eat it.

maybe i should move to india. not only do they have a growing software industry, but there's this from the may 28 montreal gazzette page a12:

"It's just not fair. It's a monopoly by
 vegetarians," said Kiran Talwar, 49, a prosthetics engineer who has seen
 vegetarianism take over restaurants and groceries all over his childhood
 neighbourhood on posh Nepeansea Road. "If you step out to eat, there's
 nothing for miles because everything around is veggie," he said.

bwuhahaha. now he knows how we vegetarians feel in many places of the world. besides it's not like you need to consume the decaying flesh of dead animals to have a good meal, anyways.

oh, for the day when the city i live in has so many vegetarians that supermarkets just stop carrying animal products. we apparently have the highest per-capita rate of veg restaurants of any major city in the country, so we're on our way there. it's only a matter of time. you meat eaters better start thinking about a strategy now. ;)

i heart t.

excerpt from an email by t. coordinating travel arrangements:

On Tuesday 30 May 2006 14:33, you wrote:
>> But what are the details...I won't know where to pick you up without a
>> flight number and such.
>
> i travel so much now that they add my name to the flight number on the
> schedule boards. booyah!

I will be the one dressed like a limo driver with a sign that says "Kaxi"

and with that, my life is complete.

lsb 4.0

i'm off tomorrow to the lsb summit in boston. the free standards group graciously both invited kde to attend as well as arranged for the travel costs and coordination. ian murdock (yep, the dude who started debian) is leading the initiative in the lsb to make it real-world-relevant for desktop application developers. this is a big task but he seems to have a realistic plan for making it happen.

from the kde perspective, i'm really excited that we are getting involved "at the ground level" on this one, so to speak. building on the excellent work to get qt ready and acceptable for inclusion in the recently-released lsb 3.1, we'll be interacting from day 0 on the formulation of lsb 3.2 and 4.0 along with the rest of the desktop world.

this is quite a change from past years where we (kde) were more reactionary when it came to these sorts of things. we often only found out after the fact that something important was happening and were usually left running to catch up. this didn't make many friends inside kde as it often felt like we were being "left out".

a couple of years ago a number of us in the project decided to take a more pro-active stance and start building more healthy bridges to the outside world. i remember listening to the sage words of people such as matthias ettrich, waldo bastian, martin konold and george staikos among others on this topic at akademy 2004. i think the turning point came during the follow-up discussion to daniel stone's talk about freedesktop.org when we had quite a spirited discussion where it was pointed out that we needed to get more involved in order to have our voices heard.

fast forward through two very exciting and intensive years and here we are with an invitation to be a part of this process from the start. i've sent out emails to various kde lists for input as well as hosted a small teleconference (which OSDL very kindly provided the infrastructure for) so as to gather up as much input from the project at large so that i can be as representative as possible. kde's biggest strength is the community model, and i want to bring that with me everywhere i go.

i'm working on some kde4 stuff today, but i look forward to working with people from projects and companies from around the free software world over the next few days in boston .. and beyond.

(go on, say that last sentence out loud in the voice of buzz lightyear. you know you want to. well, at least i did. and now everyone in the coffee shop is looking at me weird. like they've never heard buzz lightyear before. sheesh. ;)

uncomfortable moments in school halways

while dropping the p-man off at school today a woman was passing by then stopped in her tracks, turned to me and said, "you smell -really- good today." wow. uncomfortable. i informed her that it was probably the stuff i use in my hair (aveda's control paste; organic, animal-friendly and a really nice product on top of it). she just kind of stood there semi-frozen; i supposet she was dealing with the shock of realizing what an odd thing it was she had just blurted out. i bid her a good day and continued on feeling just a little ... odd.

btw, if you use distcc i highly recommend checking out icecream. it's autoconfiguring, supports transparent cross-compiling (so the machines can be different hardware and run different operating systems) and has a truly nice visualization front end for kde. i was reminded of it yesterday so went to install it on the new laptop so i could fire it up and was pleased to find nice packages for it: apt-get install icecc icecc-monitor ... sweet.

coverity milestone

thanks to the tireless efforts of those who have been picking away at the coverity reports we have worked our way to zero. we're the largest project (by an order of magnitude!) in terms of lines of code to achieve this. cool. =)

this is on the kde4 branch and doesn't include the extra gear apps at this point (though it does include koffice). since we're actively working on the kde4 code i'm sure we'll end up eventually triggering defect reports in the future but it should be fairly easy to fix those and keep the count at or near zero thanks to coverity's regular scans.

free as in beer or free as in freedom?

miguel de icaza wrote in a recent blog entry:

I believe we have overestimated the need and importance that people put on open source software over the need for free software (free as in price in this context, gratis).

he goes on to expound on how a free-as-in-beer proprietary product that does the job goes a long way to stunting, if not outright killing, open source efforts. when it comes to mass-market, user-level software this does sum up the status quo pretty well.

