With the great intro provided about Plasma Packages to get Apple's Dashboard Widgets running, it follows a screenshot that shows SuperKaramba - yes, it works with legacy *.skz files.

btw, SuperKaramba example that uses KHTML to display content

Summer of Code is back, earlier then ever. Early is good as it allows some more flexibility in the schedule (students could start on their projects as soon as mid-April, in case they aren't available later), the disadvantage is that I'm probably not the only one somewhat surprised that its starting so soon.

So it's important to get the word out to prospective students. So if you're on any LUG mailing lists or any list with Computer Science students, send them a message about Summer of Code in general and about KDE in particular. Include a link to the SoC homepage, the Timeline and the list of KDE project suggestions*. Offer yourself as kind of the local contact to the open source "world".

I sent out such a email to my local LUG and found a few interested people. The common response was that they had wanted to get involved with open source but weren't sure how, the issue SoC is largely trying to solve. We had a meeting yesterday and it sounds like a couple of students will maybe even develop for Amarok. This is just at a small university... there's a lot of untapped potential out there.

*The suggestion list, at least for Amarok before I cleaned it up, had somewhat degenerated into people putting up feature suggestions (one not feasible, one that was more like a weekend project). Be sure to add project suggestions (for projects you actually know something about), but also double check the other suggestions. Always encourage the students to work with a particular mailing list or IRC channel to help refine the proposal.

I moved into the OpenMoko apartment yesterday and right to the backside of the apartment we have some kind of hill and I could not resist and had to walk up to get this city view:


raster has been working on a new launcher, window decoration and application navigation for the OpenMoko device, some things are pretty hot about it. It is called illume and can be found here. This launcher is using EFL, actually it is a module for e and the cool thing is edje. With this little file you define objects, their look and their behavior, e.g. if it gets clicked a signal is emitted, you can write mini programs, so on click you can get a transition, like sliding out the menu. edje is pretty powerful.

WebKit related I'm spending my spare time tracking allocations, stale data and memory fragmentation. I use spiegel.de as my test site and monitor heap usage and address space growing (due fragmentation?) and somehow lacked a good application for profiling. raster kindly pointed me to memprof and now I can do this (well memprof has some performance issues with WebKit when getting the profile, but it is performing better than Instruments.app for this job):



I see most of the memory was allocated by QImageData::create, when clicking on the create method I can see the callers and navigate through the backtraces. It is working with C++ and you can easily add qMalloc,qCalloc,qRealloc,WTF::fastMalloc to the list of functions to 'ignore'.

Sup, y'all. I realized that Free Software is a lot like the wild west used to be. So, partner, I'll be spreading some "west" and a lot of "wild" over this post.
"What?", you say (oh I'll have a conversation with you whether you want it or not). Well, the connection is obvious once you think about it: during the wild west days people used to ride horses, kill each other for no apparent reason and raise cattle, while in Free Software we write software. I rest my case.

I've spent the last week with Aaron. I absolutely love hanging out with him. It's platonic. Or so I think, with all the heavy drinking that I do, it all gets a little blurry. Also, Peyton (Aaron's son) is a wickedly cool kid.

Anyway, I have a lot of Gallium3D things to do which are a priority, but at nights Aaron and I hacked on Plasma and KDE. I think I speak on behalf of Aaron when I say that we became computer programmers for the women. Which might seem a little confusing to, well all of you (especially if you're a woman) until you realize that it came down to being either a computer programmer or a crackhead. Computer programmer job pays, like, way better and if I had to pick second reason why I do what I do it's money.
We got the Dashboard widgets working. It's been something that I wanted to do for the longest time. Obviously not all of them work because some of them use OS X specific apis (like Core Image magic).
I also added interfaces to use Plasma's DataEngine's from JavaScript in web applets. So you would do something like

var engine = window.plasma.loadDataEngine("time");
var data = engine.query("Local");
document.getElementById('time').innerHTML = "Time is " + data.value("Time");

to use Plasma's time data engine to display the current time. One could use Plasma's Solid data engine to get the list of all the devices attached to the computer and display it in the web applet which would be a little more useful than another a time widget but you ain't enterprise ready unless you have 23 clock applets and we're almost there. There's also a small bug somewhere, that apparently doesn't exist in Qt and is, in fact, a figment of my own imagination due to which the background looks black. On Chuck Norris widget (that like a lot of other dashboard widgets just works. You download it, click on it, run it, show it to all your friends, and remove it once they're gone because it's pretty damn useless) it looks like this:



