snowing on a monday

It's Monday, it's February and in proper Calgarian fashion it's snowing. More importantly, I've actually caught up with things finally. Not only is my email tamed (I have a couple outstanding emails from the weekend, but nothing major), but also with the Plasma patches on Review Board, various IRC meetings and the mailing lists. It feels very good to not have things nagging at me in the back of my head.

I still have some around-the-house stuff to do (though I've caught up with house work too, miraculously!), but I'm ready to rock again. It was disappointing to see this week's KDE Commit Digest and see that Canada was only in the 1% range for commits. Usually it's in the 2-10% range, and I feel personally responsible for that slippage of my region of the world. Who says I take responsibility too personally? ;)

These week I have some great work lined up in the system tray and in PlasMate, two projects that I'm actually excited about. Working on panels some more (there are a few more features I'd like to see there) isn't the most fun thing to do, and keeping my morale up high enough to continue working at a beaver's pace (which is very fast in Canadian terms) I also need enjoyable work to sink my teeth into.

I was really happy to see some of the KWin<->Plasma visual integration work that Lucas has been working on. While at Tokamak II we put together a big list of things we'd like to see happen in KWin (and yes, we're willing to also write patches; a few of us in Plasma have patches scattered about in KWin as it is ..) and shared it with the KWin people. We also realized that we should have had a KWin person or two at Tokamak, which is something we'll remedy at Tokamak III (which is tentatively scheduled for September in a little town in Switzerland) assuming KWin people are available for a few days of fun hacking in the Alps.

When looking at Plasma, the Plasma team tends to talk in "big picture" terms. We don't really care about the technology boundaries between different parts of the code as much as we do about the over all user experience. This is a mode of thought that creates goals that usually take time to reach, but we're doing it with pretty decent success. However, we'd like the whole desktop shell to work well together and look like it's a coherent whole rather than just a collection of shell and window manager and system monitor and run dialog and ... It should appear as seamless as a smart user would expect it to be. That means working with the KWin people (and others) to find common ground and to hide from the user the seams that exist due to how the technologies work.

This has nothing to do with hiding configuration options or making the individual components so tightly coupled that you can't, for instance, run KWin without Plasma or vice versa. That'd just be silly, and while we love Monty Python we don't write our code to be like a Python skit. ;) It does, however, have everything to do with integration as deep as we can get it.

For all you university students out there who look upon our progress and go "holy crap, I wish I was a part of that!", remember that the Google Summer of Code is there as one nice avenue to do just that. You can find our list of ideas for SoC projects on TechBase, but don't let that stunt your imagination.

Oh, and if you notice I've turned on comment moderation on my blog as a precautionary measure against a recent rash of trolls on my blog. I hate the delay it causes, removing some of the immediacy in conversation between people in the comments section, but I just don't have time to delete dozens of contentless, rude comments every day. Hopefully they'll get bored and go away and I can turn off comment moderation soon enough. :)

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More on Plasma in 4.3

Coming out of Tokamak, the Plasma team has been setting goals for 4.3, putting together Summer of Code ideas and writing code for 4.3 that generally kicks ass and takes names later. Expect noticeable improvements to extenders, theming, layout flexibility, performance and general I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter-ness.

A few big picture things we're also starting to focus on in a more serious fashion now that the 4.0->4.2 journey is firmly lodged in the year known as 2008 include (other than content creation tools, which I covered in my last blog entry) the educational desktop, a netbook/MID appropriate interface and a simple media center mode for the traditional desktop set up.

(Yes, we'll also be working on the stuff we've already shipped, working out bugs, performance issues and bugs as we go... but that's a "detail" item. ;)

To be honest, the development line up for the 4.3 and 4.4 releases in Plasma scare the hell out of me .. but in a good way. You see, if I'm feeling comfortable, we're not pushing hard enough. If I'm terrified, we're pushing the envelope too hard. But if I'm scared, then like Goldylocks on her third bowl of porridge, it's "just right". It means I know we could fail if we aren't brilliant, but that if we apply ourselves with enough determination we can make it.

"It's crazy enough that it just .. might .. work!" Words to live by.

(.. and I think this entry catches me up on my back-log of blog postings for the week! I still have more topics to cover though, including what the hell happened to my weekly video casts, things people looking for a project to join should keep in mind and the difficult tasks involved in letting Free software projects mature to a whole new level.)

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PlasMate

We're regularly getting questions about creating scripted Plasmoids from new people showing up who are trying (usually successfully) to make new stuff that rocks in languages other than C++.

