This weekend was FOSDEM, we went with 4 people and a baby of 9 months, while the woman left after the Tux in Hollywood talk to the city centre to find some chocolate, we went to see various talks.

I've seen a couple of interesting talks. Not only did I want to catch up on the state of some things, I also had some things I wanted to know more about which we run into at work. Some random observations:

I missed the KDE for some unknown reason. Amarok2 talk was ok, although it started with sheets, which were a bit boring. It was called 'Amarok2', so I expected more of the live demo. It's always a bit difficult to determine from the title of a presentation in which direction it will go, but the playlist looks nice and smooth, compliments for that.

After that we went to 'Clutter: animating the desktop' in the GNome room, it was interesting to see, but I missed the start and could not really recover from that. I don't understand where to place the thing they made in the software stack. But it's good to see they are working on nice libraries which makes the desktop appealing to the public. The presentation after that was about Elise. It's a piece of software which aims to be the equivalent of Microsofts Media Centre. It uses the Clutter stuff and the presentation was awesome. As soon as they have television integrated to their software I will switch from mythtv to that. Or at least give it a shot.

To end the first day, we went to the presentation about dstat, it is a cli tool which can be used to analyse your system, you can actually determine what your system is doing, which process is at the top of the kernel's oom-first-to-be-killed list and to enable as much details as possible. That's something we can definitly use at work to analyse some servers.

After that we teamed up again at the hotel, eat krokodile steak in some african like restaurant and played a game of Cluedo before we got interrupted by the baby requiring both parents to try to calm here.

On Sunday we wanted to get to the Virtual Box presentation. But we were not alone in that wish. We could not join the room anymore so we decided to find something else, the result of the random pointing at the schedule was Miro. And it was good. Miro is application which is made under the Mozilla umbrella. It's aim is to make it possible to watch movies. They pointed out that it's not really The Internet Way to have all the video's and movies on centralised servers like youtube or google video. It's a valid point, but we decided the actual cause (bandwith) is not solved by this solution. Although it's absolutely cool software which I'm happy to try out soon.

The Farsight presentation was given in the cross desktop room. They explained how they have designed their video conferencing software, and that makes a lot of sense to me. It will make video conferencing so much better if they succeed. Linux / Desktop still lacks a bit in those areas and this can fill that gap. Being able to add videoconfering to random applications with not more then 100 LOC as the way it should be and give a large boost. Especially when integrated in all the popular IM applications. Not sure if it will play nicely with Phonon, or why decided not to use it. Could have been a good question for a cross-desktop talk.

LVM2 presentation was fun, the presention was a demonstration about what has changed lately. I always found LVM difficult to understand when you haven't worked with it for a while. Some operations are difficult for me to understand why they implemented it that way. But they've fixed some, like making a volume bigger, no longer requires to extend the filesystem as well, it's now done automatically. I think we'll make lvm standard on new servers from now on.

We ended with a presentation of ZeroConf in the OpenSUSE room. What we could see was nice, the API for KDE is nice and I might have some idea's for Mailody in that area now. But first I want to try some things to see how it works in practise. They said it was already available in Kopete, but I couldn't get find it in my Kopete (KDE3). It's great technology and strange it is not more popular...

I also liked meeting a bunch of new faces. Ana was of course the most important 'new face' ;-). It was great to say Hi to everyone again, although I didn't have time to discuss things or talk to people for longer.

I went to see Janneke Pis, the female version of Manneken Pis in the centre of Brussels, eat something in that area and went back to The Netherlands. Awesome weekend!

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• Focus follows mouse is gone. Actually, every focus policy except "click to focus" is gone or very well hidden. This is on both thin client and local logins, but might be a branch or Solaris issue.
• No desktop wallpaper image but just a flat color is gone. I can choose "Wallpaper" and "Slideshow". Sebas has an extra option "None" in his trunk build, so it might just have been forgotten in branch.
• Logout doesn't. I can use qdbusviewer to logout immediately, but something goes wrong when a confirm dialog is needed. On a local login where all the fancy effects are possible, the confirm dialog does come up, so this is a thin-client issue. Probably something gets lost in all the rendering fanciness.
• Systemsettings mouse cursor themes page crashes it, both local and thin-client.
• Changing the wallpaper sets the wallpaper, then switches to a white background, both local and thin-client.

