ervin’s piece of web

This year Akademy was a real blast. For the first time I didn’t feel like blogging during the event though, we had a pretty good coverage on PlanetKDE and the Dot anyway. I really wanted to enjoy the people while there.

That’s why, I’m just blogging a list of my thoughts about Akademy 2008 (in no particular order):

• It was the best Akademy so far, no less. The program was pretty good, the organization team did an amazing job… Congrats everyone!
• The network was unfortunately sloppy at times, more than last year I think.
• I got the best conference swag ever: a tea cup. It’s been made by our Korean team, it’s gorgeous, it’s hand made. Definitely the best present for a conference. You guys rock!
• I didn’t get much done hacking wise (my last hardcore geek Akademy was in Dublin), but I socialized a lot more and attended quite a lot of BoF.
• I’m really looking forward to see some of the discussions which happened during the conference to come to fruition. In particular regarding the release management, good stuff to come.
• Once again we had a few students from Toulouse. One from last year even came back by himself. I think the efforts in my University are slowly creating a nest of KDE hackers.
• The team humongous has been humongous (as expected). I hope I’ll get the same room mates next year, it was really great.
• Ade is a very good story teller… Now I really miss my bedtime stories involving dinosaurs, minority operating systems and flying warfare.

Of course, as a proud member of the team humongous I have to use this banner:

Now I’m experiencing the post-Akademy blues as usual. I miss you all already! See you next year!

PS: I have lots of pictures… The problem being that with a higher resolution camera I’m now stuck on how to host them online. Maybe I should upgrade to a FlickR Pro account. I’m not sure if it’s worth the money…

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…

Once again I didn’t blog in a while… In particular I didn’t blog about this year project students even if they got covered once in the commit digest. Now we’re two weeks away from the official end of those projects, so I thought it might be a good idea to show some of their accomplishment.

Kapman

This year we experimented with a project starting from scratch, and apparently we had some demand for a copy of an old famous game… hence why now we have Kapman! It’s kicking and alive, it’s in a pretty good shape already so maybe it’ll be able to enter kdegames in 4.1. Of course it’s all SVG based so you can freely resize it (artists wanted!).

Kscd

We also poked the good old Kscd… Our team made quite a lot of improvements in there. In particular it’s now fully themable using SVG (artists wanted!), and uses MusicBrainz to identify discs. Of course it also got the expected KDE4 refactoring: it got ported to Phonon and Solid.

Ksirk

Ksirk is one of those games we have in playground for quite some time. One of our team has been working on it to improve its quality and make it releasable… It’s definitely getting there. They mainly worked on improving its usability and that shows in my opinion. At least now I feel like I could play with it for hours.

Kopete

Last but not least, this year we got a team working on Kopete. They did an awesome job, it’s harder to demo or to make a screenshot for it, but they mainly focused on integrating support for UPnP and for the new live messenger protocol. On the UI front it looks less impressive, but I’m very proud of this team, they definitely had the hardest project to work on and learned a lot. Since I had no screenshot to offer, here is a picture of today’s “Kopete Gang of Four” who attended the hacking session:

From left to right: Maximilien Verdier, Michel Saliba, Romain Castan, Kevin Kin-Foo.

A few words on the hacking sessions…

Of course, after last year projects we kept the good habit of having KDE Hacking Sessions in Toulouse, we even have now a few people who are coming regularly… the community is definitely growing here. And during the student projects we have an unusual amount of my students showing up.

From left to right: Sylvere Lestang, Kevin Kin-Foo, Romain Castan, Michel Saliba, Maximilien Verdier, Stanislas Krzywda, Anne-Marie Mahfouf.

Missing on the picture: Thibault Normand who arrived later, and Alexis Menard who is unfortunately sick today.

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.