(with apologies to the salinger for the title)
it's sunny today. beautiful. slightly breezy. warm.
i was contacted today about potentially offering some technical guidance for a local company on what might end up being a very large kde deployment. it's still very much up in the air and all, but it is interesting that more and more of these kinds of events are cropping up. it's not the only one buzzing under my hat at the moment either. so .. good times.
i've taken this week at a bit of a slower pace than usual, allowing myself evening time and staying off of irc quite a bit. i also spent a bit of time with some of the solaris/kde and Sun people to catch up with what's happening there and keep some of balls rolling. this is also the last week of libs "stuff", as per the impending freeze; after this i will be turned to kdebase and kdegraphics pretty much exclusively (not counting the usual distractions inherent with being on the e.v. board, techbase, random occurences in the community, etc =).
kdegraphics is a packaging and maintenance issue; i'll be working on that package as part of the release team effort. a number of applications will be finding their way into extragear out of kdegraphics and we will hopefully be swapping in a couple of new apps. the dividing line tends not to be along terms of simple code quality, but upon generality and audience appropriateness. because of this, it has been important to me to ensure that extragear will have a regular release cycle along with kde4 releases. helio has been very helpful with this.
kdebase will see adjustments in where applications are, much as kdelibs saw adjustments in where libs were. we're releasing kdebase as three separate tarballs starting with 4.0: one for runtime requirements, one for the workspace and one for applications which are fundamental (e.g. file manager, web browser, etc) but which aren't workspace-specific. i'll be helping with that as well as concentrating on getting the workspace into not only working condition but something to get excited about. (that latter is important for me to keep my interest ;)
but that's next week; tonight, i go to the opera: carmen. i've seen it before elsewhere, and it is a show i really enjoyed last time. to 'celebrate' i bought a new pair of shoes to go with the suit i'm wearing. the young woman who sold them to me (and who, to be honest, picked them out; much safer, i've found, to let someone with a keener eye than mine for fashion take on such tasks) asked where i was going (i had mentioned i needed them for friday evening) and it turns out she's an opera fan too, though since graduating from university (fine arts majors are such practical degrees ;) she hasn't been able to get to many.
i mentioned the vivaldi concert in a couple of weeks being put on by the cologne philharmonic at a local cathedral and she said she was hoping to go to that as well and, by hapinstance, was going to germany next month. not to cologne, however, but to berlin. we chatted a bit about that fine city as we completed the shoe transaction. it was nice to run into a young person with an unabashed sense of adventure and culture in this city; there just aren't enough of her sort around for my tastes.
and speaking of culture ... i arrived home last night to a voice mail inviting me to a private invite-only karaoke event tonight being put on by a local hostess for some of the karaoke people in town. (ok, so i used the term "culture" very loosely.) i rsvp'd my unfortunate inability to attend due to a previous engagement tonight (carmen), but boy do i wish i could be there. not only will some of the more interesting and fun karaoke people in calgary be there, it's being held in a private club; the instructions where to take a flight of stairs down from the sidewalk next to another well known establishment and push a buzzer that is "behind an iron grating, on the left side of the door at the bottom of the stairs". this would apparently summon someone who would verify my attendance. how cool is that? i'd almost feel compelled to wear a zoot suit and speak like cary grant for the night ;)
i was assured that there would be future events like this one and that i'd get a call about them as they occurred. my zoot suit riot dreams may yet take flight! =P
all this was between early evening yesterday and lunch today, which i took with p. in the school yard. he's had an excellent week of performance at school academically and otherwise and i thought i'd reward him with a surprise at lunch of one of his favourite foods: sushi. i picked up a few differents kinds of rolls (avocado, cucumber and shiitake) and brought them to him. he was quite happy by the prospect of sitting outside in the sun feasting on the rice and seaweed wrapped delights.
maybe it's the sunshine. maybe it's because it's spring. maybe it's the combination of code, carmen and sushi in the sunshine ;) but it's a good day, whatever the ultimate reason.
oh, and don't forget: register for akademy today!
