Saturday, September 27. 2008OpenExpo 2008, Zurich Switzerland
Last Wednesday and Thursday a delegation of KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu folks attended the OpenExpo event in Zurich, Switzerland. There I manned (womaned?) the KDE booth together with Alexandra Leisse, Claudia Rauch (KDE e.V. secretary), Eckhart Woerner, and Luca Gugelmann.
Here you can see a photo, showing Claudia and me behind our (rather small) KDE booth:  (That's actually two tables combined; our original booth consisted of one table. But oh well;) We had a pretty good time presenting KDE4, networking with other projects, and generally enjoying the great catering. You don't want to miss out on the tasty Asian style food that they generally seem to serve at this event. Alex gave a talk about KOffice 2, which was really well visited; Certainly there is a lot of interest in the new KOffice release, and in KDE4 in general. A video of the talk should come online soonish on the OpenExpo website. And then I also helped out a bit at the Kubuntu booth, mostly by providing coffee and making sure that Kubuntu CDs were always ordered in front of the Ubuntu ones. What makes the OpenExpo event unique is that it's actually two events in one, at the same location: For one there is Topsoft, a commercial business style expo (featuring suits), and then OpenExpo, a FOSS event (featuring us long haired hippies). It's funny to see these two worlds meet, but also interesting to observe the cultural differences. So basically you have one big exhibition hall, and on the left side there are the FOSS guys, and on the right side the business guys. Interestingly it seemed to me that the FOSS side has grown bigger since my last visit (moving the division line a little further to the right), and now included some companies that you would not usually expect there, including Sun, and even Microsoft (no kidding). OpenExpo/Topsoft isn't really targeted so much at end users (although there certainly are some), but more so at networking between industry members. This also becomes evident by the scheduling: it takes place in the middle of the week, when most end users have to work and can't easily attend. Another interesting observation was that Gnome once again didn't show up. Is it just me, or are they increasingly rare to find at expos? Friday, September 26. 2008To the Batcave!<jontheechidna> You should do a seminar "Rapid debian package deployment with ruby"  (Click for bigger awesome) Friday, September 26. 2008Friday, September 19. 2008QA, PowerDevil, KDESVN-kde4, Quassel, Java
Kubuntu got its very own bug team!
 The bug tracker changes list also got updated to aggregate all KDE 4 packages (well, at least I hope we catched all). But! Be aware that Jonathan is pretty much flooding the list (I didn't read mails for 2 days and got 360 unread bug mails...). Anyway. I am currently thinking about getting powerdevil (that power manager thingy) in the Intrepid pockets. Problem is: currently it only ships with one profile, which actually screws more stuff up than it could possibly improve :S You can find Intrepid and Hardy packages in the experimental archive (I'd like to remind, that this repository is dangerous, so you should either remove it from your sources.list once you got the desired package(s), or download/install the packages manually). If anyone tries it - I would like some feedback  kdesvn-kde4 is also available in this repository. It's a SVN snapshot from yesterday, seems to be working quite well though. If you choose to test it, please also install the -dbg package and give feedback at it's kde-apps page. Intrepid's quassel(-core) package got a make over and is now creating a fancy log file + it doesn't die on upgrades + configurable loglevel/port in /etc/default/quasselcore. kubuntu-restricted-extras doesn't depend on sun-java6-plugin anymore (we switched to -jre)... a workaround in kubuntu-default-settings is making it actually work without doing anything. Snapshot of the day: 
Thursday, September 18. 2008GSoC Wrap UpIf there was a blogger award for “Most likely to make timely posts”, then in no possible world would I even be considered for the award. I could list some excuses that sound legit in my head, but the real reason I don’t feel motivated to post often (or on time) is because I’d rather spend that time in Google Reader reading everyone else’s exciting content (that was not sarcastic). So, lets see… last time I posted I was en route to Akademy 2008 (the KDE developers conference). That was July 30th, now, a month and a half later I am back from Europe (which was amazing), GSoC is over (sad), and class has started (jury’s still out). Current Status of the MP3tunes Amarok Service The Good (Works)
The Bad (Doesn’t work)
The Ugly There is one large issue I am still wrestling with. The details of the issue are complicated, but essentially it deals with the way Amarok handles remote tracks in playlists across sessions. Generally, remote tracks’ metadata isn’t cached by Amarok for use between multiple sessions. So, if you add an mp3tunes track to a playlist in Amarok, then restart Amarok and try to play that playlist the mp3tunes track is blank. Now, there exists a method for retrieving that metadata, however it was originally implemented synchronously. When you are retrieving metadata for any significant number of tracks (10+) synchronously, and each one of those retreivals is an HTTP Get request you end up blocking the GUI thread. At Akademy I hacked a way to do this asynchronously, but it is a really nasty hack. I’ve got code on my computer that implements this feature correctly, but it has the nasty habit of crashing Amarok every so often. Between classes, marching band, homework, and other responsibilities I’m working on getting this ironed out and committed. Hopefully this will happen before the 2.0 release, because right now using MP3tunes in Amarok across sessions is slow and annoying. Thursday, September 18. 2008Wednesday, September 17. 2008Tuesday, September 16. 2008We Win!