however, he states it as if this were a natural law and something that is immovable. personally i believe the reason it remains the unquestioned status quo is because of us, the free and open source software communities. we each have our bit to play in this so-far-failure to get people to appreciate free-as-in-freedom software.

the free software foundation (fsf) presents it in terms of ethics and academic argumentation. while i agree with much of what they say and wholeheartedly support what they are doing, it's also undeniable that their message influences a small percentage of the populace. why? probably because to truly appreciate stallman's philosophies requires reading them and then really thinking about them. most people don't do much of that anymore. you also need a fairly broad understanding of the state of various aspects of "intellectual property" law and how industry interacts with it. it's a complex issue that they tackle with a complex analysis. no wonder most people don't "get it". it's like trying to explain traffic safety using calculus. you can, but most people won't "get it".

those of us who are pragmatists and aren't out to kill proprietary software (i'd be one of those people, btw) often don't stand up and say much about the value of freedom software. why? probably because few outside the fsf have constructed messages that resonate and are easily repeatable. the open source initiative did and look how successful it was ... except they avoided talking much about benefits that flow directly from the freedom aspects of open source software or show the cause-effect of freedom-benefit. they just avoid it.

and nobody else has really stepped up. want to know something that the proprietary companies can't compete with us on by definition? freedom. so they avoid it and for some bizarre reason so do we. well, it's not a bizarre reason i suppose: the fsf has scared many (most?) people away from standing up on that topic ("oh god. i'm going to come off sounding / looking /smelling like rms. *shudder*") and the pragmatists have been busy working on pragmatically making the software better. in any case we simply don't tout the biggest factor that has real-world and easily-understood benefit for individuals, business, government and dolphins (ok, i'm no so sure about dolphins) that we win hands-down on.

so it's no surprise that people will pragmatically pick free-as-in-beer when available and not bother to work on free-as-in-freedom in those cases: we haven't shown the value proposition and therefore given people motivation to do it.

i think we can. we need to start talking about the immediate and personally meaningful results of free software in simple, practical terms. community, sovereignty and mitigating business risk are three categories that probably resonate with a lot of people if myspace, that whole national democracy fad that's been going on for the last few centuries ;) and the amount spent on legalese every year are any signs.

so i'd suggest to us all, including miguel, that instead of cowering beneath the shadow of the free-as-in-beer threat that we actually remind people how they want things that only are available when they use free-as-in-freedom software.

(oddly related tangent: i only buy bowls, plates, cups, etc that are microwave safe. why? because i like to use the microwave to heat things up. why? it's fast and effective. so my dish purchasing decisions are influenced because i want to quickly heat things. only after noting that a thing will survive the microwave do i bother making an aesthetic decision. i bet i'm not alone.)

movies, lamas, svnmerge.py

took p. and his mom to watch "over the hedge" today. he really liked it. it was very well animated and it wasn't a bad story but .. yeah .. nothing spectacular. but it was more important for the p-man to enjoy the outing, really.

we stopped in at a little import store that brings in fair trade goods and ended up chatting to the owner about some of the buddhist related pieces they have, ranging from mala beads and gongs to various statuettes of the buddha (some blessed by lamas with items sealed inside them) to buddhism-inspired ink paintings. i'm not buddhist myself, but i find much of the teachings of the various buddhist sects to be very interesting.

at one point the owner stood up and went behind the counter and pulled out a small pouch. in it were a few dozen seeds and some tiny dark pellets. he said that they had been blessed by the dalai lama on his 70th birthday; apparently a monk who had passed through calgary gave them to the store owner to give to people "when appropriate". the little pellets are meant to be dissolved under the tongue when bad things happen (like losing a loved one in death) to restore personal balance and bring one closer to the buddha and the dalai lama. he figured it was "an appropriate time". i now have one of the blessed orange seeds and three of the little pellets in a small bag. neat. =)

i've created a kdelibs branch for kconfig work and in my need to keep it sync'd with trunk/ i discovered svnmerge.py. wow! what a nice tool. it keeps a branch in sync with the mainline it was branched from quite painlessly. you just run `svnmerge.py init` once in the branch, then do a commit with `svn ci -F svnmerge-commit-message.txt` (yep, it generates commit messages even =) then periodically run `svnmerge.py merge` (followed by a commit usually). it keeps track of where it last merged up to by modifying the svn properties of the branch directory so it isn't dependant on a single local checkout, works fine if you start using it after modifying (and even committing those modifications to) the branch and takes care of annoyances like ensuring added files in the mainline and whatnot are handled properly. i'm sure it's not perfect and it doesn't do much to help merge the branch back into mainline (besides keeping them in sync prior to that) but it sure has made my life a bit easier =)

om mani padme hum.

it was only a matter of time, really

click for larger version

unfortunately i didn't quite qualify for full membership, only "notable mention". apparently that m. pyne guy is a bit of a hard-ass. not that fellow membership committee members wade "olie" olsen or w. bastian helped much. oh well, better luck next time i suppose.