Friday, April 27, 2007
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
a kute little story
my friend andy came over the other day and told me a rather nice little kde related story that i thought i'd pass on:
a client of his has some linux servers that are sitting in a local colo centre. the isp running the colo messed up some internal routing and half his servers could no longer talk to the other half inside the colo (though everything was visible and reachable from the outside).
his client tried with great frustration to get the isp to fix things but they couldn't figure it out. so the guy figured that if just changed the ip addresses on the system that couldn't talk to the other system to be on the same internal subnet, things should magically fix themselves. sounds logical enough. only the guy had never touched linux himself before; he was a windows guy and was apparently unaware of the nice gui's we have these days.
knowing that the client was an otherwise windows-only shop, andy had the foresight to install kubuntu on the servers complete with kde available should it ever be needed. so when the client walked into the colo and flipped on a monitor connected to his server, he saw a nice kdm screen. he logged in and changed the ip address using the guidance tool that comes with kubuntu.
not bad for a windows guy who'd never even logged into a linux machine before. his comments? "everything was exactly where i expected it to be. i just went to the applications menu, clicked on 'system settings' and set the ip." he was impressed by how obvious and simple it all was and was very happy that he could get what he needed done himself when it came to crunch time.
these kinds of stories make me very happy, as it just goes to show that the kde project is doing a lot of things right. we can debate and philosophize all we want, but when these events occur it removes all doubt.
i'd also suggest that those working on unix-y server operating systems need to seriously consider how important interfaces like kde are to those who are used to (and even like) system such as windows. just because the focus is web, mail, database, ldap, etc.. doesn't mean a graphical interface is unnecessary. in fact, having a good one, such as kde, available to your users will broaden your reach.
anyways ... enough soapboxing ;) i'm off to merge changes i made to kdelibs while away in brazil from the laptop to the faster and nicer to use desktop system ... which means i'm pretty much caught up on communication i missed while on my mini-vacation. huzzah!
a client of his has some linux servers that are sitting in a local colo centre. the isp running the colo messed up some internal routing and half his servers could no longer talk to the other half inside the colo (though everything was visible and reachable from the outside).
his client tried with great frustration to get the isp to fix things but they couldn't figure it out. so the guy figured that if just changed the ip addresses on the system that couldn't talk to the other system to be on the same internal subnet, things should magically fix themselves. sounds logical enough. only the guy had never touched linux himself before; he was a windows guy and was apparently unaware of the nice gui's we have these days.
knowing that the client was an otherwise windows-only shop, andy had the foresight to install kubuntu on the servers complete with kde available should it ever be needed. so when the client walked into the colo and flipped on a monitor connected to his server, he saw a nice kdm screen. he logged in and changed the ip address using the guidance tool that comes with kubuntu.
not bad for a windows guy who'd never even logged into a linux machine before. his comments? "everything was exactly where i expected it to be. i just went to the applications menu, clicked on 'system settings' and set the ip." he was impressed by how obvious and simple it all was and was very happy that he could get what he needed done himself when it came to crunch time.
these kinds of stories make me very happy, as it just goes to show that the kde project is doing a lot of things right. we can debate and philosophize all we want, but when these events occur it removes all doubt.
i'd also suggest that those working on unix-y server operating systems need to seriously consider how important interfaces like kde are to those who are used to (and even like) system such as windows. just because the focus is web, mail, database, ldap, etc.. doesn't mean a graphical interface is unnecessary. in fact, having a good one, such as kde, available to your users will broaden your reach.
anyways ... enough soapboxing ;) i'm off to merge changes i made to kdelibs while away in brazil from the laptop to the faster and nicer to use desktop system ... which means i'm pretty much caught up on communication i missed while on my mini-vacation. huzzah!
Monday, April 23, 2007
go, go techbase
techbase was presenting about 1000 page views a day by the end of january. between then and the latter half of march it was up to averaging ~4500 page views a day. in the weeks since the average has climbed to ~6500.
it's fairly obvious that techbase is becoming increasingly known and important. i've been mentioning it in my presentations lately to help raise awareness and i see it linked to on mailing lists, irc channels and web boards fairly regularly in the course of conversation.
if you have been wondering if it is worth a few hours of your time to add content or do some editorial review of existing content, i think the numbers speak for themselves. instead of answering those development, sys admin, etc. questions over and over (or worse, missing out the opportunity to answer such questions), take advantage of techbase . it's becoming an increasingly useful and used communications amplifier.
it's fairly obvious that techbase is becoming increasingly known and important. i've been mentioning it in my presentations lately to help raise awareness and i see it linked to on mailing lists, irc channels and web boards fairly regularly in the course of conversation.
