User:MattPerry

Current Status

Available and working.

About Me

My musical interests are eclectic with a large focus on jazz and electronic music. When I encounter artists on Last.fm or Pandora, and I'm not too busy, I make an effort to come to MusicBrainz and make a search. If data is missing, such as links to home pages or Wikipedia pages, I will fill them in.

Projects

MusicBrainz-related projects that I want to work on:

mb_server

I spoke to Rob about administrating some of the mirror servers. I need to experiment with installing and configuring mb_server and make sure I'm comfortable with it.

To do:

1. Update the INSTALL document based on what I learn and send a patch to Rob for check-in. The install document needs to be as comprehensive as possible. We need to lower the barrier of entry for new MB developers to get involved.

Automated data entry and review

There are a variety of places within the MusicBrainz database where data can be adjusted or added with little or no user intervention. I'd like to start fixing this data. Where it can't be safely edited en masse I can have a new page generated which provides candidates for user review and approval. This new interface should simply the review process and reduce the amount of mouse movements needed.

Some ideas for automated changes:

1. Many albums don't have their language and script set. It should be trivial to write a program to check an album's tracks for Latin script where no script is set. If 100% of the tracks use Latin script then the program should enter an edit to set the script to Latin.

Some ideas to ease review:

1. Using the Perl module Language::Guess it should be possible to identify albums that have no language set and are likely to have English track titles. Language::Guess isn't very accurate so instead of entering edits. However, we can use the data to generate a list of albums that are candidates for setting to English language. This list could be presented to the end user in an efficient manner to facilitate quick review and approval.
2. There are many artists and albums in MusicBrainz who don't have a link to their corresponding article in Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, most of these artists and albums are associated with a Wikipedia category or WikiProject (such as WikiProject Albums). Since Wikipedia makes a dump of its raw data available, it should be possible to generate a list of possible MusicBrainz/Wikipedia associations for review and edit.

MB Testing Project

I want to start a project within the MusicBrainz community to test the MB software. Keschte has expressed interest in helping and has already installed and configured the Selenium test software for mb_server. Keschte isn't working on MB anymore.

To do:

1. Create MB Testing project page and make announcement of project formation on the mailing list.

Reducing MB Bandwidth Usage

1. Install mod_gzip or mod_deflate on the MusicBrainz servers.
2. Place static content on its own server (images.musicbrainz.org), co-locate at a cheaper/free place.
3. Route static content through Coral Cache or another similar service.
4. Find mirrors for software and data distribution and force user redirection to a random, or local, mirror. Ibiblio?

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