Mario Fux

First about the upcoming IRC meeting about KDE’s Continuous Integration (CI) system. The Doodle resulted in the 2nd of December us our meeting day. We’ll see you in #kde-devel at 20.00 (8pm) CET (UTC+1). See this notepad about the agenda and Co.

And now about the way you can contribute to KDE even though you can’t program:

• Do you like to write thrilling articles about KDE and its software?
• Do you like to interview people?
• Are you an English native speaker and spot writing errors on first sight?
• Would you like to take care of regular and repetitive jobs like e.g. the beta release announcements?
• Do you know something about promo work and marketing?

Then we want you! Come to our mailing list or ping me on IRC in #kde-promo and tell us on what you’d like to work, what you’d like to improve and what your ideas are.

As a first task you can read the Promo and Dot page. As it’s a wiki and these pages might be outdated please fixed them and ask on the kde-promo mailing list if you’re not sure.

Just some more hours and the Randa Meetings 2014 fundraiser will close. It will end at 23.59 UTC, afterwards you need to go to the normal KDE donation page to support us ;-). So may I ask you one last time this year to help us and give something. It’s high time and we can still achieve a big jump on the progress bar with your help!

In the picture below you see the group photo of the Randa Meetings 2011 in the form of a jigsaw puzzle. The year and place when the KDE Frameworks 5 planning and work started which achieved an interim stop with the first stable release yesterday. Some great (KConfig, KArchive, Sonnet, ThreadWeaver, etc.) Qt addons for you Qt developers and for many different platforms.

Jigsaw puzzle of the group picture 2011

And guess what we plan to work on this year in Randa? Porting even more KDE applications to KDE Frameworks 5. The KDE Edu group will be there too and will port its collection of educational software to KF5. Software for kids and people that want to learn and understand the world. Understand why it’s important to be free in your decision to choose the tools you use to create great things and communicate it to the world. All these are things we work on for your and our freedom.

So take a look at your wallet and give what you can and thus help to make another great edition of the Randa Meetings possible where we create even better software for you.

First I’d like to thank David Vignoni for his work on the logo for the Randa meeting. It’s the basis for the work of the young informatic trainees. But the results are still secret (as even I haven’t seen anything myself but get the first results at the end of this week ;-).

And now to the ideas and proposals (btw this has nothing in common with the GSoC ideas of KDE!). As you probably or hopefully already know the KDE Nepomuk team will have a meeting in Randa this June (from the 1st to the 7th of this month) and we still want application developers to integrate this technology in their application or to work on some interesting and great new ideas. And there will be really good help as Sebastian Trüg will be in Randa and he is going to do one or the other workshop of Nepomuk basics. And here are some ideas and thoughts of mine to start your imagination engines:

• The KDE semantic clipboard. There is some code in the old subversion playground of KDE and in December 2010 I wrote a paper about this topic. In short, this clipboard enhances to normal one with the capability of knowing what (in the context of meaning) it copy-and-pastes. This clipboard does not just copy numbers and formatting but addresses, geographic coordinates or blbliographic references. Take a look and bring it to a releasable state. There are even some solution proposals in the above mentioned paper.
• All of the new KDE PIM application use Nepomuk technology through their Akonadi interactions.
• Digikam had (or has?) some capabilities to exchange its information and metadata with the Nepomuk storage. What about tagging your pictures with the contacts (and PIMO::Persons) of the new Kaddressbook and projects which are then usable system wide.
• And Amarok had (or again has?) some functions to share it’s music database with Nepomuk and thus make it system wide and not just enclosed in one applicatition.
• But there are as well good examples for existing Nepomuk integration: Bangarang. A multimedia player which remembers what you like, what music and videos you have on your system and where is more information about this media data (in the web).
• Another idea could be a (scientific) paper or article collector which understands the connections (or quotations) between the articles and that the strings at the top (authors) are actually persons and the references at the end of the articles are actually links and thus relations to other papers and articles. Take a look at the SWRC ontology.
• Yet another project which extensively uses Nepomuk is the new KDE Telepathy framework. They don’t just invent yet another represenation of a person and its contacts but use PIMO::Person and thus make connections to them system wide comprehensible and reusable.
• And let’s not forget the Plasma framework and its activities. But there is more and better information about this on the site of ivan Cukic.
• Or something completely new. An ontology for TV series, recordings and shows… (Update: Sebastian told me that there is already one: NMM. And Bangarang and some other applications use it.)
• And there is Zeitgeist and QtZeitgeist…

Enough ideas? And last but not at all least and I almost forgot it: two ideas for plasmoids (and corresponding dataengines).

