In the deeper directories of my storage device I have some files around from the old times, when my general purpose computer was still locked partially by proprietary (operating) systems. Never-the-less e.g. Corel Draw was still worth the lock and the money, I loved that program and what it enabled me to produce.

These products are still around. And are basically binary blobs now for me, the content not readable by the software I use. Blame on that software Well, but also the old software, i.e. Corel Draw, and its makers, using a storage format which seems not published and possibly only available by something like a Technology Partner program or similar, meaning lawyers and businessmen, not fun. But those files’ content is mine, and I completely dislike that the format binds me to a certain software.

Searching for FLOSS code that can understand files in Corel Draw’s CDR file format I discovered UniConvertor from the sK1 project and some initial code for LibreOffice, even actively developed ATM, but nothing for Karbon from the Calligra Suite.

Seeing with the hex editor Okteta (jay!) that the CDR file format is based on some RIFF and finding that one completely described on Wikipedia I somehow got tempted to try to develop a CDR import filter for Karbon, to finally free my content from those binary blobs again. And there was quickly some initial success, so I may try to stay with that combining game of decoding bytes:

At least the by-product libkoralle, a Qt-based library for parsing RIFF is useful already.

I look forward to others joining the efforts on the Karbon CDR import filter. I am mainly interested to read files of the versions 4 and 5, so people with newer versions need to make sure support for these themselves I still also need to contact the developers of UniConvertor and libcdr (if you are one, check your email box the next days ).

You can find the current state in the branch “CDRImport” in my clone of the Calligra repo.

The Reveal

As I noted earlier in the week, my recent blog posts have been slowly leading up to something, and here's what that something is:

A Bit of the Bigger Picture

This is more than just another piece of hardware on the market, though. This is a unique opportunity for Free software. Finally we have a device coming to market on our terms. It has been designed by and is usable by us on our terms. We are not waiting for some big company to give us what we desire, we're going out there and making it happen together. Just as important: the proceeds will be helping fuel the efforts that make this all possible.

It's also more meaningful than "just" Free software: The people who get to use these tablets will have in their hands a device that is more than an application bucket that sees them as a consumer. They will have a device that places value on who they are and what they are doing. This lies at the heart of Activities in Plasma Active and the open software stack will drive that trend further. Perhaps best of all: there's no walled garden to get locked into or which can be taken away.

This also will provide opportunities to the wider Free software ecosystem. Partnerships are being forged to provide things as diverse as OwnCloud hosting services, Kolab and Kontact Touch deployment support and exciting Qt/QML add-on apps for download.

The content store will offer great Free Culture artifacts such as digital books from Project Gutenberg as well as contents and apps for purchase. It will provide a conduit to users for those who love writing great software, Free and otherwise, using the typical Linux tools.

In case it wasn't painfully clear already: this epitomizes what I've been writing about for the last few days. It is a product made with and out of a commitment to the philosophy of making, playing and living. In fact, that's the brand under which this tablet, and those that follow it, is being brought to market under: Make·Play·Live.

.. but that's not all! ;)


I'll be sharing more information as to when the tablet will be available to be shipped directly to you (soon!), how you can place orders for them as well as more details on the hardware and software provided.

This will have to wait until Tuesday, however, as I'm off on a business excursion for a couple of days. Leave your questions in the comments and I'll do my best to cover them all in the coming blog posts.

Some Credit :)

Before I go, though, I want to offer some credit where credit is due. I've been involved in bringing this to fruition, but I most certainly have not been alone. The entire Plasma Active community, with their commitment and efforts, have been critical and inspiring. The efforts and commitment of both individuals (such familiar names as Marco, Sebas and Martin) as well as companies such as Basyskom and OpenSLX have been critical to making this even possible.

What a week it has been. Not only I’ve had a few days of vacations in beautiful Australia, but two major events happened.

You probably already know that, KDE SC 4.8 has been released. I might be biased, but trust me – this release is amazing. I am especially proud my work on power management got the first page this time – it’s really a killer feature, and I really hope it will become a keeper and another great reason for using KDE for most of you.

But it doesn’t end here: KDE Telepathy 0.3 has been released. Now, as much as this event might seem less interesting, it has a very special meaning to me. KDE Telepathy has been the proof of how a group of friends can get together and build something awesome, while having a lot of fun.