Just a short note, as i’m kinda busy atm, but as mentioned earlier we welcome any help at KDE events, next to come being CeBIT in Hannover. There’s a WIKI page for you to make helping even easier

Sometimes I think there are people that do nothing elase than come up with ways to annoy others into NOT buying a product. Sheesh...

After getting back from FOSDEM and sleeping for 10 hours I am finally back in the land of the living

FOSDEM was great, I had a lot of fun and was able to connect some more IRC nicks to their real life faces.

So what did I learn this weekend?

1. When traveling with Nikolaj always be prepared for something involving a bomb.
2. Mike looks/is awesome.
3. There was an awful lot of ambulances in Brussels compared to every other city I have ever been to.
4. Kriek tastes delicious.
5. Statistics on KDE commits can tell you a lot about its community. Thanks to Paul for showing me some of his work. It was insightful and will be very useful for me for Amarok.
6. I need to get started again on packaging for Kubuntu.
7. KDE people rock! (Ok right. I knew that one long before ;-))

Thanks to the KDE people for letting Amarok have a good share of the booth. We love you
Sorry I was not able to say goodbye to everyone yesterday. Big KDE-hug to all of you.

PS: Everyone who took pictures please share.

... can take many forms. Some less exciting than others:

So the greatest FOSS event of the year has come to an end. Thousands of geeks, hundreds of talks, and just a really wonderful atmosphere everywhere (see the pictures flowing in). I caught up with my backlog of emails and feeds from Friday and the weekend in only 15 minutes, which pretty much sums up what was happening in the world of FOSS at the time.

Very glad to see successful KDE (with Amarok) and openSUSE booths about. We gave out over a whoopin’ 1000 openSUSE Promo DVDs (Live+Install, with KDE/GNOME/Xfce).

Our KDE 4 desktop received a lot of attention, and unfortunately quite a few crashes at some points as we were running a very recent trunk snapshot. Still, many users very impressed with Dolphin, the new Kate, Gwenview, KWin Composite effects, the Kickoff menu and our super-sized Plasma clock. To put your mind at ease, I can promise you that we have no direct affiliation with Flavor Flave.

Some things in particular that I took from the event:

The Jordis presented the very professional Linkat, a SUSE-based Linux distribution now endorsed and promoted by the Catalynian government for schools and communities there, with all kinds of FOSS educational software.

Interesting to hear about the many challenges faced: for example, they were asked to include the latest packages but to also provide long term support. So what did they do? They use openSUSE packages when they need to have the latest-and-greatest (which comes with 2 years of security and update support), and SLED for the base packages and everything else (7 years of support). Watch this space.

Probably the talk that personally interested me the most. Michael gave a quick overview of the workings into making a package management solver. The new one is completely based on standard SAT algorithms (boolean satisfiability problem), which has nice advantages like the simple fact that there are insanely fast algorithms for computing such problems. Such small problems (in comparison) like our “very complex” package management decisions take milliseconds under this model.

This, combined with the new solv files (for repo metadata), makes for extremely fast package management.

• Timo’s very well-attended Kernel, udev, D-Bus, HAL, NetworkManager and Friends gave a really nice and quick insight into how you can debug any problems with this stack using his tidy little event notification application. The example provided was unsupported multimedia keys (surprisingly easy to fix). Will find the web link for it soon.
• Nice talk on KIWI which I’ve written about before. The more time that passes, the more I’m convinced that applications designed as distribution-independent tools (like the OBS, PackageKit, Klik, Smolt) like KIWI are completely the way forward.
• Great to finally properly meet so many more developers (too many to list).

Huge thanks to Pascal Bleser and the rest of the FOSDEM team working tirelessly to ensure that FOSDEM ran so smoothly. Nice events like that make me very happy; looking forward to FOSDEM 2009!

Another day, another set of interesting talks out of the over 200 here at FOSDEM.

First, I had a look at what the KDE guys at OpenSuSE are doing for KDE 4: plans to ship KDE 4.0.1 (or better, .2 as soon as it is released), whith some concerns about eg KDE PIM. Was also nice to know that they are working on porting the KDE 3 applications developed by their developers to KDE 4: KNetworkManager (using NetworkManager 0.7), Kerry (using a Xesam interface, thus more generic), KPowerSave, etc.

