Mario Fux
About Fellow No 1's life
KDE work day 5: Papers, presentations and sprints
December 2nd, 2010
Morning. Right now I’m in my bed after a busy day and crossing half of Switzerland. I’m in the south in the middle of the Alpes (with almost no snow down here in the valley) as I need to do some civil defence service tomorrow (some kind of substitute for the mandatory military service we (men) need to do in Switzerland). Anyway, that’s not really interesting (I hope the rest of the blog is more interesting for some of you ;-).
This morning at the university me and my collegue did a presentation about our project about a morphological API for KDE. The presentation went ok but I’m not really satisfied. And there is some code which I hope to publish in the next weeks and months. Not really sophisticated stuff but probably some nice ideas for inspiration. Finally it should become part of the Sonnet framework of KDE (there is some quite interesting stuff in playground as well).
Another KDE and university project of me ended yesterday when I handed in my paper about the KDE semantic clipboard and some proposals for solutions (I don’t want to publish it here right now but if you’re interested I can send it to you privately. Just send me an email to fux at the KDE server dot the shortcut of organisation). The project did not really end with this paper but with an oral test on the 16th of December. But that should work quite well. The project included no programming but I still hope to do some development on this thing in the new year.
And another thing of the next year is yet another meeting or sprint in Randa. After Tokamak 3 and the KDE multimedia meeting 2010 this will be the third spreenting (;-) I organize in Randa. The main topic or group which is going to work there at the beginning of June 2011 consists of KDE-Nepomuk people. I’m in contact with Sebastian Trueg and some other people and we hope to make KDE SC 4.8 the semantic desktop/Nepomuk release! Another group which could have a sprint there is the KDevelop/Kate team (you didn’t know, right?;-). And then there is another team or group. Mark Kretschmann of Amarok asked me to help organizing another multimedia meeting in Randa and as I don’t want to organize two of them in one year … There is enough space and we don’t yet fill the house ;-).
Lastly Aaron Seigo blogged about a KDE sprint manager. If you’re one of this guys or gals working on this thing, please include some name tag printer, financial integration (with e.g. Kraft or KMyMoney), reinbursement form support, accommodation night support and so on ;-).
Oh and right after my last blog (no connection) entry Vishesh Handa wrote about a nepomuk backup and syncing solution. BTW: Vishesh: Hope you’ll be in Randa next year!
Before I finish with an outlook to next week’s blog I’ve some ethical or moral problem for you to solve: as I estimate to invest one month of work time to organize this meeting I thought this year to put some allowance expense for me in the budget for the sprint (and some amount for the cook and helper!). If and when I find enough sponsors. Is this ok?
Next week I’ll write probably some more about the morphological API, about the progress of the sprint organization (this year I want to have a more formal registration system as it’s easier to organize with facts than with uncertainties and it was a wish in this year’s sprint evaluation) and what else next week? You’ll see. Good night, dear reader!
KDE work day 4: Why we need an integrated backup framework…
November 25th, 2010
As I’m still doing a lot of stuff (I don’t know if really "on" or "for" but certainly) "about" KDE it makes sense to report about this on a weekly manner.
This week and the last ones I work on two KDE things for university. One is a paper about the KDE Semantic Clipboard. Deadline is next week but it doesn’t involve coding. Just analyzing, learning and proposing solutions for some of the problems the clipboard has. The KDE Semantic Clipboard is a semantic clipboard prototype written by Tobias Wolf for his diploma thesis in 2008.
The other thing is linguistic stuff for KDE. We (a study collegue and me) are going to present our project about a "Morphological API for KDE" next week in our seminar. There coding is involved but we’re still in the trial-and-error or proof-of-concept phase. It’s about stemming, part of speech tagging, morphological analysis and generation, tokenization, etc. More about this next week. But during brainstorming and thinking about our project and linguistic stuff in KDE in general I once again had the feeling that the KDE platform misses an important part.