The project is now in a beta state, meaning we’re almost there, and you can start checking out what’s boiling without fearing your PC will blow up in a billion pieces. Of course, we are still not advertising this release to be fully stable, but we do accept bug reports at this stage, and believe the basic features are ready to be tested. So, no excuse: together with your new shiny KDE 4.8, try the future of Instant messaging on your favorite desktop environment!

Assuming you are a developer, are you interested in what these changes will bring to your world? Well, you’d better be excited. A video is worth a thousand words, they say – then why not checking out my talk at linux.conf.au about creating social apps with Telepathy and Qt? And if you are wondering – yes, the code for the example is actually available on KDE’s git on one of my scratch repos (link coming later, quickgit seems to be unreachable at the time I’m posting). See for yourself how easy it is to make your application rock even more!

But, the most amazing thing happened when David started the beer fundraiser, to get us wasted at FOSDEM. Well, the response has been flattering: up to now we have raised something along the lines of 230€, which is enough to kill a couple elephants considering where we’re going. So thank you! Given this thing has gotten quite far, we’re adding some more rules to our small game, and we’ll rollover funds to any other meetings if we pass out before spending all of this money (likely). Want to have a nice picture to show to your kids of a bunch of friendly hackers lying on the floor or having lots of fun without actually doing anything of the usual activities they are supposed to do? You still have time to donate.

(apparently wordpress.com doesn’t like paypal buttons – please refer to David’s blog post for donating)

Thanks again everyone for your support, and I hope our new software will rock your world.

There are Qt-based solutions for parsing tree-structured container formats like XML and JSON, but when a few days ago I came across a format based on the Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) a quick search for a Qt-based parser yielded nothing for me… but a sigh and also the result of a mkdir command.

There is some nice documentation about RIFF on the English Wikipedia. This container format is as old as from 1991, and its ancestors even older. WAV and AVI formats are based on it, but also younger formats like Google’s WebP.

So to have other developers searching for a Qt-based RIFF parser yield something and to follow the release-often-and-early mantra, please find on the KDE ftp servers now (thanks again to the KDE admins for their less-in-a-day quick support!) what came after that mkdir command and what serves me quite well already in the parsing code of the format I deal with:

release 0.1.0 of libkoralle, a lib for parsing (and hopefully soon also writing) data in Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) based formats.

How to use libkoralle:
Given a format based on RIFF with a structure like this:

RIFF id='XMPL'
  'VRSN'
  LIST id='DATT'
    'DATA'
    'DATA'

your code would, assuming the stream is well-formatted, be like this with version 0.1:

#include <Koralle0/RiffStreamReader>
...
Koralle0::RiffStreamReader reader(device);
reader.readNextChunkHeader();
// reader.chunkId(): Koralle0::FourCharCode('X','M','P','L')
// reader.isFileChunk(): true
// reader.isListChunk(): true
reader.openList(); // needs matching closeList();
  reader.readNextChunkHeader();
  // reader.chunkId(): Koralle0::FourCharCode('V','R','S','N')
  // reader.isFileChunk()/isListChunk(): false
  // reader.chunkData()/chunkSize(): data of the content
  reader.readNextChunkHeader();
  // reader.chunkId(): Koralle0::FourCharCode('D','A','T','T')
  // reader.isFileChunk(): false
  // reader.isListChunk(): true
  reader.openList();
  while(reader.readNextChunkHeader())
  {
    // reader.chunkId(): Koralle0::FourCharCode('D','A','T','A')
    // reader.isFileChunk()/isListChunk(): false
    // reader.chunkData()/chunkSize(): data of the content
  }
  reader.closeList();
reader.closeList();

Future version might have support for related container formats (IFF, RIFX, …) and allow passing of custom parsers for the data chunk content, to avoid the temporary QByteArray copy, as well as default parsers for standard chunk types like “INFO”.

See also Snorkel, a simple RIFF structure viewer I wrote using also libkoralle.

Contributors and feedback of course welcome!

We Seek Quality

Quality of life is a topic often discussed. There are so many different methods used
to try and measure this rather intangible aspect of our experience. We all have some sort of intuitive grasp of what it means, however: fulfillment and engagement, contentment and industry.