TPANA 4ever!

ktorrent

*doot* *doot**doot**doot* *doot* ... in breaking news, kdebase is sync'd with kdelibs in preparation for monday's snapshotting. we now return you to your regularly scheduled blogcast ... *doot* *doot**doot**doot* *doot*

the folks around the blender community released an "open movie" under a creative commons license called elephant's dream. it's already about 20% here thanks to bittorrent.

and while it was coming down i noticed something in the peer list that is becoming more and more common:



ktorrent! ktorrent 1.3 (still in svn) has really won me over. it's a lot faster and more reliable than 1.2 and now seems to support things like dht (though i've never used that myself =). the real killer feature for me, though, is the integration which is probably hardly surprising for a kde app. it starts out with a simple enough interface, but you can turn on more advanced UI bits that are loaded as plugins; the integrated search page really does it for me; firewall autoconfiguration; systray support ... or just use it for when you click on .torrent files on webpages and let it ride in simplicity.

back to the peer listing ... these days it's not unusual to see ktorrent as a peer during a bittorrent download. while i use bittorrent primarily for swapping open content (linux distros, free videos, etc) which naturally biases my experience to the techie and open source crowd, i do occasionally step into the mainstream world and i've seen ktorrent often enough there too. it's probably safe to assume that not every kde-using bittorrent downloader uses ktorrent (yet ;) so the ktorrent users represent only a fraction of the kde users on bittorrent. assuming that bittorrent is still an 'advanced users and enthusiasts' sort of thing (which i assume it is?) and that summed up the peers listings i get tend to be a representative selection sample, it seems we're doing pretty darn well in that particular segment of the computer using population. nice.

like a steamroller

monday is another kdelibs snapshot day. i'll be porting over kdebase today in preperation (huzzah for the death of KUrl:fromPathOrUrl!). meanwhile david is working on bringing kservice/ktrader over into kdecore and separating the mimetype classes out so they can stay behind in kio (and be ported to the freedesktop.org mimetype spec! woo-hoo!). this will allow him to add the plugin support needed to the spell checking stuff and me to complete the kconfig-backends-by-plugins support that the elektra people keep hounding me to finish.

and yes, the default kconfig backend will not be made a plugin since that would make no sense from a reliability and performance standpoint.

from that point it'll be on to looking at what can be done about change notification and improving performance through on-demand / sparse population of the config value mapping.

it's days like these that i really miss waldo and kalle being around to work on kconfig stuff like this.

the qt4 transition

fairly regularly i end up discussing with people how big of a transition qt4 is. to most of these people it seems to go against everything they've known about trolltech's management of qt which they've always known as a remarkably api stable library with extremely few defects.

it took me a while until i realized (yes, sometimes i'm pretty slow ;) that most people who use qt jumped on the bandwagon during the qt3 days, and nearly all the rest don't date back further than sometime during qt2. what isn't immediately apparent with that background experience is that qt3 wasn't a gigantic change from qt2 but more of an evolution. there were six years between the release of qt 2.0 and 4.0, and of course development of qt 2.0 started earlier than that. so qt3 when it arrived was the result of many years of having qt hammered on by production codebases. this had a non-negligable impact on its stability and maturity imho.

i personally started using qt back in the qt1 days and went through the qt1->qt2 transition. things changed radically between qt1 and qt2. if i recall correctly there were revolutions in collection classes, painting, window and dialog classes, etc... porting apps wasn't always trivial (i did few of those). so when qt4 came out with all these changes and the porting requirements and what not ... it didn't completely surprise me. it just reminded me of experiences i had back at the turn of the century.

i think we all know how qt3 ended up turning out (pretty damn terrific) and i'm quite confident that qt4 will mature similarly. in fact, i expect it to happen faster now that there are more people using it and stressing on it. what makes me excited about qt4 is that i see architectural changes that have real promise.

anyways, i thought i'd share some of my personal historical perspective for those who are newer to the land of qt and wondering why qt4 is such a radical landscape compared to qt3.

(preemptive disclaimer: these views may or may not reflect those of trolltech. if they do, it's completely accidental. i don't pass my content through anyone there nor do they pass any requirements or suggestions my way for these things so i have no way to know how "on the same page" we are here. =)

the astounding nature of young humans

the other day i started playing a movie on the new laptop and p. (my son) observed of the rather crisp and dynamic audio, "wow. the speakers sure are clearer on the new computer."

he's also trying to get t. to provide a replacement for her trackball with a small mouse for him on her computer since the trackball is a bit large for his small hands. she hadn't yet done so last time we were there and he used her computer (a couple weeks prior?). he was using the computer and as it was bootin he asked t. if she'd bought a mouse (which she said she hadn't). he then noted that the trackball was too big and demonstrated how when his thumb was on the ball his fingers couldn't reach all the mouse buttons. then he left it at that and went on to discussing the game he was going to play. very clever way to address a social interaction situation like that: remind but don't pester, show the reasoning behind the request, then move on.

he's 'only' six years old, going into grade one in september. though my rational mind says it shouldn't, it keeps catching me off guard how fully developed the perception and awareness of young people are.