KDE is a great platform, integrated with a lot of good software and it seems to provide the user a unique desktop experience (DX?;-) which is highly customizable. Furthermore the software becomes more personal during time. That means a personal additional dictionary, adapted configuration, personal look and feel, special activities, etc. And for the future I think the desktop learns with time the its user knows specific languages and thus e.g. provides him or her with articles and search results in the languages he or she knows best. That’s going to be just one of the learning abilities of your desktop.
But there is a problem. How do we get this data and configurations from our old laptop to our new one without losing the metadata, the configurations, our addressbook, the arduously collected personal dictionary (for spell checking and Co) and other personal and beloved stuff. More and more applications and frameworks in and around the KDE world don’t anymore store their data in normal text files but in databases or other ways.
E.g. Akonadi (and thus all the kde pim software) uses a MySQL (btw: let’s not discuss at this point about the reason to have different DBs) database for data storage (or better caching), Amarok stores its data in a database, Blogilo (with which I write this blog posts) stores it’s data somewhere (but not in a text file if I’m right) and the Nepomuk framework uses Virtuoso as its database where it stores all the RDF triples.
Several years ago Ivan Cukic started the work on such a backup and syncing framework. Its name was Kamion and was based on XML files for the configuration stuff of the different applications. Afaik Ivan spoke about it to be a bit over complex. He then had to do other stuff and the project was stalled. It got a revival several months later but no real release happened and the project is sleeping since then.
But I don’t know if the Kamion framework would be the right thing or if there is or are simpler solutions. Nonetheless I think the KDE platform needs such a framework. To get a personalized desktop from one hardware device to another one. Not just cloning the partition but extracting the configuration stuff, the data and send it to the other device and save it at the right place.
So this is atm just an idea and no time in the next month to work on this from my side. I know. There are a lot of ideas, even some good ones but when nobody works on them it’s worth a sh… When there was such a framework the application configuration extraction files (word of the day π would be a good task or good tasks for Googles Code In.
Yeah, I know. Quite a lot and dense information. Hope you can digest it. And apropos digest. Please, please, please start helping Danny with his and our weekly commit-digest.
Next week I’ll write more about the linguistic stuff and the KDE sprint(s) I’ll organize next year. And BTW: KDE … (eventough I regularly read kde-promo and all the promotion blogs I don’t know exactly what the current slogan should be π OK. KDEs workspaces, applications and platform was released today in version 4.6 Beta 1.
And if and when you like my work, reports and stuff, you can flattr me (see below but probably wait some weeks till the reports get regular again and you get a better picture of my work).
KDE work day > 3: A short note
October 26th, 2010
It’s quite some time since I last blogged. I wanted to report every week about my KDE work day: one day dedicated only to KDE, be it development, research, documentation. Unfortunately I didn’t succeed in reporting about it. But I more or less managed to work one day each week for my KDE skills.
Normally it wasn’t a whole day just for this but several hours during the week and mostly all hours summed up to more than a day. So there is and was a lot going on.
I did a lot of work on my Qt skills. Tried several things about linguistic stuff like stemming, part of speech tagging. Most of the stuff not really worth publishing. And there is other stuff. Stuff not yet ready to talk about in the public. But hopefully soon.
And there was and is this Qt and KDE programming course in my local LUG: We’re still on it and the number of participants grows!
And even Konqi and his tale are alive. In my brain. There will be another story but I don’t know when and I don’t know when I’ll tell you more about this two bigger projects. But I will. I just wanted to let you know that I’m still alive and coding, reading, organizing, thinking, brainstorming, talking, discussing, ….
Oh and almost forgot this: I’m now since 6 weeks in the English Grammar foundation course. Do you see a difference ;-)?
Konqi the dragon – the tale begins
August 18th, 2010
So this shall be the start of a tale or a long story about the little dragon Konqi and its adventures in our (or his) world. But first a preamble.
As you probably read in my former blog entry I did a schooling to be able to teach in the primary school and in general I like or better love kids and people who are from time to time childish ;-). And I’d like to improve my english language skills (I’ll do another course in autumn as well). So there is no better possibility to train than writting in this language. In the next time I plan to write on a rather regular basis about the smaller and bigger adventures of the little dragon Konqi. It should be or become a story or tale for kids that means if and when you have, know or own some of these beings tell them this story. or let them read it. Young human beings are still honest and very critical and they will tell you or me if they like it or not..
