Bobulate

Spent yesterday in Germany. The usual applies: nice train ride and for once the ICE from Arnhem wasn’t horrifically late or broken down (for some reason the ICE in the Netherlands and on the stretch to Oberhausen is unreliable, but after that very good). Battery life of laptop pretty much as expected and published: a little over 2 hours. That’s fine for the purposes for which I bought it. Ridiculously pleased about German food. For some reason I nearly always leave a Dutch restaurant feeling like I got ripped off, while schweinhaxe (pork hock) and beer (I didn’t count, but it was tasty) seemed like an excellent deal. Thought a little about a To-Do list based on the hacking on KDE 4.3 that I’ve done recently — very often patches get delayed and then blocked because of freezes and then bumped to the next cycle and delayed again .. it’s a maintainence nightmare when fixes are not sent upstream (e.g. to KDE SVN).

• File bug report for CMake’s FindBoost. Attach patch to that bug report.
• Fix up KPilot’s akonadi resources wrt. Boost includes.
• Figure out how to package soprano — I’m told that KDE 4.3 beta relies on an unreleased Soprano version. Guys, that just makes it more difficult to build, package and test stuff.
• Write a spec file / package for the oxygen icons so that KDE looks less empty — or less tango-y, as the case may be. Thanks to sebas, nuno and other commenters who pointed out that they have moved.
• Finally merge in the kpci nested-anonymous-union changes.
• Try to change qstringmatcher.h so it doesn’t define a type in an anonymous union — this isn’t critical, but it’s an annoying warning to get for each and every file that is compiled.
• And dozens more patches to upstream, but these are the ones that bother me most.

The Netherlands was one of the countries to vote early in the EU parliamentary elections this year — and it may end up in hot water due to releasing results early — so I did my bit. Now that things are over here, the paper is full of opinion articles on how the voting and campaigns were totally useless. Seems like a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there. In any case the biggest surprise in voting for me was casting a vote on paper. There were legal challenges to the voting machines — closed-source, not effectively auditable — over the winter and therefore things have switched back to paper. Seems now I need to think about the security of a big plastic bin again from a democratic perspective.

It’s hardly rocket science, but I have derived satisfaction this evening from changing the tire on my bicycle. It no longer goes wobble and bump — the sidewalls were tearing on the old tire — and my bike feels a good deal faster again. The previous tire lasted two years and several thousand km of touring and commuting.

I broke the work down into little steps: remove wheel from bike (quick release axle); remove old tire; put new tire on; reinsert inner tube; mount in frame. Between those steps I installed three different Free Software operating systems on a new laptop. My old Thinkpad is giving up the ghost — it overheats regularly when it’s warmer than 24 degrees or when I run any kind of compile on it — so it is time for a new one. Especially with the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit upcoming, and I want to be able to work while somewhere warm.

Somewhat to my surprise, OpenSolaris works best on the new machine; Kubuntu 8.10 (admittedly that’s an older version) is ok and FreeBSD 7.1 just doesn’t go. I gather that’s related to SATA DVD drives, and FreeBSD 8 snapshots don’t like the drive either. Unfortunately, this whole thing leads to a dilemma: given a nicely working new-ish bicycle and a nicely working new laptop, which do you choose? It’s not safe to code and cycle, kids (unless you’re riding something like this).

A whitepaper over on the Register piqued my interest, and then lost it, but then I ran across the Linux Days in Geneva which also has a business slant, and that reminded me again.

For the Linux Days there’s a few talks that do interest me: Michel Rocard, but that’s because it’s Free Software and legal issues and patents and things. It almost makes me wonder why he’s not a member of the Freedom Task Force, which is the FSFE’s legal group — I hang out there acting like a techie and talking to lawyers so that KDE people don’t have to (and, if you’re going to Akademy, bring an FLA). There’s something neat about long term document storage (given the NLUUG conference programme, it wouldn’t have been entirely out of place there either) in ODF; there’s thin clients and OpenSocial.

But the rest of the programme just falls a little flat. While the education track looks interesting enough, other tracks are a little depressing in their “Open Source! low cost! reliability!”-ness. Gosh, we need a word for that: neglecting the essential Freedoms that Free Software gives you and focusing on the cost side of things.

