Yay for Gay.

After Linuxtag had finished, a couple of gearheads went to Berlin Kreuzberg to grab some food and a drink in a quiet and not to crowded place. That didn't really work out, as we didn't think of Christopher Street Day. We quickly decided that it would be a fine alternative to have food and drinks in the streets and celebrated with another couple of hundred people until late at the night. As you can easily see on the photos, people were more than colourful, and it was a very friendly, laid back and fun event

Linuxtag itself was quite good, I was mostly there representing KDAB, but got some FLAs signed and also held a presentation on using KDE 4 on laptops and netbooks. I think I struck a good balance between technical background of power management related issues and things that are relevant to those who want to use KDE on those devices, and just want things to work (and possibly understand why they don't in some cases). After my own talk, I attended Will Stephenson's talk who put his salty fingers into some wounds we still have with KDE 4, and which are a problem for many user's experience with the desktop. Besides the fact that not all of our cool technologies haven't yet shown their full potential to the users, Will made a good point that we're kind of sticking our heads into the sand when it comes to a really good web experience when using KDE. I agree that we can do much better, and that we need to do something about Konqueror (or our default web browser, anyway) not being able to render many web pages people out there in the real world use.

[ Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:54:58 +0200 ] permanent link

Yay for FLA.

Protecting KDE from bad things is one of the primary purposes of the KDE e.V.. As a member of the KDE e.V.'s Board of Directors I got the special honour today to put one more piece of the protecting freedom puzzle into place by signing people's Fiduciary License Agreements (or in short, FLA). The FLA is a means for the KDE e.V. and the wider Free Software community to be able to relicense code that has been contributed to KDE by people who are, one way or the other, not able to "fix the license" anymore. When relicensing code of someone else, we're bound to pretty strict rules, all has to happen within the principles of Free Software. I'm not really firm on legal grounds, so I'll invoke my fellow board member, Nijmegenaar and the new coordinator of the FSFE's Freedom Task Force (congrats!) to explain those details. Go-go-gadgeto-Ade!
Carlo Piana summarises the purpose of the FLA in the following words:

Essentially, any developer holds the copyright of the software he/she authors, which means that for complex projects, any developer would have a say in any major decision regarding the software, with frequent problems in terms of flexibility and management (including litigation). The fiduciary licence aims at simplifying this process, by assigning the copyright to an entity as KDE e.V. which is not "scalable" and therefore provides sufficient safeguards as to the possible hijacking of the project for nefarious reasons.

[ Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:19:32 +0200 ] permanent link

Berlin, and my new job.

I arrived in Tuesday for Linuxtag. This time, however, I'm not mainly here for KDE, but for KDAB where I've started working in May. KDAB is a company focusing on Qt technology -- consultancy, development and training. It didn't take long getting used to my new colleagues, as I already knew most of them. Quite some KDE people are working for KDAB (in fact it was founded by Kalle, one of the first "gearheads"). Working for KDAB is actually quite interesting, as it's a virtual company. That means that we have our morning coffee on IRC and jabber, and that most of the people are working from home. There is this odd group in Berlin who found that an office would be a cool thing to have, and that it's best situated in Kreuzberg, one of the more fun parts of the city. As I'm working with some people in Berlin, I'm plugging into the weekly catch-up-with-everybody meeting via webcam and VOIP, which works quite well. It does give me that warm, fuzzy feeling of having actual social contact once in a while, while I still don't have anything to do with traffic jams, commuting and all that jazz.
Kreuzberg, where our Berlin office is located, is a great place for an office, it's very easy to reach, there's plenty of really good and inexpensive food around at the office, and many cocktail bars. It also makes a great place for hackathons, and my company is KDE-friendly enough to host regular meetings of all kinds. Actually, I don't think there's a place that has hosted so many KDE sprints already, with certainly more to come.
While not all we do is related to Free Software, much of the work I get in touch with is, and I think that's very cool. Working with and on Free Software is a great motivator for me, and it's good to see Free Software providing a viable business model.
So this week, I'll be hanging around at Linuxtag (we have a shared booth with the Qt Trolls, right next to the KDE booth). On Saturday, I'll be presenting about KDE on laptops and netbooks, make sure you don't miss that talk.
After Linuxtag, I'll be staying for a couple of days here in summery Berlin to catch up more on work-related things, and then I'll pay a brief visit to Kim, the cat and the chinchilla's only to depart to Gran Canaria. Thanks to my employer, flight and hotel is taken care of by KDAB. Thanks!

[ Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:19:32 +0200 ] permanent link

Metallica in my backyard.

Two or three times a year, the nearby Goffert Park is turned into a concert arena. There's a large field amidst the trees which is currently surrounded by fences. Inside, a huge stage is built, and there's space for about 60.000 people.
Today is the Sonisphere Metal festival, with koRn, Slipknot and as headliner Metallica playing. I used to a really like Metallica, I actually saw one of their concerts of the "Nowehere else to roam" Tour in the early nineties. (Support acts were Suicidal Tendencies and The Cult. That concert was really cool, although I think I've bruised a rib in the mosh pit. Since they've let the recording industry instrumentalize Metallica to fight against sharing music, I'm having issues with the band's politics. Filing lawsuits against your fans is not the way to deal with them, or new and upcoming media and the failure of large parts of the music and recording industry in the adoption of the Internet.

So tonight Metallica will be giving a concert within 5 minute walking distance from my home. I didn't get myself a ticket, but got woken up today when the festival started.
The concert starts at 20:45, and we'll probably go over to the park, there's still a lot of place outside the fence, with many people who didn't feel like buying expensive tickets but still like hanging around in the park -- it's their (our) park after all. And you get free live music by rather prominent bands. Other bands that have been performing in my back-yard in the last years include REM, Live, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, The Rolling Stones, and many more. A rocking neighbourhood.

Now playing: koRn - Live at De Goffert, Nijmegen 20 June 2009

[ Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:42:39 +0200 ] permanent link

Special characters with US keyboard.

I'm using a US keyboard layout on my machine, since that's the most hack-friendly one I can actually grok and type blindly on. Often, however I need to type special characters, such as € or letters with a diaresis on top, such as ü (useful to type my own name ;-)). Those should be easy to type for me as well. What I did is to modify my keymap slightly, so that I can use the Right ALT key (ALT Gr on some keyboards), and get the correct character just by typing Right ALT + a for example to get an ä). The 5 key already has € printed on it, so I'm using Right ALT + 5 to type the Euro sign.

