ervin’s piece of web

Since a few months, we try to setup a hacking session per month with my friends from the IPSquad. Of course, we have no problem having “outsiders” (I don’t really like the term since we’re not a closed group) participating, and that’s how Philippe joined us a couple of times.

For this month I had an idea: What about proposing the students working on KPlato and Umbrello to join us? It’s definitely better to work in groups like this. You can do more in less time and feel part of the family. Monthly hacking sessions like this are a perfect way to share the fun. So we did it yesterday. Not all of the students involved in the projects joined, but a few of them showed a real interest and were able to attend. Since it was a bigger group than usual I had to find a place. Luckily, we’ve been able to use a room of the University which was just the perfect location (most of the students living nearby). We had also the nice surprise to have annma join us. To all the people involved: Thank you a lot for your presence!

February group (from left to right): Florian Longueteau, Philippe David, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Caroline Bourdeu d’Aguerre, Hassan Kouch, Florence Mattler, Frédéric Lambert, Florian Piquemal, Thibault Normand.

Of course, no hacking session is perfect without food and a compile cluster. We had plenty of food, but for the cluster we had to install icecream on most of the computers (it was already setup only on three of them). But once everybody got it running we obtained a really nice ten nodes cluster:

Fellow hackers, food, and a compile cluster… It was just a perfect saturday!

After seeing Sebas’ slide templates, I somehow became jealous since I’m more a LaTeX Beamer user. So I decided that we, LaTeX users, shouldn’t feel ashamed in front of those beaufitul slides and that we deserved one template! It took some time to work on it and *dang*

It’s now available from the kdeslides page:

• Oxygen LaTeX Beamer style
• demo PDF file (for the curious)

Thanks a lot to our Oxygen team, they’ve done the artwork which makes this template possible. You rock guys!

Now we know who will have the best looking and well structured slides, the LaTeX users or course!

Yesterday night and today, I got back on porting and bugfixing mode. We’ve still some work to do to have everything ported to D-Bus so everybody is participating to this on going effort. I finally spotted a bug in kpersonalizer that made your session turn black… so now you can actually see the content of your windows.

Today, we started to see a few boxes having KDE 4 sessions running decently: kicker, kdesktop, konsole, kwrite… are running. Konqueror can be started by hand, but it still requires some work to make it launchable from the menu and kicker again. Of course it’s still rough on the edges, but that’s really nice to see all this running again after so many changes and refactoring. We’ve still so much to do, but the improvements made in the last few days are really motivating.

Just like yesterday, we had a truely nice lunch. It was prepared with love by Will, great coder, awesome cook. Thanks a lot Will!

This evening, we’re all hacking as usual. But it seems that today we have quite a concentration of “hackers on a couch”.

After all it’s a really nice place to hack, why not using it.

Today, I finally committed the last part of my job refactoring in KDE. We’ll finally have jobs usable accross KDE application without being tied to KIO. Moreover thanks to the UI delegate I introduced, the dependency on GUI is now optional. It can even be used to have several representations possible for a set of job. A UI Delegate for the command line, one for classical dialogs, one to publish job progresses in a Plasma message area.

Today meals were truely nice. For lunch, Will took the initiative to make pastas for everybody. Thanks a lot Will! For dinner the catering service provided us tons of food again. Almost no meat which is a nice thing for the vegetarians here… we don’t want them to starve.

This evening a big part of the Trysil team is watching the World Cup:

As you might have noticed, there’s one person really concentrated in front of the TV. Ok, let’s zoom in, see how Laurent is highly motivated by the french team:

Ok, skipped one day… time to blog again.

Yesterday, everybody worked hard. I spent quite some time working on splitting useful GUI related code outside of KIO. This way it’ll be reusable for other frameworks like Akonadi or Solid. It’s a big chunk of work, so it was far from finished but I decide to go to bed early.

Hence why today morning I managed to wake up earlier… And caught up Harald when he was trying to wake up:

Cute, isn’t it? =)

During the whole day, I continued my work with jobs and kio, the first phase of the changes is almost ready to commit. I’ve been stopped mostly by only two events: a group meeting (will probably end up as a proposal on k-c-d), and lunch. Hmmmm, Lunch! We had a BBQ, it was just perfect! Thanks to Marius for managing this so well.

