Category: KDE

The Marketing Working Group is progressing quite well, and it has been received well by the
community it seems – judging by the number of requests we’re getting. Putting infrastructure in
place and creating a list of TODOs have been two of the issues that we’ve been working on. In the
meantime, we’re reading “This is a job for the Marketing Working Group” nearly every day.
I’m happy with people recognizing the Marketing Working Group and knowing at least one possible
place to go to with all kinds of issues. Sadly, “Marketing Working Group” does not mean that there’s
suddenly a 1000 monkeys doing all kinds of promo work. This will be the major focus of the Marketing
Working Group: Building a community that is able to do more work than what’s possible at the moment,
backing that work up with coordination and structuring it. Helicopter view, maybe. At this moment,
the most important thing is getting spreadkde in shape,
having a decent taskmanagement set up to
be able to route work to volunteers.

In the background, work on market segmentation has started off. Getting to know who you’re
targeting with KDE as a product is a requirement to be able to do meaningful work.

Ah, and business cards. Can of worms freakin’ business cards. Most current status of that is
that we’re trying to get hold of the designer who’ll be working on it, defining a roadmap and
getting him to start working really soon now.

And then there’s documentation, we all love it (translates to everybody needs it, only a handful
of people actually write it). Documentation in the case of the marketing team means writing a
handbook of best practice guides, conserving knowledge, making it easier to compensate contributors
shifting away from KDE and putting new volunteers in their place. To improve our practises, we need
to care that the knowledge gets preserved for KDE. Examples are a release promotion guide, a guide
that lists important things and has checklists for visiting fairs and events, simple practical
things as well as structural and strategic measures to improve current performance and make
volunteer’s efforts more efficient.

While we’re at it, any webdevelopers or graphics designers around who’d like to help out? :-)

As some of you might know, 3/4 of guidance has been put into Kubuntu‘s latest release Breezy Badger in the last moments.
Needless to say that we’re (Simon and me) are really happy with that. This is quite unique, since
that’s the first time (I know of) that KDE ships with PyKDE by default, and makes active use of
Python modules for KControl. For those not in the know, guidance is a set of kcontrol modules that
provide editing of the init process (serviceconfig), administrating user accounts, groups
and passwords (userconfig) and an editor for fstab (mountconfig).

At
aKademy in Málaga, usability expert Jan Muehlig of Relevantive has been reviewing guidance for usability issues
together with me and proposed quite some potential improvements. Also at aKademy, I began working on
a new dialogue for mountconfig which shows free space on a harddisk. The last couple of weeks I
don’t have too much time for excessive coding sessions, but also working two or three hours a week
shows some progress eventually. The code that renders the bars works, also for swap space. What I’m
working on at the moment is a bar that shows the pysical layout of the disk with the partitions in
different colours. I’ll probably have to use different patterns also, since that might be necessary
for visually impaired people. No biggie, though.

Nice detail: No bugs that I know of have been reported yet, no angry users that complain about
their system not booting anymore after having used mountconfig. Guess that’s good. :-)

Preparing the merge with Kim is quite some work, a lot of things have to be organized, bought,
made aware of a new address, so I’m quite busy at the moment. Arranging the “I’m finished studying”
makes it even worse, and I’m ending up with a giant TODO list with a lot of subcategories. I guess
just doing a couple of things every day, re-shuffling priorities and hoping that it doesn’t become
even longer is the way to handle is, yet I don’t see the light.

Organizing all that, I’m getting more and more aware that a lot of things are going to change in
the next two months. I’ll probably start working on a full-time basis, have to develop the feeling
that even when being half-conscious
that I’m not going to my old home (it’s quite some way off from the new one, so I’d better not).
I’ll have Kim around on a even-more-regular basis, be able to use my own kitchen, less annoyance by
ignorant people who happen to live right next door …

Ow, jumping on the APIDOX-bandwagon, I don’t have problems documenting my code, nor is it
something I don’t like to do. Dealing with API documentation, I walk through the code on a regular
base, cleaning things up, raising my own awareness of design issues, and adding documentation to the
interesting (==non-self-explaining) methods. The most interesting issue for me is what to document,
I think my own code is well-legible, and the method and class names are quite clear even without API
documents — yet documenting is still a good thing, to re-think choices made and to improve
readibility and understandability some more. Distracting myself from all the details I’m thinking
about while coding usually helps getting things done. Not at least I think that well-documented code
is even more beautiful and definitely adds quite some value.

