ervin’s piece of web

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.

It was the opening day for the conference part of the event. Very nice introduction by Atul in my opinion. The keynote was nice too, getting some insights about Anjuta development, where it came from etc.

Then, I attended Holger’s talk about Open Embedded, interesting stuff too. It really shows the difficulties of having to deal with small devices and how it impacts the community.

After lunch (ah! great food again!), I hanged into the Hacking Room for most of the afternoon showing bits of KDE, discussing the design, trying to give information on how to get started with some of our frameworks. Nice and interesting people were here to discuss. Because of that I missed the QtWebKit talk by Simon, but it was worth it.

And finally, I had my last presentation, about the student projects we did last year in my University (and we have a sequel running this year), it had some exclusive data in it on how it’s going this year. I got really nice feedback to this talk, truely nice to see so many students and a few professors in the room. There’s definitely some will to replicate this and I’d love to help such efforts. We’ll see where it goes…

Since the first day of the conference was over, we moved to a restaurant… Followed by some of the organizers, we ended up being 20 people in there. Was a traditional “on the banana leaf” restaurant. Great people (again), awesome food (again)… I ended the day full and happy!

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!

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!

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!

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!).

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!

Past week I’ve done some KDE promotion. It was interesting because I did this using two radically different methods.

On monday and tuesday, I gave two talks in my university about Qt and KDE as a development platform. I gave Kubuntu CDs to the students and since they are in computer engineering they’ll hopefully install it. It seems that they enjoyed the topic. They started to wonder why they had to suffer with other non-free toolkits when I showcased Qt and QtDesigner. Then they were impressed about the niceties provided by kdecore, kdeui, and DCOP. After that, I explained them how to use the KParts and their jaw dropped when I showcased the small browser George Staikos wrote for OSDW. And finally having network transparency in their applications using KIO finished to convince them. I also took some time to present what will hopefully be in KDE4

The result? Several amazed students, that will surely want to experiment with Qt and KDE in the future. It even looks like some of them are really hooked and I had the opportunity to discuss more with them on friday answering some late questions.

On saturday, I participated in an event organized by Toulibre. I showcased a laptop running Kubuntu, there was also some boxes running Ubuntu. A talk took place, but I didn’t attend since I was involved in the booth with the rest of the team. People were really interested in the topic and we even had a journalist from the local press that came and asked questions for a paper. I think we were all impressed by the age diversity of the attendees (the youngest was under 10 and the oldest surely over 70). I find nice to be able to propose KDE to people that could be your grandparents for their daily use.

Really a nice week, I’d love to have more occasions to do this kind of things… I’ll surely try to invest more of my spare time for promotion.