Category: Travel

Berlin Desktop Summit: Deadline for visa and travel assistance

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!

Plasma Active: A Box of Crayons

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.

openSUSE conference 2010

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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.

Solid Sprint Photo Blog

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Sleep deprived as I am, I figured I’d do something more visual than my usual wall of text (quoting TGEN: "tl;dr", or for the markeys and others blessed with attention deficits, like me right now after a bunch of really intensive days :-)). So here goes the Solid Photo Blog, fresh from Madrid:

Alex Fiestas (Ale-Ale-Jandroooo), BlueDevil hacker, UFOCoder and kind host of the Solid bunch

Alex Fiestas (Ale-Ale-Jandroooo), BlueDevil hacker, UFOCoder and kind host of the Solid bunch.

Categorizer, Bluetooth hacker, new KDE-UDev maintainer and KDE-ES Vice president Rafael

Categorizer, Bluetooth hacker, new KDE-UDev maintainer and KDE-ES Vice president Rafael "ereslibre" Fernando Lopez. UFOCoder and kind host.

Kevin

Kevin "ervin" Ottens: Solid Maintainer, Sprint Kanban Manager and my pillow-talk mate for the sprint (I spare you the details, but notice the ghost behind ervin).

The cutest youngest aspirant Solid hacker, branched off in Nuremberg.

The cutest youngest aspirant Solid hacker, branched off in Nuremberg.

Solid Sprint Group PhotoMandatory group photo, top-left to bottom-right: Dario Freddi (PowerDevil), Will Stephenson (Network Management, openSUSE), Kevin Ottens (Solid Maintainer, KDE Mobile platform dude), Lamarque Souza (Network Management mobile broadband dude), Javier Llorente (openSUSE dude), Alex Fiestas (Bluedevil, upower backend), Rafael "ereslibre" Fernando Lopez (KCategorizedItemView, BueDevil), Albert ‘tsdgeos’ Astrals Cid (KDE-ES presidente, localization expert), Sebastian Kügler (Power & Network Management (Plasma) chrome, KDE e.V. dude, me, myself and I). Background: Our Kanban-based workflow, containing tasks for internal communication and progress-tracking.

Agustin Benito Bethencourt, Gran Canaria Desktop Summit organizer, ASOLIF contact and generally nice 'high-level-thinking' dude

Agustin Benito Bethencourt, Gran Canaria Desktop Summit organizer, ASOLIF contact and generally nice ‘high-level-thinking’ dude. (Missing in the group-photo.)

Madrid's Gran Via, early morning

Madrid’s Gran Via, early morning.

Clearly a Power Devil.

Clearly a Power Devil.

Solid Kanban Wall, the tasks being worked on on sticky notes.

Solid Kanban Wall, the tasks being worked on on sticky notes.

Hackers hacking.

Hackers hacking.

It's a hacker, and it runs on water, man. ON WATER, MAAAN! (But not exclusively.)

It’s a hacker, and it runs on water, man. ON WATER, MAAAN! (But not exclusively.)

I’ve also uploaded these photos (and a bunch of others) to my FlickR pages, if you’re looking for the full-size versions or more photos, get them over there.

Plasma Photo Collage

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ide Collage of random photos from my collectionToday while going through some parts of my photo collection, I’ve created a collage of some photos. It was actually more or less accidental since I was choosing photos to be printed and framed, but I couldn’t keep myself from arranging the photos nicely on my desktop. I’m using a dual screen setup on my desktop, and while browsing the photos on the left screen, I dragged the photos I’d evaluate for printing onto the other screen, creating Picture frame widgets displaying them when dropping the photos (this even works for remote files, pretty cool). The work-flow this way is actually pretty close to how I’d do it with real physical object, browsing through stacks of photos and putting a selection aside for further investigation.

The photos I happened to choose are taken in various parts of the world, there’s the old ship in Jamaica, the entry sign to Bora Bora in Brazil, Edinburgh’s castle, the entry hall of a spa in Budapest, a Spanish rooftop, Kevelaer’s basilique and of course a bunch of photos taken in Nijmegen, my home town — notably the perfectly boiled egg.

What kind of fun work-flows did you discover while using Plasma?

Surely, I’m going to Akademy, too!

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I’m on the first leg of my trip back to the Netherlands right now. I’ve spent a couple of days in Bretagne, France to celebrate the marriage of a close friend, who asked me to be his best man. The celebrations, which lasted for three days were terrific, but also pretty tiring as you don’t get to spend much time just by yourself. The main celebration was held in the "ridiculously beautiful" Chateau Domaine de la Bretesche, and in Pornichet, the home of the bride. I’m returning to the Netherlands right now, for three days of desk time (needed to prepare my Akademy talk and to get some last minute work done on the impending openSUSE 11.3 release). On Friday, I’ll be boarding a flight to Helsinki and then on to Tampere to take part in my fifth Akademy.