After that, I went to the talk on KDE 4 done by Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kügler: lots of (interesting) bla bla ( ) about KDE 4 concepts, ideas, etc, with Jos - instead of demo'ing kdeedu, kdegames and kdegraphics - tooking more than 10 minutes just to show the universe (with KStars, of course ) to the people
Then I decided to "relax" a bit, and placed myself into the KDE booth to catch up with emails and news from the world, until lunch.

After lunch, other three talks followed:

• Knut Yrvyn's talk about Skolelinux and its importance for education («Spreadsheets away from 8 y.o. kids!», could not agree more)
• Alexander Neoudorf presented CMake and some of the stuff the new 2.6 version will bring, especially for testing and simple packaging of applications
• after a small break, Jonathan Riddell's "Debian/Ubuntu packaging for dummies". Note unrelated (not that much, to be honest) to the talk: wondering _how_ 'GNU hello' reached version 2.3...

Then at 5pm, almost the whole crowd of the FOSDEM started packing all their stuff, and KDE people as well.
I was one of the last four KDE guys to leave the building, together with Bart Coppens, Peter Rockai and Holger Freyther (that managed to lose himself around the city two days out of two ).
I slowly reached the train station via bus and metro, and took the train (when I wrote this blog entry) that brought me back in The Netherlands (where the usual Dutch rain was there waiting for me, duh).

Many thanks go to the KDE people, to the Debian Qt-KDE guys (and gal, hi Ana!), and to my room mate, Marijn Kruisselbrink: all of you made me enjoy the two days at my first FOSDEM

As promised I am going to try to present the work I have been doing over the last couple of weeks in a less developer centric way.

Bascially the idea is to have an intermediate step in moving from the traditional facilities for addressbook and calendar to the future ones based on Akonadi.
This intermediate step should allow developers to migrate both applications and data acesss methods (e.g. groupware server access) one by one, so that new applications can already make use of all the possibilities of Akonadi while at the same time allow existing applications to adapt at their own pace.

Lets discuss the different approaches based on an common use case:

assume you are running KMail and at some time during the day you'd like to change some contact information in your addressbook so you start KAddressBook as well, modify the contact and save the modification.
Of course you also expect KMail to also know about this modification, e.g. if you changed somebody's email address, you want to have this new address when getting autocompletion suggestions.

The following image shows the three setups side by side:

(click here for full size)

• Traditional setup

The traditional setup is based on plugins we developers refer to as KResource framework.
For KDE's addressbook the default plugin is called "file" which means the contact data is stored in a file called "std.vcf" on your local harddisk.
The applications, in this case KMail and KAddressBook, actually don't have to care about which plugin is used, from their point of view they all look the same.

In the use case described above, both applications read the file and parse the contact data stored in it into objects we developer refer to as "Addressees".
At the time in the use case where KAddressBook saves the modifications, it overwrites the current file with the contact data it currently has stored in its addressee objects, i.e. also "replacing" the unchanged ones.

The "file" plugin inside KMail actually watches this file for changes, so it detects that someone has altered it and basically repeats its loading procedure, i.e. loading the file and parsing the contact data again.

• Migration setup

The migration setup is quite similar on the upper part of the diagram, i.e. KMail and KAddressBook still use plugins to access the data from a shared source.
However, this shared source is now a process by itself, the Akonadi server. The actual data reading and writing has been delegated to a specialized handler called the VCard resource.

In the use case described above, only this very resource handler has access to the storage file. It loads and parses the contact data similar to how the "file" plugin of the tradition setup did, so not a big difference yet.
Without going further into boring developer details the data is then transferred to the Akonadi server.

As I wrote above the two applications basically don't care which plugin they told to use, so from their point of view there is no difference in used a plugin called "akonadi" and they have no idea that this plugin is getting the data from the Akonadi server.

The main difference to the traditional setup is they way how the modification is handled.
When KAddressBook tells the "akonadi" plugin to save the addressbook it uses an Akonadi facility called ItemSync to only upload the modified addressees to Akonadi. The Akonadi server in turn notifies all interested parties, in this case KMail, KAddressBook and the VCard resource about the change.
In contrast to the traditional setup, the "akonadi" plugin inside KMail now only needs to fetch the modified addressee and only needs to get it from the Akonadi server and not from a storage device like a file.

