ervin’s piece of web

Today is officially the last day of aKademy 2006. As usual I’m staying until the last minute, which means that my plane is tomorrow morning at 7am. That also means that I’ll have to get up very early! Maybe I should change my plan and try to avoid sleeping this night.

It’s always a bit sad to see people leaving… But that’s to be able to meet and have fun again next year.

The biggest event for me today is that I switched to zsh after being a bash user for years. I doubt I’ll go back to bash one day. Zsh is really awesome, I’ll probably find a few more things to tune but it’s already quite interesting. Thanks a lot to Sebas for providing me an initial set of configuration files, it helped the transition.

I also shamelessly rebuilt my whole KDE trunk installation (and abused the icecream cluster) to have an organization similar to the one proposed by David in his talk about KDE 4 Development Setup. It makes a lot of thing more convenient and less time consuming. A lot of great tips in there, I strongly advise everyone to take a look at his how-to as soon as it’ll be made available.

That’s all for today, I’ll probably go back to the hostel soon now in order to enjoy the presence of the remaining people.

Today we finally made the Solid libraries enter kdelibs! That means that a most of the milestones of the roadmap are done. Now it’s mostly about polishing, writing more backends, and making use of it in applications. It couldn’t have been achieved without the help of Will Stephenson who mastered most of the network management classes all by himself. I’d like also to thank Laurent Montel who gaves a few advices related to the build system during the merge, and Dirk Mueller who already made a few pedantic cleanups on the code base.

After this achievement, I finally took some time to walk downtown with Peter. Dublin is really a nice city, I really enjoyed what I saw. We passed by the Saint Andrew’s Church which has an interesting architecture. This church somehow summarize this town quite well. It’s very old, and that’s what you notice first, but if you come closer you’ll see that on the inside it’s been renovated in a really modern way. Dublin is like this, it looks both old and modern.

We stopped by the Saint Stephen’s Green Park, walked a bit and sat on a bench. It’s a really nice a peaceful place. That’s actually interesting to look at people in this kind of place. Parents and children playing together, couples walking, people simply chatting… that’s really refreshing. We’re really lucky to have the opportunity to appreciate moments like this. Interestingly, a couple of elder people stopped by a bench next to the one we were sitting and started to sing together. It sounded like a very old and melancholic song. Precious moments…

After the successive refactorings of the next few days, it’s time to get ready for merging in kdelibs. So today I spent almost all my time finishing the refactorings, documenting and reviewing the API. In the meantime Will was working on the fake backend for network management. I also gave a hand at it.

I took a break since API documenting can quickly become boring. And I attended Sebas’ BoF on marketing. Quite a few interesting ideas…

Tomorrow we’ll concentrate on unit tests. Once they are ready, we’ll finally be able to move Solid in kdelibs!

Mental note: I should really try to find some time to visit the city center. I’ll surely go with Ken and Peter tomorrow afternoon.

Already the second day of the coding marathon. I didn’t attend many BoF and talks this time. I concentrated much more on preparing Solid to enter kdelibs. Not yet done, but we’re coming closer.

Apart from this code work I took some time to attend the Qt tutorial done by Mirko Böhm to Trinity students. Since I’m doing something similar in my university I was trying to see if I could find a few ideas to improve my own course material.

I also attended Mirko’s BoF on multithreading and performances. It raises a few interesting questions. Done right it could give a boost to our application startup time and responsiveness. We probably can find patterns to make implementing those concepts more easily, it’ll probably require some time to get it but that’s for the better.

A new day is now starting, see you later. Greetings from Dublin!

Today was the OpenDocument Day at aKademy. Very nice idea, it allowed a quite some people to get in contact about this important topic.

I attended the lighting talks and breakout sessions. Lot of interesting topics, but I won’t enter in more details here, there would be too much to write, and I’m a bit tired.

I made a break to attend the Strigi BoF. The design looks sane, its main developer cares about resources. It seems that we have a winner here. There’s only a few things that I dislike about the daemon part, in particular how the D-Bus support is implemented, it seems to be too much effort for the tools we currently have. But well that’s nothing critical, really.

This break was in fact during lunch time… So I get back directly to the lighting talks session of the OpenDocument Day. Luckily Peter kept me some food, so I was able to have a lunch after all. =)

During the breakout sessions I found some time to work on Solid to prepare its merge in kdelibs, that led me to some cleanup and refactoring. I’m waiting for the network related parts to be ready and then the merge will occur.

The OpenDocument Day ended with a sponsored dinner for all the attending people. Fine food and lot of talks… Once again a nice way to end the day.

As expected, the KDE e.V. General Assembly took the whole day. The minutes are supposed to be available on the KDE e.V. website at one point so I won’t cover it’s content here, it would be too long anyway.

Surprisingly we finished in time to be at the Google party for 6pm as expected. Quite nice, lot of free food a few people from Google to talk with (both from engineering and marketing departments) and of course a lot of KDE hackers.. They even made a small lottery with cool prizes… They definitely know how to receive and make you comfortable. Thanks a lot to Google for this nice evening.

After the party a few of us got to a bar nearby the university. Luckily I can reach our wifi network from here, so I’m blogging this from a cosy armchair with friends drinking beers around me. Nice way to end the day.

