ervin’s piece of web

Thursday morning, we had the first session of lightning talks. Most of them where interesting, half of them were longer than expected and easily spent more than the allocated five minutes. Thibault talked about what he did on the EBN and the plans about the running our unit tests there. In my opinion he did very well. I had time to work a bit more on my animations.

In the afternoon, we had the Bonny Banks Trip. We went to the Loch Lomond for a barbeque. The place was really nice and beautiful… only one problem: the rain. Well, we’re in Scotland, we should have expected that somehow. Food was good but we basically got flooded. I enjoyed walking around though, I climbed a hill with a few others, namely Aaron, Adriaan and Troy.

When we got back to the hostel, some of the french people teamed up for hacking in the lounge of the hostel. Thanks to the wifi offered we’ve even been able to check out mail and discuss with other developers on IRC. It lasted until 1am.

On friday morning, we had the second lightning talks session which was good too. I talked in less than three minutes of my brand new animations, advocating that thanks to QTimeLine it’s very easy to do this. Then Alexis talked about what he did in Plasma, basically implementing a new kind of animation. We also had Will talking about future plans in Kopete, and Florian talking about what he wants to do there.

Friday afternoon slowly started to feel the end… The first people were leaving. That’s always a bit sad to see friends leaving. But that’s part of the deal, we’re all going to the same place and at one point to go back home.

This night we went to a very nice Southern Indian Restaurant. Very good food, I really enjoyed it and was completely full. It seems that it was a bit too spicy for Laurent though. And now, we’re back in the hostel, using the wifi and hacking a bit. I’ll probably head to bed very soon now. See you!

Yesterday, we officialy kicked the hacking marathon and the BoF sessions. So far, I’ve mostly been stuck into the BoF sessions though. The Tutorial Day was long but just great. Jesper did a lot in it, he was just tired at the end of the day, but that was worth it. For instance, the Interview crashcourse he did with Till was probably the best one out there. Very original, interactive, using an antropomorphic point of view to help people understand… just perfect! After all that, I attended the Google Summer of Code BoF which was very productive. Thiago managed it, it allowed mentors and students to discuss how they perceived the program, and we got some ideas to ensure we can do better next year.

In parallel, we had the Edu and School day going which I couldn’t attend unfortunately. That was the reason for Bruno, the GCompris author to be there. Apparently this day went very well, and the attendance appreciated it. I’m happy that it worked well, this is the kind of important topic focused day we can do.

In the evening, I went to an indian restaurant with Alexis, Harald, Simon, Thiago and Zack. A bit expensive, but the food was just great. After that we moved to their place for hacking offline. I took this opportunity to ask Zack to help me with some of the changes I had in mind for the KFilePlacesView, introducing animations to make it more organic. After the first tests, we noticed big performances issues, and spotted that it was in KIconLoader which tended to reparse SVG files too often. As I’m writing this, Zack already introduced some caching to fix this, but more is needed because of the current overlay handling which is suboptimal to say the least. I’m confident it’ll be sorted out before the end of the week.

This morning, I was attending the non-planned EBN BoF with the other people from the “quality cabal”. Good stuff is coming with the EBN and the SQO-OSS project. Thibault attended too, and got some tasks allocated, I’m particularly looking forward to his work since it’ll be one step toward improving our use of automated tests.

In the afternoon, I’ve been BoFing again. This time for the SQO-OSS one which gave an overview on what we could expect from it, and to be able to provide input about what we’d like to see available in the upcoming system. Then I attended the Plasma BoF which gave an overview of the current state of the desktop. As I was sitting next to Zack I was mostly admiring him hacking on the first GL based plasmoid… really cool and impressive stuff.

After that, I had a discussion with Aaron and Alexis on our plans for the integration of Solid in the desktop. We now have what looks like a definitive plan to handle this. And now I’m sitting in the GHNS BoF, not listening a lot to be honest… mostly profiling again to test Zack’s fix in KIconLoader. The performances are better now, but not optimal yet, we’ll work on this later… now it’s time to dinner and to move to a vegetarian/veggan restaurant Aaron found yesterday.

As promised, a short blog post today since I spent most of my day in the KDE e.V. general assembly. It consumed the whole day until 6pm.

It started with the Lord Provost reception in the town hall building. The building itself is very cosy and beautiful… but I couldn’t care less, there was plenty of free food available. FREE FOOOOOOD! Thanks goes to Trolltech for sponsoring this.

Then I teamed up with Aaron and Zack wandering around in the city. We ended up in a bar playing lot of good music (read: industrial, hard rock, etc.). We of course had drinks there, chatted for a long time, watching at japanese and chinese movies on their TVs. And, since there was a pinball there, we played with it something like one hour and a half. Was a nice way to celebrate Zack’s birthday!