• A person plasmoid which shows all files, documents, addresses, persons, music, pictures, etc. related to this person and if you drag and drop something to this plasmoid the things get related (and not tagged with the string of this person’s name (and if you don’t know yet the important difference, please ask as I seem to be a bad teacher and explainer then)). Imagine something like a plasmoid with the name and picture of the person and in the config some checkboxes for all related resources (documents, audio files, persons, etc.) which should be displayed in the plasmoid.
• There is actually no second idea but an almost infinite number: more plasmoids (and dataengines) for other resources like projects, geographic locations (imagine a radar like plasmoid with resources depending on their proximity.)

I think these are some ideas and possible projects. As we want to send the e.V. board an estimated budget for Randa 2011 meeting we’d like to close the registration at the end of the this week.

And here are some more news about sponsoring and Randa 2011:

• 200.00 CHF by a private person.
• 500.00 CHF reducation for house renting (and thus another 500.00 CHF less for the e.V. budget).

If you have other or more ideas don’t hesitate to talk with us and do this live at the Randa 2011 meeting! For further questions just come to our mailing list.

This morning at 8:30 I gave a presentation about KDE and design & graphics. The reason? It was quite spontaneous. Yesterday I got an email of a design and graphics teacher from the local (to the south of Switzerland and thus Randa) vocational school that he got an email of a colleague of mine that I need help in some "logos for Randa" stuff. After having a phone call I decided to visit the class this morning and present them about what KDE is and what the Randa meetings or sprints are and what kind of graphics I need for them. And since after the morning break they work on art for Randa 2011.

After the presentation I had some time to go through the class and saw some quite nice work. They worked on some business card ideas with Adobe Illustrator on Macs. But the nice thing was that they had Gimp and Firefox installed even though the teacher didn’t know Gimp. And I mentioned Inkscape as well (yes, I know, what about Krita and Karbon, will do better next time). And I couldn’t resist to mention that Safari is based on KDE technology. The pupils are actually first year informatic trainees but noone of them heard of KDE – till this morning ;-). I’m curious what they show or send me next week and who knows probably one of this guys (yes, unfortunately no girls) will one day commit some code or artwork directly to the KDE repositories…

On the way to my parents for lunch then I decided to visit a friend of mine in his shop where he sells second hand hardware. Nice stuff and working perfect. But before I wanted to go to his shop I phoned him. Good idea as he was in hospital after food poisoning (get well soon, Luki). But that wasn’t the reason I started to write about him and his shop (he btw sponsored some stuff for the Randa meeting last year and will hopefully do so this year again ;-). Beneath the "normal" PC and notebooks he’s some Android netbooks in his sortiment at the moment – for half of the normal price. But mention my name when you order one ;-).

Another thing that happened this week is the agreement of my professor (in education, not computer sciences) that he allows me to setup an Apple system as a KDE build server and host it at our institute. Will talk next week with the IT guy for what old hardware he has for me. And yet another thing is that we (thanks a lot Emil Sedgh for your work on this thing!) will launch the registration page (and thus a first version of a KDE sprint manager) for the Randa 2011 meeting in a few hours or days. And thus to the todo items of last week:

• Finishing registration form: done.
• Reading some Sonnet code: no.
• Doing more QML: can’t remember.
• Bringing Oxygen to the devel env: no
• Finishing the German translation of the booklet: no. I’ll do it this weekend – for sure. But if you speak German and want to help. Send me an email and I tell you the pages which are still to be done.

And here is the todo for the next week:

• Send the translation to the layouter.
• Do some code for my KDE morphology API work (and thus my colleague) and start the concepts.
• Get in contact with more potential sponsors for Randa 2011.
• And do a lot more work for Randa 2011. All the little details…

Btw you probably noticed that I deleted the "KDE work day xy" part of my blog posts title. At the moment I work much more then one day per week for KDE stuff even though I don’t find the time to blog that much. And thus the numeration is obsolete and incorrect anyway. And markey didn’t like it ;-). So see you next week and all a happy weekend.

Morning dear readers. It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting in the train from Valais, Switzerland to Bern back home. There is already some text written for this blog post but my (one of them 😉 plan for this one-hour-journey is it to clean it up and bring it in a publishable form and push the submit button when I’m at home. So what happened the last week?

