pieces coming together

It seems like it's been forever, but it's been just a bit over two weeks since I last blogged. I thought about blogging right when I got back, but there was a pile of outstanding Plasma work that had backlogged while I was house hunting in Vancouver, and that seemed slightly more important. ;)

The good news is that we found a place out in Vancouver without much trouble. There were 100-250 listings on Craig's list each day while we were out there so there was lots to pick from. We looked at places in North Van (cool and funky, but the upcoming Olympics were a bit of a concern and it's a little ways from downtown), Yaletown (which is right downtown, some breathtaking views but that meant condo living, 20+ stories up), along the Arbutus Belt and even one place just inside of Surrey (amazingly beautiful place, great architecture, close to schools but ... Surrey ...).

We finally settled on the top two floors of an historical house in Kitsilano. Five blocks from the Burrard street bridge (with it's new cycle path) into downtown, six blocks from the beach (which has a huge outdoor heated marine pool), one and seven blocks from two really nice shopping streets, half a dozen from Granville Island and just three blocks from the elementary school. Complete with large belcony, front and back yards and a new set of kitchen appliances being installed .. score! :)

So I'll be heading out there for good pretty soon. I'm very excited about that and what the next few years of life will be like: back by the ocean, in a city that's more alive, closer to parts of my family and starting new adventures in life all at once. In the meantime, cardboard packing boxes are the dominant feature in my house here in Calgary. There's still packing and cleaning left to do. Ugh.

This also means that I'm back to being able to spend my usual obsessing over Plasma again now that I have my time back for working the crazy hours I tend to. I really missed the Plasma team while I was away (though I did get to have dinner with Chani and met up with Bruce Byfield as well), so arriving back and spending some time on irc was like a small reunion all of its own.

Lots of stuff is going on in the KDE workspace right now, spanning KWin, KRunner and Plasma. That means I owe all of you some blog entries on it. :) In the meantime, there's a nice write up on the Plasma netbook prototype written by Ryan Paul over on Ars. It includes a nice overview of the key bits of Plasma technology as well for extra bonus points. The only thing to keep in mind while reading the article is that the screenshots shown were with an earlier version of Air which was overly translucent and that this is really early work: we have a lot of polishing and beautifying ahead of us there. As a set of first steps, however, it's really great as an experiment to start moving beyond the desktop shell and start working on other form factors.

As Ryan concluded, "The prototype is an intriguing real-world demonstration of Plasma's versatility and the strength of KDE's architecture. It's also a good example of how creativity and innovation can move Linux beyond traditional desktop paradigms and make it shine in small spaces." You can also read Artur's paper on the project here.

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turning the page

The KDE e.V. general assembly was held this week and new board members were voted in to take the positions Klaas and I had bee holding. It's been absolutely terrific working with the other board members, present and past, and working for the e.V. membership has been a great pleasure.

But now that I'm not on the KDE e.V. board and putting my energy into that, what's next for me?

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Besides the professional, there are also some changes happening in my personal life. I'm moving out to where my heart has always lived regardless of where my head lay: amongst the trees that tower above the ocean on Canada's West coast. P. will once again be geographically near his mother after this move and to top it all off I've been blessed with the arrival of a loving partner who will be joining me out there.

The ten year chapter of my life in Calgary is coming to a close, and a new set of chapters is opening, this time set in a place I find a bit more intuitive and meaningful to my soul.

Work Focus

As far as my professional life, I'm not planning on straying very far. As a regular member of KDE e.V. I will still support and volunteer within that organization. I'll also continue working on KDE technology projects full time and keeping some eyes on the organizational structures in and around them. I'm quite looking forward to getting back to attending conferences and doing the public speaking thing again once my geographical relocation is complete.

Beyond that, there are three areas I plan to focus my energies on over the next few years: technology focus in KDE, helping communicate what KDE is and working on whole product concepts.

Technical Focus

It's really important that we do more than simply release new KDE 4 packages twice a year: we need to follow through on our plans and take full advantage of the various Pillars of KDE in our applications.

I feel we have lost a little bit of the sharpness in our focus that we had during the lead up to KDE 4.0. We've been working hard with our heads-down on getting 4.1, 4.2 and now 4.3 rocking hard and we have some great results to show for it. While doing so, we've let some of the long term picture grow a bit fuzzy in places. Stepping back and taking stock from time to time to maintain our focus is needed so that we the global coherency in our efforts remains and we continue to hit meaningful end points.