Yes, we have built it .. and now they are coming. First we take Manhattan, and all that...

Plasmoids in KDE 4.3 will be a lot easier and nicer to make as a result of these people using it and giving us feedback. Between now and then we're starting to see the beginnings of some cool little widgets written in Python, Ruby and Javascript.

There are, however, two things I feel particularly guilty about: our lack of comprehensive documentation for the scripting APIs and our lack of tools to help people writing Plasmoids. To that end, we started work on a content creation tool we're calling "PlasMate". The name comes from the idea that it will be your friend and partner ('mate') when making things for Plasma. Cheesy, yes. Corny, yup. Therefore just about right. ;)

The idea behind PlasMate is to give people a way to start creating things without worrying about anything except making their bits. It hides the whole metadata.desktop thing, the package layout details, making a Plasmoid package (aka "zipping up the directory"), uploading (and eventually forking other people's) content and even that whole pesky "saving and loading" thing.

Like Qt Creator, PlasMate starts up with a welcome screen that lets you spend your first click deciding what you want to do. Pick up where you left off on that widget? No problem, one click. Start a new Plasmoid? One click. New DataEngine? One click. Load an existing project it doesn't know about? Ok, a couple clicks. You get the idea. Eventually you'll also be able to wander through the online Plasmoid warehouse and pick someone else's Plasmoid to start working on.

As you edit a Plasmoid, you can see a live preview of it and even tweak its environment by doing things like changing the form factor or screen location. When you reach a "good" point in development, hit the "Create Save Point" button (or whatever we'll eventually end up calling it) and then continue working. Messed something up? Go back in time to a previous save point.

We will provide starting templates and even some tutorial like examples to start from, and relevant API documentation will be integrated right in.

The focus on "fast and streamlined" comes at the expense of some flexibility. You won't be using PlasMate any time soon for creating that next killer C++ KDE application. It isn't meant to compete with KDevelop or Qt Creator, and it uses as many components other people have written (such as Qt's SVG renderer and KDE's Kate editor component) to keep the code base itself small. This is all OK, though, because the point of PlasMate is to unleash people from the complexity of a full IDE or the "now what??!" of firing up KWrite/Kate/vim/emacs and staring at a blank text file.

In its current state, PlasMate can start new projects and continue previously started ones. It shows the contents of a Plasma::Package and can edit text files, .desktop files (with a custom form editor), etc., and has a little previewer for Plasmoids. We're busy sewing the whole thing together still, and the UI is still not anywhere near final (ergo the lack of screenshots; I'll share when it's a little closer to somewhat-cooked versus the raw state its in now) and we have things not even started to be touched yet such as integrating a previewer for DataEngines (basically stealing code from plasmaengineexplorer, I imagine).

There is code, though, and there are at least four of us working on various bits of it (Richard Moore, Riccardo, Artur and myself) and we've laid down a little over 2,000 lines of code for it already, mostly during Tokamak II.

The goal is to release it along with KDE 4.3, and maybe even do a few preview releases between now and then. We want it to eventually bloom into a full point-and-click wonder including Plasma UI builder and interface creation automator. While it was never my original intention back in the day, I now have the ridiculous goal to "kill flash" and that means having creation tools. PlasMate is the start of that, and while it almost certainly won't kill flash (though hopefully it will dislodge it from certain types of projects that really should be using something more sane) that goal gives us something to aim for in terms of functionality.

(By-the-by, having goals that you can't reach but which you use means to set direction is an interesting technique when used appropriately. As long as you're realistic about not reaching the actual endpoint described by the goal but craft it in such way that it provides a meaningful journey along the way ... it can do wonders.)

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3 mails to send and a microphone

I've been in a "creative zone" this week mentally, but it hasn't translated into much code. I did fix the bug where resizing a panel in just the right way can mess up the desktop and worked up some patches to improve scripting in small ways, so it wasn't completely barren of coding. Just not the usual 10-20 commits a day I manage when in full don't-disturb-me-I'm-coding mode. Thankfully there are lots of other Plasma developers these days that help pick up that slack.

So what have I been doing? Well, the P-man's week off from school has been mildly distracting. It's too hard not to go play with him when he's around. ;) So while I've gained back the travel time each day usually spent going to and from school, I've taken to sleeping in a little later (ah, sleep! kind and gentle mistress, I have missed you!) and doing "kid stuff" a few hours each day.

