Planet Fellowship

Series: Getting things done

Isabel Drost's blog | 07:07, Friday, 30 July 2010

Probably not too unusual for people working on free software mostly (though no longer exclusively) in their spare time, the number of items that appear in my private calendar have increased steadily in the past months and years:

• Every three months I am organising the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin.
• I have been asked (and accepted the offer) to publish articles on Hadoop and Lucene in magazines.
• There are various conferences I attend - either as speaker or simply as participant: FOSDEM, Froscon, Apache Con NA, Devoxx, Chemnitzer Linuxtag - to name just a few.
• For Berlin Buzzwords I did get quite a bit of time for organisation, still some issues leaked over to what others would call free time.
• I am mentoring one of Mahout’s GSoC students which is a lot of fun.
• At least I try to spend as much time as possible on the Mahout mailing lists keeping up with what is developed and discussed there.

There are various techniques to cope with increased work load and still find enough time to relax. Some of them involve simply remembering what to do at the right time, some involve prioritization, others deal with measuring and planning what to do. In this tiny series I’ll explain the techniques I employ - or at least try to - in the hope of getting your feedback, and comments on how to improve the system. After all, the most important task is to constantly improve ones own processes.

Question to the KDE multimedia meeting participants

Mario Fux | 22:11, Thursday, 29 July 2010

If you were a participant of this years KDE multimedia meeting I would be interested in your opinion:

As you probably know this was the second kde meeting I organized and I plan to do another one next year (btw I got today the OK of a certain person and I think this means the topic for next years meeting is set but more about this in the following weeks). What do you think if I would earn some money with the organization of the next meeting.

As I like or love to organize such meetings and I doesn’t seem to be that bad in this I’d like to organize another and another and … You see ;-). But even if it’s a lot of fun it’s also work and time consuming work nonetheless. For the meeting this year it took a good month of time to organize everything (incl. the meeting time). The whole amout of time is or was distributed over half a year.

And the other thing is that I need to eat (;-), pay the bills and as I’m moving to my girlfriend and my studies end in the next year or two a family is not that far away. And that’s another reason I’d like to professionalize the meeting, make a conference/sprint out of it. An annual one. And don’t missunderstand me: I’d don’t want to become rich on the shoulders of kde developers and/or the KDE e.V. The contrary I starting to plan and search for sponsors much earlier this time to decrease the amount of money the e.V. "needs" to sponsor.

Oh and if or when you’re waiting for my next "kde work day" blog. It’s in the making but as I’m moving (the whole room is full of stuff to package some stuff delays a bit. And there’s anoher idea floating in my mind. Something somehow kde related but not code related and something for the kids and probably something to play and something about Konqi the dragon but …

Oh and I’ll do something like (yes, I like the word "something" a qt and kde course in my local linux user group… Oh and this is the last oh: I’ll do an english course in the next semester to meliorate my english grammar. Hopefully to your pleasure as well ;-).

Article about EUPL in Linux Magazine

Matija "hook" Šuklje (articles) | 15:40, Thursday, 29 July 2010

Linux Magazine issue 118 has just been published and in it my article License That! The European Union can show off with its own free, open source license. [PDF].

It is a short article about EUPL. This is an OSI- and FSF-approved license which was written by and for the EU and is equally legally valid in all EU language versions. Not only does it tackle legal problems of FOSS very elegantly and in a short and understandable way^[1], but is the first ever free license to be written by an international government body.

Maybe one day we will be able to agree on a global (or at least WIPO-wide) public license, which would be valid the same in all languages and in all jurisdictions.

This is my 2^nd article for Linux Magazine and I can say that writing for them is quite a treat.