Whether it is Nepomuk-ing our apps, pulling fresh new ideas into the Plasma/KWin pairing, exploring the future of social/contextual computing, targeting different kinds of hardware form factors, exploring the needs of educational environments, improving document management, sorting out the web content issues we face, etc. ... we need to keep these goals in focus as we continue to refine, improve and enrich our software.

This doesn't tend to happen all by itself, so I will be working in support of our community leaders to document and maintain these goals, backed by consensus and follow through.

Communication

In addition to the critical ingredient of Freedom, we have a lot of great features and exciting capabilities in KDE right now. The world needs to know about these things, and we need to be telling them about it repeatedly and with passion, communicating with clarity what the real world benefits of KDE are for people.

We also need to ensure that others working in technology know what we are up to so that they can join us or invite us to join them where there is overlap and mutual interest. In general, we need to be in front of the variety of KDE users more often and more effectively.

I haven't been involved as much with communication side of things in the last 18-24 months as I'd liked to have, especially when compared to my level of involvement in the years preceding. Now with some of my energy freed up I will be putting some time into that.

Whole Product Thinking

How can we build up a more dynamic, sustainable and responsible commercial ecosystem around and for KDE? That's a big question. One possible answer (among many) is to engage in some clear "whole product" thining and building a full, open and participatory solution stack with KDE as one of the crown jewels within it.

I've been working on a map that has four areas within it: hardware, operating system, user interface and services. Multiple players exist within each of those areas who have relevant expertise and offerings, but finding working harmony between the four different areas is really hard and it's become rather hit-and-miss. I hear this from Free software users on a regular basis. So what can we do?

By focusing on specific use cases, specific hardware profiles, specific OS integration targets and specific kinds of services, we can create whole product prototypes that "feel right" and which can be relied on more that our current "some a lot of assembly required" approach.

KDE's open, generic support-everything approach must be maintained and having "support everything" distributions out there is also good, but these are instruments which need to be tuned to create harmony with each other so that great products can be reliably and affordably created from them.

It should be easy for someone to build a netbook device without having to start from the ground up by just ticking off boxes on a checklist. Right now, this process is currently something that even the biggest of companies struggles to succeed with. Creating whole product concepts that provide clear and reliable options for specific use cases can open up entirely new kinds of possibilities for even the most humble of groups and ultimately let us create exciting, useful and reliable objects for people to use.

No Guarantees, But When Are There Ever?

As I put my KDE e.V. board duties into the capable hands of others, I'm making a lateral move within the community and focusing on a different set organizational and process oriented tasks that really need some love and attention.

To pull it all together will take an ongoing, concerted multi-year effort. It will require building working relationships with each other in ways we perhaps haven't previously and working on defining what we expect from the systems, social and technical, that we are building. The goal-posts will also be likely to shift and evolve as we explore the landscape.

There are no guarantees of success in any of this, of course, but I am ready to bring what I have to offer for as long as it is welcome and needed. Working with and in support of this great community of thinkers, dreamers and doers, I feel we can achieve nearly anything we put our collective minds and backs into and I'm chomping at the bit to get going. :)

p.s.

I'm leaving for Vancouver tomorrow morning and will be only sporadically available over the next couple of weeks. I wanted to get this blog entry out before I left, however. I hope it answers the questions that some of you have been asking and will make my being out of touch while I'm throwing my life into the chaos of moving a little less concerning. Love 'n hugs ... aseigo.

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4.3 rc1 tasks widget crashiness, multi-head update

Since we keep getting flooded with the bug reports about this issue, I figured I should try and stem the flow with a blog entry: in rc1 there's a crash in the tasks widget that was fixed a few hours after 4.3 rc1 was officially tagged for the last time. The backtraces usually end up in methods called manualSortingRequest or removeGroup, but somewhere in libtaskmanager. It only impacts people who have panel layouts where the tasks widget may resize and it is triggered by windows coming and going in just the "right" numbers. In any case, it's fixed (probably before most of your got your hands on it) and I hope we get an rc2 out the door pretty shortly here.

