I'm happy to announce that we will have a KDE 4.8 Release Party in Ulm (Germany), on January 27.

The last party in Ulm was a blast, so we decided to repeat the event for this release as well. We will provide some finger food, live streaming, and plenty of space for having fun. For the details please see here, and add yourself to the list if you'd like to come:

KDE 4.8 Release Party @ Ulm

See you there!

KDE Party!!!! (Image by Julio Martinez)

If you have ever wondered why some KDE folks are blogging less frequently now, the reason could be that they have switched to G+. Many FOSS and KDE people are now posting regularly on G+, among them Thiago, Linus Torvalds, Rob Malda of Slashdot fame, Glyn Moody, Trever Fischer, Harald Sitter, and myself.

What makes Google+ so attractive? Basically it combines a social network, quick status updates like Twitter, and blogging, and it's far quicker to do than traditional blogging. As opposed to Facebook, which I am no longer using, its UI is very minimalist, and the "Circles" feature makes it easy to select your target audience. Most of my contacts on G+ are FOSS people and work mates, and I rarely get "Friendship" (what does this mean anyway?) requests from people that I don't know.

You might like or dislike this trend, but it's a fact. Many of my posts on G+ are technology related, but not all of them. Most of the time, my posts are "public", so you can read them without having an account. This is my feed on Google+ (if you check my contacts, you will find many KDE people):


https://plus.google.com/u/0/102602725322221030250


Is this trend worrying, a good thing, or simply a new technology that we must accept?


Update: This is an interesting (public) article on the benefits of blogging on G+:

https://plus.google.com/112546833633391090642/posts/1fkCLdAFGuT

Back in June, an event was held in Berlin called the Qt Contributors' Summit. This was such a success that the team decided that it should not be the last time something like that happened. So, to further this success, Nokia's Qt Frameworks Division has offered KDE a whole day of unconferencing at the Qt Developer Days in Munich later this month.

If you wish to take part in furthering the collaboration between KDE and Qt, and indeed other projects, then join the Qt Contributors' Day on Monday the 24th of October at the Dolce Munich Unterschleissheim. To join in, send me an email at admin@leinir.dk to that effect

You don't have a ticket to Developer Days, you say? Well, not to fret! The KDE e.V. has been given a bunch of tickets to be given out to community members. To get your hands on one of these tickets, give me an email at admin@leinir.dk to inform me of this.

Please note! If you decide that you want to join us, get in touch with me BEFORE the end of this week! (i.e. before Sunday the 9th, which is when i send off the list of people requesting tickets and the like to the e.V. board for evaluation).

So - come to the Qt Contributors' Day at Developer Days 2011 in Munich, and let's make this thing epic! Qt 5 is ahead, and with the launch of the Qt Project, we have more to say than we ever did before!

Lately, the Gluon team has been pulling a whole lot of work together, which is why you've not been hearing about us all that much unless you've sat in the channel with us. As you most likely know, the Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE tutoring programs ran over the summer, and Gluon of course took part in both. That is not what this blog entry is about, at least not directly - i simply mention it because as we are now at an end, we are getting closer to our next release, which will happen once the three projects are merged into master.

What this blog entry is about is what we've been up to over the last few weeks - specifically attending the enormously successful Desktop Summit in Berlin, and immediately following this GDC Europe.

Desktop Summit

While at the Desktop Summit, the Gluon team took part in various events, some of which got filmed. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the recording equipment seems to have more or less exploded, and while they're working on it and hope to still be able to gain at least some of the presentations, i thought it best to publish this none the less.

The first event we took part in was the lightning talks, where Felix Rohrbach spoke about his Season of KDE work implementing support for the Achievements module in the Open Collaboration Services draft.



The next event, unfortunately without video here, was our presentation. This had both Arjen and myself on stage, where we first talked about how this was our second aniversary in our current form, with the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit being the initial event which allowed us to eventually formulate our vision. After this, we showed off Gluon Creator, and what we can do with it. Finally, Shantanu showed up to show off his work on the distribution system - the part which allows you to push games directly from inside Gluon Creator and download them using any of the Gluon Player applications. From a personal viewpoint, let me just say - while the presentation fell apart due to broken network, it is still very impressive stuff!

Similarly without video, but very productive, we had our BoF, which unlike last year, where we spent the time brainstorming about the future direction of Gluon, we spent helping those present getting to grips with how to build games using Gluon. This event further showed that we need to get those screencasts done, showing how to use Gluon Creator to build games. If you want to help us with this endeavour, drop by the channel and we'll talk Scripts for the first few of them are already done, and they primarily need to be recorded.

Finally, of course, hacking went on. One of the things which we spent time on (Arjen specifically) was the particle system. So, when he had something to show off, we recorded this little video, where you unfortunately cannot see just how fast the whole thin is - but this is drawn eight times on top of itself, and there is no perceivable slowdown. Impressive stuff And this, i'm told, is entirely unoptimized as it stands, so expect impressiveness when it's merged into master later



GDC Europe

At the Qt Contributor's Summit in Berlin, Sulamita Garcia from the Intel AppUp team came up to me and asked two questions: Were i available in mid August, and would i like to go on stage to talk about Gluon. I'm always happy to talk about Gluon to anybody who'd like to listen, and it just so happened i was available at that time. So, as it turns out, they would like to bring Gluon to GDC Europe for an AppUp event. Over the next few weeks (six weeks from the invitation was extended until GDC Europe was due to happen) we worked on putting together something to show off there.

As it turned out the AppUp Lab got cancelled, but this happened at such a late time that everything else was already ordered, so Arjen and i went merrily on our way to Cologne, checked into the hotel and eventually got our passes. We walked around on the floor, talking to as many people we could about Gluon and what we are trying to do for the Makers and Players of Games, and a lot of people were more than happy to hear what we had to say.

There was lots of interest in using our various libraries directly, and our distribution system hit home as well with many people. We also spoke with a supplier of payment solutions about what we might be able to do for our donation-based monetization concept, and got some very good insights on this.

Finally, of course, everybody likes a bit of swag, and Intel decided to sponsor us some really nifty t-shirts! With a graphic designed by Eigene "it-s" Trounev, Arjen, Bjoern, Monika and i looked dashing in our dark blue Gaming Freedom t-shirts. Here is Arjen looking confused on the final day of the event (sorry, didn't get to taking other shots, we were so much all over the place i totally missed taking pictures ):



Now, as the AppUp Lab event got cancelled, i now have the remaining t-shirts in two boxes here in my home. So, we came up with the idea that, other than making sure that the Gluon team gets some t-shirts to wear, we would give others the opportunity to get one as well. And as these ones are a bit special, we thought that it would make sense to make it a bit of a competition rather than simply handing them out: So, make a game with Gluon Creator and get it up on GamingFreedom.org (through http://test.gamingfreedom.org/ - or using Shaan7's GSoC work to do it directly from Gluon Creator), and get in touch with us about it, so make sure you're you, so you can get your t-shirt! Note, there are about 200 t-shirts in various sizes, so to make sure you get one, you will need to get there before everybody else - this is first come first serve after all... and who knows, there might be an achievement in this later on

Next?

The next steps on the path towards gaming freedom are many. Some of them are:

• Merge the tutored projects in


• Release a snapshot


• Produce those screencasts to help people build games


• Use those t-shirts constructively - want one? Make a game!

I'm happy to announce that we will have a KDE 4.7 Release Party, combined with the Amarok 2.4.2 Release and My Birthday in Ulm / Germany. Location is Mark's and Myriam's apartment.

We will have food, drinks, music, and we can discuss the latest KDE and Amarok releases. If you are in the Southern Germany area, please make sure to join us and sign up here:

KDE 4.7 Release Party @ Ulm

Also joining will be Ian Monroe (KDE/Amarok) and his wife Sherry, Christian "Muesli" Muehlhaeuser, and Manuel "Sput" Nickschas (Quassel IRC). Plus some work mates from Nokia.

Paaaaaady! (Image by Julio Martinez)

Update: The event is on July 30, one week from now.

I felt like it was a good idea to give you a little update on what I have been up to lately. So here we go

First of all I should point out why I have been so quiet lately (unusual for me). Roughly six months ago I started working for Nokia, which required relocation to Germany. I am now living in Ulm, which is mostly known for the Ulm Minster, the tallest cathedral in the world:




The first three months I had been living in a hotel, which is cool for about two weeks but then gets boring quickly. I'm now living in a nice apartment with Myriam, in a 500 years old house in the city center. Unlike most Nokians in KDE I'm not working on Qt, but rather on a new project as Senior Software Engineer in "UI Design and Implementation". Also, unlike many of my fellow friends from KDE, I happen to believe that Stephen Elop is a good CEO, and I am happy with Nokia's new direction. I am in the lucky position to work with famous developers like Matthias Ettrich and Lars Knoll, and I succeeded in bringing veteran Amarok hackers Christian "Muesli" Muehlhaeuser and Ian Monroe into our team. Working with Chris and Ian is a joy, and I would be happy to bring more talented FOSS people in the project (drop me a note if you are interested).

