ervin’s piece of web

Past week I’ve done some KDE promotion. It was interesting because I did this using two radically different methods.

On monday and tuesday, I gave two talks in my university about Qt and KDE as a development platform. I gave Kubuntu CDs to the students and since they are in computer engineering they’ll hopefully install it. It seems that they enjoyed the topic. They started to wonder why they had to suffer with other non-free toolkits when I showcased Qt and QtDesigner. Then they were impressed about the niceties provided by kdecore, kdeui, and DCOP. After that, I explained them how to use the KParts and their jaw dropped when I showcased the small browser George Staikos wrote for OSDW. And finally having network transparency in their applications using KIO finished to convince them. I also took some time to present what will hopefully be in KDE4

The result? Several amazed students, that will surely want to experiment with Qt and KDE in the future. It even looks like some of them are really hooked and I had the opportunity to discuss more with them on friday answering some late questions.

On saturday, I participated in an event organized by Toulibre. I showcased a laptop running Kubuntu, there was also some boxes running Ubuntu. A talk took place, but I didn’t attend since I was involved in the booth with the rest of the team. People were really interested in the topic and we even had a journalist from the local press that came and asked questions for a paper. I think we were all impressed by the age diversity of the attendees (the youngest was under 10 and the oldest surely over 70). I find nice to be able to propose KDE to people that could be your grandparents for their daily use.

Really a nice week, I’d love to have more occasions to do this kind of things… I’ll surely try to invest more of my spare time for promotion.

You Should Learn Swedish

Fantastisk! You’re laid back about learning a language - and about life in general. Peaceful, beautiful Sweden is ideal for you… And you won’t even have to speak perfect Swedish to get around!

Funny, Sweden is one of the rare countries I’d consider to immigrate… So after all, why not learning swedish? Moreover the only swedish people I know are really nice (hello psn and inge! ;-)).

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…

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.

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.

Yesterday, I played a little with audio conference tools with mornfall and other Kalyxo guys. It’s the first time I use this kind of tool since I have my ADSL connection.

We tried GnomeMeeting and Skype…

GnomeMeeting is based on OpenH323 which I already met in an old research and development project during a training period. So it wasn’t a lot of news except that I had a GUI this time and that the Speex codec was available! And Speex is really a nice codec… worked very well for us.

Skype is unfortunately not Free (as in speech) but is quite interesting too. I don’t know which codec they use but it has a high sound quality in optimal conditions but it can degrade quickly. In the worst case, you hear only some unintelligible robotic noises.

We tried Skype conferencing mode with five people connected… it was lot of fun… full of non-sense! And since Skype seems to be intensive we finally switched back to GnomeMeeting using only point to point communications.

It was really fun, and I was glad to hear mornfall’s voice. We stayed connected a few hours… Maybe having this kind of exercises will help improve my english a bit, but at least it helped us during the proof reading of our Kalyxo aKademy talk abstract.

Ok, this is the first post in my new blog… I still don’t fully understand why blogging is so hype recently. Maybe by trying I’ll understand.

Lot of people don’t know me, that’s why I’m going to elaborate a bit on myself. *gasp* I hate this part. So I’m a student in computer science. I try to contribute more and more to KDE but recently I didn’t have the time to work on it a lot. Recently I used most of my free time working on the Kalyxo project. I’m really confident that it’ll take off sooner or later and the recent news mentioning us recently are another proof that it has a lot of potential.

From the title of this entry… you should expect some good news. Ok, it’s very good news for me. The doctoral school of my university had just decided to give me a PhD funding. I’ve gained the right to work in a lab for three years. I’ll be underpaid, etc. Ah! The great life of a french PhD student!

Ok, I’m sarcastic but it’s really really really good news for me! I’ll have an interesting job, the opportunity to teach my passion to students, etc.