Bobulate
Home [ade] cookies
Upcoming Conferences (n+1)
June 29th, 2009
Gosh, I go on about upcoming interesting Free Software conferences all the time, don’t I. But there’s just so many of them. I got four to pimp out today, and all of them have the word “Open” in their name — which reminds me I really need to deal with that word at some point in the near future. If you’re in western Europe or the middle of the United States (you may apply geography lessons to me, but it will cost you a plane ticket), harken:
- OSDevCon is in Hamburg, september 23-25 2009. It’s an OpenSolaris developers, contributors and application porters conference. The CfP closes july 26th. I suppose I should try to get something about KDE in there, although since I’m also on the programme committee there’s definite conflict-of-interest. And if you don’t particularly care about OSOL (it really does have a cool package manager), you might want to try the co-located Linux Kongress.
- Utah Open Source Conference is in Utah (which contains interesting cartoonists) from october 8-10. I can see — given the current list of abstracts — a real need there for Desktop or Free Software talks.
- The NLUUG fall conference on the Open Web, october 29th 2009. Officially the CFP closes today, but I think I can give you an informal reassurance that abstracts will continue to be accepted for another week or so. Frank Karlitschek, this means you.
- Open Rhein Ruhr is a regional conference (closer to where I live than Amsterdam is!) november 7th and 8th. All things Free Software considered, and the CFP is open until august 23rd. No reason not to submit your “stuff that will be cool in KDE 4.4” talk now, though.
That’s it for now, and until next week, when I try to explain why the 2009 Maemo summit isn’t on my list yet.
Women in Dutch IT
June 26th, 2009
I’ve written about women in Dutch IT before — on the old bobulate, which no longer exists. I can point to women in IT in Switserland / Brasil and Denmark and lots of other countries and even the Netherlands, but the Netherlands on the whole remains a problematic area. Since 1994 or so — possibly earlier — the participation of women in IT and university IT education in particular has been very low. I usually cite numbers around 3-5% of the students. A new EU study (PDF, 4.7MB, reported in Dutch as well) reconfirms this dismal view: the Netherlands is down at the bottom.
CCOSA Results
June 26th, 2009
This year’s CCOSA was done without me, as I no longer work for CodeYard — and anyway, I was speaking elsewhere. Ah, CCOSA: The CodeYard Capgemini Open Source Award, which is awarded each year to the coolest CodeYard projects. It’s a cash prize for the students involved and their school (split fifty-fifty) rewarding their dedication and talent. The two winning projects were OpenOffice Share and FretsWeb. I’ll let their websites speak for themselves, as they testify to the professionalism of the students involved. FretsWeb has since moved on to SourceForge (let’s face it, CodeYard serves as an incubator for the “big time”).
It’s the OpenOffice Share project that particularly piques my interest. Adding a collaborative editing workflow to an application like OOo is a big feature win. OK guys, now do it again for KOffice, ok?
Enlightened Self-Interest
June 25th, 2009
Yesterday I gave a talk at an NOiV event (the NOiV is the Dutch government bureau leading Open Systems, Open Standards and Open Source adoption). You can find the schedule here where you’ll find I was the closing keynote speaker (warning: both sites in Dutch). I never got around to blogging this in advance, possibly because I assume readers of my blog aren’t IT managers at Dutch local councils. It’s quite interesting talking to people in this area, because they do have long-term societal responsibility — which is something that the four Freedoms of Free Software address — and yet at the same time are stuck with interoperability and transition questions from decades of proprietary software use. So I seized the opportunity to learn more about the tax office, libraries and the police and they way they operate their IT infrastructure and software selection process. On the whole it was a pretty successful day, and I was glad to hear from several folks that they appreciated my talk. I’ll probably end up at the NOiV again in September at one of their inspirational events. That’s enlightened self-interest on my part, too 🙂
[[ As an aside, I found www.ictkalender.nl today, which seems to have a pretty complete view of IT events in the Netherlands. I’d never heard of it before, nor have I checked if it actually lists all the Free Software events in the Netherlands or any of the non-commercial offerings, but it seems fairly complete. There’s a DrupalJam going on tomorrow, for instance. ]]
Changing of the guard (2)
June 25th, 2009
At the Free Software Foundation Europe general assembly, I was accepted as a member of the association. Like KDE e.V., the FSFE is a German association with fairly strict rules on becoming a member (I should mention that becoming a member of KDE e.V. isn’t all that hard, and that you can support FSFE by becoming a fellow of FSFE). This means that I have an additional FSFE hat to wear, on top of NLUUG and KDE.
I am also discarding some hats. On the cusp of summer, I have informed the University of Nijmegen that I am leaving the place where I’ve studied and worked for the past 19 years (that’s longer than KDE exists, and longer than some valued contributors to KDE have existed, for that matter). This means that I will no longer be working on CodeYard (a project to have Dutch high-school students produce Free Software with modern tools) or Sprint-UP (closing the gap between high schools and universities). CodeYard occupies a special place in my heart, as it has produced some really neat software and gotten students to build beautiful things — something I think is really important when writing Free Software. I’ll continue to watch CodeYard from the sidelines, though.