After my prolonged absence in KDE, I'm eager to start contributing again, and especially to work on Amarok. It's great to see that Amarok is still doing fine, and that our team has made some very nice progress, with the latest achievement being the release of Amarok 2.4.2 Beta 1. We have some nice plans for Amarok, like a port to Qt Quick, which will also help getting our plans for Amarok Mobile on track.

My latest obsession is Google+, we often hang out there with nerds like Harald Sitter and Paul Adams, doing community work like trying to teach some German to Ian Monroe (it's hopeless...) Find me here: Mark @ Google+

Last not least, I will be attending the Desktop Summit and Qt Developer Days 2011. Meet me there for sharing a line of beer or injecting some Coca Cola (at DS we could also laugh derisively at gnome devs).

Hi people! Just to let you know that Gluon is very much moving - not only are all the students now starting more seriously on their GSoC and SoK projects, since their exams are starting to end, we have also been active in other places. Recently i returned from the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco, and rather than bore you with the details, i will just say that Intel are interested in a combination of GamingFreedom.org and their AppUp application store... Potentially interesting stuff on the horizon, we shall see!

Other than that, we were also featured on the FreeGamer blog, and two of the Gluon people (myself and Laszlo) took part in the OCS Next sprint - furthering the technology on top of which the GamingFreedom.org distribution site is built. Finally, a short article about Gluon was included in a recent Commit Digest, the weekly update on development efforts going on in KDE.

Finally, we will be presenting at the Desktop Summit, and on that note Laszlo has given a short presentation to the Helsinki chapter of the IGDA, whose members seemed to quite enjoy what we're trying to do. This is great news, as these are exactly the people we're trying to catch the attention of! So, in short - Gluon seems to be going places

So following the mantra that nothing is official until it is blogged about, let it be known that version 0.1.0 of my small pet project libechonest has been released. Tarball available here:

http://pwsp.cleinias.com/libechonest-0.1.0.tar.bz2 sha1: 4c4e6a478a3bd7be0121af586e635e30840fe984

What is libechonest? A small C++/Qt wrapper around the APIs provided by The Echo Nest: http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4/ . And what is provided by these APIs? In few words, the same sort of information you get from Last.fm but much better and much, much cooler.

Some Amarok users who enjoy using the Dynamic Playlists feature may already be familiar with The Echo Nest, as it has already crept into recent Amarok releases. It has been possible to run a dynamic playlist based on Echo Nest-suggested similar artists and tracks for a few versions now. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the information available from The Echo Nest. They provide up to date information about artists including audio,bios, blogs, news, reviews, images, similar artists, and much more.

So libechonest is designed to make it as easy as possible to extract this wealth of information from whatever small app you are creating. Maybe the Plasma Media Center could display related images about the currently playing artist, for example, without having to figure out what images from the artist Spoon are actually about Spoon and not about a certain type of cutlery. Alternatively, a mobile app could use the beat analysis features in the API to play continuous music that fits a certain BPM to match up with your desired running cadence. The possibilities are, of course, endless

Anyway, libechonest is being developed in KDE's git repository at git://anongit.kde.org/libechonest . For the moment the public-facing site is on KDE's projects page: https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/libs/libechonest

Sharing a nice, big booth at LinuxTag, the KDE, Kubuntu and Calligra teams are pulling together to promo all things KDE. As you can tell from the picture below, the booth is very well visited, with lots of people interested all 'round - showing off Plasma on the desktop in the middle there, and the brand, spanking new Plasma Active running on an openSuse powered tablet nearest the camera - already a real crowd puller, even in its experimental stage! Kudos to the Active team there, great stuff, very demoable



Yesterday i did a talk about Calligra, standing in for Inge who couldn't attend, immediately following Michael Meeks' talk about LibreOffice - what an act to follow - and it was received very well indeed! The message of the Calligra Engine as a kind of WebKit for office applications is clear and easily understood, and the audience seemed very interested in this. Not only that, people seemed very interested in the fact that Calligra isn't just working on mobile versions, they're right around the corner. So, yes, it sounds like Calligra is, indeed, the future of office suites as hinted by Inge in a blog post a couple of days ago.

The day before, i gave a talk about the GamingFreedom network and the Gluon tool chain, and what it means for Free game development. While there was a fairly small number of attendees (about thirty people), those who were there were enthusiastic and positive about it. The question about JavaScript was brought up again, and it seems my answer that it is for reasons of easy distribution, and that the amount of code work when writing games is reasonably small as well, was acceptable. They also responded very well to the statements about how to monetize the effort - that is, that selling games is not encouraged, but that donations are being made extremely simple, thus removing all obstacles bar will and stinginess - in short, people liked to know that they would not have to compromise on their principles just because they wanted to make a bit of money with Gluon and GamingFreedom. Which is good to know

So, all in all, it seems to be going quite well!

A few days ago, i was approached by Chris Woolfrey, who asked whether i would be interested in being interviewed for the Free Software Foundation Europe's regular feature called the Fellowship Interviews. Each month some person from the FSFE membership is interviewed about their involvement with Free Software and Free Culture, and i was introduced as somebody who had something to do with this, as one of the people behind the http://GamingFreedom.org/ network. So, i said sure thing, and we had a chat over Jabber, where we touched upon many a thing. And then, last night, it was released! http://www.fsdaily.com/Community/Fellowship_interview_with_Dan_Leinir

Also, i'm going to be at the KDE Games sprint in Dresden, named Blue Wonder 2011! Leaving tonight, to spend the night in Gatwick airport so i can catch my stupidly early plane tomorrow morning... yay excitement there Much more excitement, however, on finally getting a face-to-face between the core KDE Games developers and the Gluon team! Great stuff here, much cooperative work hopefully in the future

There is a thought that just struck me, during a conversation on IRC. I'm not sure if the idea is new, or an old hat, but I think it might have merit to discuss it.

You have probably all heard about the Technological Singularity, which is a very controversial topic. Some scientists say, it will clearly happen, the question is just, when will it happen? Others say, it's complete nonsense, it will never happen. Myself I am assuming that the theory is correct. But it might happen in a very different way than it was assumed before.

The classical assumption is, at some point computers and AIs will get so smart, that they will be able to improve themselves. When that happens, noone can predict what the result will be, hence the term Singularity. Our lives might continue as normal, or the world might completely change forever. Noone knows this. Recently there has been a lot of talk about crowd sourcing, collective intelligence, and distributed cognition. I am starting to think that we are heading right into the Singularity, right now, without even noticing! But the Singularity is not some sort of "Super AI", a computer that is incredibly advanced. The Singularity is our minds, connected over the Internet. We are the Singularity.

Think about all the incredible things that have happened lately, among them the WikiLeaks phenomenon, whole governments crumbling because of Internet activists, the wonderful TED talks, encouraging Free Thinking, and about giant Free Software projects like KDE. Think about the rapid advances humanity has recently made, in many areas of science.

There is no need to wait for this mythical AI that becomes the Singularity. Folks, we are already in the middle of it happening. Think about it, and I would love to read your thoughts on this.


Thanks for reading, and please comment

The inspiration for this article stemmed from a recent discussion with a bunch of friends. The core of our topic was: "Does friendship differ from love?" Now, love can mean a lot of things. Initially, in this discussion, it meant the classical romantic love between life partners. Which is of course a special thing. However, my argument was (controversial as always): "True friendship is the same thing as romantic love, if you have the guts to leave out the romantic crap." Please let me explain, what true friendship means to me:

Being there for each other. Especially when the friend is in need of that (sickness, financial troubles).

No need for being dishonest. A real friendship implies that secret topics can be discussed. They will stay secret.

Surviving arguments. True friends will value each other's opinion, whether they agree with it, or disagree. The truth can be told, and it's expected to be told.

I do not have very many "true friends", but: Quality > Quantity. My girlfriend is in this group of close friends. I don't think that there is a huge difference between what is classically called "Love", and "True friendship."


Think about this, and, as always, I appreciate comments. Some KDE folks are friends, just to make the connection

The Amarok Team is very happy to announce a new edition of our Amarok Insider newsletter. This time, we have really packed it with information, cool insider details, and fun!

Image copyright by Ben Golub

This edition also features an exclusive interview with Amarok core developer Bart Cerneels, who is starting to resemble Bono from U2 more and more:

Bono Cerneels from Amarok

Please enjoy:

Amarok Insider - Issue 16

I am not quite sure yet what my exact intention with this blog is, it came from a sudden inspiration, like most of my articles. I think, this thought has been breeding in me for a long time: Pointing out that contributing to Free Software projects can actually give you back a lot, without getting directly paid for it.

Let me illustrate this phenomenon with Amarok as a case-study, because I naturally know this project well, and I was able to watch it evolve over the past 8 years. An amazing process, interesting, and certainly life-changing for me. But not for me alone. Over the time, our project has served as a real "Career Maker" for many of our contributors. Also, which might be just as important, it has lead to many good friendships (even personal friendships) between members of our team. In this article, I will not so much go into the friendship aspect, because this is a rather private thing. Let me just say, I consider many members, and also former members of the Amarok team, as close friends. Some friendships have lasted for many years, and they are still going strong. Simply a great thing.