---

[1] It really is very easily understandable and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the basics of free software.
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Back in time (2)

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 08:29, Thursday, 29 July 2010

Different kind of back-in-time post, this time more like Marty McFly. I started Akregator (Kubuntu 10.4 installation) to reduce the amount of planet-surfing I do, and it comes up with a bunch of pre-configured feeds. One of them is Akregator News. It’s a fascinating time machine. I guess it’s in the default configuration and just never got changed, since it still points to the SourceForge pages. News articles about Qt 3.2, KDE 3.4 (remember that PIM skipped one minor then?). News stopped then and it moved to the blog, which culminated with KDE3-to-4 build instructions in december 2005. My. Have we been in KDE4-land (the long winding road to 4.0 and thereafter) for four and a half years already?

Pictures from the GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague (July 2010)

Brian Gough's Notes | 16:00, Wednesday, 28 July 2010

The European GNU Hackers meeting took place this weekend in the Hague. Two days of talks about GNU projects, nearly 50 hackers, prodigiuous amounts of coffee, and exotic food. All followed by two days of coding for those who stayed on Monday and Tuesday.

Thanks to Andy Wingo of GNU Guile for organising it (and having the supernatural ability to walk into a restaurant and get a table for 40 people) and the Revelation Hackspace of Den Haag for the great venue.

Are you working on GNU software or related projects, like gNewSense, and want to come to future meetings? News about GNU meetings is posted on the GHM rss feed and syndicated on Planet GNU.

Check out Neal Walfield’s blog for the “official” group photo.

MySQL connectors and the GPLv3

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 14:50, Wednesday, 28 July 2010

[ Just a repeat, but useful for upstreams and downstreams and people building modern apps using MySQL's connector libraries and other components that need GPLv3 ] Via David Ayers, I read that the GPLv3 has been added to the FOSS License Exception on the MySQL website (disregard the "Updated" date at the top of that page, this is fairly recent). This means that the GPLv2 licensed library may be combined with GPLv3 code, leaving the combined work as a whole under the terms of the GPLv3, while only the terms of the GPLv2 apply to the client libraries.

Some things to note if you read that exception page closely: "GPL" there means "GPLv2" except in the table of FOSS licenses, where it means GPLv3. Clause 2b means "this exception applies if no other part of the work forces you to use GPLv2". Clause 2d adds additional source distribution requirements beyond what you’d have to do otherwise. The page also still refers to Sun, so it needs another update anyway, one which might get a good going-over by Oracle’s lawyers.

KDE is a bunch of guitarists

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 07:05, Wednesday, 28 July 2010

Q: How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: Seven. One to change the lightbulb and six to stand around and go "yeah, I can do that."

That’s one of my favorite guitarist jokes — I play badly enough that I know most of the time I can’t do that, but hey. While the crux of the joke is that those saying they can, aren’t really up-to-snuff, I’ve been going "yeah, we can do that" a lot this week. Where "we" is various KDE applications or technologies. Perhaps they need a little more promo?

First there was this Ars Technica article on Terminator, to which the first comment was "yeah, Konsole can do that" (for years already, at that). And of course emacs, screen, and plenty of others. Makes me think of the way I use Konsole tabs, though. I tend to have one tab per thing-I’m-doing open, all in different directories; for programming projects I tend to have a source-editing and a compilation tab open. Editing means vi, unless I know I’m going to be at it all day, then there’s a Konsole tab from which I run Kate.

Oddly, I never use the window splitting feature; instead I rely on quick tab switching with alt-arrows and the activity indicators in the tabs themselves. I wonder if that’s something to add to the Konsole Userbase page, describing different ways of using Konsole efficiently? A collection of best practices, if you will, or suggested possible workflows with Konsole. That’s a useful addition to the handbook, I think.

Later — might have been via Glyn Moody’s endless twitter stream — I ran into Matt Zimmerman’s "Embracing the Web". Another "wait, what? we do that." To some extent, KDE’s project Silk aims to do just that. First-class web-apps on the desktop? Midgard does that, too with its deployment framework thingy (Henri may correct my pronounciation here). OwnCloud might fill the management gap, and GHNS (Get Hot New Stuff) brings things from the web to the desktop. The other direction, I’m not so sure of.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what Matt is after, though. A bigger ecosystem of interoperable web applications (not just services) on a Free Software model (which implies license choices so that cooperation is fostered)? Sure, sign me up — mind that a combination of Quanta Plus (once ported to KDE4) and Silk is probably an awesome development platform and the pervasive support for HTML markup and Javascript in Plasma makes development of web-like applications locally a piece of cake.

