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AK2007,D+3/4: BoFs and more BoFs

Jul 4, 2007 | 3 minutes read

Tags: Akademy, KDE

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.