ervin's piece of web

Ok, we were heading for dinner with a small gang, when someone proposed to go in near the beach in “the best tapas restaurant of Malaga”, which sounded like a very good idea after yesterday dinner. So, we took a Taxi… well in fact the group growed suddenly so much that we took three cabs to reach the restaurant.

After searching a bit we finally found the restaurant… which was in fact… a fish restaurant. Unfortunately I hate fish but well there was also some meat available so I managed to eat something. In order to get the things worse, the place was overpriced. And finally, since it was near the beach (which is well known to attract tourists), we had the pleasure to see several people coming in trying to sell random things (including awful flowers) or singing. I admit there was a nice Jazz band though.

Since a subgroup of the restaurant was tiread, or upset by all this tourists stuff, we decided to go back to the residence… So this time I go to sleep, one hour earlier, which is clearly a record since the start of the week!

Ok, here we go again… I woke up early to attend talks, but didn’t manage to go to sleep early. =)

I ended up in a local restaurant with a gang of fellow hackers, including coolo, David, and Peter. The food was quite nice… except maybe one dish, it seems I was the only one able to eat it, but since I didn’t like it I ended up quickly. We got back to the computer labs and stayed here until the aKademy team asked us to go back to the residence because well… they wanted to go back home and have some sleep.

Marketing For Geeks

The first t^Hshow was about marketing as the text implies. The speakers were Waldo Bastian, and Aaron “ola!” Seigo. It covered some simple things we can do at our level and with the available tools. It was really an awesome talk! I hope that it’ll make some of us think more about our own behavior when we communicate with people. That’s really a shame that we make such great software, but that nobody knows about it. Yes, you’ve read it : nobody. Mostly, only geeks know about it, that’s a fact, we’re really a tiny percentage of the desktop market. But if we think about it, talk about what we do to people, it’ll spread!

The State of KDE Bindings

I had a nice insight about the KDE Bindings thanks to Richard Dale. It was really interesting and exposed some misconceptions we could have about binding development. There’s still some points where you have to be careful like instance ownership (in order to get memory management right) or the differences on features between the source and target languages. He gave some examples based on Ruby… it’s really temptin for me to learn this language.

Collaborative content for the masses

This one was about Wikipedia, it was really interesting to know how the project has been created, how it is evolving, which are their future challenges, etc. Nice talk, I’m really looking forward for widespread Wikipedia use in KDE.

Novell Desktop Migration Study

I found this talk far more interesting than the previous one on the topic. We had a real explanation about the methodology used to evaluate the product. It gave some hints on how to build your own portable lab to make such studies. We would really need small local teams with portable labs like this one to collect usability data about our software. That’s would be really interesting.

Too bad that this study is a bit old now, it was using a now outdated Suse distro with only KDE 3.2 on it, but well we’ve made some important changes concerning usability since then.

Oxygen

That’s the last talk I attended, and it’s the last talk of the Developers Conference. It really looks like a great icon project it has a really refreshing and professional look, without looking boring! But well, I’d prefer to not explain this with too many details since it’s surely better to be sure that it’ll still be fresh when it’ll be released (hopefully with KDE 4).

After all those talks I attended the kdelibs/kdebase structure BoF. As Danimo already explained, we’ll surely have a new foundation stack, which basically means that we’ll have an even better framework. One of the goals being to make it easier for people to grasp the API for contributing or ISV developments. Of course a transition strategy has also been discussed in order to make all of this work as smooth as possible.

Of course… I’m still planning to go to sleep early today, but I still need to go for dinner! That’s all folks.

Today is the first day of the developers conference, I had hard time to wake up at 7am since I stayed awake discussing with a bunch of hacker until 1:30am… Aaron was there, which is good news, I was wondering if he was trying to join the ocean swimming with migrating turtles or some other weirdness. Well, anyway I managed to wake up and attend lot of talks…

Trolltech Keynote

Just like last year the speaker was Eirik Chambe-Eng. He covered what happened within Trolltech since last year, and in particular the fact that Qt4 is out, and GPL on Windows. I’m still thinking that he’s a quite good speaker! It’s informative, but he has really good ideas to make his talks entertaining which is a very good thing. Thanks to him, we’ve seen some great photos of Matthias Ettrich.

