Songbird is awesome. It has a huge amount of potential, especially in the current culture. Songbird is an open-source web-based music player. First, let me detail why I think Songbird is so awesome.

It is based on Mozilla

I’m a big fan of open-source, for many reasons, but I’ll also be one of the first to admit its failures. (That shall come in another blog) Now, having Songbird based on Mozilla means that its using much of the same code that makes up Thunderbird and Firefox. Thats right, it can surf web pages.

It opens a new door on interaction

However, not only can it surf web pages, if you visit a website specifically built for songbird, using the rather well-done webpage api, it adds new features! Imagine going to your favorite band’s blog, and hearing the latest sample songs they’ve loaded!

Or, experiencing the deep interaction that the Itunes Music store uses to offer… in a webpage. Thats right, web pages now become music stores in Songbird. But thats not the coolest feature.

Add-ons

Yep, just like Firefox, it supports add-ons, with even more potential than those in the browser. There are many many ideas here, and I’m sure you could think of a few yourself, things that you wished YOUR music player did. I’m pretty happy with what Amarok can do, and old versions of iTunes when I’m on windows. However, when I see potential, that gets me excited. And when its immense potential? You can imagine my excitement.

Now, go download it!

This is exciting stuff, and I can’t wait to see what else. My experience with songbird was pretty good. I downloaded and installed it, and then checked out a few of the samples, mainly the sample music blog, and the sample music store. Try them out in songbird, and compare it to what it looks like in your regular browser. Can iTunes do that? No!

Today I interviewed for a job as webmaster for the UBCO Phoenix. Its an university newspaper, published bi-weekly.

They’re an interesting group, pretty fun. All macs in the office, something else to note. It seems like creative groups always use macs, but thats aside from the point.

They want a webmaster, because, to put it plainly, their website is boring. Also, their was a bit of work involved in posting each story.

What they want is a rebuilt website that changes both of those, and I offered a few ideas. Of all print publications, a student newspaper can try new things out, new methods, new ways of news and interacting with their readers.

They also have the benefit that they’re writing for the new generation of movers and shakers. This audience, aged 18-24, are the people that put Facebook and Myspace on the map. Okay, I grant that that doesn’t mean too much in a sense, but it also means that these people love interaction. They love media. And a student newspaper can provide a new angle on news gathering and interaction.

They(the editors of the Phoenix) discussed an issue about how, due to their bi-weekly schedule, they get submissions that they just can’t publish. It would be too late, or too early, or just not right. A good website could change that. One thing thats annoyed me, is how news will publish stories, but there are no updates, no follow-ups, no linking together. Its still them pushing the news, what they decide as news, to us.

I do have to point out the one exception to this generality, CBC news. (I think its them, correct me if I’m wrong) They have a tag cloud, linking relevant news stories together. That is quite cool, and very very useful. What a tag cloud does, is that it takes the tags people place on the stories, and you can check out other stories with similar tags. Take for example, “Iraq”. You’d be able to see all the articles tagged with “Iraq” as well as common tags on those articles. Those tags are seen as being related, say, “US Foreign Policy” as an example.

The ideas I threw out for their website were as follows: staff blogs, forums, and online-only articles, on timely and relevant news. Say for example, the recent cougar sightings.

And here’s the best idea: individualized filters, ratings for each articles that contribute to your personal filter, which will contribute to feedback to the staff members on which stories were liked, and weren’t liked. Ones that people wanna hear more about will be rated higher, and the news staff can see this, and this is big: tailor their stories to satisfy this demand.

Those are my ideas for their website, and hopefully I get the job, despite the low pay. It will be a very interesting experience, will look good on a resume, and give me much needed experience.

I’ve been having some issues(again) with bittorrent programs. I only have these issues on Linux it seems(Ubuntu specifically). However, its the way they blow up that illustrates one of the key sources of bugs in code: error handling.

In the first place, there is Deluge, primarily a python bittorrent client. A very nice one… but it fails in a pretty mundane way. Right now, it will not add nor remove any more torrents. Rather frustrating when I wanted to download the Open Disc. I finally found what had happened. It appears that when I upgraded from Ubuntu 7.06 to Ubuntu 7.01, that deluge’s behaviour breaks. It was quite silent on any errors in fact, because they were not handled. And here’s the kicker, it will still have errors even after uninstalling, and reinstalling deluge.

The reason for this behaviour is that something the developers did not think could happen did, and therefore, unpredictable behaviour happened. Because they did not have anything in place in case there was an error they did not envision, the program is literally unusable. So, there goes my favourite torrent program.

I turn then, to Azureus… and it crashes too! This one was likely out of the reach of the developers of Azureus… as I believe it is an issue with Java itself. However, I’m still annoyed at the lack of good bittorrent programs for Linux. Well, good and stable programs.

The lesson though, is communicate with your users what happened. No matter the mistake, the bug, whatever, the users should still see something telling them something went wrong, instead of seeing the program start and behave wrongly. That is bad behavior.