Google Summer of Code 2008

After a bumpy ride in 2007 we plan to participate in Google’s Summer of Code project again. However, we’re going to change quite a few things since only one of our three projects reached completion last year. At the Summer of Code Mentor Summit in 2007, I learned quite a few things about Google’s project … Continue reading “Google Summer of Code 2008”

After a bumpy ride in 2007 we plan to participate in Google’s Summer of Code project again. However, we’re going to change quite a few things since only one of our three projects reached completion last year. At the Summer of Code Mentor Summit in 2007, I learned quite a few things about Google’s project that give me a much better clue about what to do for this year.

At the summit I learned that the most successful projects are the ones that are proposed by the students. And, given the number of students who spammed us by pasting our project ideas into their GSoC applications verbatim, we’re likely to not accept any projects based on our own ideas this year. This forces applications to dig into MusicBrainz, if they’re not already part of the project and understand what the project needs before submitting an application.

I will actively encourage students in the MusicBrainz community to participate in GSoC. Even though students may respond with: “I’m not good enough for that!” we’ve seen these students make excellent contributions outside of GSoC that are on par, if not better than accepted students. Students from our community already understand open source and MusicBrainz. Bringing in new students, especially students who are new to open source, can be a lot of work and result in culture shock.

If we do not have enough qualified applications to fill all of the Summer of Code slots that were allocated to us, we won’t fill all of our slots. We’ll give them to other organizations who have too many qualified students, but not enough slots.

This year we will conduct detailed interviews with all of the students applicants who make it close to the final round. We may even devise some sort of test to ensure that the students possess all the skills they claim on their CV.

Summer of Code 2008 should be kicking off very soon — once we have any information for students, we will post them here. Stay tuned!

UPDATE: Leslie let me know that providing an idea list is actually required. It is, however, not required to accept any proposals for these ideas. The above has been updated to reflect this.

Performance problems on the Wiki

I’ve had to disable the “FullSearch” moin macro, at least for now – far too many pages were using it, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and each invocation of FullSearch is rather expensive. The result was that the wiki server – which also runs the mailing lists and various other important things – … Continue reading “Performance problems on the Wiki”

I’ve had to disable the “FullSearch” moin macro, at least for now – far too many pages were using it, sometimes multiple times on the same page, and each invocation of FullSearch is rather expensive. The result was that the wiki server – which also runs the mailing lists and various other important things – was dying a death.

I don’t know why this has only just started being a problem, because it looks like most of those uses of FullSearch have been in place for a while. But, for whatever reason, it’s a problem now, and the quick fix to stop the server crashing is to disable the macro. Sorry 🙁

Testing Picard on OS X (Intel)

If you have an intel Mac and would like to try out the first test of a PUID enabled Picard on OS X, please download this DMG and post a comment to let me know if it works.

This DMG:

  • Is for INTEL only
  • Only runs on OS X 10.5 (Leopard)
  • Probably does not have working CD Lookup
  • Might be buggy
  • Is based on the 0.9.0 Picard tarball
  • Is NOT a Universal Binary

If this DMG works for people then I will proceed to try to get 10.4/PPC/disc lookup support working.

Testing a new libofa release

libofa, the Open Fingerprint Architecture library had many issues in the last release and quite a few of them were cleaned up, including the notorious incorrect output bug on Intel Macs. I’ve put together a test release of 0.9.4 to see if people can build this tarball without major problems. If you’ve had issues with … Continue reading “Testing a new libofa release”

libofa, the Open Fingerprint Architecture library had many issues in the last release and quite a few of them were cleaned up, including the notorious incorrect output bug on Intel Macs. I’ve put together a test release of 0.9.4 to see if people can build this tarball without major problems.

If you’ve had issues with previous builds of libofa, please build and install this tarball. Report any bugs/problems to the usual place, please.

Search server upgraded

The search server has undergone a complete overhaul and things are looking much better and much more stable now. In the last two weeks we have: Upgraded the search engine to use Lucene 2.2 (we were using 1.0) I would expect a number of bugs and idiosyncrasies to go away now that we’re using an … Continue reading “Search server upgraded”

The search server has undergone a complete overhaul and things are looking much better and much more stable now. In the last two weeks we have:

  1. Upgraded the search engine to use Lucene 2.2 (we were using 1.0) I would expect a number of bugs and idiosyncrasies to go away now that we’re using an improved search engine. If you have a search bug pending, please take a minute to see if your bug still applies.
  2. Removed all numbered types from the indexes. For instance, if you wanted to search for a band previously you had to search for artype:1. Now you can search for type:group or type:person. In the release search languages, scripts, countries, type and status are now indexed using text strings.
  3. Purchased, installed and deployed a new search server with gobs of RAM. Searches are happening quite fast now.