Multimedia API for KDE 4

Nice talk about the new KDEMM, which needs a new name obviously. I liked this talk, it was well structured, and has really good ideas, in particular the fact to have several backends available (aRTs, gstreamer, NMM, etc.). It’s clearly not targetting pro-audio, which surely requires a tight coupling to a particular framework for performances anyway. Here it’s more about having a nice API, easy to use for multimedia applications (jukebox, video players, etc.). Moreover it’s really planned to hide the tedious work to the user, and autodetect or auto-configure for him as much as possible. Finally, it seems that the NMM backend will have a separate GUI application to allow using it’s more advanced feature (since it’s a fully network enabled multimedia framework, I’ve been really impressed last year by the NMM guys talk!).

Asynchronous Programming with Qt – Pitfalls and Techniques

This talk was very interesting, and obviously very technical. It gives some insight on how to design asynchronous API, and which points are proven to be difficult while building this kind of API. Liked it, Till and David really master their subject.

Multithreading in Desktop Applications

It was nice, to have this one grouped with the asynchronous programming one. It gives another aspect on how responsiveness can be achieved, but through the use of thread. Mirko even introduced the ThreadWeaver API, which looks like something very convenient to use.

Beauty and magic for KDE developers (to be continued)

We can’t go to eat to the cafeteria anymore it seems, so we have to walk outside the University to find a restaurant… walking under the sun. I teamed up with Kalle, Till, David and Peter for lunch. We basically followed Kalle who knows the general direction to find restaurants… and we found one. It was nice, not very costly but we waited a looooot before being able to eat. Then, I was a bit in a hurry to go back to the university to attend the talk. We arrived very late, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depends on the point of view) this talk didn’t happen because Zack had some issues with his laptop, which really sucks. But on the bright side it has been reschedule, so hopefully it’ll take place! I’m prepared to attend!

Aaron’s School of Designer

It was basically a tutorial about Qt Designer 4. It was nice to have some insight about some of the changes. Looks like it improved a lot, I’m looking forward to using it… which might not happen soon since I’m currently not heading at GUI development. =)

M.2, a generic management / deployment / monitoring framework

I admit that I’ve been a bit disappointed by this one. But, to be fair, I guess that the timing was bad, the project is really too young. The presentation by itself surely lacked a state of the art part, since it wasn’t referring to any other similar framework. I was hoping for some demo of the communication layer… too bad.

Since it was extremely short, I ran to another talk that was taking place in parallel…

Scribe

Not much to say about this one, since I missed the beginning, but this looks like a nice and flexible API to handle text. As David pointed out it might miss some features for style handling though…

That’s all for today, I’ll surely try to go to sleep “early” today, since I don’t want to be sleepy at tomorrow talks. I have to hunt for food first though!

Today I attended some interesting talks, but they were obviously less user or sysadmin oriented.

TaskJuggler : A KDE Project Management Software

This one was very interesting. I’m really looking forward to this project, looks like a very mature solution for project management. It has some very neat features like the ability to manage several related projects at the same time keeping track of subprojects for synchronization, etc. It can of course generate reports, and it has even the ability to generate iCal calendars for publishing (which is neat to distribute tasks to people).

The model used is really clean in my opinion. I’m wondering if it would benefit on some more higher level concepts as what we can find in process engineering (maybe it’s already doable, I don’t know) if not it could be very interesting to have TaskJuggler as a APES target. I’ll have to discuss a bit about this with Chris Schläger I guess.

KCall

Next speaker was Eva… who obviously had a hard time recovering from yesterday party. =)

Even if the talk was a bit slow it was really interesting and well structured. They’re basically working on a framework for computer telephony. I’m really looking forward to it.

Firefox port to KDE

Not much news there in my opinion. Basically, Konqueror can embed Gecko thanks to a KPart, there’s a Firefox port using KDE technologies that is in progress. To be fair, even if the talk wasn’t very informative, the project looks interesting, and it nicely illustrate that KDE is flexible enough to act as a truely integrative desktop.