George and Celeste arrived this afternoon, it’s nice to see them around again. We’re almost all there, only Till is missing, but he’s supposed to arrive later tonight.

This evening the german team is playing in the world cup. That’s why we’re facing a strange phenomenon, it started with coolo, but people here are infected by a german fever:

Gooood evening Planet KDEEEE!

Woke up a bit late today, well that’s understandable since I got to sleep at almost 4am. On the other hand, when I left kdelibs was able to compile so it was worth it.

Today I basically worked on the kdelibs and kdebase stabilization. Now that we’re moving them to Qt 4.2 we have a few things to fix. We’re slowling getting there, hopefully tomorrow the situation will be ok there.

During the afternoon, we made a break to have a walk around the area. It’s really a beautiful place, we stopped at a swampy field where we made a group photo:

Actually, what you’re seeing above is the second try… For the first take I had Aaron in all his glory:

See you later, I’m going back to kdebase porting.

Hello from Trysil, Norway!

I finally arrived in Norway. No real event disturbed the trip, which is always good even if a bit boring. I met for the first time Alexander Neundorf and Tobias Koenig in Oslo airport. Nice to meet you guys.

We found our way to the bus. While we were waiting for it Allan Sandfeld arrived too… he was supposed to take the next bus, but since it would have required him to wait for two hours he took the same than us. Our bus was really full of people and we had the nice surprise to find Zack Rusin and Marius Monsen in it.

After a three hours trip by bus, we reached the cabin… It’s… well… GREAT(tm). A picture says it all, here is the view we have outside:

And inside it’s cosy. Since we have a TV, a few hackers here watched a soccer world cup match:

I’m really glad to be here, the next coming week will surely be terrific. All the conditions are met to make us very productive!

This week has also been interesting on the Solid front. The API is slowly improving (because of my limited spare time). And the day when we’ll have all the necessary classes and methods to port kio_media on Solid will surely come soon.

I’m currently implementing capabilities support, my primary targets are of course the ones necessary to manage media. Hence why storage and volume capabilities are half done. Even mount, unmount and eject support are there.

As expected, I’m focusing on the HAL backend, which had an interesting side-effect. This backend make an extensive use of our upcoming DBUS binding and then strengthen it by providing uses cases. For sure, it’s for the better and Thiago is really helpful in this area, I’m glad he maintains those bindings.

And before I forget, I’d like to point something new under the Solid umbrella : solidshell. This new tool will allow to the most important features of the framework from the command line. It already allows to list devices and to display their properties. Mount, unmount and eject are also provided.

During the following days/weeks I’ll focus on polishing what is currently there. After this (hopefully short) phase I’ll introduce more features again.

As the design and the code is slowly shaping up in KDE’s repository, I’m in the mood to make some noise. Yes, KDE 4 will have yet another brand new framework: Solid. After Plasma and Oxygen that will deal with fluidity on the desktop, we’re focusing on another state of matter because in the end we have real devices to interact with.

Solid will be a way to finally make the hardware and desktop applications work better together. First, it’ll be a middleware KDE applications will be able to use in order to discover devices or networks available to the system. Second, it’ll deliver a Plasma engine, to easier desktop applets creation. Third, it’ll provide a knowledge base to add and consult devices behavior reports. I think this last point will be interesting in the long run, it’ll be another way for the users to be involved by updating it.

What will this all mean to the average user? A desktop that is more robust and does more with the devices available. It’ll also mean an easier access to hardware features. Most of those changes will be under the hood, but we expect some pretty neat new applications and applets using them.

And, what will this all mean to the developer? It means that the features provided by different platform will be streamlined while portability is kept by implementing Solid backends (currently only two backends are provided a HAL one, and a fake one allowing unit tests). It also means that all the building blocks to deal with the hardware will be at hand, they just need to be used.

A new website is around for this framework, it looks similar to the Plasma website and that’s perfectly intended since I consider both to be complementary. They are the pieces of a same puzzle, and I’ll do my best to see them fit together perfectly.

Speaking of Plasma, it leads me to beauty. In this area pinheiro strikes again since he designed the Solid logo. Moreover, the Oxygen crew provided us two brand new (and not seen before!) icons used on our website. Thanks a lot to our artists! They do a marvelous job!

And Happy New Year Everybody!