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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
Thursday, February 16th, 2012
Dived Japanese Garden and White Rock yesterday, after refreshing my Scuba diving skills. I’m doing that at New Heaven Diving on Koh Tao, Thailand, a smallness diving operation who do a lot of work in marine life conservancy. I really dig their regular reef cleanup efforts, and their mission to turn more diving schools into marine life conservancy agents. In the process of experiencing the fantastic underwater world, it gives a lot of background to environmental (and underlying socio-economical) problems.
Among yesterday’s highlights were a blue-spotted stingray, porcupine fish, trigger fish, various scorpionfish and thousands of other cute and sometimes curious sea creatures.
I’ve also started using my underwater camera with so far very promising results. I need to work a bit on handling of the cam, but over the course of today’s photos, I am quite thrilled of the results after about just one hour of diving with it. As I didn’t bring my laptop or tablet, uploading those will have to wait until I’m back home in early March — until then some impressions from my phone camera will have to suffice.
Posted in English, Personal, Photography, Travel | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
I’ve been to the Desktop Summit in Berlin for the past few days, we’re now around the middle of the event, after the conference, before the workshop and BoF sessions, so I thought I might share some thoughts I’ve gathered in idle moments in the past few days.
Boredom and Diversity
Last night, the build system BoF was planned, a team session where we look at the way how we develop our software. I have to admit that to me, this is quite a boring (but nevertheless very important topic). As it also affects the way we release software, I’ve put my release team hat on and joined the session. I was a bit afraid that since it’s not the most sexy topic in the world, that little people would show and we end up with incomplete or broken ways to release the KDE SC, and KDE Frameworks in the future. My worries were ungrounded as quite some people showed up and we made good progress on all the topic we talked about. (If you’re interested what we talked about, keep an eye on the kde-core-devel and kde-buildsystem mailinglists.) What struck me is that in KDE, there’s enough people who feel responsible, even for boring topics. When I shared my (ungrounded) concerns with Stephen Kelly, he looked at me with this empty expression on his face and told me “but that’s exciting, it’s the way we build our software!”, and given his enthusiasm, I believe him (even if I don’t exactly personally share his excitement). Diversity makes us strong.
Collaboration and Sustainability
While during the last desktop summit, in Gran Canaria, there were really two co-located conferences, and for my taste we missed some opportunities to sit together with our GNOME peers, this aspect is much better this time around. I’m not sure wether it’s because we all figured out that we have to work more closely together, or if the setup of the conference enables us to work together more closely, I just see it happening. In fact, we sat together with a bunch of GNOME guys until late last night, discussing challenges the Free software ecosystem faces, and possible solutions to these. We focused on these shared challenges instead of the diffferences in our approach, and the differences in our community. We did think much more as one community, than as two.
Active Central
My current focus in KDE is of course Plasma Active, and our team of designers and hackers is fully using opportunities this event gives us to get the word out about Active, and establish it as our answer to the Freedom needs on consumer devices. Just like Matthias set out 15 years ago to conquer the desktop, to provide a Free, coherent, integrated and complete set of applications for users of desktop computers, we are setting sails to also reach this goal for a wider spectrum of consumer devices. We held a bunch of presentations during the conference track already. Martin Grässlin kicked that “Plasma Active track” off, talking about Kwin and Wayland, me doing a more general overview, then Marco and Fania explaining concepts behind Active’s Contour shell, and finally Ivan having us peak into how Nepomuk smartens up our devices by closely listen to what we do. The feedback so far has been fantastic, and I think we’re a step closer to reaching our goal of unifying our efforts regarding consumer devices, such as tablets, smartphones, media centers, and whatever will be invented.
So, on to the next ten billion disruptions! ;-)
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Plasma, Travel | Comments Off
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
I’ll be travelling to two conferences this summer, where I’ll be presenting and demoing Plasma Active to the audience. Those are FroScon and of course the Desktop Summit to be held in Berlin.