The present and future of PIM synchronisation on the KDE desktop

Not much to say here since the talk was cancelled! Maybe the speaker couldn’t recover from the party…

Cute, Embedded, Linux

Matthias Welwarsky from Archos SA gave us some insights from the PMA400 which is basically a music and video player, a webpad, a video recorder, a photo wallet and a PDA in only one device! It really looks nifty but as far as I know it’s costly. The content of the talk was really interesting, explaining some design choices.

Before the last talk I attended, the merchandising booth opened for the first time since the beginning of the conference! There was some pressure because it was well known that there’s not many konqis this year. On my side, I had the goal to buy two of them, since my father was jealous from the one I got last year, and one of my friends requested one. Unfortunately, Helio “The flying hacker” Castro managed to be faster than me and bought two of them! But luckily I bought the last one! Obviously this one will go to my father. I also took a T-shirt from the conference for me.

And finally, I attended the key signing party. It was an entertaining moment just like last year. And it’s finally a good way to meet some people I missed. This year I managed to get some more KDE core developers signatures to my collection, I now have Stephan Kulow himself in my keyring.

Finally I didn’t go to the sponsored party this night. I wasn’t really motivated by clubbing. David wasn’t either, hence why we got back to the residence together. While walking we discussed some AI technical points and we ended up sitting at the residence discussing KIO future. Some of the ideas are very interesting in my humble opinion… I’m looking forward to have them implemented. Maybe more on this later, it’s lunch time!

First of all, for people complaining about the content… In the first two day it’s the Users and Administrators Conference. So well, it’s not that shocking if it’s not really hacker oriented. Now, here are my impressions :

Novell Desktop

Keeping in mind that it’s targetted for users interested in KDE (at least I hope so) it’s indeed strange to see someone coming and explaining they use no KDE application for the major tasks (mail, browsing, etc.) except Kopete…

Kolab – Groupware the KDE way

Nice talk about Kolab, this one was clearly for sysadmins, so we had some technical insights about how it works. Till seems to be a very good speaker, liked his style.

I admit that I didn’t followed this one very closely (shame), since I was chatting a bit with David Faure about some KIO related stuffs.

Deploying KDE Using The Kiosk Framework

Another one targeted to sysadmins in my opinion. Very good talk, raising the right points, answering the right question. Presenting the context of a successful deployment using Kiosk. Well done Aaron!

Ubuntu and Kubuntu

Clearly a misleading title… It was more about cooperation across opensource projects, and even more specifically between upstream and distro makers. Oh, and well Mark Shuttleworth is the first space tourist in case you was still not aware of this…

Linux migration success stories with KDE and NX

Another talk with misleading content, but with a very interesting content. Instead of real success stories (I was expecting enterprise deployments or something similar), we had a talk about NX itself, it’s current state and how to test it. Too bad the talk by itself was lacking some polishing in my humble opinion.

Anyway, I’m really glad to see that NX is making its way. Maybe it’s a bit slow since most of what has been presented was already reality last year, but it’s really taking shape now with more features. As Kurt hinted we still badly miss a free (as in speech) client. Too bad that it’s used a lot now so changing would be difficult, but I still think that the name of this is not fortunate. “NX” is quite cryptic to most users, they surely don’t even care that it’s related to X… that lacks sexiness.

After this one, I didn’t attend anything because of a headache… Too bad, I wanted to at least attend the Scripts with KDE feel talk. I’m looking forward to tomorrow talk… But well it seems that we have a party sponsored by Novell this night (thanks a lot for this) so I guess it’ll be hard to wake up. =)

For the second time in my life have been interviewed… It’s part of the People Behind KDE serie. Thanks a lot to fab for his patience, since well I’m not that cooperative with interviews.

It even made it to the Dot, with an article.

So now you can read my People Behind KDE interview to know how lovely or mad (it’s your choice) I am.

Ok, this time it’s official I arrived Malaga. My plane was on time, and I’ve been able to take the shuttle as expected… but… alone. In fact it was not that clear that other people had to wait 11:20 before the shuttle arrive. In fact, it was even sligthly late I was afraid to have missed it. But no! It appeared! And I had a whole van to put my stuff in!

