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Monday mornings, you guessed it, are not a good thing. Especially when it’s all rainy and you get run over by a car. Luckily nothing really happened to me, only a few scratches and a new experience (I’ve never had this Hollywood style “rolling over the hood of the car” thingy happen to me before). Let’s move on to better stuff then 😉 maybe I can even write about KDE related things.
Just now I got the confirmation that KDE will have a booth at the 2nd Ecumenical Church Day which is way in the future – May 2010. More about that later.
What I wanted to talk about… Yesterday, Eckhart moved Attica into kdereview.
We’ve been poking at this nice library for a few days now, and we’re really happy that it’s ready to be used more widely now 😀
Attica is a cool little library that allows us to integrate applications nicely with the web services provided by “Open Collaboration Services” servers. Yay, for the buzzwords there! Actually it sounds more complicated than it is. Can you hear the voices in my head? I can. And that makes me happy 😉 So let me repeat for those not hearing (the voices in my head):
Someone in my head: So you might wonder, what’s that stuff good for anyway???
Me: Well, let’s see what could be done… we have a data engine to provide plasma applets with all that goodness, so it’s possible to let the user know what’s going on around him and with his friends. …
Someone in my head: Wait! You are telling us, you just wrote a facebook clone?
Me: Not exactly. We still have KDE and our users in mind. So imagine, you really like some application that is also on kde-apps.org. And since you use it daily and it’s really cool, you decide to become an fan of the application (come on, just click that button, it doesn’t hurt!). Now the author of your favorite app publishes a newer version. And you get a note right to your desktop, that a newer version is available.
Someone in my head: Ok, that’s like half way social… but…
Me (interrupting rapidly): More goodness comes from the neighbor list. Say you come to Stuttgart for a short visit. And once you go online there, you see, one of your favorite KDE developers is actually in town also. Quite interesting you think and just a click later you have sent a message to meet up. What a nice evening! Or take the event list. Here you get notified, when an event takes place close to your location. Get notified of that developer sprint next door and just drop by to meet all the cool kids. I admit, these examples are still a bit KDE-geeks-are-great centric. But they are just examples and the beginning. More stuff is yet to come. Maybe you have ideas too?
Someone in my head: Me, ideas? Uhmmm… maybe I’ll leave them in the comments…
Ok, enough talking, let’s see some action!
One thing I spent much time on last week, was getting our Get Hot New Stuff implementation knewstuff2.5 ported to use Attica in addition to the classical XML files we used so far. With the help of Jeremy I got something working by now. Yes, it still has many rough edges… Anyway – using Attica gives us some of the features that we wanted to have for a looooong time already. After ripping a lot of things apart, we’re slowly piecing the puzzle back together. Internally we now support rating and adding comments but that needs more GUI work. So today the Hotter New Stuff is server side search. If you like a certain wallpaper or that special script, it will no longer disappear after a while. Have fun watching me, trying to talk to myself here:
Watch it on Blip.tv, download ogg video. (I can’t seem to get it embedded here… giving up now…)
Quite often, a group of awesome people meets to promote KDE to new people. Most often that happens on the different IT/Linux/Free Software/something fairs. This is where many technical (and sometimes not so technical) people come together, exchange information, take the chance to talk to people directly involved with our project or just discover something completely new. I heard there are people not yet using KDE 😉
On of these events which is rather new is the IT & Business fair in Stuttgart. In the coming week (October 6-8), Eckhart, Frank and me will man a demo point to show the awesome that KDE is.
If you are interested in getting more involved with KDE or meeting us, this is a great chance. You get to see a fair (that may or may not interest you), meet users and curious people and have a chance to spread the word 😉 What you need is some enthusiasm for KDE and everything else will follow (yay, a great chance to practice talking to strangers).
While we have a certain routine by now, visiting one or the other event, we certainly would love to pass on some information how to run the show and make the experience for everyone a bit smoother. To this end, we discussed a bit with Cornelius and Frank, to get something going, and decided it’s time for a “Promoting KDE at Events” sprint.
Eckhart wrote a mail to our promo list. The suggested date for the sprint is Oct 31st – Nov 1st.