Mostly, though, I've been reading and writing. I was a couple hundred emails-need-to-be-replied-to behind, and now I'm down to, I think, three. They are not simple ones, though: one is a mail to the e.V. board following up on some nice work done by Sebastian drafting up a document, one is the content for the intro to the next e.V. report and one is the email where I introduce all the potential book authors to the managing editor at the publishing house. Each will take from half an hour to an hour to process completely. It'll be a late work day today, I think.

On the reading side of things, keeping up with the content generated by the KDE community is just insane. To do my job effectively, however, I have to do that. I need an overview of what's going on in as many nooks and crannies as possible. In fact, I need to keep my finger on the pulse beyond KDE as well. That means lots of reading, particularly because the KDE people generate so much content!

When I first started in with KDE it was like a small hamlet. Everyone knew everyone else and one could keep up with absolutely everything going on in a couple hours a day, sometimes less. By "absolutely everything" I mean reading every email on every mailing list, hanging out on IRC to catch up on the happenings off-list, read whatever was new on the websites, catch the latest code in CVS, etc. I was impressed back then by the volume of created content, but that was nothing compared to today.

These days KDE is a small city. There are so many people blogging, emailing and committing code that it is not realistic to keep up with everything in the way I used to. I now rely on a combination of summaries from others, skimming through various raw bodies of data and looking at various activity statistics. I still connect on IRC with people, but boy ... it's a veritable firehose of data these days.

I manage by keeping up with it every day. If I let a day slip, I end up behind. I've been out on the road for most of the last month. You do the math. ;)

Of course, I wouldn't have it any other way. After all these years in the project (which is still fewer than many others who are still involved!) KDE keeps my interest because it is so dynamic.

I've also been doing a lot of thinking. Thinking in the bath at night, thinking in the shower in the morning, thinking on my walks to the bakery or to get my hair done. Funny story there, actually: I got my hair done today and the reception computer "was broken" causing all sorts of havoc at the salon. After my hair was done, I had a bit of banter with the receptionist (where I joked that I'd try my best to be an impatient customer to fulfill their expectations of what a typical consumer is like when faced with problems in service ;) and then she revealed what was broken: the screen was upside down. I suggested they just turn the monitor right side up, but that one just got blank stares in return. So I suggested they go to the system tray and click on the monitor properties icon and rotate the screen back to right side up. More blank stares, then "would you like to come around?" So I did and a few clicks later (using a mouse to control a cursor in reverse is hard, just like doing something in a mirror is) the screen rotated back to normal and all the people who worked there who had gathered to watch (half a dozen or so) let out a cheer. They still made me pay full price, the bastards! ;)

I did have an interesting conversation with the hair stylist, who had gone to school for a year of humanities, then a year of comp sci, then a couple years of psych ... before finding her passion in aesthetics! She's quite a smart cookie, and we discussed the whole "finding your passion in life and making that your daily activity" thing, something that seems to keep coming up in conversation these days. I don't even instigate the conversation, people just seem to randomly insist on bringing it up. I love it when the universe does that.

Anyways .. back to relevant things, right? Like KDE and Plasma. ;)

It's really cool to see all the blogs about Plasma on planet.kde.org. I love reading about other people's passion about this thing we're making together. It reminds me that this isn't my baby anymore, and that's awesome. What's best is that we, as a team, are remaining true to the original ideas and vision. Nuno, for instance, recently wrote that "KDE will very shortly become the desktop you need and not the desktop we think you need."

Hmmm... I want to write about scripting and Plasma, but I think I'll start a new blog entry for that as this one is already too long and too scattered.

(Apologies to Beck for the blog title)

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PHP helper for userbase

Userbase is the wiki for KDE user information. It fills in a vital gap of information between traditional documentation and the usually too technical developer chatter. They need some help, though. Anne Wilson emailed me to say that they need some PHP and mediawiki help:

"Userbase really needs a php guru who can spend not huge amounts of time, quite infrequently, helping us to find solutions to the things that make userbase harder to use.  To give a couple of examples, the RSS feed for Recent Changes sends multiple copies of each change, over a period of several days.  That makes it hard to keep abreast of changes, and it only happened after a mediawiki update.  I'm going to try to pursue this through bugzilla.mediawiki.org, which I only heard about today, but if it's not actually a bug we need to know what is wrong.  It would be so much easier if we had someone with the technical knowledge to say for sure whether it was our implementation or a bug.  I get the impression that techbase uses the same version of mediawiki and doesn't have the problem.

The second biggy for me is breadcrumb navigation.  I started to build it manually, but was persuaded to stop as there are maintenance issues.  There are plugins that may do the trick, but none of us have the knowledge to really assess them.  There is even a developer of a plugin that expressed interest in working with us on implementation, but we have no-one with the skills to work with him.