Following Nuno, I'm presenting the KDE award that the Amarok Team has won. While I'm not artisticially gifted, I'll still try to give you something remotely artsy:
Please welcome: The cat (Filoue), The spider (unnamed large Tegenaria), the award (Meep), the award holder (Markey)  Thank you to everyone @KDE. We hope to redeem ourselves with a great Amarok 2 Friday, September 12. 2008Introducing the Apachelogger Software Store
Project Neon (i.e. me, me and me
 ) recently introduced the all fancy kdeplasma-addons package to kde-nightly on Kubuntu...followed by kdeutils... followed by sleep... followed by kdepim (including -dbg package, for the upcoming KMail BugDay)... followed by a screenshot: 
Thursday, September 11. 2008Akademy PhotosIt’s taken me the better part of a month to get home, settle in and upload my photos from Akademy to the cloud. Granted, I don’t have many photos since there were enough paparazzi at the event *glares at Bart and Sebas*.  The Grote Markt in Mechelen (HDR).
The HDR which I’ve posted here proves that you can indeed create impressive shots only using free software, as long as you have a little perseverance and know how. Maybe Uga’s blogs will get there eventually The rest of the images are on flickr. Sunday, September 7. 2008Sometimes I am feeling loved
... definitely not today.
I can't do anything in the Ubuntu wiki (bug report) ... yeah Konqueror is only default browser on Kubuntu, why would we do QA for it I just learned that when you install the java plugin it will pull in firefox, which will pull in ubufox, which will pull in synaptic, which will pull in half the main archive. And why do you think is that? Depends: libasound2, libx11-6, libxext6, libxi6, libxp6, libxtst6, sun-java6-bin (= 6-07-4ubuntu2), firefox | firefox-2 | iceweasel | mozilla-firefox | iceape-browser | mozilla-browser | epiphany-gecko | epiphany-webkit | epiphany-browser | galeon | midbrowser | xulrunnerNotice anything? Now I am feeling rather stupid because I actually started work on ubuntu-kde-default-settings making KDE 4 apps look like native Ubuntu/GNOME ones, too bad I don't feel like continuing it   Saturday, September 6. 2008The 300 lb gorilla in the room: Amarok 2 installer for OS X Rejoice ye unwashed heathen! A new installable package for Amarok 2 on OS X is available. It weighs in at about 300 MB but don't let the size allow you to ignore the obvious: there's now a new installable package for Amarok 2 on OS X. Do I sound like Steve Jobs yet? The OS X savvy among you will immediately realize the absence of, and probably want, a .app bundle. Unfortunately the enterprising young lad who has slaved away on this for eons couldn't get it to work. You get the installer instead. Speaking of which, grab the Amarok_2X.dmg. As an extra special bonus you can try out some KDE programs too. For those who don't already know these are developer packages. That means that you should only download these 300 MB of awesomeness if you are willing to test and give feedback. That means using http://bugs.kde.org to report what's broken. Obviously if you want to contribute beyond bug reporting that's welcome too I suppose we need a wiki page explaining how to do that ...By the way, remember when I said these packages were for OS X. I lied. They're for a certain version of OS X on certain hardware. Leopard and Intel only. All others need not apply. Now if you'll excuse me I've got to boot into Tiger and fight with gcc 4.2. Cheers. Here's one for the road!   Tuesday, September 2. 2008 |
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