We want to neither go without nor to have everything simply handed to us. We desire peaceful lives sprinkled generously with happy events while also being spared from overly repetitious dullness. We crave companionship and simultaneously seek out competition. We hope that taken together these characteristics will lead to a wonderful tapestry woven of our experiences, relationships and memories which can whisper to us the meaning of our lives.

So quality of life does not seem to be an overly esoteric concept, yet it can be devilishly hard to get a hold of. Certainly life is not perfect and many things can and do go awry over the course of a lifetime; but even with those unavoidable bumps, we ought to find patterns of life quality in our choices and experiences.

Actually Finding It Is Another Thing


Living well is something that is learned. At least, I know that I'm still learning more about what it means to do so every day.

One thing I've noticed is that we tend to construct unfortunate narratives which get us to focus on things that do not really contribute to quality of life at all. It's perhaps easier to identify these narratives by imagining the autobiography of a live driven by them:

"On that fateful day 25 years ago, I finally managed to find a store in the mall that had the phone I had been looking for. I activated it and downloaded Angry Birds. The very next day I went to work with people I can't really remember anymore working on something I only recall as being rather boring; at least I don't think I learned anything from it, though it certainly allowed me to pay for all the network I was using with my new phone."

Really? It isn't like we all need to be riding rockets to the moon or painting the next Mona Lisa, but certainly we can live in a way that adds to something worth reflecting on in years to come.

Yet collectively, we are investing so much in things with far too little meaning, typified by punch-the-clock jobs used to make us into engines of consumption. Yes, we need to work. Yes, new toys and gadgets are awesome. Yes, Angry Birds is indeed a little addictive. These should be fillers, though, not the content of our existence.

So I Asked Myself: What Can I Do?

If I wish to live in a world where people are living lives worth living, then I need to try and help create an environment that supports that.

I wish to engage in ways that contribute to the mindset of living meaningfully. I want the things I make to contribute to and support the unfolding of meaning in the lives of others.

Getting there means stepping aside from some of the dominant models in society today such as "the person as consumer" and "the person as work unit". It means finding models of value that emphasize lives lived with quality. It means creating things that reflect that value.

In short, I can't rightfully expect to find lives of quality if my own efforts work in the opposite direction. I know I will not always achieve such high aspirations, but I can certainly try and, hopefully, succeed often enough to make a difference of some size.


Epilogue

This set of make, play and live blog entries may read like so much philosophy, but these are things I truly care about and which I want to find at the heart of my efforts. They are the metrics by which I wish to measure myself by, and which I hope to inspire others to consider as well. If I can manage that, what better life could there be? :)

Now that KDE 4.8 has been released, it’s time to recap all changes you will find in Gwenview.

The main change is the addition of animations when viewing images: crossfading between images and nicer-to-use comparisons. You can learn more from this previous blog article.

This change was not nice for users of some graphic cards whose OpenGL drivers do not support what Gwenview tries to do. I decided to play it safe for now: animations in Gwenview now use software rendering by default. For better performance, you can enable OpenGL rendering in the configuration dialog.

This new version of Gwenview also comes with a lot of smaller changes, some of them caused by the limitations which were introduced by the new animation system.

Scrolling and Zooming

• No more scrollbars: A bird-eye view lets you scroll the image.
• Nicer zoom cursor. I realized Qt now supports truecolor cursors, so I drew a nicer magnifying glass cursor instead of the black+white+1bit-alpha-channel version. Holding down Ctrl to zoom won’t bring you back to the 90s anymore!
• Pressing ‘F’ toggles zoom-to-fit on and off.
• More consistent behavior: SVG images can now be scrolled using the same shortcuts as scrolling raster images.

Global User interface changes

• The “sidebar collapser”, the little arrow on the left of the view which let you hide the sidebar is gone. It has been replaced by a button in the statusbar.
• Labels for some of the toolbar buttons have been removed, reducing its width. It should now be more usable on small netbook-like screens.

Tools

• The red-eye reduction and crop tools no longer show floating widgets over the image, a thin bar slides from the bottom of the window instead.

Behavior

• Compared images follow thumbnail view order: previously when one selected two or more images to compare them, they would not necessarily appear in the same order as in the thumbnail bar.
• Arrow-key navigation in zoom-to-fit mode. This one has been requested by quite a few people. When an image is in zoom-to-fit mode, you can go to the previous and next image with the arrow keys. When you zoom in, arrow keys are used to scroll the image. This is very similar to the behavior provided by phones or digital cameras.