See you there! :-)
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Travel | Comments Off
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
- David Faure really is a great musician, he’s proven his jazz skills on the piano, some people recorded videos as proof
- I seem to have brought chocolate with bacon in it, I haven’t seen it, but I’m sure Sune would totally love it
- The mountains around us are suspectedly piles of gold and money from organized crime all over the world, covered under a thin layer of rocks. Need a shovel.
- Swisscom has sponsored swiss army knives. I’ve seen some Swiss soldiers carrying automatic rifles. Shouldn’t we get those to be closer in touch with reality?
- I think the pittoresque houses here in the valley are all fake. The cake is a lie.
- I seem to be beating people in my sleep. But not every night, and the bruises to proof it are elusive
- I now know how to properly pronounce steveire’s nickname
- Kevin are schizophrenic, even if they deny it
- The vending machine at Randa’s small train station has condoms and pregnancy test right next to each other, the latter probably paying respect to the area being very katholic, props for offering condoms, however.
- I’m seeing certain KDE hackers more often than my own mother. They should take their responsiblity and breast-feed me.
- The weather here changes rapidly, one day you get snow, the next day you can go in t-shirt wearing sunglasses.
- Ryan Lortie is still one of my favourite GNOMies, props to him for attending Platform 11 and giving valuable input.
- Coffee is not optional.
- Cornelius still leads the funny t-shirt contest.
Posted in English, KDE, Travel | Comments Off
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
(What? We’re back to tacky K-Names? Don’t worry, just using the K to reminisce us of our roots. :-)) The Platform 11 sprint in Randa is now in full swing, while relatively little code is being written by the 24-ish people here (and the occasional visitors from one of the other 3.5 sprints happening in the same building, at the same time), we’re very, very busy. It’s basically work until collapse, sleep and start again. Kevin is applying his kanban magic to manage the sprint and get everybody focused and synched. Kanban Magic means that we’re using a wall and a lot of post-it notes with tasks and topics on them, and we move those post its through different stages indicated by swimming lanes on the wall, froom waiting through design, review to done. The first note has just passed the review stage and is now in done state: our first accomplishment. :-)
 As we’re working on issues central to how we all (KDE and Qt hackers) develop, I’m sure you’re impatiently waiting for results to pour onto the Internet. While our first focus is on personal interaction and using the facetime and “high personal bandwidth” to solve hard problems, you can get at least an overall impression of the direction of our work, as we’re tracking our results on the wiki.
What is really good and healthy to see is the number of different stakeholders (sometimes represented by the same person wearing multiple hats). This way we can make ‘reasonably sure’ that we take different point of views into account, and find solutions that work for us all. One might expect that this results in endless discussions, but in practise, most of us are on the same page, and where we’re not, we’re taking the time to sync up and see how much common ground we have, and how we can take advantage of that. There are people from up and downstream, from subcommmunities and companies, and people that all have different stakes in the KDE platforms and frameworks.
A big thanks goes to those who made this sprint possible: first of course to all the participants who are focused, motivated and working hard to produce good results. Then of course to Mario and his excellent team of volunteers who make sure we’re fed, warm, safe and taken care of. There is a number of sponsors without which this sprint would not have been possible, those are the Raiffeisen bank, Swisscom and openSUSE who generously chipped in to get us all together for a focused meeting to improve our foundations. Thanks to you all! We are certainly justifying the energy, passion and resources made available to us by working very hard to produce good results!