I'm not looking to put a heavy burden on someone already busy.  We've managed 6 months without this, but occasional help on this front could have made us so much more efficient.  I wonder if you could mull this over and see if there is any mileage in talking about it in one of your blogs?"

If you are good with the PHP and will put in the time here and there to help Userbase improve its infrastructure, please drop me a line and I'll hook up with the Userbase team.

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board meeting quicky

After Tokamak II, I flew into Frankfurt with Sebas for a two day KDE e.V. board meeting. We went over our budget, the Gran Canaria event, promotion and marketing coordination support and various legal issues that have landed on our plate in recent months. All very productive sorts of topics, really. However, there were three topics that really stood out for me:

First, the board members all signed Fiduciary Licensing Agreements (FLA) which allows KDE e.V. to play a management role in the care and licensing of the code we write for KDE. Adriaan has been spearheading that work for a while and it was completed this summer ... but then we all kind of let it sit there. The timing of the KDE 4 certainly didn't help in keeping my attention on such legal details: I was happy to see the FLA come into being (major thanks to the FSFE for their legal chops that made it possible), but executing one for myself kept getting deprioritized next to everything else. At the end of the second day of the meeting, however, it came up and we realized that the only thing stopping it from happening was us not having printed copies in front of us. One of those "so ... just do it!" things. ;) Claudia printed out a bunch of copies and we got to signing. A momentous event, indeed, as its the first time KDE e.V. has taken on this kind of role; probably the trademark registration is the other legal achievement of similar magnitude that we have.

We will be bringing a sheath of FLA documents with us to Gran Canaria for the annual general assembly of membership. This way those in attendance can sign up right there and we can counter-sign in person. For those who can't be there but would like to execute an FLA, it will be appearing soon on the e.V. forms page to be printed out, signed and witnessed. They can then be sent into the e.V. offices where they will be kept on record.

The second big thing was the design of a supporting membership program for individuals. Think of it as a way for those who appreciate the work the KDE teams put into it to both support that work with a small financial commitment and become a visible part of that same team by declaring your support. We don't all have the time and energy to contribute directly, and our community reaches far beyond those boundaries. This will be a way for everyone to grab a bit of the flag and join in. We have some very cool little surprises for those who join us as supporters of the e.V. ... but I won't spoil it quite yet in this blog. We have some more planning and a bit of implementation work ahead of us and when that's in place we can share some of the neat concepts we've cooked up then.

While discussing this issue, I found it very interesting and comforting that the idea of "keeping this in the spirit of KDE" came up more than once. That there is a discernible spirit of KDE is terrific, but that there is an appreciation for its conservation and ensuring new additions are aligned with it is priceless.

The third thing that we discussed was board dynamics: how well are we, or aren't we, working together? When Cornelius and I joined the board things were rather chaotic in KDE e.V. The existing board had become, to be frank, dysfunctional and was being barely held together by one or two brave souls. It needed fresh blood, new energy and a fair amount of work to not only bring it back together by make KDE e.V. match the growth in KDE itself.

The remaining active board members at that time did a tremendous job of transitioning their responsibilities to the two new kids, and eventually three more people (Ade, Sebas and Klaas) joined us in the fun.

Up until this past calendar year, I think it is safe to say that the board was working very hard on putting into place what was needed. It always felt like we were one a few steps behind where we needed to be. Working groups, documentation of policy, regular public reports, well maintained budgets, activity goals, legal instruments and just general improvements in all the various processes that go into making this whole thing tick were slowly put into place. Given that none of us on the board do this as our "day job" that was a fairly heroic effort at times. It wasn't always smooth sailing, to be certain, but my respect for the members of this organization has consistently grown and deepened.

Now, however, while we have new things still happening and ongoing business-as-usual to take care of (developer sprints, membership, patrons and sponsors, Akademy, etc, etc, etc) it's all a lot ... calmer. It feels less like we're running to catch up and more like we're walking with obvious purpose. This, in combination with the excitements of 2008, led to a rather lower key six months or so for the board.

So we spent some time going over our communication habits, our need to keep our working relationships sharp and strong, to keep the warm fuzzies rolling and to keep our team work as a board well tuned. There were concerns we were slipping a bit in that, but this meeting helped alleviate a lot of those concerns. There was visible progress for us to mull over and sitting in the same room we were all working together very well, just as we have for the last few years.