Video support

• The on-screen-display is now transparent.
• One can use the left and right arrow keys to seek
• A late addition: an undocumented shortcut (P) to toggle playback
• Note that video support is a bit fishy right now: it seems Phonon does not always play well with its video widget being embedded in a QGraphicsView, known symptoms are wrong colors or wrong aspect ratio. Hopefully this will improve in the next releases.

4.8.1 should bring you its usual series of bug fixes, among them is generating thumbnails for all images of the current folder, not only the currently visible ones. This fix is a bit bigger than your usual .1 fixes, so if you are willing to test it, you are welcome. The code is available on Gwenview git repository, in the “gen-all-thumbnails” branch.

I hope you enjoy this new Gwenview!

Qt does not sell mobiles. As a consumer, Qt is a technicality. Right now, the experience and availability of apps sell phones. Qt is just a tool for us developers to implement those experiences. Despite this, it is interesting to compare the Nokia N9 and the new WP7-based Lumia handsets. The market’s reaction to both, and the irony of it all.

Sweden is a highly developed smartphone market. Almost everyone has a smartphone. Flat rate data subscriptions are cheap. Both N9 and Lumia are sold here, and are advertised.

The reviews are interesting. In mobil.se’s comparison, the N9 lose out because the platform is bound to die, thus have fewer apps. In the same organisations yearly awards, the N9 win three out of four applicable categories (the Sony Ericsson Mini Pro won the value-for-your-money-award). The N9 also went straight to the top of the selling charts at katshing.se, and in the telekomidag.se review of Lumia, the final words praise the N9 “Sister model N9 with MeeGo was a (albeit late) eye-opener, for Lumia is feeling more of oh well-character. Skilled in every way - but we have seen most things before.” (google translation of ”Systermodellen N9 med Meego var en (om än för sen) aha-upplevelse, för Lumia blir känslan mer av jaha-karaktär. Kompetent på alla sätt – men vi har ju sett det mesta förut.”)

Following this trail, the latest sad figures from Nokia report that things aren’t going that well. Telling your customers and employees that your current unique product is dead, then delivering a mainstream product later does not help improve business. Bloomberg has looked at various analysts’ estimations of sales figures, and they estimate 1.4 million N9 where sold 2011, while the Lumia is estimated to have sold 1.3 million (estimates range from 800k – 2M).

The interesting part in all these comparisons is that the N9/MeeGo platform is not being pushed by Nokia. They do not want to sell it. The Lumia, on the other hand, is being pushed by the biggest marketing budget Nokia ever has spent on a single product. The Lumia series is being expanded, apps are emerging.

I am sure that Nokia/Microsoft will succeed. I had a VHS system at home, even though Betamax was technically superior. The cost for success will be to turn Nokia from a leading brand into a mainstream supplier, no more important than HTC or Samsung. Sad for Nokia, sad for Finland, sad for what could have been for Qt. Launching N950 alongside N9 and following up with multi-core models would had been great. Also, seeing that MeeGo Harmattan more or less was Maemo with Qt, Intel’s drop-out would not have been the end of the world.

Still, from a Qt developer, this, in combination with the openly governed Qt Project means that Qt will stay a cross platform tool. The risk of seeing it being sucked into a life as a (great!) single platform is no more. Qt/iOS, Qt/Android and Qt/MeeGo give a bigger target area than WP7 has. And if the WP8 platform is to follow desktop, Nokia just jumped from one burning platform to another, since they are going HTML5.

Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications.

To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel

"I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!"

or later in the same thread

"KDE 4.8 is rocking for me too.Using the Kubuntu PPA's on Sandy Bridge system and it's just lightning fast to do anything. "

You have an Touchpaddevice and you're looking for an free and open source operatingsystem, touchfriendly and with a KDE UI?

Then you maybe have heard about Plasma Active. Plasma Active is a new UI specially developed for touch-devices. You can download it there from open-slx. That image is prepared to install Plasma Active on the Top of Balsam Professional.

In this Article you can see how to prepare the stick. After booting and installing you have a Plasma Active on your device. You also can use Plasma Active inside a Dual or Multiboot Installation.

But we want to use Skype for this device.

First of all you have to surft to: http://www.skype.com/intl/de/get-skype/on-your-computer/linux/downloading.suse . After accessing the site it will be prepare the download. Just save it any place.

