October 16, 2004

Server

Style Guidelines Work

Started work on the effort to move the official style guidelines to the Wiki. Created a Wiki page mimicing the current Official Style Guidelines page, it's still a bit rough and I need to work on the formatting, but it's there. Also started work on the style pages from the main site out of CVS, but realised I can't get too far without a working running version of the MB server - viewing the raw html file in the browser doesn't get all the Mason code. Setting up the server is a job for tomorrow.

Posted by tma at 06:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

picard

They're not barriers, they're challenges

Mac OS X: I've decided Fink can suck er .. something rancid, and I've gone down the path of compiling everything from scratch, including gtk+2 and all of its dependancies, and Python. Now that I've got that all out of the way, it turns out that OS X has it's own version of Python, and this version of Python doesn't play ball with the ctypes package. Ah well, getting closer, slowly.

Posted by tma at 06:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

October 15, 2004

Server

Annotations

This evening I'm taking another look at the "Annotations" work done by Matthias a while back. It's pretty near complete - he did a good job. Now I've just got to polish off a couple of rough edges and merge it back into the CVS trunk. I think we should be able to throw this one open for testing pretty soon.

Continue reading "Annotations"

Posted by djce at 03:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

picard

Lucene rocks!

I've been playing with the Lucene text indexing system (in particular, I'm playing with PyLucene, which is a GCJ compiled version of Lucene with Python bindings). Lucene does text searching really well and its fast!

Eventually I'd like to use Lucene to power the MusicBrainz searches as was as building a copy of it into Picard. Picard? Yes! Lucene is so good, that you can give it a track title and chances are its going to find the right track. My idea is this:

1. Cluster new files and determine which artists these files cover.
2. Download and cache the metadata for the artists locally, and build a lucene index of it.
3. Throw each of the tracks at lucene to see what it can match.
4. If nothing matches, maybe do a full DB search via the web service or do a TRM calculation.

I'm excited by this -- the proof of concept looks fabulous. Executing it on the full scale where things are getting cached and locally indexed, is going to be a fair amount of work. Unfortunately.

But, this gives me hope that Picard will have some serious brainz under the hood. :-)

Posted by mayhem at 12:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

October 13, 2004

General

It's been a slow week

This week I ar' been mostly scanning surface scanning Maxtor hard disks. It's a slow operation - very slow - so I've had zero chance to work on MB really.

Continue reading "It's been a slow week"

Posted by djce at 11:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

picard

Two steps forward, one step back

I've been trying to set up various environments to install Picard (Mac OS X 10.3, Gentoo linux, and Windows XP via VirtualPC on the Mac). It's been a rather trialing process...

Continue reading "Two steps forward, one step back"

Posted by tma at 05:50 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

MetaBrainz

First tax-exempt application filed

I'll jump in right now and update you on my progress.

I just dropped the FTB3500 tax-exempt application to the State of California into the mail. This application is one of the two big ones that took many weeks of preparing and creating budget forecasts for the next two years. Budgets are not my strength, but our Treasurer helped me with this process and we got it done. Next up is the biggest and most dreaded form -- the 1023 application to the IRS.

I've also got the first cut at the MetaBrainz web site created -- this site will detail everything about the non-profit including all donations and finances, board of directors and other non-profit stuff. Of course the new web-site is not going to be public until we're ready to announce every last detail of the new non-profit. Stay tuned!

Oh, yeah -- I also created this blog this week. Maybe tomorrow I can start hacking on advanced Picard features.

Posted by mayhem at 04:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Community

Welcome to the MusicBrainz community weblog!

We recently started discussing setting up a blog for MusicBrainz contributors to post information about the work they are doing in order to keep the community up to date. Having gotten no negative feedback on the idea, I proceeded to make it happen.

I really like Movable Type -- its a great piece of software, and SixApart agreed to donate license for Moveable Type -- that's a $249.95 value! We can now publish this blog and add up to 35 users to this blog. I think that should suffice for the immediate future. :-)

Thank you very much to Mena, Ben, Mie and Barak at SixApart! You guys rock and so does your software!

If you are a MusicBrainz contributor and would like to get an account to post this webblog, please send me some mail and I'll set it up.

Posted by mayhem at 03:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (2)