In the same way as I’m interested in your comments (about the content, about the grammar or orthography (errors ;-)) I’m interested in the opinion of your kids. And there is another thing I’d like to mention before I start to tell you about the life of another little being: What’s a good tale without good and nice pictures and paintings? So if you’re in some way talented or you are one of the few KDE artists (Nuno, Alexandre and all the others π and you’ve some spare time send me an email (fux at the KDE server DOT the mandatory TLD org) and you could be the first who gets the newest report about Konqi’s life. And probably and with some luck the next part of the story has a nice little painting besides.
Oh btw, Krita would be the perfect tool for your fantasy. And there is only one rule for the paintings: Konqi must be green! And now let’s fly to another far away part of the world …
Once upon a time there was a little dragon called Konqi. He was rather small for his kind but more than anything else his heart was good. Konqi grew up in a land far away in the mountains near a nice little village inhabited by human beings. This village was surrounded by a dense coniferous forest and several small rivulets which ceased in magical little ponds. Some of the rivulets had its sources high in the mountains others started just somewhere in between the numberous tall trees. In the steeper areas of the forest there were some caves. Most of them were deep and never entered by a human being, others were just the right place to hide when a sudden summer rain began to fall down to earth.
And in one of these caves, certainly one of the more hidden ones, the little dragon Konqi lived. He was still in his childhood when one day he decided to walk over to the big hill and check what’s there behind this big little rock. After his breakfast, which consisted of berries of the forest, mushrooms and some tasty leaves (Konqi was not one of these dragons who liked to eat up other beings or earthlings), he packed some food for lunch, closed the door of his cave and took the stick which was leant to the rock in front of his cave. It was already at this moment when he first had the feeling that this day would become one of the more thrilling of his long life.
After some minutes of walk through the dense forest he had to cross the first little river. At this place the trees stood not that narrow so that the sun could throw its beams till the ground and there were some white little flowers which enjoyed the warm light of the sun and the soggy neighborhood of the rivulet. Konqi took a break sat down and drank some of the river’s water to refresh himself. He was not really cautious in doing this even though he heard stories about some bewitched waters in the forest. But they must be much deeper in the forest and at places much darker than this beautiful place. And actually it was not the first time he took some of this water.
Finishing his rest he packed up the blanket he had been sitting on and started off into the darker part of the forest. Ten minutes later Konqi then found a place where a lot of different mushrooms were growing. But as he already had enough of them in his bundle he decided to continue his walk over to the big hill. Then after a nice morning walk through denser and clearer parts of the forest he arrived at the hill at around midday. But before he had lunch he wanted to investigate the new side of the hill. ‘New’ because he never before was this far away from his home cave. This was also an area where almost no trees grew.
On the other side of the hill the further area looked exactly the same and so he decided to continue his journey after a short lunch in the hot sun. "Why not take a few more steps away from home?" he was thinking. Just as he was taking his first step of this new part of his trip he perceived a gentle voice almost inaudible. First the voice was just gentle but then suddenly you could recognize fear in it. For the shortest of a moment he continued in lowering his foot to the ground but then suddenly and abruptly its motion was frozen.
And why Konqi’s motion froze so suddenly and who the owner of this gentle and silent voice was you’ll probably find out in the next week at this place. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoye(d) it.
KDE work day 2 – git and lugo
August 11th, 2010
So good morning dear readers. It took a long time for this new and next entry of mine about my kde work days. But I’ve an excuse. I moved – and the new and better internet connection starts to work from the 19th of August. Till then I’m online only when I’m in the office and on some swiss train stations occasionally. It’s now more than two or three weeks since the last entry and I want to start right on about some stuff I did or tried.