Do you see black? No, you don't! It's simply that Chuck Norris is a black hole that consumes everything around it, including all the color. Deal with it. Chuck Norris has.

As I wrote before, the obvious complaints people are having after trying out Chad's precompiled PictureFlow for Windows Mobile are (1) slow start-up and (2) memory footprint. These stem from the fact that the example demo program that I included was written for clarity so that you can get your feet wet quickly. To overcome the initial loading and memory consumption problem, of course you have to attack the problem from a different point of view.

So here it comes: PhotoFlow. It is a small application for view images and photos, designed to run on mobile devices --like those HTC smartphones, other Windows Mobile phones, Qtopia-based handsets etc-- although you can test it of course on the desktop (but I will focus on the intended target platform only). The usual trick employed here is the so-called "delayed loading". PhotoFlow never attempts to load, resize, and prepare an image to be rendered if that image is not in the vicinity of the user's view. Thus, it starts rather instantly and won't suck hundred of MBs of the precious memory space. This is even done without changing anything in the original PictureFlow widget, we just need to subclass it and handle several things smartly.

Because I am (still) insane, PhotoFlow supports both Qt/Qtopia 4 and the old Qt/Embedded 2.3 (actually also Qt 3, for which there isn't any embedded version) with a single code base. Also the delayed loading part has two versions: with and without QThread. Of course the former is better but some platforms with Qt/E (or even Qtopia, if you want) might not support threading at all, hence the latter.

Get it while it's hot and flood my inbox with your flames.

So here i am, having a TODO list of over 70 items and having to finish my slides for a class i'll do on Saturday about KDE and what do i do? Port and improve my gopher ioslave to KDE4. *sigh*

The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage just finished - an enjoyable event like every year, with a certain community spirit not often met at events of that size. The KDE booth was staffed by four people (smajewsky, eckhart, tokoe and me). People were mostly interested in KDE 4.1 alpha to put it bluntly :) but we demonstrated 4.0.2 on most of the screens. Ruphy was kind enough to provide us with new oxygen-ised poster templates before the event so we printed two A0-sized posters. Unfortunately the boothbox didn’t make it so we didn’t get most of the booth decoration.

While working on some plasma data provider at the end of the second day we learned that there’s a secret tool called AutoCMake to help with the creation of cmake files. Now what’s totally missing is AutoCConf so we can come up with some decent AutoCTools! Just kidding. Some more serious issues were about my xrandr-powered Xinerama-like setup which Plasma didn’t handle too well. Also dynamically adding and removing batteries of the laptop isn’t well-supported as of yet in the battery applet. Nevertheless, most visitors were satisfied with 4.0.2 quality over their previous 4.0 impressions which they mostly got from CDs shipped with computer magazines.

The next important event for KDE will be CeBIT. According to tackat’s message on kde-events, volunteers are still needed for CeBIT next week. Don’t miss the opportunity to represent the latest trends in free desktops to an audience which still needs that sort of information.

This is not meant as a sentimental entry. It's about marketing and communicating a message to your potential users. Too often I find myself at a website of an Open Source project and ask myself. "where am I now? what the -beep- is this? and what can I do with it?"