It was another great day here! I love this city, and this event. I took a real breakfast for a change, actually the free breakfast in the hostel is not really interesting, but there’s a restaurant next to it.

David’s talk was interesting because it provided plenty of nice tricks that make your life easier on day to day hacking. I heard you David, I’ll probably switch to zsh really soon now.

Anne Østergaard’s talk was also interesting, it put in light quite some interesting information about the men/women relationship in free software communities. She had a few not so easy questions in my opinion, and answered in a very clear way. I’m glad that she made this talk. Thank you Anne!

After the coffee break I attended Adriaan de Groot’s talk about the English Breakfast Network. Very interesting and useful stuff if you ask me. I also attended Julien Seward’s talk about Valgrind. This is really an awesome tool, and using it for a full KDE session is a kind of crazy idea. But that gave me another idea, this approach could be used in EBN. Since EBN is already doing some GUI automated testing, during this testing it could also be collecting valgrind data at the same time.

After lunch I attended Pau Garcia i Quiles’ talk. Interesting stuff, that’s surely the biggest Qt/Ruby application around.

Holger Freyther talk about KDE and Consumer Electronics was interesting. We can still improve in this department. I tend to disagree about his very technical view about the problem though, most improvements required are more cultural than technical in my opinion. Granted it’s not really something easy to fix, but we can work on it.

I also attended Richard Dale’s and Richard Moore’s talks. Also very interesting topics that will bring quite some interesting features for KDE4 if we embrace them. And we clearly have to embrace them.

I attended Coolo’s talk about Kickoff which showed quite some interesting usability studies result and a great prototype.

Finally I attended Will Stephenson’s talk about Network Management. Very nice talk, introduced some of the network related parts of Solid.

We ended the day with the aKademy awards. Congrats to all the winners you really deserve it! The awards were followed by a nice dinner concluding those two days of conference. I’d like to take the opportunity to thank all the people who made this event possible. In particular Marcus Furlong who drived the effort so nicely. I also have a special thought for Tink who put an awesome amount of work into it, even if she knew she wouldn’t be able to come. THANK YOU!

Now onto the day long e.V. membership meeting and the upcoming coding marathon! Conference is over, but not the whole event, more very good stuff is coming…

Today was the first official day of aKademy 2006. It started with Aaron’s keynote which was just awesome. I must say “as usual”, he is such a great speaker, very inspiring. His photos slideshow was just a great idea, it really showed how much common background the community shares.

I then attended the talks about QtDBus and Plasma which led us to the coffee break. It was time for the joint Phonon and Solid. I think that our duo with Matthias definitely worked, and it seems that our talk and approache was received quite well.

We formed small groups to hunt for lunch. We stopped in a small restaurant with David, Coolo, Thiago and a few other people. The food wasn’t bad and strangely both waiters were french.

Despite the bad weather here, we managed to get back for the second keynote in time and dry. After this keynote I was pleased to attend J5’s talk, the content was really interesting. And in particular his motto should be remembered: “Competition and Cooperation are NOT Mutually Exclusive”. Thanks a lot John for coming and participating in the conference part with this talk!

I missed a few talks, I was talking with Sebastian Trüg about future plans for KDE 4. It’ll probably lead to interesting reuse of some K3B code. Too bad I didn’t see the Asian Track, I was particularly looking forward Pradeepto’s talk.

I finally attended all the remaining talks of the KDE4 track. George’s talk about KHTML state was particularly interesting in my opinion.

I’m now writing this from the “pav” where we had a perfect geek dinner thanks to Nokia who sponsored a ton of pizzas and drinks for us. Thanks a lot for this support! The “pav” is an interesting place, cosy and warm… really nice, I’m so glad to be here!

I was ready on time to travel to Dublin… but not my plane. Departure got delayed around 40 minutes. Not a nice way to start the day. I was supposed to meet Volker Krause on arrival, and luckily he was kind enough to wait for me. In the airport we met a few other KDE hackers: Antonio, Inge and Lubos.

Reaching the hostel from the airport was really easy, we were just a bus and 5 minutes walk away. We had to wait a bit to be able to reach our rooms so we used this opportunity to have lunch together with John Tapsell and his wife.

Went to the PC huts to finish polishing the talk we have with Matthias. I’m looking forward to giving this presentation with him.

In the evening I met Cormac Lawler of WikiMedia fame and his girlfriend. We chatted in the Kennedy’s Bar for almost three hours! He’s really a great guy and it was a real pleasure to meet him in person. We discussed some interesting collaborations and I truely hope we’ll see the discussion we had opening to a broader audience and give birth to nice cross-projects.

That’s all for this friday, I’m finishing typing this as I’m attending Aaron’s keynote.

See you later!

This post will keep the current trend on Planet KDE going: Dublin, I’m coming!!!

I finished packing. Now I just need to have some sleep, and wait for my friend E. who will drive me to the airport. Thanks in advance for this!

Quick checklist:

• Stuff packed: done.
• Maps, and info to find my way, printed: done.
• Ogg Vorbis player filled with good music: done.
• Books to read in the plane: done.
• Slides for the Phonons in Solids talk: done.

I even found some time to work on Solid so hopefully it’ll be merged in kdelibs this week-end.