persistence

more than a year after starting the interview, this bit about analytic engineering, inc's use of kde as part of their industrial test systems is up on the dot. sometimes persistence pays off as this email thread sat in my inbox the whole time easily making it the oldest thing in there. thank-you caleb for keeping available and wade for doing the final 'put everything together and actually get it published' part =)

midmonday

so far a busy day... got peyton off to school ... helped a fellow debug an interesting problem with kiosk profiles in a school env where if a dozen or so people logged in at the same time sometimes the profiles wouldn't take (turned out to be a problem with cache dirs getting assigned properly); he has an interesting patch to kstandarddirs that allows assigning profiles by system hostname (allowing for profiles to be tied to a given machine or set of machines rather than just user/hostname that i might look at cleaning up for kde4); did some e.V. work this morning (it's ironic that kde used to be my escape from corporate duties and now is the soruce of them for me); made progress on getting the podKast together (canllaith is going to try her hand at collating the individual bits, navindra is looking into the possibility of theDot hosting the files...). and i haven't even gotten to lunchtime yet.

btw, if you're a kde contributor and would like to do your bit for the podKast, record a 5 minute thing starting with "hi, i'm $YOUR_NAME ..." followed by something related to kde or of interest to kde users and then send it either to myself or canllaith. it'd be nice to have a dozen or more different kde voices every month or two for people to hear.

dirk mueller appears to be on a mission from $OTHER_WORLD with his coverity scan commit fixes. pretty impressive flow of commits. soon we'll be at zero defects on the coverity report at this rate. i fixed a handful of reports (80 or so i believe) but nothing compared to the shear force that is dirk on this one. =)

suse 10.1

so i installed suse 10.1 on a desktop system here at the house. it's a pIII 1GHz system with 312MB of ram. nothing special. i donwloaded the cd's via bittorrent because t. uses suse at home and likes to install from cd.

the installer seems to have gotten more complex with more buttons and options and not everything is exactly sensicle. but it's 'just' the installer, not something that's overly critical. it is too bad that they started with such a lead in the installer area some years ago but haven't kept improving things. they've made changes, but that's different than improvements. over all it's not all that much different than 10.0 or even 9.x really.

i do like how they now offer a bunch of non-Free stuff like flashplayer and opera on an extra cd now. using it with the installation process is a little less than intuitive and takes more steps than it really should, but it does work and saves time from having to add those things later. certainly an improvement and all distros should do something like this IMHO. ++cool.

after the install, the bootloader screen looks beautiful. the boot process itself is ugly though; for some reason the install didn't give me a nice graphical boot but an old school text mode thing. i noticed that it still installs and turns on things like postfix as well, which shows their emphasis on the server rather than the desktop. the login manager is very attractive as is the desktop splash.

and boy does kde come up quickly. lubus' boot improvement patches are in this version it seems (no surprise: he works for novell) and kde 3.5 is up and usable in ~4 seconds on the machine. impressive!

unfortunately the fonts suck, the sound card wasn't set up automatically, the default display resolution was rather low (800x600, with not higher options available in krandrtray either; will need to do some manual tweaking here), a power management utility was loaded by default in the systray and the patch updater GUI is quite slow and looks foreign. yast is still slow. the "my computer" links brings up all kinds of information i don't care about (do i really care that the floppy filesystem is "auto" or that / is reisferfs?), though it does look really pretty =) would be nice if it didn't move to the top of the page every time it refreshes, but that's really more of an issue with konqi not providing a rich content view for these kinds of things. and then at one point the monitor just went black and wouldn't come back on so i had to reboot.

the overwhelming majority of problems i've run into in the first few hours of having it on my machine aren't KDE related but have had to do with software lower in the stack.

so i'm not quite sure what to think. lots of really good moves can be seen in suse 10.1, but also lots of rough edges. is this the result of Novell's focus shifting and figuring out how to do this linux thing? it seems that while lots of work is going into the server side of things, which is understandable given where sales are likely coming from for them, the desktop seems to be languishing. i'd be more than happy running SUSE 10 on a server given the software it comes with and YAST's great configuration tools for those tasks, but i'm not sure i could say the same for the desktop. Novell is focusing on the enterprise, but i just don't see that focus outside of the server offerings.

we'll see how it settles in over the next week or two, but so far i don't think it will be tempting me away from the laptop much.

i'd like another black eye, please

sometimes people prefer others not to learn from their past. usually because they want people to repeat the past but this time with them because it'll turn out better this time.

so it is that christian, a gstreamer developer, thinks that kde should bet on a single media engine again as we did with aRts. this would require that we first forget the lessons we've learned and ignore the real-world test cases of amaroK, juk, kaffeine and others.

specifically, the day that gstreamer or any other media engine provides:

• a believable API/ABI stability guarantee that covers kde4's lifespan


• an API that is easy enough to use for casual development (bonus points for fitting in nicely with KDE's API)


• availbility on every platform that KDE supports (that's more than linux; it's even more than open source platforms for that matter)


