GNU Media Goblin 0.3.0 Released

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GNU Media Goblin 0.3.0 Released

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday May 2, 2012 @05:18AM from the zuckerburg-is-goblin-food dept.

A mere year since the Mediagoblin photo/video sharing project was started, the project has hit version 0.3.0. Release highlights include: a rewrite of the database from MongoDB to SQL (via SQLAlchemy, making it much easier to install), audio support (using the HTML5 <audio> tag), a first take on a mobile interface, and smarter video buffering. Not content to sit idle, the developers are starting work on Salmon protocol support to federate with software like Diaspora in the next release.

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Bad move by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 05:21 · Score: 5, Funny

MongoDB is webscale.
1. Re:Bad move by navyjeff · 2012-05-02 06:05 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  For those who haven't seen it.
2. Re:Bad move by dkf · 2012-05-04 00:29 · Score: 1
  
  Does /dev/null support sharding?
  Wonderful!
  
  --
  "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
AND? by who_stole_my_kidneys · 2012-05-02 05:27 · Score: 3, Insightful

are we advertising every product that has a point release on /. now?
1. Re:AND? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 07:51 · Score: 1
  
  What else would you whine about? Oh that's right, anything.
2. Re:AND? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 17:21 · Score: 0
  
  This isn't "advertising" and it's not a "product"; it's the GNU project!
Diaspora by vlm · 2012-05-02 05:29 · Score: 3, Funny

Diaspora... theres a name I haven't heard recently. I checked the github and its certainly alive and kicking. Do many /.ers use Diaspora and could therefore use the Goblin?
I wondered about the license and had to LOL at the commit comment:
GNU-AGPL-3.0 2 years ago added license to every single goddamn file. also, put one in the root [Daniel Vincent Grippi]
Yes, that answers the licensing question quite firmly

--
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
1. Re:Diaspora by John+Bokma · 2012-05-02 05:42 · Score: 0, Flamebait
  
  It's not like stuff like that can be automated, right? I really despise childish comments, especially if the anger is unnecessary and gives the impression the author is incompetent.
  
  --
  
  Perl Programmer for hire
2. Re:Diaspora by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 05:53 · Score: 0
  
  It's not like stuff like that can be automated, right?
  I really despise childish comments, especially if the anger is unnecessary and gives the impression the author is incompetent.
  You sound like you should go to the ER and see if they can extract that large wooden object that's lodged in your rectum.
3. Re:Diaspora by broken_chaos · 2012-05-02 05:54 · Score: 0
  
  gives the impression the author is incompetent.
  I remember reading some things back when Diaspora first showed up that suggested this is exactly the case, with both beginner mistakes in security and even the choice of Ruby on Rails for something intended to be run by 'normal users' (which, I've never used Ruby on Rails, but apparently has a habit of breaking applications with every upgrade).
4. Re:Diaspora by DuckDodgers · 2012-05-02 07:12 · Score: 1
  
  Upgrading user software is going to be a headache for Diaspora no matter what toolkit or web framework they used. I think the choice of Ruby on Rails was reasonable. In an ideal world I would like to see something like Diaspora written in C++ or something similar, so that it runs well on old PCs and on tablets and entry level smart phones. But if they used C++ we would probably still be waiting for the 0.1 release.
  
  The security flaws, on the other hand, were a disappointment.
5. Re:Diaspora by Lunix+Nutcase · 2012-05-02 07:26 · Score: 1
  
  The Diaspora people must be pretty incometent if it would take them more than 2 years to hit a version 0.1 writing it in C++. What exactly would make the task that hard? And if they are that incompetent why would you trust them with your security?
6. Re:Diaspora by Lunix+Nutcase · 2012-05-02 07:41 · Score: 1
  
  And please don't give me the tired old crap about memory management (which is all but automatic with very few exceptions), or having to supposedly write everything yourself as if no libraries exist for C++, or how you have to use complex pointer manipulation (also bull crap), etc.
7. Re:Diaspora by vlm · 2012-05-02 09:40 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  The funny part is RoR has recently (well, recent YEARS) gone thru the growing pains C++ suffered thru maybe a decade or so ago.
  C++ used to be exactly the same way, you upgrade gcc/g++ and suddenly nothing compiles anymore.
  I think you're pretty much past that with RoR so its safe?
  I think they were also trying to make a political point about scalability. The point of the diaspora is not to centralize, not to scale. There were people who Just Didn't Get It about diasporas goals complaining about RoR "How you gonna scale one RoR site to over 500 million users" etc. Thats, um, kind of the point. Shouldn't have more than a household or so per server. Not enough people per server that the admin could make serious dough selling the private info of people he doesn't care about but are on his server anyway. A self correcting privacy policy, sorta, via dispersal.
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
8. Re:Diaspora by vlm · 2012-05-02 09:44 · Score: 1
  