As personal example I take kmess.org as example. We tried really hard to fix this. The site is a lot of content nowadays, but we think there is a lot of room for improvement. While discussing this we Valerio came up with the following blog entry:

Why Ubuntu 8.04 needs better marketing

That article shows the big difference between a summary of technical details and something that appeals. Their revised announcement makes me all of a sudden excited about downloading Ubuntu 8.04. Less technical wording, clearly written sentenses and focus on what advantages does it has for me. Worth reading, this article is written really well!

In the comments there is also a nice observation:

The key however is to, like Apple, make a directly emotional appeal. Even Intel claims to be trying to take this route, inspired by Apple (successfully? Maybe). Take a look at Apple’s OS X page: http://www.apple.com/macosx/. The bold heading is very dominant. And it doesn’t really contain too much logic… again, it is an emotional appeal.

I really like Apple's site. It makes me enthusiastic about their products, and while browsing it just goes on. Yet I can also find a lot of technical details there. I couldn't describe why, but now I'm starting to understand the key aspect here: emotions.

Another example: Last week I was on a holiday/journey, and tried to explain a bit Aikido to the guy next to me. It's the martial art I practice and love. In the years I developed a few short phrases to explain it but somehow my description didn't get though at all.

Fortunately I got a little advise whispered in my other ear: "you are too technical". Dang! I'm currently inspired by "feeling first, mind later" theories and this is another eye opener for me. By using more vague descriptions adjusted to the receiver (communicating a feeling/emotion) the other guy managed to get it a lot better. Whoa. Using less strict descriptions actually makes people grasp something better?

This incident among others makes me realize a lot of people are probably wired this way (call them alpha's if you wish). As technicians we love to communicate details, and the receiver can reconstruct the same image in their mind. Most people are not like that, or can't manage to be so. I didn't expect this gap could be so big. I noticed how this guy next to me responds much better while communicating an emotion, feeling or vague description (which you can technically put down as inaccurate, misleading, etc..). It has a strong effect, as the message is received in a more powerful way.

Meanwhile I'm starting to get an itch to do something with this conclusion within the KMess website too. If a lot of people are wired this way, shouldn't our websites reflect that? I'd like to call it "communicating emotions".

<shameless-plug>We're looking for more ways to improve the KMess website. If you have suggestions, don't wait any longer and post them!</shameless-plug>

So I’ve had it!, after three years of very good experiences with my Acer Aspire 3000 it started to make even more noise then it already did and it became slower and slower every day. At last FOSDEM I wanted to hook up my laptop to the wireless (which I never use anyway) connection at the event and I discovered that I’d forgot to get my BCM43xx driver working (installed Kubuntu Feisty on it, so no automatic firmware).

So that was just it, the lack of a good wireless chipset, no fancy 3D stuff (sis chipset, even no simple shadows compositing worked), a very slow harddrive and simply horrible unpredictable and bad service from Acer. So in a very impulsive mood I decided yesterday to purchase myself a new laptop, after dreaming month’s of it I finally settled my hunt on a Lenovo Thinkpad.

So after I started my google queries and review reading yesterday I decided that a Thinkpad T61 (NI265NI) would be the best choice and within budget, altough quality devices like these never have been cheap. After fiddling trough the ordering process (which resulted in a double order) I got the delivery confirmation in my mailbox at 5PM yesterday, it’s going to be delivered within two or three days.

Feeling like a happy little child getting his duplo-toys, simply can’t wait!

Though I have to resume the php code I was hacking on… Cya!

Here's another of the topics I was going to show in the screencast: Packages. The test case was getting Apple's Dashboard Widgets to work out of the box. The rules were that we couldn't adjust any of the Plasma infrastructure at all .. it has to all work with Packages and ScriptEngines. This meant changing and improving a few things in those parts of Plasma but the result was .. well, let's take a look:



In the Add Widgets dialog the Install New Widgets button is now a menu, letting you choose between downloading from the Internet using GetHotNewStuff and DXS (where what you are about to see is even more automated) or opening a widget from a file. Our test case was the Hello World widget example from Apple.

