Tokamak 3, Start of Day 1

Day one has begun! After breakfast (more freshly baked bread! :) we did introductions and I gave an introductory presentation. Now we are doing the individual presentations and tech demos. Right now Marco is showing the current state of Plasma Netbook. We are recording the presentations and will post them along with any slides people used later.

You can follow us along "live" on identi.ca where I'm "live blogging" the event just as I did for Tokamak 2. Keep checking the #t3 tag page on ident.ca for updates from me and the rest of the crew.

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Tokamak Day 0

Today is the day that people are arriving in Randa. We are in a nice chalet in the Alps that has a spectacular view of the glaciers that cap the mountains on either side of the valley the village sits in.

The town itself is very quaint with rather traditional buildings. Structures for livestock are scattered amongst the houses along the couple of main roads, which are just wide enough for a single car. One of them is cobbled and snakes upwards at an impressive angle, flanked on both sides by beautiful, rustic houses. Many have the occupying family's name painted on the outside.

That street is not the one we are on, however. We managed to take a wrong turn in a town with three streets and get lost. My navigational skills are legendary. Thankfully there were three others with me and I was not the one with the directions print out so I can pretend to not be overly responsible for this impressive feat. ;)

It's currently just after 15:00 and five of us have arrived thus far: two from Brazil, one from Germany, one from Franc and myself. We had a refreshing lunch in the garden (a wonderful home made bread, home made vegetable soup, some sausages and cheese) and then came inside to fire up the laptops. Mario is an awesome host, having met us with his KDE "Part of the Solution" t-shirt on, a large Konqi outside at the front door and his wonderful cooking and kind demeanor making us all feel at home. Four of us are in the main meeting room right now working on our demos for tomorrow's presentations, catching up and email and (as you can tell ;) blogging.

I've hooked up a Freescale MX51 based system that I brought with me to a monitor and keyboard in the main meeting room as well. It's hardware typical of what we will be seeing in netbooks that will be finding their way onto the market in days to come. This obviously dovetails well with our Plasma Netbook efforts and the machine was sent via FedEx to me here in Switzerland so I could bring it along for us to play with and get the latest Plasma goodness running on it.

I can already tell that Tokamak III is going to a ripping success: we're in beautiful surroundings without distractions but with everything we need (good food, good internet, good KDE hackers) at our fingertips. Tomorrow will be our first of six days of serious Plasmacation, and we'll keep you updated here on planetkde.org as well as on identi.ca (using the KDE tag). Please feel free to follow us along and join us in #plasma on irc.

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pre-tokamak

Tomorrow I travel to Randa here in Switzerland as Tokamak 3 is set to start on Saturday. It seems several of us will be meeting on the trains in various places so we will arrive in small bursts.

Last weekend I wen to the opera in Bregenz where they have a massive outdoor stage. It's the one that appeared in the recent James Bond movie. They performed Aida but on a scale I'd never seen before: two full sized construction cranes were part of the set. Add in dozens of people, a handful of boats of various sizes, some truly huge set pieces and a bit of pyrotechnics and that's what they call an opera house. ;) It was a rather amazing evening.

Over the week I also attended the first wedding I've been to in many years (I generally try and avoid them), spent a bit of time in the countryside here (which is gorgeous) and tried to continue expanding my German (with moderate success).

Most importantly, though, I had time to hack on some things, and not just on the island of bugs and improvements I've been marooned on for the last couple months either. I got to do real, bone fide, new features! WOohooo! :) Yes, there was the usual bug fixing and and what not and the never ending slew of phone calls and other such stuff to attend to .. but that didn't stop me from working on a rather interesting issue (at least to me): how best to roll out Plasma desktop shell based systems into larger deployments. This mostly centers around configuration issues.

Plasma's configuration data is not scattered over numerous files like it was in KDE 3 and this brings a number of advantages with it. It does, however, make the files a bit more complex. The rather handy kwriteconfig and kreadconfig are also pretty useless with them. Worst of all, however, is that kconfig_update, which is how changes are made to user's configuration files between upgrades if/when they change, simply doesn't work well with Plasma. Or KWin, krunner or any other application that starts really early in the desktop launch sequence. The reason is that when the kconfig_update scripts are run, plasma-desktop is probably already running and so it's modifying configuration data that's already been read and processed and it's non-trivial for plasma-desktop to go back and try and change it's configuration based on those changes while keeping changes it may well have made in the meantime as well.

