ervin’s piece of web

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:

Finally I didn’t go to the sponsored party this night. I wasn’t really motivated by clubbing. David wasn’t either, hence why we got back to the residence together. While walking we discussed some AI technical points and we ended up sitting at the residence discussing KIO future. Some of the ideas are very interesting in my humble opinion… I’m looking forward to have them implemented. Maybe more on this later, it’s lunch time!

First of all, for people complaining about the content… In the first two day it’s the Users and Administrators Conference. So well, it’s not that shocking if it’s not really hacker oriented. Now, here are my impressions :

Novell Desktop

Keeping in mind that it’s targetted for users interested in KDE (at least I hope so) it’s indeed strange to see someone coming and explaining they use no KDE application for the major tasks (mail, browsing, etc.) except Kopete…

Kolab - Groupware the KDE way

Nice talk about Kolab, this one was clearly for sysadmins, so we had some technical insights about how it works. Till seems to be a very good speaker, liked his style.

I admit that I didn’t followed this one very closely (shame), since I was chatting a bit with David Faure about some KIO related stuffs.

Deploying KDE Using The Kiosk Framework

Another one targeted to sysadmins in my opinion. Very good talk, raising the right points, answering the right question. Presenting the context of a successful deployment using Kiosk. Well done Aaron!

Ubuntu and Kubuntu

Clearly a misleading title… It was more about cooperation across opensource projects, and even more specifically between upstream and distro makers. Oh, and well Mark Shuttleworth is the first space tourist in case you was still not aware of this…

Linux migration success stories with KDE and NX

Another talk with misleading content, but with a very interesting content. Instead of real success stories (I was expecting enterprise deployments or something similar), we had a talk about NX itself, it’s current state and how to test it. Too bad the talk by itself was lacking some polishing in my humble opinion.

Anyway, I’m really glad to see that NX is making its way. Maybe it’s a bit slow since most of what has been presented was already reality last year, but it’s really taking shape now with more features. As Kurt hinted we still badly miss a free (as in speech) client. Too bad that it’s used a lot now so changing would be difficult, but I still think that the name of this is not fortunate. “NX” is quite cryptic to most users, they surely don’t even care that it’s related to X… that lacks sexiness.

After this one, I didn’t attend anything because of a headache… Too bad, I wanted to at least attend the Scripts with KDE feel talk. I’m looking forward to tomorrow talk… But well it seems that we have a party sponsored by Novell this night (thanks a lot for this) so I guess it’ll be hard to wake up. =)

Looks like Simon Edward’s blog post about hierarchies showed some concerns about some of our “new” ioslaves. Moreover, I’ve seen some similar questions raised on the Dot.

Since I am the maintainer of some of them (system:/, media:/, home:/ and remote:/) and participated a bit in trash:/ development (which is maintained by David Faure), I think that I should explain some more what it is all about.

I disagree on the fact that people “don’t get hierarchies”. That’s not that simple, they can deal with hierarchies if they don’t become too complicated. If it’s really deep that becomes a problem. That’s just like lists, if the list is too long you easily get lost. On the other hand, I fully agree with the fact that “people doesn’t understand other’s people way of organizing things”. But don’t forget that those statements are particularly right for managing documents, in particular because a document can be placed in several categories.

For managing documents, it becomes clear that a system based only on hierarchies is not the best solution. That can be addressed using more complex systems based on search and concept tagging. Some of the most refined systems are still “research toys” (I’m even working on one of those “toys” for my PhD). But there’s still hope, and we already have technology to improve things today, that’s the Tenor path.

So why creating system:/?

Because the current UNIX hierarchy is not well suited for desktop users. Lot of its content is really cryptic and exists because it’s necessary to make the system work. Finally that’s just a low level concept from the user point of view. Then system:/ is here to hide this implementation detail.

Because, we had some ioslaves for a while partly helping with desktop tasks in a network enabled context : access the trash, access a medium (usb flash disk, camera, dvd, etc.) and access a remote share. All this is covered by ioslaves recently created, or existing for a while (audiocd:/, media:/, trash:/, remote:/, fish:/, ftp:/, etc.). Those ioslaves are great from a developer point of view because they lead to specialized components addressing one particular task. But they are not so great from the user point of view, because he has to know they exist in the first place, and he has to deal with URLs. Then system:/ is here to hide this implementation detail.