When you select the "Open From File" entry you get this:



It's an assistant dialog that lists all known packages. It doesn't list all known applet types because to the user it shouldn't matter whether a widget is implemented in Python, Ruby, ECMA Script, XTHML+JavaScript or what-not. If they behave the same and load the same then to the user they are the same. The difference here is the package type: Apple's widgets are different from Plasma's native widgets in how they are packed up and they appear to the user as different.

I'd like to eventually automate this by trying to get plasma to figure out what kind of package it is automatically. Unfortunately right now we don't have mimetype detection for different kinds of widgets and I just haven't done enough research with all the possible package types before me to do this. This is something I want to look into for 4.2 (unless someone beats me to it, of course).

Anyways, the way we get this listing is Plasma queries for all known widget types. Every widget type advertises what "language" it is; for Mac Dashboard support the language is "dashboard". Every widget type may also advertise what sort of package structure it uses. Here's the .desktop file contents for Mac Dashboard:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Dashboard
Comment=MacOS X dashboard widget
Type=Service
ServiceTypes=Plasma/ScriptEngine
Icon=internet-web-browser

X-KDE-Library=plasma_appletscriptengine_dashboard
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Author=Zack Rusin
[email protected]
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name=dashboard
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Version=pre0.1
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Website=http://plasma.kde.org/
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Category=Applet
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Depends=
X-KDE-PluginInfo-License=BSD
X-KDE-PluginInfo-EnabledByDefault=true
X-Plasma-ComponentTypes=Applet
X-Plasma-Language=dashboard
X-Plasma-PackageFormat=dashboard

Currently Plasma has package structures for wallpapers, Plasma themes and widgets. New ones can be added at runtime, however. If the package structure is static, which is to say the files are always in the same place in the package, you can do this with a simple rc file. The PackageStructure class can read and write these files as well. If the package is not static, then you can instead provide a C++ plugin that manages this. Also, if the package requires special installation routines the same C++ plugin can provide that. Both are true in the case of the Mac Dashboard widget support.

So when a Mac Dashboard widget is opened up, Plasma looks at the X-Plasma-PackageFormat entry and goes off in search of the dashboard package format. It finds it here:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Dashboard Widget
Comment=MacOS dashboard widget
Type=Service
ServiceTypes=Plasma/PackageStructure

X-KDE-Library=plasma_packagestructure_dashboard
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Author=Zack Rusin
[email protected]
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Name=dashboard
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Version=pre0.1
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Website=http://plasma.kde.org/
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Category=Applet
X-KDE-PluginInfo-Depends=
X-KDE-PluginInfo-License=BSD
X-KDE-PluginInfo-EnabledByDefault=true
X-Plasma-PackageFileFilter=*
X-Plasma-PackageFileMimetypes=application/zip


Mimetypes and filters for the file selection are defined, as is the library and plugin name by which to load it. At this point Plasma can now call the install method which looks like this in the dashboard package structure plugin:


bool Bundle::installPackage(const QString &archivePath,
const QString &packageRoot)
{
QFile f(archivePath);
f.open(QIODevice::ReadOnly);
m_data = f.readAll();
f.close();
open();

if (m_isValid) {
m_tempDir->setAutoRemove(false);
QString pluginName = "dashboard_" + m_bundleId;
//kDebug() "valid, so going to move it in to" pluginName;
KIO::CopyJob* job = KIO::move(m_tempDir->name(), packageRoot + pluginName,
KIO::HideProgressInfo);
m_isValid = job->exec();

if (m_isValid) {
//kDebug() "still so good ... registering";
Plasma::PackageMetadata data;
data.setName(m_name);
data.setDescription(m_description);
data.setPluginName(pluginName);
data.setImplementationLanguage("dashboard");
Plasma::Package::registerPackage(data, m_iconLocation);
}
}

if (!m_isValid) {
// make sure we clean up after ourselves afterwards on failure
m_tempDir->setAutoRemove(true);
}

return m_isValid;
}


What's happening in the code above is that Bundle opens the file at archivePath and makes sure it does indeed have the needed contents. It then copies it to packagRoot and registers the widget. Reigstration is accomplished by creating a PackageMetadata object, setting the relevant fields and passing it to Package::registerPackage, optionally along with the path to an icon for it. This creates an entry in the ksycoca database using a .desktop file that looks exactly like a native Plasma widget, except that this one is marked as being in the "dashboard" language.

