Planet Amarok

So, FOSDEM is over now and I finally have the time to have a look back.
As I already said I was there one day earlier, so I could do something else but promoting Amarok for one day: visiting the European Parliament. The EP was located about 30 minutes by foot from the hotel. I can really recommend not always using the metro or tram lines: with that you only see some spots of the city but are never able to connect them. Walking from one point to another really helps to get some orientation, so afterwards you are able to find your ways quite easily.
Anyway, I arrived at the EP a few minutes before 10 AM, to meet with Erik Josefsson, member of the EP for the Green party, at one of the (afaik) two accreditation centers. Some minutes later, after passing those airport like security checks, not Erik but Christian Engström showed up. As you might know he is the first Pirate ever in the EP after the election result of more than 7% in Sweden. So in his office we talked about the current state of netpolitics in Sweden, Germany and the EU. Things like data retention (very interesting for Sweden atm, as they were just successfully sued by the EU for not making that into national law), ACTA, or the SWIFT treaty with the US (that the EP will very likely reject no matter what Hillary Clinton says). So in general: all those things that are about to attack the base of our security: freedom. Also some election campain ideas were exchanged in our discussion.
Anyway, he still had to do some paperwork so he suggested to bring me into a "hearing" of the "Digital Rights Group". Well, I didn't seem to remember the name, but the agenda was very interesting: all kinds of netpolitics. So i agreed to go there, of course. Which would really not have been possible for me alone at all, as all the hallways in those buildings seem to look exactly the same. You can get lost there sooo easily.
On arrival Christian showed me Erik, who was sitting on the conference table of the meeting room. Also Amelia Andersdotter was there, the second Pirate in the EP (since the signing of the Lissabon treaty Sweden has two more seats) and afaik the youngest ever. As all visitor seats were taken I just sat down on the floor and listened to what they have to say. The discussion was really inspiring, it was about data retention at that moment. The people on the conference table, which I thought were members of the EP, were asing somebody from the European Commission (I knew the face but not the name...) many very, very critical questions. One thing hat came up to me during that: does something like "anonymized data" actually exist at all? I'm gonna write about the problems I see there later in another post.
I was surprised: the Council  and Commission have not yet arrived in the Lissabon treaty times and still don't accept the EPs new powers, or at least they try to ignore it all the time. So i expected critical questions. But not THAT critical. After some time I got even more confused: one person with the same kind of name tag as me, so appearently another visitor, was allowed to ask a question directly to the representative of the Commission. So clearly I had the wrong impression of where I was.
Well, during lunch break Erik explained to me that this was a meeting of all kinds of netpolitics organizations. In fact this was part of a two days conference, for the first time ever those groups hat the chance to meet directly inside the EP buildings. So before FOSDEM I accidently took part in another conference. ;-)
The afternoon was very interesting then: as there was a free seat directly at the conference table I could go, from the introduction I learned that there were people from netzpolitik.org, La Quadrature Du Net, AK Zensur, Pirate International and others. Someone even came up to me saying: "Hey, I know you, you are with the German Pirates.". Completely right, but I'm only a normal member there, We both had no ideas where he could have seen me.
In the afternoon we made a list of current and upcoming topics that will influence digital rights massively. I will put then into a separate blog entry, as the list is not that short and I suppose not everyone reading the Amarok-Feed of my blog is deeply into politics.
So to come to an end to that political stuff: it was a very, very interesting day, thanks to Christian, Amelia and Erik for making that possible.
The FOSDEM beer event then took place again at the Delerium Café in the center of the city. New beers I tried this time: cactus and coconut. Well, if you are into those lemon bricks that can be put into the toilet to make it smell better cactus is the beer for you! It smells exactly this way and tastes... as you would expect it to taste! Everyone on the table agreed. But: it makes a good start for funny conversations. Coconut on the other hand is fine: smells and tastes like coconut, is kind of sweet and gets served in a bowl looking like half a coconut. Very nice. :)
FOSDEM itself (wasn't this blog entry planned to be about FOSDEM?) was really good as well: many visitors as always, many people were interested in Amarok and our shirts at the booth. My talk filled the dev room completely, so the "closed" signs had to be put on the doors to stop people from entering. This morning I saw a mail on the list saying: Sven really kicked ass holding one of the most entertaining and informative talks Thanks a lot!
I really like to keep my talks open for discussion, and that worked perfectly this time. So check the mailing list for the resulting ideas.