There's also the issue of default layouts. Some of the distributions have wanted to have different layouts depending on the screen resolution and similar things.

Looking at all the issues it occurred to me that one way to satisfy them would be to offer a runtime scripting option. Since we're using ECMA Script all over the place already, can guarantee it's availability on a system (it comes with Qt) and is easily controllable, it seemed like a fairly natural choice for this.

I needed a nice way to test and debug what I was working on, so I added a small "interactive console" window to plasma-desktop that can be called up via D-Bus. With that in front of me, I realized that this was something that other people may find useful as well. I also wrote up a small runner so you can open the console from KRunner and even load scripts from disk into the console (though you still have to press the "Run Script" button, for safety's sake).

Currently one can lock the desktop, query for screen geometry, enumerate activities and panels, add new activites and panels, remove activities and panels and set various parameters on them (associated screen, geometry, hiding mode, etc.). Enumerating, adding, removing and configuring widgets is next. The full list of the currently implemented API can be seen here.

I'm particularly happy with how the API hides the distinction between views and containments and other such details. While these are great from the software architecture point of view, they lead to confusion for sys admin types it turns out.

So what does it all look like right now?

Of course, scripts for initial layout or system updates won't run through the interactive console window but be loaded from disk and run at start up. What I will need to know (at least once I've finished the widget support) is what other sorts of things people will need and example scripts demonstrating those things.

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on feature requests

So while deprived of Internet access due to various snafus that arose in the midst of my move, an article hit Linux Weekly News about how we as a community of developers are apparently struggling with feature requests. The source of the material was a thread on the kde-devel mailing list where feature additions for KDE 4 was brought up, and in particular features that were in KDE 3 that are not in KDE 4.

Since it was deemed interesting enough a topic to appear in an article on LWN, I figured I should add some detail and context to the outline that article provided. It is an interesting topic.

In general there are four kinds of feature requests I come across:

• The reasonable and well explained which many people would benefit from (where "many" is contextual to the application and feature in question)


• The reasonable and well explained, but low priority due to other work ongoing and/or size of audience that would benefit


• The reasonable, but unlikely due to design choices in the software


• The unreasonable


• The incomprehensible, usually because the request is made in haste and/or with little care/li>
  

The challenge starts with the ones that are unreasonable, incomprehensible or unlikely. For a significant percentage of those reports, if they are closed along with an explanation, the reporters get frustrated (understandable), annoyed (understandable, if not really called for) and too often start harassing the developers on the report (not cool). I'd understand it if the developers in question dismissed any and all reports and didn't give some reason for the closure. This is almost never the case, however!

The challenge extends with the low priority feature requests. To the requester, the feature is important. Otherwise they would not have reported it, right? So when it doesn't get implemented right away, the reporter sometimes gets impatient and starts bugging developers.

What all of this leads to is developers not closing feature requests that ought to be closed and even staying away from engaging often or at all with feature request reports. They will implement what they can when they can and then close the reports then with little feedback.

The real casualties are the valid and high priority feature requests. They often languish in a swamp of requests that won't go anywhere, making them hard to find and track and often even just ignored until the developer gets around to that feature.

Adding insult to injury is the choice of the word "wishlist" in bugzilla to refer to a feature request. This gives some reporters the wrong impression that these are not reports with much impact, and unfortunately the current situation just lends to reinforcing that impression.

Nobody is winning in this scenario, user or developer. Now, some KDE project do a great job of dealing with feature requests. In my case, it's been the smaller applications that I've worked on. Their feature request rate tends to be limited, and that makes all the difference in the world. This really seems to be an issue of scale.

It is also, in my opinion, an issue of it being a strictly user-to-developer oriented communication: the user "requests" and the developer "accepts, denies or ignores". It's not very collaborative in structure: it doesn't lend itself to include other users, bugzilla isn't great for holding discussions and the user has little mechanism for input other than to report and then hope it goes well (and kvetch when it doesn't).