I have to say it's pretty impressive how many of you are testing the betas and rc's for 4.3 and reporting bugs. That's very cool.

Speaking of testing, some people stepped up to test the multi-head changes I made the other day. The distinction of first-back-with-results goes to "DarkMetatron" on irc. Yesterday he came with:

[00:16] Hi, I read your blogpost about multihead. I use this setup and the bug is a total showstopper. How can I help?

I told him what he could do (install kdelibs and kdebase from svn, try it out and let me know how it goes) and today he came back with:

[16:19] Hi.. I am running kdelibs and kdebase from svn now and so far it works just as it should. Your changes work

We discussed it a bit more than that, of course, but there's the important bit. If I can get more testing of this feature over the next month or two, I will backport it to 4.3.1 or 4.3.2 depending on when they come out and how much testing this new code gets.

I also have a blog drafted that I'll probably publish tomorrow after I go through it once more about what exactly I'm planning on doing now that I've transitioned out of the KDE e.V. board. Until then: congrats to the new board members and it sounds like Akademy and GCDS is doing quite well. :) For those of you there, please keep us all informed!

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multihead

I put in the first bits of code needed to make Plasma run properly in a multi-head environment where there's a different X server on each screen, as opposed to the more usual one-X-server-and-multiple-logical-screens.

People have been after me for a while about this one, though no one actually stepped up to address it. It's one of those features where the main users are not often software developers but are pretty aggressive about the feature's importance to them.

Anyways, the first bit of code is in there now and I need testers if this has any hope of working well in KDE 4.4. Which means I need at least one person who uses a dual head set up to install kdelibs and kdebase, at a minimum, from trunk to be my guinea pig(s). I'm working blind here as I don't have a dual head system, so here's your chance to do something positive. You know where to find me: #plasma on irc.freenode.net or on plasma-devel at kde dot org. :)

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Plasma in KDE 4.4

Each release of Plasma over the 18 months since its debut release has marked an impressive step forward in its evolution. We are planning on making 4.4, our second anniversary release coming in January 2010, more of the same in that regard.

We recently had our Plasma release cycle planning meeting, and here is our list of goals for central Plasma technologies in 4.4 (in no particular order):

• Improve kiosk based lock down and deployment management: We are communicating with some large deployments in Europe about the process of migrating from KDE 3 to KDE 4 and how we can make KDE 4's desktop shell an even better experience than Kicker and KDesktop provided. We've started a wiki page here that we are working on with these downstream users. Expect a lot more to find its way there over the next few weeks and months as we continue to work out the needs and use cases with them.



• More Cowbell JavaScript: A full JavaScript AppletScriptEngine that provides access to all of Qt and KDE core libs and JavaScript DataEngines.



• Plasma Netbook: A Plasma shell optimized for the netbook use case of a small-ish screen, hardware accelerated video and online usage. It features no taskbar (relying on the "display windows" desktop effect instead), an integrated panel and window title bar, Plasma widgets and a full screen search and launch interface. Hopefully we'll be able to add a media interface as well.



• Media Center Components: A first release of media center components for browsing, collecting and playing media in a full screen Plasma containment. This will not replace Amarok, Dragon, Kaffeine, etc. It's designed for casual full screen usage and will also sport Plasma widget support. Oooh! Full screen widgets! :) Essentially, we believe that a basic media center experience should be easy for the home user to get at, which means it needs to be integrated with the desktop shell and be readily available with it. As a first release, it won't have tons of bells and whistles (something we hope to eventually get by integrating this work with existing media center projects in the future) but it should get us on the right road.



• Remote Plasma: Send your data or your widgets to another computer or device or receive Plasma components on your device. No-configuration local area announcement of services over UPnP, working with all Plasma components without modification, integrated authentication and access control and extensible delivery mechanisms will allow us to share components around a table (e.g. at a meeting), control other systems (e.g. a media center) in the house or even run Plasma services on headless systems on the network. No other widget system out there has this, and even the web hasn't yet achieved this level of relocatability.



• Pluggable Containment Actions: Want to have Control+Alt+MiddleClick open up a list of running windows? Scroll wheel on a panel skip through desktops? This plugin based system for defining contextual actions for containments opens up all those possibilities as well as the more mundane but much wanted consistency between containments. Now Folder View Activities can have all the same options as the default Desktop Activity without any duplication of code. Best of all: you get the final say by selecting the plugins and the activation sequence for them if you wish in the integrated control panel.



