ervin’s piece of web

Sorry to all the males out there, but I won’t be posting pictures of Angelina Jolie… I’ll be talking software here.

So JOLIE is an interpreter for a high level language to interact with services. Services as in service oriented architecture, and yes that includes web services but also much more. And, as you might have noticed, we discussed with the guys working on JOLIE during the Tokamak Mark I and as Danny hinted, I wrote a Qt implementation of SODEP (the protocol used to interact with running instances of JOLIE).

Now you might wonder, what’s the point of all that? Well, it’ll enable KDE, to be a first class citizen in the service oriented world (and seeing the amount of web services out there or the growth of D-Bus usage, that’s an important goal). By “first class citizen”, here I mean making it trivial to interact with those services, today we can interact with them but that still require quite some hand made code, something JOLIE and the facilities we’re planning to add in Plasma will hopefully make obsolete.

That’s mostly post-4.1 material… Except that Fabrizio Montesi one of the humongous JOLIE developers couldn’t wait and wrote some proof of concept code. So I’ll post a few screenshots he made because they’re pretty cool in my opinion. So what he made is a small service named Echoes and driving an amarok instance, and GWT based application providing a gui client to this service. Then users can fight over your playlist.

We tested it, it’s pretty nice all instances are synchronized. Also, if something is changed directly in Amarok you notice it in Echoes GUI. Now, it becomes really cool because you can embed such service clients in your cellphone:

Or even as a Plasma Widget:

Of course, it’s still all a bit experimental and ad hoc at the moment. Our goal post-4.1 is to make this kind of service client GUIs trivial to write and better integrated in KDE. Services are widespread now, let’s make use of them!

As you might remember, I offered a drink to some of the people submitting talks for Akademy 2008.

I know the schedule is not online yet, but to help you wait a bit I’m going to announce the
Winners of the Akademy 2008 Drink Awards!

So the following people met the criteria of submission order and quality for their proposals, which give them the privilege to be on my final list. Please applaude this year winners:

• Paul Adams
• Harald Fernengel
• Celeste Lyn Paul
• Patrick Spendrin
• Thomas Baumgart
• Sebastian Kügler and Dirk Mueller (they submitted a joint talk, but I’ll be nice and let them have a full drink each… could have been fun seeing them with only one glass to share though)

Feel free to poke me during Akademy for your offered drink. It’ll be my pleasure to get something nice and refreshing for you.

Of course, the mandatory banner:

PS: Now, I’m sure I would make a crappy host for the Oscars…

If anyone out there wonder why Aaron Seigo’s blog is down, the reason is pretty simple… Its author got burnt out because of some of the poisonous people in our project. The story started several weeks ago (probably even months ago) with constant
bashing of some of the decisions taken in the Plasma project (which is not a one person project by the way). It culminated last week with very rude and useless mail threads on kde-devel, and yesterday on the dot with personal attacks.

That’s why Aaron decided to retire from the public and do what he truely loves: code. No more blogs, minimal involvement on lists and IRC to ensure coordination with the other developers. That’s what we obtained after those weeks of angry poisonous mobs. You might think: “well you can ignore them”. Really? Could you? Such people can bring a lot of stop energy. Really a lot of it, and that worries me. It seems that the project I love is not a nice place to live in anymore.

When we are able to turn down one of our public face, someone very active and energetic, we really crossed a line. Of course, we could shake head, and think “tsss, those poisonous people, they’ve no idea what they’re doing”. That’s even probably what we did during those weeks of bashing… and still we let it happen. I think that’s the most frightening side of the issue: nobody stepped up, and no actions are taken to make KDE a better place again. Oh, and don’t worry, I have my share of guilt in this story… I didn’t step up either.

Worse than the stop energy carried by poisonous people, there’s the apathy of your peers. I don’t want that anymore! We have to end it!

Of course, I’d like to propose a way out, but I’ve not much to propose. Here are my attempts at bringing some improvements proposing some actions which could be taken (in no particular order):

• Recruit more editors for the dot, as far as I know they’re overbooked and can hardly moderate it;
• To help the dot editors, we have to improve it’s engine with a real moderation system (how come most news site I know have one but not the dot?);
• Write a code of conduct (probably something for the e.V. membership), and publish it as soon as possible;
• Enforce it, especially on mailing lists and on bugzilla, mediating as necessary, and banning people in the most extreme cases.

That’s definitely not much, but that’s a start… More ideas are welcome, but most of all: acts are needed. We must stop this kind of behavior.

PS: I’m not linking any thread, bugreport or mails on purpose. I don’t want to point finger. Aaron’s reaction is a symptom of something broken in our community (in the broad sense, all contributors and users included) it’s just an example (and not the first case). If you want specifics, do your homework and dig our archives it’s all public anyway.