Aloha and the art of semantic web content

Henri Bergius (Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software) | 19:07, Tuesday, 27 July 2010

To bring CMS editing to the next level, the IKS project is working on a semantic HTML5 editor. This week we had a hackathon in Helsinki focusing on implementing our ideas with the Aloha Editor. In addition to enjoying the hot summer weather here, we accomplished quite a bit and in the end were able to present the whole pipeline of:

• Loading content from Midgard CMS to Aloha Editor
• Annotating our content with Google-compatible Person RDFa elements
• Saving the content back to Midgard
• ...and finally analysing the content with FISE to find more semantic information

The hackathon participants included developers from Nemein, Gentics, Infigo, Salzburg Research and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence. Some screenshots:

Editing content with Aloha in Midgard

Annotating persons with the Aloha RDFa plugin

RDFa annotation created with the semantic editor

Additional semantic information suggested by FISE

All the relevant code can be found from GitHub (see also the FISE Midgard integration).

Telepathy File Transfer in Konqueror

Dr. Danz's blog (Just another FSFE Fellowship Blogs weblog) | 18:27, Tuesday, 27 July 2010

I wanted to write a Service Menu to send files from Dolphin, but I needed a dynamically loaded menu with the names of my contacts and this is not possible using Service Menu.

So I wrote a konqueror popup menu plugin (KonqPopupMenuPlugin).

It doesn’t work in dolphin though, because the plugin isn’t loaded.
Anyone knows if there is a way to get konqueror plugins loaded in dolphin or if there is a better way to do this?

Anyway, there it is!

Telepathy File Transfer in KSnapshot

Dr. Danz's blog (Just another FSFE Fellowship Blogs weblog) | 21:17, Monday, 26 July 2010

This wasn’t in my project, but I thought it would be useful…
When I’m chatting with someone, I often need to send him screenshots, so the “standard procedure” is to hit printscreen (KSnapshot pops up), save the file, open Kopete, find contact, right click, send file, locate the file on my file system… That’s boring! What about a “Send to…” menu in KSnapshot?

Easy done using KTelepathy

GSoC Update: Telepathy File Transfer in Cantor

Dr. Danz's blog (Just another FSFE Fellowship Blogs weblog) | 21:15, Monday, 26 July 2010

A few updates about my GSoC:

• Most of the contact list work was moved in a library (libktelepathy in trunk/playground/network/). It is quite ugly at the moment, it will need a lot of cleaning
• File transfer jobs don’t depend on any qt/telepathy-qt4 patch, so they are now in libktelepathy. By the way all issues with file transfer and telepathy-qt4 are now fixed, but we decided that the kioslave is outside the goal of my project, so I abandoned it for the moment
• I added a “Send to…” menu in Cantor, the allows you to send your results to your contacts, not only images, but also latex formulas and animations!

Back in time

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 12:04, Monday, 26 July 2010

Back in time. That is, back (from vacation) in time (to avoid the long drizzly tedious soaking rains of today). I was off for a week, bicycling with the family in the Netherlands. We did not go camping this time, just to "trekkershutten", which I suppose can best be translated with "simple holiday home for a traveling family". The week was hot and sunny, which was just the right kind of weather for us. This year the kids had to ride their own bicycles — no more tow or kiddy seats! For both Mira and Amiel 25km per day is really the maximum they can handle. On 16" and 20" wheels that’s still a long ways to go. Amiel just pedals along fanatically, at a steady 9.5 km/h. So while it’s a real distance and endurance achievement for a 5 year old kid, mom and dad’s main challenge is cycling that slow all day.

