Be seeing you, originally uploaded by Olivander.

Amarok 2 has two scripted services that are really cool. For one SeeqPod, that lets you search for any kind of music on the web and listen to it in Amarok. And the other one is LibriVox, that integrates the LibriVox service. LibriVox offers free audiobooks of public domain books. Both services are great and definitely deserve to be in Amarok 2.0.

The problem is that they were written a few weeks ago in Ruby. Now they need to be ported to QtScript as that is the only scripting language we allow for internal scripts to reduce the headache of script dependencies especially keeping the Windows and Mac releases in mind.

Among all the stuff that needs to be done before the release of Amarok 2.0 those two scripts were kinda forgotten until now and really need some love. If you want to help us get those two scripts back please let me know. Free cookies and hugs included

The Amarok team is proud to announce the first beta of Amarok 2.0, codenamed Nerrivik.
Please digg it and enjoy the release notes.

If you want to meet some KDE folks, want to see KDE 4.1 in action or if you have questions about KDE FrOSCon in St. Augustin is the place to be this weekend.

Come and say hello at the KDE/Amarok booth and in our dev-room.
We have interesting talks for everyone in our dev room:

Saturday:
11:15 KDE Edu (Frederik Gladhorn)
16:30 KDE Community - How to get involved (Alexandra Leisse and Lydia Pintscher)

Sunday:
11:15 Amarok 2 (Sven Krohlas and Lydia Pintscher)
15:15 Kubuntu - A KDE desktop (Marcus Czeslinski)
16:30 KDE Grill - Ask questions about KDE you always wanted us to answer (KDE dream team ;-))

And on Saturday 15:15 Sebastian Kügler will talk about KDE 4.1 in his talk “Don’t look back” in the main track.
Hope to see you there.

Oh btw: Last year’s social event = best social event of 2007. Let’s see if they can beat Akademy this year

Finally back at home. Less tired after sleeping in my own bed again. Missing everyone. Caught up on stuff. Laundry still piling up

Akademy was great. Very big THANK YOU to Wendy, Bart and their team. You did an amazing job.

Akademy was quite productive. Talked to lots of people about lots of stuff. Wait for some interesting things to happen in the next weeks and months.

I took the time to talk to some of our Google Summer of Code students about their experience. I wanted to find out where we as a community are doing very well and what we can improve in their opinion. Of course it wouldn’t be of much use if only I knew this so let me share it with you:

• Everyone seemed to agree that KDE is a great community and that they felt welcome in our community. Akademy was seen as a great opportunity for the students to get to know people and it seriously helps in turning some of the students into contributors outside of GSoC. (Note to self: Find out how many of them are still committing code in 6 months.)
• Documentation!!! The Amarok team seems to be doing a bad job here :(  (Not really sure about the rest of KDE.) I need to find ways to improve this. Suggestions welcome.
• The Big Picture: This seems to be missing. Mentors should try to give an overview of the code and community and how it fits together at the beginning. Some of the students felt lost at the beginning and it took them a lot of time to get used to everything. For Amarok I created a wiki page with all the important links to websites and mailing lists for the students. Unfortunately the code overview part of it did not get finished.
• Blogs: The Amarok students were encouraged to blog about their work every week and post it on Planet Amarok and Planet KDE. Same goes for some of the students that worked on other parts of KDE. Everyone seemed to agree that this was a good thing. The feedback they got was encouraging and helpful. They felt pushed to produce something worth blogging about at the end of the week which was seen as positive and motivating. It also showed that people are interested in the work they do and that their progress is monitored.
• Branches: Working in a SVN or Git branch outside of trunk was seen as a problem. Code did not get reviewed and tested enough before it hit trunk. Those students worked too much in their own little world. Immediate testing and code review by other developers would have been preferred and a lot of problems would have been avoided. (I know there are reasons for branches but something needs to be done about this.)
• Timezones: Timezone mismatches between mentor and student made students switch their sleep/wake times by several hours. I got a few complains about this but it was always seen as a minor problem. I don’t think it is too healthy though. So maybe this should be considered next year when matching students and mentors.
• Gurus: Every single student was very thankful for having very knowlageable people in our community they could ask when reading manuals didn’t help. Even if their questions from time to time weren’t the most clever ones they got help. You rock!
• Mentor being away: Some mentors left for a week or more on very short notice. This should be avoided or a backup mentor in place.
• Students liked that they were mostly free to do what they want, i.e. solve problems the way they want and work on their own schedule.
• Mentors in general seemed to have done a good job. You rock!