To summarise the traditional applications can, without any code modifcations, already reap some of the advantages of Akonadi, e.g. fast distribution of local changes (no access to the storage device necessary) and single points of access to storage devices.

• Future setup

The future setup, i.e. native Akonadi support, looks almost like the migration setup when being abstracted like in the diagram.

The differences are now mainly how the applications can handle the contact data internally, e.g. they are no longer limited to keeping copies of all addressee objects at all time, KAddressBook no longer needs to check which addressee objects to upload to the Akonadi server since it can now upload them individually right after modification.

That's all for now.
I am going to write a second part about migration options for data access facilities. Until then stay tuned through Danny Allen's awesome Commit Digest

A very busy week has passed. Didn’t give much time to sit down and look back. Luckily tomorrow’s a non-working holiday (as if I have a job), so that gives me some extra time to share some random personal junk I’ve accumulated.

School!

Finally, I’m going to school again! If all goes well, that is. I actually already finished my college course 4 years ago (Bachelor of Arts Classical major in Philosophy), so this is like a second degree, but not equivalent to a baccalaureate (since it actually requires that). I’m taking up Diploma in Computer Science, something I’ve wanted to take up years ago. Now I will, and fortunately for me, I would be able to take it mostly at home. It’s a distance education/home learning program, so I can stay at home, and only go to the campus for exams. I still have to apply, though. Then comes the excruciating waiting for news whether I’m accepted or not. Keeping my fingers crossed.

Essays…

As part of the requirements for the application to school, I’m supposed to write a 500-word essay. The topic is “what is your purpose in applying to the program and what are your plans after finishing the program?” These types of questions always smell like beauty pageant questions, and I almost can’t resist ending my answer with “and world peace.” Somehow I was hoping that the topic would be a bit more thought-provoking. But at the same time, I literally took me a week finish writing the essay, partly because of boredom, and party because of being unable to think up of ways to make my essay not look like a grade school’s answer. I somehow miss my philosophy days because of it.

Fun & FOSS

Two weeks ago I started reading (again, from the beginning, for the nth time), Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. When I came across his discussion on centers, particularly the “Pleasure center”, I was reminded of how often I (and probably many other people) used “fun” as the reason for starting, staying, and even leaving their areas of FOSS contribution. I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard “I do this because it’s fun/I like doing it” or “I’m leaving/stopping because it’s no longer fun”. I’ve even said it myself. A lot. Like for example, my “zeal” in helping out in Kubuntu is slowly starting to disappear, due to some circumstances. But mostly because I don’t seem to be enjoying it anymore. This is not an attempt to strike at those people who use “fun” as their raison d’être, specially since I’m guilty of the same thing. I’ve just been reflecting on whether we should rely on something as flimsy as “fun” as the driving force for contributing. Human as we are, and as volunteers who mostly don’t get paid to work on projects, we, of course, are inclined to do what we like more. But what if, as I’ve experienced a lot, the “fun” runs out? What do we do? Somehow I feel that I myself should have some deeper, more substantial motivation. Does world konquest count?

What will you get if you google for deutsche telekom hotline ?

So, as I said previously, I'm at FOSDEM right now, sitting in the KDE boot, with some Amarok guys, Joos demo'ing all around, Marijn working on KDE and Adriaan hacking on the KDE4-branded SOLARIS thin client.

Personal impressions on some talks of day 1:

• Linux in Hollywood: interesting how all the modern graphics for movies is all based on Linux, even if just for the rendering farms. A long-ish list of proprietary computer graphics applications for Linux is a nice way to tell the world that Linux can actually be used even for serious stuff
• Interesting update on the current status of FreeBSD an its community, and how they still use CVS (sigh), but using Preforce to work more reliably with branches and such
• Status on software patents: another good occasion to stress on the topic, recaling that the real issue is the patents _on software_
• Linkat: an OpenSuSE-based distribution, targetting catalan schools (its primary language is catalan), and providing many services around it. It is interesting how they provide catalan documentation for the distro and the applications; I'm taking contact with them so they can hopefully share their material about KDE-Edu applications with us (KDE-Edu)
• Sadly lost Enrico Zini's talk about Xapian, the room was damn full, not even the space for throwing the head in the room...
• Followed MadCoder's talk about using GIT to fully maintain a Debian package, for all original sources, debian directory and patches to it