if you have been wondering if it is worth a few hours of your time to add content or do some editorial review of existing content, i think the numbers speak for themselves. instead of answering those development, sys admin, etc. questions over and over (or worse, missing out the opportunity to answer such questions), take advantage of techbase . it's becoming an increasingly useful and used communications amplifier.
oxygen icon usability study
openusability.org has created and made public an online usability survey to collect data on the usability of the oxygen icon set. you can find the survey here.
to quote Riccardo Iaconelli of the kde artist team:
It takes just a few minutes to answer it, and your small effort can lead to a
much more usable KDE 4.
please participate to help make kde4 that much better =)
know the score
i'm back from brazil and life at home has wrapped her arms around me again. i was up at 7:30 this morning to get through email and take a quiet shower before p. woke up; then it was get him into the shower, run to the bakery to get some fresh bread (mmm...), cook a healthy breakfast for two, get p. off to school and then back home to get some work done.
quite a different pace from the last week or so where i sat on beaches with a drink in hand and little else to do. i did my best to not even think about work and free software, and i think i generally succeeded.
of course, it wasn't all typical vacationing. as brian, a new friend from the free software world who also lives in canada, observed: life can be a bit surreal around us oddball types. for instance, birthdays played a significant role in our adventures: we visited a nude beach where we played by the rules and stripped down to birthday suits; took a jog on thes and and then played in the waves. very liberating.
we also managed to get ourselves invited to not one, but two birthday parties. one was professionally dj'd with a small and excessively inexpensive bar; a number of the partiers were dressed in various costumes ranging from pirates to french maids. the second birthday event was in the apartment of a local free software aficionado's parent; this was prefaced by a freshman college party and followed up by a night on the town visiting some of the interesting establishments of florianopolis. we watched the sun ascend over the ocean that morning from a pier where people were fishing with nets. a moment to remember.
it wasn't all party party though. i would get up in the morning with the sun, shower and then head to the beach with a towel and do some yoga. it was very ... healing in some way to look out over the rippling blue ocean glittering beneath early morning sunshine and work my way through various poses. i was usually done before too many people started taking their morning beach strolls so the peace and tranquility was left alone. this really helped contribute to a feeling of unity with the natural world again. i needed that =)
i also came back with a yerbe mate kit from a local market so i can enjoy that local drink as i wander about the city this spring...
and of course there was FISL which was noticeably bigger and more productive than last year's installation. so kudos to everyone who put it together! i know that i made a good number of connections within the local community, regional business interests as well as international companies. it sometimes strikes me as a bit funny that sometimes one has to go to another hemisphere to connect with companies that are, relatively, in your own backyard.
showing KDE4 had a huge and positive effect. people are quite amazed by what is already there, and i'm sure they'll be even more impressed by what emerges as we move through 4.0, 4.1 and beyond. even outside of the presentations i gave (one on kde4 in general, and one a technical coding presentation, both to packed rooms of at least 4-500 people) i was holding coding tutorial sessions on the exhibition floor for new and interested developers. sitting around and sharing our cool hacks with people who will undoubtedly turn around and contribute their own efforts in the futrue was in itself extremely enjoyable.
in any case .. i'm back in black. see you all around the intarwebs =)
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
arrived in brazil
so all the travel went smooth as silk and i'm now sitting in my hotel room in porto alegre. huzzah!
i've read through the most critical emails in my inbox and see that i have a few things to do. on the flight from sao paulo i wrote a small example app for solid that i'll be using in the kde4 devel talk; the example apps in svn just cover listing devices but don't touch on detecting devices as they are plugged and unplugged, or network devices for that matter. so i filled in that little blank. i'll probably commit it later tonight after dinner.
i shared the ride from the airport with one of the fisl volunteers, a postgres hacker and two asterisk guys. one of the asterisk guys says as we pulled away from the airport, "last i saw you was at the ohio linux fest. it was at a club and you had just hit on the girl friend of one of the ohio state football team player's girlfriends, and the guy was about to kill you." i had totally forgotten about that little event until he brought it up.
