ervin's piece of web

So, Fab wants to know if KDE will have Wireless made easy, and clee points to the fact that we could make NetworkManager and KDE work together.

Don’t worry guys… That’s exactly on my TODO, my productivity dropped recently due to personal constraints which don’t mix well with working on this in my spare time, but the new Hardware Discovery Layer I’m working on (planned to be available with KDE 4) will cover this issue, dealing with specialized daemons like HAL or NetworkManager when appropriate.

Stay tuned!

While discussing some Plasma related stuff with Aaron, I raised some concerns about the name “plasmoid” used for Plasma applets:

[00:04:54] <ervin> well that’s just another name for “plasma applets”
[00:05:05] <ervin> ‘plasmets’
[00:05:09] <aseigo> plaslets?
[00:05:10] <aseigo> ahaha
[00:05:23] <aseigo> GET OUT OF MY HEAD!
[00:05:25] <ervin> stop reading my mind :p
[00:05:30] <aseigo> rofl
[00:05:32] <ervin> d’oh!

So now, I have a proof! Aaron has a mind reading device (possibly a plasmoid)! Or we simply have a kind of mental connection… scary!

Well, that reminds me that I have a “teleporter plasmoid” on my TODO…

This time it’s really finished. I’m back home. This year aKademy was great.

Today, I’ve not done much apart from travelling. I didn’t loose my luggage. Everything went well until I arrived Paris. My flight has been delayed for more than a hour, and the weather was so bad in Toulouse that the plane couldn’t land at the first try! But well, the pilot managed to keep us safe. =)

A lovely woman was waiting for me at the arrival (almost two hours late), that’s really nice to be back.

Yesterday night we had a beach party with a kind of barbecue (something typical in the area). The only problem from me is that they cooked only sardines this way, but there was more food so it wasn’t a real issue.

During the event, people quickly started to walk around. The place was really nice. We’ve seen KDE hackers swimming in the sea by night while a few others were playing freesbee on the beach (by night!?). Around midnight a show made by a school of Flamenco started. It was really a great moment, this dance is really a beautiful one in my opinion. I really enjoyed this show.

And finally, we waited for the bus to arrive and bring us back home. We were near a small restaurant, and of course, a few KDE hackers (no I won’t disclose the names :-p) were trying to hit on two or three women that were there. They obviously faced a conflict of resources, because well… women attract geeks, and they were quickly surrounded by ten, or twelve persons. =)

Today, I plan to keep hacking a bit… I don’t know how much time I’ll be able to access the net, we’ll see. Anyway I’ll surely do only small things, I’ll still be able to commit from home if needed.

I’m becoming really impatient to come back home. I feel the need to see my girlfriend. This feeling was present when I left home, and grew quickly during the conference. I’ll see her tomorrow in Toulouse airport when I arrive. I need to speak with her, take her hand, etc. I’m addicted to her.

Enough for today, next time I’ll blog from my home.

Yesterday night I discussed with David a lot, the scope was large and we even ended up discussing about time travelling. Was interesting, but we decided that 1:30am wasn’t the right time to discuss such thing and we should better go to sleep.

I woke up a bit late because of this, but I managed to be in time for the KOffice meeting. It was insightful about the current state of the project. There’s not many contributors, so if you’re searching for a project where you could contribute : WE NEED YOU FOR KOFFICE!

Some people left today, there’s obviously less people in the computer labs already. But, it doesn’t stop us to work on KDE! Today was very productive (attending no meeting helps).

I finished a thin layer around HAL which will be the backend for a new hardware discovery layer in KDE. It’s works nicely already. Using this small wrapper you can already list hardware with a very few lines of code. I’ll now build a full featured API on top of this to be able to do more complex manipulations in applications.

Since I needed a break on this kind of work I started to work again on my (almost) secret project… It’s something GUI based for a change, and I plan to make it as reusable as possible, I don’t know if I’ll be able to have something interesting before the end of aKademy. But I’ll continue to work on it after aKademy, I’ll blog again as soon as I have something demoable.

I’ll soon go back to the residence to have some food, and maybe some sleep (except if I continue hacking from there).

This morning was really nice, we had a touristic visit of the old city center. First, we visited the Cathedral of Malaga which is really huuuge, and has nice pictures and organs. Then, we have a look at the “Teatro romano”. And finally, we visited the Alcazaba which is a very old fortress, it was really a nice and beautiful place. The guide was interesting, giving a lot of insightful details and speaking a fluent english.

For this afternoon the plan is basically to hack as much as possible, no meeting. And this evening I’ll surely team up with some people to by food in a supermarket nearby the residence, I just have to not forget to prepare everything I need to hack from the residence, since we have no Internet access from there.

Not much more today, see you tomorrow!

Yesterday (D+5) was the meeting day for me. Or at least I tried since the first BoF about Plasma has been cancelled… Aaron didn’t show up.

In the afternoon, Zack made his talk and showed a demo… it was really cool eye candy, now we have to make a wise use of this, to improve the beauty of our desktop while having usability in mind. After this talk, I attended the build system meeting. The choice has been made to switch to scons+bksys, we’re aiming for a smooth transition of course. And people involvement will be an important factor for the success of this transition.

After the end of the meetings, we ended up in a restaurant in the city center… I was quite nice actually but a bit costly in my opinion. When we got back I turned on the computer to finish some experiments I hacked during the day (between the meetings obviously) since something wasn’t working… I ended up debugging the code in one of the library I use and found the bug! Now I have a fix I have to push upstream, but it basically works. Once again, more on this later.