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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
Wednesday, April 17th, 2013
We (the KDE Plasma Team) are sitting at the SUSE office in Nürnberg, Germany right now, kicking off the already 6th edition of Tokamak, which is the name for (most of) our Plasma meetings. A Tokamak is a container for Plasma, which uses magnetic force to keep the Plasma in one (very hot) place. For the Plasma team, it provides a high-bandwidth setting where we can discuss, design, review and hack on the technology behind the Plasma workspaces. This meeting’s topic is Plasma2, the evolution of Plasma into the Qt5 and Wayland world.
First, we agreed on a bottom line: “Plasma 2 will be at least as good as the current Plasma, and probably better in many aspects.” This means that we’ll have to invest considerable effort and time into stabilization. At this point, where we are probably still a year or so away from a Plasma2-based release, making it part of our planning now will allow us to focus on the things that we think, matter. Among that is making sure the transition to KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 2 and Wayland will be as seamless as possible, and perceived as an upgrade to our users.
But why are we doing this? Why are we putting so much work into it, what’s the benefit for the user?
Why switch graphics stacks?
In the past years, the landscape of graphics under Linux has changed quite a bit. Many things, like memory management of the graphics stack, rendering of primitives, font rendering, and a few other things involved in the process of “getting pixels onto your screen” have changed, and they’ve changed for the better. With a stack based on Wayland (and in extension Qt5), we are able to utilise modern graphics hardware better, to reduce maintainance effort and hopefully grow the community around the graphics stack, and not at least, to make sure that every frame that ends up on the screen is perfect. In the X11 world, we can’t really control it, since we have no idea when something is painted, in which way it is, where it’s painted, and when the pixels end up on the screen. With Wayland, this process of event processing, rendering and blitting is structured and guaranteed to happen in a certain order. In the end, this transition will enable us to put 60 perfect frames every second on the screen.
The new architecture also allows us to split the rendering into its own thread, so data processing or event handling in the application doesn’t end up delaying rendering. 60 frames per second will make the UI feel smooth as buttery silk, leading to less strain on the eyes and a nicer user experience.
Posted in English, KDE, openSUSE, Plasma, Qt, Travel | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 11th, 2012
 I’ve attended FOSS.in in Bangalore two weeks ago. FOSS.in is the largest Indian Free software conference, and has been on my list of conferences to ever attend for a long time. I’m back home for a good week now, so it’s time to recap a bit my experiences there. I travelled together with Lydia, a.k.a. Nightrose, who was attending on behalf of Wikimedia to tell about Wikidata. For the conference, I was scheduled for a talk about Plasma Active, and we also did a workshop on creating device-adaptive interfaces. More on that later.
Lydia and I went a few days earlier, to have some time to see Bangalore and surroundings. It was my first time in India, so also a good opportunity to see a few new things here and there, and to acclimatize. On the first day, we went around the city a bit, and later were invited to PES-IT, a renowned Indian IT college, where a 24hour open source hackathon would take place. Lydia and I held ad-hoc presentations about getting involved with KDE and Plasma Active respectively, followed by hands-on demos and discussions about both technical and non-technical issues. The students and professors were very friendly, and it was awesome to see enthusiastic students spending their weekend together hacking. We only arrived late at night back at our hotel, after some long and enlightening discussions about Free software and Indian culture. What struck me in particular (and in a very positive way) was the number of girls attending, about one third. In most “Western” countries, information technology is very much a male trade, Dutch universities for example struggle to attract more than one or maybe two girls each year for their computer science courses. India is way ahead there, which on the one hand is great to see, but on the other hand raises the question what is going wrong in my home country. Free software communities suffer from the same skewed demographic, so the same question applies here.