Currently it's the worst behaved that get visibility and good ideas have little chance of being fleshed out further or found by prospective users and would-be implementers. This all needs to be turned on its head.

(As a side note, I'm constantly struck by the feeling that Bugzilla is designed with in-house development in mind and is really not suited much at all to open, collaborative approaches.)

Tangentially, I believe that those who decide to get involved by interacting directly with us as developers form a special kind of contributor: those people shape our community's feel, they provide valuable testing and feedback .. but it is a form of contribution and interaction as a member of our creative commons. As such, there are similar responsibilities to other contributors. As software developers (or translators, artists, documenters, etc) we are expected to behave well and when we don't, well, we get rewarded with public lashings. If your project is high profile enough, those lashing happen on the community news sites. There's little one can do about it as it's not a fair trial by jury or even paired with mechanisms of feedback, negotiation and consensus. We are also held to standards by our fellow contributors as well as our own expectations and consciences. This is to say, contributors have very real consequences to their actions. Unfortunately, for people who interact as involved users there is little if any responsibility tied to their actions. This is unfortunate and ultimately a negative thing as it results in a few people running around behaving badly and ruining it for others. Something to think about.

Back to feature requests, however, it seems we really do need something that allows more user-user interaction, provides a way to incubate ideas to maturity and allows developers a way to interact in a productive manner rather than simply judge. Being able to tie in reputation would be a bonus.

OpenSuse's FATE (which I've heard there is a KDE client for somewhere?) and KDE's own Brainstorm are two examples of tools that are starting to develop and which are probably much better suited to dealing with feature requests in a collaborative, positive and enjoyable fashion.

I want to see the good ideas float to the top and get the attention they deserve (e.g. implementations) and the good ideas that need to be prioritized for later still get the attention they deserve so nobody feels neglected.

It would be easy to just ignore the whole situation, of course. We manage along OK as it is; but it could be much better. Which is why I cared enough to say anything in the first place. :)

(I'm writing this from the boarding gate in YVR airport; I was the first to make it through the gauntlet of check-in, customs and security. Huzzah! :)

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kmymoney 1.0, positioning

KMyMoney made their 1.0 release recently and it's looking really hot! Congrats to everyone involved.

What's equally exciting is the new financial management tools module in KDE, where KMyMoney finds company with Skrooge and Kraft and hopefully as things progress in the future even more tools. By pulling some of these applications together into one place in the KDE world, our community has essentially grown another head on our hydra's body of application categories. Besides giving these tools more visibility, it will also hopefully foster more developers to join and more cooperation between these projects. Common ground leads to new opportunities is the theory.

One thing I did notice in the KMyMoney communications is the mention of it being "for KDE" in one of their pre-announcement banners and "for Linux users" on their web page. Well, obviously KMyMoney is not just "for KDE"; it's built using KDE technologies but the term "for KDE" is nearly meaningless given that KDE applications run just about everywhere these days, and not just on Linux! Our apps may experience the best integration when run with other KDE applications or in a KDE workspace, but we should keep in mind that our applications are not bound to other KDE applications when communicating their benefits to the world at large. This is a change in our thinking and communication that I expect to take some time to really settle deeply into our collective consciousness. :)

Once again: cheers to the KMyMoney devs and I hope you all managed a small celebration to commemorate your milestone and the great gift you have delivered to the world! :)

(I am writing this standing in a line up waiting for the US customs office to open up. Ah, the joys of travel, huh?)

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arrivals through the barrel of a time gun

I moved into the new house last week, and this is my first full day on the Internet since that point. I had a lot of catching up to do and still have more to do. Lots of code review and, following up on a blog entry by Albert noting that deleting items from a QGraphicsScene before removing them causes a full view paint, I committed a nice little set of optimizations that prevent full-screen repaints in plasma-desktop when just moving your mouse around over widgets. It really smells like something that should be fixed in Qt, but for now a few work-arounds in libplasma can't hurt anything and are now in both trunk for 4.4 and the 4.3 branch for 4.3.1.

