With this great title stolen from the techbase page, what could possibly go wrong?

Yesterday in Freiburg our meeting to discuss about Nepomuk and integration with social-semantic-collaboration issues kicked of. We, that is Sebastian, Alessandro, Frank, Leo, Stéphane, George, Laura, Iridian and yours truly.

Topics discussed are things like: What meta information would I want to share with my friends, when I pass on photos? What is sent, when I pass on a contact to someone else? Do I want to identify where a rating for a song comes from? Should I be able to search in my music collection for the favorite songs of a friend? What and how is all this technically feasible? What about my privacy and that not so public comment I wrote the other day?

We talked about some use cases, such passing on data on usb sticks, later mailing some of the data and thinking about the life cycle of the meta data. Now we know a lot more about our virtual friend Claudia, her wedding and Dirk’s dislike for her dress

While some of this may sound pretty academic still, we also discussed the practical side of things, how it can be expressed in the Nepomuk onthologies and how to deal with privacy issues. Clearly the others are more into the RDF world than I am, so I’m still playing catch up with all the fancy words and wealth of abbreviations around. But don’t let that scare you, to use Nepomuk as user, you won’t have to deal with all of these. Even as application developer you can use Nepomuk without becoming an expert in semantic issues and onthologies since Nepomuk takes care of most of the work for you

During breakfast we had a lively discussion about GUI features and how to give more of the power of Nepomuk into user’s hands and where we need more integration.

On the more practical side, Sebastian helped me debug one of the strigi analyzing problems that the virtuoso backend showed on my desktop, within a few hours my Nepomuk database now grew from containing the meta data of about 100 files to over 20000 now :). (Just in case anyone wants to try: get Virtuoso from sourceforge (released version 5.0.12), use “./configure –disable-all-vad”, rebuild soprano and kdebase.)

Currently Frank presents the Open Collaboration Services and we will discuss integration of online data, services and Nepomuk afterwards. Then we’ll try to get some of the data exchange ideas put into code.

I'm working part time on improving the performance of QtWebKit (memory usage and raw speed) and I have created some tools to create an offline copy of a number of webpages (gmail, yaho mail, google, news sites...).

Using these sites I have created special purpose benchmark reductions. E.g. only do the image operations we do while loading, while loading an painting, load all network resources. One thing I have noticed is that with a couple of small things one can achieve a stable and noticable speedup. These include not calling QImage::scanLine from within a loop, avoid using QByteArray::toLower or not use QByteArray::append(char) from a loop without a QByteArray::reserve.

I have created a small guide to Qt Performance, I will keep it updated and would like to hear more small hints that can be used to improve things. If it makes sense I can migrate it to the techbase as well.

Today when I got home I felt like doing something big, something new and something fast. As many other times, this turned into some KAlgebra coding rush but today it was a bit different, because it involved a new project in KDE: Cantor.

So what happened? Cantor is an interface for mathematical engines (supports Maxima, Sage and R) that works on worksheets instead of just a console as we do in KAlgebra currently, like many other programs that you might know like Maple for instance. What I did was to implement a KAlgebra backend for Cantor.
I have to say it was quite straightforward. Alexander Rieder, the developer, has been helpful and everything worked fine, which is great and surprising for such a young project, so kudos for Cantor!

This backend already supports code completion, syntax highlighting and some embedded help, it doesn’t support plotting or latex exporting ¿yet? though, but I hope this will be added at some point. I’d like to remark that it’s good to have such backend because it makes Cantor a project that properly integrates the tools that KDE-Edu provides and doesn’t just rely on (probably better) choices from 3rd parties.

So now we have 4 KAlgebra interfaces: GUI, Console, Plasmoid and Cantor. What’s next?

Here you can see what it looks like:

Enjoy!

Dolphin for KDE 4.4 will provide a refactored information panel and refactored tooltips. The goals of the refactoring have been:

• Show the same data in the information panel and the tooltips. Up to now the information panel did not provide any information about the permissions or the owner of a file. The tooltips have shown this kind of information already, but they did not provide informations like rating, comments or tags.

• Prevent a possible blocking of the user interface, even when a slow Nepomuk backend or a buggy Strigi analyzer is installed. Although in KDE 4.3 some improvements had been done already, there have been still problems in this regard especially for tooltips.