Now we’d love to have some new people at this sprint as well, to get some fresh input. It would be great to see fresh faces, people who like to write, talk about KDE and think about the logistics side of things as well.
Some things we’ll discuss is the practical aspects of the booth box (it’s currently very robust with the tiny downside of being about as portable as a medium sized coffin). Creating instructions for setting up the booth and including some niceties such as a table cloth (dear me, we are going to be so decadent).
Techbase page to coordinate the promo sprint
Drop me a mail if you’d like to come at gladhorn AT kde DOT org !
Usually I assume that people trying to kill me, me on my bike, they in their cars, don’t do that intentionally.
I admit, I would have almost run over a bike before once or twice. No I’m not perfect. But I have nightmares after such situations.
Now today I had one of the more harmless situations. A car turning into my lane so that it would have hit me, had I not jumped out of the way (or pulled over in this case).
IMHO it’s my right to yell at people for doing that. Yeah, selfish me.
But then, taking me over with a devilish grin, “I knew you’d go away anyways”, makes me slightly angry.
From Wednesday last week on, the Fantasy Film Fest visited Stuttgart. After having missed this event completely last year, I decided to see more of it this time. 
Since the movies at this event are somewhat up my venue, I went a few times to enjoy unknown, independent niche movies, including vampires, blood thirsty kids and some serial killing. And zombies, never forget, there be zombies 😉 District 9 which is supposedly quite a nice flick was sold out already, but it’ll be in the movies in a couple of days anyway, so no problem, I’ll get to see it, just a week later.
So here is what I saw:
- Blood: The last Vampire: Japanese adaption of the Anime of the same title. I didn’t expect much in the way of it having a story… but I was a bit disappointed by the action. No “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” like beauty during the fighting. Instead ugly demon-vampire creatures being slaughtered so fast that it’s hard to follow the sword of the protagonist in her school uniform. Not recommended.
- The Children: This one was much more to my liking, little kids that have a bit of a cough that turns them into evil beasts (even more evil than children usually are :P). So on a weekend trip to a lonely cabin the little sweety-pies have nothing better to do than slaughter their parents. Of course only the grumpy teenage girl understands their evil intentions. Some murderous kids, the cuddly teenage wanabe rebel girl and dark humor. I did enjoy this one.
- Thirst – Durst: (“Bakjwi” – Korean) A monk subjected to medical experiments is the only survivor of some virus. He develops super human powers but needs to drink blood to sustain his new way of living. That doesn’t make him to happy. Poor guy with too much of a conscience. Must be hard to be a vampire without fangs. I did enjoy this one a lot, though I found Chan-wook Park’s “Old Boy” much more intense in comparison. Modern vampires in an eastern setting.
- Push: Science Fiction with some super powers mixed in (telekinesis, mind reading and similar) which turned out much more enjoyable than it sounds. Good movie with some cheap Matrix imitations, a bit of a comic super heroes feel (but not in a bad way) and a nice story that has some surprises and a flower built in.
- Sexykiller: Spanish with English subtitles delights me as I like to practice my increasingly rusty Spanish from time to time. And this killer is sexy indeed… a girl that sometimes is almost Austin Powers like tells her story. Better don’t ask her, why she’s a serial killer… you’ll only end up decapitated. With a firm believe that even today “serial killing” is a chauvinist domain, our heroine sets out to change that. Including fake advertising – learn how to become a serial killer in just 10 days and lose 5 kg at the same time. Quite a bit of black humor, weird scientists and towards the end zombies that are quite entertaining. I had to laugh quite a bit and thoroughly enjoyed this show.
- Bathory: The story of Erzsébet Báthory. Or rather not. Two hours that seem to last longer even… Some of the scenes are actually nice. But some just made me cringe. Some monks are sent to spy on the Countess. Why on earth do they have motorized skates, a camera and other technical inventions that don’t really fit a movie set around the year 1600. Oh please. At the entrance of the movie theater there was a big white board, letting visitors leave their opinion about the movies. One comment said: “Without the monks please.” I wholeheartedly agree. I would have liked to like this one, nice historical setting and costumes, but there were too many irritating wtf moments to enjoy it.