The move itself was uneventful, if very taxing on my spirit and body. It's great to be by the ocean again, however, able to smell the salt in the air. It's great to be in a city that is so vibrant and alive. To live on a street with old trees on it. To wake up to the morning sun throwing its opening rays of light in through the East-facing skylight. To visit with old friends and make new ones. To start settling into this new era of my life.

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moving about

Tomorrow morning I pick up the moving van and then begin the 800km or so drive out to Vancouver with my worldly posessions in the back. A friend, Steve, is driving out with me. Well, he's actually driving my car out and playing chauffeur to the cats. Caravan style, baby!

I'm in Vancouver for nearly two weeks and then I'm off to Switzerland for Tokamak III. I'm actually heading over a bit early to do some stuff in Switzerland before the meeting, but I'm quite looking forward to the week of hanging out and experiencing a high level of creativity with my fellow Plasmers.

We'll be following a schedule very similar to the KDE Libs hackfest prior to 4.0 in Trysil. Communal breakfast, a morning kick-off session to coordinate, hacking until lunch, lunch, a nature walk where we can discuss ideas, concepts and the especially gnarly problems away from the computers, back to hacking (punctuated by dinner) until we all fall over in happy heaps of Plasma. The first day will be a bit of an exception to this as we'll be doing technology presentations.

Some interesting numbers:

• 27% of attendees will be from the Americas, 2 from South and 2 from North America


• 13% female attendance; if Annma could have made it as she usually does it would have been 20%.


• One KWin hacker will be there, so we can work on better workspace integration


• One Qt Software hacker will be there


• Three GSoC students will be there


• It will be fully 1/3rd of the attendees first Tokamak, with two KDE contributors coming

We will be discussing and working on things like remote widgets, activity actions plugins, new widget browser, netbook, great usage of context and social desktop technology, integrating Plasma activities and KWin window management and much more. It's going to be a busy and, I am confident, productive event.

We'll be hosting a "live blog" of the event everyday on identi.ca. Dents will be going to the KDE group with the Tokamak tag. We will also endeavor to provide a two-way audio link for our fellow Plasmers who can't be with us for this Tokamak. There will also be the customary wrap-up article. It's important to us to make sure that the community of contributors and users can keep up with what goes on at these meetings.

Once Tokamak has completely drained me, I'll be back home for a few weeks and then it's off to France for a friend's wedding. Then back home. Then possibly down Arizona in October for a F/OSS event there ... in other words I'll be back to the usual travel schedule. Hello, carbon footprint!

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a walk in the evening rain

(note: i'm going to write this blog entry in my "traditional" no-caps style.. deal with it ;)

with the house boxed up and feeling very transitional, there are just a few days to go until i load everything into the back of a rented truck and drive across the rockies and into vancouver. i decided to go out for a walk in the evening air to get out of this place full of boxes. rain was drizzling, the air was refreshingly cool and i stopped by beano's, my local coffee haunt, to get a tripple espresso to go.

music was playing in the background, as it usually is in beano's. this particular evening it was a rather typical western acoustic folk music and as i stood waiting for my espresso i was taken by a pre-nostalgia: that feeling one gets when they know they are about to leave a place they have memories of.

the fellow in front of me at the counter got his coffee and scooped some of the raw sugar that sits next to the cash register at beano's into his cup while the thirty or so people in the place chatted to each other, creating a very human sound in the place. i smiled to myself and knew that i'd miss this little shop.

and as that missing-it-before-i-have-gone feeling rippled through me, it took me by surprise.

calgary is certainly not the most amazing city to live in and i've never particularly "fit in" overly well here. but i've been here for a decade now and i know its nooks and crannies. i've spent many a day and night around its streets and establishments. i know people who work and live in this area, and many of them know me. in the moment i knew what i needed to do: i had to walk these streets one more time before i left.