Switching to the career aspect, many of our contributors have started with Amarok when they were still quite young. Many of them have been students back then, or even pupils. Myself, when the idea of creating Amarok formed in my mind, I was in a rather desperate state. Being a student, I had next to no money. I did not have many friends. I had almost lost my interest in computing, which had been an obsession when I was a teenager (I started programming on the Commodore Amiga, at age 15, those were the times!). Nowadays, I am sometimes being treated very respectfully when visiting Free Software events. I have found many friends in KDE and Amarok, from all over the world, I have met a wonderful girlfriend, and I have had interesting jobs that I could never have dreamed of back then. And so much more.

Going back to our team, what has Amarok meant for them, after all these years? Let me just list a few of the achievements, which I think have at least partly been enabled by contributing to our project:

Max Howell: One of the first contributors to Amarok. Back when Max started, he had just earned his master degree in Chemistry. He was not really sure what to do with it yet. Then, one day, a guy named "mxcl" showed up in our IRC channel. I learned that he was from the UK, that he was friendly, and eager to hack on Amarok. So he did that, very successfully. After a while, Max realized that his real passion was in IT, not Chemistry. But he he did not have any formal education or degree in IT. He took the risky step to apply at Last.fm, and was accepted. A few years later, Max had become Lead Developer at Last.fm, famously developing the Last.fm player. Nowadays, Max is a highly competent and successful Software Engineer, works for TweetDeck, and still occasionally contributes to Open Source. Impressive career, I would think.

Christian Muehlhaeuser: Christian (Muesli) showed up around the time that Max had joined Amarok. Together, we are still listed in the English Wikipedia article for Amarok, as "The 3 M's of Amarok". After contributing to Amarok for many years, he took his chances, and applied at Last.fm. He became one of their first employees. When he left Last.fm, Christian was a sought-after Software Engineer. Today many companies are trying to hire him. He has the freedom to choose to do what he likes best. Very impressive.

Seb Ruiz: Seb comes from Down Under, and he was among the "second generation" of Amarok hackers. He contributed massive parts of Amarok 1.x and Amarok 2.x, as well as a unique sense for community spirit, and joy. Today, Seb is Team Leader at Atlassian, a renowned software company based in Australia. It's a great job, from what I heard. He seems to enjoy it a lot.

Ian Monroe: Ian also is from the "second wave" of Amarok developers. Back when he started, he was very young, just beginning his university studies for a degree in CS. When he left university, Ian worked at companies like Collabora. Today, Ian remains an active Amarok contributor, and an active member of the KDE community. His recent work on the KDE Git migration has been very appreciated. It's pretty clear to me that Ian has a great career in front of him, he is still fairly young.

Leo Franchi: Leo joined when he was still very young, just starting his studies in CS and Philosophy. He became one of our most active contributors, and remains with Amarok until today. Leo is now working at KDAB, a company with very good reputation, which has close ties to the KDE community. It's easy to see that Leo will have a very promising career ahead of him.

Lydia Pintscher: Lydia (Nightrose) joined Amarok when she was still new to Free Software, just having started studying for a degree in CS. Lydia quickly became our Community Manager, and a very active person in the KDE community. At this time, Lydia is finishing her master thesis in CS, which is about Amarok and another FOSS project. Heaving read a preview of her thesis, it is clear to me that it will be very successful. It's not hard to see that Lydia will have very good job options, especially with her long experience managing Free Software communities.

This is just a very small part of the many many contributors that Amarok has seen over the years. There are more examples of great careers, which have at least partly been made possible by contributing to a Free Software project.

If you are pondering about investing some time into Free Software, and you are wondering if this is really worth it: I think we can answer this question with a very clear:

Yes.

The Old Gang: Seb, Ian, Mark, Max, Muesli

Code-In a Big Success for Documentation

By Valorie Zimmermann:

Last week the students continued to work on our Handbook, and the tasks are progressing very nicely. Now that the Handbook tasks are almost finished, they are lending a hand for our next “Amarok Insider” (past issues available at http://amarok.kde.org/Insider). It’s inspiring to work with these students, some of whom are very young, and yet are so smart, and work so hard. They have started hanging out in the #amarok and #rokymotion channel more, and getting to know some of our developers and helpful testers and users. I’ve set 39 tasks so far, and 25 are already completed! And most of my open tasks are claimed, so we’re doing very well.

Dealing with Regressions and Crashes

By Valorie Zimmermann:

Everyone has been working really hard on testing out our new features, and making sure that 2.4 is excellent! We’re collecting information about regressions and crashes to help in this effort. If you come across something which troubles you in 2.4 beta, please come into IRC, write to the Forum or list, or file a bug. We don’t see this as whining or complaining, but helping us make Amarok better! IRC is great if you can come in, because sometimes help or bug-fixing can take place on the spot! Quite inspiring to see our talented developers and the rest of the team in action.

Dealing with regressions and crashes is not quite as much fun as seeing new stuff get added to Amarok, but it is very important to a successful process. So, please help us out!

Bugs and Wishes

By Myriam Schweingruber:

Last week we have continued our bug-fixing work to get the next Amarok version out of the door. Amarok 2.4 is shaping up nicely. We have fixed a total of 98 bugs only this single week! There were of course a fair amount of duplicates, but the statistics are the following:

8 implemented wishes

33 fixed bugs, of which 14 were crashes

13 invalid reports

33 duplicate reports

3 upstream and 2 downstream reports

Two reports were pushed to later and four were closed as “WONTFIX”. Now, what does this mean? Well, most of the time either it is a wish that is out of the scope of Amarok, or it cannot be implemented within a reasonable amount of time by the developers.

Why so many duplicates then? Well, it is simply an indicator of a growing user base, since the more duplicates we get, the more users are willing to report their problems! Of course it would be nice to have the users check for duplicates first, but not everybody understands the system the first time around, and it up to us triagers to help them making better reports in the future

What I want to write about today is Pizza. Nom nom Pizza. We all love Pizza, right?

This here is the best Pizza place in Switzerland:





My plan is to invite Aaron to a nice Pizza there, when he comes around next time. Here's the relation to KDE: Who wants to join us?


PS:
I can't buy Pizza for everyone. This is why we need Pizza donations.

My latest toy:



Not very long ago I had broadly claimed that the Nokia N900 is the best smart phone on the market. Now I'm in a bit of a situation, because that was not really true: I found out that the HTC Desire is really the best phone. Contradiction much? Nope! The N900 is ideal for geeks, while I would say that the HTC Desire is the best phone for everyone else.


What makes it so great?

AMOLED screen with fantastic quality, the best on the market in my opinion. You can read it even in direct sunlight, and the colors are vibrant. Contrast is great.

Android 2.2, with "HTC Sense" UI. Simply the best usability currently, beats iPhone easily. MeeGo might be able to challenge it, but a lot of hard work lies ahead for that to happen.

The size of the phone is "just right". It's neither a brick that needs rapper pants or a gold chain for carrying, nor is it too small. Also, the weight is nice, it is pretty light.

Good camera. 5MP, and with extra software you can get for free (Android Market), you can turn into a really nice HDR cam.

Excellent build quality. This device feels solid and well put together. I find it feels higher quality than e.g. the Samsung Galaxy, which also happens to have a bad screen.

Google's navigation software is hard to beat. With enabled "satellite" layer, it makes driving a nicer experience than I thought is possible.

It looks pretty.

PS:
I should note that newer models of the Desire (e.g. the Desire HD) do not use an AMOLED screen, but rather some "Super LCD", which is marketing BS for "really crappy TN TFT." I went through great efforts to get one of the original models.

New Features

Similar artists applet now shows artist tags from Last.fm, and the full artist biography is shown when the artist image is clicked. It’s very nice to be able to listen to a stream from Last.fm, go to the Artist’s page in Last.fm, or even check out similar artists to any that sound interesting! A great way to Explore Your Music.

Bug Fixes

Ralf is still working on the collection scanner. He reverted back to writing the database in batch mode (like the old scanner did) which solved some performance issues when committing more than 20000 files. But a new auto test uncovered some other issues. Most of those should be fixed now and the result should be finished and integrated this weekend.

New Incremental Podcast Directory

Bart has been working on a new podcast directory that, instead of storing a cache in the database, reads directly and incrementally from an online OPML file. OPML is the standard file format for storing lists of RSS feeds, such as podcasts.

A master OPML file will be stored on amarok’s public server which will link to public podcast directories but also lists of favorite podcast channels maintained by Amarok developers.
The incremental feature is important because it means OPML’s are parsed even while they are downloaded and it’s contents are shown immediately even if the download takes multiple minutes. Furthermore this data is fetched on-demand, so there is no unnecessary internet traffic.
Since last week this work is public in the new git branch titled stecchino-IncrementalOpmlDirectory reflecting the naming convention we discussed earlier this month. This branch is open to any contributors and specifically we are looking for someone to implement the look and feel of this new service. Contact us via the developer mailing list or on IRC (Freenode): #amarok and ping Stecchino.

Bugs and Wishes

We closed 23 bugs during that week of which 8 were bugfixes, 1 wish was implemented, 2 closed as upstream bugs, 9 duplicates and 3 closed as invalid.

