Month: September 2012

Help us make some stickers!

MusicBrainz will be attending the Google Summer of Code mentor summit, and we’d love to have some stickers to hand out, so our fellow open-source friends can show off how cool we are. Sadly, we don’t have the skills to actually make the designs to send off to get printed… but that’s where you come in!

Do you do graphic design? Do you know someone who would be willing to help us? If so, please get in touch with us – leave a comment, tweet us or shoot an email to info@musicbrainz.org. Thanks!

Splunk supports MusicBrainz!

As part of Google’s Summer of Code program we accepted Dániel Bali to work on analyzing our web server logs to mine them for interesting information about MusicBrainz and people who are using MusicBrainz. (see a preview of this project)

To make that project a reality we had help from Splunk, the company that creates the fantastic data analysis tool by the same name. Splunk provided us with enterprise trial licenses during the summer and now going forward has accepted us into their Splunk for Good program. This program provides a free 10GB/day (it allows us to import 10GB of data into our Splunk server per day) license on a yearly basis.

We now count Splunk among our sponsors and we’re looking forward to rolling out Dániel’s work in October. Thank you Splunk and thank you to Joyce Morrell and Christy Wilson from Splunk for working with us to make this happen!

Search server release: 2012-09-18

We’ve just updated our search servers with a new release. This release adds support for a new improved json format for the search server and will be publicly available after the next mbserver release. We also now output the date (in the XML/json) the index was last updated so you know how old the results received are. This will be exposed to the end-user in the web search results in an upcoming release of musicbrainz-server.

Thanks to Paul Taylor and Aurélien Mino for making this release happen!

Improvement

  • [SEARCH-232] – Search server should return information about when the indexes were last updated

New Feature

Possible date change for our summit: 9-11 November 2012

I’ve just found out that the Music Hack Day London conflicts with our summit in Barcelona. 😦 Given that a few people from MusicBrainz wanted to attend that Hack Day, we’re considering the possibility of changing our summit date to 9-11 November.

I’ve already contacted all of the people who signed up as potential attendees, but I wanted to throw this suggestion out to all of you who might consider going.

If you have a problem with the new date, please post a comment. If we dont get any significant conflicts, we may change the date.

Thanks!

Server update, 2012-09-17

We’ve just finishing pushing out another update to the MusicBrainz servers. This release is mostly a bug fix release, with a few improvements thrown in for good measure. Thanks to Alastair Porter, Aurélien Mino, Nicolás Tamargo, nikki, and the MusicBrainz developers for their hard work on this release! Here’s what has changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-3540] – Set track length edits can become too wide
  • [MBS-3757] – ‘releasegroup’ used as the annotation type when displaying search results
  • [MBS-3956] – Merging URLs can be done as auto-edit
  • [MBS-4085] – Users with open edits can delete their account
  • [MBS-4143] – Removing a tag from a well-tagged entity can give "undefined" as text
  • [MBS-4365] – "Edit Recording Associations" displays track artists for recordings
  • [MBS-4584] – Track parser doesn’t understand fullwidth full stops
  • [MBS-4599] – Artist not shown next to release name in edit release label edits
  • [MBS-4872] – Can’t directly add a release to a collection if no collections exist
  • [MBS-4946] – Deleting account does not unset new profile fields
  • [MBS-4950] – Internal server error when cancelling a recording merge instead of submitting
  • [MBS-5010] – Running a slave database without READONLY database settings produces confusing exceptions
  • [MBS-5029] – Cover art from downvoted ASIN still being displayed in the sidebar
  • [MBS-5043] – Edit search forgets "low" data quality selection
  • [MBS-5066] – IPI fields are not validated properly
  • [MBS-5086] – Degrade release editor gracefully if release editor session memcached is not available.
  • [MBS-5120] – Edits changing an empty cat number to a non-empty one can overwrite each other
  • [MBS-5143] – Non-translatable items on "http://musicbrainz.org/relationships"
  • [MBS-5164] – Non-translatable items on "http://musicbrainz.org/artist/<MBID>/edit_annotation&quot;
  • [MBS-5194] – Set primary alias for locale is auto-edit
  • [MBS-5204] – & in an image comment shows up as &amp; in edits
  • [MBS-5205] – Text diff incorrectly highlights first word that didn’t change
  • [MBS-5209] – statistics/editors largely untranslatable
  • [MBS-5210] – statistics/timeline shows the menu and page footer in English
  • [MBS-5211] – (Part of) page title untranslatable for statistics/*
  • [MBS-5212] – search/edits is largely untranslatable
  • [MBS-5217] – Internal server error loading a report when reports have never been generated
  • [MBS-5224] – Historic edits are shown incorrectly when the server is translated
  • [MBS-5235] – Edit search is not correctly ordered when edits have the same open time
  • [MBS-5239] – Dropdowns on "Add/Edit Relationship" pages are untranslatable
  • [MBS-5248] – Subscriptions mails should not have In-Reply-To and References headers
  • [MBS-5252] – data dump MD5SUMS file includes temporary paths and private dump
  • [MBS-5255] – Replication trigger for release_group_secondary_type_join is misnamed and duplicates trigger for release_group_secondary_type
  • [MBS-5257] – Split artist is stuck and doesn’t get removed
  • [MBS-5258] – DropReplicationTriggers.sql not in sync with CreateReplicationTriggers.sql
  • [MBS-5259] – Track Parser "detect track durations" is broken on releases with DiscIDs, appending lengths to Artist
  • [MBS-5270] – scripts complain about LWP not being loaded
  • [MBS-5271] – gravatar hash should be made of lower cased smtp address