It's been a while since I blogged last. I blame microblogging. So just to introduce myself again, I'm Ian Monroe and I'm an Amarok developer. I live in Iowa, USA. For about a year and a quarter I've been working for Collabora. I believe the rate of hired Qt developers has been growing exponentially at Collabora year-to-year since 07, so it won't be long until we all work for them. ;)

You'll find tons of sample Git workflows in Git docs all over the Internet. We've been using Git in Amarok since July and I've been using it everyday at my work since January so now I have my own Git workflow to add. It assumes you know the basics of Git already and that the project you work on is actively developed by others at the same time.

But first a note on why my commands are longer...

Keep it Explicit

One thing that much of the documentation for Git does is make things 'simple' by using various command shorthands. From helping fellow Amarok devs get used to Git and just from my own experience I've decided that in the longterm using commands that combine several tasks or use default options are confusing. Most of us type at about 50 words per minute causally, there's really no reason to skimp.

An example of this is to use git push origin master:master instead of git push. That tells you exactly where your commit is headed: to the default remote named origin. The master:master says you are pushing from the local branch master to the remote branch named master. I like being explicit with branch names since getting mixed up which one you have checked out is a mistake I've made before.

Importantly it keeps you in control and aware of what you're doing.

A Workflow

So you notice it's time to go make dinner, instead of just leaving the code uncommitted I say its a good idea to go ahead and do a git commit -a before you leave. Writing the commit log is helpful for when you sit back down later. Remember you can always git commit --amend and add to your last commit before pushing.

Okay so next morning, back to hacking. Time to update. It is important to often update to avoid conflicts.git remote updateThis command refreshes all the remote branches. It doesn't touch your checkout. Both 'pull' and 'rebase' let you interact with remote branches directly, but I like to break it up. So now bring in the latest changes to your checkout:git rebase origin/masterThis is mostly why I like to leave all changes committed before I leave, because then the rebase works without you having to remember to git stash or commit when you're updating in the morning before having had any tea.

The advantage of rebase over doing a merge/pull is that it changes the commits you haven't pushed yet by making them patches on top of the latest code. It gives those commits a 'new base.' It's actually how Subversion works all the time, if that makes it easier to understand. This leads to easier to understand linear history, in the unlikely event everyone else in your project also uses rebase.

Okay now you've done more hacking and are ready to push. Repeat the above steps to make sure your code is still up-to-date. If you try to push when its not, Git will notoriously tell you that you are trying to do a non-fast-forward. It sounds scary, but 90% of the time it means you just need to update.git status
git commit -a #or git commit -a --amend if you want to add to a current commit
git remote update
git rebase origin/master
#maybe double check it still compiles after updating
git push origin master:master

Obviously there are other ways to use Git, but this is mine. I hope it has been helpful.

A friendly user has today created a screenshot of the latest Amarok from Git Master. I was rather surprised that it actually looks fairly decent on Windows (had expected worse things), and the user even said it also works pretty well, with the new Phonon-VLC backend.

Anyway, I wanted to share this with you, but please keep in mind: This is a preview of the next Amarok version. Some things (like the new toolbar) are not yet fully finished, so please don't complain about that.

It’s that time of the year again when we need to start thinking about awesome ideas for GSoC. I just prepared a page on the community wiki to collect them. The list needs to be finished by March 8th. Got a great idea for a nice project a student could be working on for the summer? Add it! If you are unsure or have any questions ping me or the team of the app you have an idea for.