• Improve the layout of the information. The rating, comment and tags information are not handled in a special manner anymore.

• Simplify the interface for editing tags and comments.

Although there is still a lot of finetuning necessary until KDE 4.4, it is obvious already that the tooltips...


... show the same information as the information panel:


Originally it was planned to move the refactored widget to kdelibs, so that applications like Mailody, Gwenview and Okular can show the informations in a similar way. However there have been some usecases especially in combination with Gwenview, where the interface of widget was not sufficient yet. So we decided to leave the widget in Dolphin for KDE 4.4, but I'm confident that we find a good solution until KDE 4.5.

I finally got rid of the last theme I had and installed something that, as per my conventions, looks quite professional. This is a modified version of the CreativePress wordpress theme, which offers a range of nice eyecandy effects using jQuery. Setting up the theme was quite a tedious job — removing my feeds from the planets (sounds ironic), doing the whole theme changes, and software upgrade and all that without access to db (why? well, our college university filter blocks it under category “hacking sites”….).

Anyway, of all the features, I can brag about:

1. The preview slider: I can set the slider to take up posts from a fixed category, “featured posts” in my case. Once I attach a “custom field” called ‘preview’, the slider picks up the image and scales it accordingly to use it as a thumbnail.
2. A nice homepage: It gives me a nice homepage. Hence now, I have completely removed the “blog” subdomain from my server and I am left with only one wordpress install in contrast to the two independent installs on different domains.
3. Wordpress 2.8.5: Just upgraded from 2.7 to 2.8.5, and I hope that things get a bit more stable now :p Apparently 2.8.5 has some much needed security fixes, which IMHO was worth the pain incurred from upgrading.

Honestly, I did have a bunch of points in my mind, but I can’t remember what they were

Anyway, I’m just happy that this went well. If you decide to give the theme a shot, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I am.

After having a quick chat with Kévin Ottens on IRC we agreed that it would be useful to write up a a small how-to explaining the Art of Booth Organization™ as a follow up on the how-to for sprints I posted earlier. He has been poking me about it repeatedly, so voilà, Monsieur, finalement, c’est fait.

While writing down all those steps I realized organizing a booth more complex than I thought. Chances are high that I have forgotten anything more or less important. The comment section is yours!

Let’s say you come across an interesting event in your area or elsewhere and you think KDE should be present and have a stand in whatever shape and size. How do you proceed?

Register a booth

This is obviously the first step. Usually, the call for projects closes several weeks before the event takes place. As soon as it is open and you have decided that you’d like to be there send an email to the kde-promo list. Ask if anybody has already registered a booth and/or would be interested to organize one together with yourself.

Go to kde.org and copy and paste the usual about blurb on the front page for the registration or look for one of the translated versions. It keeps things consistent and saves you a lot of thinking.

Find staff

Don’t be afraid if noone speaks up when you ask for physical presence. The usual reaction is something along the lines of “what do I know today about what is going to happen in 6 weeks?”. In most cases you will find someone coming along and do booth duty. Don’t be afraid to get on people’s nerves.

Set up a wiki page on community.kde.org (which is currently a building ground, but fear not!) to collect all information regarding the event and the staff. This will help you to organize accomodation and keep an overview. Keep nagging people to put themselves onto a list there and set a deadline!

Order material

An empty booth does not really make sense, you will need something to show. Good news is that the KDE e.V. has an awsome booth box that can be sent around for events. Ask for it on the kde-promo list and Claudia will let you know if it is possible. She might also just send you t-shirts and stickers and other things via mail if shipping the whole box is not feasible.

For any place outside Europe, we are still looking into the options we have for booths. Ask on the list if you are planning to organize one and need anything.

If you have to manage without the booth box you will need to think about hardware, too. Usually one or two laptops with a recent KDE installation including some demo data like images, music, movies, office files etc. The upcoming marketing sprint in Stuttgart is supposed to come up with a clever solution to the problem of demo data, watch out for updates from that front.

Make a budget and collect travel details

You may have to rely on non-locals for your booth who need funding for their travels. Find a room for them and ask them to add their travel costs to the wiki. Again, set a deadline! Some weeks prior to the event you should have all the costs collected on the wiki and send an email to kde-ev-board [at] kde.org and ask for funding. You should get a positive reply in a timely fashion and then you can push people to book their travel.

