ervin’s piece of web

Yesterday was an important day for me. I sent the last draft of my PhD thesis to the official reviewers. That means that the purely scientific work is now done, and most of the editing work is behind me. Now I have to wait a few weeks to get their reports and know if I’ll be allowed to defend (and hopefully get my diploma) or not.

To be honest, I was really looking forward this particular day. Most of the pressure I had because of the PhD is gone, what I need is patience now, which also means I suddenly have more time to spend on KDE. But now, I’m feeling dry. This morning, I managed to get nothing done on KDE. I knew what I should do, I have a few important post-aKademy tasks to do, but I can’t seem to find the energy for them.

Then, today, my morning was a big nothing… Great way to start… How disappointing. So I decided to go for a walk downtown. Took the bus, and had lunch in a small shop. A bottle of water, a veggie sandwich and a chocolate muffin and I was feeling better already. I don’t know why I chose this place, I got there only once I think. The food is not outstanding, but pretty ok… there’s something retro in the place which makes me like the atmosphere.

I kept wandering in the city: store, bookshop, computer shop, another bookshop… This little “waste time” game lasted for a bit more than two hours I think. Then I decided it was enough, and walked to the bus stop. But, I didn’t feel like waiting for the bus, so I kept walking to the next stop. I don’t know if I missed it, but at one point it was feeling easy to skip this one too, and the next one, etc.

Halfway to my home, I suddenly realized I was close to a park and an area I used to spend time when I was much younger. So my feet led me to the park, completely forgetting the bus line… I was back fifteen years ago. Everything was still here, as if it was waiting for me. Of course, it changed too. I felt like someone who was in a coma and was rediscovering the place. And I kept walking in the steps of my younger self, ended up in front of my old school. The front changed a lot, but it’s still here… Too bad it’s closed for the summer, I’d like to see it from inside again. And I kept walking, followed the same path than when I finished my day at school…

This very long and unexpected walk actually led me close to my flat, so I ended up there, finally reaching home. I knew when I moved in this flat that I was moving close to those old memories… But I didn’t realize it until today, walking with no real purpose. It was nice to follow again the steps of my younger self. I’m generally proud of the fact that I kept a child in me, but apparently I lost some of the memories of this child along the path. And now, those memories are back… at last!

The only downside of this walk was that I kept a part of me feeling guilty because I was doing “nothing”. But I think it was worth it, and it’s definitely something I have to do in order to have more energy again for the coming years. I need to enjoy the summer, I want it to be a calm period in my life to prepare a new beginning…

We (Alexis, David, Florian, Thibault and me) left the hostel early to avoid troubles at the airport. Since we’ve been told the security was raised there it looked wise to be on the safe side. It turned out that we arrived there too early and couldn’t even check in. So we had to wait…

After the check in, everything went well: short time at the security check point, plane (almost) on time, run for the connection in Amsterdam, wait 20 minutes… We reached Toulouse airport in time: 10:15pm. Good, it was much more pleasant than our previous experience. No baggage was lost or hurt in the operation.

Finally at home! Great!

And this morning, back in the lab at 7:20am as usual…

Today was the last official day of the conference. But apparently, the security guards decided differently. We had a hard time getting into the building for hacking. We had to wait until 9:30am. The almighty Kenny Duffus helped solve the issue and that’s how we got access.

We basically spent the day hacking as more people left. And soon the labs were looking more and more empty. After lunch, I got outside with David for some shopping. And then got back to the labs as soon as possible for more hacking.

Since we were supposed to leave the labs early today, we left at 5:30pm and went to the hostel for more hacking there. Finally, we went in an italian restaurant for dinner. The food was fine, maybe a bit too salty for my taste.

And we’re again in the hostel enjoying the unreliable wifi connection as I’m typing this. Tomorrow will basically be devoted to going to the airport and waiting for our flight. We’ll probably cross our fingers hoping everything will be ok this time.

Thursday morning, we had the first session of lightning talks. Most of them where interesting, half of them were longer than expected and easily spent more than the allocated five minutes. Thibault talked about what he did on the EBN and the plans about the running our unit tests there. In my opinion he did very well. I had time to work a bit more on my animations.