Change now to that directory which contains the saved package. Type in your console:

sudo zypper in skype-2.2.0.35-suse.i586.rpm

After the installation you will see the Skype Icon in the Applicationlauncher.

Tap now on that icon. Now opens the graphical client as you maybe know from the desktop. Tap on Username and type there your Username with the virtual keyboard. Sadly the virtual keyboard doesn't see the Password field. That means that you have to use an external USB Keyboard for this field.

After the Login you can use it through tapping on it. If you tap on the Text field you can use the virtual keyboard. If you like to call anyone just tap on the phone icon.

The integrated WeTab Webcam is supported directly without any changes.

You can plug in a Headphone into the WeTab. A  seperate port for a microphone isn't placed there. But the WeTab has a integrated microphone which pacify in most cases.

Updated 27.1.12: Changed the packageinstall from rpm to zypper.

Wizards, sorcerers, witches, shamans, pajés and other mystical creatures that are KDE and Linux users celebrate: KDE 4.8 is avaiable in Mageia Cauldron repositories!

                                 

Thanks to the work of John Balcaen (mikala), the main KDE packager on Mageia. Those who use the Cauldron, we invite you to install the new version of KDE to work on possible bugs that may come to appear. According to the roadmap, KDE 4.8 will be available in the next Mageia stable release, Mageia 2, which will be released on May 3. Mageia devs will work to give the community a desktop environment as stable as possible.

Mikala wrote an interesting post about technical questions related to KDE in Mageia. The reading is recommended to those interested.

There's a well-known saying which first appeared in a book by James Howell published in 1659: "All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy." The message is that life should not only be about the seriousness of work and that enjoyable, recreational activities are an important part of life. It is as true now as it was three and a half centuries ago.

Humans aren't the only ones who engage in play, of course. Many animals also play extensively, mostly while growing up though some continue to do so well into adulthood. It's one of the reasons I love having cats around the house: they are given to running around, chasing things (and each other) with obvious joy and frivolity. In addition to the enjoyment they get from it, this play has a pretty serious component: it's a way to put their skills into practice and improve them. It can also be a way to build social bonds with others of their social group.

Similarly for us humans, play can be more than just enjoyment and relaxation. It can be applied to creative processes to draw out truly great results from both individuals and teams. It can let us explore ideas, social interactions and generally open doors to new experiences and modes of being. It's a safe and enjoyable way to experiment, all while helping relieve stresses and pressures that may be trickling in from the more serious efforts in our life.

Sometimes I get the sense that technology has been getting more and more unplayful and that saddens me. The industries built around computing are massive. Billions of dollars swirl around them every day, and that sort of scale certainly requires a good amount of applied rigor and seriousness to keep things moving. The sheer amount of money that can be made coupled with the increasing complexity of technology and the ever rising expectations from people who use it can lead to an overly serious, unplayful environment that produces overly serious, unplayful results.

I've noticed that even many of the most popular games available for devices like phones and tablets these days are built around obsessive, repetitive behavior wherein you collect synthetically scarce imaginary resources and vie for the approval of imaginary beings. While rewarding to certain aspects of human psychology, these games are less playful than work-like. They don't even give you much opportunity to expand a set of skills. Even our most serious of traditional games, such as  chess or go, are opportunities to exercise and grow strategic thinking while bonding with other humans. If even our games are less playful, one need not apply much imagination to how opportunities for playfulness are elsewhere.

In short: without play, life becomes dull and we risk become an increasingly boring group of people. That's not the sort of experience I wish to have, nor the sort of experience I wish others to have when using the things I help make.

The activities of play, when added to the other ingredients of life, can help create a fantastic and dynamic experience. That's why there's a certain seriousness to being playful; there is even such a thing as "serious play" which is being increasingly explored by those focused on innovation and communities. There's also, of course, the completely freeing and frivolous sort of play that rounds out this picture.

Make and play. Play and make. They go together, and I'd like to not only experience this myself but help support others in finding their own moments of exuberance.

There are applications which are more or less a mess for a window manager. For example The GIMP opens quite a lot of windows and you want to have all of those windows visible. In general you don’t want to have any other window on the same desktop

The solution to that is to move GIMP on it’s own desktop. But how? We can use static window rules to get this working, but what if there are already windows on that desktop? The perfect solution to that would be to have a desktop which gets created when you open GIMP and gets removed again when GIMP closes.