Everybody staffing the booth should put their arrival and departure times into the wiki and provide the mobile phone number. That way you will have all the information you need at hand and can reach everybody if anything goes wrong. If you are collecting mobile numbers privately I recommend making a list and sending that to everybody helping out at the event.

Set times

Someone will have to take care of setting up things before the event starts and packing up after the end. That does not necessarily have to be you. Make sure that this is clarified beforehand so you don’t get stressed when the event starts. Then let everybody know where they have to be and at what time. If the event is big and you have enough staff it may be a good idea to make a schedule for booth duty.

Relax!

As soon as the event has started the worst things are over. Now it is time to enjoy what you are doing. Show those great technologies to interested people, answer user questions and look for the “Aha!” expression on their faces, talk to the folks at the other booths and all in all have a good time!

Post-event activities

Sometimes you receive questions you didn’t know how to answer or a concrete request. Remember to follow up on them when you’re back and get the right people in touch with each other. If you have the time write a short report on the event with all the things that both went well and that didn’t to the kde-promo list. We’re always interested in things like that. Oh, and what about a blog? Or a story for the dot?

In case sonmeone else have troubles with this:

After updating to Karmic, I found CPU monitors plasmoids no longer displayed anything (they were just blank). Nor did network managers, and a lot of other applets. Today, I finally went digging: from the cpu plasmoid which turned out to be using the systemmonitor plasma engine, which in turn used the sysguard parts of kdelibs. Well, perhaps those libs were not installed or something. It turned out to be ksysguardd (recommended by ksysguard required by kubuntu-desktop) was not installed. Installing fixed my troubles, yay!

Admittedly, the Kubuntu upgrade program had crashed midway, so most of the upgrade was done by aptitude. So the blame is really that crash, or rather, that a subprocess-crash can kill the upgrade.

Hello goodpeople,

this is a quickreminder for all kdefriendly bug triagers and otherfolks. Ok, I'll stop with the strangetalk now...




We are going to have a Phonon Bugday on the 8th of November, which is really quite soon, if you think about it. Phonon is a very central component of KDE and Qt, but like all software it does contain a number of bugs. It doesn't have to stay this way though

Come join us at our Bugday. Developers, triagers, normal users - you can all be helpful. I'm pretty much convinced that many of Phonon's issues are fairly low hanging fruits that could be fixed rather easily, if we all help out a bit. Also, Phonon's new maintainer Martin Sandsmark is pretty awesome, and I'm confident that with him at the helm we will be able to make a real difference.


Join us!


PS: The event is not actually happening in Buğday, but rather on irc.freenode.net, channel #phonon. Bringing Kebab is totally fine though.

The boosters team promised to talk about what happens in our sprints – the two week time boxes in which we work on our projects. The last sprint ended on october 27th and we still owe you what happened.

Please understand this little report as usual as an invitation to ask, comment, suggest things and of course fire up your editor and contribute if you like.
You find us on IRC in channel #opensuse-boosters or on the opensuse-boosters mailinglist.

Discoverable centralised documentation driven by Lubos, Egbert, Henne, Petr and Federico.
This squad is working to provide a better discoverable developer documentation around openSUSE.

In the last sprint a lot of discovering “how things are usally done with wediawiki” has happened, such as how wiki content
is sorted or how portals are used. That went in parallel to the discussion Rupert started on the wiki mailinglist, good enough that both efforts go combined now – everybody is asked to join the discussion on the wiki list.

We also discovered that the media wiki update has not yet gone through, the problem was that our iChain plugin was broken with the new version of the Wiki. The squad will fix that.

Integrate all infrastructure under one Umbrella driven by Klaas, Robert, Darix, Michal, Pavol.

We were still very much individually sitting around and fiddle with the Ruby on Rails framework to get on speed with it. For example the way how to integrate several Rails projects under one umbrella project was investigated.

The plan for the next sprint is to come to a first draft on how the new web structure should look like. We’re very much bound to our artists work, so if you are a screen designer, please get in touch with Robert to support him to direct the poor developer souls.

factory.opensuse.org – website visualising Factory status driven by Tom, Vincent, Will, Coolo

this squad was a bit understrength because of vacation and the upcomming 11.2.

Nevertheless they discovered a lot of dependencies in the OBS which are needed to set up the factory.o.o page. Some not so nice corners in the OBS were cleaned a bit which came to light when tom and Will were working to set up a test instance of the OBS.