• Widget Explorer: A more "Plasma" widget explorer that integrates better with the panel controller, looks hotter and is generally just more usable.



• Improved KWin Integration: We've been working on this in 4.3, and we'll try and take it to new levels with the KWin developers. This includes moving some of the effect inside of Plasma into KWin for greater performance, taking better advantage of some of KWin's effects and seeing more Plasma based theming options for KWin (such as window decorations). A good portion of this work will be done by the KWin developers, but I figure it makes sense on this list as well. :)



• Social Desktop and Geolocation Improvements: Building on our start with the Social Desktop features in Plasma in KDE 4.3, we will be adding more features to the existing widgets, adding new widgets where needed and using geolocation in more of our components. We are also looking at ways to improve the geolocation DataEngine itself, though no concrete for 4.4 plans have been committed to yet.



• Plasmate: The 0.1 release of the Plasmoid and DataEngine creator will follow with the KDE 4.4 release. Transparent revision control, live previews and minimal-clicks-to-get-to-work workflow will lower the bar considerably to making scripted Plasma components.



• KUIServer Resurection: KUIServer has received a facelift and an internal resurrection. Now jobs can talk to KUIServer and it updates Plasma for its job notifications. This means applications like Dolphin can now also consume that data without Plasma getting in they way and if Plasma should crash the jobs will still be there on restart.



• Notification Improvements: Notification summaries, queueing and logging, making the notifications area more robust against applications flooding it and more useful by keeping the latest information at your fingertips. We're also exploring the best way to show only the new stuff when it arrives, while letting you click through to the older stuff, too.



• Kinetic: Plasma in KDE 4.4 will be the first release to start using the new Qt animation and state machine framework.



• Plasma Desktop D-Bus Access: A full D-Bus service exposing the widgets, containments and more in your currently running Plasma desktop session.



• More KRunner: In 4.3 KRunner received a lot of interface, performance and stability love. Now we need to keep the runners coming. I started a Kopete chat runner the other day based on a request received on identi.ca.



• Plasmoid Updates: Working with the KNewStuff developers, we want to provide an easy way to check for updates to the Plasmoids you installed over the network as well as check the installed ones for integrity.



• Notification Item Goes Prime Time: With the new D-Bus based system tray protocol in place and under real-world usage in 4.3, we will be porting as many apps as we can get our hands on to it. A formal specification is being written which will be submitted for consideration at freedesktop.org and we hope to move the KNotificationItem class into libkdeui. Next to the ability to put Plasmoids in the system tray (and possibly elsewhere like the quick launcher), this is the single most exciting thing that's happened to the system tray since I've been following KDE. Finally we have a modern system tray / notification area with the ability to have multiple views on the same entries, have non-graphical representations of them, separate the entries into different groups in different widgets, integrate them with the taskbar, react to the internal state of the entries (e.g. for autohide) and theme them properly for the host desktop shell (icon theming, sizing, etc).



• Improved Documentation: Work on extended JavaScript Plasmoid tutorials is underway, and we're growing the general body of documentation around Plasma.



• New Configuration Dialogs: A revamp of the existing activity and wallpaper configuration as well as Plasma global settings is planned. Beauty and usability are the goals.

That probably seems like a lot, but most of the above items have already had significant work done on them and are currently in active development. We do have more plans, such as improving the Lion Mail Plasmoid and working on improved Akonadi integration, but the above sums up the big changes coming to the core components. The usual incremental improvements in other Plasmoids, performance and stability work can also be expected. (They just make crappy line items in a "OMG! What colour poniez are they making?!" list.)

There's so much more that's possible, too: a dock PanelContainment, improved pager usability, getting kdewebkit to a place that we can replace our use of QWebPage with KWebPage for Plasma::WebContent, a Plasmoid based on the Kickoff internals that shows a menu of just a certain sub-menu in the application menu hierarchy, .... there's lots of cool stuff just waiting for eager hands.

