ervin’s piece of web

Tuesday and wednesday were basically spent doing API review and refactoring the public API to address the issues found. It’s great to get input from people experts in the field… After all their work on Qt proves they have a lot of expertise in making APIs which rock.

That’s why Solid is getting get a big facelift during this week. I’m cleaning it up at a lot of places, and had to refactor the internal API a bit. Hopefully now the most intrusive changes for the hardware discovery part are done. It’s kind of frustrating because I’d basically like to see this week last for a month. I opened the eyes in quite some shortcomings, and we probably won’t have the time to make a second round of API reviews.

So… Let’s get the most of this week! Back on furious hacking!

As usual started with a very early flight. I had to woke up at 4:30 this morning to get it… No need to say I’m pretty tired while writing this. Of course I’m also pretty excited, which explains that despite being exhausted I’m hacking at… the Trolltech offices in Oslo. Today being the first day of a 5 days long sprint about Phonon and Solid.

It’s always nice to meet old friends and new faces. The Trolltech guys form a very friendly group.

Today, we basically travelled, setup our small network for the sprint and had discussions about investigations and work for this week. It already looks like it can become a highly productive week. After this nice kick-off we gathered in a very nice restaurant in Oslo with a few trolls. The food was just wonderful, and it was very cheap (in particular compared to Oslo standards).

This night we finished the work on factoring XMLGUI out of KMainWindow with Simon. It’s now in trunk, so now we can concentrate on the main purpose of this sprint…

Thanks a lot to the Trolltech people to allow this sprint to take place.

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!).

I attended FOSDEM 2007 this week-end. It was my first time there, it’s really a great event. It looks a bit like a system at the edge of chaos… but it self-organizes correctly. There’s always something happening because of an insane amount of talks. It’s even a bit frustrating at times because you definitely can attend only a few talks. Which means you have to choose very carefully… I admit I was disappointed by two really bad talks but no big deal.

Particularly interesting was the OpenMoko talk. I’d say it’s nothing ground breaking on the technical side, but it looks great from a business model perspective… Definitely looks like a tempting cell phone for hackers.

Also amazing was the attendance during the KDE 4 talk. The room was just full, it was difficult to find a seat. Jos Poortvliet did a very good job at summarizing the current state of the matter. Keep up the good work Jos!

Apart from the talks, FOSDEM has proven to be just great for socializing. It’s great to meet known friends again, to put faces on people you only know from IRC or mail, and new people. That’s probably the best advantage of FOSDEM, a lot of different projects are present there, so it’s really easy to discuss with them. The cross-desktop and education sessions just showed it.

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!

aKademy 2007 is slowly coming. stop.

It will be in the nice city of Glasgow. stop.

A Call for Participation has been published more than a month ago. stop.

You can Submit Talks until 14th February 2007. stop.

You surely have something interesting to say so Just Do It Now! stop.

Of course you have something interesting to say! stop.

Konqui wants you for aKademy 2007. stop.

I usually don’t write “qotd” posts, but I really had to share this one!

<aseigo> so yes, now you can just mention ovulation and i’ll come a ‘runnin

‘nough said…

Yup, it somehow looks like a famous Green Day song…

Akademy has come and passed
Ten days has gone so fast
Wake me up when october ends

Back in office again
Falling from the stars
Drenched in my work again
Becoming who we are

As my memory rests
But never forgets what I lost
Wake me up when october ends

Akademy has come and passed
Ten days has gone so fast
Wake me up when october ends
Wake me up when october ends
Wake me up when october ends

This lame attempt at borrowing a song lyrics for my own blog comes from the fact that october is exhausting here… I’ve basically been unable to do anything useful in the free software land since the end of aKademy. Too much work both on the research and teaching front. But it seems I survived once again.

Hopefully starting this week-end my schedule will slowly come back to it’s normal state, so I’ll have some spare time to spend. I already sent a bunch of patches for HAL and committed some code into Solid. It feels good to be able to work on this again!

Today I received this:

Thank you Google.

I’m glad this t-shirt arrived safely, since I never received the 2005 edition… That said I prefer the logo of this year t-shirt. That’s always a good thing to get one more geek t-shirt in your collection.