This process all happens fairly well instantly and the result is that the widget appears in the widget listing alongside all the others:



The user sees no real difference. Places on the canvas we get:



As with native Plasmoids you can rotate it, resize it, drag it around to wherever you want, etc. Corona, Containment and even Applet are all blithely unaware anything different is going on. Zack was downloading various widgets from apple.com and trying them out and they tended to Just Work(tm).

(There are some issues currently with QtWebkit and these widgets (such as the white background and incorrect starting size), but Zack has pushed fixes for those upstream and those should be trickling down soon.)

Remember, however, that this is not specific to Mac Dashboard widgets. We can do this for any widget type we want. Indeed, Zack went ahead and did up a "native" webkit based widget for Plasma. As with Mac Dashboard widgets you do it all in HTML and use JavaScript within the webpage itself to manipulate it. Unlike Mac Dashboard, you can access Plasma goodies ... like DataEngines. So from embedded JavaScript you can fetch data from an engine and display it on your web based widget. Langauge type is "webkit". Nice.

(In fact, the Package stuff isn't specific to widgets at all. We could apply this to all sorts of after-market application add-ons.)

If you would like to add other types of widgets, I'd be happy and interested to both help you out and get resulting code into svn. Google Gadgets, Yahoo widgets, Windows Vista widgets, Opera Widgets ... they are all game. While they won't have all the features of the native Plasma widgets or cover the same kinds of topics, it would be great to be able to give people access to the whole world of widgets on their desktop.

Be Free to use the widgets you want, we have no agendas to push here.

So, this one of the topics I was going to screencast about before being hit over the head with the lameness of media in the free software world was progress on the new application launcher interface (ALI, floats like a menu but stings like a bee). While I figure out what's up with recordmydesktop, I figured I'd just blog about it instead. (BTW, hats off to Phonon, jack and the few other projects that are helping us Getting Media Right(tm) for the long run; I know things often get worse before they get better, so we should be getting really good any time now ;)

So, kickoff ... well, a picture is worth a 1000 of words, so they say. (But then if that was true you'd think they'd state that fact in a picture rather than use words and therefore save time and verbage while making their point more clearly. ;)



There's a lot going on in that shot, and here those things are point by point:

• There's the username, host and branding at the top of the menu. This was contributed by Stephan Binner from the OpenSUSE team and probably looks familiar to most OpenSUSE users. The logo (which is a temporary graphic to be replaced with something less lame ;) is clickable and will take you to a website. All of this is configurable so that our downstreams don't have to do any source code hacking or screwing with icon themes. In fact, in 4.1 Plasma themes will support a logos.svg file that contains various bits of branding in it so that downstreams can provide one file and get their branding sprinkled tastefully around. The defaults will remain KDE themed, of course. The upside of recognizing this behaviour of downstreams and working with it is that we can take it into consideration, do a better job of making it easy and work decently upstream and make it easier for downstreams to work with KDE in this way. If you're a downstream and have some workspace branding thoughts, don't hesitate to contact us on the [email protected] mailing list.



• The grey box in the top right is awaiting artwork, but it works already: when you click and drag you can freely resize the menu. This was also submitted by Binner.



• No more HUGE BOLD fonts for headings. They are calmer now.