Right now there are 22 release parties all around the world on the wiki and of course there will be one in southern Germany as well. Previously we always did them in Stuttgart but it’s time all those Stuttgart people get to see Karlsruhe
So if you are in or around Karlsruhe on the 13th around 20:00 then feel free to join us for our release party at Vogelbräu. Please put your name on the wiki page or let me know by email by Monday latest if you are coming so we know how many people are coming.
If you are not anywhere near Karlsruhe check out the other release parties or organize one on your own

(special thanks to Lemma for taking care of the venue)

Ok, just to let everyone know: I arrived in Brussels, where I will give a talk about Amarok on Saturday at FOSDEM. At 17:30, iirc.

The flight was quite interesting (well, I don't fly that much, generally I try to avoid it due to the environmental issues): there were just eleven passengers on board. And it was so short that I had to empty my free drink fast as they announced the landing procedure.

Also quite funny: meeting people at the airport and seeing them a few minutes later again near the Grande Place. You're spying on me, aren't you? ;-)

I guess for the first time in my life someone tried to rob me. You know, you're standing there, looking at the map, then this guy shows up, saying something you don't understand (that's the moment paranoia level goes up to the max), starts swiping your jacket (check: no other strangers in the range of two meters), he tries to make you understand that some liquid was on the jacked (ok, now everything is clear as water...), wants you to take it off (let's play a little game...), tries to hold it in his hands (you know that I know your plans, there's nothing of any value in it and your friends five meters away won't get closer because I already spotted them...), and then walks away (Ha! Giving up already?). Fun. :-) So remember: keep anything of value in places that cannot be reached in a matter of seconds.

The hotel was relatively easy to find but I have to confess it's totally not my style. First they required me to fill out a form. A form asking for name (so far, so good), birth date (it gets interesting), home address, profession (you see where it goes?), nationality, identity card or passport number (!!!), the authority that delivered that passport, date of arrival, number on your motor-vehicles plate, other family members: wife (including maiden name!), number of children (what the hell do you want to do to my non existent children?), date of departure and something I didn't get, I suppose the current date.

If I had a wife and would check in together with her that information would be enough to open a bank account in her name in Germany! Why the hell do they ask all those questions? The guy at the reception said the law required it. "Controlle des voyageurs dans les hotels et maisons d'herbergement" is the title of the form and according to him also the name of the law. Can anybody verify this? I'm quite sure that can't be legal from a human rights point of view. Never ever!

Of course I tried to cheat a bit: I gave them both my nationalities, but in the German short form. And I didn't try to give them a good handwriting of the number of my Swedish passport. If you know my handwriting you know what that means. This should be good enough to confuse automated systems that work on this data.

Oh, and I took a blank one of those forms with me. Really, there something has to be done. Any Belgian pirates reading this? I am not too paranoid on this, am I?

If I don't show up tomorrow then they brought me to Guantanamo. ;-) After asking those critical questions I paid cash, for which I earned a surprised look. Hey, I only want to live my life without being monitored, but if I do I'm automatically being looked at suspiciously.

Internet costs 2.50 euros per 30 minutes, a day is 10 euros. Oh, and the clock starts ticking the moment you log in. Logging out seems not to be implemented yet. Funny people. The room for the night I'm early is also more expensive than I thought, 129 euros. Well, I'm sure they pay a developer to implement a fair accounting system for their wireless. They do, they do, they do! *putting fingers in my ears* Lalalalala... So if you can read this it's very likely I used their wireless for a lot of money (Update: I have and they combined my freshly received account data with my room number... hello European data retention regulations!). According to Wireshark no one else logged in in the last three hours. ;-(

Apart from that Brussels hasn't changed much. I found some waffles in a supermarket (maybe I should get some beer there tomorrow to bring it home) and a nice Italian restaurant with cheap prices. At least for Brussels, in Karlsruhe 10 Euros for a lasagne would still be quite expensive. But it was very good and I had a chance to practise my rusty French a bit. Oh, and the Celtica club (more like a Irish bar with live music and DJ) someone recommended to me is also just around the corner. same for the Delerium Café, where the beer event will take place.