- Loft: I don’t remember watching anything with Dutch (Flanders) language and German subtitles. Funny, how close the languages are sometimes and how totally different at others. A few friends get hold of a Loft to get away from every day life and especially their wives and girlfriends. Here they can cheat, celebrate and enjoy… until they find a dead body in there one day. There is a plot to this story. And it gets twisted. And twisted again. At some point, I thought it would never end but instead come up with different endings and more twists till eternity. It did end, I did enjoy it, it is not my new favorite.
- Hansel and Gretel: Another Korean one, not quite the classical fairy tale. After having an accident, Eun-Soo has luck to find help and is guided to a house deep in the forest. Recovered after a night of sound sleep he starts to walk home and comes right back to the house… Some nice twists and the original Hansel and Gretel is an important element here, but not retold. Interesting and fun to watch, but not entirely convincing.
So two Korean movies, I did like them, but not as much as “The Isle” (Seom) or “Oldboy”. Sexykiller was the most fun one of the bunch, though a bit over the edge sometimes. Overall lots of fun and a nice crowd at the festival, different from the average audience. Mediocre movies, only recommended if you enjoy independent or B-movies.
Last week we had our little get together with FSFE and KDE people.
That was planned as a local thing to just get to see each other (living in the same city and only meeting in different countries is weird). So to my surprise we had visitors from Karlsruhe, namely Sput of Quassel fame and Lydia (Amarok, and she’s here more frequently) and Eckhart promo/marble from Augsburg. And us few locals of course, so we added up to nine in total. It was nice food and lots of talking from seven to midnight. Actually everyone was there a little before seven, except Lydia and me that is… oops, I take the blame 🙂 We took a looong walk from the city center to the restaurant. Don’t trust me to find a place after I haven’t been there for a year…
We tricked everyone into playing KSquares in memory of the Linux Tag. It is fun to play on the touch screens of the tablet PCs.
After this nice evening Eckart stayed a little longer so we kept talking for quite some time in the night and the next morning. Fun!
Now that was a week ago. Today Alejandro of Amarok fame arrived here coming over from Barcelona. Since we both craved being outside for a while we went for a walk in the near by forest to see the Bärenseen (bear lakes, no bear except the stone one that Alejandro spotted though) and sat there for something to drink. Tomorrow we’ll go into town to see what Stuttgart has to offer.
Lately Git was (and still is) one of the hot topics in KDE land. After Qt has moved to gitorious.org for their public repositories, one question for KDE is where to host the KDE repository – on KDE infrastructure or for example also on Gitorious?
The Amarok team decided they want Git rather now than later. This is why their SVN-repository is now read-only and you can find Amarok on Gitorious. I talked with Lydia a bit about this and we figured it would be good to see how it works and checked how someone external to the project would submit code by creating a merge request.
This is not what a regular contributor will want to do for the usual bug fixes if they are straight forward.
Creating an account on Gitorious is as easy as it gets – pick a name and password and you are done. If you happen to have a KDE-SVN account you might want to ask one of the KDE Admins on Gitorious to add you to the KDE-developers group, but that is not what I had in mind for my test.
Choose any project on Gitorious that you want to work on and start by creating a clone. Remember, we look at it from the “external patch contributor” side. If you simply check out the existing repository, you will not be able to push your changes (unless you are in the right group and use the right url). You will also need a ssh key pair in order to push changes back. This is similar to working with ssh in the KDE svn repo. ssh-add will still work therefor 😀
In my case choosing the project meant going to http://gitorious.org/amarok. Next select the branch I want to work on, which is “trunk” or “HEAD” (in git talk), in case of the Amarok repository called “amarok – Mainline”. I am logged in to Gitorious, so I see a button to clone the repository (and on the way I get asked to add my public ssh key, so a secure connection for pushing and pulling can be established).
That’s what I want, so I get my clone of Amarok. Next step – check it out – or better “clone” it.
There are two urls that the page of my clone shows, one public that everyone can clone and the other that let’s me push my changes.