It does remind me how important it is to always be tending those aspects of a team, especially one that works on things that are so non-trivial and even non-fun. The team dynamic is the source of enjoyment and energy needed to get it all done. It was good, therefore, to refocus on that again.

When I think of the person(s) who will be joining the board as new members this year, I'm happy that there is this team spirit in place. It will make their journey more enjoyable, rewarding and productive. We talked about this as well during the meeting, and I hope to talk with some of the possible candidates more over the coming weeks in preparation of the nomination and eventual voting process in the next few months.

Frankfurt wasn't all business for me, though. I took a couple evenings just to myself, which isn't something I've done at past board meetings. We had our traditional first-evening-at-the-pub (the one with the clown on the wall down in Rodelheim (sp?)) and a nice dinner at an Indian restaurant that was showing Bollywood flicks .. but I took some "me time" as well. For instance, I managed to arrange one evening for a rather wonderful meal that had a delectably prepared gnocchi in a truffle oil glaze at the center of it all (kept company by a soft, buttery chardonnay). And while the food was great, it was really the company that made it shine. Few things bring out the flavour of food like conversation with a friend, and I was lucky enough to have a friend come into Frankfurt for a visit.

I'd only been home for three or four days in the last month by the end of it all, but things like Tokamak II and the most productive board meeting make it all seem easy. Which isn't to say that I'm not looking forward to a couple months at home at this point. ;)

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back from my walk in the woods

Poems are words that sit together in a peculiar fashion; they tell stories and make up thoughts but do so with a certain ease and flow that prose, while useful in its own right, can't match. There are days where the flow is poetic and others where it is prosaic. There are, of course, the jumbled alphabet days, too, but in general my mind opens its consciousness upon the day in either a poetic or a prosaic state. Today is definitely a poetic day.

Another way I connect with my mental state is in terms of oceanic moods, something that anyone who has lived next to a large body of water can probably understand. Some days there are waves, other days it's just a choppy mess of little waves whitecapping in the winds and other days it can be expansive and calm. The vocabulary used by people who live by, in and on the ocean to describe the water can just as easily apply to human moods: today my thoughts are flat and glassy.

On days like this I can sit and write code endlessly, but the prosaic frame of mind is more productive for that, I find, in terms of raw line count. Glassy, poetic days are better for communicating and visualizing the paths behind and in front.

The mounting backlog of email has been annoying me these last couple weeks, but today they appear as a wonderful opportunity to sit and write and connect with people. :)

It's also a holiday here in Alberta (and many other parts of Canada) so there's no school for the P-man and the streets are quiet. It all rather fits in nicely.

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Plasma, Qt 4.5, Tokamak, etc.

Tokamak II was a grand success, modulo some unfortunate hiccups with travel and bed bugs. Sebastian, with the help of Richard, wrote up a rather nice review of the event. I was quite happy how there was a strong mix of coding, planning and community building that went on. People from the local area stopped by at various points to look in at what we were doing, which was pretty interesting and really reflects our open nature well. No secret meetings here! :) Now we just need to see how well we execute on things like the new system tray method over the next 6 months.

Today, however, I'm sitting in a board meeting for KDE e.V. We try and do these in person a few times a year as we can get a lot done sitting around a table together for two days relative to the usual email and phone communication we do. Today was no exception, and I'm feeling exceptionally tired mentally at the end of today's meeting. Tomorrow we do it all again, all in the name of continuing our process of both reinforcing what is working and improving what could work even better.

During this time there's been a small bruhaha on the KDE blogs about Plasma in 4.2 and Qt 4.5. Here's the short and sweet story on it so everyone can relax and sleep a bit better at night:

We (the Plasma team) would like Plasma in 4.2 to work with Qt 4.5. Obviously, this is also what the wider KDE and Qt community wants to. As they say, however, you don't always get what you want. But if you try, sometimes, you get what you need.

Right now, with all the changes in QGraphicsView in 4.5, there are some Unhappy Places in Plasma when you use it with Qt 4.5. For example, there is an "interesting" one pixel gap in some of the SVG rendererings (specifically, Plasma::FrameSvg). There are also some work-arounds in Plasma for bugs in Qt 4.4. that are not Happy with Qt 4.5. So we have some testing and patching to do. While Plasma generally runs better with Qt 4.5 in a number of ways, such as performance and less layout hacks needed, it currently needs some work.

We're working on these things in trunk, and will do our best to come up with a patch set against 4.2 in the process. Helping us test KDE 4.2 against Qt 4.5 and identifying these issues is very welcome and then later testing the patches would also be welcome. While the Plasma team will be doing our best to do so, reality is that wider testing equates to better results.