• a solid user experience

then we can think about ditching somethign like phonon.

we learned with aRts that one size does not fit all and that over time media engine trends change. the ltsp people right now are struggling to find a media engine that does really solid network media, particularly video. i've discovered that gstreamer isn't able to give me a good sound experience for amarok (to state it kindly). and i wonder what the people on macos or windows think?

reality is that different people will pick different things. it's not our job, as a desktop environment and not a systems integrator, to try and dictate the usage of a media engine particularly when it comes at the expense of user experience. we can and should certainly push for standardization by supporting and even spearheading those efforts (ever notice who the main developers in the portland project are?), but reality meets wishful thinking when it comes to multimedia right now.

christian is probably right that the high end of media apps such as studio-quality media creation apps will need more power than what phonon can offer. but for 99%+ of desktop applications out there, that power is meaningless. they don't need something that powerful when it's also sporting a complex, foreign API and only works or is available on 1/N support platforms. this is why most open source desktop apps that could or should have media support tend not to (think: video clips in presentation apps; or audio recordings in note takers).

phonon is providing things like access to basic recording, effects and visualizations; it is more than "just playback" and should cover the overwhelming majority of needs quite well. so let the <1% of applications written that need ultrahorsepower multimedia framework access surf the tumultuous seas of multimedia uncertainty; the rest of the desktop deserves better and we can deliver that to them today.

but something christian obviously doesn't "get" is the benefit of writing an app that works with a "host of media frameworks". christian erected the following strawman: "The reasoning is that no framework 'does it all' so having this flexibility is a good thing." good thing that isn't what we're thinking because that would be stupid. no, the benefit to working with a "host of media frameworks" is that you gain portability both between different operating systems today as well as between the same operating system today and tomorrow. been there done that with aRts and gstreamer isn't any better on that front; then again, no media system currently is.

now ... i can understand how this might be frustrating from a media framework developer's perspective, but perhaps they could step back for a moment and try and understand how frustrating the multimedia world is for a desktop project right now.

honestly, people writing media engines should write media engines instead of trying to politic the desktop environments for their support (gstreamer isn't the only or even worst project in this category, btw). instead how about writing something so good, so solid, so portable and so easy to write applications with it that it becomes the obvious answer and then we can stop having this conversation. and when that is achieved, we'll be right there in a very good adoption position due to phonon not having wedded us to some other media framework. until then, we'll continue to make sure our users, system integration partners and 99% of our application developers are looked after thank you very much.

warms my heart

it warms my heart to read first-person experiences of people moving off of proprietary systems and onto open source ones, especially when they say things like, "One of the best [Linux desktops] is KDE, which I use. It's a richly featured GUI that easily rivals Windows XP.'

easily rivals xp. we hear these kinds of things from happy users on a regular basis. this past saturday night when i went out for some post-linuxfesting karaoke with a group of lug'ers, a guy came up and commented on the fact that we were wearing "linux shirts" (nothing broadcasts "geek" quite as well as a huge tux head on a white t-shirt) and asked what we were up to. after telling him about linuxfest he expressed his dissapointment in not knowing about it. he then gushed on about how much he likes his suse/kde powered laptop. either working-class karoke bars are heavy in geek appeal or we're really making inroads.

so when i hear about how the open source desktop won't make it, i just drift off inside my head and remember all the people who kde has already succeeded for. it's only a matter of time until we spread out to the rest of the world. ;)

on an unrelated note, i'm seriously considering starting a weekly podcast thingy along with a bunch of other kde people. if it goes ahead, i'll do a 5 minute-ish audio segment ~once a week about some kde and/or free software related topic. my first thought was to do an "ask aaron" thing where people send in (hopefully on-topic) questions and i answer them (hopefully =). this way i don't have to think of topics that people would be interested in: i'm lazy like that. so if you have a question you'd like me to address, email it to me (aseigo at kde dot org) and we'll see how this whole podcast thingy goes.

yadnom

linuxfest.ca went great.. i took marcel gagne out for a couple of birthday beers between sessions (happy b-day marcel!) and we had a few really excellent chats about various things free software and desktopy. i handed out a bunch of the cool silver light-up trolltech pens and a few t-shirts to the attendees, all of which were extremely popular.

for a first year event, i was really impressed by how well the show went. apparently there were in excess of 70 attendees and the talks i attended were really good. if next year builds on this year... damn!

i had a bit of a hiccup with the projector, however. it was the first time using the new laptop with a projector (or "beamer" for those in .de ;), so i wasn't sure how'd it go... well, krandrtray worked wonders but the projector didn't like the 60hz refresh rate at all. the crt monitor in the lectern showed things nicely but the screen was an ugly mess of purples and sepias. unfortunately i couldn't convince the lcd to do anything but 60hz, so i changed my x config to run a xinerama set up: lcd running one resolution @60hz and the external monitor running a 1024x768 @ 75hz. bingo!