Hampi
Jean-Baptiste (j-b) of VLC arrived two days after us, and we all hopped on a nightbus to Hampi, a UNESCO heritage site, an old capital of a long-gone empire and religious centre a few hours North-West of Bangalore. There, we spent an unforgettable day, from watching (and participating) in the morning ritual of washing your body in the river, sipping a glass of chai, having a wonderful breakfast under the Mango Tree, watching temples in a beautiful surrounding, more wonderful curries, chais, temples and friendly people to enjoying the sunset from the top of a mountain.
Aakash
On Thursday, FOSS.in started. One of the booths that struck me first was the stand of Aakash, which is a low-cost tablet meant for students. The tablet is procured by the Indian government under the supervision of the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay (IIT-Bombay). It is running a dualboot Linux/Android system right now. The Aakash people have already looked into Plasma Active (they prefer it much to Android, but there were some problems getting it to run on their hardware. The hardware is a 7″ tablet with a a capacitive screen, 512MB RAM and otherwise an Allwinner A13 chip with Mali400 GPU. That should just be powerful to enough to run Plasma Active. I got demoed a few applications, both under Android and Linux which quickly revealed why Android was not the best choice: Android basically made a lot of apps run 3 times slower. In the course of the next days, I sat down with IIT’s developers to look into problems they had with getting PA to run. We made some progress, and fleshed out strategies how to get it to run. One bigger hurdle is the lack of a good graphics driver, other tasks involve “relatively simple” system integration tasks. Doable, it seems, and a wonderful opportunity to bring KDE’s software to a very large new group of users.One thing that struck me as genius in this project is that it is not limited to procuring hardware and getting it to boot, but a large part (60+% of the budget) is allocated to content creation. Software is created under the GPL, content under Creative Commons, non-commercial licenses. Translation of content is an integral part of the project, so this initial Freeing of educational content has the potential of being very useful far outside of India as well. Visionary.
As with any big project, there are also critical voices. Hardware is one issue, building a relationship of trust with Chinese manufacturers is not easy, as is getting the manufacturer to understand the constraints and requirements of Free software. I wish the Aakash project all the success it needs however, and we will continue to support the goals of the project. This could be the beginning of a wonderful thing. :)
Plasma Active Presentation and Workshop
 On the first day, I held a presentation about Plasma Active, its approach, technology, goals and so on. The talk took place in the main hall and was well attended. I collected some valuable feedback, and am happy that people understand the ideas and believe them to be right. The next day, we held a KDE miniconf, where Shantanu and me did a workshop on developing device-adaptive apps. In the workshop, we outlined the process from idea to running code on a device, and dug into details. We had about 50 interested visitors, the workshop itself was quite interactive, and we did some live-coding, it was a lot of fun to do.
conf.kde.in 2013?
During the conference it became evident, that the Indian KDE and Free software community would very much like to organize an Indian KDE conference again. After conf.kde.in 2011, which was a great success, this seemed like a good idea, so we did some planning on that, asked if people were willing to volunteer in the organization and outlined a few possible options. The discussion has moved on to the kde-india mailinglist, so if you are among the people who would love to see conf.kde.in 2013 happen, join the list and add your ideas and man/girlpower!
The Internet of Things
One of the presentations I attended during FOSS.in was by Priya Kuber, who works for Arduino. Arduino produces a open source hardware microcontroller aimed at educational purposes. The talk was very inspiring, so I wondered if I could use this for some home automation tasks, as simple example a remote power switch to turn on my workstation in the office, or somesuch. Priya sat down with me and quickly got me going with my own basic programme for the Arduino microcontroller, and it was all very easy and fun. Back home I ordered an Arduino starter kit, which has already arrived and contains basically what I’d call a kid’s microcontroller wet dream, it has the Arduino Uno board, LEDs, sensors for light, temperature, an LCD display and a bunch of other small electronic components along with a nice book. Surely something to spend the calmer Christmas days with, old style. :)
Still in India, I sat down for an afternoon and hacked up some code to use with this little project, and got already quite far. The idea is to connect the Arduino to my RaspberryPi (which is energy-efficient enough to run 24/7), run a small http server on the RPi and use that to remote control physical devices at home from a remote location (I’d like to think of a tropical island here ;)). I’ve implemented the server in twisted Python, it presents a JSON interface, which can be directly consumed from a QML Plasmoid, on either my laptop or any Plasma Active device. I didn’t get around to doing the actually interesting hardware part, yet. Maybe this is the feable start of using KDE technologies for home automation and domotica?