So in summary: using Qt 4.5 with Plasma in KDE 4.2 right this minute will result in less than perfect results; we're working on it; help us and it'll go faster; eventually running Plasma in KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5 will be smoothly doable. In the meantime, please be patient and don't jump the gun. Given that Qt 4.5 isn't even released yet, I don't see the issue.

I now return you to the regularly scheduled storm in a tea-cup ... I have a board meeting wrap up waiting for me to pay attention again. ;)

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follow Tokamak on identi.ca

I'm "live blogging" today's Tokamak presentations and other events on identi.ca, so if you'd like to keep a voyeuristic eye on what we're doing you know where you can go now. ;)

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user vs technical language (aka more on widgets)

When we are coming up with terms to use for various aspects of the system, the first thing we ask ourselves is, "Is this a word or phrase the user sees, or is this a developer issue?"

For things that the user sees, we use words and phrases that describe what the object or action is and avoid technical jargon. So, for instance, we don't use the word "Plasma" in the Plasma user interface except in the About Box. The person logging in probably doesn't really care what that the wonderful thing they see is called, they just like using that thing that, to them, is their "desktop".

For things that the user doesn't see, we try and use technically useful terms. So because the plugin metaclass is call Applet, the .desktop files are plasma-applet-*.desktop by convention. The user never sees this and it helps developers understand the technical path things take. Another example from Plasma is "Containment" versus "Activity": the former is a literal technical term describing the class structure, while the latter is the ultimate functionality it (and a few other related classes) provide to the user.

This leads to slightly different sets of language depending on whether your are dealing with the technical mechanics of things or the user interface. A common term for this is "plumbing versus porcelain" referring to how the user of a sink or toilet sees just the (hopefully) nice exterior and doesn't see any of the internal pipework and supporting mechanisms.

Once you get used to thinking in terms of "mechanism versus purpose" or "developer and user", it all becomes second nature. The alternative of trying to use one language for both developer and user often results in "leaking" jargon out to the user interface (not good) because user language just doesn't map cleanly to the technical implementations in many cases. So instead we have an accurate and concise language for the technology project and a clear and understandable language for the user. Understandably, those who straddle somewhere in the middle (e.g. packagers) can sometimes find this bewildering. ;)

I hope that clears up a few more bits of confusion around the whole "which words to use" issue.

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Scotty, fire up the generators!

Tokamak II begins today. This morning we're all catching up on svn (hooray, Qt 4.5 is in qt-copy!), nutrition, sleep, email and our lives since we last saw each other. This afternoon, we will be sharing Plasma related presentations with each other and then the serious conversations, designing and hacking shall commence.

I'll keep you all updated as to what insanities we come up with as Tokamak progresses. One key thought I'll be trying to spread at the event here amongst the team is keeping serious play going even as Plasma matures. We've only started to innovate, after all.

Though it seems that with the rest of the KDE4 workspace team, we've managed to make something more desirable than Vista and even reminiscent of Apple visual quality, already. ;)

(We watched the video as a group this morning after finding it on Wade's blog and had a great laugh!)

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why a widget, brother?

Davide posted a (micro-)blog entry noting to use the word "widget" rather than "applet" which caused a small flurry of conversation in the comments around the possible reasons for this. In Plasma we rarely do things without thought and conversation and so, yes, there are good reasons for this.

First off, Applet is not a well known word in the user populace. I've actually done semi-formal surveys of people to figure out which words are recognized by them and which aren't, and despite "Java applet" being a part of our technology vocabulary for quite a while, the average person doesn't really connect the word "applet" with anything overly meaningful. Many KDE users know "applet" from kicker, but that's not a huge percentage of the world population. "Plugin", thanks to web browsers, is probably the winning word but because it's associated with web browsers so strongly and has a well understood it wasn't really an option.

Widget, however, is increasingly used by people to mean "those little mini-apps that you put on your desktop, in our browser, on your phone etc". Therefore we have MacOS Dashboard Widgets, Vista Widget, Yahoo Widgets, Opera Widgets ... Google Gadgets are one of the odd ducks there. The others are of the form "$TYPE Widget".

Of course, we also have the word "Plasmoid". A Plasmoid is a native Plasma widget, meaning that it uses the Plasma facilities for theming, widgets, data, services, etc. Since Plasma is a canvas that you can put more than just Plasmoids on, though, we decided to use the generic term "widget" everywhere.