Then, we crossed the street to another bar and listened to the last song of a blues man there. Very cool music again, and plenty of drunk people… Some of them just got interested in us and that was the beginning of a new journey. No idea where they wanted to go, but the girls just wanted us to follow, of course the boyfriends were really not impressed. As we walked with them we got relabeled “canadian”, “polish” and “frenchie” in no particular order.

At one point we got ride of them, and tried to find another place to stay… Problem being that at midnight all the bars are closed here. So, asking some people in the street we tried to find a place called “the Garage”, with a truck in front that we couldn’t miss. Looked like a good plan since it was supposed to be the busiest place in town. Then we walked, and walked… and walked through a no man’s land. Found a few uninteresting clubs, but no Garage or truck. Aaron and Zack were feeling hungry at 1am and almost ran into a noodle bar, when I noticed a trunk next to it… We finally found the Garage. After their very late dinner, or very early breakfast, we were all feeling tired, so we walked back home without even stepping up in the Garage.

We reached the hostel around 2:30am if I recall correctly. That was a very nice night with the right mix of drinks, music, drunk people and noodles.

Second and last day of the conference. In the morning I basically attended the whole quality track, and even participated in it since I had my first talk there. Overall it was a good track I think. I particularly appreciated the SQO-OSS one. It was a very good talk by Paul Adams, very clever, lot of humour… and very interesting approach on the how to deal with quality metrics, and how to build them. I’ll definitely attend the follow-up BoF. These kind of tools are a good way to improve the overall quality of the project and strengthen our release process without to go through the bureaucracy hassle. I’m looking forward to use more the EBN and the results coming out of SQO-OSS in this regard.

The Qtopia for Developers talk by Harald Fernengel was really good too… the only “downside” is that after the talk you definitely want to get a Greenphone to experiment quite a lot of stuffs with it.

It was followed by the group photo and lunch. I had interesting discussions with Aaron, Lars, Marius and Zack during this lunch.

During the afternoon I particularly appreciated the community talks. First, Claire talk about how we could get more involved in research projects. Actually, I think she has a very good overview of the situation, even if I consider her a bit too optimistic on the amount of projects we could handle short term. That said, I’m really willing to invest some time to make that happen… The only unknown being how much time I’ll have available overall after my PhD.

The last talk I attended was the one by Anne which was about how to build consensus. Very, very interesting topic for community like us. We sometimes try to build consensus with no clear rules and it makes it harder. We sometimes also rely on votes, which matches our “real life” habits, but generate bureaucracy. I’m glad to see people working on such issues.

Then it was my turn again, I had a talk about the students projects I setup at the IUP ISI. I think it got well received, and I hope to see the ideas in it grow outside of Toulouse.

Finally we had the aKademy Award Ceremony. This year the committee awarded Sebastian Trueg for K3B, Matthias Kretz for Phonon and Danny Allen for the commit digest. Congrats to all of them!

That was the last day of conference, monday is about the KDE e.V. general assembly so I’ll probably won’t blog much, and then the Hacking Marathon is coming with lot of nice BoFs, extra talks and coding fury!

Saturday, is the first official day of the conference. I was tired of the trip, and disappointed about missing the pre-aKademy meeting in the local pub. But at least, it was nice to see friendly faces for breakfast in the morning. Anne-Marie and Alexis showed up, proving the taxi plan worked… even if they apparently had to complain to get it.

This year, the opening was a talk by Lars Knoll, and a very good one in my opinion. I think it was important for the community that Lars gave us more insight on how the things are working inside Trolltech, and to call for more cooperation in both way. It’s so nice to see the Qt developers so committed to the KDE platform.

The talk about Sonnet was interesting, but I was a bit frustrated about the lack of in depth information. That said it’s completely understandable, Zack being back on business on this library only recently.

The second keynote by Mark Shuttleworth was interesting, but obviously raised some controversy about release processes. Apparently he’d like to see all free software projects release in sync every six months. That looks very optimistic to think it could be even done. And even if we suppose for a second we could apply this to the whole community (good luck!), I’m not impressed at all. Doing this to such a scale looks like the best way to kill innovation in my humble opinion.

The talk about Akonadi was pretty informative, and that’s nice to see code running. In particular, demoing a plasmoid giving the state of your mailbox in real time was a very good example. If you add to that the fact that’ll be an unified and semantic rich way to get all your PIM information… nice features are coming.

Then I attended Zack talk on graphics, and his new framework named Quasar… well, it was a talk made by Zack, enough said. It rocked, and it even gave me some motivation to do crazy graphics stuff.