  If you're not experiencing the joys of doin' it the hard way, and you don't care if it can't be scaled above 200 million users per site, why not just string together a bunch of CPAN modules and be done in a weekend? That's the part I couldn't figure out.
  RoR forces you into certain mindsets for doing things that may make life harder, and the ruby library infrastructure, while good, isn't as wide ranging or as well debugged as CPAN.
  I kinda like all 3 languages mentioned, it just seems Perl would have been the correct tool for this particular job.
  
  --
  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
9. Re:Diaspora by DuckDodgers · 2012-05-03 01:25 · Score: 1
  
  I wouldn't trust them with my security. I know the bare basics about website software security - use named parameters on database queries, at a minimum validate all of your inputs on the server side, escape your input strings so that posted code is just stored and rendered as text, and for every single action check both authentication (is the current user logged in) as well as authorization (does the current user have the right permissions to create, read, update, or delete the current object). I assumed the Diaspora guys knew that, and I'm disappointed that they did not.
  
  I exaggerated the difficulty of using C++. It's an outstanding language, there's nothing wrong with it. But there is a reason that millions of websites are built on scripting languages like Ruby, Python, Perl, and PHP: the rapid developer feedback loop. Write code, save changes, restart webserver or reload application, refresh browser page. With most compiled languages, the extra step to compile code causes a massive slowdown. Depending upon how large your code base is, it might only add 20 or 30 seconds to the whole feedback process. But if you're changing and testing hundreds of times per day, the developer using the scripting language is easily three times as productive. You get lean, fast, efficient code, and he gets bloated and memory hungry but working code in one third the time.
  
  I'm sure a highly skilled C++ developer, especially with a lot of experience building C++ web applications, can write good web applications every bit as fast as a skilled developer in another language. But the Diaspora group wasn't a group of highly skilled veterans, it's a bunch of motivated college students. I guarantee they would have been slower in C++.
10. Re:Diaspora by DuckDodgers · 2012-05-03 01:59 · Score: 1
  
  I'm sure you know the answer to that - at the time when Diaspora was launched, Ruby on Rails was the highly hyped holy grail of web development and the reputation of Perl as "write once, read never" was near its peak. I mean no offense to the Diaspora team when I say this, but I suspect if they had a few more years of industry experience before they tackled the project it would have given them a better perspective for examining the merits of Ruby on Rails versus Perl plus CPAN (or for that matter PHP and Drupal or Python and web2py or whatever).
Site's Down by windcask · 2012-05-02 05:41 · Score: 2

I know Slashdot is a force in webtraffic, but did we just overwhelm their site?
1. Re:Site's Down by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 06:02 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  It's they fault, they moved from MongoDB to SQL, which isn't webscale.
2. Re:Site's Down by paroneayea · 2012-05-02 06:02 · Score: 2
  
  It's not totally down but super slow. I guess that'll teach me to include all those high resolution .png files in our release notes. :)
  
  --
  http://mediagoblin.org/
3. Re:Site's Down by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 06:51 · Score: 0
  
  It's they fault, they moved from MongoDB to SQL, which isn't webscale.
  I know you are kidding around but to clarify: the mediagoblin.org site is generated by a static site generator (pyblosxom). It's mostly the wiki that seems to kill the server by the means of apache-mpm-prefork.
4. Re:Site's Down by mcgrew · 2012-05-02 08:27 · Score: 1
  
  Wow, you really MUST be new here! You actually never heard of the "slashdot effect"?
  