I've saved the following settings into a file called ~/.Xmodmap-Umlaut and when logging in, I'm just running a small script

    #!/bin/sh

    xmodmap /home/sebas/.Xmodmap.Umlaut
    

    keysym  u    = u U udiaeresis      Udiaeresis
    keysym  a    = a A adiaeresis      Adiaeresis
    keysym  o    = o O odiaeresis      Odiaeresis
    keysym  e    = e E ediaeresis      Ediaeresis
    keysym  i    = i I idiaeresis      Idiaeresis

    keysym  s    = s S ssharp
    keysym  5    = 5 percent EuroSign
    

[ Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:05:55 +0200 ] permanent link

Depeche Mode concert - not quite yet.

I'm a big Depeche Mode fan, maybe not so much of their rather simple music they made in the eighties, but with the start of Violator (1990), they've continued to impress me with really good electronic music. Depeche Mode, (and Pink Floyd) are probably among those bands who have been influential for most of electronic music we're listen to nowadays, and in my opinion, very rightfully so.
So Kim and I got ourselves two tickets when DM announced the tour they're holding right now, but got disappointed when they had to cancel the concert that was supposed to be held week in Düsseldorf, Germany (quite close to Nijmegen actually). Dave Gahan, their charismatic singer had to undergo a cancer surgery to remove a malignant tumor in his bladder. Fortunately, he seems to be getting back to health quickly.
Just read on the website in the news section that they indeed had to cancel some concerts, luckily though the one we got tickets for will be rescheduled, albeit to a yet unknown date. Others have been cancelled altogether, and seeing how much I'm looking forward to that concert, I'm feeling sorry for those who'll miss out. I guess until the concert is rescheduled, I'll just enjoy the silence...
Now Playing: Depeche Mode - Sounds of the Universe

[ Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:14:13 +0200 ] permanent link

Senlik conference in Istanbul.

This week has brought me to Istanbul, to attend Senlik, which is a Turkish Linux conference organized by LKD, the Turkish Linux users group. I've been invited to this conference by some developers of Pardus Linux, which is a KDE-focused Turkish Linux distribution. KDE is actually very strongly represented at this conference, thanks to the work of the gals and guys from Pardus, who are also wonderful hosts to me and Kim, who accompanies me to enjoy the city for a bit.
The conference is hosted at Istanbul's Bilgi University, which is not purely technical but focuses on design and user interaction. I think that makes a great location for a Free Software conference, as the UI part (artwork and usability) are often seen as stepchilds in Free Software projects. I'm trying hard to make sure that people know that we're embracing designers as first class citizens in our community just like we embrace coders, documentation writers, translators, promo people and community management folks. The grand scheme is I think that KDE is moving from being a Free Software project to becoming a Free Culture project. After all, 'only code' is not enough to conquer the world and make Free Software the default on most people's machines.
As someone just pointed out to me, I (or rather the organizers of this conference ;)) have picked the perfect time to visit Istanbul. Temperatures are at a mild 20 degrees C during the day, the sun is rather warm and nice, but it's not too hot like it becomes during the summer here in southern Europe. I really enjoy the Turkish culture of coffee in interesting tastes (had a green nut coffee last night, which was really tasty, mild coffee) and Nargile, the traditional water pipe which also comes in interesting flavours, such as apple or the mint / lemon mix I tried last night. The nargile causes a bit of a "light" feeling in the head, I figure it's mostly caused by an increased amount of Oxygen reaching your brain. The pipe's smoke seems rather harmless being filtered by the water. Food here in Turkey is just awesome. It's very easy to find both snacks and also more fancy food. There's relatively little in the way of fast food, but many different options in Turkish food. Vegetarian food options are just as numerous and good as non-veggie food (which is what I enjoy being a meat lover).
One thing that really strikes me is the number of women around here. It's really refreshing to see that a Free Software conference can attract women just in the same way. Unfortunately, that is not the case across the board yet. It's something we definitely need to work on. (Although I think that KDE doesn't do a bad job right now, with core contributors such as Celeste, Lydia, Alexandra (yeah, all you Alexandras! ;), Chani, ...). Overall, the number of women involved in Free Software is still embarrassingly low (around 3% overall :(), so there's still a long way to go ... make Free Softare communities a more attractive place for female contributors, make them feel welcome and taken seriously.
On Wednesday, I'll spend the day at the Pardus office here in Istanbul, where we planned a workshop for the team. I'll be using this opportunity to learn more about Pardus Linux which has been continuously impressing me with its amazing level of integration between desktop and underlying operating system. The upcoming version of Pardus, dubbed 2009 will be released this summer, and I can only recommend to check it out. Pardus builds on Python, and most of its infrastructural bits (package management, network management, ...) but also the UI are implemented in Python. We'll be looking at how we can improve the flow of code upstream, and what issues the Pardus developers are facing when interacting with KDE, both code-wise and community-wise. There's definitely a lot of interest to work closer together with KDE as an upstream community, and often it's just a matter of encouraging people to apply for an SVN account and start committing. That doesn't go without it being explained in the first place, though often the reaction I see is "Ow, it's *that* low barrier ..." Some of the Pardus developers will come to Akademy this year, make sure you check out their stuff!
The coming days, I'll be a bit silent, as I'm taking the opportunity of being here with Kim to also relax a couple of days as well, something we didn't get to a lot lately. And there's this long list of different things I still have to try while being here (turkish bath, Iskender kebap only being two of the items lined up.

[ Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:12:17 +0300 ] permanent link

OpenBossa keynote viewable online.

Last month, I gave a keynote at the Bossa Conference in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil. It has been recorded and is now up on blip for everyone who was not able to attend to view it.

[ Tue, 07 Apr 2009 01:08:44 +0200 ] permanent link

Akonadi Sprint in Berlin

This weekend has brought me to the wonderful city of Berlin (wonderful in terms of having the baroque alternative charme that makes Kreuzberg so special). I'm here for the Akonadi meeting, which is all about the personal information store for the Free Desktop. Together with about 15 other people, the time from Friday until Sunday we're trying to advance Akonadi to the next level. I'm mainly here because I was brave (stupid!?) enough to start writing an email plasmoid after being infected by Till (who also turns older today) with the Akonadi virus.