Plan for tomorrow: visiting the European Parliament together with some Swedish members from the Pirate and Green parties. And later today I'm gonna try out that bath tub, I haven't had a warm bath since I moved out of my parents flat years ago. So that has to be used then. :)

A while ago I had written an article about the dangers of "micro-options" in software. Like many articles about usability, this one was discussed somewhat controversially (which is good in a way), but overall I did get a positive reception, even from a professional usability expert.

While this article was perhaps interesting, there was no "proof in the blog pudding". Let's be honest here, anyone can claim the wildest things in blogs, which may be true, or not. I did however stumble upon an interesting connection between psychology and usability, which appears to back up my speculations. The connection is this:

The Paradox Of Choice

Have you ever been in the following situation: You're in a supermarket. You want to buy a salad dressing, and the timing is somewhat tight. Guests are waiting, the usual...

Alright, found the "salad dressing" section (which can he hard in itself, in huge supermarkets). So, not much time, let's choose something that looks yummy, and preferably not too fatty! So, what do we have here? Vinaigrette, Blue cheese dressing, Caesar dressing, Honey Dijon, Hummus, Italian dressing, Louis dressing, Ranch dressing, Russian dressing, Tahini. Hmm. Nice choice. Let's go for some Italian Dressing, I like that one. Wait, there are three different brands of dressing, each of them offering further varieties of this product. Chef's Choice, Low Carb, Lite, Very Lite, and hey: the Special Edition!

Here is someone who can explain this problem of choice much better than I could ever do. His name is Barry Schwartz, he's a professor of psychology, and he made one of the best TED talks ever (according to the founder of TED himself):


TED Video: Barry Schwartz - Paradox of Choice


I very much recommend watching this video. Few have been disappointed by it, and I suppose you might find it enlightening too. It does explain many phenomena in our modern life in a surprisingly simple way. One of them can be translated to usability: Too many choices can reduce the user's satisfaction with a software product.

I'd be happy to read comments on this article, be it positive, or negative. Discussion is important, so I think we should do that. But please, do me one favor: Watch Barry's talk before commenting. Thanks

A lot of FLOSS mailinglists (including KDE’s) are run by a software called Mailman. Now Mailman is great and all but it isn’t exactly a dream to work with if you have to admin a mailinglist with it. And it gets worse if you have to admin more than one list with it.

Thankfully there is a great little program called listadmin that helps here. It is a command line tool that remembers the lists you moderate and their passwords and then just checks them for new emails or subscription requests you need to deal with.

This is what it looks like if there is a mail in moderation:

Of course I want to approve sebas’ email (how could I not? ) so I say “a” for approve and then “y” to submit all the changes for this list:

And done:

Not really hard, right?  The only thing that’s not so easy is figuring out the correct format for the .listadmin.ini file with the preferences for your lists. For @kde.org lists it needs to look like below. All settings (username, password,… apply to everything following it until overwritten). Adapt for your needs

Hope it helps making admining Mailman lists a little easier for you. And now I’ll go investigate the Mailman patches the great folks at Systers have written to see if they are maybe suitable for KDE.

log “~/.listadmin.log”

username lydia@kde.org

adminurl https://mail.{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}

password ******

amarok@kde.org

password ******

amarok-devel@kde.org

amarok-promo@kde.org

password ******

community-wg@kde.org

password ******

kde-press-announce@kde.org

password ******

kde-soc-mentor@kde.org

kde-soc@kde.org

password ******

kde-core-devel@kde.org

password ******

kde-kiosk@kde.org

We need a lot of help collecting data for the new www.kde.org that is being worked on and you can help! It is pretty easy but a lot to do. The more people help the better.

What needs to be done? Just find some simple data about KDE’s programs following a template and putting them on a wiki. We also need screenshots. The community wiki has more details. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know all the data for a certain program. Fill in as much as you know. Everything helps. If you have questions come to #kde-www on freenode or drop me an email at lydia at kde org.