In the afternoon, we had the Bonny Banks Trip. We went to the Loch Lomond for a barbeque. The place was really nice and beautiful… only one problem: the rain. Well, we’re in Scotland, we should have expected that somehow. Food was good but we basically got flooded. I enjoyed walking around though, I climbed a hill with a few others, namely Aaron, Adriaan and Troy.

When we got back to the hostel, some of the french people teamed up for hacking in the lounge of the hostel. Thanks to the wifi offered we’ve even been able to check out mail and discuss with other developers on IRC. It lasted until 1am.

On friday morning, we had the second lightning talks session which was good too. I talked in less than three minutes of my brand new animations, advocating that thanks to QTimeLine it’s very easy to do this. Then Alexis talked about what he did in Plasma, basically implementing a new kind of animation. We also had Will talking about future plans in Kopete, and Florian talking about what he wants to do there.

Friday afternoon slowly started to feel the end… The first people were leaving. That’s always a bit sad to see friends leaving. But that’s part of the deal, we’re all going to the same place and at one point to go back home.

This night we went to a very nice Southern Indian Restaurant. Very good food, I really enjoyed it and was completely full. It seems that it was a bit too spicy for Laurent though. And now, we’re back in the hostel, using the wifi and hacking a bit. I’ll probably head to bed very soon now. See you!

Yesterday, we officialy kicked the hacking marathon and the BoF sessions. So far, I’ve mostly been stuck into the BoF sessions though. The Tutorial Day was long but just great. Jesper did a lot in it, he was just tired at the end of the day, but that was worth it. For instance, the Interview crashcourse he did with Till was probably the best one out there. Very original, interactive, using an antropomorphic point of view to help people understand… just perfect! After all that, I attended the Google Summer of Code BoF which was very productive. Thiago managed it, it allowed mentors and students to discuss how they perceived the program, and we got some ideas to ensure we can do better next year.

In parallel, we had the Edu and School day going which I couldn’t attend unfortunately. That was the reason for Bruno, the GCompris author to be there. Apparently this day went very well, and the attendance appreciated it. I’m happy that it worked well, this is the kind of important topic focused day we can do.

In the evening, I went to an indian restaurant with Alexis, Harald, Simon, Thiago and Zack. A bit expensive, but the food was just great. After that we moved to their place for hacking offline. I took this opportunity to ask Zack to help me with some of the changes I had in mind for the KFilePlacesView, introducing animations to make it more organic. After the first tests, we noticed big performances issues, and spotted that it was in KIconLoader which tended to reparse SVG files too often. As I’m writing this, Zack already introduced some caching to fix this, but more is needed because of the current overlay handling which is suboptimal to say the least. I’m confident it’ll be sorted out before the end of the week.

This morning, I was attending the non-planned EBN BoF with the other people from the “quality cabal”. Good stuff is coming with the EBN and the SQO-OSS project. Thibault attended too, and got some tasks allocated, I’m particularly looking forward to his work since it’ll be one step toward improving our use of automated tests.

In the afternoon, I’ve been BoFing again. This time for the SQO-OSS one which gave an overview on what we could expect from it, and to be able to provide input about what we’d like to see available in the upcoming system. Then I attended the Plasma BoF which gave an overview of the current state of the desktop. As I was sitting next to Zack I was mostly admiring him hacking on the first GL based plasmoid… really cool and impressive stuff.

After that, I had a discussion with Aaron and Alexis on our plans for the integration of Solid in the desktop. We now have what looks like a definitive plan to handle this. And now I’m sitting in the GHNS BoF, not listening a lot to be honest… mostly profiling again to test Zack’s fix in KIconLoader. The performances are better now, but not optimal yet, we’ll work on this later… now it’s time to dinner and to move to a vegetarian/veggan restaurant Aaron found yesterday.

As promised, a short blog post today since I spent most of my day in the KDE e.V. general assembly. It consumed the whole day until 6pm.

It started with the Lord Provost reception in the town hall building. The building itself is very cosy and beautiful… but I couldn’t care less, there was plenty of free food available. FREE FOOOOOOD! Thanks goes to Trolltech for sponsoring this.

Then I teamed up with Aaron and Zack wandering around in the city. We ended up in a bar playing lot of good music (read: industrial, hard rock, etc.). We of course had drinks there, chatted for a long time, watching at japanese and chinese movies on their TVs. And, since there was a pinball there, we played with it something like one hour and a half. Was a nice way to celebrate Zack’s birthday!