Related projects

Work continues on the new Phonon-VLC backend to Phonon, which is sounding excellent! In addition to that, it is now rock solid. We have not experienced a single crash in several weeks of testing, which makes it the most stable of all available Phonon backends. We have to thank the VLC team for cooperating so closely with us. Without their help, it would have been impossible to do.

There will be a new release soon and we hope that all distributions will ship the new Phonon-VLC backend soon.

Today in #amarok (Freenode IRC):

[14:53]  so I'm sat here going steadily nuts on a nasty maths problem

[14:53]  and amarok's dynamic playlist puts this on

[14:53] * Sentynel is listening to "Everybody Knows That You Are Insane" by Queens of the Stone Age [Lullabies to Paralyze, 2005] -- see http://www.last.fm/user/Sentynel for more

[14:53]  did somebody add a sense of humour to the random algorithm?

[14:54]  I find stuff like that all the time!

[14:55]  I think it's built in

[14:55]  

[14:55]  we should put that on the features list

[14:55]  yeah, we should collect those stories

[14:56]  shall I do an Insider bit?

[14:56]  we'll get email, I think

[14:56]  

[14:56]  haha, why not, could be amusing

[14:56]  may I have your permission to quote that bit for a blog post?

[14:57]  go ahead

[14:57]  then I can collect some funny stuff to choose from

So, send in your stories, folks! And we'll print a few of the best in the Insider

First of all, allow me to point out what ADHD (Or ADD, as it is sometimes called) really is. However, instead of trying to explain it myself, I will let Wikipedia do it for me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivity_disorder


So you might ask: "Why on earth should a random KDE developer write about a psychological disorder, and what does it have to do with KDE?" First of all, I am myself affected by ADHD. In fact I'm a pretty hardcore case. Some of you in KDE might have suspected this, or heard about it, as I tend to speak out openly. Second, I'm a bit of a hobby psychologist. I know, I know. "Hobby MDs" are the worst kind of MDs. And that's very true. However, I happen to have a good friend who is an MD in psychology, and I talk to her often. Adding to that, I have read many books, articles, and theories about ADHD. So this gives me a bit of an advantage.

Next question, how is this related to KDE at all? Well, KDE mostly consists of geeks. ADHD is very common among geeks. Some scientists believe that the rate might be as high as 30%. So, it is quite likely that many of you either have ADHD and know about it, or they have it, but don't yet know it. In my opinion, it is time for an article that could potentially help those who suffer from ADHD. So I'm doing just that.

Let's start by explaining common misconceptions about ADHD:

It means that a child is always distracted in school. WRONG

It means that someone is really totally nuts. WRONG

It's a bad illness, it needs to be treated, ideally with Ritalin. WRONG

There are many more such misconceptions, I only listed a few of them here.

But what is ADHD really? That's a difficult question, and not even professional psychologists are quite sure about it. Officially, the accepted theory in psychology is: "ADHD is a serious disorder. It is an illness."

I'd like to challenge this theory! That's quite something, isn't it? Here are some of my own theories about ADHD:

First of all, it is not really a disorder per se. In fact it is more of a gift, if used correctly. If not used correctly, it is a pest. It can ruin your life. So, it is worth trying to understand what it really is. Or else you will suffer, and suffer some more.

Let me list some of the advantages of ADHD, if "used correctly" (I will get to that later):

Ultra-fast learning.

Interest in almost all forms of science and crafts, ranging from IT to medicine, to bongo drumming.

Ability to multi-task. Very important in our new information based world.

Ability to "hyper-focus". This comes very handy. ADHD people can focus so strongly on a task, that they can get it done much faster than anyone else could.

Being pretty smart. Some ADHD people are in fact very smart.

Being good communicators. ADHD people are often found in leading positions, such as CEO's or Project Managers.

Being able to detect lies easily.

Less need for sleep. 5 or 6 hours per night are just fine.

However, there is a price in life for everything. ADHD is no exception. These are the disadvantages:

Having next to no patience. Big obstacle, because this really annoys everyone else.

Being unable to lie, or being unable to be dishonest. Can be a problem, because not everyone can take the truth.

Going nuts if bored. Boredom is the worst thing that can happen to an ADHD person. In fact it can lead to deep depression. Imagine it like a CPU that needs constant data feeding, or else the cache starves.

So, let's get back to the point of "using it correctly". What does this mean? First of all, never let that CPU starve. It needs input. A lot. Feed it books, the Internet, science, anything. Just don't get bored. Then, ADHD people tend to be chaotic. "Messy" is actually an advanced form of ADHD. You don't want that, right? So, always try to keep order. Throw things away that you don't need. Never hamster stuff. One phone is enough, you don't need 5 phones. Give them away to friends who can put them to good use. And: Always use TODO lists. They help you organize your life, which is all important. Got a funky idea, but you are taking a walk? Always take something to write with you, pen and paper, or a smart phone. Write the idea down. Later on, think about it again. It might just be a brilliant idea, or a very crappy one. You'll find out later.

Try to be patient with other people. I know, it's next to impossible. But there are ways to get around this. If someone talks slowly and you get bored, find an excuse. "I'm sorry, but I really need to take a leak. I will be back later." That works most of the time. Also, try not to get into pointless arguments, and always stay friendly. Other people will get very annoyed if you are too harsh. It happened to me in the past. Now I know how to handle this better, and it works.

Let's get to the core of the theory. Please read this article first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention-deficit_hyperactivity_disorder_controversies


So you see, not everything is nice and dandy in the world of psychology. It's a science, and as such it is constantly evolving. New theories replace older ones, if they work better. The current official theory about ADHD might be true, or it might be wrong. We will see in the next years. I'm pretty confident that there will be some revisions.

And now we get to the meat! This is getting really controversial. If you don't like controversial ideas, please stop reading here. You have been warned.

"What is ADHD really, then?"

It's the next evolutionary step of our brain. Studies show that the rate of ADHD increases world wide. This is no coincidence. There must be a reason for it. Only ADHD allows you to live comfortably in our new information based society. Without it, it gets very hard to work e.g. in IT, as you need to learn constantly. Stopping to learn means losing your job, essentially. ADHD people love learning, so they actually enjoy the work, if they like it. Work == Fun. Simple as that. I don't have something to work on, be it payed work or a hobby project, I will get very depressed. It has happened to me, it can happen to you.


ADHD is the Brain 2.0.

There you have it. Discuss!



PS:
It took me exactly 25 minutes to write this article. Only possible thanks to hyper-focusing.

Ralf’s huge Collection Scanner patch

Amarok’s “Collection Scanner”, which is the part that reads your music tags, was one of the oldest pieces of code that we still had in Amarok. It stemmed from the very early days of something like Amarok 0.8 (jurassic!). While the code was later on greatly improved by Jeff Mitchell, the system started to show its age, and it was very hard to get an overview over what had become a rather complex part. Ralf Engels has now rewritten the scanning system entirely. While we are currently still ironing out some bugs, the new system should be even faster and easier to maintain.

Visual improvements for the Current Track applet by Rick

The Current Track applet was neglected for a while. It now is cool and useful even when you aren’t playing music, accurately listing the last 6 or so tracks played. And doesn’t it look great while Amarok is rockin’? Of course you can still easily rate your tracks there, but also “love” them in Last.fm, save your position in a long piece or podcast, and new: edit track details, such as tags, lyrics, labels, and such.

Also new to the current track applet are the “Show In Media Sources” icons, which allow you to add filters to the media sources browser using the current track’s album, artist, composer and genre if available. These are not shown by default, but they can be enabled in the applet’s configuration dialog - accessible by right-clicking somewhere in the applet.

Colored debugging output by Rick and Kevin

You might not notice this unless you run Amarok from the console. It really is interesting to see the work that Amarok is doing to keep your music humming, though! So sometimes start up a console, and type in the command “amarok -d” or “amarok --debug” and see the output just scroll past your unbelieving eyes! Someday you might have trouble (yes, it happens occasionally) and we’ll ask on the list or in IRC to run Amarok this way, and show us the output. You’ll already know how to do this, when you are not stressed out.

New Guitar Tabs applet

We have a new applet that shows you the guitar tabs in the Context View. Thank you to Rainer Sigle for this nice applet for guitar enthusiasts.

Ralf’s refactoring that improved stability

Another patch from Ralf improves Amarok’s overall stability. While it already is a rather stable application (I personally cannot remember the last time it crashed on me), this patch should improve some corner cases where things could go wrong.

Improvements in the Lyrics Applet

In the past, you possibly lost your edits if you were editing lyrics and the song ended. Now you are prompted to save your edits as the track changes. Remember, you can always right-click on a track and Edit Track Details > Lyrics. Your computer doesn’t even need to be online to do this type of editing.

Bugs and Wishes

Over all, we closed 80 bugs and implemented 2 wishes:22 were bugfixes, 2 downstream bugs, 1 upstream bug and 34 were marked as duplicate.

Last not Least

Please remember that we are still running our annual fundraiser Roktober! The Amarok team will be happy about every donation you make, and you will be added to a special edition of our “About Amarok” dialog!