Everyone who completes at least two programs gets hugs from me

It should all be done next weekend so get cracking!

This is the entry for Parley as an example:

Homepage: http://edu.kde.org/parley
ID on kde-apps.org: 66741
Page on Userbase: [empty]
ID of subforum on forum.kde.org: 21
Link to handbook: http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdeedu/parley/index.html
IRC channel(s): #kde-edu
Mailing lists: kde-edu@kde.org, parley-devel@kde.org
Project name on cia.vc: kde/parley
Bugzilla component: parley

Dear Amarok and KDE users,

I'm sure that you have heard of the terrible earthquake disaster that has happened in Haiti. Current estimations of deaths range from 100,000 to 200,000, and this number keeps rising. What we are looking at is very likely one of the worst natural disasters of the last 10 years.

I would like to encourage our users to help Haiti in this situation, if you can. One way of doing this is by sending donations to international humanitarian groups that support helping Haiti. I'm sure there are other ways, if you know some concrete examples, please add a comment.

Please do not voice your opinion if you have any bizarre theories (be it from religious motives, political fearmongering, conspiracy theories, etc) about how this disaster happened. I've heard many of them, and there is no need to hear any more. This article is only about helping, but not discussing backgrounds.


Thanks.


Disclaimer: I do not speak for the Amarok team, nor do I speak for KDE. This article is a private matter.

Quite often -- or at least, "often enough" -- we get people that want to rescan a particular folder in Amarok. This is usually the result of them changing tags and wanting Amarok to pick it up. (Remember, for efficiency reasons Amarok watches the modified times of the collection directories, not the collection files, so adding or deleting (or renaming) files will trigger an incremental scan but modifying a file's contents won't.)

Previously, our advice was "touch the folder" or in the worst case "just do a full rescan." Now there's slightly better advice we can give. If you right-click on a folder in the collection setup dialog, and if the folder was already in your collection (i.e. you didn't just check it a moment ago), it will give you the option to rescan that folder.

The text above that field has also been modified slightly to indicate that this is possible. Check it out:

This is in current git master and will be in the 2.2.3 release!

one of my longstanding goals as an amarok developer has been to expand the way that amarok helps you explore your own music collection, and discover your own music. for those of you who will be attending campkde a few days (my flight leaves tomorrow am...) i'll expand on this point quite a bit more in my talk on sunday. but here's a nice little precursor that shows the sort of features that I think media players should be able to do.

most people who use amarok are aware of this "dynamic playlist" framework, and I hope that a good percentage of users understand what it's for. for those who don't, basically, it allows you to modify the composition of The Playlist (right hand side) based on a set of pluggable criteria. historically in amarok 2.x these criteria have been things such as "artist name == FOO" or "playcount > 5" etc. I think 2.2.0 was the first release (or was it 2.1.0?) that had a lastfm similar artists bias--that is, amarok would try to play similar songs by asking last.fm what artists were similar to the currently playing one.

now that i've pushed another option to the last.fm similar bias, and added a completely new bias, i'm getting closer to helping amarok help you play music you want. so what's new?

playing-history based bias
if you've been a meticulous user of last.fm (which is easy thanks to the seamless amarok integration) you know that last.fm knows a lot about your listening history.

every so often I sit back and realize how much my music tastes have changed over time. the music I listened to 4 years ago i rarely hear today. but is that because my tastes have really changed? or is it also because i've simply forgotten some of the more obscure bands I was listening to? well, now you can tell amarok to play you music that was in your "weekly top artists" list between any two dates in your listening history.

that's right, so when you remember that you listened to a ton of electro-punk last july but can't remember all the bands, just set up the dates and let amarok rip. a trip through history lane indeed

new track-based similarity
for those who have used the last.fm similar artists bias, you've probably noticed that on the whole it's not super accurate. that's because it just asks last.fm for similar artists---and if you happen to like an artist that covers a wide variety of genres, this can get pretty inaccurate.

anyway, last.fm recently introduced a new track similarity function---you can ask it for similar songs to any given song. this, of course, is much more accurate. it's also harder to find matches (the odds that you have the exactly correct track in your collection is lower), but that's the tradeoff you have to make.

in any case, there is now a combobox that lets you choose between artist similarity and track similarity when using the bias.

enjoy!

