinton.

I call him my close friend because you can't read the honest, heartfelt story of his pre-political life (Dreams From my Father) without feeling like he's your brother, your friend.

Howling Queries

Banshee's search code is getting revamped. Before getting into the technical discussion, I want to note that simple queries that you can perform in stable today will most of the time produce the same results in trunk. In trunk, the default operator in user-queries is AND, so a query dave matthews is parsed as dave AND mathews. Filtering is done in real-time as you type, and mal-formed queries are handled gracefully. You can also specify fields (by:dave, album:"under the table", rating=4). Trunk is well organized into assemblies that break along logical boundaries. One of these assemblies is called Hyena, and contains reusable data-oriented classes. I want to highlight one namespace in it that has come a long way in the last few weeks. Hyena.Data.Query The fundamental data structure in Hyena.Data.Query is the QueryNode tree, made up of QueryTermNodes (literal values, field queries) and QueryListNodes (and, or, not). We have two parsers, UserQueryParser and XmlQueryParser, as well as methods to take a tree and produce user or XML queries. This means we can go from a user query to XML and back, or vice-versa. Given a list of queryable fields and their mapping to Banshee's database (a QueryFieldSet), we can also take a tree and produce SQL for actually carrying out the search. You can see all this in action if you run trunk from a terminal: All this work makes searching much faster (straight against the database), unifies our search infrastructure, and makes it trivial to implement features like dragging a smart playlist onto the search entry and turning a search into a smart playlist. Both our user-query language and XML are extremely close to the XESAM spec, and we want to be compliant. We're working with the XESAM team to make sure it meets our needs.

Bansheescoped

I'm in Boston this week working with Aaron and hanging out with Miguel and others. In between amazing people with the XO retroscope, we've been busy getting Banshee 0.13.2 out - and it's here! Support for new iPods, a Last.fm plugin (see below), updated TagLib#, and lots of other fixes and features got in during this long release cycle. Over 10 people contributed to this release - thanks to everybody! Aaron has blogged about the release too. Screencast demoing the new Last.fm radio plugin. Ogg/Theora, 69 seconds, 4.1 MB. Besides Last.fm server errors, which cause some songs to be skipped, and a bug where new stations don't show songs on the first run, the plugin works great. I discovered five new artists with it and already bought their CDs. We will do one more release off the stable branch within the next couple weeks to fix the Last.fm new station bug and make the new MTP support rock solid before we focus 100% on trunk.

Pacing Progress

I got Karl Fogel's excellent Producing Open Source Software for Christmas and have been enjoying reading and learning from it. One suggestion he has is to have a svn-commits list that includes full diffs to allow for fast, easy code reviews. I brought this up on the GNOME infrastructure list, where Olav Vitters raised some concerns and asked me to solicit planet-wide opinion. As a project leader and/or svn-commits subscriber, would you like to see full diffs? By e3000, used under the CC BY-SA license. I think this simple idea could help projects (like Banshee) add more committers and increase the pace of progress since every commit is reviewed by many eyes, most commits will be good, and you can always revert ones that aren't. Assuming there is enough support for the idea, the next step will be modifying the script to pull configuration data from some yet-to-be-implemented DOAP setup.