to make this perfect x.org would need to be able to switch between xinerama and non-xinerama set ups on the fly (perhaps this is already possible and i'm just ignorant to the fact =) and kpresenter would need a two-screen setup where presentation notes show on screen0 and the presentation itself shows on screen1. this is what apple's presentation software does and it's really quite nice: it shows a small shot of the slide, an even smaller one of the next slide and below all that your notes.

committed the kdebase porting i did on thursday/friday today except for libkonq which someone else did between the time kdelibs_snapshot was updated and i woke up. i think that went pretty smoothly and may do that in two weeks again, though i'll probably do it on saturday instead (now that i know how long it takes; it's actually pretty quick). then maybe others can concentrate on the other modules. i'd take on other mods myself, but i have a personal and vested interest in kdebase building due to that being where much of my actively worked on code lives these days.

and speaking of actively worked on, it was really cool to see some commits in recent days fixing things from ebn.

linuxfest.ca

spending the day with t. at linufest.ca here in calgary today... the day has just kicked off with marcel gagne giving the opening keynote which he is giving using kdissert (seems to be a big fan of it =).

i'll be speaking in a bit about about getting started with kde4 development and the later in the afternoon on how open source affects society. i've somehow managed to avoid giving for the Nth time one of my kde4 talks. the free software philosophy talk (as i refer to my afternoon topic =) is one of my new favourites. it's nice to be able to talk about the reason i'm (and many if not most others are) involved with this crazy open source thing rather than just talk about the results of everyone's efforts.

they have good wireless here, which is awesome. too bad the power bars at the tables aren't working (yet?), but that's not a big deal. i've discovered i can use the new laptop for 3-4 hours doing things like reading email or ~2 hours if i'm compiling stuff non-stop.

ebn.evolve();

allen pointed me at ebn today noting that another round of improvements and work had been done. omg! graphs! =)

lookin' great, guys!

++day

as the week goes by things keep getting better. first a fellow by the name of johan stepped me through the rather simple process of getting the card reader on my laptop to work. while it didn't work out of the box, all i had to do was:

aseigo@freedom:~$ lspci | grep SD
0000:06:04.4 0805: Texas Instruments PCI6411, PCI6421, PCI6611, PCI6621, PCI7411, PCI7421, PCI7611, PCI7621 Secure Digital (SD) Controller
aseigo@freedom:~$ setpci -s 06:04.3 4c=22

and voila! card reader works. i put the setpci command in /etc/rc.local and the world is good. or at least better. thanks johan! you rock =)

i also noticed that the trackpad on this machine has a scroll strip on the right side of it; so if i run my finger up or down the right edge of the trackpad it scrolls the window like a scroll mouse. huzzah!

i have kde4 up and going on the machine as well. so i took the opportunity to port kdebase to trunk/kdelibs. got to write my first bit of phonon code in the process. i also met with the kbfx team regarding bringing their efforts into kde4. they are a dedicated group of people with an eye for pretty things and the commitment to make the code match that. it'll be interesting to see what exactly comes from their minds and hands as they work closer with the main project and bring on additional usability expertise. i'm excited, in any case =)

tomorrow i'm attending and speaking at the calgary linuxfest which should be a lot of fun. finally, a linux event in my own backyard! though it will feel a bit odd not driving to the airport before walking through the doors ;)

it'll almost certainly be a lot more fun than the morning i spent at the microsoft-on-linux event on tuesday as well. barnaby jeans is a cool guy who i always enjoy talking with, and i really appreciate microsoft travelling around telling the world about linux. lord knows we would have a much harder time getting their die hards into a room like they can to talk about open source, so they are, imo, inadvertently helping us out. there was the expected amount of decete and even outright falsehoods, but it's getting harder for them to say nasty things about our efforts. in fact, they are now touting how they are working more with the open source community which is a testament to how much credibility the community has gained. either way, it's better than being ignored.

laptops and laundry

so my laptop has been slowly but surely disintegrating on me over the last month. not good. it's impacted my ability to be effective at community events, it's slowed down my development efforts ... and it's not like it was a super machine to start with. but that's ok, i'm used to getting by with "good enough". but this was becoming a dire situation. i had to get a new laptop so i bit the bullet and went shopping on monday.

my requirements were "simple", though perhaps "simple" in the way that the plans in mission impossible episodes were "simple": under 5 pounds, perfect linux support, look good, decent screen (esp when viewing from an angle), be suitable for development and not cost more than CA$1000. and just like in mission impossible, it all turned out well in the end. i ended up springing for a toshiba m50-mx5 which comes with a pentium m 750, 512mb ram, 100gb sata drive, built in wireless, 14" widescreen, dvd burner, etc...

i was fairly confident things would go decently smooth since the graphics, wifi and .. well .. every other chipset that mattered to me was an intel product. when it comes to laptops, intel and linux tend to go well together in my experience. but i wasn't prepared for how well it did go.

i picked up the machine tuesday afternoon, shoved a kubuntu 5.10 cd in and a half an or so later ... had a working system. i did zero configuration and everything worked: the screen had the right (widescreen) resolution, networking worked, speedstep, hibernation/suspend (the power button does a cool orange pulsing thing when hibernating), the all-important coming out of hibernation (which is usually the part that doesn't work so well under linux ime), sound ...