Here's a little story I wanted to share with you. It's so bizarre, you might not believe it when you read it, but it really happened


Some back story:

A few months ago Amarok had migrated to Git, and then Konversation had migrated too. We had to write a special "commit hook" script for making the commits show up on IRC, via the CIA bot. This script was running on our Amarok server (called "Kollide"), and all was fine. At some point then we migrated our server to new hardware, as the old contract had expired. That also went really well.


What happened later:

At some point the CIA bot started to print everything twice. Yes, every single commit, all duplicated. I guess you can imagine how annoying that was. So we tried to debug this for weeks, looked at all scripts, at Gitorious, and whatnot. Noone was able to spot the bug, it was a mystery. Two days ago then we discussed this problem again in our #kde-git IRC channel, with Jeremy Whiting, and Eike Hein. Basically we were close to giving up on the whole thing. For fun, Jeremy said something like: "Hmm, what happened to your old server, btw?". That got us thinking. Then Eike compared the IP addresses of the server that sent out the commit message, and what did we see there: Two different IPs. What had happened:

The old server (we like to call it our "Shadow Server" now) had continued to run happily, because the hoster had forgotten to switch it off. So it was still running our web site, all sorts of other stuff, plus this little commit hook script!

When we realized what had happened there: There was just one possible reaction: Headdesk


Don't know about you, but we found that quite bizarre and funny, as noone had anticipated that (not even our admin)

Amarok 2.2.2 “Maya Gold” is released and it brings back the last two most requested features of 1.4.x: moodbar support and custom labels. We hope this brings some smiles to people’s faces

Download it now, enjoy and rediscover music with us!

… every Free Software project should not only have developers, but also

• graphical artists
• usability experts
• user support specialists
• documentation writers/translators
• software translators
• bug triagers
• marketing ninjas
• community managers
• release managers
• website and wiki maintainers
• unlimited funds…

Amarok is very lucky to have most of those. No, not the unlimited funds, sadly, thats one of the reasons why we ask our dear users and Amarok lovers to support us with donations, it allows us for example to maintain our server,  which in turn can host other Free Software projects of the KDE family like Konversation.

Linda and Valorie have started to write the handbook for Amarok 2.2.2, and Valorie is currently looking for skilled wiki writers and maintainers,  too.

I am more active in doing user support and act as a bug triager for Amarok, and occasionally also other KDE projects like Phonon. This all started on a rainy Sunday afternoon when I tried to get rid of some of the numerous duplicate bug reports and wishes and I got hooked on it. Some 12 months later I have closed 1885+ bugs and triaged thousands of others:  Amarok went from 2.0 to 2.2.2 and got 2864 new bug reports and wishes in this time, of which 3071 could be closed. An average 5-10% only were unique bugs, all the rest were either duplicates, invalid, already solved or reported against the now unmaintained Amarok 1.4.x. Some were also reported against Amarok by error and had to be reassigned to another project.

Bug reports and wishes are something that definitely needs triaging, since many reports have flaws. This can be

• an incomplete or a too complicated description, sometimes not even in English
• missing elements: version number, distribution, what were they doing when the bug occured
• in case of crashes: incomplete backtraces
• more than one item per report, which makes it too difficult to follow
• duplicates
• already implemented features or corrected code
• Invalid reports

All of these flaws are quite common, it is rather rare to get bug reports that can be used “as is” by the developers. And that is my point: bug triaging is not a developer task. Developers develop code, they should not have to loose their time running after users for more information about a bug or a wish. Unfortunately most of the projects don’t have their own triagers and rely on the KDE bugsquad to do this task, which is not that easy and something that needs to be addressed:

While much of the triaging can be done by people not involved in a particular project, it gets difficult when the triager doesn’t know the application. IMHO s/he should at least be a regular user of the application and ideally also run the developer version from GIT or SVN. This is not as complicated as it sounds, most of the projects have step-by-step instructions on how to build from trunk. If it is one single application the triager is interested in, s/he can build it locally in the home directory, which can be easily removed if needed. But it is of course important that the triager is in direct contact with the developers, be this only to be able to get feedback from them if necessary.