Thanks everyone who had a chat with me about their GSoC. If I didn’t find the time to talk to you at Akademy or if you were not there feel free to ping me on IRC. I will make sure your feedback gets heard.

I hope a lot of our students stay with KDE after GSoC. You have done an amazing job. Rock on!

PS: Thanks to everyone who signed my Moleskine at the social event. I considered doing nasty stuff to Sebr when he took it away from me but I have to reconsider this now since it is the BEST THING EVAR and will be reminding me of Akademy for years to come.

*hug*

whatever happened to the rock and roll?
Originally uploaded by johnnyalive.

Paul always does sweet little graphs to show interesting stuff. Since everyone in the Amarok team felt that development really sped up in the last weeks/months I wanted some proof of that mainly to show it off and to find out where it came from. So I asked Paul to help me with that by doing what he does best. And only a few hours later he presented the results. If you haven’t read it yet you should do it now before reading the rest of my post.

Impressive, right?

So now that Paul did his part I should probably do my job and explain why this is happening

There are several “sources of developers”:

• Google Summer of Code: With 6 of our 7 students (Alejandro, Casey, Daniel, Daniel, William, Peter) doing an excellent job they really help getting things done. You rock!
• Season of KDE: Teo is working on his SoC project (mass tagging) without sponsorship from Google. He is doing a great job. Two others are starting to work on another project right now. You rock!
• KDE BugSquad: Edward started triaging bugs for us during the Amarok bugday and is now starting to help with development. He already made a very impressive start. You rock!
• Oldtimers: Our core developers are doing a lot more lately. On the one hand they help new developers getting used to Amarok development and give them a hand when they have trouble with stuff like the buildsystem. On the other hand they seem to be a lot more motivated to get Amarok 2 ready for release now that we have the alpha releases out of the door and things are starting to fall into place. You rock! (But you know that right? ;-))
• Other contributors: A few new people showed up in the last few days and already presented promising results. I hope you all stick around. You rock!

So the next question is: Why are more people interested in Amarok 2 now than they were say 2 months ago. The reasons I can see are:

• With the release of KDE 4.1 it became easier to start developing on Amarok because the hurdle of compiling KDE from trunk was gone.
• With Neon a lot more people could give Amarok 2 a try without compiling it from SVN. (Which also helped non-dev team members _a lot_.)
• The release of alpha 1 and 2 made it a lot easier to try Amarok 2 with distro packages and gave the signal “We have something we think is worth testing now”.
• A lot of very positive reviews in the press.
• People actually start to understand our vision for Amarok 2 and want to help making it reality.

Last but not least: Developers are motivated by:

• Very positive reception of the alphas in the press and among users.
• A lot of bug reports that show that users are caring about what we do and want to help us improve as much as possible until the release of the final 2.0 version. Among those bug reports are a lot of junior jobs which makes it easy to get started with a small task and get used to everything.
• Actually switching to Amarok 2 as their main player without big problems.
• Development being in a very exciting phase, i.e. we left the really hard start behind us where we literally had no new blood at all for a very long time (for reasons see above) and are not yet in boring maintenance mode.
• The frameworks actually start to pay off.

It is pretty interesting to see how most of this, if not all, can also be applied to KDE 4.1. Let’s see if we can get some nice stuff put together at Akademy to prove this

Exciting times and more of them ahead of us! Now is the right time to join KDE development (and any other non-dev part of KDE of course).

Amarok 2 alpha 2, codenamed Aulanerk, has been released. See the release announcement for more details.

Thanks everyone who helped with bug reports and patches. Keep them coming

And of course a screenshot for you to enjoy:

The first alpha of Amarok 2 has been released.
My first time as release gal. Turned out to be a little more complicated than I expected due to broken scripts and lacking documentation. But well. Worked out very well in the end.

Enjoy and please digg: http://digg.com/software/First_alpha_release_of_Amarok_2_0_Malina

Daniel, my GSoC student, has been working on the GUI part of the biased playlists and did some work behind the scenes this week. It is really getting into shape even though it is still trying to fool you a little. Read more about it in his weekly report and don’t forget to check out the screenshot

Oh and of course:

Hands up in the air everyone! Please cheer for Daniel!
Dynamic playlists are back \o/

Daniel, my Summer of Code student, has been working hard to get one of the most loved features of Amarok 1.4 back for Amarok 2 and probably made a lot of people very happy by doing that last week. He implemented a dynamic mode as basis for the biased playlists he will be working on next. First results can be seen now and it is going to be great. It already improved a lot over what we had in Amarok 1.4 because it is easier to discover, configure and use. And I am sure Daniel will continue to improve it and kick ass

You can read more about it in his status report for this week and of course try it yourself with Neon or your own build. Go read it!

