Mario Fux

Ok. I’m actually almost there already ;-). But I hope you are ready to go there and you got all the emails (some people told me that the mails landed in their spam folders). Look at the kde-events archive if you’re unsure.

If you come by plane you should have received an additional email with details about the train ticket from the airport to Randa. If you didn’t get this email or still need such a ticket contact me asap (fux at the KDE servers). This is the last chance!

There is a sprint page on the community wiki where we collect information about this year’s meeting. Thus if you blog before, during or after the meeting please add your post to the community wiki page. Do the same with the picture collections you take in Randa or on the way there or back ;-).

And here is something you can use in your blog posts about the Randa 2011 meeting. Some banners done by the first year informatics trainees of the vocational school Visp (Valais/Switzerland):

Oh and btw the above mentioned sprint page is the black or information board for important information during the sprint. Read you next as I’d like to report you about our work of the last weekend: wiring the house in Randa and thus taking the house apart ;-).

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.

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 😉 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 😉 (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 😉 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 😉 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 😉 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.