I encourage all larger projects to recruit dedicated triagers. This has more than one advantage:

• it takes away an important workload and the developers can concentrate on their primary task
• dedicated triagers know the application and can judge much better what is needed to make a report useful than somebody who occasionally triages here and there
• it adds strength to the team, and dont’ forget, sometimes triagers become developers (not me, there are already too many bad coders in this world … )
• id adds efficiency to your development cycle, and you find your way around in the bugs list since all incomplete bugs are gone

Now how do we recruit triagers? This can be done by encouraging advanced users to give a hand from time to time, I can assure you, bug triaging can get addictive
But there is a much easier way: through the BugWeeks dedicated to bug triaging in the KDE Forum. The first BugWeek has just ended, set up and lead by Darío Andrés, our “Bugs Hero” who had the initial idea and set up all the course. We plan to hold two BugWeeks per month and encourage everybody to participate and make the number of untriaged bugs much, much smaller! Also, a BugWeek on the forum has the advantage of being easier to run than a BugDay, where people need to be online at the same time and share a wiki.

On another hand I would like to write about a particular form of invalid bug reports: those from poisonous people. Every project has sometimes to face people submitting bug reports and wishes in non-objective ways . The bug may exist, but the way these particular reporters report it and comment on it is poisonous, subjective to the extreme and sometimes quite insulting. A non-objective report is not something one can act upon in another way but by marking it as Invalid  if the reporter doesn’t change their tone. To avoid loosing the important information, IMHO the triager should make a new report with the important information, but close the original one.

I have done this twice already and it worked out quite well, so I think this is really worth a try.

My reason for doing this is clear: useless reports by these people, insulting and personal attacks are discouraging and demotivating for the developers. It can in the worst case lead to developers leaving a project because of this. The triagers have a unique possibility to avoid these insults to reach the developers in filtering those. Of course this can be dangerous for the triagers, too, as themselves can get wary of such posts.

We here should all think and take action to not let this happen and make use of the wonderfully motivating and supportive network we have which is KDE: talk about around you and let the magic work. Don’t keep it in your mind alone or in your developer channel or mailing list or bug report, talk to your team, to your friends, to the bugsquad and of course the Community Working Group. And don’t forget the two last paragraphs of the KDE Code of Conduct: Support Others in the Community and Get Support from Others in the Community.

This is the second part of my series of articles about "good music", which was originally planned to become a series of three. In the first article of this series I had talked about Progressive Rock. The plan was to do a follow-up on Electronic Music, and then one on Classical Music, but somehow I got inspired today to write about Rock Music instead, so I'm changing the plan a little.

As a preface I should again say that this is of course highly subjective. Tastes differ wildly, and talking about art is especially subjective. Why am I writing this? As a developer of a music player I simply get to hear a lot of music (all day, basically), and I've always been fascinated by music, although I'm personally not a musician. So, take all of this with a grain of salt. What motivated me to write this second part is that I did actually get some very nice feedback on the first article, including a fellow KDE developer talking to me at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit about this article, which I thought was really nice. Apparently there is some interest in talking about music, so let's just do that

Now I should explain why I originally didn't plan to write about Rock Music. The reason is a bit weird: I am somewhat ashamed of admitting that I do enjoy Rock, simply because there's so much crap in this genre. Again, this is highly subjective, but I just don't consider run-of-the-mill Rock very exciting. However, some bands managed to do Rock with a twist, either by adding components of other genres to it, or simply by being freaking good. Most of these "freaking good" bands also are versatile though, and they do incorporate different styles into their music.

