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.

In case you forgot, the deadline for Akademy 2008 CfP is in two days… yes, May 1st is coming quickly now! If you haven’t submitted your abstract yet please don’t wait for the last minute. Moreover, every year, after the CfP is over, I find people who should have submitted but didn’t because they think what they do is boring. It’s just plain wrong.

That’s why, I’d like to remind everyone: Yes, what you’re doing is interesting. No kidding.

Since people need incentives to submit their interesting abstracts, here is the deal: The first two talks to be accepted this year will get a drink from me. After that, each of the 2^n-th talks which get accepted (so no need to rush crappy proposals) will also get a drink from me (that is the 4th, 8th, 16th and 32th since we generally accept no more than 50 talks).

Submit now, you might get a free drink.

This week I’ve been participating to the FISL conference in Porto Alegre. I held a 3 hours long tutorial here to introduce students to Qt and KDE development frameworks. The feedbak I got was pretty good, the questions were interesting and I even managed to cover what I was planning during this session. It’s been really enjoyable.

Apart from that, I’ve been mostly hanging at the Trolltech/KDE booth, or the speaker’s room. Lot of interesting people here. I’ve been very impressed by the INDT people, they’re a very nice and smart bunch of people.

Today is my last day in Brazil, since it’s sunday I’m going to relax a bit with Andreas and Thiago. It’s been great being here. I’m really looking forward to being back home, that said spending 14 hours in plain will probably be a pain. That’s all for now, I’ll probably blog again about Akademy 2008 CFP when I get back home.

I’m back from Milano. The first Plasma sprint has been a pretty good event. My only regret is the low productivity on the first day since we spent quite some time hunting for food. But once we found the right balance, the productivity just got through the roof and we got an humongous amount of things done (as the current activity in the repository proves).

I’d like to thank everyone involved in this sprint, we really formed a great bunch, that’s nice to be able to get things done and make new friends at the same time. A special thanks for Richard Moore, without him I’m not sure we would have seen the end of the API review. Also I’m really looking forward to collaborating with the JOLIE developers, it’ll probably cover all our current Web Services needs.

Also congratulations to Alexis who led the effort to make WoC finally happen in Plasma, and to Sebas who did a humongous job in this area too. Yet another important piece of the Plasma project finally done.

And now preparing for departure again, I’m going to FISL 9.0 where I’ll give a tutorial about developing applications with Qt and KDE. I probably still have to rework a bit my slides to fit the target audience and the time slot. I still have to pack too…

Last week-end we had the release event in Toulouse, it has been the only french event and that’s why I decided not to go to Mountain View. On friday evening we had a long user oriented talk with some bits of Aaron’s keynote, followed by a cocktail and a merchandising booth. It’s been a real success, I expected not more than 20 or 30 people… but it turned out that the room was full, some people had to stay outside. Also I was the one giving the talk, and I think I didn’t screw up from the questions I had after the talk and people reactions. Of course, I played our first KDE Commercial, especially since it’s been secretly done by a couple of people in Toulouse. They really did a great job in my opinion.

On saturday, we had technical conferences for the whole day. We had a really nice bunch of speakers. Aurélien Gâteau, David Faure and Lauren Montel travelled in Toulouse just for this event and give talks. We also had our local gems: Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Alexis Ménard. I also gave a couple of talks. The atmosphere was quite nice, people had interesting questions and David even implemented a feature request almost in realtime (after screwing up his desktop).

We (the speakers) ended up the saturday evening in a restaurant, Aux Fils de l’Aligot, were we had an excellent regional food. Laurent and David didn’t knnow what aligot is so we had to help them discover it. Too bad Aurélien had to leave in the afternoon… next time Aurélien you’ll have your share of food too.

Finally, I’d like to thanks all the people who made this two days event possible:

• our sponsors, C&S and KDAB;
• all the speakers who made this event possible;
• all the people from Toulibre who were really supportive;
• Michel Saliba who spent hours coordinating the necessary work to subtitle Aaron’s keynote;
• and a special thanks to Alexis who really did a great job organizing this, he was so active I didn’t have much left to do.

It’s really nice to see how the Toulouse community pulled such an event almost from nothing… I think it was a good test run for us, maybe next time we can try something bigger. Akademy 2009 or 2010 anyone? :-p

Congratulations to all the people involved. Even if you just committed a couple of lines, made a bug report, showed support, etc. anything to push the project forward, you helped in making this release happen. You helped ensuring the future will be brighter. Be proud of you!

Be Free.

Damn, another late blog entry… I’ve nothing worth blogging for months and when I finally have something I let it sleep for two weeks. *sigh*

Friday the 23rd of March was the official ending of the KDE/ISI student projects we announced in December. Of course, it was an important event for all the students involved. Particularly since each group had to showcase their products and defend their work in front of the professors. The two KDE groups did well in my opinion, and the professors particularly liked the result.

It has been a great pleasure to work with such dedicated students, now we’ll see how many caught the KDE-virus.

Pierre Pettera standing for the Umbrello defence! The other students in the background, the professors on the front

Alexis Menard showcasing KPlato. The other students in the background, the professors on the front

I posted only two pictures (one for each KDE group), but I have more! The pictures taken during the past two Hacking Sessions with the KDE teams and the students defences (including the J2EE groups) are available on my FlickR gallery.

Ok, I’m a bit late on blogging this one, let’s not delay it further.

So the Hacking Session of March happened on saturday again. It was quite a success in my opinion. Working in group is always a pleasure, and I generally end the day in very good mood. Note that this session was a particular one for the students working on KPlato and Umbrello, it’s the last one before the official end of they university project. They’ll have to exhibit what they’ve done for their respective projects on Friday, I wish them good luck.

Unfortunately Philippe and Anne-Marie couldn’t make it this time… But all the other people who attended in February attended this month too. Even more students joined us which raised the number to 13 persons.

February group (from left to right): Florian Longueteau, Thibault Normand, Nicolas Micas, Hassan Kouch, Frédéric Lambert, Mohamed-Amine Bouchikhi, Alexis Ménard, Florian Piquemal, Stanislas Krzywda, Caroline Bourdeu d’Aguerre, Pierre-Benoit Besse, Florence Mattler.

Of course we had quite a lot of wires, it was a bit messy but worked. And we got plenty of food with a particular focus on pizzas for lunch (yay!).