I would like to thank the KDE e.V., the foundation for the KDE community, for supporting my trip. You can also pitch in here, to make participation of KDE contributors in this kind of events possible by Joining the Game.
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Personal, Plasma, Travel | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, September 19th, 2012
Randa Retraite
Starting this weekend, KDE e.V. the organisation supporting the KDE community organizes a number of meetings in Randa, Switzerland. Randa is a village in the Swiss Alps. It’s a bit of a remote location between mountains which reach up to 4500m, provides the perfect location to sit down together and do nothing but concentrate on a single topic. You can help us to make this happen, but first, read on to understand what we will be doing in Randa, and why.
From Platform to Frameworks
One of the meetings planned there is the meeting of the KDE Plasma team. The goal of this meeting is to plan and make progress on the port of libplasma, the framework that is underlying the Plasma workspaces to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5.
 Within the KDE Frameworks 5 effort, the KDE team splits up and reorganizes the whole KDE platform. This effort has been started during last year’s meeting in Randa, and while being a huge effort, we have already made good progress across many of the libraries and technologies that make up KDE Frameworks. KDE Frameworks 5 will be mostly source-compatible, meaning that no large rewrites will be needed in order to port an app to Frameworks 5, much rather, we’re splitting dependencies differently across the board to make it easier to reuse only certain frameworks, without having to drag in larger dependency chains. The Frameworks 5 effort goes along with porting of the codebase to Qt5 (which is also much more painless than the port from Qt3 to Qt4). The result will be a faster, more modular, and hopefully due to these new virtues more widespread use of KDE technology.
The road to Plasma-Next
One of the technologies in Frameworks 5 is libplasma2. For libplasma2, there is still a lot of work to happen. While we have a rough plan what we want to achieve, and already taken the first steps to make this happen, there’s still a huge mountain of work ahead of us to create a new libplasma2 that is worthy its place in Frameworks 5. One of the high-level goals is to be able to run Plasma workspaces (and apps) in an entirely hardware-accelerated environment. In Qt5 terms, this means we want to use QtQuick 2 to display our user interfaces using an OpenGL scenegraph. As that is quite a deviation from the current, QPainter-based approach, you can imagine that it won’t be easy to get this “just right”, and in any case, it involves touching and testing a lot of code that works well right now. Also for Plasma Addons, we want to achieve almost source compatibility, so all the work that has gone into Plasma in KDE SC 4 will be immediately available in the new world order of Qt5. Not an easy task, and there are a few areas where we don’t have satisfactory solutions yet. A lot of sweat and braincycles will be needed.
 The good news is that we have a capable and motivated team to tackle this effort, and to really kick off our libplasma2 hacking spree, we will sit down in Randa and plan all this through in detail, then sit down and get hacking so we have hopefully reached a critical mass to continue on, and a clear and shared vision across the team how we want to go about the remaining work.
How you can help…
Free Software is a joint effort, and everybody can pitch in. In order to get travel costs funded for this event in the Swiss Alps, we have started a fundraiser campaign. The goal is to raise 10.000€, and we’ve already made good progress towards this goal. You can help reaching it, making the sprint in Randa possible and contribute to the future of the software you might (or might not yet!) be running!
