ervin's piece of web
White noise from a gearhead
AK2010, D+4to6: Hectic and wrapping up
Jul 9th
OK, once again I didn’t quite manage to write a blog each day… It always starts well and then the hackathon kicks in. 
The last three days, I had more meetings again. We made quite some progresses on our plans for Solid. I even got some more people to write on backends for libsolid, really neat. Looking forward to share the load in this way.
Of course hacking in between, and in particular today where I made quite some progresses on the new version of Zanshin which I neglected completely for the past year. Also notable was yesterday day trip, we spent the afternoon next to a nice lake. Kind of reminded the day trip in Glasgow, except that we had great weather this time, and hungry mosquitoes.
People started to leave already, I’m part of the last group of fearless hackers here. Tomorrow it’ll be my turn to move back home, not really looking forward to the trip itself, but having some rest at home will be welcome after such a hectic and awesome week!
AK2010, D+3: Meetings, Meetings, Meetings
Jul 6th
Unlike planned today, I actually hacked until early in the morning… But managed to get enough sleep to be lively today which was basically a long stream of meetings for me. Two highlights of the day:
- KDE Mobile BoF, where actually quite a few people attended, many more than I expected. We made nice progresses there, discussing the ecosystem how to integrate there, how to push forward the modularization of our platform. Very nice group we had there, although it was somewhat large it was also very well disciplined. I’ll have to update our wiki accordingly now;
- KDE PIM BoF, discussing post 4.5 plans and so on. That’s where I’m sitting right now.
Nice day overall, looking forward to tomorrow where I’ll put my metalworker hat on with a couple of Solid BoFs.
AK2010, D+2: KDE e.V. AGM World Record
Jul 5th
We made it! Yes! We made it!
"Made what?" you might ask… Well, today was our "day long" general assembly meeting of the KDE e.V. We call it "day long" because it’s usually the time needed to get through it. Last year we made it in half a day though, and we set a new record of efficiency, only three hours! New world record!
We’re definitely getting good at it, and it’s not that we’re less careful, I think we just grown up as an organization and we’re getting better at this kind of exercise.
Obviously, we then had some unforeseen time for hacking and meetings. I didn’t get much hacking done though, I started preparing for the next round of university projects in Toulouse, collecting ideas, checking with people if that’s actually feasible and so on.
Enjoyed tonight a relaxing indian dinner with Claudia, Paul and Pradeepto. After that we were all thirsty (for some reason the indian place was damn hot inside), so just stopped at a pub next to TOAS and spent a couple hours attracting gearheads in the bar for a drink… And at some point I headed out with David for a late hacking at the TOAS itself.
Tomorrow my tour of BoFs starts… maybe I shouldn’t hack until too late, or well, early in the morning.
AK2010, D+1: Let’s be elegant
Jul 4th
A few nice talks today, I found Lubos talk on performance quite interesting, definitely give some ideas on what and what not to do when trying to improve your application performances. Also interesting was Sebastian talk about the project Silk which nicely shapes up, I hope to see more of his ideas deliver in the coming months/years.
Obvious highlight of the day: Aaron Seigo’s keynote "Reaching for Greatness". Once again it was a very good moment of introspection on what’s going on in the community, and giving directions to satisfy our urge for excellence. I very much liked how he tied that to the concept of Elegance (yes, using an upper case E even). I won’t give more details as I far prefer people to actually watch the recorded version once it’ll be available.
I have to confess that I didn’t attend many talks today. I spent quite some time discussing architecture of our platform with people in the hallway.
Tomorrow, probably no blog from me as we’ll have the full day KDE e.V. general assembly. Looking forward to the hacking marathon starting on tuesday. We actually kind of started as I’m sitting in a room full of hackers in the TOAS Student House right now.
AK2010, D+1: Thought of the day: Aaron Seigo’s facts
Jul 4th
Sooo… People recovering from last night party hangover as I’m typing, attending the first talk of the day. And suddenly, an idea crossed my mind: in order to satisfy Aaron Seigo megalomania, we should start an "Aaron Seigo’s facts" website. Here is my first contribution to it:
"Aaron doesn’t have a God complex, it is God who has an Aaron complex".
Hugs everyone!