funny story: we were out after dinner having some drinks. i was ordering a drink at the bar when i look over and see these two cute girls at a table together. one of them smiled so i smiled and waved back. she smiled some more, or something, because i went over to say hi. we ended up chatting, and then her clog fell off. she was sitting on one of those absurdly tall chairs that some places have and so would've had to literally hop down to retrieve the footwear. so i said, "let me get that for you." as i bend down to put it back on her foot who comes by but her boyfriend. she hadn't mentioned his existence to me up to this point and was, actually, being quite friendly.
well, the football player wasn't impressed. he was also many, many times my size. figuring i was pretty much screwed i figured i could at least explain myself without running away and looking like a complete drip. apparently drunk football players aren't the most reasonable people in the world. fortunately one of the ohio linux fest organizers was dressed much like the bouncers at the place and pretended to be one to split it up. we all walked away in one piece.
as we walked into the hotel here in porto alegre and lined up to get our room keys, the guy behind the counter points at me, smiles and says, "you were here last year, weren't you? i remember you!"
hm. i need to learn to keep a lower profile.
anyways, looking forward to the next several days of geeking out. already saw keithp, mad dog and others.. looking forward to seeing the kde people =)
i've read through the most critical emails in my inbox and see that i have a few things to do. on the flight from sao paulo i wrote a small example app for solid that i'll be using in the kde4 devel talk; the example apps in svn just cover listing devices but don't touch on detecting devices as they are plugged and unplugged, or network devices for that matter. so i filled in that little blank. i'll probably commit it later tonight after dinner.
i shared the ride from the airport with one of the fisl volunteers, a postgres hacker and two asterisk guys. one of the asterisk guys says as we pulled away from the airport, "last i saw you was at the ohio linux fest. it was at a club and you had just hit on the girl friend of one of the ohio state football team player's girlfriends, and the guy was about to kill you." i had totally forgotten about that little event until he brought it up.
funny story: we were out after dinner having some drinks. i was ordering a drink at the bar when i look over and see these two cute girls at a table together. one of them smiled so i smiled and waved back. she smiled some more, or something, because i went over to say hi. we ended up chatting, and then her clog fell off. she was sitting on one of those absurdly tall chairs that some places have and so would've had to literally hop down to retrieve the footwear. so i said, "let me get that for you." as i bend down to put it back on her foot who comes by but her boyfriend. she hadn't mentioned his existence to me up to this point and was, actually, being quite friendly.
well, the football player wasn't impressed. he was also many, many times my size. figuring i was pretty much screwed i figured i could at least explain myself without running away and looking like a complete drip. apparently drunk football players aren't the most reasonable people in the world. fortunately one of the ohio linux fest organizers was dressed much like the bouncers at the place and pretended to be one to split it up. we all walked away in one piece.
as we walked into the hotel here in porto alegre and lined up to get our room keys, the guy behind the counter points at me, smiles and says, "you were here last year, weren't you? i remember you!"
hm. i need to learn to keep a lower profile.
anyways, looking forward to the next several days of geeking out. already saw keithp, mad dog and others.. looking forward to seeing the kde people =)
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
birthdays, snow and cleaning
so i'm off to fisl in brazil this afternoon. it's currently snowing, which portends badly for my first flight. the snow isn't very heavy, so hopefully it doesn't delay the flight which would result in me most likely missing my flight to sao paulo. so, knock on wood that i don't get stuck in toronto for the night.
i've got a bit of cleaning left to do around the house before i leave.. maybe an hour's work or so. it's not all drudgery though; i smiled as i swept together and put away all the parts to the desktop computer that p. has been taking apart component by component for the last 2 days in the living room. i'll get to the rest of the house as soon as i'm done this blog entry,. that and pack my suitcase.
i'll be missing p.'s birthday on the 14th, which sucks. we did an early birthday for him on saturday, though, so that was good ... but still. would be nice to have been here on the actual day. we had a lot of fun though: build-a-bear, gifts from friends, dinner out and a calgary flames hockey game to finish the evening. it was his first hockey game, so i suppose he's now officially canadian or something ;)
i'll be offline for much of the next 24 hours or so, so if you can't find me online that's why. next blog entry will hopefully be from porto alegre.
i've got a bit of cleaning left to do around the house before i leave.. maybe an hour's work or so. it's not all drudgery though; i smiled as i swept together and put away all the parts to the desktop computer that p. has been taking apart component by component for the last 2 days in the living room. i'll get to the rest of the house as soon as i'm done this blog entry,. that and pack my suitcase.
