MusicBrainz Blog

We’ve been accepted again! Potential mentors can apply now and applicants can take a look at our ideas page.

We’re looking forward to participating this year again!

UPDATE: This clearly going to be a major hassle, so we’ll spend the extra time coding a program that will sanitize the data before it goes into splunk.

Last week Google’s Summer of Code program started and my student Dániel Bali is ready to get busy combing through our massive logs and see what sorts of information he can mine from our logs.

We only have one minor problem — our logs contain the IP addresses of our users and some requests contain the user names of the person making the request. Removing this private information from the logs before Dániel sees them is quite a pain to do well.

I would like to propose that we:

1. Consider Dániel part of our core team for the summer and allow him to see IP addresses and all the requests in full.
2. Have Dániel sign a short statement stating that he will not divulge any private information.
3. Will fail him in his GSoC project if he does divulge any private information.

If this is not acceptable to you, please speak up soon. I would like to make this happen early next week so Dániel can continue his GSoc work.

UPDATE: The final output of Dániel’s work will not contain any private information. If we end up using any private data as input, we will sanitize it and remove private information before we publish the output.

We’ve been accepted for Summer of Code! Interested students: Start at our ideas page or come up with your own idea!

The Summer of Code application process has just begun and we’re soliciting feedback on what projects we should suggest to students this year. Please take a look at our Summer of Code Ideas page and add your ideas if its not already there.

Thanks!

Jamie McDonald has continued his Summer of Code work and has submitted the first version of the MusicBrainz app to the Android Market! If you would like to be able to look up releases by barcode, search for artists and rate/tag data in MusicBrainz, this app is for you:

MusicBrainz App in the Android Market!

I’ve already used this application in a number of social situations where someone wanted to know some music info and I was able to look it up very quickly. Its quite handy! Also, an iPhone version is still in the works.

Thanks very much for your continued work on this project, Jamie!

First, many apologies to our Google Summer of Code students for not posting about which projects we had accepted for this summer. The NGS release took an amazing amount of time and I’m finally getting on top of the backlog of things to catch up on.

Now on to introduce the projects for this year:

Eliza Gebow (Batsy) has been accepted to hack on Embeddable Widgets that will allow anyone to embed a MusicBrainz widget into their site/blog/whatever that will dynamically display MusicBrainz information about artists, releases, recordings and possible works if there is enough time. You can follow Eliza’s progress on her blog.

Ian McEwen (ianmcorvidae) has already been madly hacking on improving our timeline and statistics pages. The goal of the project is to provide MusicBrainz users with a comprehensive tool for examining the growth of the MusicBrainz data and to understand how changes in MusicBrainz features and policy affect our database. Follow
Ian’s progress on his blog.

Last, but not least, Michael Wiencek (bitmap) is spending his time this summer hacking on Picard. First Micheal is focusing to make Picard ready for the NGS site — as we were developing NGS we didn’t have the resources to make Picard ready for NGS. Michael is fixing this and adding some new features to Picard as well. Michael has overcome his dislike for blog and you can follow his progress on his blog.

Most amazingly, both Ian and Michael have already shipped working code as part of their GSoC work. Ian’s bare bones timeline is now live on the NGS site and Michael has already released a new beta version of Picard. Amazing stuff — please keep up the good work!

The title just about says it all! Once again we’re in good company!

Google’s Summer of Code program is starting up for 2011 and we’ve applied to be part of it again. If you have any ideas for projects that Summer of Code students should tackle for MusicBrainz, please head over the the Summer of Code ideas page and add your idea!

I hope we get to participate again — last year was productive and fun!

Google Summer of Code is nearly over and the Android app is coming along nicely. If you want to download and try the application, here is a QR code for you:

Once we’re done with debugging the application we will release it to the Market.