This year’s Akademy is significant to me for a number of reasons:

  • I’m running for a second term on the Board of Directors of the KDE e.V., the foundation backing KDE. I’ve taken this opportunity to re-focus on my activities there. I will be working towards improving the organisation’s transparency a bit more. Transparency of the of our activities sometimes falls behind a little, since we’re very much focused on getting things done, and there’s always something important to push a little further, at the same time, status information gets outdated rather quickly. With the launch of our Supporting Membership Programme, it’s even more important to get the word out what the KDE e.V. is doing, so that’ll be what I’m working on on that front.
  • Last year, Richard Moore and I started Project Silk, which has been silently tagging along. Silently doesn’t mean that we didn’t make progress, just that we didn’t talk about it as much as we could. We felt that we wanted to show results before talking a lot about it, so we sat down and wrote code, worked out concepts, talked to people in order to verify and improve on our ideas. I think we’re at a point now where we got some really compelling stuff to show, and to prove that what we have in mind is not only very viable, but also very important to move on. This year’s Akademy will in part be used to spread those ideas within the KDE team, and to get more people to think Silky. If you think that’s all too vague, attend my talk during Akademy. For the few of you, my dear readers who won’t make it, I’ll prepare some online resources over the next days, so you can catch up as well, and join the Silk bandwagon.
  • Meeting my fellow hackers from the KDE Plasma team. After our last meeting in February in Nuremberg, we’re getting together at Akademy next week to plan, hack, gather ideas talk and have fun. What I really enjoy about getting us together is the sparkling you can see above the table we’re working on after only shortly being together. I guess it’s the motivation, the friendliness, the shared love for beautiful, intuitive Free software but also the mutual respect that creates this atmosphere where we’re getting into hyper-creative mode. It puts us in the position to think about solutions for the really hard problems out there, which none of us could solve individually, and it has more than once been the start of exciting new features and sub-projects.

[break] So I just got home, into our hot top-floor appartment in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Everything’s been taken care of by our terrific friends, the cat is better now after a bladder infection we had to leave it at home with last week. While I do like summery weather, temperatures beyond 30 degrees centigrade without a really cold room are a bit too much for me, and tend to have a bad effect on my productivity. Band-aid: Work at night as much as possible, keep the sleeping room as cool for as long as it lasts and stay in bed as long as I can to get the needed sleep. The laptop is already compiling an updated trunk, while I’m enjoying Brazil playing Chile (Robinho scores the 3:0 as we speak, so I guess my special friend Artur will be happy).

Jumped!

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Last weekend, a couple of friends and I went to an island in the Dutch Wadden Sea to celebrate the bachelor party of a close friend of mine. It was all pretty awesome, I picked up the poor guy around noon last Friday (when he thought he’d have another good 3 hours of meetings that afternoon), so it was a good start. The night, we spent bbqing on the beach (had Jerk pork) and the next day we want to the small airfield on Ameland — Chris still not knowing what would be happening.

The next couple of hours we spent hanging out with the parachuters from Paracentrum Ameland, learnt a bit about safety, how you’d not break your legs, and what happens if you lose your contacts in mid-air. Then we boarded the small plane, one after the other, and climbed up to 3000m above the island, giving a fantastic view over all Dutch Wadden Sea islands. Then I was secured to my tandem master more tightly, put on the safety glasses, and open went the door. At that point, I just stepped out of the airplane onto the small step outside the airplane, stood there for two or three seconds, and jumped. We fell freely for a good 30 seconds until the parachute opened (probably wouldn’t be writing this if it hadn’t ;-)) at ~200km/h, and then spent another 5 to 6 minutes slowly decending onto the airfield again. Landing went smooth, as you can see on the photo.

I must say, that was an awesome experience, it’s a really weird moment when that door opens, but the view, the experience (and certainly the rush of adrenaline) make it absolutely worth it. I wonder if I’ve left behind my slight acrophobia on that flight. As to Chris, I think he still likes me. His face, in terms of Big Smile looked about the same as mine right after the jump.

If you’ve got friends that have you thrown out of a plane in mid-air, you don’t need enemies.

New challenges.

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I’ve resigned my job at KDAB last month in a swift move towards more KDE-time. This all came pretty suddenly, but it felt like The Right Thing to do for me personally and for KDE, which I care a lot about. Since May, I’ve been working for Open-SLX, a German company that makes and supports the openSUSE boxed version. My focus in that work is the user experience of the product. The idea is to work upstream (in openSUSE and KDE / Plasma) as much as possible. While Open-SLX benefits directly from my work done in KDE, this is also a nice way to give back to the community, by making sure I get to spend enough time on things that are not directly related to the product. So now I’ve settled into my new job, and up until now, it’s been great. I’ve been able to catch up with a couple of areas in KDE, I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted in the past, and I have started working on some ideas I was dragging around in the back of my brain for a while). One of those things is Project Silk, which is a Project to boost and deeply integrate the web into KDE Plasma and applications. Its motto is no less ambitions than "Freeing the Web From the Browser", so there’s lots of work to do. ;-) Others have already shown off their cool creations, so I’ve got some catching up to do. I’ll share more detailed information about Silk in the next weeks, so if you’re interested in that, hang on just a little bit longer.

With this new job, I’m also able to spend a bit more time on KDE e.V. things. I’m a Board Member for some time already. Being able to sneak in a bit more of that structured desk time for things that need doing in the near future is surely a good thing. Regarding the e.V., I’ll travel with Ade to Berlin on Friday to meet Celeste, Cornelius and Frank there for an extended weekend of board work (and fun).

I’m a *real* developer …

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… not just a marketing guy. :-) During the Qt Developer Days in Munich, I took the Qt certification exam (actually as one of the first people to take it). It was my birthday, so they let me pass:

Nokia Certified Qt Developer
Also, right now I’m in Reykjavik, Iceland for the KDAB company meeting and 10 year anniversary. Preliminary conclusions: Watch out for roastbeef, it tastes like whale, riding on a horse feels like riding a square-wheeled bicycle (but slightly more scary) and having infinite amounts of energy under your rearside makes for interesting and relaxing uses and given a large-ish island with tectonic and seismic activity, you’ll find the capital at the most likely spot for an earthquake.