This was so far not yet possible without manual interaction. But with todays additions to KWin scripting this became possible. Here I present a KWin script which does exactly that:

workspace.clientAdded.connect(function(client) {
  if (client.resourceClass == "gimp-2.6" && client.windowRole == "gimp-image-window") {
    // create a new workspace for the Gimp image window (kind of the main window)
    // switch to the new desktop and send the gimp window to it
    workspace.desktops = workspace.desktops+1;
    workspace.currentDesktop = workspace.desktops;
    client.desktop = workspace.currentDesktop;
  } else if (client.resourceClass == "gimp-2.6") {
    // send all other gimp windows to the current desktop
    client.desktop = workspace.currentDesktop;
  }
});

workspace.clientRemoved.connect(function(client) {
  if (client.resourceClass == "gimp-2.6" && client.windowRole == "gimp-image-window") {
    // when closing the gimp window let's remove the last desktop
    workspace.desktops = workspace.desktops-1;
  }
});

I should really start to publish the quite useful example scripts I write to test the scripting functionality on places like kde-apps The API for 4.9 is documented on Techbase

The thing we always stressed out in Plasma Active is how the system is designed to fit a whole device spectrum, even if the first two releases are explicitly about tablet devices (and in the near future this is not likely to change ;)

But how? it's pretty obvious that one user interface doesn't fit all for sure. Some devices, like mobile phones could share let's say the 60% of the QML UI written for the tablet, some other, let's say set top boxes could need something radically different.

The Plasma Active shell is actually something that doesn't provide any user interface at all, but instead provides some basic features in the logic: manages the user Activities and loads the plugins that will provide the actual user interface, assembled like a LEGO to fit the user experience of a particular form factor.

About user interface plugins: the central parts are Containments and Applets, that are familiar from Plasma Desktop, a new one is a package format used to distribute stand alone QML files sets, and a very important one in the Plasma Active shell is the Home screen.

The Home screen package is a set of qml files that behaves the basic behavior of a Plasma Active shell, such as how Containments are managed, and manages other pieces of user interface such as the activity switcher, the top panel, the application launcher and the recommendation overlay. So by changing this it's possible to change a lot of the behaviour of the Plasma shell (a particular device could also require a different plugin for the main containment, as they are different between Plasma Desktop and the tablet version with its browser of Nepomuk resources)

To make easier for developers that are interested in new form factors to heavily customize the look and feel of Plasma Active, I've put together a wiki page that describes how to proceed writing a new homescreen, and what is the API used in the communication between the shell and the QML part.

KDE 4.8 just got released and that means Okular 0.14 also got released!

First of all I'd like to thank everyone that has done a git commit in the KDE 4.7 → KDE 4.8 trip, here the list in alphabetical order: Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol, Christopher Reichert, Dario Freddi, David Faure, David Palacio, Elvis Stansvik, Frederik Schwarzer, Geoffry Song, Jiri Baum, Kevin Kofler, Martin Ueding, Michal Svec, Michel Ludwig, Mohammad Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun, Montel Laurent, Niels Ole Salscheider, Patrick von Reth, Philip Muskovac, Pino Toscano, Ralf Habacker, Stephen Anthony, Yuri Chornoivan.

That's more than 20 people! Awesome :-)

This release introduces new features like improved text selection in documents with columns, table selection tool, LaTex rendering in annotations, improved embedded support (for use in e.g. Kile), better layouting for facing pages, smarter screensaver/powermanagement handling, improved page label support, default zoom configuration, improved Landscape printing, etc.

You can find a non complete list of bugs and features in bugzilla.

And best of all there's already new features in the pipeline for the next release :-)

Let's keep the ball rolling!

KDE SC 4.8 seems to be a pleasant update, especially regarding KDE PIM. Though the latter still features bugs regarding filtering (filtering for List-Id or List-Post headers does not work for incoming mails on imap accounts) and has a few other issues left, it got a lot more stable and its active development is noticeable. Thanks to the new maintainer and the KDE PIM devs! Dolphin’s UI got a lot quicker and there are a lot more small improvements spread across KDE.