For details on the new improved search syntax, please take a look at the search syntax page. If you find new bugs, please report them.

General update: Search troubles and solutions

It appears that the world is slowly discovering MusicBrainz. Last month we pushed nearly 2M pages per day and smoke is pouring out of our poor search server. Fortunately we have some money in the bank so, the board of directors approved the purchase a new RAM-heavy server for use as our new search server. … Continue reading “General update: Search troubles and solutions”

It appears that the world is slowly discovering MusicBrainz. Last month we pushed nearly 2M pages per day and smoke is pouring out of our poor search server. Fortunately we have some money in the bank so, the board of directors approved the purchase a new RAM-heavy server for use as our new search server. Then yesterday, Matthew Mullenweg of WordPress fame donated $5000 to the MetaBrainz Foundation!! That nicely covers the costs of our new search server (~$3000) and then some.

I’m also working on improving the search server so that it runs more efficiently and that we get fewer timeout errors. Things improved yesterday when I redirected all web-based searches to our new server. I hope to cut over the rest of the search traffic (web service traffic) to a better suited server later this afternoon.

In other words — I’m working hard to make sure the site stays responsive, even under the growing loads. Things should improve much more once we can deploy the new server mid-next week.

Stay tuned for more details on the changes on the search server!

Working With Picard, Episode 1

Hi! The first episode in my series of “Working with Picard” screencasts has now been recorded, and is available for public consumption 🙂 A YouTube link to the video is available, and a higher resolution Ogg Theora file is also also available. You’ll probably find the Ogg Theora easier to read due to the higher … Continue reading “Working With Picard, Episode 1”

Hi!

The first episode in my series of “Working with Picard” screencasts has now been recorded, and is available for public consumption 🙂 A YouTube link to the video is available, and a higher resolution Ogg Theora file is also also available. You’ll probably find the Ogg Theora easier to read due to the higher resolution.

In this first screencast I go through the basics of Picard – how to load files, how the interface works, and basic usage with clusters.

If there’s something that’s unclear, or you have future ideas for screencasts – let me know! Other wise, enjoy the screencast – and show you’re friends and convince why MusicBrainz is so cool (if you haven’t already 🙂

UK mirror downtime

Our mirror server in the UK suffered a power supply failure yesterday. The mirror will be down for at least a week as the replacement power supply finds it way to the UK. We’ll post an update once the mirror is back online. Sorry for the hassle!

Our mirror server in the UK suffered a power supply failure yesterday. The mirror will be down for at least a week as the replacement power supply finds it way to the UK. We’ll post an update once the mirror is back online.

Sorry for the hassle!

Failed drive in database server RAID array (updated)

Yesterday afternoon a drive failed out of our RAID array in the master database server. We have four drives in this server, with two sets of two drives (using a RAID-1,0 configuration) so a single drive failure isn’t a big deal. We’re still up and running, but we’re quite a bit more vulnerable until we … Continue reading “Failed drive in database server RAID array (updated)”

Yesterday afternoon a drive failed out of our RAID array in the master database server. We have four drives in this server, with two sets of two drives (using a RAID-1,0 configuration) so a single drive failure isn’t a big deal. We’re still up and running, but we’re quite a bit more vulnerable until we get this drive replaced. If the last drive in our RAID-1 array fails we’d have to deal with data loss for today — fortunately the data dumps ran last night and backed us up until then. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we do not have any failures today.

Once I got notified that the drive failed, I promptly called Sun for a warranty replacement. In the back of my mind I thought: “I should order a new drive from NewEgg, just in case”. But, the Sun representative assured my that they would have a replacement drive for me today. This morning a clueless service engineer called me to tell me that they shipped the wrong drive to our data center. When I called back, they informed me that they did not have the correct drive and that the vendor would ship one to me by Thursday morning.

Having lost faith in Sun to do the right thing, I ordered a spare drive for the server from NewEgg — I should’ve done this a couple of months ago when the prices for these drives become reasonable. Now we’ll have a spare on hand for the next time this happens (and it will quite soon, I’m sure — both Seagate drives that originally came with the server failed within one year. The first drive failed within the first month!)

So, I am curious to see who will win: Sun who had an 18 hour head start to replace the drive, or NewEgg/UPS who got my order just this morning. I’ll post an update once this plays out — in the meantime keep your fingers crossed for no further drive failures!

UPDATE: DHL delivered the Sun drives 1 hour before UPS delivered the NewEgg drives. The drive is now in the server and the RAID array is working optimally again.