The KDEGames panel was a very very good idea. It gave a pretty good overview of the kdegames maintainer team, on the state of the module, where it’s going on, etc. I’d love to see more of such panels, for other modules too.

Lars Knoll had another talk, but this time about Webkit and KDE. I think he gave a pretty good picture of the current situation and of the advantages to use Webkit now. And the best of it, is that it’s not science-fiction, we already have a kpart for konqueror which use Webkit (it’s in playground right now, and completely working).

Then we got the “beautiful features” talk by our renowned serial-hugger: Aaron Seigo. As usual, great talk, he’s speaking really well… a real born speaker. He gave quite some clues on the direction we should follow to make our UIs more appealing.

And last but not least I attended Inge talk about large installation and thin client settings. That’s nice to see KDE works quite well overall in such setups, but I have to admit I share his concerns about Kiosktool. It could become one of our best asset, but right now it’s really suboptimal and probably needs rethinking.

On the evening we got our first social event. We went to a bar, got nice food and drinks. The place was really nice, and I’ve been able to chat with many people. Very good stuff… except for the music. It was overall too loud for my taste, in particular when one of the DJ played us some experimental music^Hnoise. It was extremely loud, and unfortunately it made quite some people leave. That’s really unfortunate, the place was very well choosen otherwise, but you can’t control everything.

I was still at home, that the trip was looking bad already. Around one hour before leaving I felt sick and had stomach ache… Just perfect, a plane is a so lovely place to feel bad. But well, I wasn’t bad enough to skip this!

As planned, I met up with Anne-Marie, Alexis, Florian and Thibault to take our flight. Check-in went smoothly, we embarked… and waited… and waited… until the pilot told us we had a small problem with one engine. So, we waited even more… until they asked us to disembark. Fine, so we’re back in the airport, it looked like will miss our connection.

After one more hour waiting to know if the flight would be cancelled or not (which would mean we’d still be in Toulouse as I’m writing this), they managed to repair the problem (the right engine was leaking fuel). So we embarked again, and waited for a new window to take off… fine you get used to waiting I guess. And finally we took off, twenty minutes before the time we’re supposed to embark in our connection at Amsterdam. So now, for sure we’re going to miss it.

Eventually we arrive in Amsterdam, which probably prove the leak was really repaired. We rush to the transfer desk… and… wait, of course! When it’s our turn, we get the following deal: three of us (Florian, Thibault and me) are booked on the next flight to Glasgow at 9pm (our was supposed to take off at 3:30pm), two of us (Anne-Marie and Alexis) are booked on the next Edimburg flight at 10pm then the airline will pay for a taxi to Glasgow. Ok, fair enough… at least will be in our beds in Glasgow.

So we waited our new flights… 8:15pm came we’re going to embark for the Glasgow flight at last! We’re even feeling a bit more lucky as we met Thiago, sharing the flight with him looked like good omen. Unfortunately, we still have surprises coming… at the last minute, Florian wasn’t allowed to embark, we got overbooked and he got sacrified on the austel of low prices. He’s told to try his luck with the Edimburg flight.

Thiago, Thibault and me got in the plane. Thibault got executive class, nice. We waited… and waited… until the pilot announced that there’s a problem with the plane. Yes, again! Another plane, another issue. The good thing is that we were able to call Florian to check how it’s going for him. Unfortunately, no Edimburg plane for him, it was full too. So he’s staying in Amsterdam for the night.

And of course he needed his baggage, and I noticed that I lost his baggage number… So we’d no idea if he’d be able to get it back. I was really feeling bad about this… Luckily when we arrived in Glasgow, Thiago had a voicemail on his cellphone from Florian. Apparently they found a solution for his bagage.

So all in all we got to Glasgow, in three separate planes and a taxi, one have travelled for 24h… and the minimum delay was for Thibault and me, we had “only” a 6 hours delay. But, yeah we were all lucky, despite the convoluted trip, no bagage got lost.

Tomorrow is the official opening of the aKademy conference in Glasgow. Once again I’ll be there, and I’m really looking forward to meet the community as usual. I know a few people I appreciate won’t be there this year, I’ll miss them of course.

But this year is a bit special: for the first time I won’t travel alone from Toulouse. Of course, Cyrille left yesterday, but this time I’m travelling with our favorite annma and three of my former students who worked on the KDE projects I organized in my University. It’s a great opportunity for them to meet the community for the first time, and maybe get more involved in the project for a longer period. Some of them already worked on a couple of things apart for the official University projects, and the other ones have already a few ideas they probably want to share.