Anyway, I’m not writing to criticise one specific conference; to each his own. It’s more the confluence with that Register article on desktop Linux. There’s no mention at all in that article of any specific desktop technologies; it’s a sort of Herb & Jamaal of the desktop. And then it moves on into TCO again. That’s not really the point of Free Software, is it.

[[ There is one interesting bit in the Reg article about target audiences and where transitions to Free Software operating systems on the desktop are most (or least) comfortable. Straightforward office use and basic educational desktops would be good targets for a migration; there’s no surprise that specialized workers trained to specific applications have a harder time making a switch — but that’s any switch, not something special to the Free Software desktop. ]]

Linux gadgets. What’s not to like? vanRijn likes the Palm Pre, or would like it if it was available already. Like him, I spent a long time on Palm Pilot syncing and the enthusiasm for the whole platform just petered out. Handheld device syncing never really took off like one might hope it would, even with OpenSync and other bits and pieces. Perhaps the Pre will turn things around for Palm, and I hope at the same time that they put a little more support into Linux (or Free Software Desktop) syncing this time around.

Me, I think my main desktop sync desire right now is my Nokia 6300 phone. Or it would be, if I cared about syncing my phone book with the desktop at all anymore.

I spotted another searching-for-Linux-gadgets kind of post; is it really so hard to find neat gadgets running a Free Software operating system now? I’ve got three on my desk right now I could enthuse about (a Conceptronic NAS, a Freecom MusicPal and a modded Linksys 54GL) but, truth be told, none of those three are the kind of shiny gadget you’d use in a business setting. They’re boxy and utilitarian even when they’re shiny (this picture has a nice collection of devices, not all of which are Linuxy).

What does make my heart beat faster (and then my brain kicks in, saying that I don’t have time to look in another direction at all) is something like this ARM board. As far as the BeagleBoard goes, I have the baseball cap but no hardware. There are a dozen cool things you could do with these, but after that putting it into a shiny box for consumer use is a big step. Marvell’s SheevaPlug has made the step to stodgy white plastic (but then again, it’s supposed to be a wall wart).

Finally, Aaron writes about gadget integration with the desktop. The relevant part is a bit hidden, so I’ll quote it here:

The project is building a proof of concept device using an Arduino processor with a Bluetooth board attached. When you approach with a Plasma device (well, pending Rob’s GSoC project on Remote Plasmoids) we’ll see that there’s something available via Bluetooth. Plasma will poke the device such that it spits out a Javascript Plasmoid that will then appear ready for action. Walk away and the Bluetooth connection goes away and so does the widget.

It’s not that far from carrying your applications in your pocket and BT’ing them onto the desktop. You can almost see a set of Lego blocks like that carrying around your personal computing environment. It reminds me of a device I saw a few years back which had a full Linux system on a USB stick which would export a display via VNC, so you could plug it in, VNC to the stick and continue working there. I wonder what became of that? In any case, I think there’s enough niftiness out there, just waiting for use.

Some days, there’s just too much new software out there at once. Not only has a pony escaped (I met Kushal last in Bangalore), but a tiger is on the prowl (Gökmen, Negril), and KOffice (I know the last time I met Cyrille it was in a large bar, multi-storied, all wood paneling and such and Boudewijn was there as well but I have no clue what year or even what country it might have been in).

The modh coinniollach is not as difficult as it often seems (…) all you need to do is to delete the ‘dh’ from the aimsir fhaistineach and to replace it with ‘nn’.

My brother brought me those instructions out of an Irish paper; I’m sure it’s good grammatical advice, but I find I’m lacking the knowledge necessary to put the advice into practice.

The reason I bring this up is not one of Irish grammar (though you may consider it a shout out to my friend Shane in Japan), but one about context and documentation. I’m an IRC user. Since 1994 or so, and for most of that time I’ve been [ade] or adridg on the networks I use (Ade Lovett used to be without the brackets). For most of that time, screen + ircii or irssi have been my tools of choice — I never could get quassel to do anything useful on the operating systems I use, and konversation, while nice, doesn’t survive my KDE session. So it came as a bit of a surprise to need to use jabber; this is used for FSFE communications, so I started up kopete.