During development of Lion Mail, I've gotten a pretty good idea of what Akonadi does really well (make it easy to use PIM data in your application), and what's lacking at this point (searching and sorting being my main wishes). Yesterday, I presented Lion Mail to the PIM crowd, showed some new concepts I'm trying to implement using it, and also showing some of the Social Desktop Plasma stuff I've been working on in the last weeks. Immediately after my demo, the discussion how to get searching, filtering and sorting done in Akonadi, which I think is great. Not that it wasn't on the agenda for this meeting anyway, but it's really nice to see that some of my wishes are picked up immediately by people like Volker. Other notes from the discussion are on Techbase

I'm not mainly here to talk though (although that obviously is very important), and it would in fact be very disappointing for me if it was all talk-only. Yesterday, I've sat down with Volker and looked at a couple of immediate issue I have in Lion Mail, and solutions for those. In my last blog, I was talking about a performance issue that makes it take 20 seconds until Akonadi returns even fairly simple query results. This was a local problem with my setup. (For those in for a good laugh: My Akonadi was incorrectly set up so that it would fetch all the folders from gmane (about 40.000 :o) and store them. While my personal cache of gmane certainly could certainly come handy in case I was dropped onto a lonely island for 30 years, it's not the most common case. After removing the NNTP resource in Akonadi, query results show up pretty much instantly now. (And gmane has probably also become a bit faster, ...)

Some other bits that I fixed in Lion Mail include monitoring for changes in collection statistics (number of emails, number of unread ones), and writing out the changed information of an email back to Akonadi (or in less technical terms: marking an email as important, read, new or task now actually works). It's one of the things where pieces of a puzzle fall into place, since the changes being written back to Akonadi showed that also change notifications about those items actually work. That means you flag an email as important, and other applets showing this email are reflecting that change as well. Nice.

Also, I've done some UI cleanups in Lion Mail, the action icons are now only shown on hover, making for less clutter in the default view. Yay, because clutter sucks.

Toma has been working on fetching information from microblogs into Akonadi (such a thing in akonadi language is called as "resource"). I've spent some cycles yesterday night to add support for this kind of data to the Akonadi dataengine in Plasma and finished this in the course of today. While there's a microblogging dataengine already, storing the data in Akonadi makes a lot of sense, as it caches the information and makes it easily available to all kinds of apps (not just Plasmoids). It also makes it very easy to share the data across applications. It'll also be a lot easier to query the information, for two reasons: The way you retrieve data from Akonadi is largely unified. Loading an email from Akonadi works nearly the same as fetching Contact data, or in this case entries in a microblog.

Now the team is up for a totally different, less collaborative and more competitive endeavour. Some Trolls from the Berlin office have come over to teach the PIMsters the necessary Foosball lessons. And while I had initially been bragging about my skills (I'm unbeaten Foosball champion in the KDE e.V. Board-internal competition!), I'm now back to hacking. I'm better at that. (Which says more about my Foosball skills than anything else.)

Ow, and I'm tainted now. I did my first commit to the kdepim module today. (Though I snuck one in yesterday already through some code that was about to move.) Feels kind of dirty, but good.

[ Sat, 04 Apr 2009 21:29:08 +0200 ] permanent link

Summer of Code and Social Desktop

I've been thinking about Google's Summer of Code program a bit, and since it's having its fifth birthday this year. I thought it would be about time to congratulate the people at the Open Source Programs Office in Mountain View, especially Leslie, Cat, Tiff, Erica and all the others who I had the pleasure to meet at various occasions. Good works, gals!

From a KDE point of view, it's nice to see after 5 years that this Summer of Code works. "Works" means that it does get us a lot of attraction from new talent. There are actually quite some people active within KDE on a regular basis that have found their way into KDE through the Summer of Code programme.
It's good to see how this is managed by the Google staff as well, they're not just throwing money at us, they're actually putting a lot of effort into SoC, and it provides real, tangible and sustainable benefit for Free Software projects. That's money spent well.

The user wins as well, over the past year, we came to ship many of the things that have been done within Summer of Code project. In Plasma for example, there's the extenders that have been introduced with KDE 4.2 and has already become part of the core infrastructure. Rob Scheepmakers is the guy behind extenders, and has since then maintained the codebase and improved it further. Then there's of course Chani, who has also "landed" her Summer of Code project in KDE 4.2. Her project brought plasma widgets to the screensaver. Something I wanted to start using on my desktop machine yesterday so I can suspend it without needing to unlock it first. No dice, turns out it's not as straightforward as I thought (i.e. it would take me more than 20 seconds, which I didn't want to invest at this point). It's probably about 4 lines of javascript as well. I'll buy the person that does it a beer during Akademy on Gran Canaria.

This year, I might mentor a project. There's the Social Desktop proposal. I thought I had added it about a week ago, and wondered why nobody got back to me on that. Turns out that it hadn't actually been saved probably due to an error on my side. I've added it again, and now it actually turns up on the page. I think there are still a couple of days left until the deadline, so maybe someone comes up with a good proposal. I can help a bit by giving feedback for a draft, so you can still get it into good shape before the deadline.
The Social Desktop is actually a very intereting project. It possibly combines many of the interesting KDE4 technologies in a way that should be tangible for the user. Code-wise, it will mostly happen on a rather high level. Part of the work will be integrating the bits that are already there, Decibel for real time communication, Nepomuk for search and indexing, Akonadi for PIM data, but also more "web-enabled technologies" such as GHNS, JOLIE and Attica to get information, content and also more interaction between users going. Update: So turns out that my space-time continuum was out of balance when I wrote the above lines late last night. I had been looking at the 2008 page, and assumed my social desktop idea wasn't there. Some friendly people pointed out that it is 2009, and after a quick check (we have clocks for that in Plasma), I have to concur.

[ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:00:30 +0100 ] permanent link

What's up with Lion Mail?