When starting to work on it, you want that url, I’ll
git clone git@gitorious.org:~frederik/amarok/frederiks-clone.git
Creating a commit just for the sake of testing seemed stupid, so I sat down and added a little feature that I find actually useful. “Stop playing after this track” has been available in the playlist for a while now. But I usually don’t bother opening the Amarok window just to find the current track and right click it to make Amarok stop playing after this song. It usually happens that when I’m listening to music and I have to leave a few minutes later, I find the current song is just great. Since this will most likely also be the case for the next song, I’ll never be able to leave. So I need a global shortcut to help out in this situation… “stop playing after current track”.
I create a branch and check it out:
git branch stop_playing_after_this
git checkout stop_playing_after_this
Compile it once to make sure, start adding my changes. Since I don’t know the Amarok code, this took me a few extra minutes. Now my patch is ready and it’s just hackish enough to get a rebuke from my favorite Amarokkers in which case I can see how the commenting on merge requests in Gitorious works 😉
Commit my changes:
git commit -a
Now it’s time to get it out into the interwebs (or Gitorious at least):
git push origin stop_playing_after_this
One mistake I made was when I tried to push my changes was pushing master instead which is just my checkout (which I had updated to a newer revision at this point. Not what I wanted.
git push origin master
I documented some of the steps on techbase in the patch contributor section: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Sources/KDE_git-tutorial Most of the docs are written by the Amarok people themselves though.
In my opinion, Gitorious seems like a great option for KDE. A few points are still lacking though. For example I wouldn’t know how to get notifications about commits in a branch that I’d like to watch (similar to what commit-filter does), but that’s something that will come, I bet [I’m told eean works on this already and there are rss feed in the meantime]. And at the moment there is not possibility to close bugs on bugs.kde.org with a commit yet. So no big points really, just minor annoyances.
Well behaved Git use means having the first line of the commit message to be a short summary… and to see this line in Gitorious you need to click on the “1 commit” part of the log.
And then we were wondering who would get notified of the merge request. Since Chani just responded, it seems that for now, all people in the KDE-developers group get notified, which is maybe a bit too many for an Amarok commit, so that needs to get sorted out.
All in all, I’m really happy with this, pretty much everything worked as expected, but it sure takes some time to wrap your head around git. Sending a patch by mail would have been faster for this example, but since I need to polish it up a bit, now I have much better tools at my hands in order to do that. And compared to using git-svn this was all painless and easy 🙂
Thanks and congratulations to the Amarokers for being brave. And for helping me get the git stuff right.
Hi all 🙂
If you happen to be in Stuttgart in two weeks – August 1st 2009 that is – why don’t you drop by for a chat with some of your favorite local FSFE and KDE people?
Back in February we had a nice FSFE fellow meeting combined with a party to celebrate the KDE 4.2 release. Panagiotis who became active in the German translation team after that event asked for a repetition. Of course we won’t let him (and you) down.
It’s been half a year (and it’s KDE 4.3 time), so again we meet, talk and discuss, free software people, you are invited to come and join us!
We decided to switch location (and have food this time). Come and visit us here: Restaurant Wartburg Tol(l)eranz on August 1st, 19:00.
If you plan on comming, don’t hesitate to leave a comment so we can approximate how many people we’ll be.
On a totally unrelated note, Daniel started picking and poking at Parley again, which of course makes him my hero of the day! In fact we sat down for an entire day of Akademy to discuss lots of issues and interface problems that we’ll hopefully address at some point. It’s always great to get some motivation and energy when talking to you fellow geeks 🙂
Now that Akademy is over, it’s time to meet again, right? 😉
Yesterday we arrived at Gran Canaria and made our way to the hotel. Alejandro was waiting at the airport when Daniel and Frank and I arrived from Stuttgart (followed by Sven a few minutes later with a different machine, so we saw him before taking off and after landing).
The hotel is nice but didn’t make us stay long. Instead we walked along the beach to the Alfredo Krauss auditorium to register for the conference. No t-shirt this time… a towel instead, by Qt Software… so does the meme “always bring a towel” lose validity with this game changer? I doubt it – unless it becomes a tradition to get cute towels as presents 😀 Those served as instant GCDS attendant markers, so we had fun greeting all those with green towels (mostly still wrapped in plastic :)).