Attached to LinuxWorld is the InfoSecurity trade show (or the other way around, since LW is about a fifth of the size of IS). It’s a nice opportunity to find out about networking, crypto, and other things going on in that part of the world. Security isn’t exactly my thing, although when I was running CodeYard I was located across the hall from the security research group at the University of Nijmegen — and of course I’m never without my Fellowship of FSFE GPG-card.

At the NLUUG conference last week I heard of the Yubikey — unfortunately I missed the actual talk by Henk, so I’m still a little confused as to what you can actually achieve with such a device that acts as a USB keyboard and spits out 16 fixed characters followed by 32 random ones. One-time passwords, sure, but I’m just not creative enough to come up with what to do then.

The FSFE is an enthusiastic user of GPG encryption and digital certificates (from CAcert) because we feel that Freedom and Privacy (through the use of strong encryption) go hand in hand. So I was happy to meet some folks from a company called Legid who are pushing certificates (S/MIME and otherwise) as means for digital signing, and have a hardware-software combination that uses a smartcard with a neat wifi-and-usb (?) enabled terminal to handle them. The terminal also apparently supports something that looks like OpenID, sending authentication requests and authorization requests (e.g. when trying to pass a doorway) to different parties for permission. The long term goal is to have everyone with a smartcard and a collection of personal (i.e. bound to your real identity) certificates for legally sound document signing; naturally you’ll want more certificates to handle the different online identities you have.

Going from there to the “but email clients are too difficult” end of the spectrum, I chatted with a company that does secure document silos — to which I largely responded “why on earth would I want a new, locked-down, non-interoperable web-based silo for document exchange?” This might signal a difference in workflows — I have different client apps for different activities (but because it’s KDE4 they integrate really well) and don’t see much value in having to go to a website to retrieve a document when encrypted attachments (S/MIME or otherwise) have been part of email for tupping ages. The company (DigiNotar) claims that that’s too complicated, and I suppose for people who have a web-browser based workflow anyway, that kind of makes sense. Especially if the silo combines document management with security — the idea behind the silo is partly that you can keep better logs of document access and document reading. Again, a move towards being able to say “I know you read the document, because you were logged in (with your client certificate) and downloaded the encrypted version offered by the portal and then sent back a signature on the document.”

For such a silo my concerns quickly turn to interoperability; I have a bank that communicates with me through such a closed sercure silo — or rather, it doesn’t communicate with me because their silo doesn’t work with my choices of browsers (and the one they do support doesn’t run on my hardware).

All in all, good to see work on privacy going on; in so far as it’s possible to get a good idea of what’s going on from a chat at a trade fair.

Two days of LinuxWorld have left me tired by happy. I ended up giving two talks, because Karsten and I made it a double on wednesday and then on Thursday I had another one on best practices in license selection for Free Software projects (one-line summary: pick one that is consisten with your business strategy). The Open Source pavilion at LW isn’t all that large, so 14-20 people as an audience fills it.

Besides giving some talks on licensing topics (FSFE hat), I sometimes stood around the NLUUG booth and handed out posters for the next NLUUG conference — spring 2010, topic “System administration.” Very traditional for an Open Systems and Open Standards organization. And aside from that, wandering around a trade fair with four themes — Linux, Storage, Security and Business Tools — is an education in itself. I try to make clear at the start of every conversation that I’m not a sales opportunity, as that seems to avoid wasting time for both of us if I run into a hard-sell booth (still, the one stand that asked “How many workplaces does your company have?” and then “Well, you have less than five hundred desks, you’re not interesting, goodbye!” — I never even found out what they were selling at all.) You can still get conference goodies though, so I got home with a nice collection of peppermints and flashlights for the kids.

Leo and I went to California for the GSoC mentor summit to talk to lots of other mentors and admins about Summer of Code and whatever else was on our mind. In short: absolutely awesome and definitely worth the travel (which included lots of hours in airplanes and airports for me including an unplanned 6 hour stay in Salt Lake City – thank you very much border control).