This new series of articles was inspired by Boudewijn Rempt's great "Last Week in Krita". Thank you Boud, for giving us the idea

Please enjoy an overview of current Amarok development. Things are moving at a crazy fast speed currently, and Amarok 2.4 is going to rock hard, I can promise you that. Here is what we did last week:

We launched our annual Roktober fundraiser

Each donor who agrees will have a “Thank you” entry in the Amarok “about” dialog, optionally with social networking features provided by openDesktop.org for those who have an account!

Rick's mega patch, fixing most Applet issues

Amarok developer Rick W. Chen committed a mega patch, consisting of no less than 110 separate commits! What he did is simple to describe, but hard to do: He fixed almost all bugs and various issues in Amarok’s Plasma applets (those applets in the middle part of Amarok). Additionally, he made many small improvements to the applets, such as:

Improved layout of the Wikipedia applet, and added a nice progress bar that shows how far the page has loaded.

Better layouts for the VideoClip, Labels, and Album applets.

Much less memory consumption.

Performance improvements.

All applets now work with proxy servers.

The main features (the main motivation for context view changes for me) were supporting Wikipedia locales and upcoming events for specific venues.

MusicBrainz auto-tagging from Sergey

This is a killer feature, as far as I am concerned. Like most developers, I am very, very lazy. To be honest, I have not tagged an album in my life. This feature changes all that. You click one button, and everything you want is tagged correctly. This is awesome.

New option for hiding the menu bar

This has been a much requested feature for a long time. And since we care about usability a lot, Amarok is going to explain to you how to disable this feature before you activate it.

Font size of On-Screen-Display is now configurable

The user can now control the font size of the text in the OSD. Rather than setting the absolute point size, as was the case in Amarok 1.4, the user can specify the size in a relative percent-of-normal size. For example, setting the size to 115% makes the OSD font a bit larger than the normal screen font. Why the change from absolute to relative sizes? It lets Amarok look better on a wide range of devices, from small mobile or netbook screens, to HTPCs.

Playdar Collection by Andy Coder (GSoC project)

Amarok will now render this menu readable with all color schemes

Bugs and Wishes

Over all, we closed 98 bugs and implemented 6 wishes: 29 were bugfixes, 3 downstream bugs, 4 upstream bugs and 62 were marked as duplicate.


Thank you to all Amarok developers who have contributed to this article

A few days ago, Paul Adams and Guillermo Amaral recorded a pretty nice Podcast interview with me. We were talking about some pretty interesting things (secrets will be revealed!), and about some pretty silly things (ROFLing will be achieved!). At any rate, we had a blast recording this, and I recommend to check it out.


You'll find the Podcast for download here:

KDE and the Masters of the Universe: Amarok founder Mark Kretschmann

PS:
Of course you could also use Amarok's Podcast feature to subscribe to the feed

Short answer: Yes.

Longer answer:

I have been very lucky recently. At the fantastic OVI and KDE Sprint, kindly hosted at the Nokia office in Munich, I was given a N900. First of all I would like to say "Thank you!" to Nokia, for doing that. It's a great gift, and I promise to put it to good use (MeeGo port of Amarok...)

I had already heard great things about this device. As a former owner of a Nokia N810, which was nifty, but "not quite there", I was very excited to find out if the N900 got it right. And hell yeah, did they get it right this time. This is the device that every geek has been dreaming of: A full Debian computer that fits in the pocket of your jeans, including a phone. Usability is excellent (far better than e.g. of the N97 Mini, which uses S60). I will admit that this device is probably more suitable for geeks, than for example for my daddy. It's a bit too "computer'ish" for the average non-technical person.

However, I find it easy to use. And features... well. There isn't anything that the N900 cannot do. Every day I'm discovering some new amazing feature. It has: A full Debian OS, with all the apps that you would use on a desktop too, e.g. X-Chat, ScummVM, and even an X terminal. Which brings us to another important point: It runs X11. What other phone does it? None that I know of. The big advantage is that all your favorite Linux apps will run just perfectly, without much of a porting effort.

Hardware wise, this is just the best of the best: The OMAP 3 CPU (well, SoC really) is pretty fast, the camera is neat (although the image noise level is a bit too high for my taste). It has Bluetooth, 3G, WiFi, a real keyboard (big advantage!), pretty decent battery life, and great sounding speakers (they sound far better than my laptop does), and really good in-ear canal headphones, that can be used as a headset too. Ah yes, it also has an FM radio receiver, which I haven't used so far. The display is really good, excellent viewing angle, great contrast. In fact it's so good that watching movies is a pleasure with the device. I watched "Avatar - The Last Airbender" in bed the other day. Btw, that movie is far better than people like to say


So, to sum it up, for a geek, there isn't a better phone currently than the N900. This is the device you want, believe me that. Well, there is one better device, which is the N900+1, but it's not yet released. I will probably buy it on day one, because thinking about it alone it already gives me a nerdgasm.

Here it comes: October in all of its glory! For some, this is a time of falling leaves. For others, it is a time of warm sunbeams. Either way, we are once again nearing the year’s end and are ready to sum up our efforts, while we continue to develop and Rok the World!

In the last twelve months, we have made more than 4000 commits, closed over 4000 bugs, released 6 new versions of Amarok, wrote a Quick Start Guide to Amarok, attended over 10 conferences and had a big developer sprint in Switzerland. All of this, thanks to your donations!


Some of the highlights we worked on in Amarok itself:

new Automatic Playlist Generator

improved cover fetching

new applets for the Context View (Upcoming Events, Similar Artists, Videos...)

moodbar support

better desktop integration (including KNotify support)

better podcast handling

queue support

custom label support

a huge number of improvements to existing features!

For Amarok 2.4 (planned for early 2011) and upcoming releases we have planned:

transcoding, so you can transfer files to your media device in the right format

UPnP support

Playdar integration

spectrum analyzer

completing the Amarok handbook

many more exciting features and improvements!

You might have noticed that our development pace has quickened! In order to continue working on Amarok at such speed, we call on your help. Costs such as server maintenance and travelling expenses are too much for our tiny budgets to handle. Remember, everything we do, we do for free! And this is where you come in!

This year’s Roktober, our annual fundraiser, has a goal of 5000 Euros. Reaching this goal will help us handle this next exciting year smoothly. The funds will help us develop more powerful features in Amarok, pay for our servers, and send team members to conferences; we may even run a developer sprint or two!

As a sign of our appreciation for your support we will add donors agreeing to it to a special section in Amarok’s About Dialog. Your name will then appear in each version of Amarok that gets released in the next 12 months.

So join us, and throw in your share to Rok the World!

In the weekend leading up to the Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, 13 KDE hackers and community members, and Nokia employees Knut Yrvin and Ralf Engels have got together in the Nokia Offices near by. There they discuss the potentials of Nokia's Ovi services offering and what opportunities exist in Ovi for KDE as well as what KDE can offer Ovi. The meeting was sponsored by Nokia, and approved by the KDE e.V. - both of these indicating that both parties are interested in seeing such a collaboration succeed.

I am "sorry" to report that we have been so busy here that i have not been able to set aside time to do a proper blog entry about the sprint each day as normally happens during the KDE sprints, but as you can tell from the following, and the Dot article which is going to be posted soon, this sprint was really quite a heavy deal - in the good way!

Friday

My Friday started out with me getting up at horse o'clock England time (that is, the moment in time when by all rights only horses ought to be standing, in this case meaning 03.15), and as my poor house mate had offered to drive me to the airport, he of course got up a matter of minutes later. So, off to the airport we went, and i shall not bore you with any details of the entirely uneventful remainder of the trip itself.

Arriving at the Nokia office in Munich to find Rune 'dimse' Jensen already there, i promptly got my little, already prepared signs ready to be hung up. Unfortunately, as it turned out, their monochromatic nature, caused by our printer's lack of colour quality, meant that they were mostly unnoticed by the intended recipients, but oh well - i know to make them bright KDE-blue for next year


After spending the day waiting for people to slowly trickle in and chatting with Knut and each other in general, we decided to go into town and find a place to get something to eat. So, off we went, finding a nice bar, which in stark contrast to so many places in Germany simply had English language menus by default - an obvious hint to the fact that central Munich is a place where a lot of people come from all over the world to drink beer and gawk at really pretty architecture.

After managing a really nice steak for a surprisingly small amount of money (EUR 19 for a perfectly prepared, rare cooked steak, very good!) and further chatting - this time including beer - we went off to the hostel. We had ordered space for 13 people, which in A&O Hostels speak seems to actually mean "the smallest number of rooms we can fit that many people into", which here meant four people per room in six person rooms... which when we arrived were even equipped for eight people, with four bunk beds in each room. Somewhat confused, we tucked ourselves in and prepared ourselves for an early start the next day.