From there we went to find some good Spanish food and walked back towards the hotel to find good icecream.
Back to the auditorium to have a beer or two sponsored by Canonical. There we met a large amount of great people and lots of discussions going on. After the party I enjoyed a moment of silence, walking back home along the beach barefooted.
This morning started with a quick swim for me, which feels great, perfect water temperature, then off to breakfast with Alejandro and then to the keynotes which I enjoy just now. Great talks by Robert Lefkowitz, Walter Bender and now Richard M. Stallman so far.
Putting on my KDE Edu hat, one thing that I liked a lot about Walter Bender’s talk is the idea to directly give the student the source code at hand. Integrated in the Sugar UI. This is really a great move that I didn’t think much about before. Carsten lately also expressed his newfound love for Python, so maybe we should discuss this venue for KDE Edu also since it makes teacher’s and student’s involvation much easier. Back to listening to the keynotes.
Hi Planet FSFE,
like Adrian I decided to move my blog from kdedevelopers.org to the FSFE blogging platform which features a nice WordPress installation.
Just now I’m preparing for Gran Canaria to join the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit (and especially Akademy).
I noticed I still haven’t updated my blog with all the Linux Tag or Linux Day events I’ve been to lately. All of them included some KDE booth work and nice chats with other FSFE Fellows.
The first is quite a while back, 28th of March, Linx Info Tag Augsburg. Lydia and I joined Eckhart who organized the KDE presence there. I had the chance to talk to Thomas Thym again (who gave a talk and very enthusiastically presented KDE to people passing by). We had a great dinner in the evening, joining with others (I recall some Gentoo people and FSFE fellows). The KVM talk was very interesting, I still want to have a go at playing with ARM type of devices and other microprocessors but haven’t found the time yet 🙁 Ingo of Radio Tux was there as well and we had a good time walking around the exhibitions and talking to people (dude, maybe we could coordinate traveling, we came there both from Stuttgart).
 Thomas discussing with our Debian neighbours Also with the help (and some pushing – luckily no one got hurt 😉 ) from the Debianistas who were camping (boothing?) next to us, I finally got around to install Debian on my notebook that day. I still use it and I’m happy with it so far (to my own surprise). A few weeks ago blog posts about distro switching were quite en vogue on planetkde, I guess I’m too late though.
Next up was the local event at the Hochschule der Medien, Linux Day (note the slight difference in the title, they use the English Day :P). I was working that day, so I skipped the talks and came just for the important part, the social event afterwards. I met Daniel and Frank from KDE and of course, (is he following me or am I following him?) Ingo. No travelling involved this time, although the 800 meters to my home seemed quite long after one or two (three?) free beers (free as in beer). Some talks would have been interesting that day, for example a preview of using JavaScript in Firefox to manipulate the contents of HTML5 video tags.
Finally last week Linux Tag in Berlin took place. After a horrible trip there (involving two hours delay, a broken passenger door letting rain in and a close encounter with a truck) I got to enjoy two days of this nice event. Our booth was staffed well, together with Kubuntu and Amarok and I don’t think there was any time without visitors. All in all I would have expected more visitors.
We had fun talking to users and other developers (for example Christoph from the OpenOffice user experience team). I enjoyed lunch with lots of people, for example Lena and Mattias. Meeting so many people was great. And of course Ingo was there also 😉
Finally on Saturday (after I gave a talk about our KDE Education apps which went quite well) some of us went to Kreuzberg to pick up something to eat (passing by the great KDAB offices to drop some of our stuff) and stubled right into the Gay Parade (CSD) as you can read in Sebas’ blog. Chani and I went home at some point to get some sleep, which ended not so great because we couldn’t get into the flat. So we waited outside for an hour. On Sunday those left at the flat went to have good food at an Italian restaurant and then journeyed back home (or to Oslo).
Now it’s already getting late, so I better get to bed. At least I finally managed to write about some of the awesome events I’ve been to lately (still leaving out the Amarok sprint). Tomorrow packing for Gran Canaria is due, I’m leaving with the same flight as Frank, Sven and Daniel (do you belive in chance? we all booked independently). Let’s see who else will be on that plane. I can hardly wait to get there 🙂
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