Then, we crossed the street to another bar and listened to the last song of a blues man there. Very cool music again, and plenty of drunk people… Some of them just got interested in us and that was the beginning of a new journey. No idea where they wanted to go, but the girls just wanted us to follow, of course the boyfriends were really not impressed. As we walked with them we got relabeled “canadian”, “polish” and “frenchie” in no particular order.

At one point we got ride of them, and tried to find another place to stay… Problem being that at midnight all the bars are closed here. So, asking some people in the street we tried to find a place called “the Garage”, with a truck in front that we couldn’t miss. Looked like a good plan since it was supposed to be the busiest place in town. Then we walked, and walked… and walked through a no man’s land. Found a few uninteresting clubs, but no Garage or truck. Aaron and Zack were feeling hungry at 1am and almost ran into a noodle bar, when I noticed a trunk next to it… We finally found the Garage. After their very late dinner, or very early breakfast, we were all feeling tired, so we walked back home without even stepping up in the Garage.

We reached the hostel around 2:30am if I recall correctly. That was a very nice night with the right mix of drinks, music, drunk people and noodles.

Second and last day of the conference. In the morning I basically attended the whole quality track, and even participated in it since I had my first talk there. Overall it was a good track I think. I particularly appreciated the SQO-OSS one. It was a very good talk by Paul Adams, very clever, lot of humour… and very interesting approach on the how to deal with quality metrics, and how to build them. I’ll definitely attend the follow-up BoF. These kind of tools are a good way to improve the overall quality of the project and strengthen our release process without to go through the bureaucracy hassle. I’m looking forward to use more the EBN and the results coming out of SQO-OSS in this regard.

The Qtopia for Developers talk by Harald Fernengel was really good too… the only “downside” is that after the talk you definitely want to get a Greenphone to experiment quite a lot of stuffs with it.

It was followed by the group photo and lunch. I had interesting discussions with Aaron, Lars, Marius and Zack during this lunch.

During the afternoon I particularly appreciated the community talks. First, Claire talk about how we could get more involved in research projects. Actually, I think she has a very good overview of the situation, even if I consider her a bit too optimistic on the amount of projects we could handle short term. That said, I’m really willing to invest some time to make that happen… The only unknown being how much time I’ll have available overall after my PhD.

The last talk I attended was the one by Anne which was about how to build consensus. Very, very interesting topic for community like us. We sometimes try to build consensus with no clear rules and it makes it harder. We sometimes also rely on votes, which matches our “real life” habits, but generate bureaucracy. I’m glad to see people working on such issues.

Then it was my turn again, I had a talk about the students projects I setup at the IUP ISI. I think it got well received, and I hope to see the ideas in it grow outside of Toulouse.

Finally we had the aKademy Award Ceremony. This year the committee awarded Sebastian Trueg for K3B, Matthias Kretz for Phonon and Danny Allen for the commit digest. Congrats to all of them!

That was the last day of conference, monday is about the KDE e.V. general assembly so I’ll probably won’t blog much, and then the Hacking Marathon is coming with lot of nice BoFs, extra talks and coding fury!

Saturday, is the first official day of the conference. I was tired of the trip, and disappointed about missing the pre-aKademy meeting in the local pub. But at least, it was nice to see friendly faces for breakfast in the morning. Anne-Marie and Alexis showed up, proving the taxi plan worked… even if they apparently had to complain to get it.

This year, the opening was a talk by Lars Knoll, and a very good one in my opinion. I think it was important for the community that Lars gave us more insight on how the things are working inside Trolltech, and to call for more cooperation in both way. It’s so nice to see the Qt developers so committed to the KDE platform.

The talk about Sonnet was interesting, but I was a bit frustrated about the lack of in depth information. That said it’s completely understandable, Zack being back on business on this library only recently.

The second keynote by Mark Shuttleworth was interesting, but obviously raised some controversy about release processes. Apparently he’d like to see all free software projects release in sync every six months. That looks very optimistic to think it could be even done. And even if we suppose for a second we could apply this to the whole community (good luck!), I’m not impressed at all. Doing this to such a scale looks like the best way to kill innovation in my humble opinion.