Last Friday I started a serie of programming courses at my local LUG (the LUGO – Linux User Group Oberwallis). I’m not yet good in developing with Qt and KDE but I tought that I could give and share my new knowledge with some other LUG mates as I go on. And we already were a group of four people increasing in the next course. There are some spare notes and nine slides of a short presentation. Probably I still write some text of what I told them. But the course shall and will be quite interactive as we are all on different knowledge. So if and when you’re in Switzerland and speak German visit us. The next course is on Friday, the 10th of September 2010. Oh and btw. This Friday, the 13th of August, we have another general meeting at our LUG with some presentations about Linux on different devices (and of course a short presentation by me about KDE mobile) and somehow an integrated release party for KDE SC 4.5.0.
Then I read and tried some of the git stuff in the last weeks. As the projects grow (more than one file) and version control system begins to make sense and which could be better suited than git (no flame war about vcs please – I’ve choosen git because Qt already switched to it and KDE will finally switch to it in the next months). So here is a short summary and listing of some git commands:
- "man git-log" or "git help log" to get information about the git log command
- "git init" in a directory to create and initialize a new git respository
- "git add ." to add the current directory to the cache (index) and
- "git commit" to finally commit it
- "git commit -a" to commit all new changes without explicitely adding them
- "git diff –cached" to see the changes and
- "git log", "git log -p" or "git log –stat –summary" to view the history
- "git branch <newBranch>" creates a new branch and
- "git merge <newBranch>" merges it with the master branch (what a surprise π
- "git clone <localOrRemoteUrl> <newName>" clones another repository
- "git pull <otherRepo> master" merges the changes of the otherRepo with your master and
- "git fetch <otherRepo> master" does the same without merging
- "gitk" is a graphical history and diff browser for git
All the stuff I read or learned is from the gittutorial and git documentation (aptitude install git-doc on a Debian system ;-).
As you probably already noticed I’m somehow interested in semantic and natural language stuff. Some months ago I asked some friends of mine to send me five to ten (5-10) sentences in natural (human) language about searches they want to do on their computers. Something like: "show me all the text documents I worked on last week and tagged with ‘project X’". So here is a wish to you or job for you: Send me some such natural language query (english or german, probably some french once, that’s all I speak and understand ;-), preferably from collegues or friends who are not power users but normal computer users. I want to analyse them and try something out.
As this blog entry is already longer than expected I want to add some information about myself. You should now my name and that I like (or love?;-) free software and thus KDE. I’m 31 years old, life in Switzerland (grew up in the south of it and life now somewhere in the middle (who knows where and read the last entry?;-). Eleven years ago I finished my schooling as a primary school teacher but decided to study which I hope to finish in the spring of 2012. My major at the university is education and social education and the minors are computer sciences (with a special interest in AI and semantic web engineering) and computational linguistics.
And to end this entry. There is a new Qt technology coming up about the semantic web and desktop: QtSparql… (but Soprano is worth a look as well to say the least) and soon you’ll find here more information about Konqi the dragon…
Question to the KDE multimedia meeting participants
July 29th, 2010
If you were a participant of this years KDE multimedia meeting I would be interested in your opinion:
As you probably know this was the second kde meeting I organized and I plan to do another one next year (btw I got today the OK of a certain person and I think this means the topic for next years meeting is set but more about this in the following weeks). What do you think if I would earn some money with the organization of the next meeting.
As I like or love to organize such meetings and I doesn’t seem to be that bad in this I’d like to organize another and another and … You see ;-). But even if it’s a lot of fun it’s also work and time consuming work nonetheless. For the meeting this year it took a good month of time to organize everything (incl. the meeting time). The whole amout of time is or was distributed over half a year.
And the other thing is that I need to eat (;-), pay the bills and as I’m moving to my girlfriend and my studies end in the next year or two a family is not that far away. And that’s another reason I’d like to professionalize the meeting, make a conference/sprint out of it. An annual one. And don’t missunderstand me: I’d don’t want to become rich on the shoulders of kde developers and/or the KDE e.V. The contrary I starting to plan and search for sponsors much earlier this time to decrease the amount of money the e.V. "needs" to sponsor.