So today was rain all day, and I’m glad we didn’t have to ride through that. Catching up on a week’s worth of email (#1: I really need to install Kontact on my n900; #2: expensive hotels in Amsterdam charge you 7EUR an hour for internet, while cheap hostels in the middle of the forest offer wifi for free) and trying to ignore all but the most urgent for now.

Frankencamera aims to make cameras open and programmable

Henri Bergius (Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software) | 11:05, Friday, 23 July 2010

Frankencamera, or fCam, the open source computational photography platform from Stanford's Camera 2.0 project was unleashed for the Nokia N900 this Wednesday. PhysOrg has a story outlining the significance of this:

Computational photography refers to the ways computers can extend the capabilities of digital imaging by combining multiple photographs taken with different camera settings to create an image that could not be taken in a single shot, or with an ordinary camera.

Some of these new ways of combining images can be done in Photoshop or another such program, but until now they could not be done inside the camera, Levoy said. That's because commercial cameras are closed to development by all but their manufacturers. Frankencamera, on the other hand, brings computational photography directly to the camera, by making the camera a programmable platform.

I installed fCamera and the HDR photo assistant from Maemo extras-devel yesterday, and the results (taking .DNG RAW images, automatically generating HDR pictures) seem quite impressive. Here is a quick example from our office. Sun is shining outside and the office is not lit:

For comparison, here is the same setting with the regular N900 camera application:

It will be interesting to see what developers will come up with, now that all these camera capabilities are available through an open API!

Recent performance improvements for Midgard 8.09

Henri Bergius (Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software) | 11:35, Thursday, 22 July 2010

Midgard 8.09 is an industrial CMS that is now in Long-Term Supported stage, with the community maintaining it until 2013. As we all know, performance is a feature, and with a CMS framework that has lived through many changes including transitions from PHP4 to 5.2 and from Classic Midgard era to the modern APIs, there is a lot to do.

For the next 8.09.10 release we decided to put quite a bit of efforts into performance tuning, with some excellent work done by Content Control to simplify ACL handling and cache navigation information. As you can see, the result is quite impressive:

What is left to be done is some work with the multilingual content database queries. After that we should be good to go with what is probably the fastest Midgard1 ever.

Michel S.

Intuitionistically Uncertain - Michel explores computing and assorted gadgetries | 09:21, Thursday, 22 July 2010

Your editor will confess that he still feels a certain childlike joy at the prospect of reflashing an expensive device that he depends on, possibly bricking it, then painfully restoring all of the settings and discovering all of the new bugs which have been added. It’s the sort of adrenaline experience that others, perhaps, seek through horror movies, bungee jumping, investing in equities, or PHP programming

Jonathan Corbet, The end of the road for the Nexus One, Linux Weekly News

3rd and 4th meeting of FSFE Fellowship group Slovenia

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 23:33, Wednesday, 21 July 2010

The 3^rd meeting our Fellowship group was on the 4^th of March and was mainly about organizing the DFD. You can read the full minutes (in Slovenian) on the wiki.

The next — 4^th — meeting of FSFE Fellowship group Slovenia took place on the 6^th of July and although there was only five of us present, it was pretty important.

1. Money Refund — we divided the money we got refunded for the DFD from the FSFE.
2. Structure of the FSFE & Fellowship — I explained what I learnt about the structure of the Fellowship and the FSFE and how they relate to each other to others. Since only those who donate to the FSFE are formally Fellows, strictly speaking most people on our mailing list and participating in our meetings aren't Fellows. But since our Fellowship mailing list, meetings and actions are open to anyone, that doesn't bother anyone really. The main thing is that stuff gets done.
3. Plans for the Near Future — The general vibe is that we would need to be more vocal about emerging privacy and IPR problems and for that that we need more effective communication channels with the outside world. There was a debate whether and how much we should concentrate on Windows/Apple tax and/or si2010.
4. Regular Meetings — We plan to have regular (probably monthly) meetings on a fixed date in the future. We will discuss the exact date after the summer vacations.
5. Censured SourceForge — Rok Papež explained that sf.net follows the US embargo and in general disables downloading of free software in certain countries. This of course goes against the basic ideas of free software. Afterwards a short debate arose on the mailing list as well [start of thread]
6. Digital Agenda, Internet Censorship in the EU — After that I explained a bit about what's happening in the EU concerning censorship (e.g. access to all internet search terms) and the Digital Agenda.
7. ACTA — A short introduction and promise to post short and informative links to the mailing list on what problem we face with ACTA.
8. Better Communication — We all felt that to achieve anything we need better means of communication with the outside world. One of the problems is that for (mainstream) media a wiki page and planet of blogs is not good enough. Apart from the guerilla approach — blog, microblog, mailing lists, social networks etc., a solution would be to make a website with its own domain name where we could post our press releases. We are also planning to cooperate even better with other similar-minded groups on activities that are of interest to both.