• The selection indicator is now a rounded rect. It has a gradient to pull the eye gently towards the text (the meaninful bit), while tying the icon and other bits associated with the text together. It doesn't get in the way of the icon or other graphical accoutrement that may appear. The icon of the selected item also grows. There was long discussion *ahem* about how to do this. I really dug my heels in and refused to budge until we had a solution that wasn't a compromise one way or the other and once people got over the fact that I wasn't going to be cool with a quick "fix" that simply introduced other problems, we really started getting somewhere. The result was a real team effort. I think we're getting there with this new graphical treatment, though I'm sure there's more to go even yet.



• The current tab is blended with the content visually for better visual association. The cute little animation of the icon raising is still there of course. =)



• Sub-texts (the little grey bits under the main text in an entry) are still shown on mouse hover only ... with two exceptions: If there are multiple items in the category with the same name we now paint the subtext always; this way if you have 2 "Terminal" applications, you can tell at a glance which is which without mousing over them. The other exception is for lists such as the Recent Documents list where you always want the subtext to see the full path of the document in question. This approach preserves the clean look of minimal text on screen at once while painting that extra text when it is actually of immediate need.



• You can't see this one in the screenshot, but it paints properly when reverse now so those using the desktop with a RTL language can be happier.



• Something else you can't see in the screenshot is the headers on the Applications page are now in breadcrumb style on one line using the same font style as all other headings. Eventually I want to make these clickable for really fast navigation.



• You can right click to swap between Kickoff and the traditional menu now; they are still separate plasmoids but this just makes it easier to swap between them. Neat.



• Lots of pixel twiddling has gone on: better spacing; consistent sizes of items in the lists, even on the applications page; text and icons never touch anymore; all left/right edges of items line up at all times; small indentation before the subtext. It's been fun as numerous people have piled on and fixed these little things. People paying attention to pixels like that excites me. You might think I'm easily excited, but it's the pixels that make the differences.

There is more to do: making the breadcrumb trail clickable on the apps page, changing the position of the tabs depend on where on the screen the menu appears (Will Stephenson has a patch drafted to do this; it's almost there), hooking up the search with Runners, showing the menu right on the desktop when kickoff is placed there (possible now that we have WoC), etc. But it's already approaching something that I think people will like a lot more, i think.

And yes, there are other options available that you can replace this particular ALI with. That's what plasma is all about after all.

i am tired of the state of multimedia in the free software world.

phonon has eased so many of my multimedia pains while using kde4 apps (such as re-routing audio to my usb headset) that i'm getting sightly spoiled. i imagine it's what windows and mac people have felt like .. well .. for a long, long time. and that in itself is just sad that we've waited this long.

for the last two days (on and off) i've been trying to put together a screencast. in the past i've used recordmydesktop with the qt-recordMyDesktop front end. now, no love. recordmydesktop sometimes works. if there is anything touching the soundcard it just refuses to work. the rest of the time, it sometimes works. randomly. i've now done half a dozen records that didn't come out (no audio or just nothingness). and so for right now, i'm done. no screencast, i'm sorry. blame media on linux. i've done my bit, and it's let me down. were i a normal human being i'd be off back to proprietary software.

this is pathetic and alarming.

it doesn't end there, though. i've played with the various sound recording apps: audacity, jokosher, etc.. they all fail badly in one way or an other. it's not the UI (ok, those are pretty crap too, tbh) but rather the utter lack of sensible media hardware interaction.

we clamour over our ability to play media, probably because that was a long and hard road, too. but now we're at the point where we need to be able to record media ... and you know what? it's really, really bad right now.

a few years back we were way behind with display technology (think x.org) and we're eventually catching up with that (i have a blog i'm working on that topic, actually). today we're at the same sort of point of suckage when it comes to media play and capture. we must fix this or else go down in flames.

If you've been to a couple of Open Source conferences, you might have noticed that motivation spikes after such a meeting. I guess it's not the conference itself but rather the people that are present.
We'll it might not be true for everyone, but it certainly motivates me. Last weekend there was FOSDEM. I got a huge energy boost from that and managed to spend many an hour on Akademy during the 3 vacation days I took beginning this week.

