Habari DR, and some bad news
Yes I was in on the joke. Owen asked me to be the “straight man” for this little prank, and I must say it worked out quite well. Owen and Scott are both very much committed to Habari for the long hall, fear not.
Well today saw the release of the Developer Review of Habari, and the departure of two of the founders. They could have chosen a better time to leave, but to each his own I suppose. I wanted to talk about this now, before other sites like HabariWank blow it out of proportion.
I am still not really sure what happened, but as of today Owen Winkler and Scott Merril have left Habari to start a new project. I am still reeling from this, since I had really thought that we had gotten past all the bickering and second guessing that showed up in the first couple of weeks of the projects life.
Both Owen and Scott will be missed, Owen commited a lot of great code to the project, and Scott was ever the champion for the user, which we really needed. I hope that their new project is able to provide the atmosphere that they feel they need to work in. I just wish Habari could have given it to them.
On to some lighter news. Today we release the long anticipated Developer Release of Habari. The core committer team have been working round the clock to get the code whipped into shape, and I have to say that we are proud of the product we have turned out. You can find the official announcement on the Habari Project Blog, I suggest you go read it and then download away.
Springtime Rituals, a Viddler episode
So I am trying out the “Next Big Thing” in video sharing, Viddler.com
Most of you might be thinking, “Whoopty Crap, another video site.” I can forgive you your lack of enthusiasm; it mirrored my own at the beginning. But after playing around with it a bit, Viddler has some rather novel, and I tend to think, inspired features missing from other services.
Things like, tagging or commenting points in a given video; another way to look say it, tag or comment specific time codes in a given video. Its brilliant.
So, here is my first Viddler video, in which I talk about “Spring Time Rituals”. Enjoy.
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AppleTV, some random thoughts
The Apple TV is now shipping, and some lucky blokes like Walt Mossberg were given demo units to play with early. I don’t have much to say, other than as it stands now I will not be purchasing one, and here are some reasons why.
I want my DIVX!
Seriously Apple, come on. H.264 is actually a beautiful codec; I have no complaints with the quality that you can get out of it. What I will complain about is the footprint. I can get the same, or better quality, from a DIVX encoded file that is sometimes half the size. Period.
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Current Side Projects
Update: Do to lack of support for DVI on my ATI video card, I have had to dump Ubuntu and go back to using the MacOS. This isn’t something I am extremely happy about, but it works so I can’t complain too loudly. I will have pictures and a write up of what I needed to make everything work soon.
So I like to have side projects to occupy my time with; usually these projects are required to have nothing to do with web programming, and if I can swing it, nothing to do with Computers in general.
I like to build stuff, so I usually try to have something cooking in that arena. My current building side project is to build an altar for our home. This is a long, involved process and as such it is very much on-going.
My current short term project was/is to build a digital media center, to replace my aging EyeHome. I have an aging G4 tower lying around the house so I thought I would see how far I could push the hardware. Surprisingly I can push it pretty far.
The State of the News
No, this isn”t an official communique from the wild frontier that is Habari, but it is a litle missive from yours truly about his favorite little baby.
In one word, the state of the news is vibrant. In the weeks following my announcement on this very site, we have had hundreds of people join mailing lists, hang out in IRC and install, break and fix the product.
As you can see by the Google Code project page, we are now at 10 comitters on the project, and we have a rather active community of patch submitters. From where I am sitting, I couldn”t be happier about the place Habari is at right now, heck we even have the first original theme for Habari out in the wild.
There will be some more rumblings from the project site soon, and yes we are working on a Dev blog, and we are working as fast as we can to a public release. Big things are just around the corner, can you feel it in the air? I can.
So, why the move?
I am sure that is what a number of people are asking themselves… especially with the other people who have made the leap in the days since I spilled the beans here on Sillyness.
That is actually a very complicated answer for me to give, but I will try my best to give it. But before I begin with all of that, I thought I would take the time to set something straight.
I am not now, nor have I ever been ”The Core Developer”, or ”The Lead Developer”, or ”The Grand High Poobah of Development” for Habari. I am one of the core developers, and a founding developer but nothing more.
Habari is run by a core group of talented coders and designers who all have the same status and say. We rule our Kingdom of Code as equals in council, not as a King and his subjects. And with that, lets get to the heart of this matter.
In the beginning was b2
That”s right young ”uns I started out this blogging thing running b2. When WordPress hit I was overjoyed. Things were bright and shiny, and believe it or not, I learned how to “code the PHP” by hacking WP into submission.
As time went on, and my skills as a jedi grew, I began to frequent the WordPress IRC channel, and answer questions. This is how I came in contact with people like Photomatt, Molly and a host of others.
About the time I became well known in the WP community, I began speaking at ApacheCon, the conference of the Apache Software Foundation. After being around some of the smartest people in the world, I began to be irritated with the way WP was being run.
This has very little to do with the merit of how WP is run, and more to do with how much I personally resonated with the Apache Way. Rich speaks about this much more eloquently that I can, so just read his stuff and come back, I”l be here… promise.
Suffice it to say, I felt as though I needed to make a change. Thankfully I found 3 people, each my better in a thousand ways, to join forces to birth what you now know as Habari.
What this means for me personally
Make no mistake, this is not a light decision that I have made. In a very real way, all that I have now is thanks to the community that surrounds WordPress… developer and user. My current job, the chance to write a book… the blessing of a wonderful home and the security and love that I am able to give my wife and son all find, at least in part, their beginnings in WordPress.