coffee in hand steaming upwards as the rain fell downwards, i strolled down 17th avenue. i passed what used to be my favorite late night coffee haunt (now gone, replaced by a tim horton), my favorite vegetarian restaurant, what used to be my favorite blues club (also now gone), the little lingerie shop, watchman's, the ship & anchor pub where i'd enjoyed many an open mic saturday and meals on its deck (including the infamous beggar-and-potato-chips incident), where the bar named sue used to be, the street down which the local karaoke joint is, the annoying yuppy bar that was the backdrop to the incident where the catholic girl kept going on and on about the pope to me until i finally grew completely exasperated, the bar where i saw the only Rage Against the Machine cover band i've ever seen (they were awesome) and many more mediocre to horrid bands play (including the one that was so bad that when the lead singer made some "we're awesome" statement on the mic, i disagreed from the audience, causing him to literally lose it and come charging down at me; thankfully one of the bouncers stepped in.. what a night that was!), the pizza joint where i ended the night spent drinking with the welsh rugby team (another long story) .. and on and on. little restaurants and corner shops and diners and ... and that's just one avenue and four or five years worth of living along it.

i did see the signs of change all around me as well. the new buildings, the new shops, a hooker (never seen that on 17th before!), a public toilet, recycling bins on the street next to the garbage cans .. it's not just additions, it's also so many of my old favorites gone as rents on the avenue skyrocketed.

i certainly wasn't dying, but this most recent period of my life was flashing before my eyes. don't get me wrong: i don't think i'll exactly miss this city, but it is laced with memories and events from my life. i asked myself: how did i manage so long in this place? honestly, i think the traveling over the years helped keep me from going nuts and allowed me to stick it out this long.

but on this cold and rainy evening with the memories and old feelings (most good, some not) coming back as i strolled through her streets, i knew quite certainly that calgary had earned a unique place in my heart. as humans, we build connections with the places we spend time in. the longer we are there, the greater the connection. that is almost an inescapable eventuality (and i can imagine how it was a great survival trait for our ancestors who lived in often abject conditions). and that connection to this place is what is in my mind as i prepare to escape to the west coast and start a new series of memories, a new chapter in my life.

farewell, alberta. i'll miss you, sort of.

I hear a tale
About a heaven in Alberta
Where they've got all hell for a basement - Big Sugar, "All Hell For a Basement"

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inspired by freedom

KDE 4.3.0 was released today after six months of diligent efforts and a lot of individual passion poured into artwork, translations, bug triage, community efforts, release management and, of course, code. The release announcement and Jos' screencast cover a lot of it, but the code name for the release also reveals something important: Caizen.

Kaizen (spelling it "Caizen" is a little KDE tongue-in-cheeck humor ;) is all about continual improvement in all areas of an endeavor. It's a daily activity (something the SVN repository and bugs.kde.org certainly attests to!) that includes everyone. It's an all-encompassing and all-inclusive philosophy of reaching towards perfection one step at a time.

KDE 4.3.0 is a great release, packed with improvements on every front: features, bug fixes, stability improvements and optimizations. We wouldn't have achieved this in the 18 months since 4.0 if we didn't eat and breath continual improvement. It's very rewarding and enjoyable to watch that progress happen day by day as those around you add their incremental improvements to your own.

I've been watching an archeology series recently and I'm reminded of the great, and small, monuments in the past that were created by communities coming together. Barns raised, barrows dug, stones erected, villages growing outwards. It's such a natural human thing to create great structures together, it touches somewhere very deep.

That's the creator/contributor side of it. For our users, they can simply enjoy the ongoing improvements. They may get involved and join us in building this thing on day, but even if they don't it's great that they have tools that work for them.

Of course, we're not done. That just wouldn't be very kaizen. We're already hard at work on KDE 4.4 and looking constantly at ways of improving our processes as well as our code.

I hope you all enjoy KDE 4.3.0. (And the upcoming bug fix releases, one per month!)

Personally, I'll be laying down in a sleeping bag tonight as my house is now essentially packed up so that I can get to cleaning things out nicely before I leave for the coast and our new abode on Friday. S. booked her flight out the other day as well, so that's all figured out. The changes in my non-KDE life feels very concrete at this point, very real .. and all in good ways. :)

Love and hugs, aseigo.

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