Posted in Active, English, KDE, openSUSE, Plasma, Travel | Comments Off
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
Plasma Mobile Becomes Plasma Snowmobile
As has been clear from the past days’ blogposts on Planet KDE, the 2011 Randa sprints are kicking off here in the Wallis in southern Switzerland. Surprisingly, it snowed last night, and as we’re at an altitude of 1400m, it’s sticking around for a while. Those that arrive during the afternoon will be in for a snowballfight, I guess. I’ve also made sure the Free beer (new label!) is still tasty, and that the Suisse version of croissants (Kipferl) doesn’t bear any surprises. My train-ride here was calm, I could get a good couple of hours of sleep on the train that got me here during the past night, and enjoyed the massive mountains (which hide in the cloud) already. It’s slightly weird to see snow at the beginning of June, and I’m sure we’re in for a bunch of “WTF?!?” as more people arrive over the course of today. Mario has already posted some photos, just as quick impression.
Posted in English, KDE, Travel | Comments Off
Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Tonight I’ll board a sleeper train which will get me to Randa, Switzerland by tomorrow morning. I’m travelling to that small village in the Swiss Alps to participate in the Platform11 sprint.
 What is this platform11 sprint about? (Randa’s trainstation only has 2 platforms, one towards Zermatt, one towards Visp. That’s probably not it.) The wiki page about the sprint makes it more clear, however:
To examine the current state and near future of the KDE Platform (kdelibs and kdebase-runtime), particularly as it relates to the growing usage of it in new contexts such as mobile or on Windows and MacOS and its traditional usage as a set of conveniences and consistency creators for KDE application development.
The sprint will aim to create an actionable, multi-year roadmap for kdelibs and kdebase-runtime and will examine issues of modularity, topicality and the inherent dichotomy between the KDE Platform as an application development framework (similar to Qt) and as a stand-alone platform to target (similar to, e.g. Windows, MacOS, etc.)
To me, this sprint marks an interesting point in the lifecycle of KDE 4, as we are now rethinking the structure of our platform.
Platform or Frameworks?
Last week, we had an interesting discussion wether the development libraries KDE software bases upon are called a platform or frameworks. I personally prefer to think of it in terms of frameworks, because that has a less exclusive nature to it. A platform sounds very much monolithic, while frameworks give a modular impression — and indeed, one of the goals of the Platform 11 sprint is modularity of our "platform".
Plasma Active and Platform11
One of the goals for me for participating in Platform 11 is to make our development frameworks more suitable for building non-desktop systems. There have already been efforts that work into this direction for quite some time (the platform build-time profiles come to mind, or recent work on libplasma2), but we haven’t yet had a focused meeting where we sat together to discuss our platform as a whole. That will likely mean a bit of restructuring in our libraries, deprecating some overly old stuff, and examining where we’re lacking a consistent API for modern needs. Geolocation comes to mind here, and rumours are that there’s an exile-kiwi coming with plans to Randa.
Last night, during dinner Kim asked me what I’m looking forward to in Randa other than technical and community bits. My answer was “watching the mountains”. As I’m living in the Netherlands, mountains are not a normal thing in sight, and the magnitude of those Swiss Alps keeps astonishing me. I’m also looking forward to those idle moments staring at the mountains.
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Plasma, Travel | Comments Off
Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Some administrative bits.
For the upcoming Berlin Desktop Summit, some people might need visa. The organisation (KDE e.V. and GNOME foundation) can help here. Since we’re a relatively small team, and visa application can be critical to a person being able to attend, we need you to send us your visa request as soon as possible, but in any case before June, 1st. This is necessary so we can do the necessary paperwork and make sure important contributors will be able to attend. Please get in contact with the GNOME foundations travel committee or the KDE e.V. board of directors if you need a visum.
If (you’re a KDE hacker and) you need assistance with travel costs, and you haven’t already applied, please also do so quickly. There’s also a June 1st deadline for that. (The rationale being here is that we do not want to decide on a first-come-first-serve basis, but we need some planning security.)
See you in Berlin!
Posted in Administrative, English, KDE, Travel | Comments Off
Sunday, April 17th, 2011
One of the results of the UX sprint in Berlin which I’m really happy with is that it helped me frame some of the bigger ideas behind in my mind behind Plasma Active, and make it digestable for someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time yet thinking about it, and digesting these ideas.