/me is proud and so happy she can listen to music again without having to select songs herself all the time

Whoa what a ride

The Amarok bugday was a blast. Thank you everyone who took part. And an even bigger thank you to those who are still hugging the beasties. YOU ROCK! The goal of flooding my inbox with bugmail has been reached

Kubuntu tutorials day went very well. To my surprise I got the honour to pitch in for nixternal since he couldn’t make it.  Thanks nixternal; also for the notes Logs of all talks can be found in the KubuntuWiki.

Lots of love for my little FolderView intro. I didn’t expect that to be honest. But it is nice to see that more and more people realise what a powerful and beautiful tool they will be given with KDE 4.

In the comments I was asked to show screenshots of the menu of FolderView. Since this was not implemented in time for KDE 4.1 Beta 1, which I am using right now, I couldn’t provide them. But fear not. Yours Truly asked and was given Thanks Tony.

So there has been a lot of confusion about the KDE 4 desktop and FolderView lately and some nasty stuff I don’t want to go into right now. In the comments to Aaron’s blog someone said they don’t see how exactly it will be better and help them be more productive. So let me show you it

For those who don’t know about FolderView: It is a Plasmoid you can add to your desktop in KDE 4 to show files. It can also be used to emulate the “normal” desktop (for those who really really want it) but let me show you a few more very nifty things you can do with it.

This screenshot shows my self made todo plasmoid. I have a ~/tmp folder where I throw in all the stuff that is, well, temporary. This stuff needs to be moved somewhere else and I was just too lazy to do it right away or is stuff I need to look at and that can be deleted afterwards. And there are also a few TODO files in there that need my attention. So Plasma to the rescue! I created a FolderView that shows the content of my tmp folder and (here comes the nifty) filters it to only show me the stuff I really care about. Which is files with TODO in the filename.

But what about this cool thing: In KDE we have KIO and it is just fantastic. And of course you can also use KIO in FolderView and show all kinds of remote folders right on your desktop.

Here it shows the folders that keep my irc logs on the server my irssi is running on.

And here some files on my ftp server:

And of course you can also show something totally boring like my home folder

I hope this shows how powerful this already is now.
But it will become even more awesome once Nepomuk search can be used with this. (Or can it already?) Imagine showing all files tagged with “todo” across your whole file system. Or how about showing all files related to your thesis? Just tell it to show all files containing words related to your thesis.

Get creative people! There is a lot of nifty ahead of us

How are you going to use FolderView?

And before someone asks: You will be able to use it just like a “normal” desktop.

UPDATE:

Daniel, the SoC student working on Nepomuk integration in Amarok, just send me this:

Sweetness :)  (It is still a work in progress and therefore in Playground.)

Amarok bugs, here we come again! We are going to have a bugday with the KDE BugSquad on Sunday. The goal is to clean up a little and close a lot of bugs for Amarok 1. If you ever wanted to contribute to Amarok or KDE in general this is the right time to start. Join us in #kde-bugs. We will start at 0:00 UTC and go on all Sunday in all time zones. Members of KDE BugSquad and Amarokers will be around to answer your questions and help. All you need is a working Amarok 1.4.9.1 and preferably Amarok 2. For more information check the wiki page. Let’s hug the beasties

Don’t forget to join us for the Kubuntu tutorials day in #kubuntu-devel. Lots of interesting stuff to be talked about and a perfect opportunity to join the awesome Kubuntu team.

links of the day: categorical imperative and Severed Fifth

Whoa, finally back home and no longer sleep deprived after Linuxtag in Berlin. It was a lot of fun. Got to meet some KDE people I had not had the pleasure to meet so far. And they were as great as I expected them to be. Every single one of them. The four I’d like to point out are Alexandra, Claudia, Monika and Franziska who made the number of women at the KDE and Co booths sky-rocket with me. You rock! Aaron even has a photo of the KDE booth that proves that the KDE team is 50% women :P  But seriously: It is great to see that more and more women are turning up in the KDE community lately and the benefits of this could clearly be seen at this years Linuxtag. Thank you for being such a welcoming community. It really shows that we are doing a good job at being an inclusive community no matter who you are and that we are good at attracting people who are reluctant to join other FOSS projects. In the 3 categories I can see in the free software world (1. actively excluding - 2. indifferent - 3. actively including) KDE definitely belongs to the scarcely inhabited number 3 and that makes me proud. This is one of the things that is making and will make KDE successful in the future. Or as Wade puts it: “Let’s all be different together!“.