Posted in English, KDE, Plasma, Qt, Travel | 2 Comments »
Thursday, July 26th, 2012
After a nice stroll through downtown Porto Alegre with a few fellow Free software activists from Spain, Mexica, Peru and Argentina, today was the first day of FISL13, and it was amazing. My usually screwed up biorythm in this part of the world means that I get up at a reasonable (for a conference visit) time in the morning, enough to have a relaxed shower, a bit of emailing, breakfast and still be on time for a fully packed conference day. FISL’s first day was amazing, it started off by meeting a few well known faces (Sandro, Filipe, Isabel, Knuth, I’m talking to you!), and getting to know a lot of new ones. Especially the Brazilian KDE community is really awesome (I knew that, but doesn’t hurt to mention it nevertheless). I also went by SOLAR, the Argentinian Free software organisation who offered me a nice cup of Mate tea, and an opportunity to share some ideas by means of an interview.
After a bit of booth-crawling, I went to attend two talks, which were both really excellent: The first was by Seth Schoen, who is with the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF). Seth talked about privacy and data security at the United States Border. I’m sure anybody who has travelled to the U.S. in the past 10 years can relate to that. Seth explained how the border control is organised, what your right are (at the border, your normal civil rights are actually limited, so searching your luggage or detaining you for questioning can be done without good reason, unlike “in the streets”, so it’s very good to know what they can and can’t do), and how you can protect yourself in case you *DO* have something to hide (or rather, how you carry private information on digital devices across the border). There are a few methods, one is: wipe your device, do a clean install and download the interesting data only after you crossed the border, more sophisticated tricks involve temporarily encrypting your device with a key you don’t know and only get after you’ve passed through border control. Lots of interesting information there, and it makes me more comfortable when travelling to the U.S. the next time. Also, chapeau to the EFF for their protection of privacy and civil rights in general. The talk was excellently held, really interesting and absolutely worth my time.
Next up was Rick Falkvinge, one of the founders of the first Pirate Party (in Sweden). Rick talked about the history of copyright, how people who gain power all of a sudden “kick away the ladder” to secure their position, and how, in more general the Internet changes society. Another excellent talk that felt like it was really worth the time spent. Interestingly, these days, the Brazilian branch of the Pirate Party is being founded, so it’s very much a historical thing happening here. Excited to witness that.
Later in the afternoon, Daker Fernandes Pinheiro of Plasma Qt Quick Components fame and me did a workshop teaching everything you need to know to get started writing device-adaptive applications using Plasma. The workshop was well-attended, I think well prepared as well and people seemed to like it (even if we flooded everybody with a lot of information). It was quite practical, luckily Daker and me hit the right audience, so I think even if it was quite heavy on information, it’s still manageable. After a good two and a half hours where we taught the basics of Qt Quick, Plasma Quick, and how to write Plasma Components and Apps, it was evident on the faces of our audience (and judging by their questions) that people enjoyed our sharing of knowledge, and who knows, maybe a few of the attendants will join our team and become new KDE hackers. As promised, I’ve put the slides online. They provide a good overview of the technologies involved, so are probably quite useful as reading material. Of course, as sharing is good, let me know if you would like to reuse them in part or as a whole, and I’ll send you the sources (including a bit of example code). I myself enjoyed “teaching” as well. Especially Plasmate, our one-stop-shop workflow-driven Plasma IDE resonated really well with the audience, just in time for the end of this summer’s 1.0 release.
Overall, I’m really exhilerated by FISL so far. People are more than welcoming, so it immediately feels “at home” (at 12.000km away from it!), I’ve had really interesting and inspiring conversations, and everything is really well organised. I’m now at my hotel (one that focuses on sustainability, it’s really nice, well done FISL peeps!), we’ll go for churrasco in a bit and then off to the first night’s party.
My talk on “Freeing the Device Spectrum” will be on Friday, at 11.00 o’clock in the GNU hall (that’s the big auditorium). It’s targeted at a general audience, so a lot less technical than the workshop we did today. Be there, or be square!
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Plasma, Qt, Travel | Comments Off
Tuesday, July 24th, 2012
I got up rather early this morning to catch a flight from Amsterdam across the ocean (and equator) down to Brazil, where on Wednesday FISL (Forum Internacional Software Libre) will start. Right now, I’m temporarily stranded in a bar at Sao Paulo airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Porto Alegre where FISL will take place.