As really nice example Celeste came up with is “The Box of Crayons“.
Let’s say, we as developers create a crayon, just one color, one thickness, a tool that is fine for jotting down a note on a piece of paper. There’s something magic about this crayon however: You can change it, and you can clone it nearly effortlessly. We start spreading around the clones of this crayon. An artist picks it up, and starts sketching with it, but she’s quickly unhappy with the crayon’s thickness, and the color isn’t very beautiful either (surprise, it’s made by a software developer, those don’t have the same visual tastebuds as many others). The artist takes the crayon, clones it a few times, changes the thickness of some, adjusts the colors of others. She takes a sheet of paper (same magical capabilities) and starts drawing. Happy with this new box of crayons, she tells her friends, and starts sharing it with others (now as a box of coloured crayons, in different colors with different stroke-styles. Others go ahead and add paper, canvases in different forms or shapes…
Applied to Plasma and Active, this means that we have to bring the traditional tasks of application developers to a wider group of people, and deliver the possibilities and infrastructure to share and change our creations. Creating a new “App” (a crayon, or a piece of paper) is not necessarily programming something new, but it can also be a specialized version of something that is already there — as long as it provides added value, it’s a useful addition. An interesting aspect here is that this ties in closely with the core values of Free software, yet provides an intriguing way of blurring the lines between creators and consumers.
Plasma provides these generic crayons with magical capabilities already today. We want these to be used, shared, adapted and combined into new, desirable tools.
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Plasma, Travel | Comments Off
Thursday, October 21st, 2010
These October days, I’m spending in Nürnberg in Southern Germany to attend the openSUSE conference. My role here is three-fold, first and foremost I am here as a representative of open-slx, my employer who sells products and services based on top of openSUSE. Then, I’m a KDE ambassador. Finally, I’m also getting more and more involved with the openSUSE team, getting to know many people and learning about challenges and opportunities this community faces.
That last one is actually really interesting, as the openSUSE community is in the process of re-finding itself. There’s the discussion about strategy going on, which is I think mainly formalizing the biggest problem openSUSE has: It’s lacking a common direction. This is a symptom of good and bad things, it reflects the diversity in the openSUSE community, which I think is of great value. On the other hand, it makes it hard to deliver one coherent product as there are nearly as many goals and opinions how to reach these goals as there are people in openSUSE.
Another part of this process is the de-coupling of the openSUSE community from Novell. This independence is very important for the Free software community since it means taking your own decisions — for instance about the direction of the product. Now my impression is that Novell doesn’t want to abandon openSUSE, but it’s trying to make it stronger by giving it more independence, it’s some sort of growing up of openSUSE.
Yesterday, I attended a session about setting up a foundation for openSUSE that can manage funding, governmental aspects and other more organisational tasks. Interestingly, the openSUSE board has (after looking at many comparable organisations in the Free software space) taken a direction very similar to how KDE with the KDE e.V. backing it up is set up. This is good to hear, since on one hand it validates the work we’re doing in the KDE e.V., and it’s yet another way of sharing in the Free software ecosystem. (Actually, we get requests for organisational assistance from Free software or Free culture projects on a somewhat regular basis.)
I’ve just attended a talk by Cornelius and Vincent (KDE resp. GNOME) who were talking about freedom in the cloud, giving a nice overview how the values of Free software apply to application used from the cloud. The rest of the day is packed with technical sessions, which I’m really looking forward to, and towards the end of today, I’ll talk about user experience in openSUSE. Actually, I’ve decided to talk about user experience and interaction design in general, explaining typical design processes and tools. I aimed for a talk teaching and explaining techniques this time around, since I think that this applies best to a community from kernel hackers to UI designers. My hope is that people will take away some ideas of how to improve the user experience of their work.
Posted in English, Open-SLX, openSUSE, Travel | 1 Comment »
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