i'll be missing p.'s birthday on the 14th, which sucks. we did an early birthday for him on saturday, though, so that was good ... but still. would be nice to have been here on the actual day. we had a lot of fun though: build-a-bear, gifts from friends, dinner out and a calgary flames hockey game to finish the evening. it was his first hockey game, so i suppose he's now officially canadian or something ;)
i'll be offline for much of the next 24 hours or so, so if you can't find me online that's why. next blog entry will hopefully be from porto alegre.
kde4 api
yesterday was libs monday and there was a good amount of change. nothing like last weekend's insane mob attack of the libs, but still a good 150 or so commits to things. not bad =)
next week in oslo there'll be a week-long api review of kdelibs hosted by trolltech. they'll be working in a branch and then committing the results on the next monday. i'm really looking forward to seeing how the api looks after that. i'm really happy with how kdelibs has shaped up for kde4. it's not perfect, but nothing ever is. it is much more consistent, modular, thoughtful, pared down and generally laid out better.
given how well kde3's api was received by developers, it will be interesting to see how kde4 gets greeted.
if you are interested in what's changed so far in kdelibs api-wise (so, not counting the moving of binaries to kdebase/runtime, for instance), most of it is already recorded in the the kde4 porting page. right now it is in svn for developer convenience and commit tracking, but once things freeze up, we'll move it to techbase as reference material.
next week in oslo there'll be a week-long api review of kdelibs hosted by trolltech. they'll be working in a branch and then committing the results on the next monday. i'm really looking forward to seeing how the api looks after that. i'm really happy with how kdelibs has shaped up for kde4. it's not perfect, but nothing ever is. it is much more consistent, modular, thoughtful, pared down and generally laid out better.
given how well kde3's api was received by developers, it will be interesting to see how kde4 gets greeted.
if you are interested in what's changed so far in kdelibs api-wise (so, not counting the moving of binaries to kdebase/runtime, for instance), most of it is already recorded in the the kde4 porting page. right now it is in svn for developer convenience and commit tracking, but once things freeze up, we'll move it to techbase as reference material.
a4 to us letter
i get documents all the time that are laid out for A4 paper. when i go to print them, my printer asks me to load A4 paper ... well, i don't have the a4 paper cartridge for it so i can't do anything but cancel the print job.
if it's an odf doc then no problem: just reset the page size. but what if it is a pdf? no problem, kword opens up pdf's well enough and then i can resize the page there.
however, i'm really interested after reading albert's blogs on printing in kpdf and a nice new pdftk frontend. hopefully there'll be a way in okular or this new pdftk thing to switch between paper sizes.
or i could just buy an a4 printer or move to europe and not deal with the inconsistencies anymore ;)
if it's an odf doc then no problem: just reset the page size. but what if it is a pdf? no problem, kword opens up pdf's well enough and then i can resize the page there.
however, i'm really interested after reading albert's blogs on printing in kpdf and a nice new pdftk frontend. hopefully there'll be a way in okular or this new pdftk thing to switch between paper sizes.
or i could just buy an a4 printer or move to europe and not deal with the inconsistencies anymore ;)
Friday, April 06, 2007
getting kde4 to usable
the topic of this post doesn't refer to usability, really, so much as it does to "software that works". we're at the point where we need to start making kde4 usable on a day to day basis. that means fixing the bugs that most of us have to this point been working around and/or ignoring because there were bigger fish to fry.
yesterday someone started bitching in #kde4-devel how so many things weren't working as expected and how frustrating that was. they are right: it is frustrating. there are no desktop icons (they are coming), khtml is fubarred at the moment so launching konqi with the webbrowsing profile dies spectacularly, etc.. these are big issues, but most of the problems are actually pretty small there's an easy solution to them: fix it. example:
this morning my cat crashed konqueror with his tail. i'm not sure what key he hit exactly, but it brought konqi down. the fix was a two liner and didn't take 10 minutes to track down and set right. turns out it was due to a new wrinkle introduced by the model/view stuff.
there have been a huge number of changes to the code base over the last year and a half. this is going to result in various instabilities and annoyances. most of them are likely to be fairly minor. i'd like to encourage my fellow developers to take the time to fix those little annoyances as they appear.