Already a few years back, I heard that FISL is one of the pearls among international Free software events, and this year, fate (impersonated by the FISL organizers) invited me to speak at FISL, a wonderful opportunity. Doing bit of research, FISL is an order of magnitude bigger than European events, which due to geographical proximity are a bit more often on my agenda, so I’m quite excited to celebrate this Planet’s biggest community-driven Free software event, and I’m honoured that I will get the opportunity to present our ideas, work and progress on Freeing the Device spectrum to the audience (mark down “Friday, 27th, 11.00h, auditorium” in your agendas!).
Brazil has a special place in my heart, I’ve been working together for a few years with many awesome Brazilian hackers and contributors, I’ve had the opportunity to visit this huge country earlier (when I keynoted at OpenBossa conference in 2009 in Recife) which I’ve fond memories of. I’m glad I’m back now. (Although it’s not quite so real yet, airports are quite the same everywhere.) I’ll arrive at my hotel in Porto Alegre quite late tonight, will hopefully get a good night of sleep to counter the jetlag, and a day tomorrow to acclimatize and possibly visit the city.
On Wednesday, Daker Pinheiro and me will be running a workshop about developing apps for the device spectrum using KDE technologies. For this workshop, no prior knowledge of Qt or KDE technologies will be required, we hope to be able to get you going with the basic steps and concepts during that workshop, so that attendees get a kickstart and can continue this fun adventure when they’re back home, supported by our many online support channels (docs, email, IRC, wiki, read-the-source-luke, etc…)
The weather back home in the Netherlands has been mostly aweful, quite a crap summer indeed. Let’s see if Southern Brazilian winter beats this year’s Dutch summer…
Posted in Active, English, KDE, Personal, Plasma, Travel | 3 Comments »
Sunday, June 17th, 2012
In this post, I’ll try to provide an overview of the results of the work we’ve done during the Workspace sprint in Pineda de Mar, Catalunya, Spain. The sprint is still going on, unfortunately I had to leave early to attend a friend’s wedding. Before going into any details, a few thank yous and credits are in place: Aleix Pol and Alex Fiestas for being excellent hosts organising this sprint (including picking this terrific location which allowed us to concentrate 100% on our processes and 0% on the beach), KDE Spain for sponsoring our food, the KDE e.V. (and its donators!) for sponsoring travel expenses and providing organisational backing, Kevin Ottens who took a sizable slice of time out of his vacation account in order to facilitate meetings, enabling group dynamical processes and generally being a good moderator, Björn Balasz for chipping in time and providing his background in psychology and usability and of course open-slx, my awesome employer.
Activities central: One focus that we have been working on in Plasma quite extensively is organising your documents, contacts, applications, files and other digital assets into Activities. Activities provide a contextual way of organising your devices. Activities usually enclose these resources into personal context which might include locations, contacts, documents and any other resource we’re able to express in terms of semantics. (So pretty much all. :))
We’ve identified areas where we can improve the activities workflow. Switching between Activities and getting an overview can surely be improved. There have already been some ideas floating around, and some smaller and larger improvements are in the pipeline to see the light of day in one of our future releases. In some parts, we’re transplanting features we have matured in the Plasma Active user experience into the desktop. The Plasma Way: Share code across devices, investigate workflows across apps and device borders. (So a workflow which we want to enable may actually involve using more than one device — we want to make especially these patterns a lot easier, intuitive and fun to use. There’s a few real challenges in there, although many parts involve someone “just sitting down and doing it”.
Personas: I’ve dedicated a separate blog entry to Carla and Raj, our brand new personas, so I’ll kindly refer you to that.