On Wednesday I filmed another presentation of Prof. Petko at the university of Zurich (last time I filmed a presentation of him about "serious games"). The presentation was about ICT (information and communication technologies) in school and education and it was interesting to listen to him talking about Equador (right?) and Portugal where there is one PC per child which is not yet reached (or even targeted) in the oh-so-rich Switzerland. Somehow embarassing and somehow understandable if you know about the fear of technology in this area of the world. But you know which systems run on the PCs in Equador or Portugal? No? Ever heard about OLPC, Linux, KDE and Free Software?

But now to the four todo items I listed in my last blog post and thus to the first miss.

Instead of NLP and Sonnet code reading I did some QML and QtQuick learning and hacking. The screenshots below shows my playground to learn QML. It’s a prototype or rebuild of a bus stop information board. Not coincidentally it shows the train stops you pass when you arrive at the Zurich airport and want to go to Randa by train. I hope or try to extend this further to a plasma based information board for different stuff. We have a lot of great data sources ("dataengines" and "services" in Plasma speech) and for the public transportation stop display I’ll try to use the public transport dataengine by Friedrich Karl Tilman Pülz (if you read this is there any official release coming?). If it’s better to develop a new Plasma containment or if an applet or plasmoid is enough needs to be discussed with the Plasma professionals ;-).

My second todo item was it to further continue my KDE development enviroment and as a newer llibdbusmenu-qt-dev package arrived finally in Debian sid I succeeded here ;-). But now there is another new problem. The software doesn’t find the Oxygen icons. Another todo item was further work on the registration form for the Randa 2011 which I hope to finish tomorrow or the day after. Concerning Randa I’m in contact with two teachers of the local vocational school (both of them or participants of my Linux course) about a possible meeting of their pupils and the KDE guys in Randa. The two guys teach informatics and electro techniques at this school. And this btw wipes off my last todo items as yesterday I did another lecture (or three 😉 of my current Linux course.

And before I list my KDE work items for the next week here are some random thoughts of the last week:

• KMyMoney is a really great financial tool with great documentation. Take a look if not yet done.
• The Calligra Stage GSoC idea about a plasma presentation widget would be perfect for my planned Plasma Information Board (PIB?;-).

Todo for the coming week:

• Read Sonnet code and write one or two concepts for my NLP and CL (computational linguistics) projects.
• Finish the registration form for the Randa 2011 meeting.
• Bring some Oxygen into my KDE development enviroment ;-).
• Further working and playing with QML.
• Finish the German translation of the KDE Booklet (if there is no more help I need to convince B. to help me as he has holidays ;-).

BTW I see your flattring as some mean of voting as well. The more one of my posts get flattred the more you seem to like it and the more I should work on this particular work.

These are wild days in the Qt land. The big finnish home of the cute trolls decided to work closer with some other people from nanosoft land and the new Nessecitas brings our wisdom to the land of the droids. What will happen? We’ll probably see but Qt stays cute and thus to the main topic of this post. What was and what will be or what I’ve done in the last week (or two) and what I plan for the next days and week.

The weekend before the last we (the people of the LUGO – Linux User Group Oberwallis) had a hack-weekend in Randa. We worked on a new homepage for our LUG, enjoyed the fellowship and talked about some registration form for the Randa 2011 meeting. And last but not least Randa at this weekend held one of the two official Swiss KDE 4.6 release parties. Etienne Rebetez from Kalzium fame was there as well and we concluded the weekend with the visit of the great Swiss computer museum (If you’re ever in Switzerland or more precise in Solothurn go and visit it. They even have a working Apple I and the new building for the museum will show even more of the history of computers.)

Even before this hack-weekend I started together with some people from the LUGO to translate the new great KDE promo booklet to German. Felix Michel, the layouter of this booklet, agreed to newly layout the text when we’re ready which I hope to be the case in the two coming weeks. Other things that I worked on are more email communication about the Randa 2011 meeting and possible sponsors, I joined the game and got some business cards from KDE e.V. for the further searching of sponsors (another good opportunity for the translated KDE booklet ;-).

And today I had a short meeting with Prof. Bernstein from the university of Zurich. He gave me the (Java) source code for some of their NLP projects. I hope to find some inspiration or ideas for a possible NLP (natural language processing/programming) interface for Dolphin and/or Co.