well, almost everything. the sd card reader doesn't seem to work (some error about "generic_make_request: trying to access nonexistent block-device mmcblk0"). and i seem to be having some intermittent problem with the Marvel 88E8036 ethernet chipset and the sky2 driver; a rmmod followed by a modprobe "fixse" it, but it's certainly a bug in the sky2 driver with 2.6.15.

ironically, the wifi support has so far been more stable than the traditional, wired ethernet. though at first i didn't think the wifi worked at all as iwconfig could see the wifi card and i could configure it but it wouldn't pick up any access points. then i discovered a little switch on the front of the machine that when turned to 'on' actually turns on the wifi card. i noticed this while looking at the pretty blue lights and noticing a little panel beneath that with a wifi icon. turning the switch to "on" allowed me scan for and join wireless networks. it's a nice little feature to have when running on battery and not on a wireless network.

well, since everything went too easy, i upgraded immediately to the dapper beta2. still nothing broke (though the sd card and ethernet problems remained) and now i have a nice kde 3.5.2 system humming away. all i can say is "wow".

it also starts up, reboots and shuts down faster than the devil himself. so kudos to the kubuntu/ubuntu team for putting together such a great operating system, and to toshiba for a decent laptop at a reasonable price. though i suppose the real test will be 6 months from now and seeing how it stands up to the aseigo treatment =)

hopefully by tomorrow i'll have my kde4 dev env up and running .. *fingers crossed*

i also got the laundry situation sorted out. the neighbour came looking for his
laundry asking if i'd seen it. instead of answering his question immediately i informed him that we have a problem. he proceeded to freak out as i stood there calmly waiting for him to finish (took him a couple minutes to get it all out) and then explained to him the problems i had with how he was behaving. he calmed down pretty much instantly, apologized and then we talked for another 10 minutes or so finally arriving at a schedule that works for both of us (he gets night time, i get day time). i then told him where his laundry was and went to fetch it for him. i begin to understand why rich people end up building huge walls around their houses.

i heart ruby too

cornelius puts in the good word for ruby. i, too, prefer ruby and agree with all the technical and social reasons cornelius gives for this (heck, as he noted i wrote them in the blog he replied to ;). and if ruby ends up becoming as popular as python, you bet i'd prefer to see us go that route. but that's the rub: right now python is installed pretty much everywhere, it's used by most major linux distros for building their custom apps and likely still has the edge on ruby when it comes to things like bindings support outside of kde (where we have -awesome- support thanks in large part to rich). for that to change would probably take years and it'd be nice to having something between now and then. (apparently ruby won't even have proper unicode support in the language until version 2, so it's got room to grow too anyways.)

in the end, despite my own crush on ruby, i'm willing to lay down my personal language preference and ask if we can't push ahead with a good-enough solution for the vb crowd.

and no, it won't prevent people from continuing to write in ruby or java or c# or dylan or ....... whatever so i don't think that's a fair statement to make, cornelius =) it's just means we'd have a language we could all agree on to support so that it's the easy answer from an availability standpoint. it's not like it has to be a five star solution .... we're talking ex-vb-ers here, after all ;) and python is generall good enough(tm)

p.s. to ade congrats on getting your thesis done. wooo hooo!

the case for python

uh-oh. i'm going to blog about languages again. ring the bells of warning. i fully expect to get all sorts of fun email and blog comments from the language gallery, but please keep in mind while reading this entry: i personally don't like python all that much, which is to say it isn't the language itself that causes me to write this.

ok, enough "hoping to deflect the flames" preamble ... i was sitting in an airport with zack, chris blizzard, david from pgsql and keith packard chatting about stuff. the topic of languages came up, in particular python. i suggested that we really need a visual basic for our platform. but not visual basic. even microsoft seems to understand that it's a dead end language, and we really can do better than vb.

but it's pretty undeniable that we need a language for the people who aren't code ninjas that is safe to use and fast to develop in. it should be open source, easy to learn and have lots of hooks into useful functionality like xml handling, networking and graphical toolkits. of course, we have several of these in the open source world. but none are hailed as "the vb for the open source desktop" because ... well ... we can't get our ducks in a row.

personally, i'd love to see ruby get the nod because i really like that language. but python is already used far and wide, has a smaller learning curve (at least imho) and has all sorts of vb-like qualities.

if python were to be christened the quick-n-dirty app devel language of choice for the open source desktop, several things would likely have to happen. like the string handling in python would need to get unfuckified. due to having two internal string representations, one unicode safe and one not, all sorts of fun can happen when running python apps in various locales. i was unaware of this problem until i sat in on a discussion and listened while some people described the problem is great detail to a python fan at linuxconf.au in january. python's gc also needs a revisit.