Social networks and messaging: Carla’s and Raj’s lives involve talking to people across different channels. We want to enable these patterns by providing deep integration of messaging and social networks into the desktop. While we likely will not ever support every single feature of all social networks, we definitely want things like native notifications for messages, and being able to keep tabs on the going ons around you. Technologies we’ve been working on in the part years and which are coming to mature now will be a great help in creating a nice user experience here: Akonadi, Telepathy being at the forefront of double-plus-useful frameworks here.
Along with the integration of more social services into the workspace, we also want to enable cross-device workflows using online services. Examples for getting your data across devices are ownCloud, but also commercial services like FlickR. I think we are in the position to put Free software solutions first, but not excluding proprietary services, but enabling Carla and Raj to mix and mesh whatever they uses. In this, we need to pick up the user where he or she is now. We’re not going to switch users to Free software users if we require social disruption in their lives. :)
Something I found particularly exciting was the call by a few participants to reinvigorate Project Silk. The idea is to make the web, web apps, -applications and -services first class citizens in the desktop. This can range from the introduction of a site-specific browser to deeper integration of online content and services: think of FlickR integration in Gwenview, caching data from online sources, providing native UIs for services that are otherwise a bit cumbersome to use, and much, much more. I’m surely hoping we’ll see a surge of improvements in this area. I’m also happy that Richard and I documented our ideas quite well when we came up with them in 2009 at the Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria (coincidentally also Spain, at least technically ;-)).
There’s almost too much exciting new ideas that it’s hard to report about all of it without choking your feedreaders or webbrowsers, so I’ll just mention a few more telegramme-style. Feel free to ask in the comments if you have specific questions, or just head over to the plasma-devel@kde.org mailinglist where you can discuss with the whole team involved.
- As base for identifying needed improvements, we will concentrate our thinking on which workflows we can enable for users. This first line of identification will be thought about without a specific device in mind. Much more so, workflow can and often do include different devices. We want this to be at the heart of our designs.
- Virtual desktop will remain what they are, orthogonal to the principle of Activities, We do not plan any sweeping changes here, in order not to break engrained workflows. Nepomuk synchronisation across devices is still a very challenging problem. It needs more design and research work to define an achievable scope.
- We’ve proposed a few changes to KDE’s release rythms, basically decoupling the releases of workspaces, applications and (in the future) KDE Frameworks. This is basically a continuation of KDE’s effort to implement branding closer aligned to how we work and what we produce; currently under discussion.
- Notifications will likely receive a rework in order to make them more activity aware, and to display insensitive information on a lock screen, just to name two examples.
- Everybody agreed that stability and quality are key for users. We will avoid disruptive changes, but concentrate on making existing tools better, and new features not get in the way of existing workflows. A few changes in our processes have also been planned,
- Clemens of Blue Systems attends the sprint as well, it’s good to see new faces participating and supporting KDE. We’ve had very interesting conversations about all kinds of topics.
- Maybe the most important thing was the sharing of the Plasma vision with a wider team of contributors. It strikes that Plasma lately has been moving so incredibly fast that we built up a backlog of communication, some of which we managed to knock down in the past days, but it surely will take some time until all ideas, concepts and processes are ingrained into everybody’s brains. The first steps for this have been taken, however.
As you can see, that’s a lot of stuff we have carved in sand in the past days. It will need refinement, and consolidation, more design, ungodly amounts of hacking and surely won’t all be implemented in a whim. It does however give everyone a good idea where we’re going, and what the steps into that direction are. Exciting times ahead. If you’re looking for more sprint results, I’d also read Marco’s blog about it.
Saying good bye was relatively easy this time around, as most people attending the sprint will also be at Akademy, which starts in two weeks in Talinn, Estland. The next Plasma sprint is planned in September in Switzerland. The plan is to mostly work on libplasma2, QtQuick2 and Frameworks 5 in order to technically pave the way into the future of the Linux workspaces.
Posted in Active, Akonadi, English, KDE, Open-SLX, Plasma, Qt, Silk, Travel, Usability | 16 Comments »
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
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