I got the local Akademy team together to meet at café "Friends" in Mechelen. Everyone say hi to the team:

From left to right you'll see:

• Pieter (Gunirus)
• Bart Coppens (from krita fame)
• Wendy
• Pieter Vande Wyngaerde (just try to get that last name spelled right the first time :) )

Not in the picture are:

• Andy Goossens
• Wesley (profox)
• Bart Cerneels (me, Stecchino, behind the camera)

more pictures here
These are the girl and guys that will be guiding you to and from Akademy 2008, around the campus, the hostels and the city. Better memorize their faces, you're wellbeing may depend on it :) An by that I obviously mean a nice bed and food.

We'll this should be enough to motivate me and the team members for another few weeks. And I hope it motivates you, dear reader, to start working on those ideas for Akademy 2008 as the call for participation will be published soon.

Greetings
Bart

ZFS is arguably the greatest thing since sliced bread. However, the OpenSolaris installer doesn't support it, so normally you end up with a boot disk with UFS and then the rest of the system on ZFS. Doesn't seem sensible (although I suppose putting the UFS on a small amount of flash memory might make sense). So there is ZFS boot which futzes around a bit and gets GRUB to boot OSOL from a ZFS pool. Tim provides a script and some more documentation, but there's an issue with getting the disk partitions just right so ZFS will work with it. Like so:

Suppose you've just zeroed out a disk and want to use it for ZFS root. You have an installed OSOL and want to transition to ZFS root. The disk is totally unlabled and has no partition table. What now? I kept running around in circles until I found a recipe for re-labeling. But there's one thing left: you have to go into format's partition menu and manually add a partition (number 0) that spans the disk. You only need to do this if you've zeroed or otherwise seriously buggered the partitions, and it looks like this:bash-3.2# format -e c2t0d0
selecting c2t0d0
[disk formatted]
format> pa
partition> pr
partition> 0
The 'pr' is there to print out the current partition table, and you'll see partition 2 'backup' which covers the entire disk including the boot blocks; partition 8 boot and covers the first cylinder. The '0' command creates a new partition 0, and you can use the defaults except for starting cylinder (use 1) and ending cylinder or size (use the last one on the disk). For me the relevant bits look like this: 2 backup wu 0 - 30397 232.86GB (30398/0/0) 488343870

partition> 0
Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
0 unassigned wm 0 0 (0/0/0) 0

Enter partition id tag[unassigned]:
Enter partition permission flags[wm]:
Enter new starting cyl[0]: 1
Enter partition size[0b, 0c, 1e, 0.00mb, 0.00gb]: 30397cAfter all that, you will have a c2t0d0s0 partition that you can hand off to zpool or Tim's script. Then afterwards, follow Scott's recipe for swap on ZFS, and you are all set to say goodbye to UFS.

March. The countdown to dr. [ade] begins in earnest now, as I will defend my thesis march 6th at 10:30am in a public defence. After that, it is party time -- well, we'll go to the zoo in Kleve and see the camel. I want something low-key. As university customs vary considerably, I'll try to describe what it's like in the Netherlands. I've attended lots, assisted at two, and now I've got my own to be the lead player in.

A thesis is defended in public, by the candidate (promovendus) against a commission of smart people (at least half of whom must be full professors, and the rest must all be Dr.). The candidate is assisted by two paranimfs, who are there to defend the candidate from physical attack by the commission (apparently people got more worked up over these things in days past) and if need be take over the thesis defence if the candidate is rendered unable to continue. The defence itself takes exactly one hour. At the end of the hour, the pedel (officer of promotions) enters, says "hora est" and the defence ends. The commission retires to confer on the status of the defence, and the candidate grins like an idiot. The commission wears their academic gowns; the candidate wears a tuxedo. It's quite a formal public event.

So yeah, there will be pictures of me looking like a penguin. There is no room for a Beastie pin, helas.