Oh and if or when you’re waiting for my next "kde work day" blog. It’s in the making but as I’m moving (the whole room is full of stuff to package π some stuff delays a bit. And there’s anoher idea floating in my mind. Something somehow kde related but not code related and something for the kids and probably something to play and something about Konqi the dragon but …
Oh and I’ll do something like (yes, I like the word "something" π a qt and kde course in my local linux user group… Oh and this is the last oh: I’ll do an english course in the next semester to meliorate my english grammar. Hopefully to your pleasure as well ;-).
KDE work day 1 – xml and nepomuk
July 14th, 2010
I’m sitting in the train from Zurich to Burgdorf (Switzerland) and want to report, dear reader, about my first week of KDE (or atm qt) development. It was not really as I planned it, I did not work a whole day on qt and kde, but several hours during the week.
As I told you last week my first week was about an xml indenter. Some years ago when I started to track routes for OpenStreetMap.org my Garmin GPS device spat out bad formatted xml (GPX) files. Bad means here that all of the content was on one line and as I sometimes wanted to extract single tracks me and the dear editor (Kwrite or Kate) had some problems to read and understand it. So then I wished there was a simple possibility to indent and format this piece of … I’m sure there are tools for this and probably I would have found them quite fast but as I didn’t search that much … Now in the last weeks when I played with QtXml and the dom API i stumbled over a simple function which did exactly what I wanted.
And so last week on my train home (other track π I took out my laptop and decided to write this little program to solve my indention problem. 50 lines and 15 minutes later it worked. You can download it here if it’s of any use for you. It takes two arguments (input file and output file name) and a third optional one (number of indention spaces) and is of cource a command line tool. And don’t forget: I’m no code peat – at least not yet.
The other project was about a Wikipedia reader or Wikipedia viewer. Almost the same circumstances here. Some weeks or a year ago I already played a bit with Qts WebView component (QtWebkit). It was amazing how easy it was to write a webbrowser ;-). So last Friday on the train (which got broken after ten minutes what gave me more time to hack π (btw it was the same track as this one (and yes I like nesting ;-)) to my girlfriend I did it.
It was amazing for me how easy it was and how good the Qt documentation is. After something like an hour there was it. A simple Wikipedia reader where you just have to write the word or concept you want to search for and it shows you the corresponding Wikipedia article (hopefully even in the right language). If you are a KDE or Qt developer you’ll say how simple this thing is but for me it was a great experience.
As I did not have an internet connection on the train I could not try it out. But the internet connection where my girlfriend (and soon I π live does not yet work for my Debian laptop. So on the other day I thought to myself: let’s try to “port” the Wikipedia reader to her Windows notebook which has internet access. “Port” is in quotation marks because it was not really porting. I download the Qt SDK for Windows (Open Source version of course) which was actually the hardest part of “porting” (not because of Qt or Nokia but because of the lame internet connection).
Two hours later I just copied my wikiviewer folder to a usb stick, plugged it into the Windows laptop, imported the .pro file (waited a moment and yes, I don’t like Windows Vista and yes my girlfriend will get a GNU/Linux installation and yes I asked her ;-), pushed the “Run” button and it worked. It just worked. Sorry, I know. It may be normal for you but I’m amazed.
During the last week and days I did a lot of reading. Beneath the reading of blog posts on planet.kde.org and the lurking and reading of 10 to 20 kde mailing lists I read a lot about RDF (Resource Description Framework), LinkedData, RDFs (RDF schema), OWL, etc. Almost all of the stuff where presentation slides of a course I took a year or so ago at the university about the semantic web. After some reading I wanted myself to visualize some ontologies (the meaning, semantics or vocabulary). And I (re)found the W3C RDF validator which outputs the graphs in different graphics formats.
After downloading the Nepomuk (and here we are finally π ontologies in the RDF/XML format I saw that the validator takes URLs as input as well (anyway I want to work with the RDF/XML version as well). Interestingly three of the ontologies failed to produce a graph (namely the NIE core, the NID3 and the PIMO ontology). I don’t know where the failure is but there could be something wrong.