   There was also a debate whether local portals where citizens can submit suggestions to the government and to the EU could be of use. Milan Lazarevič commented that in theory the idea of participation via e-government is good, but from his experience in practice it's not worth the time. We'll still keep an eye on it though.

9. Misc. — general chitchat while sipping coffee and juice.

As always the full minutes (in Slovenian) are available on our Fellowship group's wiki page.

Side note: for the past few months the number of subscribers to our mailing list has pretty much stabilised itself to a little over 60.

hook out >> eating chocolate pudding and going to bed...
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A Free Software week in the Basque Country

Karsten Gerloff's blog (Free Software, policy, open standards and all the rest) | 18:57, Wednesday, 21 July 2010

With sights like the old town of San Sebastián and the Guggenheim museum at Bilbao, the Basque country in northern Spain is certainly worth a visit. But the reason that I and FSFE staffer Rainer Kersten spent a week there had nothing to do with old houses, art or pintxos. (Well, *almost* nothing to do with pintxos.) We went there to meet with people from the vibrant community of Free Software activists, to give talks and to build links between the local and the European level.

We came into town from RMLL at Bordeaux in Rainer’s 2CV, a car that by now is something of a minor celebrity in its own right. After settling in with the mayor of Baskooge at San Sebastián, the first stop was a meeting with the regional government on Tuesday in Vitoria.

This meeting was organised by the Technical Office for the Support of Free Software (SALE), which was recently set up by the government, and is run by a number of experienced Free Software people. The Basque government sent some rather high-level representatives, with two Directors General present at the meeting, as well as the director of EJIE, the publicly-owned company to which the government has outsourced its IT work.

Most of all, the government representatives were curious to hear what is being done with Free Software elsewhere in Europe. I presented some example cases, such as Munich, CommunesPlone, and the huge @ndared project in Andalusia. The Basque government just embarked on an effort to open up government data and make it available online. But they don’t yet have a strategy for using Free Software as a motor for regional economic development. This clearly was a new perspective for them, and I made an effort to get the point across that local companies prosper when the public sector moves to Free Software.

After the formal meeting and the obligatory three-hour lunch, we drove back to San Sebastián, arriving just in time for the first Fellowship meeting there. There were Free Software activists with impressive experience, such as a teacher who has succeeded in migrating her school to GNU/Linux.

On Wednesday I had a couple of interviews with a regional radio station and a newspaper, and then it was time to move the base camp to Bilbao.

After a live radio interview [mp3, sorry] there on Thursday, I gave a talk [20100715bienvenidos_al_mainstreambilbao.pdf] about the role of Free Software for regional businesses and the public sector in a technology park. It was really well attended, and we got great feedback. From there, we went directly on to a networking meeting with regional Free Software activists at Deusto University in Bilbao, where Txipi organises a yearly Free Software summer school. We talked about what people in the Basque community are doing, and how linking up with FSFE can help them become more effective.

After so much work, it was time to relax a bit with friends, and those who would soon become friends. We had a Fellowship meeting in Bilbao, where our crowd of fifteen or more people quickly overloaded each bar we went to. The meeting only wrapped up when the waiter took the table away from underneath our last caña.