With an Akonadi sprint in Berlin coming up, I thought I'd write a couple of lines for those who are interested in some PIM stuff in Plasma.
Lion Mail is a Plasmoid that shows information about emails. It can be used to display for example unread emails in a popup in Plasma. Lion Mail is much more powerful than that though. Lion Mail can load various collections, and handle them as independant applets or groups of applets on the desktop. It uses Plasma's extenders which provide support for detaching parts of an applet. Lion Mail offers in fact two Plasmoids. The Lion Mail applet groups emails into collections and displays them in a configurable listview, either on the desktop or as popup applet in the panel. Then, there's the emailmessage applet that can be put in either panel or on the desktop, and reveils more information as you make it bigger. It dynamically loads the body and displays it if you give it enough space by resizing. This happens transparantly for the user. The idea behind this is that you can drop interesting emails for reference onto desktop or panel, and throw them away when you don't need them. The email applet also offers interaction buttons. You can flag the email as new, unread, important and task item right now. I'm planning to also offer a safe way to trash an email, so you don't get to end up with the situation where you're distracted once by some spam email, Lion Mail and the Email Message Plasmoids act as some sort of intermittent email reader.

The third and least visible part is the Akonadi dataengine. It's actually there for a long time already, but hasn't been much used. I've picked it up, brushed a bit of bit-rot off of it and extended it to do everything I need, and a bit more. I've also added support for contacts to the engine. Having a dataengine for this kind of stuff means that the data is very easily accessible for scripted applets, no special bindings for libraries in PIM or Akonadi are needed. (Naturally, the dataengine itself uses those libraries internally.) In the screenshot, you can see the configuration dialog, the Lion Mail applet and an email applet, all placed on the desktop. The Lion Mail applet show a list of emails, with various bits of metainformation hidden or shown. As you can see, you can even view the full email from within Lion Mail. The buttons shown let you tag the emails, or mark read/unread. Clicking on the icon expands and collapses the header, clicking on the green expander shows and hides the body. It's loaded dynamically from Akonadi. Typically, you'll have Lion Mail sitting in your panel, if you click on it you'll see a popup just like the right applet in the screenshot. If you're using the email applet on the desktop (bottom left in the screenshot), you can reveal more information by resizing it using applet's handle.

There are a couple of things that need more work, either because I've not gotten around to it yet, or because I didn't find a good solution. In random order:

• Various layouting bugs. Qt 4.5 has improved the situation quite nicely, and along with it my experience and wisdom of QGraphicsLayouts has increased a bit as well. Still there is something I've not completely sorted when displaying the applets in a list and expanding items in that listview (usually Lion Mail).
• Fetching the list of collections from akonadi often takes 20 seconds, I'm not sure why. Fetching individual items is pretty darn fast. Fetching of all the lists and content from Akonadi happens fully a asynchronous, which is a big, big plus if we want to keep the UI responsive.
• Drag and Drop support. It works in a wacky way from Lion Mail onto the desktop, but needs a cleaner solution. I've already called onto the gods and demi-gods of the holy Plasma to get me ideas. The issue is basically that we're not dealing with email data but with URLs that deliver us one content type or the other. Checking the mimetype of some dropped URL and doing something sensible with it is something I didn't get to work nicely yet. While the current code is totally disgusting, it's pretty neat interaction-wise. Upon dragging an email, you get a nice large-ish email icon attached to your mouse cursor, and when you drop the email onto the desktop, it's created from the akonadi URL, and loads its content from there. Eventually, the user should be able to just drag an email from her favourite email client (Mailody for sure, it's the first app to use Akonadi for email) onto Plasma, and maybe the other way round as well.
• Sorting and more advanced querying ("virtual folders"). The way Lion Mail works right now, it's not possible to sort emails. I'm not sure how to solve this best, since it's two things I want. First and foremost, I don't want to request full folders of emails (a couple of thousand emails in the common case) only to throw 99.9% of them away. That means that I need some way to query "8 news unread emails from all folders" or "all emails flagged important from imap folders private, work", "emails tagged 'petting zoo'", "8 latest emails from Artur, Wade and George (Yes, you George!)". That's the kind of thing I want to be able to display with Lion Mail. The other side of the problem is of course that the display in Lion Mail itself doesn't do any kind of sorting at the moment. I figured that would be futile, since I'm using the "throw away 99.9% method" right now anyway. (WTF++) Something that needs more of that tender, love and care. And probably some model-view-akonadi-fu as well. (I'm looking at you, Till. :-))
• Integration of activities. The collections shown may vary depending on the current activity. It should be straight-forward to set up Lion Mail so that it only shows you emails relevant to your current activity. Or in less abstract terms: When you're free, you should be notified and shown emails from work or when you're working on some project, to show emails relevant to that context. One of the TODO items.
• Notifications. Didn't get to that yet, simple as that.
• Improved display in the panel. This means for example showing the number of unread emails in there, or something more fancy than that.

Another couple of ideas I'm planning to implement for Lion Mail is more integration with Contacts. Here I'm not necessarily talking about "entries in my addressbook" (only in the ideal case, where they actually have an entry in my addressbook). A contact goes further than what the entry in the addressbook provides. Contacts are one way to provide context to data. The sender of an email matters a lot, even more so when you're looking at emails. Other emails by some person are probably relevant to show as well, pulling in instant messaging status, and possibly social network activity are surely interesting things to look at. Hmm, ... "Lion Mail: Social Networking for Email Geeks". sounds like a nice vision statement for it. ;)
For that to happen, I need to figure out a way to ask Nepomuk about data related to the concept of a "Contact". The exact relationship is a bit unclear to me right now though. Should all data be requested through Nepomuk? In how far can I use Nepomuk concepts in Akonadi? Think of the famous "give me all items (emails, chat logs, ...) by this Nepomuk contact".

If you're interested in looking at Lion Mail code-wise, it's currently in Plasma's playground. If you're planning to use it, hold your breath for a while, it's not ready for use at this point.

A nice side effect of all that hacking is that I'm starting to get the hang (addiction?) of the Monster that C++ can be. I've started learning C++ about two years ago. Over the last weeks, I've felt that I'm more confident with how I write code, I make less dumb errors, I understand more quickly what's going on, and I can understand code quicker now. There's so much more to learn, but at least I'm feeling I've moved from the "figuring out how I express this in C++" to "write code" mode. That said I'm all but an experienced C++ hacker. One of the things that continue to strike me is the overall clarity of KDE's codebase. Combine that (providing huge amounts of examples for everything) with a lot of nice people that can help you figuring out things, and you get a very productive and rewarding learning environment.
Of course I'm not even talking about touching non-Qt/KDE code. That still is something I generally try to avoid, mostly to keep complexity down to a level that is manageable for me. And it's icky.