Unfortunately I’m once again fighting virtuoso-t eating CPU although the file indexer is idle and the dbus interface does not show any active queries – but that’s nothing a quick and dirty removal of all of nepomuk’s data can’t “solve”. I know, it’s not a nice solution but it worked for me in the past. I’m still trying to start using nepomuk+strigi with each release – e.g. hoping for some useful (e.g. google-like) search results that display more than a filepath when searching for a string.

Regarding openSUSE packages, you can check the build status in order to make sure all packages you have installed are available for an update. If the repo is rebuilding enable the “Last time results” checkbox at the top-right of that page to see whether the package did succeed before and was published. After that it’s as simple as (for openSUSe 12.1):

sudo zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/48/openSUSE_12.1/ KR48
sudo zypper mr -r KR48
sudo zypper dup --from KR48

Make sure you do not add any Qt repos since the required Qt packages are included. Disable the UpdatedApps repo! You can read more about the KDE repos available for openSUSE on the wiki and drop-by on the openSUSE KDE IRC channel #opensuse-kde or the forums in case you need help.

Bangarang’s development is now hosted on KDE’s git infrastructure in playground.  Many, many thanks to Ben Cooksley and David Solbach for their patient help with the migration from Gitorious.  I’m not a software developer by trade, so their help was invaluable.  The translations are now also hosted by the wonderful KDE translation team – thanks for handling the move Albert!  The new development project page is here.

Gitorious has been an absolutely wonderful host for this fun little project for the last 2 years. In that time there are many things I’ve learned and there will certainly be many things I’ll miss.  That said, I am definitely looking forward to working more closely with the KDE community.

So this is your invitation to join in on the fun.  As always, Bangarang remains a project I spend time on for no other reason than the joy of it.  Good energy in, good energy out.  Rumor has it that the KDE community has oodles of good energy!

At Eljakim (my new employer), work repositories are all svn (lowest common denominator), but several of us access them via git-svn. I’ve created a couple of new ones recently, but thanks to timezones, I never get an svn repo until I’ve already done a day’s work (in git). Getting those commits into svn without losing history is a simple thing when you know how – but when I googled, all I saw were strange and crazy hacks involving arcane commands I didn’t understand. So, here’s the easy way:

• Check out the svn repo

git svn clone https://url.to/svn-repo

• Make a folder for your work (assuming it’s not already there)

cd svn-repo
mkdir chani
touch chani/temp
git add chani/temp
git ci
git svn dcommit

• Check out just that folder

cd ..
git svn clone https://url.to/svn-repo/chani merge-repo

• Connect it to the git repo

cd merge-repo
git remote add mygit /path/to/git-repo
git fetch mygit
git checkout -b mymerge mygit/master

• Rebase your work on top of svn

git rebase master
git checkout master
git merge --ff-only mymerge

• Clean up the temp file (is thre a way to just commit an empty dir in git?)

git rm temp
git ci

• And send it to the server!

git svn dcommit

• Switch back to the primary repo (optional)

cd ..
rm -rf merge-repo
cd svn-repo
git svn rebase

Of course, you don’t have to delete the merge repo, you could keep using it as your primary repo – but the way things are set up here I always end up wanting my checkout to be a level above that. :)

Edit: Also, make sure you move or delete the original git repo once the commits are safely in svn. I spent half the day continuing to work in the pure git repo after blogging this… >.< oh well, at least I just had to copy&paste off my blog to fix it. :P

Simply the most polished, fast, flexible, beautiful and elegant desktop, ever.

Make

There was a time when most everyone I knew had some sort hobby or past-time in which they made things, often simply for the sake of making. From this they derived enjoyment and personal meaning. The meaning was not kept to themselves, either: I remember being invited to watch a cactus that flowers most spectacularly but only once per year bloom as evening set in at the house of a hobbyist horticulturist. I spent evenings with good friends in old barns or in the comfort of their living room making music, listening to others play instruments alone or together, sharing stories they had written. I watched a friend sail out on a boat he built with his own hands in his own back yard, taking other friends out on day excursions on the waves. I've also watched that kind of involved life fade out from being the norm to being the exception.

Over the course of 2011, I had a strikingly consistent conversation with various individuals on this topic of making. In particular, the discussion would end up pondering why so few people in industrialized societies engage in the process of making. We would usually end up mulling over the role of modern patterns of consumption in this trend, what we have perhaps lost and how we might bring making back into the mainstream.