Saturday

Early starts are not something geeks traditionally are particularly brilliant at, and as a result we did not manage to get everybody up and out before almost an hour after the planned time. At least we got to the office before mid day

So, with everybody arrived at the office, we started out by attempting to describe in some detail just what Ovi actually is. A lot of people have been confused about this, so this helped streamline the whole thing a lot: Ovi is not just the app store, or more recently Ovi Maps. It is, in essence, an umbrella term which covers all of Nokia's service offerings. And it means "door" in Finnish - yes, door, not gateway or portal or somesuch, simply door


After getting the basics done, we began our discussions - in particular this happened by putting three big pieces of paper up on the wall. Each then had a title added, reading: What can Ovi do for KDE, What can KDE do for Ovi, and What features could be added to Ovi.

During these discussions, another piece of paper was added when we realised that one of the Ovi services, Ovi Files, would be shut down (in fact it is being shut down as i am writing these words). As a result, we made it one of priorities to come up with specific ideas for Ovi Files, and how to offer a sensible replacement for the service. As we are reasonably well informed that the reason for shutting it down is technical and not a lack of users or the like, we spent some time coming up with ideas for what we could possibly offer in this area, and came up with what we believe is a sensible business model for using ownCloud to provide an Ovi Files style service.


After working out the first details of this, it was time to get ready for the fact that Germany is entirely shut down retail-wise on Sundays. As such, we went out and bought enormous amounts of food. To be exact, 120 euros worth of food was purchased, preparing us for lunch on both days. Bread, meats, cheeses, salad things, and even some pasta and sauce, in case of occurrances of The Geek Hunger

In the evening, after much more talking, including a round table, where we talked about our individual wishes and interest areas (with notes taken by Chani), it was pizza time. However, getting 15 geeks to agree on which pizzas to buy can be quite a task. One we managed to complete in only two hours! While waiting for the pizza to arrive, more work went into getting some arguments put onto the sheets of paper on the wall and generally discussing the various potential topics. As you can possibly tell by now, the structure of this day was very, well, unstructured: This was in part a deliberate move, to allow people to get their heads wrapped around the concepts in Ovi itself - Sunday would be the day of more structured work.


Before catching the train back to the hostel - something which was much fun, and took two hours(!) due to strike action, and leading to the discovery that the extra bed had now been removed - was that Knut handed the devices over that he had brought. This meant that the first two people, Dipesh and Arjen, were given an N900, to assist in their work: Dinesh on his PIM work, and Arjen for his work on making GluonGraphics work in other places than the desktop. The remaining devices were put back in the bag and put to one side for the next day.

Sunday

Sunday started with a breakfast in the hostel's hotel section. While some people seem to have assumed this would be in any way different, it was of course discovered that, being A&O, the only real difference was the fact that it was higher up and had families with children in there Oh well, the food was the same, so at least there was no change in quality there - except for the fact they'd run out of croissants when i got there, but oh well - the cereal was nice, as was the bun. All in all, a successful second visit to the A&O Hostels Hackerbrücke - certainly recommendable. Simple, cheap and pleasant enough, with actual bathrooms rather than dorm showers


After a relatively successful getting out of the hostel (only twenty minutes late this time! ), we arrived at office to find that our final participant, Pradeepto, had arrived. After people got themselves woken up a touch and caught up on email, µblogs, feeds and other such things, we began discussions again - both one on one and in groups. One of these things end up with Pradeepto giving a short lecture on history of Symbian S60.

At some point, we finally reached the point where some structure was needed: We split into the groups suggested by the round table presentations from the previous day, with yours truly joining the group discussing Ovi Store related items. This, in essence, focused on how we could potentially convince Ovi that exposing their store through a web API would be advantageous to them, and have no real drawbacks. Seeing as the Ovi Store seems to run as a web page as opposed to a fat client on the various devices, we have based our ponderings and suggestions on there being no API already. Talks with the head of device development at Orange Labs R&D, Rafel Uddin, at Qt Developer Days following the sprint have shown that this seems to in fact be the case: Orange have wanted to create a rebranded version of the Ovi Store, and they would very much like to do this as a fat client rather than the current solution which requires them to do it as a web application. The suggestion this group comes up with is to suggest basing this exposure on the well proven and by now extensively implemented (both for clients and servers) web API named Open Collaboration Services, as this would instantly bring support in various places around the world - including directly in the KDE desktop.


At some point when most of the teams were reaching some level of completeness in their discussions, it was agreed that it was time for food. And so, lunch happened. This consisted of leftovers from the previous day, as well as something which translated roughly to white saussages. I am told this is a Bavarian specialty, and they are eaten by peeling the skin of the rapidly boiled sausage, and with mustard and brezes - the soft version of pretzels as you might know them from beer drinking

After lunch, people slowly start working again. Rune mentioned that he is in need of arguments for the mobile devevelopment camp he helps run for UNF.dk (the Danish youth association of science) to use Qt rather than Android. Pradeepto consequently offered to put him in contact with Jarmo Rintamaki, the manager at Forum Nokia responsible for contact with universities and other educational institutions. This finally happened at DevDays - networking, people, is the name of the game

Arriving at dinner time, we were all more or less ready to round off the sprint. The video below is the current end result of what has become an on-going discussion of what we need to contact Ovi about: In summary, we have many very good arguments for why it would make all kinds of sense for Ovi to help us and also let us help them. Drop by the wiki page to see where we are at the moment, it's already looking good, but needs much more work on the formulation part before we can hand it on to go further.

I'll keep up my Linux Grandma blog for now, but Blogger has started adding an insidious ad across the blog content, obscuring it from the reader. That must be really annoying, and I don't want to subject people to that. Serendipity is the blog software that KDE uses, and so far, it seems great. I might install it on my own server for the other blogs I have, and move the content. What a pity, blogger used to be great.

Maverick Meerkat Kubuntu, released 10/10/10, was quite an adventure in installation, due to PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair), but with the help of my son, and friend maco, and my blogged experience of the last install, I have quite a beautiful install going.

All apps installed well, most importantly Amarok and Konversation. Once I regained my old /home partition, I have my music again, unfortunately without covers and lyrics. However, the new cover-fetching is excellent, and I hope to have that all rebuilt in the next couple of months. Until then I'll be playing "Random" a lot!

While mentioning Amarok, I have to say that it's Roktober, so give! I did, and it feels great. Also, it's great to have it built from git again. All the latest!

The biggest surprise with Mav was installing Skype again, to test my built-in video camera and mic. Previously, the camera worked, but never the mic. I thought maybe it was mis-installed. However, once I unmuted it in pavucontrol (Pulseaudio controller), it worked perfectly!

I've been recently given Kubuntu membership, and am headed for UDS next weekend, to plan for Natty, the next release. Please give me any feedback you'd like me to take to Florida about the future of Kubuntu.

I will be attending the Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich. As I hear, the number of attending KDE developers is especially high this year, so I'm really looking forward to meeting many of you.

Before the event there will be a developer sprint hosted at the Nokia office in Munich. This will be the first time I'll visit the Munich office (I've had the chance to visit the Berlin team a while ago), and I'm sure we will make good use of our time and do some cool things with MeeGo and Qt hacking.

So, I'm pretty excited about the upcoming week. It will be interesting to learn new things, and at the same time it'll be fun to meet old friends, and to make new ones.

The four computers in our household are named: Hyperion, Endymion, Serenity, and Shrike. Can you tell that we are big SciFi nerds?

What you're seeing above is a photo of my work place (home-office, which rocks in so many ways!). Hyperion and Serenity are compiling Amarok with 12 compile jobs, using Icecream.

What I really wanted to write about is Serenity, my new ThinkPad X201 lappy, because some of you have asked me for a little review. Before I start I would like to say one thing about the keyboard, which is really dear to me: This is actually a vintage IBM Model M, from 1985. The Model M is often referred to as "the best keyboard in the world". Simply put, that's no lie. If you get the chance to lay your hands on one, never (ever!) give it away. Typing was yesterday, Model M is flying.


ThinkPad X201

This is the configuration I got:

Intel Core i7-620M Processor (2.66GHz, 4MB L3, 1066MHz FSB)

360GB HDD, which I exchanged for a Intel X25-M G2 SSD, 160GB (more on that later)

One 6 cell Li-Ion Battery, and one 9-cell (up to 11 hours running time)

Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 WiFi

UltraBase docking station

Price was about 2,000 USD for the ThinkPad, and an extra 350 USD for the SSD. Was it worth it? Totally. It's a sweet machine. What I like about it:

It's fast, extremely quiet (even under full load you hardly hear fan noise), and very small. In fact I like to think, the X201 manages to pack the power of a "real" laptop into almost Netbook format - quite impressive. The SSD was something of a personal dream of mine. It's the first I got, and I must say it's totally worth it. Boot times of about 2 seconds, instant application start times, and especially no more freaking harddisk noise. You often hear the argument "Yeah that's cool, but HDDs are still bigger!" That might be so, but think about the real use of an SSD: 160GB is more than enough for putting your whole system data on it, plus some personal data and such. This is what needs frequent access, so it really matters to have the speed. All the rest, the rarely accessed data like movies you watch once in a blue moon, you simply put that on a dirt cheap external USB HDD. Problem solved.