The energy you get when you put that many geeks together is amazing. And at the same time it is quite different from conferences where you only have one project present like Akademy. It shows you that people working on competing projects are actually pretty cool people when sitting in a hot-tub with them *g*. (If course I knew that one before but it feels good to be reassured about it.) It shows you a lot of white spots on your personal open source map. Any idea what the Boost community looks like? Any idea how huge the Apache Software Foundation is? Now I do. It has definitely been interesting for me to see how different communities are managing their day-to-day business and especially GSoC. And the most surprising thing for me: Even pretty dysfunctional communities can release decent software I also learned that you can indeed have a session on minorities in free software and actually get useful results everyone can apply in their communities instead of getting derailed and discussing colors of random bike sheds. (They should all be blue and have pink doors of course.)

Check out the session notes (not 100% complete at the time of this post but hopefully soon), the one thing people learned at the summit and pics.

Thanks a lot to Google and everyone who attended the summit for making this happen. It has been 2 intense days and a great experience.

After the summit I stayed another 2 days with Alejandro to check out the area. Thanks so much for offering a place to crash. We went to San Francisco – what a great city – and met up with Gary and blauzahl who were great hosts. (Sorry I wasn’t more talkative that night folks but the previous days really drained my energy.) And it again showed me one of the best things about our community: No matter where I go on this world, friends are never far. I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.

I’ll definitely have to return – not just for the massage chairs and hot-tub.

This is a message that Cristian Onet sent to the KMyMoney KDE4 mailing list today. I got his permission to post it here, as I thought it would be interesting for everyone to see.

DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT EVEN BETA! IT WILL EAT YOUR  DOG!! DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME! Done, there you have your warning. Now to the point.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey folks, just a little heads up about what's happening internally within the KDE marketing juggernaut. (Seriously, I've seen comments referring to us in such a fashion... do they know we're about 15 volunteers?)

Anyway, since we need to compete with Microsoft's marketing budget, which is on the order of 3 billion USD, we've done really well without spending much money at all. I mean, we have estimates of around 50-100 million KDE software users worldwide, which is quite substantial.

Note, that is "Users", not installations. In Brazil, for example, Free Software by KDE is used in the school system, where we include all students exposed to KDE software as a 'user', even though the total number of installs is likely lower. The converse applies to people like me who have multiple installs of the KDE workspace. I mean, the software is free, so what does it really matter if we're counting users versus installations -- we don't have to answer to a budget :)

Anyway, next week a bunch of KDE promotion folks are meeting in Stuttgart for a marketing sprint/meeting where a couple of things need to be worked out. We have an agenda! :)

Possibly the most important topic will be a potential branding shift for KDE 4. This is the type of topic that leads to bikeshedding on mailing lists, so we'll discuss it in person where we can arm-wrestle to a conclusion, however it may go something like as follows:

• KDE becomes the term referring to the group/organization/community that is producing the products.


• Projects made by KDE will be referred to as "Made by KDE", or based on Cornelius' suggestion: "Free Software by KDE", in the case of projects that are associated with KDE (like Amarok, KOffice, etc.)... so one could say "Amarok, by KDE", or "KOffice, Free Software by KDE" or similar in promotional materials.


• Separate the Platform and Workspace into their own identities, so that people wanting to run certain apps don't feel like they need to install all of KDE, and vice versa.

Although we'll announce final decisions via the dot or elsewhere, and most of the discussion will be happening internally within the KDE community, it'd be interesting to get some user feedback (yay or nay) on this.

We have other topics to discuss too, such as how to revitalize the websites, how to present a more consistent presence at trade shows, what to do to fill the void left by the commit digest, how to position ourselves in press surrounding the Gnome 3.0 launch (as they are probably going to go through much of what we did with 4.0, but we want to make sure that the press/comments know that KDE and Gnome are friends fighting for a common goal against a much larger market share), etc.

So, our team of 15 or so volunteer promotion peeps will be in a room for a few days to hammer these things out. The sprint is sponsored by the KDE e.V. (our non-profit legal body), which is spending a few thousand euros on the event. Not much compared to the 3 billion MS spends on marketing, and hopefully money well spent on behalf of the donors that keep the e.V. running.

I just released the Version 1.4 of the Open Collaboration Services Specification. As usual all the new features are already implemented on all the openDesktop.org sites.