Suffice to say it’s been an extremely annoying three hours of futzing about.

There’s not much point in writing bug reports against kopete from KDE 3.5.10, so I won’t (scratch 20 minutes because a newline got into the server’s hostname when pasting it into the configure dialog); in addition I can’t always tell the difference between a bug and myself being stupid (groupchats are totally different from contacts). The only thing I can sensibly do is add some notes to the wiki for the congenitally IRCed. Now, having written a sentence like “use RMB on the systray, pick and identity and then ‘Join Groupchat…'” I realize that there’s an awful lot of context missing there as well (and it’s o-so-disrespectful of tablet users). I take my cap off for the KDE Userbase editors, for sure.

Sadly enough, this entire tale could be retold with “pdflatex” in the place of IRC and “OpenOffice” in the place of Jabber. I now have a working OOo on FreeBSD 7-STABLE without a JRE, but that too took a measure of doing. It’s just the price you pay when you start interacting with different communities with different tools.

The mother of my children (MOMC) is in Norway for a few days, leaving me with the kids for the long weekend and the school days following. This is a reversal from our usual roles, where I’m galavanting about to Free Software conferences and she’s at home dealing with the kids (and acting as editor for the town paper). It’s been great weather so far, but how do you keep the kids busy?

Oddly enough it was the EU parliamentary elections that provided a solid friday afternoon’s entertainment. I don’t know how it is elsewhere within the union, but the distinguishing trait of the run up to the elections has been a total lack of a campaign, debate, or even information on what the whole darn thing is about. Sure, there’s a few posters up saying “party X is against Brussels” (have you been there? the Brussels cheese is awesome in its horribleness). Friday’s Trouw had a column decrying the lack of content in the election; saturday’s NRC had a half page on this same lack.

Anyway, the Greens were out on the streets handing out invites to a picknick in the park. Since the kids were tagging along on my shopping expedition (shopping list: blue cheese, espresso coffee and soy sauce) I figured it would be a good thing to attend. I added a baguette and some camembert to the list. The campaign trail was said to contain a trampoline and a speech by the leader of the Greens in the Netherlands; one of those must be applicable to a 4- and a 6-year old.

One thing that particularly struck me was the lack of security at the event. National politicians who wander into a park and give a speech and then stick around for a glass of apple juice just seems odd. Good, but odd. Also I realised that explaining democratic structures to small kids is kind of complicated: “but dad, why is there a Dutch parliament as well as a European one?” Is that the principle of subsidiarity at play there?

I’ll leave out the actual political content of the afternoon — it was quite light in payload, but at least there was something, and that made for a refreshing change.

PS. The alternative would be to send the kids to the Glory Hole with Paul Adams (congrats on completing your thesis, dude). That would be humongous indeed.

Some folks have noticed that my “Bobulate” blog on fruitsalad.org has gone away. This is true. For many years, the KDE-FreeBSD team used fruitsalad, kindly hosted by Hasta AB (a manufacturer of cool curtain rods and blinds). It seems the machine has rolled over and died one last time; the home directories are no longer mounted. While I might have liked a little notice (for instance to get backups off of the machine) there’s not much to be done about it right now except try to reconstruct things using search engine caches. Nonetheless, thanks to Hasta AB for hosting things for so long.

On the KDE-FreeBSD front, development things are now hosted at iXsystems, such as the ports repository, patches, and whatnot. I’ve been slowly updating all my FreeBSD machines to the current ports (KDE 4.2.3) to see what it’s like and what I should expect when updating the packages that I do for OpenSolaris.

As for my blog, I’m happy to move it in with the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). I’ve been involved with the FSFE for some years now, latterly as an FSFE fellow (still owing Rainer much beer, I think) and as a member of the Freedom Task Force. These relationships with the FSFE follow from the kind of things I do as a board member of KDE e.V., where I wear the “legal dude” hat, and from my long-term commitment to Free Software. I’ll be using the FSFE blog platform (it’s WordPress) for my own writings from now on. I will try to continue to cover the usual topics: kids wearing funny hats, Free Software conferences, legal issues, KDE development and KDE packaging on non-Linux Free Software operating systems.