markey

Ahoy, ye scurvy sea dogs. Today be the day for talkin' like a pirate! Have a mug o' fine rum an' set out for some swashbucklin' fun. Show them land lubbers what a pirate is made of, yarrrr!


Fair Winds,
Yer Cap'n Marrrrrkey

Yesterday Rob Levin, the founder of the freenode IRC network, died after a tragic accident. The Amarok project (and I think the free software world) ows much to his work. It was on freenode where our project was started. Freenode made it possible to bring together our developers from all around the world.

Rob Levin shall be remembered.

This weekend a KDE delegation attended the Come2Linux expo in Essen, a city in western Germany. I was one of the KDE booth babes, along with Harald (from Austria), Carsten (Germany), Eckhart (Germany), and Benoit (France).



I met up with Harald and Carsten on Saturday morning at the central station in Essen. There I also had the honor to meet Bernhard Reiter, one of the leaders from the FSF Germany, who had coincidentally taken the same train as Carsten. The four of us (and 200 Kubuntu CDs) then travelled to the expo location at the university of Essen. When we arrived at the location, things looked promising. There was a nice huge room with glass walls, sunlight streaming in (the weather was wonderful!), and many exhibitors had already set up their booths. We talked to the organizers and were given our badges and information material. Then we learned that our booth would not be in this room, but actually in another building on the campus. Oh well, so we took our gear and walked to this building. Turned out it was actually quite far away, maybe half a kilometer from the main building.

Arriving at our building, we found that our booth location was in a corner at the end of a long corridor. Scattered along this corridor were booths from the FSF, FreeBSD, a Linux gaming group, and a number of other exhibitors. We set up our booth, explored the location and then settled behind our booth table. After some hours we began to realize that our booth location wasn't exactly ideal. As opposed to the folks in the main hall, we had no sunlight, no internet, no waffles, and no visitors. Well, not very many visitors at least. Some found us simply by chance while searching for the talk rooms, which were located in the same building.

On saturday night we went for beers in a nice restaurant in the city. Afterward we wanted to visit the Gnome release party, but couldn't find the location. Instead we ended up in a heavy metal club. Five geeks and a laptop among the crowd of grim looking, long haired heavy metal dudes, I'm sure that was quite the sight to behold. We didn't mind and had some fun anyway, and many more beers. On our way back to the hotel we pondered what to do about our frustrating booth situation. We were not looking forward to sitting another day in our dark corner in that corridor. So we decided, if things would not improve, we would simply pack all our stuff and sit at a table outside of the building. As we didn't have internet anyway, we could at least enjoy some sunlight, we reckoned.

And indeed, on the next day things did not improve. No internet, even less visitors. Sigh. As we prepared to move our table outside, a friendly guy from LW Systems made the generous offer to share their booth space in the main hall with us. We gladly accepted this offer and moved our booth. Now we could also enjoy internet access, waffles, and sunlight. Quite the improvement!

What rocked:

• When we discovered how to get kick ass sound out of crappy notebook speakers: Put a second notebook next to it, and start playback on both machines simultaneously. Eckhart and Harald came up with this idea, fired up Amarok on both boxen and then clicked Play at the same time. The result was amazing. The slight delay generates something like a chorus effect, which made the sound so much fuller and more enjoyable. Bomb the bass! In fact it bombed so much that we were quickly told to "turn off that noise", heh.


• Harald doing the Qt4 dance.


• Meeting the other KDE folks.


• Our accomodation on Saturday night in the "Unperfekt House", a famous artists' residence and hotel in Essen, who have a great attitude towards free software. They use free software exclusively on all computers in the house (including an internet cafe with KDE running on all computers), and in turn they will let open source developers reside in the house for free. This simply rocked, big thanks to the Unperfekt House and the organizers who made this possible.

What did not rock so much:

• No internet on the first day.


• Our crappy booth location at the end of the world.


• Relatively low number of visitors. It was a rather small event, and apparently not very well advertised. At any time there were far more exhibitors than actual visitors in the room.


• Due to miscommunication, we had no KDE merch with us for sale. Worse still, we didn't even have KDE t-shirts and badges for ourselves. Most of us were wearing normal street clothing. Next time we really need to plan this better.


• No press attended the event.

Summary:
I did enjoy this event and would do it again, but the organizational troubles and low attendance flawed the experience somewhat. However, I'm sure some of these issues can be overcome the next time.

Well, I don't know why you're doing it. I keep on using C++ because Amarok is written in it, which can't be changed easily. And that's about the only reason.

This morning I intended to review a code change in amarok.h, one of Amarok's central headers files. Accidentally, I pressed :w in vim, touching the file although it was not modified. The following build cycle left me ample time to shower, have breakfast, and write most of this blog entry! Just changing a single line in one of Amarok's C++ sources (heck, a single character), means a whopping 10 minutes of compiling and linking, until you actually get to see the result. Made a mistake? Oh well, fix it, and wait another 10 minutes. To summarize: Compiling is driving me nuts. I've wasted enough time for it in my life. Life's too short to wait for a freaking compiler.

Alas, there is no need for this madness. We have been given two wonderful tools, that present a true alternative for KDE application development. One is Ruby, given to us by Yukihiro Matsumoto, and the other is Korundum, by our very own Richard Dale. Using these tools, we can create applications and actually have fun doing it! Why bother with endless compile times, when we can have the same result in a much shorter time? Ruby is less performant than C++, but many programmers don't realize that this is utterly irrelevant for GUI applications, which spend 99% of their time in library calls, waiting for an event.

Two days ago I had this wonderful encounter with Gregor Karzelek in our new IRC channel #kde-ruby. He told me this:

"It is unbelievable how fast you can develop with ruby and how easy and fast you can create GUIs with korundum. i started a project for my brother a week ago and have done already about 80% of the functions and 90% of the gui. when i think how long it took my to create such things in java.."

"And for the speed: i don't know whether it really is that slower like so many say. i do think the gui of my project works quite fast. at least fast enough."

I think this speaks for itself. I, for one, don't plan to create another KDE application in C++. I have better tools now


Did this blog spark your interest? If so, join us in #kde-ruby to learn more about Ruby and Korundum.