Just a heads up to any readers who are in Chile (or South America for that matter) that feel like they would like to make some new KDE friends. There is an active KDE chile group on google groups which you really should subsribe to and check out.

http://groups.google.com/group/kde-chile/

(Some of the kde-chile folks and myself at Encuentro Linux 2009)

That's all! Keep on hacking and have fun! :)

Today on the very ultraviolent gamaral broadway play: MS fires peeps, I hate Nextel and more. (all in under 20 minutes)

Please send in your comments, ideas, topics and/or ****Google Wave**** invites to: gamaral@amaral.com.mx.

Animus Me – 2009-11-04 (MP3)
Animus Me – 2009-11-04 (OGG)

Subscribe! (MP3)
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While reading planet KDE a bit I somehow got caught by Aurélien's release announcement for Yokadi, "the command-line driven, geek friendly, sqlite backed TODO list". I was in need of such a tool already for quite some time, and so began to look at it.
First of all Yokadi is written in python using an sqlite database, which is basically the size I was looking for. Also it makes it possible to run also on windows... In the README it says that Mac OS X and Windows should work but haven't been tested and so I started my way through it.

To make it possible for more people to use this application I want to document what I needed to do to get yokadi working on Windows:

1. Install the python setuptools if you haven't done so yet. After the installation you might need to adjust your PATH to include the Scripts folder of your python installation so that the easy_install.exe is included.


2. get pyreadline, sqlobject and dateutils by simply running easy_install[PACKAGENAME]. Make sure you have svn.exe in your path for pyreadline. Except for this requirement, everything went smooth so far.


3. Now get the yokadi sources with git. I needed to add a patch, so make sure this patch is already contained in your yokadi sources. I send this patch to the mailing list and hope it gets committed soon.


4. After you made sure about the patch, run setup.py install from the commandline. This will install yokadi as a python site-package.


5. Set the EDITOR variable if you don't have vi.exe in your path. I installed the commandline version of vim for that: set EDITOR="C:\Program Files\vim\vim72\vim.exe".


6. To not add a HOME variable to my local environment, I made a yokadi.bat which basically sets the environment variable HOME to the directory where I want to store the database (and the history file) and then calls the yokadi python script in the scripts folder.

I haven't tried the yokadid daemon which is supposed to notify you about due dates: both because I don't like such notifications and as well because at least the master version looks suspiciously Unix-only ;-).
So far I am really pleased by yokadi, it matches my way to work (yes I use the windows cmd.exe a lot!) and I hope I can get rid of all those .todo files now :-D.

One thing which recently made it into my reverse-culture-shock impact list is the widespread use of incomprehensible (read: broken), mixed-language expressions, potentially due to many reasons (to name a few: innocent show-off, following the mainstream, or just trying to look more "educated"). It starts with an easy one, like denoting the printer cartridge types as "black" and "color", i.e. in English, although we have good Indonesian words for that ("hitam" and "warna", in case you can't recall). The worse part is yet to come, it kills me when someone starts to sprinkle English words in an otherwise perfect sentence, e.g. "tapi you mesti ngajak aku to follow your, ehm [can't find the English words], kegiatan, which is sebenarnya quite interesting". This wonderful fragment is ridiculously non-sense for both foreigners who never learned Indonesian and for my fellow countrymen who do not know English at all.

Of course it won't surprise you if I say that you can easily find flyers and other promotion materials exactly using the same pattern. Just today we found a state-sponsored, free Shopping & Travelling Guide booklet featuring dozens of pages with English headings. Again, the contents are written in Indonesian. This leads to a number of striking typos and mistakes, one of which is shown here:

I have nothing against foreign languages (I have my share by learning few of them), but I also still love my wonderful mother tongue, Bahasa Indonesia.

Monday mornings, you guessed it, are not a good thing. Especially when it’s all rainy and you get run over by a car. Luckily nothing really happened to me, only a few scratches and a new experience (I’ve never had this Hollywood style “rolling over the hood of the car” thingy happen to me before). Let’s move on to better stuff then maybe I can even write about KDE related things.

Just now I got the confirmation that KDE will have a booth at the 2nd Ecumenical Church Day which is way in the future - May 2010. More about that later.

What I wanted to talk about… Yesterday, Eckhart moved Attica into kdereview.

We’ve been poking at this nice library for a few days now, and we’re really happy that it’s ready to be used more widely now

Attica is a cool little library that allows us to integrate applications nicely with the web services provided by “Open Collaboration Services” servers. Yay, for the buzzwords there! Actually it sounds more complicated than it is. Can you hear the voices in my head? I can. And that makes me happy So let me repeat for those not hearing (the voices in my head):

Someone in my head: So you might wonder, what’s that stuff good for anyway???