Maybe those hands belong to you? If so, come find us on irc.freenode.net in #plasma or on the plasma-devel at kde dot org mailing list. Either way, enjoy riding KDE 4.3 while we work away on KDE 4.4. :)

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an afternoon of small things

I spent the afternoon working with some very small computers that we picked up today from a local shop that specializes in electronic parts for things like hobby robotics:

The white breadboard in the picture is 4.3 centimeters along the wider side. One day in the not-too-distant future a Plasmoid will live on the above device and I will be able to access it using Bluetooth and then control the device from my Plasma desktop.

Rob L. and I put some more work into the wire protocol and looked further into what will be needed to integrate it with Rob Scheepmaker's remote Plasma work. Rob L. wrote some code for the device and we got a couple steps further.

I have no idea if this idea will ever see the light of day in a commercial product, but I also don't really care to be honest. It's a fun hack that I'm spending some of my free time on and it stretches Plasma out to a whole new area. Wheeee for having fun. :)

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an rc1 package by any other name

I've spent much of the last week dealing with bug reports for "4.3 rc1" packages that users have downloaded from various distributions. Sadly, these packages are usually not packages of the actual 4.3 rc1 that was announced just yesterday and so I'm spending time weeding out things that are already fixed in the actual rc1 and people are spending time reporting bugs that are get closed immediately as duplicates.

The distros tried to get packages out to testers to make sure the packages worked for launch day; fair enough. KDE also spent nearly eight days between the first tagging of rc1 and the eventually final release of it; that's too long. As far as I know, no users were informed of the situation and so took to testing the rc1 packages in good faith. They have done a great job uncovering bugs we've already fixed in the process. ;)

I'd love to see our betas and rc's have much shorter tag-to-release cycles, even if developers come up with last minute fixes: just release another rc a day or two later. I'd rather have seen us put out rc1, rc2 and even rc3 if needed over those eight days.

I'd also love to see distros inform their users much more clearly what those pre-release packages are so that they test what they should be testing: that the packages install cleanly.

In the meantime, for all of our valued testers out there: if you download a beta or rc release and it hasn't yet been announced on dot.kde.org ... it's not the actual release. It's a pre-release. Hold off on reporting bugs until the announcement is up on dot.kde.org and you've updated your packages one more time to make sure you've got all the updates.

Cheers :)

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WebKit

I'm glad to see discussion about web content in KDE, spurred on by Will Stephenson's posting on the matter. A couple years back I attempted to get QtWebkit and KHTML working together and failed utterly and miserably. Shame on me. Today's situation, which Will outlines, is a result of keeping the status quo since then.

Many others have weighed in on the matter since, and it seems there are huge numbers of comments on each of these blog entries. I haven't read the comments as I don't have time to do so today (I have a couple hours to close out some bugs I want to kill and then I have to dash out to the outskirts of the city for a farewell dinner) and I'm not sure I even want to open that Pandora's box, to be honest.

For those who are discussing it, here are some thoughts that rattle about in my head, in point form, that others may find useful in the discussion:

• This has nothing to do with Konqueror beyond "we'd like to use Konqueror, so we need a suitable rendering engine for it". The discussion is really about web rendering stacks.


• That we need to have this discussion says nothing negative about the KHTML developers, their efforts or those who use KHTML. The people working on KHTML enjoy doing so, have their reasons for doing so and do great work. They can and should work on KHTML for as long as they enjoy doing so.


• The discussion should remain centered on what application developers need and what our users require so as to make decisions that serve those ends properly.


• There are two contexts for web content: web browser (e.g. Konqueror) and application usage (we use web content in Plasma, throughout Kontact, in application intro screens, in some control panels, in educational apps, in ... a lot of places). These two contexts may not have the same answers. There is C++ API currently missing in QtWebKit that make it not a great option for some applications (though it seems Qt 4.6 is addressing a lot of this issue), but which is pretty well irrelevant to its use in Konqueror as a web browser. There are vice versa examples as well. So keep in mind that there is not, at least not right now, a "one size fits all" solution availalble to us and the discussion ought to reflect that. We need to pick the right answers given the specific questions.


• The reality is that some applications are already using WebKit, so this isn't particularly revolutionary.


• Equally real is that KHTML will be with us at least until KDE 5 and there will be users of KTHML for quite a while yet no matter what happens.