guido would probably also need to show his ability to do the graceful hand-off of his baby to the community. not that he needs to step away from it, but apparently there is a feeling in the community that guido is a blocker to python's future success. this isn't my opinion (i am completely uninvolved in the python community) but it is a common comment i get from people. (please don't shoot the messenger *whimper*) if this isn't an accurate observation, then the python community needs to find a way to fix that perception in the broader open source community. how? i don't know, because i really don't know where the sentiment is coming from (i just know it exists).

then we'd need to circle the wagons and get most people on the same page: kde, gnome, ubuntu, mandriva, red hat, novell, etc ... so we can tell the world that if you want something to fill the gnawing void of vb for the open source desktop, it's right there. only through consistent messaging and proper support across the board will the newcomer crowd grok the talk. the good news is that most of these groups are already python supporters in some way, so it shouldn't be a stretch.

we also need to look at what we offer for support. richard dale's korundum for ruby shows the way, imho. from the kde perspective, while we have pyqt and it seems to work rather well indeed i think we could do better. well, that's probably stating the obvious (i'm good at that ;) because anyone can always do better ;) but if python gets the nod, then that needs to become the mantra for the python tools we offer.

ok, so ... why not java? too complicated, too 1990s. why not ruby? not enough mind share, a bit too complex to throw vb'ers at i think (though what a beautiful language it is! =) why not c#? while in brazil, i got to see one of the landmark c# apps that comes out of novell itself crashing spectacularly. yep: crashing, complete with backtrace into c code. according to miguel "the mono man" himself this was because the c# app was passing a null into a method that ended up calling a c library function which doesn't do nulls and that the crash was intentional. apparently they used to throw exceptions, but this "hid bugs in application code" and so they instead now just let things crash. uuuuuh. why use a new-gen language if you get to deal with the same friggin' problems we've struggled with for decades, like memory management? while the clr concept is a great idea (i'd love to see a really solid clr widely available and used in the open source community), my faith in c# is pretty much zero at this point, and that's without even going into the non-technical issues with the language.

of course, these languages must not be abandoned or relegated to being red headed step children if python gets elected to fill this one role. these languages all fulfill important places in our ecosystem and have thriving communities around them. that's valuable.

so ... is it possible to get a well advertised and supported vb alternative? i don't know. this may be yet another fantastic though on my part that we as a community just aren't ready to implement in a meaningful way. maybe we are. i hope to keep another opportunity to chat with chris, and others, about this as the year unfolds. who knows where the wind will blow ....

and now back to our regularly scheduled m

stupid people

so my silly neighbour who couldn't figure out the laudry facilities on her own moved out a month or two ago. her live-in boyfriend finally chased her away with his brutish, emotionally abusive self. a real piece of work that one. and also laundry challenged, it turns out.

he kept doing laundry at random intervals in the week and tying up the machines for days at a time by just leaving this laundry in them. eventually i'd just move his clothes and start doing mine. i had requested we set up a basic schedule (like i had with my previous neighbour) but that apparently was too much for him. seems that people are "riding his ass" and he's having to juggle jobs or something and that's just too much for his wee mind to handle and remember what days the laundry facilities are his to use.

i finally had enough and told him that sunday and monday was mine, he could have the rest of the week. that gives him 5 days, one of which is on a weekend. seemed fair and kind from my perspective. he just said he didn't think he could manage it. i told him to figure it out.

last night i put some laundry in the machine, it being sunday and therefore one of my days. i went to sleep with it whirring away in the dryer. i woke up to the dryer still going. that couldn't be right. i went downstairs to discover the laundry i had folded already sitting in a pile on the old washing machine (why he felt the need to move it when it wasn't in his way beats me) with the load i had in the dryer thrown on top of that. to make it worse, the load wasn't dry yet. sometimes the dryer doesn't get a load completely dry and you have to put it in for another cycle. so now i have wet clothes on dry previously folded clothes. i was not a happy camper.

this comes on the heels of him taking a load of mine out of the washer last week and piling it on the dryer without putting it in the dryer so he could wash a load of clothes. i find it the next day needing to be washed again.

i'd had enough. but he wasn't answering his door (though i heard music inside). so this morning i grabbed a garbage bag, went downstairs to the laundry room, opened the dryer and shoved his clothes into a big green plastic bag. which currently sits next to my regular garbage in the kitchen.

when he figures out what happened to his clothes, we'll have a nice little "talk". how he deals with that will define what's the outcome of my bag of laundry. if he's a good boy, he'll get a bag of clothes. if he can't manage that, perhaps the homeless people in the area would like a bag of clean, trailer-park chic clothes.

and speaking of people doing really silly things, i just read this blog entry lamenting a kde deployment. really, really pathetic showing, guy. while i totally understand the desire to have the software you write used by people, this is about as inappropriate a response as can be imagined. and yes, if a kde person wrote the same thing about a gnome installation i'd also call it bad form; in fact, i'd probably chat with them personally to see if they might not come to their senses. perhaps someone in the gnome project will take up the call and have a chat with murray. based on past interaction i've with gnome devs (some of whom i'd even call friends), i know the gnome project is better than this.