If you add to that, the great programme, the Edu & School day, the Tutorial day and social events, it’ll be once again a very content rich and friendly conference.

I’m packed, hopefully I forgot nothing. I’ve already a few items on my TODO… And now I’m waiting to get my plane. Looking forward to see you there!

So two weeks ago was my last day in Calgary. Aaron basically explained a lot of stuff already and he’s a much better blogger than I am. That’s why I won’t add much… That said, I’ll keep a particular thought from the day trip in Banff which was truely amazing. The Canadian Rockies are a very specific landscape, the shape of the mountains looked exotic to me. Such a perfect day.

Also, to be fair, Aaron told about a particular chipmunk we met there. No, I don’t have fifty pictures or it, and yes I have twenty pictures of it… So, for the first time, let me introduce in all his glory, and in FullHD(tm), Bob Chipmunk!

My recent life is so unusual to the pattern it had in the last few years: work, hack, sleep, work, hack, sleep, hack, work, sleep… ad nauseam. 2007 has obviously something special, I didn’t envision my life changing so much when I turn 27, but it happened. I’m traveling much more than usual, and it shows on the way I’m looking at the world. It seems smaller than I thought. I guess the trip to Hawaii had something to do with it, it was really different than the places I got before, it’s such a mix of cultures. Really, I think I enjoyed it more for the interesting cultures and the wild nature, than for the stereotyped beaches most people have in mind when you talk about Hawaii.

So after being back at home, I had no time for working on KDE and no time for procrastination either. You probably wonder why I focus that much on procrastination… That’s simply because it’s an important part of the PhD student life (well, at least that’s what most people say). And, I got a nice gift from my friends here, some of them being also PhD students. I got probably the best resource about procrastination and the academic world. For those who don’t know Piled Higher & Deeper it’s the best webcomic about grad students life. When you’re preparing a PhD you have to read it, it makes you laugh a lot… and cry a lot because it pictures really well your current life.

So, what was the reason for not procrastinating, and not working on the changes I planned for yesterday? Basically, because I had only two weeks to prepare the second draft of my PhD thesis, and that consumed most of my time. Why two weeks? why so much time pressure? Well, you probably got it already, I’m travelling again. Tomorrow, I’m leaving for Calgary and visit Aaron… Furious hacking, hiking and working on the final draft of my PhD thesis are on the schedule for this trip.

2007 has obviously something special, I didn’t envision my life changing so much when I turn 27, but I learned something earthshaking (which will justify the title of this post): Travelling has a direct influence on procrastination. If you travel more, procrastination is inhibited.

Unfortunately, it seems it also has a direct impact on your Free Software contributions… But I’m looking forward to the coming trip to confirm or not this point. I hope to prove it wrong.

Damn! I didn’t even finish my blogging about the Oslo sprint… so much stuff to do. Well, I’ll probably make another post about it, more focused on the results we obtained regarding Solid and what I learned there (in short: a lot!).

The three weeks which followed were quite exhausting. First just after the Oslo sprint, we still had quite some work to finish the required refactoring in time for the freeze on the 1st May. But we managed to merge the branch, do the work and have it working for the Alpha1. So you’ll get nice Solid and Phonon with kdelibs 4.0 Alpha1. There’s probably a couple of cleanups to do until the 4.0 release, but nothing huge. In my opinion, the APIs matured quite a bit thanks to the trolls expertise. Once again it proves that when you work next to other people next door you can achieve far more in less time. We should really keep in mind that more sprints are good for the project!

After that I spent most of my time on my PhD… My life was the one of a monomaniac: sleep, eat, write, sleep eat write, etc. But now I have issued the first draft of my PhD thesis! Was hard but worth it, there’s only half a chapter missing because I’m waiting for someone else data. That’s just nice to finally see something that looks like a thesis, not a bunch of notes and files scattered on my disks. It’s now in the lab for internal review. When it’ll be done I’ll write the missing bit (hopefully it should be straightforward) and be able to enter the official review process… and maybe get my diploma. That’s still a few months away though, since because of the length of the review process and the summer coming the (potential) diploma won’t be delivered before september or october. Administration takes holidays very seriously here.

And now? Well, I’m going to travel again! Actually I noticed that I’m only spending two or three weeks at home between my trips this year… It’s going to last like this until aKademy. But, the coming trip has something special, I’ll be on the other side of the globe this time, the first time I go that far. I got a paper accepted to AAMAS 2007 and since I’ll attend tomorrow morning I’ll travel to Honolulu by plane.

Since I’m staying longer for obvious reasons, I’ll be back home in two weeks. I don’t know since I’ll probably have trouble having internet access (depends a lot on the conference organisation): see you in two weeks!