• QtWebKit is not perfect. It's moving forward nicely in Qt 4.6, but to be perfectly blunt: I am disappointed with its progress to date. I had hoped it would be much farther along than it is now. I see all kinds of cool demos for it, but it's mostly for embedded application and usage. We aren't testing it enough on the desktop and we aren't creating enough pressure to move it forward in those directions. Those responsible for QtWebKit would, imho, be wise to put more human resources on it as well.


• The biggest asset WebKit has going for it is broad usage and broad development by numerous entities. The web has become stupidly complex and is ever evolving; it needs a large developer base to keep up, and this is why WebKit works "better" than KHTML on today's "web 2.0". (As a related aside to the Gtk+ WebKit developers: naming your library libwebkit is not only ballsy it's downright ridiculous, divisive and offensive. It's a shameful decision.)


• Here's the most important point, and thus the one I'll end with: this discussion will not matter one little bit in the least unless people commit to a solution and write code for it. Words are great, but they are just words. It is the effort that turns those words into something that matters. You don't have to ask for permission to work on something, either. Just do it, where "it" in this case is the webkit part in playground/libs/webkitkde.

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independence

P. is out in Vancouver now, visiting his mother and going to summer camp where he will play in the coastal waters and rainforests of the lower mainland of British Columbia. I woke up this morning in an unusual silence that wrapped the house. Even when he's sleeping in another room, there is less silence than this, but with P.'s departure a profound silence descends. I am alone, again; independent, again.

While laying there waking up I realized that there would not be a single dirty dish laying out that I did not eat from. Were I to stop eating, the dishes would stop becoming dirty. This is not true when you live with others, particularly your own children. Under such circumstances, even if you stop moving the world is affected in ways your are, at least in part, responsible for. Alone, however, it is only the quiet decay of the universe riding towards in it's love affair with entropy that creates change apart from your own actions.

This is the independence I remember from my single, childless years.

While laying there, now slightly more awake with these thoughts, it also occurred to me that were I to cease (a massive heart attack? an embolism in the brain finally giving way to the interior pressures, stroking my grey matter into ribbons? an unlikely small prince riding an equally unlikely comet crashing into my bed as I lay there, crushing me?) nobody would notice for days. (Ok, the comet scenario might attract some attention, granted.)

Friends who called would assume I was out or just not answering my phone as I sometimes do; perhaps, they might think, I was out of the country and forgot to tell them. My cats would eat the last of their food, drink the last of their water and then venture out to fend for themselves.

As I lay there thinking this, an interview with Mavis Gallant was broadcast on the CBC, wherein she recounted laying on the floor of her Paris apartment for three days until the concierge finally noticed her absence. I don't have a concierge, so even three days would seem very optimistic in my case. (These are the sorts of thoughts that come in the waking moments.) Most likely, my remains would just lie there until I didn't arrive in Vancouver in 10 days time, at which point people expecting me to arrive would begin to get worried.

There is a symmetry there: I don't move and the world doesn't change in response to me, but if I don't move anymore the world doesn't take notice either, at least not immediately.

Today is Canada Day. It is the 142nd anniversary of the founding of my country. We are a relatively young nation, as measured by our time being known as sovereign "Canada". It is an old land, however, populated for thousands of years: the oldest studied human settlement on our soil dates some 5,000 years back, though it is thought people arrived here between 12 and 25 thousand years ago. Not until 142 years ago, however, was it a whole nation from sea to sea independent, at least in theory, within our borders. This is, it struck me, somehow not unlike me waking this morning to find this house suddenly my own.

There is a feeling of liberation in this state of independence: no concern of others over whom we do not have the direct cerebral control we have over our selves. Such liberation causes people to celebrate. Today in Canada people are holding concerts and competitions and taking days off from work to wave little swatches of fabric inked with symbols we say represent our area, our region, our nation, our identity. It is a great feeling to be your own persons, is it not?

If that liberation is the only feeling, however, then existence disregards us in direct proportion to how much we are separated from that which is outside our tidy little borders (personal or national). In moments of independence, which I do enjoy, I am also reminded to consider the strength of sharing life and consideration with others.

Sure, it means I have to wash more dishes, including ones I never ate off of, but happily there is more to it than cleaning up after others from time to time, even if that is an unavoidable part of the pact. There is the opportunity to build and experience things together that do not come with solitude: memories, love, art, architecture and mechanism, families, nations, planets.

So I love waking up alone. I just don't want to do it too often.

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