The FSFE hat represents some additional responsibilities, too, and answers the “how do you eat?” question. In the coming months the Freedom Task Force will transition from the capable hands of Shane Coughlan to mine; Shane has spent the past two years building up a unique group of technologists and legal representatives to discuss law-and-technology matters on neutral ground and provide services to Free Software projects that need a little help getting their legal activities in order. The FTF created the Fiduciary License Agreement, for instance, for dealing with copyrights in distributed development projects; KDE uses a modified version (PDF, 40k). It continues to grow, and I hope I’ll be able to follow some of the path that Shane has charted.
I may need a captain’s hat, after all.
Changing of the Guard (1)
June 24th, 2009
Last weekend was the annual general meeting of the Free Software Foundation Europe, which was the reason I was in Spain. It was very much fun to meet the people who have been working on Free Software at a European level for the past eight years. Much like every Free Software conference or meeting I’ve ever attended, there was a “work hard, play hard” atmosphere. Plans for the next year were made, schedules set and many tales were told. The main result of the meeting is the changing of the guard: after eight years, Georg Greve has stepped down as president of the FSFE. I cannot hope two write something to compete with the words of thanks for Georg’s work pronounced elsewhere. So I will round up with some typical KDE words: “dude!”
Rushing about (nth edition)
June 23rd, 2009
Back from Spain. Speaking in Utrecht tomorrow (managers). Dancing and organizing dinner in Lent thursday (square). Speaking in Nijmegen friday (high school students). Weekend. Mopping up KDE-Solaris stuff. Organizational matters monday and tuesday. Gran Canaria wednesday. And then the real rushing about begins.
Template function parameters
June 15th, 2009
Started pushing patches produced in packaging KDE 4.3-beta2 on OpenSolaris to the KDE SVN repo yesterday. Started on some safe targets, like KPilot, where I know the codebase pretty well. One of my patches was “add a newline at end of file”, which is one of those kind-of-dorky fixes that sometimes needs to happen.
There was one interesting patch, though, which again illustrates how gcc stretches (or violates) the C++ standard for convenience. The issue if templates that take function parameters, like this one:
template <int (*f)(int)> class A { } ;
This is a template you can instantiate with a single function that takes an int, returning int. For instance, close() would fit the bill. Or would it? In C++, functions also have linkage — this could be either C++ linkage (default) or extern “C” linkage. In the example above, f() has C++ linkage. This means that you can’t use close() as a parameter to this template, because close() has C linkage.
With gcc you can. It glosses over this difference, but standard-conforming compilers will refuse to compile this. It’s apparently a confusing and contentious issue, given the number of blog entries (like this one) and forum posts dedicated to it. If it had been just KPilot, I suppose I would have just committed stuff and moved on, but template function parameters show up in Akonadi as well, so I suspect they will get more use as time goes on.
The point is you can’t write
template <extern "C" int (*f)(int)> class A { } ;
to specify the linkage of template parameter f. There are apparently two ways of working around this. One is to use a typedef to introduce the linkage into the function type, like so
extern "C" typedef int (*cfunc)(int);
template <cfunc foo> class A { } ;
The other is to introduce an intermediate function with C++ linkage (as expected by the original template) that calls the intended target function with C linkage, like so:
int _close(int fd) { return close(fd); }
// ..
A<_close> a(0);
Here we introduce an intermediate function _close that just calls the original function; the only difference is the linkage of the two. Making _close static inline should keep the overall impact low (I haven’t investigated).
Which approach you choose depends on how much control you have over the template definition. For templates defined by an external library, only the latter might be possible.
The Poisoned Web?
June 15th, 2009
I was reading some article on the Register just now and one of the doubleclick ads was for OpenOffice. “Gosh, Free Software really has gone mainstream”, I thought, although the domain name of the target was a little odd; I clicked on it anyway (wear rubbers!) and ended up on www dot openoffice dash dash plus dot info slash nl slash and .. whoa. That’s a fascinating way of getting people to download a very big, presumably very poisonous, .exe file. It’s a good thing that the site is a mish-mash of Dutch and Spanish, as that might tip off some potential victims that this is not entirely kosher.
The Open Web
June 15th, 2009
The Open Web is a mix of technologies and concepts. Open web technologies and protocols (HTTP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, …) have carried the World Wide Web to success by implementing decentralization, transparency, extendibility, third party innovation, bidirectional communications and end-user usability and integration.
The NLUUG fall conference (expect around 280 attendees in Ede, the Netherlands) is on the Open Web this time around; if you’re working on web standards, web tools, interoperability or anything else covered by the call for abstracts (PDF, 817k, low information density), do drop the programme committee a note (and an abstract of around 200 words). Even policy wonks can have their say there. Deadline for submissions is the end of this month.