Me: Well, let’s see what could be done… we have a data engine to provide plasma applets with all that goodness, so it’s possible to let the user know what’s going on around him and with his friends. …

Someone in my head: Wait! You are telling us, you just wrote a facebook clone?

Me: Not exactly. We still have KDE and our users in mind. So imagine, you really like some application that is also on kde-apps.org. And since you use it daily and it’s really cool, you decide to become an fan of the application (come on, just click that button, it doesn’t hurt!). Now the author of your favorite app publishes a newer version. And you get a note right to your desktop, that a newer version is available.

Someone in my head: Ok, that’s like half way social… but…

Me (interrupting rapidly): More goodness comes from the neighbor list. Say you come to Stuttgart for a short visit. And once you go online there, you see, one of your favorite KDE developers is actually in town also. Quite interesting you think and just a click later you have sent a message to meet up. What a nice evening! Or take the event list. Here you get notified, when an event takes place close to your location. Get notified of that developer sprint next door and just drop by to meet all the cool kids. I admit, these examples are still a bit KDE-geeks-are-great centric. But they are just examples and the beginning. More stuff is yet to come. Maybe you have ideas too?

Someone in my head: Me, ideas? Uhmmm… maybe I’ll leave them in the comments…

Ok, enough talking, let’s see some action!

One thing I spent much time on last week, was getting our Get Hot New Stuff implementation knewstuff2.5 ported to use Attica in addition to the classical XML files we used so far. With the help of Jeremy I got something working by now. Yes, it still has many rough edges… Anyway - using Attica gives us some of the features that we wanted to have for a looooong time already. After ripping a lot of things apart, we’re slowly piecing the puzzle back together. Internally we now support rating and adding comments but that needs more GUI work. So today the Hotter New Stuff is server side search. If you like a certain wallpaper or that special script, it will no longer disappear after a while. Have fun watching me, trying to talk to myself here:

Watch it on Blip.tv, download ogg video. (I can’t seem to get it embedded here… giving up now…)

Today was the 30'th anniversary of Iran hostage crisis.

The Islamic Republic, as usual, prepared a rally against the former building of U.S Embassy to tell Americans how much Iranians hate them. Thats just wrong.

Despite (several) official threats by the goverment in the past week, real people came to streets. They closed underground-trains so people couldnt reach the rally points. Internet was extremely slow so that we couldnt post the videos of the violence of goverment. Security forces hit us, throw us tear gas (this thing really sucks!) captured some people. Again, our television reported none of this.

The real people came to the streets to tell the world that we are in peace. Our goverment may burn your flag, may shout 'Down with America/Israel/Britain' but we, Iranian people, are in peace with you and I am personally sorry for what our ancestors did 30 years ago.

I am truly sorry for what our goverment has done in the past 30 years. Fighting with world, hating the world and thinking about (literal) world domination is what my goverment has done so far.

However, the events in the past four months made me feel so good. Why? Because I felt whole world cares about me. We have seen people around the world wearing green, throwing green stuff out of their windows or wearing green wrist-wraps. Cities around the world turned green at some times.

This means A LOT to me, personally. Not that it makes the damn extremists/dictators go away. Of course they are not leaving that easy. But it just made me feel that people care.

Today KDevelop Beta6 and Php Plugin Beta1 released.
I'm really excited about that as we have been working on it for quite some time now. Not that we are finished - it's just a first useable version. I'll try to do use it for php coding here at work.

» Download now
and give us feedback.

I just ran into this sentence in a README file: "But qt4 is not at all source compatible to qt3" After 6 months, a couple hundred commits in the new repository, and a lot of sweat and tears, I found this to be kind of a misunderstatement. It made me laugh, though.

The README belongs to AqBanking, btw, which I'm compiling right now to try the just ported aqbanking plugin. Cristian and the rest of the made a terrific port and ported it in a couple of days. That paves the way for a release, with only a couple of issues left to solve.

Well it's been 4 months since my last release. Yes, really long time due to rewriting the base code to optimise a lot of the client and to add more support for additional features. It's becoming more stable and more feature wise with each release and really happy about it.