Of course we worked hard at the booth every day showing people the awesomeness that is KDE 4 and Amarok 2. To make up for that hard work we had something planned for every night. After arriving in Berlin on Tuesday we went to the fair ground to set up the booth and then went to have dinner with around 30 KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu people.

On Wednesday we went to an Indian restaurant. Delicious food!

Thursday was reserved for the official social event which was at the same location as last year which was very nice but a little too crowded for my taste.

On Friday we were invited to the Trolltech and friends dinner (Thanks to the Trolls for that.). After that karaoke was planned as I already mentioned. Boy, that was fun! We will have to poke danimo to publish the videos I now know who would win the KDE vs. Gnome song contest and who has the better dancers I will keep the result secret though for my own world domination plans. One never knows when things like this are needed

On Saturday Ubuntu-Berlin did a great job at organising a BBQ again. It was at C-Base this time, which is a great location modelled after an UFO landing side. Very different and very cool.

The two talks I was giving together with Sven and Harald went well and people really seemed to have liked the Amarok talk which was pretty much a “This is the new stuff in Amarok 2″-talk including the Summer of Code and Season of KDE projects and the new internet services.

And now I am back at home \o/. No more events/conferences for me until Akademy. I need a break after all these events.

Oh and to the people who take care of matching booths and projects at events: Please get Amarok and KDE booths as near to each other as possible. We belong together and tbh I hate having to switch from one hall to another all the time. (Before someone ask, yes we did ask for booths next to each other. And this was the 3rd event where we had booths that were way too far apart.)

(photos by Aaron, Carlos, Markus and me)

Frederik sums up OpenExpo and mentions “Nini is as good a table soccer player as I am.” Hell yea I am! We rocked (NOT)! But it was great fun. YAY for whomever brought the table soccer to OpenExpo. I think we need to make karaoke and table soccer regular KDE activities. And we sure will do our best at Linuxtag ;-)  Karaoke is planned for Friday. Maybe videos will turn up somewhere at some point *g*

It was nice to meet Martin, who is doing the desktop cube for kwin as a GSoC project. Lubos, your student rocks ;-)  Everyone please check if there are other GSoC students living near your place. Would be cool if at least some of them could meet some KDE folks face to face and be welcomed by the community this way.

I have to prepare some last minute stuff for Linuxtag now. Hope to see some of you there at the KDE, Amarok and Kubuntu booth and thanks again to everyone who helped at OpenExpo. *hug*

As I already mentioned before I did a session on free culture at FOSSCamp and I promised to write a little more about it. So here we go

Nikolaj did a great talk at a few events about Amarok 2 and how it lives at the crossroad of free software and free culture. (Check out the video if you want to see his talk. It’s worth it!)
The main point is that the free software movement and free culture movement have very similar goals and ideas that drive them. But they also have similar problems. Both of them want to create something that makes a difference in one way or another and do not want to restrict the user’s freedom. Unfortunately both of them also are not as widespread and popular as they could be. And one of the reasons for that is that a lot of people don’t know (enough) about the great stuff that is out there. (Although it is of course improving.) And here is where the magic is: Collaboration and integration! It will eventually benefit both parties.

Take for example Amarok 2. We have integration for Jamendo and Magnatune (and others). There is a lot of really good music at both of them but they lack the exposure to the user. By integrating them into Amarok we give many people access to both services that would have never had a look at them otherwise. Of course this is also a great thing for Amarok because we have a music store integrated that sells (and a service that lets you download for free ) DRM free music, one of our developers gets paid for work he loves and we get some money for every album that gets sold through Amarok so we can pay for team members to go to conferences and other events. The other big benefit we get from this is example data. New users of Amarok have a whole lot of music at hand without having to think about it. With the infrastructure that Nikolaj worked on (service framework and scripted services) it is as easy as never before for people to get their own or other’s services integrated into Amarok and therefor accessible by a large group of our users. We also hope that this attracts new developers and that really awesome stuff will come out of it.