[ Tue, 24 Mar 2009 04:25:25 +0100 ] permanent link

Bossa conference 2009.

I'm in Porto de Galinhas near Recife in Brazil right now, where I'll be keynoting at Bossa Conference later today. I've been flying in last Thursday from Amsterdam via Lisbon, where I already met some Trolls (Andreas (QGraphicsView), Marius (QItemViews) and Simon (QWebkit)). After a good flight (I got four free seats in a row, which translated to "lie down and sleep as much as you can" to me), we arrived in warm and sunny Brazil. It's about 30 degrees here, and it's spot on summer (spot on winter would mean 26 degrees C, since Recife is only 8 degrees south of the equator). On Friday, we visited the INdT office close to our appartment, and on Saturday the iNdT guys took us to Bora Bora, a piece of beach 2 hours south of Recife that welcomes you to paradise. Can't really argue with that. :-)

On Sunday, the "conference improper" began with a welcome and drinks in the evening so everybody was able to have a fresh start on Monday. Sandro opened the conference with being interrupted by a bunch of Brazilian dancers, I guess everybody was pretty much awake after the drums on dancing.

The conference itself strikes a very nice balance between interesting talks, interesting conversations with interesting people, all that in a very relaxed environment. It takes place in a beach resort, basically a small village with a large swimming pool landscape in its center. The conference and hotel staff is making sure that everything is running smoothly and nobody seems to miss anything.

An interesting talk I followed yesterday was Marcel Holtzmann's presentation about ConnMan, which is a new piece of infrastructure for "getting online". Marcel went through some parts of the network stack showing many parts that just aren't up to today's requirements anymore, and presents a solution that he's currently working on as part of his work for Intel. ConnMan is a replacement for NetworkManager, which is built to be scalable for the future when new technologies such as WiMax arrive at the user. It's basically supposed to be a "more than full" replacement for NetworkManager, which is very complicated in its design and often very slow in its use. ConnMan is designed to make it easy to build a UI on top of it, which is good news for people like me, having worked on the NetworkManager plasmoids UI bits. While I was at first rather sceptical, thinking "Now that NetworkManager actually starts to behave like I want it to, it's being replaced, oh noooooo!", Marcel's managed to convince me that the way forward he's proposing is actually very sensible. Will Stephenson will probably concur as he sees actual documentation, as he's been the "sucker" who took on the work going through large parts of NetworkManager's source code to find out how to write a UI for it. Let's just say "it could've been a more pleasant experience" ;-) So yeah, documentation on the interfaces is something critical if you want others to use your stuff.

I had some interesting conversations yesterday with Rasterman, the founder of Enlightenment. Topics ranged from resolution-independant interfaces to release policy, filesystem hierarchies and how that works for users and of course more mundane subjects like "cocktails served in coconuts".

The atmosphere is is really great, it's fantastic to discuss plans and their implementations with the iNdT folks (especially when the meeting table is not a table but a large swimming pool -- that definitely makes for fun and interesting digressions.

In unrelated news, Gökmen, one of the developers of Pardus Linux (a Turkish Linux distribution) has invited me to speak at a (more user-oriented) conference in Istanbul next month. I'm happily accepting that invitation, so if you're in Istanbul on April 17 and 18, make sure you drop by.

[ Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:55:18 +0100 ] permanent link

Don't ship KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5.

Just a couple of days ago, we've upgraded qt-copy in KDE's SVN to the release candidate of Qt 4.5. Qt 4.5 is to be released shortly, and some distros and Operating Systems apparently plan to ship KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5. That is not a good idea, not if you want a well-working Plasma. (qt-copy is a copy of Qt (d'oh!) we're using for KDE development and which contains some patches we're pushing upstream to Qt. Those are often fixes we need in order to be able to develop KDE.

But let me explain. In Plasma, we're using QGraphicsView a lot. QGraphicsView is a canvas that is different from regular widgets and windows. As such, "normal" QWidgets don't work (wait, I'll get to that in a second), neither do QLayouts. Enter QGraphicsWidgets and QGraphicsLayouts. The latter are still quite new in Qt, and as such not as mature as we're used to from other components in Qt. QGraphicsLayouts in Qt 4.4 for example have problems resizing when their content changes its size. Luckily, most of that has been addressed by the Qt developers so that we're looking at a much improved QGraphicsLayout in Qt 4.5.

In order to get some of the more complex Plasmoids to work correctly in (the Qt 4.4-based) KDE 4.2, those Plasmoids contain workarounds for those problems, workaround that aren't necessary for Qt 4.5 any more. Some of those workaround are even considered harmful when using Qt 4.5 (i.e. they will simply break things such as screwing out the layouting of widgets). The result of that is that Plasma in KDE 4.2 is effectively incompatible with Qt 4.5, hence the reason we ask distributors to not ship KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5. At least not until further notice.

We've already removed some of those workaround and hacks in KDE trunk/ (which is what is going to become KDE 4.3 this summer). KDE 4.3 will require Qt 4.5 anyway once it's released, so this is pretty much a no-brainer. It's not trivial to backport those things, that's why we're currently not planning to do that.

So as it looks like, we (the Plasma team) won't support running KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5. If you'd like to know further details about this, or want to find out what it takes to get KDE 4.2 working with Qt 4.5, please come over to the Plasma mailinglist (plasma-devel kde org) to discuss this further.

Update: Most of the issues have been resolved by both the Qt and KDE teams. If you happen to run into problems with this combination, let us know via bugs.kde.org or one of our mailinglists and we'll see if we can fix it.

[ Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:03:40 +0100 ] permanent link

First Plasma BoF in the Sea.

Note to self: Just blog, don't ask Blauzahl if the picture is good enough, you can always fix it up latah!
Thursday night, I arrived in Kingston, Jamaica after a long, trip. Roger had hooked me up with Michael (who had, the night before also Jos had the pleasure to be Michael's guest). Michael has been a very nice and caring host. He put me to bed after a marathon of something close to 40 hours without a bed (but the occasional 1-hour-naps on the plane). The plane had taken me from Amsterdam to London to Miami (insert bitching about U.S. customs here).
I arrived in Kingston roughly two hours late because there had been some fuel leaking into the engine. Apparently the crew didn't feel comfortable to fly my last hop without having it checked by two groups of engineers. After an hour or so, we the problem was fixed and we flew over to Jamaica. Michael picked me up from the airport, got me some good food and put me to bed, which was needed after a long trip. Thanks dude for caring for me so well!
Finally, I had made my way to Jamaica.