Sometimes the conversation would bloom out of a discussion of consumer centric social structures; sometimes we got onto the topic by way of possible economic alternatives to "we must find everyone a wage based job"; and other times I simply brought up the topic on its own. From those interactions, I took away three primary points of personal interest.

First, whether one self-identifies as conservative or liberal (economically, socially, politically or some combination thereof), people are generally aware that we make less and consume more, that the ratio between those behaviors has changed significantly towards the latter and that this is somehow not a great turn for our societies.

For many consumption has become the primary mechanism of involvement. There is nothing wrong with consumption itself (if we do not consume air, water and food, we will in short order cease to be), but it also probably isn't enough on its own. A working balance between participation by making and involvement by consumption has been lost.

Second, there is a distinct sense that many societies have begun to forget what it means to make. I had to remind one fellow, an academic that has found a very cool niche in the NGO world, that he did actually make something in the course of his daily work, even if it is not a physical good. He caught himself in surprise at the realization that, yes, he did make something ... and often.

Others expressed concern that fewer and fewer people knew how to really make much of anything. Instead, the skills being commonly acquired seem to be more  geared towards acts of consumption, or for practices that don't really create anything.

Third, regardless of the trends towards consumption and away from making, there remains a high degree of value placed on the act of making and on those who do so. Aside from the obvious observation that we hold those who are great makers (which may be different from people who make great things) aloft in our societies, there is a definite inner connection to the act of making alive in people. We have not (yet?) gotten to the point where we have forgotten there is great value in the act of making things.

Despite all that general agreement, no one I talked to had any really solid  ideas on how to bring making back into the core of our collective experience.


At the same time ... The Maker Faires are beacons of hope; the open source world continues to be a hive of activity; Wikipedia and OpenStreeMap bloom; kids still love lego; and I still bump into people doing crazy and wonderful things "just because". However, it seems evident that prioritizing behaviors, activities and objects that encourage and support making over simple consumption is still very much needed.

This avenue of thought has caused me to reflect quite a bit on what it is I am doing, what I am making and how I am encouraging and enabling others to engage with life creatively as well.  Few things are as inspiring to me as watching something being made; few things fill me with more hope than someone with a warm heart and busy hands.

Yet if I truly believe that a world of people who engage in making is a better place to be, how am I contributing towards the realization of that reality? Eventually the obvious truth filtered slowly through my mind and hit me over the head with its simple truth:

I want the things which I help make to become opportunities for others in their turn to participate with their own voice, their own movement and their own passion.

Today marks the day of yet another KDE Telepathy release. We're so confident with this third release, that we decided to put the Beta sticker on it. Let this be supported by our recent move to KDE's Extragear.

In the past 3 months since we released KDE Telepathy 0.2, we managed to close over 100 bugs. 102 to be exact. We added stability (if you'll make it crash with normal usage, I'll buy you a beer). We added visual polish. And we added new features too. Here's a list of what's new in 0.3:

• A completely rewritten and simplified plasmoid applet for controlling your online status
• Support for MSN over XMPP
• Dialog for adding accounts was redesigned to show the most favorite IM networks first
• Multiple file transfers with drag'n'drop support
• File transfers can be resumed
• The contact list is now separate, fully self-contained, easily embeddable widget
• Greatly improved contact tooltips in contact list
• Contact filtering in send file utility
• Support for /me in chats

Please don't ask "when you'll have this and that". We know you want metacontacts, history logs, OTR support, better integration and so on. We know it and we have it all planned. It will simply be ready when it's ready. (Though you might be nicely surprised by an upcoming post on David's blog about planned features for next release ;) And it's perfectly fine to say "you suck for not having it yet". We know that too.

You can get the 0.3 sources still hot from KDE's ftp servers. Building is the boring usual. Also watch out - we now require TelepathyQt 0.9, which is the first version under a new name - it's not TelepathyQt4 anymore, but TelepathyQt.

Please report any bugs you find at http://bugs.kde.org, product Telepathy.

Big part of the great team will be at FOSDEM and you are very welcome to buy us a beer for our work. If you're not attending FOSDEM, you can still contribute to our "beer fund", which is solely for relaxation and partying purposes.

You can also come listen to the great adventure of KDE Telepathy to our FOSDEM talk, scheduled for Saturday at 17:35 in CrossDesktop Devroom. Mark your calendars & see you there!