So, yeah, overall the X201 is really fancy. There are a few things I dislike about it. One of them is the rather poor performance of the Intel GMA HD graphics (which is actually integrated in the CPU). Desktop usage with up to two displays is fine, but forget about anything fancy like gaming. I'm suspecting that the Linux drivers play a rather huge part in this issue. Something else that annoys me is the bad quality of the docking station's audio jack, which produces a lot of hissing noises due to bad shielding. However, the audio jack on the lappy itself is just fine.


Verdict: Buy. (and get a Model M - the most beautiful model there is)

A new Free Software event is born: FrOSCamp. The location is nothing less than the renowned ETH Zurich university, in the beautiful city of Zurich, Switzerland

KDE of course could not miss out on the chance of partaking in the first out of a (probably) long series of successful FrOSCamp events. Thomas Thym, Myriam Schweingruber, and myself (Mark Kretschmann) organized a joint KDE / Amarok booth. On the second day, Amarok hacker Edward "Hades" Toroshchin joined us at the booth as well.

Thomas Thym gave a great talk about "The 7 principles of successful open source communities". Check it out, it's seriously interesting (and I don't say that lightly).

Check out more photos of the event here. And don't miss out on joining us next year! You can talk to the organizers in #froscamp on irc.freenode.net. Also, the wiki page contains heaps of useful information.

The image you're seeing above is showing the Wurlitzer Lyra, an innovative digital jukebox by the Wurlitzer company (a subsidiary of Gibson Guitar Corporation), which has a long history of building famous jukeboxes. The Lyra however is their first all-digital product, marking the advent of a new era.

I wouldn't have blogged about this product if I didn't have a special relationship with it. As it happens, members of the Amarok team were in fact part of the original team of engineers that designed the Lyra. Originally the jukebox was supposed to run a modified version of Amarok, which some of us worked on for several months, including a meeting with the CEO of Gibson Guitar himself, which I had written about earlier.

Although the final product did not end up using Amarok, I'm still happy about the fact that it did not get shelved, but that it was turned into a real device that can actually be bought. Also I'm pretty sure that the Lyra will generate a rather decent sound, which I could witness as I had been partaking in some of the hardware tests. Gibson stands for quality, and they wouldn't have used crappy speakers in their gear.


PS:
As for why the Lyra does not use Amarok now, there are several reasons: For one, the timing was simply bad, as Amarok back then was at version 2.0.1, and it simply did not have the maturity we required for such a use case. Additionally, and for this I blame Gibson, they tried to get away with development on the cheap, and they did not allocate sufficient resources for our development team. Software development is expensive. There is no way around this, if you want quality.

After a summer hiatus with lots of... well, not Amarok hacking... we are back with a fresh release. I won't list all of the changes here in my blog, as you might as well head over to the official release notes.

I will however say that our team now seems to be beaming with a newly found spirit of excitement. We all had to reload our batteries a bit, I guess. If you have ever toyed with the idea of contributing to Amarok, now is the perfect time to do so! We are now starting to work on the "next big version" (likely to become 2.4), and we have an influx of new developers, promoters, handbook writers, and all that makes up a team of this size.

We are also happy to welcome again two teams of students working on Amarok as university projects, one team from France, and one from Germany. Now is the time to introduce new features, and test out all of the wild ideas that you might have for Amarok. Git makes it possible to develop your very own branch of Amarok, and when you feel it's done, you can request a merge into the main development line. Dive in now!

Yeah, i went there - apparently the headline in my previous blog entry wasn't really clear enough

So, here we go with a few updates and clarifications:

Price:

FREE (for you). Yes, in the tradition of KDE developer sprints, this will be free as much as possible. This is why you need to supply me with a good estimate of your travel costs

Time and place:

Knut Yrvin has confirmed that Nokia are offering the Nokia offices in Munich from the 8th until the 10th, and DevDays Munich is from the 11th until the 13th.

Food:

Taken care of by Nokia during the sprint.

Sleeping:

None, this is a sprint! ...alright, so you need space to sleep, ok then - we will attempt to book space at the hostel we stayed at last year. Simple, but effective and including breakfast. Four persons to a room (we can probably work something out if you are desperate, but if you wish so, i would really like some help with organising that part of the trip ).

Signing up:

Please ensure that you email me ( admin@leinir.dk ) with your name, your irc nick (if you have one) and your travel cost estimate (in euros please)

Wiki page:

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Mobile/Pre_Devdays_Sprint_Munich_2010

Also NEWSFLASH: We have been granted 50 tickets for the Munich developer days training sessions! Specifically we have access to the following three modules:

• Qt Essentials (yes, this is for you who already know some programming and want to start coding in Qt, but just haven't gotten around to it)
  
• Qt Quick
  
• Qt Mobile Development for Nokia Devices
  

This is in addition to the sprint, and you will need to sign up for this separately. Please make sure to do this as SOON AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. Note that you do not get travel cost covered for this (unless you happen to be at the sprint anyway, though you as a sprinter in no way am forced to take part in the training sessions if you do not want to... but consider what you're missing out on ).

So, if you are near Munich, consider very heavily whether you should not sign up for one of these training tickets - they are all kinds of worth your time.

In closing: PLEASE BE QUICK TO SIGN UP! We need the travel cost estimations really soon, so we can ask the KDE e.V. to provide the funding.

Another blog entry in such a short time, i must have gone bonkers! So, update:

The sprint has been booked out - we are twelve people signed up for it, with one person even scheduled to drop in on us a bit late.

The training sessions are still nowhere near booked up, though - so if you're interested in free training on Qt technologies at any level, and have the ability to get yourself to Munich on the 10th of October, please don't hesitate to sign up! Either send me an email or add yourself to the list of attendees on the wiki page (or even better, both! ).

Next step for me: Get an estimate for 12 people in a youth hostel in Munich between the 8th and the 14th, put together a budget with that information and get it shipped off to the KDE e.V. board for approval. Damn we're getting close!

As some of you will know, it has almost become tradition for the Trolls at Nokia's Qt Developer Frameworks division to offer some tickets to Qt Developer Days to community members. This year is no different, and it is my great pleasure to extend an invitation to you:

Join us for a pre-devdays sprint at Nokia's offices in Munich - last year the focus was the Gluon game development and distribution framework, and this year it the focus is aimed at bringing the OVI services into KDE (seeing how they might fit in, where they fit, and hopefully the ability to provide the OVI team with feedback on their work). In the process we will also be looking at how this all might fit into MeeGo and Symbian. So, if you've got a thing for KDE on Mobile (yes, i know there's a few of you guys out there ), come along, and let's spend a couple of focused days on that topic.

In return for taking part in the sprint, you will be given a community ticket which allows you to take part in Qt Developer Days 2010 Munich. As someone who took part last year, i will not hesitate to mention just how amazing and productive it all was. Everybody were wired up by the prospects of attending developer days - close to a week of all kinds of Qt-related things.

The sprint is scheduled to run from Friday the 8th until Sunday the 10th (the weekend before Qt Developer Days). We have space for 12 people (of which at least two have been reserved already, one being myself of course ), so please - sign up soon

Sign up by writing to admin@leinir.dk and saying you would like to go. Include in the email the following information: Your full name, an estimated price for travel costs, and your background (reason for wishing to take part, and what you believe you can bring to the table at the sprint).

Following up on some questions on email: We will most likely be staying at a youth hostel (the same one we stayed at last year, simple but entirely pleasant), and this will hopefully be paid for by the KDE e.V. in the style of any other KDE sprint. Similarly, you will be reimbursed for your tickets - but please, we are a community project without huge sponsorships, so try your utmost to find cheap tickets

Following recent tradition, here is another post mostly unrelated to Amarok (next one will be on topic, I promise)

The company that I have recently co-founded, Memolane.com is in need of a graphical and interactive lead designer.

So what do we offer?

As a very young startup, we offer long hours, constantly changing tasks (we all need to pitch in wherever needed) and huge responsibility for doing the best you can as there is no one else to fall back on.

But for the right person we also offer a unique opportunity to help shape a new company from a very early stage, to become a key part of a small, young and dynamic team, a very decent (for a young startup) salary and a nice little bag of lottery tic... uhm... stock options

If this person is you, get in touch with some examples of your previous work. If it is not you, but you know someone who might be interested, a good bottle of champagne or two is up for grabs for the person who refers us the designer we end up hiring.

Anyone interested or who wants to know more can mail me a "Nikolaj{at}memolane.com" or leave a comment below.

The rapidly moving and Qt based Gluon game creation and distribution framework will be present at Akademy, where two events in particular will happen:

On Sunday at 16.45 in Room 1, the Social Games talk will be happening. The goal of this talk is both describe what, in fact, this odd entity Gluon is (hint, what is KDE? Yeah, the new version ), and how you use it. There's also a quick round-up of what our Summer of Code students Kevin and Shantanu have been working on.

On Friday at 09:30 in Area 2, the Games with Gluon BoF session will happen. This is aimed squarely at everybody in our community who have even the slightest interest in game construction. Also, free breakfast included, but registration required for that, so if you want to get in on that, make sure you've registered (no worries, easy registration ).

Hopefully we'll have a good time together there, let's make it happen! We've got a world to take over


And so, in case that was not already clear:

So, recently I was looking for something to do, but now I am in the position of having to turn down interesting offers because I am already committed elsewhere.