The next day I slept in a bit and ate a large amount of really good fruit, including melon, sugar cane, grapes, ... Then, Grandville, a friendly taxi driver picked me up to go by the University of the West Indies, to pick up Richard and Monika, two students attending CampKDE and some recording gear.

The next 4 - 5 hours, we drove from Kingston to Negril, a good 200km. The trip was mostly fun, we talked about music and Jamaica, I saw a lot of the inner-Jamaican scenery, we had some patties (Jamaican pasty stuffed with beef) and spicy shrimps on the way. When we arrived in Negril, it was already way beyond dusk, and most of the KDE folks that had arrived already were having foods and drinks near the beach. I met Dmitry here, who happens to be one the same racing team as Grandville, our taxi driver (not kidding!).

After the usual (but pleasurable) hugfest that's inevitable when seeing all the people again, we went for a Plasma BoF in the sea (which was still nice and warm). Points of discussion were mostly the ZUI, its usecases, how it's related to virtual desktops, and what we think we'd need to do to make it really usable. We also talked a bit about documentation issues, developer documentation for libplasma, documentation for scripting Plasmoids, and user-oriented documentation. Blauzahl told us that one problem of triaging Plasma bugs is that people often don't really know what's what and that the BugSquad in turn has a hard time to get useful bugreports. Something that can easily be solved with an annotated screenshots (this is the one that needs a better version).

[ Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:00:38 +0100 ] permanent link

Crystal desktop search applet.

Over new year, I've been playing around with Strigi and Nepomuk, which are the two technologies around desktop search and "making sense of your data". Strigi is the underlying library that is used to analyze all sorts of files and index those results. Nepomuk provides a semantic layer on top of this information, and a nice KDE API for easy integration in applications. While Nepomuk is only lately maturing, it shows some nice ways to interact with information on your desktop. Nepomuk uses RDF and ontologies to make sense of your data. It has the concept of types of data (think of a photo being an an image), and how those types relate to each other. It also stores metadata (for the photo example, that'd be size, camera model, and so on.

Nepomuk started catching my attention when I had been looking at a bug in krunner, that cropped up when the desktop search on my machine magically started working. It displayed too many results and kept the KRunner interface very busy, and sometime even made it crash. I've tried some tricks limiting it in a sensible way, but wasn't really familiar with the workings of Nepomuk. Sebastian Trueg has fixed this bug last week, fortunately.

There are some caveats, when setting up Nepomuk. In order to get reasonably fast search and indexing, make sure your Nepomuk is using the Java JNI based Soprano backend (JNI is an interface to some Java functionality for C++). I am compiling KDE from trunk usually. Soprano sits in kdesupport and has two possible backends you can use, Redland and Sesame2. The former is C++ based, but it's very slow. So in order to get reasonable performance out of Nepomuk, make sure the Sesame2 backend gets installed. For compiling it, I had to install the necessary Java packages -- I've installed both the JDK and JRE. CMake apparently didn't find this enough, when configuring Soprano, it still reported that it cound't find the JNI, so wouldn't compile the Sesame2 backend. I had to tell it explicitely where to find Java by putting the following into my .zshrc file:

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java

Over christmas, I had been thinking how to integrate desktop search into Plasma, and started writing a small applet as interface to the desktop search. I'm not really fond of KRunner's current interface. It displays too little information about the results, and looks a bit messy to me. We've already been thinking about possible improvements on the plasma mailing list, but with all the bug fixing around, we didn't get to tackle KRunner's UI in a way that makes it suitable to display results from a desktop search.
So I started writing an applet for Plasma, since nobody seems to have done this yet and called it Crystal, since that's a cool name. Nepomuk actually made it very easy, with 300 lines of code (C++ even), I had a basic Plasma applet, including configuration to tweak the search, and the whole thing displaying results and opening those files.
I've committed the applet yesterday to plasma's playground so others can have a look at this, too. It's already quite nifty, but only very basic and totally not polished. Many aspects of the applet might change in the future, but it should be a good starting point to experiment with desktop search on the KDE4 desktop.
The applet can popup on shortcut (I got this for free with the plasma configuration dialog actually) and pre-fill the clipboard into the lineedit. This way, you just select and copy a word into your clipboard, then hit some shortcut and press enter and dang! it searches for it. When the applet pops up, the text in the query lineedit is selected so you can also just start typing and thus override the pre-filled query (your clipboard or the default from the config dialogue). There's no keyboard navigation in the list of results yet, and it doesn't sort the results by relevance. I actually have a small patch that makes the SearchHitView sort by relevance, but it sometimes causes rendering problems, painting resulting items on top of each other. That patch essentially returns a rounded score for the items and makes KCategorizedView to order descending. I'll have to investigate if that's the right way to do it. Rafael (ereslibre) has some promising work on KCategorizedView in the pipeline as well. We'll see where this all goes...

Codewise, actually searching and displaying results with Nepomuk is dead easy. Most of the important functionality is included in KDE 4.2's kdelibs. There's the QueryServiceClient which is what you use to fire queries into Nepomuk and retrieve the results (Nepomuk::Search::Result). The client is connected to a SearchHitView, which internally retrieves the hits from Nepomuk and puts them into the model, then updates the view.
The SearchHitView is from playground's nepomuk-kde. It gives us models and view for search items, and has plugins for different types of files and result types. Here's how this looks like in an example:

// Create a new client for the search
m_searchclient = new nepomuk::search::queryserviceclient( this );

// Search when the button is clicked
connect( m_buttonsearch, signal( clicked() ),
            this, slot( slotsearch() ) );

// ... also search on Enter in the search field
connect( m_editsearchtext, signal( returnpressed() ),
            this, slot( slotsearch() ) );

// Put new results in the SearchHitView
connect( m_searchclient, signal( newentries( const qlist& ) ),
            m_resultsview, slot( updateresources( const qlist& ) ) );

// Do something when the user clicks on a result
connect( m_resultsview, signal( resourceactivated( const qurl& ) ),
            this, slot( slotresourceactivated( const qurl& ) ) );