This blog post gets longer and longer and there is still some stuff remaining (hope somebody likes to read it anyway). During the playing with the Wikipedia reader I recognized that already with such small things and few lines of code a version control system could be handy. So next week I want to read about Git, work and play with it and probably set up a git server (for the Strafful project I need it anyway).
And yes (or no) Strafful will be open source and free software but I won’t publish it before it has some basic features and some things I want it to have. The earliest you’ll see a 1.0 version is January 2011. And no (or yes π It will be about RDF, Nepomuk, the semantic web and the end of Google ;-).
So next week you’ll read here about Git, hopefully about my setup of a KDE development environment (and yes, we need something that easy like the Qt SDK for KDE: choose the platform, download a package and begin to develop. Qt has a great development platform but KDE’s is even better) and probably I’ll tell you what “Strafful”, the name, actually means.
My plan is still that I dedicate a whole weekday for Qt/KDE development, more or less half of it reading documenation (at least at the beginning) and half of it developing. And at most 30 to 45 minutes to write a blog post about it. Hope to be shorter next time and for something somehow unrelated: do you know www.TED.com and the TEDtalks? Great page, visit it!
BTW: Now I miss a feature in Blogilo: checking if all the links work.
I want to develop (for) KDE and I will!
July 5th, 2010
From now on I want to dedicated at least one work day each week to develop and program. Of course not all the 24 hours but something between 8 and 9 hours.
It’s not the first time I start my kde code contribution but hopefully it will be the last time. This blog should be something like a diary for this experience. There were already some blogs some time ago here on the planet about people’s first experiences with kde development. But this blog won’t be a howto or step by step introduction but a blog with links and what I’ve done on this day and about what I plan for the next week.
And by this way probably my big project "Strafful" will become alive or gets at least a first 1.0 releason in something around half a year or a year from note. I’m taking notes about it, about a manifesto, about milestones, different widgets, different platforms, a lot of stuff but the first public release will be 1.0. But more during the next weeks and months.
Btw this won’t be, as I already told above, my first first experience with Qt and KDE. A year ago I already worked through (and btw I hope my english will get better during the next months as well π Daniel Molketins Qt4-Book (german homepage here). A really nice start. And I’ve done some smaller experiments and little project with Qt and Co. Like a toponym detector for a computational linguistics exercise (together with a collegue and foma: a finite-state machine toolkit and library. And I’ve read several Qt tutorials and tutorials and articles on KDE’s great techbase pages.
So here is something like a teaser for the next blog of my KDE work day. As I’m doing some geo tracking for OpenStreetMap.org from time to time a problem appeared to me that my Garmin devices spits out horribly formatted GPX files. And as I worked with Qt dom xml stuff lately I’ll do a short xml formatter next time and a simple wikipedia reader. These are the plans for my first real KDE work day. Let’s see what the outcome will be.
My secret about the KDE multimedia meeting 2010
July 2nd, 2010
I’d like to tell you a secret of why in fact I organized the KDE multimedia meeting. It was completely egoistic. I just wanted stable versions of my preferred multimedia software. And the success is finally arriving. On the 31st of May Christoph Pfister released the long awaited 1.0 version of Kaffeine for KDE 4. Thx a lot for this. And k3b‘s MichaΕ MaΕek released the 2.0 stable version some days ago as well. Thx a lot!
But this was just an introduction and not really the main topic of this blog post. It’s about some statistics of the meeting. I did a questionnaire, which you can find here in pdf form. And 25 people completed it. The day before yesterday (when I started writing this blog post some weeks ago π I put all the ratings, remarks and data into rkward (a KDE tool for statistics) but today they all disappeared :-(. I don’t want to blame rkward because it’s becoming a really great tool worth a look! Fortunately there were some plots but the rest was undiscoverable. Today I recollected the data in OpenOffice.org-Calc and here are the results of the Swiss jury (yes, I like the Eurovision Song Contest ;-).