The talk about Akonadi was pretty informative, and that’s nice to see code running. In particular, demoing a plasmoid giving the state of your mailbox in real time was a very good example. If you add to that the fact that’ll be an unified and semantic rich way to get all your PIM information… nice features are coming.

Then I attended Zack talk on graphics, and his new framework named Quasar… well, it was a talk made by Zack, enough said. It rocked, and it even gave me some motivation to do crazy graphics stuff.

The KDEGames panel was a very very good idea. It gave a pretty good overview of the kdegames maintainer team, on the state of the module, where it’s going on, etc. I’d love to see more of such panels, for other modules too.

Lars Knoll had another talk, but this time about Webkit and KDE. I think he gave a pretty good picture of the current situation and of the advantages to use Webkit now. And the best of it, is that it’s not science-fiction, we already have a kpart for konqueror which use Webkit (it’s in playground right now, and completely working).

Then we got the “beautiful features” talk by our renowned serial-hugger: Aaron Seigo. As usual, great talk, he’s speaking really well… a real born speaker. He gave quite some clues on the direction we should follow to make our UIs more appealing.

And last but not least I attended Inge talk about large installation and thin client settings. That’s nice to see KDE works quite well overall in such setups, but I have to admit I share his concerns about Kiosktool. It could become one of our best asset, but right now it’s really suboptimal and probably needs rethinking.

On the evening we got our first social event. We went to a bar, got nice food and drinks. The place was really nice, and I’ve been able to chat with many people. Very good stuff… except for the music. It was overall too loud for my taste, in particular when one of the DJ played us some experimental music^Hnoise. It was extremely loud, and unfortunately it made quite some people leave. That’s really unfortunate, the place was very well choosen otherwise, but you can’t control everything.

I was still at home, that the trip was looking bad already. Around one hour before leaving I felt sick and had stomach ache… Just perfect, a plane is a so lovely place to feel bad. But well, I wasn’t bad enough to skip this!

As planned, I met up with Anne-Marie, Alexis, Florian and Thibault to take our flight. Check-in went smoothly, we embarked… and waited… and waited… until the pilot told us we had a small problem with one engine. So, we waited even more… until they asked us to disembark. Fine, so we’re back in the airport, it looked like will miss our connection.

After one more hour waiting to know if the flight would be cancelled or not (which would mean we’d still be in Toulouse as I’m writing this), they managed to repair the problem (the right engine was leaking fuel). So we embarked again, and waited for a new window to take off… fine you get used to waiting I guess. And finally we took off, twenty minutes before the time we’re supposed to embark in our connection at Amsterdam. So now, for sure we’re going to miss it.

Eventually we arrive in Amsterdam, which probably prove the leak was really repaired. We rush to the transfer desk… and… wait, of course! When it’s our turn, we get the following deal: three of us (Florian, Thibault and me) are booked on the next flight to Glasgow at 9pm (our was supposed to take off at 3:30pm), two of us (Anne-Marie and Alexis) are booked on the next Edimburg flight at 10pm then the airline will pay for a taxi to Glasgow. Ok, fair enough… at least will be in our beds in Glasgow.

So we waited our new flights… 8:15pm came we’re going to embark for the Glasgow flight at last! We’re even feeling a bit more lucky as we met Thiago, sharing the flight with him looked like good omen. Unfortunately, we still have surprises coming… at the last minute, Florian wasn’t allowed to embark, we got overbooked and he got sacrified on the austel of low prices. He’s told to try his luck with the Edimburg flight.

Thiago, Thibault and me got in the plane. Thibault got executive class, nice. We waited… and waited… until the pilot announced that there’s a problem with the plane. Yes, again! Another plane, another issue. The good thing is that we were able to call Florian to check how it’s going for him. Unfortunately, no Edimburg plane for him, it was full too. So he’s staying in Amsterdam for the night.

And of course he needed his baggage, and I noticed that I lost his baggage number… So we’d no idea if he’d be able to get it back. I was really feeling bad about this… Luckily when we arrived in Glasgow, Thiago had a voicemail on his cellphone from Florian. Apparently they found a solution for his bagage.

So all in all we got to Glasgow, in three separate planes and a taxi, one have travelled for 24h… and the minimum delay was for Thibault and me, we had “only” a 6 hours delay. But, yeah we were all lucky, despite the convoluted trip, no bagage got lost.