it'll make kde4 a more welcome home to those who are less about the infrastructure and more about the applications. =)
yesterday someone started bitching in #kde4-devel how so many things weren't working as expected and how frustrating that was. they are right: it is frustrating. there are no desktop icons (they are coming), khtml is fubarred at the moment so launching konqi with the webbrowsing profile dies spectacularly, etc.. these are big issues, but most of the problems are actually pretty small there's an easy solution to them: fix it. example:
this morning my cat crashed konqueror with his tail. i'm not sure what key he hit exactly, but it brought konqi down. the fix was a two liner and didn't take 10 minutes to track down and set right. turns out it was due to a new wrinkle introduced by the model/view stuff.
there have been a huge number of changes to the code base over the last year and a half. this is going to result in various instabilities and annoyances. most of them are likely to be fairly minor. i'd like to encourage my fellow developers to take the time to fix those little annoyances as they appear.
it'll make kde4 a more welcome home to those who are less about the infrastructure and more about the applications. =)
Thursday, April 05, 2007
vacations
i haven't taken a real vacation in about 5 years. by "real vacation" i mean one in which i don't have a work schedule that accompanies the travel. this makes enjoying the day to day life rather important for me, otherwise i'd probably burst into a sputtering flame and spend the rest of my life making oragami art at the local "rest home". so i try and live life with a bit of an edge. (a downside is that i tend to exhaust people who get too close for too long.)
next week i'm at FISL, where i'll get to see many of my free software friends again such as helio, mad dog, j5, jono and many others. hopefully i'll make a few new ones, too. once fisl wraps up, however, i'm taking 3 days off. the laptop shall remain off and i'll attempt to release my mind from all things work related. a vacation! let's see how successful i am.
it's going to feel a bit odd, i'm sure. i've been trying to pin down why it is i don't take vacations. perhaps because i feel there are too many things to do and people who i want to be with. perhaps because i've been stuck in "think and do" mode ever since i can remember, seemingly whether i like it or not.
it really hit me, though, when p. asked me why i don't get to have weekends. and again when m. said over lunch yesterday that her roommate observed that p. never stops: he's constantly doing something, often multiple somethings at once. nature or nurture, i don't know, but sometimes it is scary looking into the life of someone who resembles me in so many ways inside.
lately i've been doing a bit of creative writing, so i might take that with me. when i was in heathrow airport at the end of last week i put the headphones on, cranked the music and started writing. i got into something of a full body bobbing motion thing: legs popping, heading jogging, shoulders trying to keep up... i'm pounding away on the keyboard in this stream of consciousness piece when i notice a "presence" and look to my right and there's this kid, maybe 10, leaning over the back of his chair so his face is maybe a foot away from mine. he was just starting at me with this straight face and huge eyes. i smiled without stopping the typing (gotta keep the stream going, after all) which i think freaked him out a bit more than he already seemed to be. i can only wonder what he thought was going on with the crazy man in the seat behind him =)
next week i'm at FISL, where i'll get to see many of my free software friends again such as helio, mad dog, j5, jono and many others. hopefully i'll make a few new ones, too. once fisl wraps up, however, i'm taking 3 days off. the laptop shall remain off and i'll attempt to release my mind from all things work related. a vacation! let's see how successful i am.
it's going to feel a bit odd, i'm sure. i've been trying to pin down why it is i don't take vacations. perhaps because i feel there are too many things to do and people who i want to be with. perhaps because i've been stuck in "think and do" mode ever since i can remember, seemingly whether i like it or not.
it really hit me, though, when p. asked me why i don't get to have weekends. and again when m. said over lunch yesterday that her roommate observed that p. never stops: he's constantly doing something, often multiple somethings at once. nature or nurture, i don't know, but sometimes it is scary looking into the life of someone who resembles me in so many ways inside.
lately i've been doing a bit of creative writing, so i might take that with me. when i was in heathrow airport at the end of last week i put the headphones on, cranked the music and started writing. i got into something of a full body bobbing motion thing: legs popping, heading jogging, shoulders trying to keep up... i'm pounding away on the keyboard in this stream of consciousness piece when i notice a "presence" and look to my right and there's this kid, maybe 10, leaning over the back of his chair so his face is maybe a foot away from mine. he was just starting at me with this straight face and huge eyes. i smiled without stopping the typing (gotta keep the stream going, after all) which i think freaked him out a bit more than he already seemed to be. i can only wonder what he thought was going on with the crazy man in the seat behind him =)
okular, nepomuk and so much more
in amongst and after this weekend's crazyness in svn, there have been a few other really nice happenings.