And these are the things I plan to do in the next days or week:

• Finish the setup of my KDE development enviroment. I had some problems with a missing dependency on my Debian system. The dbusmenu-qt is not available in an current version.
• Sonnet and other NLP stuff: I plan to take some hours to read through the Sonnet code in KDE. Probably some new API docu commits will follow but this time without embarassing typos in the commit message ;-).
• Randa 2011: More emails and letters to potential sponsors, more communication with the owners of the building in Randa, some contact with the municipality of Randa, finishing the registration form and presentation to the four groups about what’s missing.
• And on Friday I do my second of five evening in a Linux course. Last week we started with some history, philosophy and free software and Linux basic stuff and this Friday we’ll look into package management, installation and virtual machines.

So all a good week and I’m sure I forgot to write about something important…

Oh yes. I loke (ok, I can’t decide if I love or just like it 😉 RSIbreak. Since some month now I’ve problems with my wrist and some weeks ago I decided to install RSIbreak which forces me now for a 20 seconds break every 15 minutes or so. Great. Thx Tom!

As I wrote yesterday today I’d like to share my blog with Joel and post his short article about how to setup a KDE development environment. This is partly based on several techbase pages but as KDE is currently in the process of migrating its version control infrastructure from Subversion to Git there are some new commands and URLs. Next week I’d like to write about my university projects and thus about more Sonnet and linguistics stuff.

But here goes Joel:

A few days ago, Mario and me set up our own KDE-Development-Environment. This guide shows, how you can setup your own KDE-Development-Enviroment, using the new git repositories.

Mario used the following commands under Debian, I used them under Kubuntu 10.10.

Step 1 – create user:

First of all, we need to setup a new development user called kde-devel. We do that, because this is easier with an extra user, and with this way, we can’t destroy our existing user.

• $ sudo useradd -m kde-devel -s /bin/bash
• $ sudo passwd kde-devel

Once we created the kde-devel user, we have to add the user in the sudoers file.

• $ sudo visudo

Under the “User privilege specification” comment, we add the kde-devel user under the root entry:

# User privilege specification

root ALL=(ALL) ALL

kde-devel ALL=(ALL) ALL

This gives the kde-devel user all root privileges.

Now we have to copy the .bashrc from our existing user to the kde-devel user:

• $ sudo cp ~/.bashrc /home/kde-devel/

We have to enhance the .bashrc from the kde-devel user with the bashrc from this link: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Increased_Productivity_in_KDE4_with_Scripts/.bashrc

• $ sudo kate /home/kde-devel/.bashrc // please choose your favorite editor (e.g. gedit, vi, nano…)

Step 2 – login:

We created a user and gave him root privileges. Now we can try to login with the kde-devel user to our local machine.

There are two different ways to do this. The first variante didn’t work for me.

• $ su – kde-devel // didn’t work for me
• $ ssh -X kde-devel@localhost // worked for me

Step 3 – Install packages:

When you are logged in successfully with the kde-devel user, we need to install a few developer packages. Visit the following page and install the packages under KDE 4.x and KDE 4.6 with aptitude or apt-get [or the package management tool on your system]:

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4 [Paragraph “Required packages from your distribution”]

I just linked this page, because the packages in the wiki may change.

Step 4 – Clone and build repositories

When you installed the packages, we can install qt-kde, soprano and kdelibs. For that, we clone the packages via git and compile them. This part may take some time. I did this on an i5 with 4GB of RAM and this step tooked me over one hour.

Install qt-kde:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/qt-kde
• $ cd qt-kde
• $ ./configure – -prefix=$HOME/qt-copy // (remove the space between the two dashes
• $ sudo make -j 2; if [ “$QTDIR” = “`pwd`” ]; then find . -name ‘*.o’ -delete; else make install; fi; // this takes a little while

Install soprano:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/soprano
• $ cd soprano
• $ cmakekde

[You’ll probably need further software from the kdesupport module like Phonon, Strigi, etc.]

Install kdelibs:

• $ cs
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kdelibs
• $ cd kdelibs
• $ cmakekde

Install kde-baseapps:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-baseapps
• $ cd kde-baseapps
• $ cmakekde

Install kde-workspace:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-workspace
• $ cd kde-workspace
• $ cmakekde

Install kdelibs-runtime:

• $ cs // change to the src directory
• $ git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kde-runtime
• $ cd kde-runtime
• $ cmakekde

[If you need Kate or Konsole, these are now in separate repositories.]

Step 5 – Enjoy:

Now your done. You setted up your basic development environment. Now you can start cloning existing projects and hack’em.