Hello there blogosphere,

It has been almost one year ago the last time I wrote a entry in this dusty blog. And since then, a lot of things changed in my life and on the web. And one of those is that I got a new, and my first serious job back in June last year.

So, back in June ‘07 I started working at the funny called company Madcap (still in Dutch) which at that time consisted of 7 employee’s and existed for only 1 years or so. My employee is using Drupal in it’s projects and is preparing mayor contributions to the projects it uses. Since then the company grew rapidly to over 25 employees, which meant I didn’t had much spare time left as I had to rest a lot and had lots of other things to do besides KDE and such.

But happily I’ve been following the kool people on this planet every day and saw the KDE repository growing from alpha code to a stable ‘four dot oh’ release, congratulations to everyone involved! So, last week, FOSDEM took place at the free university of Brussels, Belgium. After some bad experiences with hostels the previous years I subscribed to the organised KDE accomodation by Lydia Pintscher (Amarok’s community manager) and shared the room togheter with Jonathan Riddell and Manuel Nickschas (who wrote Quassel).

Before the event started the FOSDEM people organised the ‘Friday Night Beer Event’, which we (a lot of cool Amarok people, who all joined the grouped KDE accomodation) used to promote Amarok to a group of XMMS people inside the delerium cafe to promote Amarok by howling! On Saturday (damn, I felt broken, really had a hang-over) I’ve been playing booth-bunny togheter with loads of Amarok and other KDE people and wrote reviews of the talks in the devrooms together with superstoned Jos Poortvliet.

Saturday night all the KDE people got organised and Knuth Yrvyn (Trolltech’s community manager) decided to give a nice restaurant a go in the south of Brussels. While waiting Marijn Kruisselbrink showed off running plasma on a openmoko telephone, what really surprised me! Though it took a long before the food was on our tables, it tasted very good. Fosdem is quite a nice event, thanks for all the energetic people cheering up my weekend!

See you next time… Gotta wrap up right now

Lucas Nussbaum has graciously setup a mailing list with the approval of the great people over at Freedesktop.org. The purpose of this list is to allow all of the distributions to work together and for those working in distribution development. Lucas gave a brief example such as:

• How do you achieve graphical boot in your distro? Do you use some kind of dependancy-based or events-based boot?
• How do you package both ruby 1.8, ruby 1.9 and jruby, or handle KDE vs KDE4?
• Do you use a system that gives a limited set of rights to new contributors?

So for you KDE developers who are working in distribution development and are interested in the cross-distribution collaboration, go ahead and join the list. If you would like more information on Lucas’ announcement, feel free to read it in full HERE. He also has an mbox file for download consisting of the communications he had between some of the distributions interested. Thanks Lucas!

A few weeks back I requested a mailinglist at freedesktop.org for cross distro collaboration. (The original purpose was having a list to discuss with other distros how they handle the whole ~/.kde vs. ~/.kde4 thing.) Unfortunately I never got a response and just stumbled upon the now created list at http://lists.freedesktop.org by chance.
It didn´t really get any promo so not a lot of distro people are subscribed yet. Please change that now and make good use of the list!

If you are involved in a distro please ask the appropriate people to subscribe.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions

(@ fd.o people: I am still interested in helping to take care of the list if needed as I think it is important.)

Next week is Cebit time. Say hello to your favorite Amarok and KDE people at their booths or check out some of the talks

Do you know the feeling you don’t want to do anything? And when you touch something it gets screwed? Yes? So you now how I feel last weeks.

So there is quite no progress with my SW. Sad but true. OK, you can read a small article about joys of Scribus documents and enjoy the initial work of QStardict port on Windows.

Heh, it’s quite cool how many Linux/KDE apps I’m missing in the windows session. Hey guys, what about to speed up the KDE_on_Windows work? ;)

BTW did I said that Dan Swanö rules with his Nightingale? The perfect music for this mood.

That’s enough for now. Ten days long holiday is awaiting me… hmmm, sea food, tasty drinks, cycling…