We don’t want people to deal with complicated hierarchy, or to type URLs. So I introduced a new concept in the ioslave land : forwarding. This way we keep the technical advantage of those tiny specialized components, but in the end we can have the user dealing with only one ioslave allowing to work on desktop tasks. Other ioslaves like media:/, home:/, trash:/ are now helpers for the system:/ ioslave, users don’t even need to know they exist.

In this case it becomes easy to avoid dealing with URLs, you just need a link to system:/ (and it’s already available). We just have to make sure the system:/ hierarchy doesn’t become too complicated. That’s exactly why the entry list at the root of this hierarchy has been simplified for 3.5.

Now the user has system:/ which is a hierarchy suited for desktop tasks. One day, we’ll surely go beyond hierarchies but that’s not a reason to let current users with half-baked tools, that’s exactly what I’m trying to change.

We’re near the end of the aKademy… Tomorrow will be the last day. But today was quite interesting.

I woke up early because I had to be present for a talk… The talk I gave with Peter Rockai about the Kalyxo project. For my first talk in english it was not that bad. I was understandable. Maybe our talk was a bit too technical for a user conference… but since the project is still quite small we don’t have final products to showcase yet. Anyway, some people expressed interest after we gave our talk, it’s a nice feeling.

Then I attended some other talks. The first one about Kommander was interesting, it really seems to be a nice glue technology and I’ll look more closely at it for prototyping tasks. Then, Jonathan Riddell’s talk about Umbrello was interesting too… maybe a bit too UML centric, but it’s nice to see someone working on this. From what I’ve seen it made huge progress.

I’m working with David Faure on the trash:/ ioslave. It’s very interesting and I try to learn some of the KIO black magic he knows. This is an interesting piece of code to work on. Moreover David is really friendly and patient… I appreciate to work with him a lot.

Argh! I still have to sort out some of the design thoughts I have for the new devices:/ ioslave… I need to find some time to have this on paper and discuss it with the relevant persons.

Today, I managed to arrive at 11:00 to the aKademy… I slept enough for this night at least. I’d like to do the same this night, but… since I have a talk at 10:30, so it’s not advised to arrive at 11:00

So the working day was short… I discussed with David Faure a lot in fact. Mostly of hacking kioslaves for the purpose of the devices:/ ioslave. At one point we became slightly off-topic since we share some cultural background.

I started to help David on the future trash:/ ioslave (a least I try). It’s a good thing to address this, because the current trashcan implementation is not that fortunate. I’m pretty confident that this ioslave will improve things a lot for the user.

This blog entry is quite short today… But there’s not much more to say this time.

Because of yesterday coding marathon I only woke up at 11:00 today… So it’s now official, I went to aKademy very interested by the usability talks and discussions and managed to miss everything except Aaron’s talk. It’s really a pity. Anyway I hope that those discussions will lead us to a well organized cooperation with real usability expert. We need to find our own process to handle usability aspects in open source software.

Apart from this major failure, I attended the KDE Quality Team BoF. I’m not really a PR skilled person, but the discussions were interesting. An idea was even given by mornfall to allow user to propose “What’s This” texts when they are missing. He started to implement it this evening, and it’s shaping really well.

On the hacking front, I finished the first stage of my work on the devices:/ ioslave. You can now give more convenient name to your devices. But the whole code is a bit old and difficult to extend, so we’ll discuss the new architecture until the end of the week. The new implementation will be done after aKademy.

Now, I’m going to find something else to hack, like helping mornfall on his current work, code for Kivio or maybe help David Faure a bit on the upcoming trash:/ ioslave.

So, yesterday was the first day for the coding marathon. I have not many things to add… I was so tired when I finished that I didn’t want to blog at all.

One particular event, except from the coding, was the PGP Key Signing party… really a game for geeks. You make a little dance around a room, showing you ID card and your key fingerprint. Of course most of the people laugh at your photo ID.

Of course, because of yesterday, I managed to get up too late to attend the first talk of the day about usability. But I was here to listen to Aaron Seigo’s talk… very interesting!

Today, some coding again. I’m working on the devices:/ kioslave. At this rate I hope to implement the planned features before the end of this week.