Improvement

  • [MBS-169] – Show number of subscriptions on subscriptions page
  • [MBS-3360] – Remove unused tags and garbage collect tags on retagging
  • [MBS-3878] – Number of votes to fail normal and low quality data should be the same
  • [MBS-4465] – Cover Art Archive > Ability to navigate through zoomed cover arts
  • [MBS-4638] – Show more information on the reorder cover art page
  • [MBS-4779] – http://musicbrainz.org/iswc/ISWC url should accept various ISWC formatting
  • [MBS-5251] – URL statistics
  • [MBS-5263] – Cover art from sidebar should not be included in the set of images when you’re navigating through zoomed cover arts
  • [MBS-5267] – Make fallback to language detection via browser headers optional
  • [MBS-5273] – Normalise mobile Wikipedia URLs

New Feature

  • [MBS-4825] – Normalize blogspot URLs

Task

  • [MBS-5008] – Remove voting differences for data quality
  • [MBS-5249] – Update replication triggers verbosity for the search server updater module

Sub-task

  • [MBS-3135] – Predefined edit URL should be redirect/converted to standard edit searches

The Git commit SHA for this release is 8060824492, git tag v-2012-09-17.

Schema change release: Oct 15th

On October 15th, we’re going to update our schema once again. This time we’re only making minor changes and some cleanup from the last schema change. To find out exactly what will be changing, please take a look at our milestone for this release.

At this point we’ve frozen the list of tickets we’re going to adress for October 15th. We’re not going to accept any more schema change tickets for this release.

Please let us know if you have any questions!

Release editor service interruption: Thursday 20:00UTC

We have a minor hosting change to make (change how an instance of memcached is managed) that will lose all of the current release editor sessions. We will make this change tomorrow, Thursday at 20:00 UTC. During this time, any release editor session that is active will break and you will lose your changes in the release editor. To prevent this from impacting you, make sure to submit any changes before 20:00 UTC and wait for us to post another entry saying that the change is complete.

The rest of the site will be unaffected by this change.

Wiki updated!

As we mentioned yesterday, the wiki was read-only for a period today as we performed some much-needed upgrades. The new wiki is now live on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org and testing is encouraged to make sure we didn’t miss anything! It isn’t available as of this writing because a DNS change is required, but the old wiki will remain available at http://oldwiki.musicbrainz.org for some period of time, in a read-only state.

The new wiki has a few changes:

  1. You’ll see that the style has changed; instead of maintaining our own complete MediaWiki skin, we’re now just doing some modifications on top of the provided monobook skin.
  2. Login is now required to edit pages, partly as a spam-mitigation measure and partly because people were often editing without logging in, which made it hard to track down who exactly changed a page.
  3. The MediaWiki API should now be accessible, from http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/api.php.
  4. Finally, A few extensions have shuffled around and been updated as well; the full details are available on http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Special:Version.

If you find mistakes in our setup, please contact me: ‘ianmcorvidae’ on the MusicBrainz site and on IRC, and @musicbrainz.org via email; or, file a ticket on http://tickets.musicbrainz.org (under MusicBrainz Hosting, assign to “Ian McEwen”).