(free hugs [86/365] Originally uploaded by moonwire.)

But Amarok is surely not the only application that could benefit from a collaboration with free culture. And this is why we did the brainstorming session at FOSSCamp. Some of the ideas we came up with were:

• Integration of the Creative Commons photo search at Flickr in digiKam
• Integration of Project Gutenberg in Okular
• Integration of the Creative Commons music search in Amarok
• Integration of YouTube/$videoservice in DragonPlayer/Kaffeine

I am perfectly aware that not all of these are feasible for different reasons or might already be worked on. What I want however is developers to think about ways their application could benefit from free culture. A good starting point is search.creativecommons.org.

So what ideas can you come up with? Which project could benefit? And in which way?

Saturday was the second and last un-conference day at FOSSCamp. There were a lot of interesting sessions, just like the day before.

I attended a few sessions:

• cross desktop (session 3): Who needs to do what to get the stuff done we talked about in the first two sessions?
• PackageKit: Introduction and discussion on how to solve some of the remaining issues it has.
• cross distro: a follow up on some of the discussions on the distro mailinglist at freedesktop.org and the ##distros IRC channel - conclusion: A page/service which lists links to bugtrackers, patches, packages and so on for all distributions would be awesome.
• OpenSSL: How to deal with it in the near future?
• upstream bug collaboration: What do upstream projects need? How do they use Launchpad? How can triaging bugs for their projects in Launchpad be made more attractive to them? How can upstream collaboration be improved in general?
• Ubuntu QA: How can the service be improved to be more valuable for Ubuntu developers and upstream? A weather report page for every package is planned which lists bugs, patches, build status and so on.

At the end of the day we went for some sightseeing again and checked out a few local pubs and restaurants. Prague thanked us with heavy rain and excellent food.
We checked out a karaoke bar that we came across the day before but a private room was way too expensive for only the 3 of us that were left at that point. So no videos of Jonathan, Jos and me doing karaoke this time Let’s see what we can do at Linuxtag The last cafe we went to was the local Hard Rock Cafe including Absinthe, Blue Lagoon, White Russian and a fancy old video recording of a concert with various famous musicians done as a circus show. Rock on!

The interesting point that came up again and again during the day is how alien the concept of upstream and downstream is to a lot of people. There are a lot of bugreports where the user is not sure if the problem is specific to a certain distro’s package or if it a general problem with the program he is using. He will have to decide at some point where to file the bug and will make the wrong decision in a fair number of cases, which is fine and human. Just as common though are wishlist reports in which the reporter assumes that his distro is developing all the features of the software he is using. A distro is not seen as a product that mainly bundles applications and tweaks them to be sutible for a certain target group and purpose.
So what is my point? Bug triagers and developers should be very careful when closing a bugreport with a comment like “Needs to be implemented upstream.”, simply because the bug reporter is possibly not aware of the whole concept. A sentence or two to clarify might be helpful. (Yes I am guilty of this one as well sometimes when triaging bugs unfortunately.)
The other question is if this is generally a bad thing. Should we expect a user to know about things like upstream and downstream? I certainly doubt that. Why would he care? On the other hand it creates unneeded work and frustration on both sides. Maybe Launchpad needs to show a note before filing a wishlist bug asking if it is really a wish for Ubuntu or if it might be better filed in the upstream bugtracker along with a link to it.
And what would really be interesting for me to know is: Does this only happen for Launchpad/Ubuntu due to its target group? Or is it seen across distros and I just don’t recognise it since I very rarely or even never check bugs there? I would expect Gentoo for example to be different just for the fact that its whole design requires you to have at least a certain understanding of it all. But what about OpenSuse, Fedora, Mandriva and so on? Please leave a comment about your experience.

Sunday was planned to be used for sightseeing but apparently Prague didn’t want us to leave the hotel for that. Heavy rain again (Maybe Prague only wanted us to be productive. If so, it worked. Everyone was busy hacking in the lounge ;-)) When Celeste arrived we went to get something to eat and then I took a taxi to the airport to catch my plane. Right now I am sitting in the train back to Karlsruhe and miss everyone.

To make a long story short: Prague (except for the rain) and the hotel were awesome, the sessions were very productive and I hope to see a lot of the great ideas that were talked about realised and am sure the feedback everyone got was helpful. I had a great time and miss them all already. *sob*