Ow yeah, and due to moving houses, I’ll probably not have a “real” internet access at my new
house for a couple of weeks. Let’s hope one of our new neighbours “shares” an access point … >:-)

Obviously the guy on the photo over here is a pretty lucky one. Here’s why:

Without an exhausting struggle, we (Kim, a.k.a. loveliest girl in the world and $me)
found a nice appartment in the city centre of Nijmegen, the city where I already live, where I’m
working, and not at least where I’m planning to stay for a while. We’ll be moving houses in the
beginning of November, people who are willing to help carrying boxes and stuff are welcome. :-)

Next, this afternoon I got the result of my last exam, “Introduction to Accounting
and Finance” (needless to say that this is my alltime favourite, that’s why I kept it that
long).

Bingo. I’m done. No more study, finished, finito, end. All good. I’m happy.

Bram blogged in Málaga that SuSE is everywhere, when I was
walking over the parking lot belonging to this cosy house I’m living in, I cannot say that this is
not true …

On a more serious note, we’ve (which is Simon and me)
decided that guidance will be put into
kdesvn within the next two days (after some due cleanup). Also Jonathan Riddell told me on IRC that
he has got guidance running on breezy, the development release of Ubuntu Linux. I was about to have a look into the issues that had
been around, but apparently I can concentrate on other things, down the road to perfection
*ahum*.
I’ve updated my workstation to breezy yesterday, and I must say that I’m quite
impressed. Not only does it have a modular Xorg already, being a development version it works quite
nicely. Highlights are OpenOffice2-beta2 which works just fine (it seems to be the first release
that’s really usable for me). This OpenOffice release brings nice KDE integration, such as KDE’s
file dialogues and the crystal icon set. A couple of other things are really well done aswell.
Konqueror’s selected area now gets a blue shade, which looks very slick. Also the selection in some
dialogues has cute round edges. This stuff had been around on www.kde-look.org for a while already, but I can’t find the
page.

Ok, back to preparing my presentation for Software
Freedom Day in Tilburg / NL next saturday.

The beachparty on
saturday night was a lot of fun. There was plenty of fish (sardines, I think, grilled by a
couple of brave men standing at a fire), sangria and beer. Also flamenco for the real tourists among
us.

After having returned to the residence, we did our best to diminish existing beer
resources, which went quite successful regarding the state of my head when waking up after 5 hours
of sleep. The thing I learnt: Never forget to drink enough water. My body was pretty dehydrated
which manifested itself in a giant headache. Ideal for travelling about 2000km back home to the
Netherlands. My stomach also felt quite unstable, which made the flight a lot of fun. I now have a
very decent idea why there’s a paperbag for every seat, luckily I didn’t need mine (which I wasn’t
quite confident of, especially when the plane began to descend).

In contrast to my
travelling mates, the dutch railways didn’t suprise me and brought me back home like scheduled.
Nice details: My girlfriend was awaiting me at the station with a pizza. Not kidding, dreams
actually come true from time to time! :-)

aKademy’s hackathon has nearly come to and end for me, we will be kicked out of the University
of Malaga at around six o’clock, at which point I’d like to have dinner. That will be a problem,
since the restaurants usually don’t open before half past eight here, and that’s still quite early a
time for dinner.