one is trolltech donating a significant amount of code to the free software stack for text rendering.
another was okular finally moved back into kdegraphics. i've taken on maintainership of the kde4 kdegraphics module for release purposes, and i have my work cut out for me there as there are a rather large number of decisions and actions that need to be made and taken. the people working on things in kdegraphics have been awesome so far and really helpful; we all seem to be thinking in the same general directions which is really nice and most everyone is upbeat and positive. i can't say how much that helps me get through the day when others have a positive attitude.
i spent a good part of the day today reviewing nepomuk which is in kdereview in hopes of still getting it into the kde 4.0 release. i think this is important as otherwise it will be next to impossible to do the integration into the apps for 4.1.
the krita people continue to amaze me with things like auto-alignment of pictures into panoramas.
the usability people are really picking up steam with the HIG, and i saw what will be the first public usability web testing for oxygen (they've done focus group stuff up until now). thomas zander even found a way to largely automate the dialog layouts they want to do, though there are still one or two little fudgelettes here or there to do.
techbase continues to grow: not only were there two new tutorials today, including one on nepomuk's kmetadata, but i looked and over the last two months we've averaged 4000 pages served a day. not exactly "high volume" yet, but that's 4x what it was at the start of february and we've only started getting the word out about techbase.
we also have set up a page on techbase for widgets and other classes that aren't in kdelibs but might be useful to find their way into libs. this is an attempt to start tracking such candidates in a more active manner.
one is trolltech donating a significant amount of code to the free software stack for text rendering.
another was okular finally moved back into kdegraphics. i've taken on maintainership of the kde4 kdegraphics module for release purposes, and i have my work cut out for me there as there are a rather large number of decisions and actions that need to be made and taken. the people working on things in kdegraphics have been awesome so far and really helpful; we all seem to be thinking in the same general directions which is really nice and most everyone is upbeat and positive. i can't say how much that helps me get through the day when others have a positive attitude.
i spent a good part of the day today reviewing nepomuk which is in kdereview in hopes of still getting it into the kde 4.0 release. i think this is important as otherwise it will be next to impossible to do the integration into the apps for 4.1.
the krita people continue to amaze me with things like auto-alignment of pictures into panoramas.
the usability people are really picking up steam with the HIG, and i saw what will be the first public usability web testing for oxygen (they've done focus group stuff up until now). thomas zander even found a way to largely automate the dialog layouts they want to do, though there are still one or two little fudgelettes here or there to do.
techbase continues to grow: not only were there two new tutorials today, including one on nepomuk's kmetadata, but i looked and over the last two months we've averaged 4000 pages served a day. not exactly "high volume" yet, but that's 4x what it was at the start of february and we've only started getting the word out about techbase.
we also have set up a page on techbase for widgets and other classes that aren't in kdelibs but might be useful to find their way into libs. this is an attempt to start tracking such candidates in a more active manner.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
libs explosion
i haven't had a chance (read: motivation slash energy) to blog this week yet, which is perhaps unfortunate, because there's certainly a lot to blog about. monday in particular was crazy with some 500 or so commits, most to libs.
lots of clean-ups in kdeui; kevin factored out the sidebar bookmarks stuff from dolphin and put it into kfile so we can share that code between the file dialog, the file managers and what not; a ton of more work on strigi; josef spillner merged khotnewstuff2 into kdelibs; david faure made the file dialog dlopen the implementation, which not only is yet another start up optimization but it opens the door to future implementation changes (and, i suppose, implementations for win32 and mac os, e.g. use the native dialogs); stephan kulow brought in a new libloader which combined with a final fix to kdebug meant no UI deps in kdecore (a long time goal finally met!); some further work by david (and some help by thiago) meant that kdecore now links to 18 less libs (holy crap!); speaking of thiago, the new knetwork classes went in deprecating the old libs and providing just a few classes that build on the much enhanced networking system in qt 4.3; lubos "seli" lunak updated the window management classes with improved versions (and today laurent put in stubs for macos and win32); bluetooth support in solid was added by daniel gollub; ... and i'm sure i'm missing a lot of things, not to mention all the "little" things that went on as usual.