One of the projects I have been in touch with is of particular interest to me, as even though it is for a commercial company, the project that they need someone to work on would very much benefit the Free/Open Source software community in general and Amarok in particular, and therefore I offered to blog about it in the hopes that someone else might be interested in working with them. Had I not just a week before more or less accidentally co founded a startup (much more on that later), I would have been all over this project myself!

Basically they need a way to synchronize iPods on Windows and OS X, and rather than going a commercial route, they want to look into using libgpod and friends. Libgpod however is currently not ready for this task, as various bits are missing or needs to be improved on Windows and OS X, so the job is basically to do whatever is needed to fill in these missing bits.

They are looking for someone who can work full time on this and are willing to pay good money for it

If this sounds interesting, leave a reply here (remember to put your email in the comment form so I can get back in touch with you)

Finally, after long months of a whole lot of hard work, the Gluon team is now very proud to announce the immediate release and availability of the Gluon software packages - The Gluon libraries, Gluon Creator and a couple of little samples. So... Come one come all! Announcement over on the Dot. Sacha (DrIDK) has furthermore recorded a little screencast (yes, i know, it's on youtube, but hey, if you care enough about that, you are obviously using a html5 compliant browser and thus you should be able to view the video anyway ). Watch out, though, the sound is a little funny, thanks to GtkRecordMyDesktop being weird

Thanks to Eugene (it-s) for the amazing graphic above, which is used on the GamingFreedom.org website.

For those who don't want to worry about the reasonings behind Gluon and such, you can go straight to the download page and grab yourself a copy, and start playing around

It has been brought to my attention that recently, I have not blogging enough about cool new features in future versions (as in, not the upcoming version, but a later one) of Amarok.

So to make some kind of amends, here is a little something I hacked together yesterday. It needs a lot of polish still, but it does work (mostly).



Yes, that is the beginning of full .cue file support for Amaroks local collection

I am currently at an event called Startup Weekend in Copenhagen. The event aims to get as many talented people and people with good ideas as possible together and the see what they can come up with over a weekend.

I joined a team working on an idea that could potentially revolutionize the way you think about your social media ( Bold words, I know ). The basic idea is to form a graphical and searchable timeline of your activities on various social media sites.

As part of our idea, we need feedback from people comfortable with using multiple different social media, a description that fits much of the Amarok and KDE community. If the idea sounds interesting, you can help us out by taking our 2 minute survey (where there is also a more detailed description of the idea)

Thanks!

Lately we have made some really nice progress on the Multimedia front, and I thought it would be nice to keep our users (and other developers) a bit up-to-date with all the latest buzz. First of all, I'm happy to announce that we have finally been able to make Phonon-VLC usable and stable. Mostly we have to thank Ben Cooksley for that, who invested many hours in doing some rather complicated detective work for making this work nicely. But now we are there, and most features are working, minus some things like Equalizer support (but we'll get there too).


Let me sum up why exactly this new Phonon backend is so important to us:

Phonon-VLC is fully cross-platform, so we don't need special backends for Windows and Mac any more

It's already far more stable than most other existing Phonon backends

We can now focus on creating one good backend, instead of having 10 more or less broken ones

It simply sounds awesome. I'm not sure why that is, but the sound quality is notably better than with xine

It is currently a bit complicated to build this backend, as it needs libVLC 1.1, which is not yet packaged by most distros. However, we plan to write a tutorial for building it, and we're also happy to help out with questions in the #phonon IRC channel. Give it a try


In other news, Amarok is making rapid progress. Only a few weeks ago we have released Amarok 2.3.0, but thanks to our extremely short release cycle (I had earlier written about this system in this article), our current ChangeLog for 2.3.1 is already rather promising. Not only will 2.3.1 come with many bug fixes and some polishing, but we'll even introduce a number of exciting new features. I'd like to give you a preview of two new features here:

CoverBling

Similar Artists

Left to right: Heike, Klaas, Myriam, Mark

On Wednesday and Thursday a delegation from KDE represented our Kool Desktop Environment at OpenExpo in Berne, Switzerland. Unfortunately I couldn't make it on Wednesday, so that Heike, Klaas, and Myriam were rather busy handling the booth (their voices started to sound rather strained). But yesterday I found some time and could help out a bit.

Klaas Freitag is working for Novell (openSUSE team), and in his spare time he and his wife Heike create a very promising application for businesses, called Kraft. Myriam Schweingruber is from KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu/FSFE (is there anything she doesn't do?), and myself of course I'm from Amarok and KDE.

The event itself generated mixed feelings due the stronger commercial orientation than usual, resulting in less space for Free Software, while the business side (called Topsoft) was more emphasized this time. However, this was not the fault of the organizers (the OpenExpo team is doing a great job). We will see how things are going to work out with this in the future. The Free Software community is hoping that the event could regain the great atmosphere of the past years, which generally used to be very well received.

After the event we went out with Heike and Klaas to the city of Berne, which has a very charming architecture and some great pubs. We ended up having beers in my favorite place, which happened to play videos of Pink Floyd and U2 concerts, and that was just the perfect ending for this day.


Many thanks to Heike and Klaas for attending OpenExpo, it was really nice to meet them!

Image by Roozbeh Shafiee

Dear Community,

you might have heard it already elsewhere, but I thought it would be a nice touch if I wrote a short article as well. The good news:

Fresh Release: Amarok 2.3 'Clear Light'

We are rather happy with this release, and I think we were able to deliver a nicely rounded start of the new Amarok 2.3 series. As always, you can expect new releases in this series fairly rapidly, as we plan to keep our "roughly 6 weeks" release cycle.


I hope you enjoy this release, have fun

Image by Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester

As I am finding myself in a similar situation as my fellow Amarok developer Nikolaj Hald Nielsen is currently in, I figured that doing something similar as Nikolaj did could make sense.

To sum it up, I have been working as a software consultant for quite a while. Having my own small company (Kretschmann Software Consulting - KSC), I have mostly worked as an independent contractor doing software engineering. Recently I have worked for Gibson Guitar Corporation, and more recently for Collabora Ltd. In my free time I work on Amarok, a Free Software music player.

I am specialized in C++ development with Qt, and I have been an active member of the KDE community for a long time. Further on, my special areas of interest include Software Quality (finding and fixing complicated bugs), GUI Design and Usability, and Multimedia.


If you are a company that would like to work with me, please contact me at kretschmann@kde.org for getting my full CV.


Thanks

For the last 2½ years I have been working full time as a developer for Magnatune.com. While I have enjoyed this work very much, within the next few months, Magnatune wishes to transition me to a part time position instead.

This means that I will either have to find some more clients for my small one man consultancy business or find something else to do altogether.

So, if anyone is interested in working with a skilled developer with a passion for Free Software and Free Culture and a proven record of making stuff work (whatever unconventional solutions it takes) I am putting myself up for grabs. I am very skilled in C++/Qt/KDE through several years of contributing to Amarok and I can work with pretty much whatever technology is needed to make a given project work (at Magnatune I have done mainly PHP and TCL and in previous jobs I have worked with Java, Perl, Lua, Delphi, C and host of other things)

Alternatively, if anyone out there wants to sponsor a particular feature for Amarok, now would also be a perfect time. I wrote the integrated Magnatune service and the framework behind the services in Amarok 2 (as well as many of the other services as well) so anything that aims to integrate an online source of music I am particularly good at.

If you have any interesting proposals, ideas, questions or just want a full CV, please mail me a nhn@kde.org

Image copyright by Ben Golub

The Amarok Team is happy to announce that we have produced a new issue of the Amarok Insider, our monthly newsletter. We have prepared many interesting bits of information for you, giving you an insider look into Amarok development. This issue features:

A sneak preview of the upcoming Amarok 2.3.

Many tips and tricks for new features that we have been working on.

An exclusive interview with an Amarok developer.

Last not least: Juicy details about the romantic life of small gerbils.

Please enjoy:

Amarok Insider - Issue 14

PS:
The last part I wrote might not be exactly true, but it's interesting anyway

Amarok teamster Abhishek has again produced a great video, this time explaining some new Podcast features of the upcoming Amarok 2.3:





Here is a direct link to the video, in case the embedding did not work:

Video: Podcasts in Amarok 2.3

Enjoy

What is Kraut Sourcing? No worries, I will explain this later on. First I would like to ask our community for a favor:

The Amarok team is about to release Amarok 2.3 fairly soon (our release schedule is tight), perhaps in about three weeks from now. What I am asking our community (especially artists) for: Creating a new splash screen for this release


This is how the current splash (kindly made by Lee Olson) for Amarok 2.2.x looks like:




As Amarok 2.3 is the start of a new major series, we would love to have a new splash screen. Any takers?


The winner will be chosen by the Amarok team, and the reward is:

1 Amarok t-shirt, a mention in the "Thanks To" dialog of Amarok, and... hmm, a beer at our next meeting. Does this sound ok?



PS:
"Kraut Sourcing" is pretty much what just happened here: A German asking for Crowd Sourcing.


Update: Please note that the license must be Creative Commons, cc-by-sa