The point is that the user should not need to care what language or what widget toolkit something is written with. They are all "widgets" and why they don't work well together is a technical issue not a user issue. Exposing that to the user, therefore, is not the way to go. They are all widgets. They all work on Plasma. The user need not understand the fine points if they don't want to (though they can drill down if they wish).

For those who were concerned that we already have a meaning for the name "widget" in the sense of pushbuttons, menus, etc. that's confusing technical jargon with user facing language. As a developer, I don't get confused when there is a Plasma::PushButton which is a "widget" but all the Plasmoids are also "widgets". I know the distinction, and it's pretty easy to sort out. The typical user doesn't know the word for "all things pushy and poppy and clicky" and so doesn't face this confusion at all in the first place.

So, in summary, we picked a word that is already being used as a generic term for these things by many others, which would minimize confusion and which was accurate given the broad nature of Plasma.

Now we just need to remember to always use the word consistently in our communication. :)

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some days you have to try harder than others

Usually when I travel it's no problem: I sail into one airport and (eventually, often with some stops in between) out of another. Nothing interesting happens, and that is certainly a good thing when it comes to the actual transit part of travel.

Some days, though .......

I arrived at the airport two hours early, after saying goodbye to P. and his mom, M., who has come in to house sit and look after the P-man while I'm out of the country. I go to the express check in counter (hooray for the small benefits of traveling too much! ;) and I get my first heart stopper: the woman isn't sure my passport has enough time left on it. It expires this year, but not exactly soon and I certainly haven't had enough time in the country to apply for a new one. My plan was to do so as soon as I return from this trip. So here I am being told that they might not even let me out of Canada?! *sigh* She checks into it some more, I point out that I do have a return ticket, that I travel in and out of Europe rather regularly, etc ... and she decides that, yes, I will be allowed to travel around Europe at least one more time on my current passport. Holy heart attacks!

I brought a guitar with me this time, a small one to be sure but not small enough to just through in the Lufthansa overheads and so Air Canada makes me put it into the oversized baggage. I swear that it must be the smallest oversized bag in the load. Unfortunately the Russian junior hockey team and the Swedish ski team are simultaneously wreaking havoc on the oversized baggage security check. You can't make this stuff up.

I'm in that line for nearly 40 minutes when I decide that I need to take matters into my own hands here and so beg my way to the front of the line as my flight will leave without me otherwise. Social skills are useful. :)

Next stop: security. Of course, the line is horrendously long. I've never been through that side of YYC when it was that long. I was going to miss my flight now for sure. Not.

I walked right past the line, waited for the fellow who checks people's boarding passes at the entrance to finish with his current passenger and then interjected myself. I asked the people who were next for just a moment's grace and then pleaded my case to the gatekeeper. Turns out ... he used to work in oversized baggage and completely empathized. He said with an empathetic smile, "I probably shouldn't, but just this time ... just go through. I know how bad oversize can be!"

With the final hurdle cleared, I am now sitting at the boarding gate waiting for boarding to commence. Thankfully YYC now has free wifi so I can blog my pain in near real time. ;)

Porto, here I come!

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when the fever breaks

The day after I returned home I came down with a horrendous fever that left me shivering in bed for the last two days. It finally broke yesterday evening and I'm feeling 90% now, which is about 10,000% better than I was a few hours earlier.

Better than beating the bug, however, was news that we now have an "official" KDE review board installation. We've been using review board in Plasma for nearly a year now and it's been a terrific tool in helping with the peer review of non-trivial patches before they go in. My experience tells me that once code goes in, the chances of fixing problems with it often go down slightly, or even dramatically depending on whether the submitter is a regular contributor or not.

What makes a patch "non-trivial" also varies in definition depending on the submitter and we've found that review board can be a nice set of training wheels for new contributors. Most importantly, though, it prevents losing patches on mailing lists. Since review board integrates with mailing lists, all discussion around patches for a given project can appear on the respective mailing lists as well, so it's certainly both/and: you get mailing list activity and a place where patches are collected.

The inline commenting, threaded discussion and screenshot support are also really nice.

So if you'd lik to take review board for a spin for your KDE-hosted project, run over to the reviewboard.kde.org now and register!

Thanks to people at VMWare for contributing this fine piece of software to humanity, and to David Solbach for being a terrific sys admin and setting it all up!