and that doesn't even touch the usual work that happens in apps. i was happy to see Alessandro Praduroux breathing some new life into krfb, for instance. kdegames keep getting better....
there also seems to be a recent jihad in the codebase clearing out usage of qt3support classes, which is great to see.
of course, all that change meant lots of modules were broken right up to today. but things are sorting themselves out... very, very encouraging to see so much energy going into things.
lots of clean-ups in kdeui; kevin factored out the sidebar bookmarks stuff from dolphin and put it into kfile so we can share that code between the file dialog, the file managers and what not; a ton of more work on strigi; josef spillner merged khotnewstuff2 into kdelibs; david faure made the file dialog dlopen the implementation, which not only is yet another start up optimization but it opens the door to future implementation changes (and, i suppose, implementations for win32 and mac os, e.g. use the native dialogs); stephan kulow brought in a new libloader which combined with a final fix to kdebug meant no UI deps in kdecore (a long time goal finally met!); some further work by david (and some help by thiago) meant that kdecore now links to 18 less libs (holy crap!); speaking of thiago, the new knetwork classes went in deprecating the old libs and providing just a few classes that build on the much enhanced networking system in qt 4.3; lubos "seli" lunak updated the window management classes with improved versions (and today laurent put in stubs for macos and win32); bluetooth support in solid was added by daniel gollub; ... and i'm sure i'm missing a lot of things, not to mention all the "little" things that went on as usual.
and that doesn't even touch the usual work that happens in apps. i was happy to see Alessandro Praduroux breathing some new life into krfb, for instance. kdegames keep getting better....
there also seems to be a recent jihad in the codebase clearing out usage of qt3support classes, which is great to see.
of course, all that change meant lots of modules were broken right up to today. but things are sorting themselves out... very, very encouraging to see so much energy going into things.
Monday, April 02, 2007
so now that that is over...
the second half of my trip was, i suppose, productive. but it was not particularly enjoyable: not enough time with the trolltech devs and way too much time moving around. every night i was either on an airplane or a long distance train. most days i was presenting and in meetings. hopefully something good comes out of all of it.
i got home friday night, but my luggage didn't. so i went out for a drink or two, came home and fell asleep. and then slept most of the next day. i was so exhausted from the last week that my body just refused to get up and do anything productive. fair enough.
my luggage did arrive today and after washing them all i have my favourite clothes clean and wearable again. not to mention the relief of having more than 3 pairs of underwear (2 of which were in the laundy hamper by this point) and 4 pairs of socks. yay for clean underwear!
today the internet was up and down all day making working impossible so i took the day off. did some grocery shopping with p. and otherwise generally just hung out. the massive downside to all this is that i've missed 2 out of 3 of the binary incompatible days from this "monday all the time" weekend. *sigh* oh well, i'll have tomorrow to commit things in any case.
i did notice on the train ride from kristiansand to oslo that the find and replace dialogs in kdeui need a large re-factoring to move forward at all. essentially the find dialog houses all the user interface and the replace dialog nastily pokes into it. the two classes are far less separated as one might think and this makes for some kind of messy internals. but it works. so i've backed out the changes i had into a patch and will reconsider it for later. other work in kdeui fared better =)
i got home friday night, but my luggage didn't. so i went out for a drink or two, came home and fell asleep. and then slept most of the next day. i was so exhausted from the last week that my body just refused to get up and do anything productive. fair enough.
my luggage did arrive today and after washing them all i have my favourite clothes clean and wearable again. not to mention the relief of having more than 3 pairs of underwear (2 of which were in the laundy hamper by this point) and 4 pairs of socks. yay for clean underwear!
today the internet was up and down all day making working impossible so i took the day off. did some grocery shopping with p. and otherwise generally just hung out. the massive downside to all this is that i've missed 2 out of 3 of the binary incompatible days from this "monday all the time" weekend. *sigh* oh well, i'll have tomorrow to commit things in any case.
i did notice on the train ride from kristiansand to oslo that the find and replace dialogs in kdeui need a large re-factoring to move forward at all. essentially the find dialog houses all the user interface and the replace dialog nastily pokes into it. the two classes are far less separated as one might think and this makes for some kind of messy internals. but it works. so i've backed out the changes i had into a patch and will reconsider it for later. other work in kdeui fared better =)
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