AK2010, D-Day: I see mobile talks everywhere
Jul 3rd
Today we had the first day of conference of Akademy. Plenty of nice talks (surprise!). Quite a few mobile related (surprise!). I was really looking forward to the development track which had only interesting topics, but unfortunately for me it wasn’t conveniently placed regarding my own talk and the talk of my students. So I could only attend the first one from Thomas McGuire, which was really good. Oh well, I guess I’ll virtually attend the other ones thanks to the recorded videos when they’ll be online.
Other highlights of the day were basically PIM on Mobile by Till, and Plasma Mobile by Alexis and Artur. Very nice talks as well!
My own talk about the KDE Platform Mobile happened at the end of the mobile track which was inconvenient for the aformentioned reason, but also because it was competing with the end of some random soccer game. 
Last but not least, we had the talk done by my students about the projects in the Toulouse University. And they did a really decent job although that was really a first for them to hold such a talk in an international context. Definitely not an easy exercise which can be frightening at first. Well done guys!
And now that my talk is behind me I can feel free to hack late at night again… unfortunately not tonight as I’m nursing a terrible headache (which is why I left the party early unfortunately).
AK2010, D-1: Touchdown!
Jul 2nd
I arrived in Tampere yesterday around 10pm. The trip was uneventful (nice!), but somehow long. Anyway managed to meet a few people already. Heard a few horror stories about lost luggage already, luckly I was not affected… and apparently their luggage appeared this morning. Now plotting for a group lunch before the Akademy welcome opens.
Glad to be here. Stay tuned!
AK2010, D-3: Getting ready
Jun 29th
Just like the fellow gearheads who already published this kind of blog, I’d like to claim that, yes!
This year I will be spread on several fronts (like every years in fact), but you will for sure meet me during the following events:
- My talk about KDE Mobile, which will happen on saturday afternoon;
- The KDE Mobile BoF which I will be moderating, people willing to discuss the future of the KDE Platform and how to contribute more to the the Maemo / MeeGo ecosystem;
- The Solid BoFs where I’ll meet my fellow metalworkers, strengthening our plans for 4.6; note the plural there, there will be two of such meetings (because some people will attend remotely, and then because of timezone constraints).
Apart from those three events, I’ll run around as usual, probably trying to poke a bit the Plasma people as well or furiously hacking somewhere.
Looking forward to meeting you all!
KDE Platform Profiles: It’s alive!
Apr 29th
As part of the KDE/Maemo effort (that should get a more generic name really…), we’ve already seen emerging some SDKs to help us target the relevant platforms, some Plasma mobile shell, etc.
Still, one of the challenges is also to widen the scope of our KDE Platform. For that, a draft plan was made during Tokamak4, and since then we’ve been progressing carefully on the matter. We tried to get as much feedback as possible on the plan, not rushing things to make sure we weren’t stepping on anyone toes.
Today, I’m happy to announce that the very first corner stone of this plan got delivered. We added support for "profiles" in our platform. The CMake scripts for it got committed this morning, along with some changes to libplasma which effectively becomes our first library supporting those profiles.
By selecting a profile at build time, you get a default setup for our libraries which will enable or disable some extra features and dependencies. For instance, if you choose the "Mobile" profile the feature set coming from kdelibs will be reduced but on the other hand there will be much less internal dependencies in kdelibs, this way an application will only need a reduced subset to be able to run.
This more modular kdelibs depending on the profile chosen is of course only a first ongoing projects, but we have other topics to tackle like the runtime dependencies (namely klauncher and kded) of our platform. On this area we still lack reliable data as it is much harder to track. Still reducing dependencies during build time will be a big leap forward. And I’m truely excited because we’re slowly (but steadily!) getting to a slimer KDE Platform.
PhD Aftermath, more than two years later
Mar 6th
Some of you might remember that I graduated in october 2007. I finally managed to get the paper version of my diploma yesterday… Yes, more than two years after the facts. The best part is they managed to insert a typo in the title of my thesis on the diploma, so it seems I worked on "mulit-agent systems" and not "multi-agent systems", why not after all.
Let’s talk about some more interesting information now. I remember when I graduated that some people out there would have loved to get an english version of my thesis. If you’re one of those people, I have a good news for you. Just after graduating I worked on a long paper which covers the most core parts of my thesis, and adds some more information about a potential use in information search. This paper got accepted and published in the Journal of Logic and Computation issue of October 2009 (yes the review process is kind of slow).
If you’re interested in it, you can find more information about it in the page for the corresponding issue of the journal.