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some props to our fellow fossers

When something improves, it's not hard to forget to say something about it. It's easy to just take it in stride and move on, leaving the poor people who worked so hard on it feeling probably just a little under-appreciated. ;)

So I wanted to say "nice work!" to the people who have been working on suspend-to-ram support and the Free software wifi drivers in the Linux kernel. Both features have been working absolutely flawlessly in every way for me for a little while now. It wasn't too long ago that I regularly ran into issues, shall we say, with both.

Even KWin's compositing comes back absolutely properly after a suspend-to-ram and the recovery time is remarkably fast and swift (well under a second). It gives me hope for some of the other things that still aren't quite up to par.

So kudos and thanks to the people working on these features. That is all. :)

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comparing and contrasting conferences

Going to a non-IT conference made up mostly of university students was pretty interesting. There were a number of scientists doing some pretty interesting research (the phosphorus cycle is a lot more interesting, and important, that I would have imagined), including some that relied heavily on software (such as the community metrics via social network analysis stuff), but mostly it was economics and political studies.

One thing that jumped out at me was the diversity of the attendees. It was very evenly split between men and women and there was good representation of all the various continents and regions on our planet. It reminded me how uniform our own community is and how we really can do a lot better in the diversity column. The reason to do so is not to just be able to say "we're diverse" but to be able to tap more people's talents and interests, to broaden our scope by broadening our participation.

Still, during the expert's panel on the last day it was interesting to see how men were still picked from the audience to ask their questions far more often than the women in attendance. I didn't really notice this until the ex-U.N. ethicist prof and I were talking over dinner and he made an observation about this. He also provided some really good pointers on how to improve on such things in groups like that. In particular, he shared the "stopwatch approach" (which involves a cooling off period between each question of up to 20 seconds to allow more people to think and gather the gumption to share) as well the "list approach" where you write down on a piece of paper everyone who has contributed in the group as you go to ensure you don't unconsciously favor certain people.

I'm also not used to the power difference between people in academic settings anymore. Well, Ok, honestly I was never good at that. Having people carefully call me "Mr. Seigo" and then ask if that was Ok (as if they had some yet more uncomfortable and formal way of addressing me ready to go), or just generally be unsure if they could come up and talk was ... odd to experience. I'm a rather used to the more level playing field in that regard at our conferences, though I did appreciate the generally higher level of social awareness amongst the attendees they displayed in other ways. The lower level of care for social structure in our community is both a blessing and a curse in that regard.

I had also forgotten just how much university students can party, however. If you think the geeks drink good amounts of beer at Free software events ... holy moley! As I was leaving on my last morning there (the conference still had a day or two to go) I could only marvel at the sheer number of crates of empty wine bottles the kitchen staff were packing out from the night before.

Speaking of the kitchen staff, it was really cool how they put an emphasis on locally sourced organic produce and vegetarian eating. In some ways, I felt very at home amongst that particular kind of appreciation and awareness. Oh, and I got cookies!

In conversation some people asked about our software conferences and other odd bits of my more usual life experience and I shared how we have our ways of showing affection even beyond the now rather pervasive KDE hug, namely Ade's cookies. So a couple of the attendees got some materials for the kitchen and made some home made caramel for me! Yay! They made enough that everyone got some, of course, and they also picked up some cookies for me at the store. Ade: don't worry, I still pine for the heavenly smell that pervades the kitchen when you make your cookies. (And aren't we seeing each other in a little over a week in Frankfurt? *cough* ;)

They also had a "love box" in the main hall for the last few days. Or maybe they had it the whole time, I'm not sure; I only slept in the same building as the attendees for those last two days at the castle grounds outside of Zurich. In any case, the love box (which was clearly labeled as such) was full of little red boxes containing condoms. The rate of depletion was noticeable and impressive. I don't think I've yet seen such a thing at a Free software conference. Another social difference.

All in all, though, I had not only a lot of fun (I was a closer in age to the students than the professors, so I hung out with the former during the evening/nights leading to much opportunity for revelry and enjoyment) and I learned even more from the bright minds and spirits that were there, including a couple of new German words which I shall now misspell for your amusement: fachidiot and morgenmufflen morgenmuffel.

The latter rather perfectly describes how I tend to be in the morning (those who know me can probably fill in a more precise definition from there), and the former refers to someone who is so isolated in their specialty that they become nearly useless at anything else. Going to conferences such as this student summit is, I can only hope, a way to prevent myself from becoming such a fachidiot. Hopefully those who attended the lectures and panels I was a part of also gained something of value, though given the feedback it seems safe to say that many did. Exchange is good.

Several attendees have sent me emails that I need to follow up on now, so I suppose it isn't really over, just the introductions are behind us now.

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