The questionnaire consisted of a part about the person (sex, age, first time in Switzerland and group), a rating part and two last questions about the idea of another KDE group which could come to Randa and if they want to come back themselves. But first some general information about the meeting and the location.
We had 45 persons there which means developers, artists, organizers, bug fixers, etc. The house has a capacity of up to 100 people with something like 20 single rooms, 6 group bed rooms, 4 group rooms, one big group room under the roof, a chapel, two dining rooms, a club room, a chief office, 4 restrooms, a kitchen and some other infrastructural rooms. And there is a BBQ place outside surounded by a big green field.
Randa is located at approximately 1440 meters above sea level. We did a trip to Zermatt (1600 above sea level and 12 km away) walking back to Randa. And some of us even went up to the top of the Klein Matterhorn which is at 3883 meters above sea level.
From the 45 participants where 10 female and from the 25 questionnaire fillers were 6 female. In the picture below you see the age distribution.
We served almost 500 meals during the 5 days (thanks a lot to the cook Hadrien Eggs who was on holiday and cooked for us the whole week) and spent 15 EUR or 10 CHF for the food and drinks (excluding beer π per person per day. The alcohol drinkers at the meeting (i don’t drink any) emptied 360 bottles of FreeBeer. The network helpers (thx Oliver Summermatter and Co) distributed several dozens of network cables and 6 or something wifi accesspoints.
We had more the 150 guest-nights in the house. And I hope (and think, because of the fresh mountain air π most of the people slept well even tough the wooden floor of the old house was sometimes quite noisy (btw I slept in my families chalet nearby where the plasma meeting Tokamak3 happened ;-). But now back to the questionnaire and its results:
As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing ;-). Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).
- Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
- Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
- Location (house) in general: 2.6
- Location (area, geographically): 2.8
- Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
- Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
- Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
- Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
- Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
- Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
- Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
- Organization staff competence: 3
So as you see most of the items are between “good” and “very good” except of the item about the wifi. As I heard and experienced wifi is always a bad point at conferences but nonetheless we’ll do better next year. And yes there’ll be probably a next years meeting. More information to come…
On the proposal and remarks site of the questionnaire we got some valuable information: “real coffee” was missing, we need a “more formal registration system” next year and the house was sometimes noisy where we can’t fix a lot unfortunately. In the last question I asked if the people know of another KDE group which should have a meeting in Randa and the answers where between “yes”, “no” and “Nepomuk (the same and all the others” ;-). All want to come back to Randa, nobody ticked off “no” ;-).
And to end this post and staying somehow in the row of all the other posts here on the planet: I’m not going to Akademy. But if everything worked out fine I’ve a proxy there for my vote at the KDE e.V. agm. And I’ll read and watch everything that happens over there so write and capture a lot!
Oh an btw: I begin to love Blogilo! What a nice piece of furniture …ah… software.
Multimedia meeting day 1: great team
May 21st, 2010
So the second time at the KDE multimedia meeting ends. I’m tired but happy. I’ve a great team (Oliver Summermatter for the network and several other jobs and Hadrien Eggs, the cook, the one and only)!. Thx you two and thx to all the other participants who all are helpful where help is needed.
My day was good. It did not start at the meeting but with a job interview for a social worker job. Went fine. Then an interview with the local newspaper (Walliser Bote) about the meeting. Should be published tomorrow. Hope to get some people interested for Monday, the open day at the meeting.
I’d like to spend more time with the developers and in the presentations but I’m quite busy to inform the new arrivers, organize the trip and taxi, do some finance stuff the I don’t lose the overview, check with the cook that we’ve enough food for the day and next day, do some promotion, etc. pp. But the people here are really busy. Just check the community wikis recent changes and you see what’s going one.
Now slowly I’m able to compare who the different teams in KDE work and I see my expectation confirmed that they are really busy. So cu and read you tomorrow for more news about the meeting and don’t forget to read more news about the meeting on planet.kde.org.
Oh yeah. Tomorrow afternoon we go to Zermatt and walk in a 2 to 3 hours hike back to Randa where we pass the lake where Aaron Seigo and Sebas like to swim ;-)…