Earlier on Sunday, richmoore blogged about a small class he has written to interact with MediaWikis. I've quickly took his code and put it into Crystal. Within an hour or so, I had Crystal display matches from TechBase along with the Nepomuk matches (albeit not correctly yet since the SearchHitView expects a bit more than a QUrl pointing to a random location (oh noes, our techbase is not random!). After a bit more hacking, Crystal now searches in Wikipedia, TechBase and UserBase for your search term. Display of the results is a bit better, but still not quite there yet. Something to sort out. :)

Some more ideas I have for the Crystal applet are saving of searches, for example to the desktop, a dropdown, or something so you can easily access pre-defined queries. Rich's MediaWiki code also got me thinking a bit about the difference between searches on the web and on your desktop (other than "I don't want everything I type submitted to Google", of course ;-)).
It would be really good if applications started using Nepomuk more, although we see some interesting stuff coming up there as well, Gwenview has nepomuk based tagging and rating in KDE 4.2, for example. What I'd find useful is if applications started tagging files through Nepomuk automatically. It would be really useful to keep track of visited webpages, and have some information about that in the results of the desktop search. And of course Email. Tags for attachments from certain persons would be useful. Also there's a small problem in the config dialogue for Strigi right now -- you can't enter directories starting with a ".", and my email is somewhere under ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail. That should be relatively easy to fix though. Mid-term Akonadi should be accessible in the same way.

And finally, I think we should put a searchbox into our file dialogue. During the redesign that has taken place for KDE 4.2, we left some free space in its top center, arguing that it make be the place to put a desktop search box. Sure enough the desktop search is fast enough (and I'm lazy enough) for me to replace most of the navigation-through-my-filesystem by simply typing the filename and choosing the correct file. The results from Strigi and Nepomuk are usually fast enough and correct. The file dialogue feels as a very natural for file search.

[ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 17:12:07 +0100 ] permanent link

Merging branches upstream with Git.

This is one of those "I write it on my blog so I can easily find it back" posts, that's hopefully useful to someone out there.
For KDE development, I'm using git and git-svn to manage the codebase. Earlier today, I've merged a branch I had created over new year's holiday. It consisted of 25 patches, some larger (implementing a new feature), some smaller, cleanups, but also some patches I wanted to keep separate for easier reference and review. I didn't want to commit it to KDE's SVN as one huge commit, but also not as 25, with a lot of those smaller ones that were more the "savegame" type of commit you do once in a while to easily get back to a "working state" when you're about to break things or experiment.
Git's rebase tool is what I wanted then. I've started off with my branch, counted it was 25 commits I want to restructure.

git rebase --interactive HEAD~25

git rebase --continue

[ Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:30:55 +0100 ] permanent link

Networkmanager in KDE4.

Networkmanager is a daemon that keeps track of lower level bits on computers that have changing network hardware. It's designed to do this dynamically, and exchange information about status with a user interface that acts as configuration UI and policy agent. Networkmanager has gone through a large redesign between the 0.6 and 0.7 version, including the necessary API and DBus interface changes. Not without advantages though. I personally didn't really like networkmanager's behaviour in the past, found it too random, too much getting in the way. Networkmanager 0.7 is better in that regard, it doesn't drop my connection all the time for a start, it stays online while you log out and operates mostly within the bounds of what I deem sane.

One of the projects I've been working on over the last couple of months is the networkmanager plasmoid for KDE4. Will has put the infrastructural bits and pieces that are needed to work with networkmanager 0.7 into place. There is the networkmanager backend for Solid, KDE's library for interaction with hardware, but also all the different configuration interfaces for all kinds of network access.
During development of the networkmanager plasmoid, I've often used the GNOME nm-applet. It does the job quite well and is a reliable interface to networkmanager. Something I find a bit confusing is that it offers two context menues, one on right click and one on left click. I often find myself looking in both until I've found the option I've been looking for. This also has to do with a limitation of the whole systray interface, which seems really outdated when looking at how we usually do these things in Plasma. As a matter of fact, nm-applet uses the GNOME keyring, which reminds me that it would be nice at some point to share this functionality (i.e. have it uses kwallet on KDE and keyring on GNOME). Right now when using nm-applet, I've two password stores that I need to unlock after login. I've also tried some other 'wifi connection' UIs. One, I've seen in Windows was particularly bad. It would ask the user to type in a WEP key (the long versions, often), didn't offer any help doing this, but made it made it harder. You had to fill in the long HEX key twice, and both fields for that were password fields, so you can't even see what you're typing. It was just plain horrible. Quite a bit better is the interface of the iPod Touch (and presumably the iPhone). It does a good job on the input side (especially given that the user doesn't use a keyboard but the touchscreen). It does fall flat on its face technically though. First, support for WPA2 is lacking, that rules out access to the network at the university, and supposedly many others. Then, it often reports that it has established a connection when it merely logged on to the access point, but didn't get an IP yet. Since you can often connect to accesspoints (even encrypted ones) but don't actually get an IP address, that information is often bogus and it can be quite annoying being told you're connected, while you're not. One of my favourite wifi settings UI is the one shipped with Maemo. While it's nothing fancy, it gets the job done reliable and it doesn't confuse me.

So one of my personal goals is to not make all those mistakes in the interface for networkmanager in KDE4. We're not there yet, but progressing OK. Settings for wired and wireless start to work, as in "at least three persons on this Planet have ever been able to connect to a wireless network using it". It has UI glitches, it's not nicely streamlined for workflows we have in mind, the configuration interfaces are no beauty yet, and it has bugs, lots of it. It is in no way near release quality yet, more like an early Alpha. We're trying to have a first working version out within the next couple of months, hopefully in time for the distros that ship in spring. So the applet won't ship with KDE 4.2 we're planning to release it individually so you (or your distro) can grab it in the meantime. We're looking at putting it into KDE 4.3 then.
If you're interested in hacking on it or just trying it, the current code can be checked out from playground. For this to work, you need to have the libsolid code from kdebase/workspace/solid installed. There are actually two networkmanager plugins, one is for networkmanager 0.6, one for 0.7. The latter one is the one we're relying on. Yesterday, coolo started committing patches to the networkmanager plasmoid, scratching an itch. That's pretty cool given that he's one of KDE's oldtimers. A true honour to share code with :-)

[ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:13:16 +0100 ] permanent link

KDE 2008 fly-by.