On the flight itself it was a nice experience. That’s the first time I’m in a plane flying that high… well ok, I don’t travel that often so it explains it was my first time. :-p

As usual I looked at the earth while the plane was taking off, it was as usual, the same good old colors I always see when I take a plane. I see those in France, but also last year when I travelled to the Stuttgart airport. I’ve been a bit bored after some time so I started to read a bit some stuff I found in the plane. After around an hour I looked again and was amazed! No more the usual colors! It was really really different mostly ochre, brown, sand. Even the rivers edges didn’t look similar. Pretty impressive from the sky in my opinion.

And of course after all this goodness, I’ve been pleased to finally reach the residence, and start talking with fellow hackers!

Well, that’s all for today. Tomorrow we’ll have talks, so I’ll surely blog more.

Ok, it seems that I’m ready for aKademy now. All my stuff is packed, the laptop I borrowed from the lab is ready for development. If everything goes well, I’ll just have to reconfigure the wifi connection to be able to work. Immediately productive!

My flight is early tomorrow morning so it’s my last minute online at home. When I’ll be able to reconnect I’ll be on site! I’m very excited…

The really nice thing is the shuttle service on arrival, that’s a great idea! And I’ll be able to finally meet İsmail Dönmez (cartman) in real life, he’ll surely be one of the first persons I’ll meet since we’ll share the same shuttle.

See you all at Málaga!!!

Looks like Simon Edward’s blog post about hierarchies showed some concerns about some of our “new” ioslaves. Moreover, I’ve seen some similar questions raised on the Dot.

Since I am the maintainer of some of them (system:/, media:/, home:/ and remote:/) and participated a bit in trash:/ development (which is maintained by David Faure), I think that I should explain some more what it is all about.

I disagree on the fact that people “don’t get hierarchies”. That’s not that simple, they can deal with hierarchies if they don’t become too complicated. If it’s really deep that becomes a problem. That’s just like lists, if the list is too long you easily get lost. On the other hand, I fully agree with the fact that “people doesn’t understand other’s people way of organizing things”. But don’t forget that those statements are particularly right for managing documents, in particular because a document can be placed in several categories.

For managing documents, it becomes clear that a system based only on hierarchies is not the best solution. That can be addressed using more complex systems based on search and concept tagging. Some of the most refined systems are still “research toys” (I’m even working on one of those “toys” for my PhD). But there’s still hope, and we already have technology to improve things today, that’s the Tenor path.

So why creating system:/?

Because the current UNIX hierarchy is not well suited for desktop users. Lot of its content is really cryptic and exists because it’s necessary to make the system work. Finally that’s just a low level concept from the user point of view. Then system:/ is here to hide this implementation detail.

Because, we had some ioslaves for a while partly helping with desktop tasks in a network enabled context : access the trash, access a medium (usb flash disk, camera, dvd, etc.) and access a remote share. All this is covered by ioslaves recently created, or existing for a while (audiocd:/, media:/, trash:/, remote:/, fish:/, ftp:/, etc.). Those ioslaves are great from a developer point of view because they lead to specialized components addressing one particular task. But they are not so great from the user point of view, because he has to know they exist in the first place, and he has to deal with URLs. Then system:/ is here to hide this implementation detail.

We don’t want people to deal with complicated hierarchy, or to type URLs. So I introduced a new concept in the ioslave land : forwarding. This way we keep the technical advantage of those tiny specialized components, but in the end we can have the user dealing with only one ioslave allowing to work on desktop tasks. Other ioslaves like media:/, home:/, trash:/ are now helpers for the system:/ ioslave, users don’t even need to know they exist.

In this case it becomes easy to avoid dealing with URLs, you just need a link to system:/ (and it’s already available). We just have to make sure the system:/ hierarchy doesn’t become too complicated. That’s exactly why the entry list at the root of this hierarchy has been simplified for 3.5.

Now the user has system:/ which is a hierarchy suited for desktop tasks. One day, we’ll surely go beyond hierarchies but that’s not a reason to let current users with half-baked tools, that’s exactly what I’m trying to change.