I am more thankful, blessed and lucky than one person deserves to be, and it is because of all the people I have been able to know through WordPress. You have my undying gratitude and support always. But as I said, it was time for a change. And so we come to the end of this overwrought missive, I think.
Summing it all up
I have left WordPress because I wanted to create something new and amazing, with amazing people; the scary thing is that the number of amazing people I get to work with literally doubles everyday.
My personal thanks to the core development team of WordPress for making a wonderful product that I had the privilege of helping to make better in various, small ways; and for helping to make a passable programmer out of me.
I hope that we (Habari and WordPress) can work together in the months and years ahead, to make all of our work that much better; because in the end we are here to serve our users, not our egos.
Changes around Sillyness
If you are one of my more astute readers, you might have noticed that there have been some changes around these parts since Tuesday the 2nd of January.
Sillyness is now powered by Habari, a next generation blogging tool being developed by some familiar faces… that aren’t ready to have fame and fortune knock on their door just yet, so I won’t link to them.
Needless to say I am one of the core developers, and I am in love with this product. We decided to eschew legacy concerns and blaze forward with more cutting edge technology (read: PHP 5, entirely object oriented, full ATOM Publishing Protocol support and dead easy AJAX integration just for starters.)
We are still a couple of weeks away from a developers release, but I was too excited to wait any longer. I also believe that if I use the software everyday I will identify more places to improve it… and possibly stumble upon new ideas.
Needless to say, expect some warts here and there as I iron out the rest of the move.
I am sure there will be people wondering why I have left WordPress behind as my blogging platform of choice, and trust me I plan on covering it in detail in a later post, but for now I need to get back to work.
MyPirateTV, care of TiVo
So while taking a break from working, I checked out TiVo’s site, in hopes that they had come to their senses and lowered the cost of the Series 3 box, I noticed a link to a press release that had an interesting title.
TiVo announces plans for even more choice in bringing Web video content to the TV.
So I click through, and eventually land on this press release. In a nutshell, this service allows you to set up ‘virtual television stations’ to transmit your home movies to friends and family who have TiVo’s.
But of course, I see a much more fun use of this service. Why transmit home video, when you can send that episode of Doctor Who you just retrieved from bittorrent instead?
Or what I would enjoy doing, set up a channel that streams a lineup of shows I think my friends would be interested in, an episode of Heroes here, an episode of Avatar there; they could then sign up for the channel, get their season pass, and enjoy new shows every time I upload them.
That, would be hot.
Five things
You didn’t know about me. Gee, thanks Rich.
I usually don’t do these things anymore, but seeing as it was Rich that tagged me I thought I would make an exception.
- I am a countertenor, meaning that I can sing in the alto range. Up until 5 years ago I was actually a sopranist, meaning my range extended into soprano. Oddly enough I usually sing Bass when I perform, since I have an unusually low end for a countertenor.
- When I was 15 (1992) I had my ears pierced, and wore earrings, and usually a big ‘ol chain, until 3 years ago (click for very bad, pictorial evidence And look, long hair!).
- I am a published poet.
- Even when I want to, or need to I am unable to cry.
- I can play, with varying degrees of skill, the following instruments: Guitar, piano, french horn, trumpet and saxaphone. I hope to pick up Cello sometime soon.
And that is it, I refuse to tag anyone else with this meme, the insanity stops here!
People, please
The Pulitzer Prize is for exemplary work in the field of Journalism, and as such is restricted to recognized Journalistic Entities.
Newspapers and other periodicals submit material to the Pulitzer, not individuals; furthermore by the stated statutes of the Pulitzer Commission itself (emphasis added by yours truly):
8. Must I be a U.S. citizen to apply for a Pulitzer Prize?
Only U.S. citizens are eligible to apply for the Prizes in Letters, Drama and Music (with the exception of the History category in Letters where the book must be a history of the United States but the author may be of any nationality). For the Journalism competition, entrants may be of any nationality but work must have appeared in a U.S. newspaper published at least once a week.
What this new development means is that blogs that are run under the direction of a newspaper or periodical are now eligible for inclusion, not any random blog.
This is not, I repeat not traditional media finally validating the everyday joe blogger as a serious journalist. And I don’t think it should. I am not belittling the contribution of private citizens to a new breed of journalism by any means… but there is a difference. What we need is an equivalent of the Pulitzer for private individuals who blog about world changing events…
Lifestream, ala WordPress
UPDATE: I have a fix for the time problems. You need to add the following code right after line 93 of stream.php (that line should look like this: $date = strtotime( substr( $item['pubdate'], 0, 25 ) );):$date -= 3600*N;
Where N is how many hours you need to remove. If you need to add time, then change the -= to +=
I really like the concept of Jermey Keith’s Lifestream, and after reading Mike’s cry in the dark for something akin to this, that caches, I decided to create a plugin/page template combo that replicated Jeremy’s code, but using only bits and bots that are present in WordPress.
This doesn’t really address much of Mike’s needs… I am pretty sure I could easily wedge this data into an RSS feed if I wanted to, but I don’t really care to at the moment. Maybe tomorrow. What this does do is use the bundled versions of snoopy and magpieRSS to query and render the content.
This gives us built in caching, and a mechanism for retrieving the data that gets around host restrictions on fopen and the like.
There are currently two caveats to this code:
- Twitter doesn’t have a valid RSS feed, so magpie chokes on it. A quick trip through feedburner fixes that right up.
- I can’t for the life of me, get my del.icio.us feed to display correctly. A trip through Feedburner couldn’t even fix it.
So there swell, I have a Lifestream, now I just need to stay on top of updating it. If you would like to take it for a spin, you can download the code, sans CSS, over here