I hope that this guide was a bit helpfull for you.

Greetings Joel Bodenmann & Mario Fux

The distance between two of my KDE work day reports each week get’s a bit bigger but I think it’s still quite regular and I’ll do my best to bring it back on track. Thanks to all the people who flattr me (the FSFE wordpress software got a flattr plugin now 😉 and thanks to all the people who "just" read my blog. An idea for next year is to provide other facilities to donate and probably even to vote on what you prefer me to work ;-).

This week I’ve done some personal work on two of the KDE wikis. On techbase I inserted a first very (very) raw draft for a collection of KDE software configuration files and directories and data storage files and directories. I’ll start with the apps I use myself most often. Actually I don’t know if it’s possible to edit one other user’s personal page on the wikis but later I’d like to move this part of my personal page anyway to a better place. By the way underneath there you still find an attempt to collect the release dates (past and future) of different GNU/Linux distributions.

Some more work went into the personal page on the KDE community wiki: There I collect information about free (as in speech) NLP tools. NLP stands for natural language processing and programming and consists of almost everything that brings natural languages and computer together. This page is work in progress and thus will change a lot before it get’s excluded from the personal page area. But here fits the same as with the other page: If it’s possible to edit it and you’ve some good information to add do so, please! Additionally you find there some NLP stuff already in and around KDE.

And then there is something that happened last week which makes me quite proud and I’d like to share with you. There is even some connection to KDE ;-). In one of my last blog post I wrote about a paper I had to hand in about the "KDE semantic clipboard". It got accepted and last week on Thursday I had an oral test about it (actually something similar to my last exam for my minor computer sciences). And you know what? Best mark! A 6.0 here in Switzerland and the professor and my advisor told me that this work and exam appears to be one of a major student. Great… I couldn’t resist to ask if there is a possibility to do a doctoral thesis when I’ve finished my studies and they once again said yes ;-).

But I’m not yet sure if I want and will do a doctoral thesis afterwards. First I still need to write my diploma thesis in education which needs a lot of motivation as my major topic (education) isn’t that interesting for me anymore.

I try to keep the rest of this blog post as short as possible. The work on the morphological API for KDE (and thus Sonnet) goes on, if you’re interested in helping (or lurking) in the organization of the next Randa meeting subscribe to the kde-events mailing list till tomorrow or the day after and I joined the game as well.

And the last thing for this time the promised english language learning links:

• Advanced English Lessons: http://www.englishpage.com/ (good exercises collection)
• Baccalaureate Exam Tricks: http://english.errachidia.org/
• English Grammar Online: http://www.ego4u.com/
• Englisch Hilfen: http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/ (German)
• English The Easy Way: http://www.english-the-easy-way.com
• Learn English Free Online: http://www.learnenglish.de/ (German)
• Grammar diagnostic test: http://english-grammar.webpark.pl/diagnostic_grammar_1.htm

The half vegatarian half carnivore pizza is in the oven and before the TV show about some Wikileaks background story starts I’ve some minutes to start writing my blog entry about "serious games", a very interesting presentation I visited yesterday, and some other KDE stuff.

As it’s part of my job to sometimes record guest presentations at or of our institute (of education) yesterday I had the possibility to visit a presentation about "serious games". The presenter was a former teacher of mine (now professor) who taught me a lot about education and media. "Serious games" is a concept about computer games with an educational and teaching background. The audience consisted almost exclusively of women (female human beings are the majority in the educational sciences and business in Switzerland). Unfortunately the prejudices about the anti-social character of gamers and a causal relation between players of violent games and violent acts are still alive. This even though there is no study which underpins these ideas and some studies exist that show even the opposite of the former.

The presentation was very interesting and entertaining and I hope to take some ideas for my diploma thesis. At the end the presenter showed some interesting free (probably not as in speech) browser games with a "serious" background. I hope to post some of them in the next days when I’m finished with cutting and uploading of the taken recording. And by the way: our institute provides a nice video portal about school lessons in different languages. Not all are free to watch and the website is still only in German but useful and interesting nonetheless (and finally works on Linux (with Flash ;-( as well).

On another thing today I got my svn-soon-git KDE developer account and a batch of KDE business cards was in B’s and my postbox.

Oh and yesterday I got my english grammar test back. A better mark than I expected. And if there is some intereste I would post the links I collected during this course to leverage my english. So are you interested in english grammar exercises and grammar rules?

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!