ervin's piece of web

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](http://solid.kde.org) 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](http://akademy.kde.org). 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](http://www.aamas2007.org) and since I'll attend tomorrow morning I'll travel to [Honolulu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honolulu) by plane. Since I'm staying longer [for](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oahu_from_air2.jpg) [obvious](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Oahu_windward_side_beach.jpg) [reasons](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Valley_Oahu.png), 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!

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](http://www.trolltech.com) offices in Oslo. Today being the first day of a 5 days long sprint about [Phonon](http://phonon.kde.org) and [Solid](http://solid.kde.org). 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.