Queen

It is pretty hard to describe Queen briefly. It's also pretty hard not to hit superlatives when talking about them, because they were very super in many regards. I personally consider Queen the best rock band of all times, that's probably the best way to sum it up. Queen also happened to be my first "love" in music, and to this day I love them just as much as I did when I was 14. What made them so special? First of all, their singer Freddie Mercury was simply as good as singers can get. Incredible vocal range, fantastic and unique voice. Freddie Mercury died in 1991 from AIDS, one of the first prominent victims of this virus. Back then this caused quite the media stir, as Freddie was more or less openly gay, and the media tried to do the best they could to explain that "the guy died because he was gay". I'm missing words to describe this stupidity, so let's switch to Brian May, their guitarist. May is in fact "Dr May" now, as he has recently completed his PhD in astrophysics, and he's currently listed at #39 of Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time". It's hard to call the man anything else than a genius, if you have ever listened to his compositions and guitar work.

Freddie Mercury was able to switch effortlessly between Falsetto voice and Modal voice (what you would consider the normal voice), without really pausing or causing a hitch in the transition. As far as I know, this is pretty difficult to do, and not mastered by many. In my mind, I always had the image of him using his voice more like a musical instrument than just a voice, much like a trumpet. He was able to start deep, and then lifting it up, higher and higher. If you try that at home, chances are you'll end up with a sore throat next morning.

If you care about music at all, you should listen to some Queen songs. Some recommendations for especially good songs: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Who Wants To Live Forever", "The Show Must Go On".

U2

This band is a bit of a strange bag. I have some sort of love/hate relationship with them, caused by a moral dilemma: Their music is among the best you can get. Their believe system is comparable to a fruit cake.

U2 is an Irish band, but these days they are more like a worldwide corporation. Their singer Bono is a bit of a controversial person. On the one hand, the guy is simply a good singer. On the other hand, he tends to get a bit over his head, meddling in politics, trying to cure world hunger, and kissing the Pope's ring. One of his latest escapades even made it to Slashdot. You be the judge if this man can be liked. My opinion: It's important to separate the personal from the professional. And professionally, this band simply is damn good. Bringing us to the next important band member:

The Edge, who is the guitarist and main composer of U2. I personally find him more likable than Bono, but all this is of little relevance. What is relevant to me is that Edge is a very good guitarist, with a unique style that is different from most other guitarists. His electrical guitar soli are rarely there for showing off, but more for creating a mood, and that he does masterfully.

It is important to note that most of U2's brilliant albums (they also made some crappy ones) were co-written by Brian Eno, who is widely known as one of the most influential persons in the music industry. My suspicion is that Eno is the true mastermind behind U2, as all albums with him tend to be masterful. The rest, not so much.

Some recommendations for U2 songs: "One", "With Or Without You", "Unknown Caller".

Honorable Mentions

Here are some more "rock" artists that I enjoy (they are all not classic rock'n' roll bands, but let's keep it at that):

The Verve

Guns 'N Roses

Pink Floyd

Frank Zappa

R.E.M.

I hope you enjoyed this article a bit, thanks for reading! And as always - I'd love to hear some feedback

Off-topic: to the KDE person I ran into in downtown Mountain View coffee shop, please leave a comment so that I may remember your name.

Nice holidays and a happy Hackmas to all of our users, developers, and basically to everyone else too




PS:
There are two easter eggs hidden in this xmas blog article. If you can spot them, you deserve one extra "Happy Hackmas" from me

Happy holidays and a happy new year to all of you. I hope you get to spend it with people you love and care about. May the next year bring many exciting things and great opportunities.

The Amarok team will begin the new year with the release of Amarok 2.2.2 at the beginning of January and KDE will follow with KDE SC 4.4.0 in early February. Exciting times ahead …

The first (and only?) beta release “Tattoo” of Amarok 2.2.2 is out!
Check the release announcement for all the nice features in it like moodbar support and help us with testing and bug reporting and fixing.