tokamak 3 on the home stretch

We've been in Randa for nearly 5 days now and it's been a spectacular experience thus far. Some of the attendees could, understandably, only stay for part of Tokamak 3. A week makes for a long sprint and some could only stay for three, four or five days. Some have already returned home due to work or school requirements. Most are here for the whole thing, however.

Our daily nature walks have given us not only breathtaking mountain views but also time to discuss what we are working on without the distraction of our email and music players and build some team bonds. One day we built a small dam in a river as a group. With half an hour of physical work, we had quite a nice little stone wall. It was an interesting exercise in working together and fun on top of it.

The entire environment here has been quite interesting. We've made our own bread twice a day and different people have taken turns doing this daily job. Dishes and basic chores are also part of the routine here. It makes it feel more like a family living together rather than a bunch of people just working together.

Of course, it's not all walking in mountain forests, wading in streams, drinking wine in the evening and baking bread ... we've also been insanely busy here with the code.

We've talked about future features and existing flaws in Qt with Qt developers. We've merged three different GSoC branches: remote widgets, widget explorer and KAuth. We've done profiling of Plasma and increased the speed of various things, sometimes radically: job tracking for file downloads will take virtually no CPU in 4.4 and very little (though a bit more) in 4.3.2. We've worked on context and integration with Nepomuk; better activity management and integration with KWin. New work on WebKit based technologies in KDE 4 has made leaps during our time here. We've put KDE 4 on a small ARM based device and, with Qt 4.6, Plasma runs really smoothly; compared to Enlightenment EFL apps on the same hardware, the performance is at least comparable. In fact, zooming out and in of Plasma is faster on that device with Qt 4.6 than it is on most of our latops here with Qt 4.5. Desktop theme settings have been moved into system setting and the background and activity settings streamlined. Mouse plugins are working smoother and JavaScript control of plasma-desktop has improved greatly. Control panels can now execute actions very easily with greater privileges, finally filing in the gap that removing "Admin mode" left, with a cross-platform authentication system backing it up. (On Linux it uses PolicyKit in the backend; backends for other platforms are needed, though.)

A full report of everything we've done (yes, there's even more!) will appear in a story on theDot once we're done here. We've even made a few videos of people here showing what they have been working on.

At the end of this week, we will be leaving no doubt a bit more tired than when we arrived, but we will be a stronger and more tightly knit community for it. (We were joined by Markey and Mamarok today, too!) Plasma and other parts of KDE will have jumped forward another set of leaps as well to the benefit of every one of the people in our community of users and contributors.

It was a bit expensive to bring people from Brazil, Canada and all over Europe here for a week, but it's paid off tremendously. It has been the perfect setting for our projects and our team.

I am left wondering, however, what language "HE HAKPbIBATb" is. I know it means "do not cover" or something like that, but it's the only one of the 9 languages I couldn't identify on the radiator in the bathroom. ;)