Let’s have a look what aKademy2005 has brought:

guidance …

… has been extensively reviewed for usability issues
by Jan Mühlig. (Thanks again, Jan for your time and expertise, I enjoyed the work!) This has
brought quite some possible improvements to light, some of which are easy one-liners (like changing
a label), some of them require changes of parts of the UI. I’ll start fixing the one-liners as soon
as I have Jan’s final report, to keep guidance releasable, and will work on the other issues as soon
as we have a stable version released and can start a new release cycle. (Yeah, I know about
branching.)
I’ve had a BoF about the future of kcontrol with Benjamin Meyer. He asked if I’d like to put
guidance into kdeplayground to give it some more exposure to developers and generally agreed on the
idea of using python to build kcontrol modules. He also liked most parts of guidance and actually
sees an existance of them in kcontrol before his virtual eyes. Promising.

KDE and marketing

I’ve stepped up to try to improve the marketing of KDE in a more structured way than it has ever
been. This will be quite a hard task, but it can also be a lot of fun. Yesterday we had a pretty
long BoF about how we can get this pig flying, and we actually came to a pretty good (and stable, I
think) approach. Existing efforts will be improved. More information on all that is yet to be
wrapped up for the involved mailinglist, so expect some material on that. I’m already thinking about
a couple of things that could really help us on our way to world domination – which will by the way
happen, the only question is why. :-)

The second day of DevConf begun with Aaron
Seigo and Waldo Bastian teaching us mere geeks how to properly promote our applications.
Although it beared some elements of the motivation talk by some well-known big software vendor
company, known from movies on the internet (“developers, developers, developers, developers,
developers …”) it was quite funny. Nothing really new, nothing earth shuddering.

Short thereafter, I gained a lot of insight in KDE’s bindings through Richard
Dale‘s talk about them, he elaborated on misconceptions, techniques to generate them, what’s
possible, what’s even much more easy using bindings rather than C++ (DCOP anyone?). Interesting, at
the very least.

I spent the afternoon, writing a basic PyQt Tutorial which took most of my attention, with a
short interruption to have a look at the KDE4 iconset “Oxygen” which is developed by Kenneth
Wimer, Nuno Pinheiro and David Vignoni our divine artists. (I’ll not show photo’s of it, though.
You’ll have to wait. :P)

The first day of DevConf started with Multimedia API for KDE 4 by Matthias
Kretz who has done quite a lot of work on the kdemm API, a unified way to develop applications
that use multimedia. He was already able to show a basic application using the new framework which
is supposed to be used by KDE4.

Next were two talks about parallel execution, the first, Asynchronous Programming with Qt –
Pitfalls and Techniques by Till Adam
and David Faure showed a couple of techniques with which you can workaround the need for
multithreading, showing how to use QTimers and a couple of other techniques. In the second talk, Mirko
Böhm showed a structured approach to multithreading using interdependant threadlists and
adding dependancies to them. Pretty neat stuff, although Qt seemed not quite ready for all that.
(Mirko explicitely warned to *not* try this in Qt3.)

Zack
Rusin‘s eyecandy-wanking has been postponed to wednesday because the beamer doesn’t seem to like
Zack’s Mac, let’s hope this will get fixed. Zack did show his work later this afternoon, here’s a movie of it. Note that this is quite
an old notebook, about 4 years old, running XGl on a Radeon 9000 graphics card (!).

Aaron showed a couple of nice features of Qt4 designer, which does offer some new
stuff, such as easier integration of custom C++ widgets, it would be nice if that would be available
from python at some point, too. (But then PyQt4 is still far away.) Dragging and dropping and the
whole handling of layouts have undergone some major changes, which is quite good. There are still
some painting issues, though, but it seemed far better than what I’m experiencing with Qt3
designer.

Here’s an overview of the photos.

Spanish food can be very unixy.

Not knowing the language, and most of the spanish people not speaking english very well
(“aah leetul”) makes it a pretty funny experience to order food. Tapas are a nice thing
then, you can basically order half of the menu and then pick the stuff you like. Someone will
probably eat the rest. Having small portions, which combine quite well is great.

The social event last night, which was kindly sponsored by Novell was a lot of fun as most
people attending aKademy will know. I’ve annoyed people walking around taking photos, have a look here.