The beginning of this year in KDE was marked with the tagging and release of KDE 4.0, followed up by the release event in Mountain View. KDE 4.0 has marked for the KDE community a stable base to build a kick-ass desktop and applications on. Over the past year, we see this effort paying off. Applications such as Dolphin, Gwenview and Okular are mature tools, powerful and userfriendly at the same time, speaking for the KDE4. With KDEnlive and Amarok 2.0 as their first KDE4 version, we see the more complex applications coming up. On the workspace side, new UI technology has matured, KWin's compositing and Plasma give you a very smooth ride as well.

The development platform is paying off, it proves to be a very extensible and future-proof platform, more and more applications are becoming available on Windows and Mac, KDE on OpenSolaris is getting closer to inclusion in the distribution, and we've seen KDE already available on FreeBSD. New applications written in Python have entered KDE, and scripting support for many applications is becoming available as well, in the form of services in Amarok and scripted Plasmoids for example.
The development platform appeals to be very attractive to new developers as well. At the end of 2008, we'll have welcomed 300 new developers in the project. The current activity in terms of commits to the KDE's SVN, the ongoing bug frenzy and general polishing of KDE4 desktop and apps is amazing.

On the organisational side, this growth in the KDE community and the increased attention from both users and the wider Free Software community, has been balanced out by the launch of the KDE Forum and UserBase to improve communication across a wider community. The formation of the Community Working Group has worked out very well and has come far in smoothening out how we work together. The wide acceptance of the Code of Conduct is another successful chapter in improving the collaboration.

The opening of the KDE e.V. office in Frankfurt and employment of Claudia has been an important step, and are leading to a smoother functioning organisation in many ways. In 2008, many developer meetings have been supported both financially and organisationally and two larger conferences have been held in Mountain View and Mechelen, which scored the record number of attendees.

So what's up next year? Personally, I'm hoping, actually being confident that in 2009 we see the rise of new technologies such as Akonadi, Decibel, integrated desktop search and the semantic desktop. I'm looking forward to seeing KOffice2 becoming available and maturing. Higher level concepts such as the Social Desktop will start to be integrated, and a wide variety of new and existing applications will make their way onto everyone's desktops and mobile devices.
More imminent, there will be the second KDE conference in the Americas on Jamaica in January, and a smashing Akademy during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in July.

It's been a smashing year, and we're not even done yet.

[ Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:33:36 +0100 ] permanent link

Dolphin screencast.

So this first screencast walks us through a part of Dolphin's feature set. The different view modes, zooming functionality, tooltips, the cool selection mechanism (no ctrl-key!), shows how Dolphin integrates my USB stick and how you safely remove it, the Capacity indicator, the places, information, folders and terminal panels and how you can use them to make Dolphin fit your working habits. It concludes with a run through the configuration dialog. Enjoy!

[ Fri, 28 Nov 2008 04:49:51 +0100 ] permanent link

Re: Making sure we do power management the right way.

So Matthew Garrett dissects what he thinks powerdevil is doing wrong and gives a couple of point that in his view, power managemers on the Free Desktop aren't doing right at the moment. Let's have a look at Matthew's points (I'm paraphrasing here for ease to follow, hoping I'm not getting his points wrong):

• "Powersave is the wrong governor". First of all, Matthew assumes that the setting "powersave" will actually use the powersave cpufreq governor. Fair enough, the label offers it as powersaving mode. The CPU governor in use though is not the powersave governor, but the "conservative" governor, which indeed is an "ondemand" governor, meaning it gives you the extra needed CPU power when you ask for it. As its name says, it's slightly more conservative than the ondemand governor when scaling up. Matthew gets this wrong, but he's probably misled by the label we present to the user.
  The "powersave" performance profile does more than just switching the cpufreq governor, it can also control your display's power consumption (and in the future probably even disable animations all over the place so you don't loose any of these CPU cycles for eye-candy).
• "Thermal management is not the job of a power manager". True, mostly. Usually, it should be controlled by the BIOS. The default setting though is usually very conservative / safe. In general, we don't want users to fiddle with the limits (at what temperature should your CPU cooler start spinning?). Powerdevil doesn't offer such option, so Matthew will be happy about this item. (I don't see how Matthew gets to think that powerdevil does poke into thermal management settings, so I guess Matthews point was more a general one in the first place.)
• "Presentation mode". Something the app does indeed. We've discussed this on the hardware-devel list and came to the same conclusion. Again, powerdevil doesn't offer an option for presentation mode to the user because it's "an application behaviour policy" as Matthew tells us. I do agree. What Matthew is missing here is that PowerDevil manages those policies. It's in fact the central place to do so in KDE 4.2. Apps will tell powerdevil that a presentation is running, powerdevil will keep track of all apps inhibiting certain PM features (screensaver, dimming, suspend, ...), check other policies (e.g. "lock screen on resume?"). There's no "inhibit suspend" button in Powerdevil though. Downside is that we have to rely on apps actually setting this cookie -- which might or might not be more reliable than the user herself. So it might take some time until this feature in powermanagement on the Free Desktop works for everybody. (Until that time, you can switch to a power profile that doesn't suspend / screensave in the first place. All happy. :)
• "3d takes more energy than 2d". Might be true. From my measurements, however, facts are: a) KWin with compositing enabled does hardly spend "a significant proportion of the time on the GPU". (In fact, it sleeps most of the time.) and b) KWin in compositing mode does hardly need any more energy than when compositing is off. (Again, results of my measurements, those might be off. I'd invite Matthew or everybody else to provide additional data points so we can improve our default setting to optimize its behaviour further.) Users can of course easily check this themselves. Run powertop with compositing on, measure your CPU consumption, switch it off (alt+shift+f12), measure again, compare. In my tests, results have been in the 1% - 'hardly measurable' range. If that's different on your machine, configure powerdevil to automatically switch off compositing. If you're findings vary from mine, let me know and we can further improve powerdevil's set of policies.

I'd also like to thank Matthew for his input on these matters, and I'm glad it's not as disheartening or dramatic as he tries to put it. In fact, reading his blog, I'm now even more confident that we have something that is both, in its default setting a very sensible system to manage power consumption while not getting in the way of the user, and also very powerful for all those cases where machines are just a bit different -- so we're also set to deal with a great variety of systems and usecases.

[ Sun, 23 Nov 2008 17:15:08 +0100 ] permanent link

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