  --
  Free Martian Whores!
Vanity Site? by b0bby · 2012-05-02 05:43 · Score: 1

I have a vanity site with thousands of photos & videos. I have always just used a script + imagemagick & ffmpg to get things to a useable set of html files, but I keep hoping that there will be someting easier. Can anyone tell me if this would be a good way to dump a bunch of jpgs & video files to a directory & have all the pretty stuff happen in the background? I'm not interested in the social side so much, but I have yet to find anything which can handle large batches of files in a way that I'm happy with.
1. Re:Vanity Site? by Aleksej · 2012-05-02 06:12 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  http://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/109
2. Re:Vanity Site? by b0bby · 2012-05-02 06:50 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks! I guess I'll stick with my old scripts for now...
3. Re:Vanity Site? by atisss · 2012-05-02 07:15 · Score: 1
  
  Gallery 3
4. Re:Vanity Site? by Culture20 · 2012-05-02 07:22 · Score: 1
  
  I have a vanity site with thousands of photos & videos. I have always just used a script + imagemagick & ffmpg to get things to a useable set of html files, but I keep hoping that there will be someting easier.
  Can't f-spot make a bunch of static html galleries from a directory of photos?
5. Re:Vanity Site? by icebraining · 2012-05-02 11:19 · Score: 1
  
  Gallery is a poor choice unless you really need the features. Being an application, it's both slower and less safe (there's a reason the last release was a "security release") than a static generator.
  
  --
  Dilbert RSS feed
6. Re:Vanity Site? by pbhj · 2012-05-02 12:04 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps you could share with Opera Unite and just mirror the automated pages online somewhere?
Fantastic by jon3k · 2012-05-02 06:56 · Score: 4, Funny

Another brilliantly named piece of software. Now I use Linux and Gimp and the Media Goblin. I'm sure my parents are very proud.
1. Re:Fantastic by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 07:39 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Say what you want, but it's a better name than Media Dildo.
2. Re:Fantastic by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 08:38 · Score: 0
  
  So you think "Windows", "Oh ess 10" or "Lion" are good? How about OS/400, CPM and DOS?
3. Re:Fantastic by mcgrew · 2012-05-02 08:46 · Score: 1
  
  Well, FOSS isn't the only entity that gives products stupid names. Wi-Fi, for example. Or Twain. Or the iPod (open the pod bay doors, Hal).
  The KIA auto? No combet vet would ever drive a car that was the acronym for Killed In Action.
  Dodge Startus... er, Stratus?
  The band Oingo Boingo?
  Windows Media Player (WiMP)?
  MicroSoft? Sounds like a woman complaining about her boyfriend.
  The list goes on.
  
  --
  Free Martian Whores!
4. Re:Fantastic by Lee_Dailey · 2012-05-02 11:46 · Score: 1
  
  howdy mcgrew (92797),
  actually, i always loved the name TWAIN. it's such a delightfully snarky acronym. as it was explained in the docs for the 1st scanner i ever set up it stands for ...
  Technology Without An Interesting Name
  i don't see the "stupid" here that you see. aint it nice that folks are so different? [*grin*]
  take care,
  lee
5. Re:Fantastic by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 17:25 · Score: 0
  
  I only clicked this article because of the awesome name.
  Now back to working on my D&D campaign. That's not even a joke.
6. Re:Fantastic by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-02 17:35 · Score: 0
  
  ohh, would that i could upvote you here sir....made my night
7. Re:Fantastic by Anonymous Coward · 2012-05-03 03:43 · Score: 0
  
  Sounds like a great excuse to come up with terrible names.
8. Re:Fantastic by mcgrew · 2012-05-04 01:16 · Score: 1
  
  aint it nice that folks are so different?
  Yes, it is.
  
  --
  Free Martian Whores!
Try it out! by jwandborg · 2012-05-02 07:23 · Score: 2

Currently the MediaGoblin wiki is down, which is the residence for a list of live instances. AFAIK there are two instances running with open registration at the moment: http://gobblin.se/ and http://goblinartists.net./

--
I'm new here.
Sideways move by fat_mike · 2012-05-02 10:05 · Score: 1

So they're going from one unknown though heavily hyped technology to a proven, stable, universally supported technology so they can develop for yet another unknown heavily hyped technology?
Did anyone send them the story a few above this one saying that the company that they're trying to compete against is going public in a month where they're expected to make billions of closed source dollars?"
1. Re:Sideways move by jwandborg · 2012-05-02 22:02 · Score: 1
  
  You have been misinformed. MediaGoblin is not a Facebook-killer. It's a Flickr/SmugMug/Gallery3/YouTube/Soundcloud-killer. Currently it is a media hosting application built in Python running on a Django-like unframework backed by celery task processing (optional). It has some social features but much is still lacking. Intentions are that instances should be provide some "follow", "comment", [...] functionality across instances, that work will be based on the OStatus collection of specification drafts (the same thing StatusNet [identi.ca] uses).
  
  --
  I'm new here.