After too few hours of sleep (again) it was Friday morning, and I headed to the airport for my flight home. It was a great week in a wonderful region. We met a lot of people who have been active for Free Software for a long time. We also came at an exciting point in time, when both the government and local businesses are wanting to emulate the successes that Free Software has brought elsewhere.

Zeitgeist does location: what did I do while in Brussels?

Henri Bergius (Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software) | 17:16, Wednesday, 21 July 2010

Zeitgeist, the desktop activity logging engine is now becoming geo-aware. From Seif Lotfy's blog:

It allows you to ask Zeitgeist stuff like

• “Get me the recent files I edited at university”
• “Who do I contact most when I am at School?”
• “Which pictures did I take in Brazil?”
• “Where was I when an Email came in?”
• “What files did I open during the conference?”

As I've been advocating since 2006, location is important for making applications smarter. While you might not remember where you stored some file, you probably remember where you were when working on it. Then Zeitgeist's location features, powered by GeoClue, will be able to get it for you.

This is especially cool since Zeitgeist is coming for Maemo as well. My laptop is quite mobile, but the N900 is even more so.

Linking software, or what's a derivative

Carlo Piana (Law is Freedom... and Freedom is all the rest) | 07:48, Tuesday, 20 July 2010

The Free Software Foundation Europe is the facilitator of a legal network comprising hundreds of experts from private practice, corporations, universities around the world. One of the Special interest groups has spent almost one year producing a document explaining how differently licensed software programs and libraries can and cannot mixed to make or not to make a derivative of each other.

The result is what we call "the linking document". It might not be perfect, but it's a valid platform for discussion around a topic that provide headache to many players in the field. To find a comparable discussion, albeit controversial and limited to the GNU licenses,  one should redress to the FSF's FAQ.

Some clarity at last.

read more

GNU GPLv3 added to the FOSS-License Exceptions of libmysql

David Ayers’ blog (Just another FSFE Fellowship Blogs weblog) | 10:32, Monday, 19 July 2010

I have a few hats on in the greater Free Software community which puts me a position where many folks approach me with their licensing issues.  One of those hats is the PR representative of the Open Source Experts Group [sic] of the Austrian chamber of commerce.  In that position I was approached by the APOSDLE project a few months ago, which implemented a learning on the job solution comprising many third party components.  Some of these components were licensed under Apache license, others under the GNU GPLv3 but there was one library that was causing licensing issues due to incompatibility.  This of course was the MySQL client library.

This incompatibility is well known in the MySQL community.  The initial responses from the vendor included an offer to purchase the proprietary license.  Yet that offer doesn’t solve the issue.  The license may save the project from a compliance complaint from the current MySQL copyright holder.  Yet the project would still be in violation of the GNU GPLv3 terms of the other libraries.  This meant that the source of the project could not be published.  The MySQL copyright holder could not offer me any other viable options at that time, which lead to a pretty frustrating situation.

But few days ago I received a follow up mail from the MySQL copyright holders, that they have now added GNU GPLv3 to their FOSS License Exception. I congratulate them to this step.  Many projects licensed under the GNU GPLv2 have removed the users option to distribute the software under the terms of the future versions of the GNU GPL .  This logical contribution will allow many projects to use current software licensed under GPLv3 together with MySQL client library.

I can now announce that the source code of APOSDLE will go public in the upcoming weeks.  I would like to express my gratitude to all those involved, as I’m sure we were not the only ones who approached the MySQL copyright holders to achieve this state.

Apache Hadoop in Debian Squeeze

Isabel Drost's blog | 12:04, Saturday, 17 July 2010

After using Mandrake for quite a while after finishing my master’s thesis I started using GNU Debian Linux (back then in the version code-named Woody). Since I always had a GNU Debian on my private box as my main operating system - even installed it on my MacBook following the steps in the Debian Wiki.

As I am also an Apache Mahout committer, closely related to the Apache Hadoop project, I always found it kind of sad that there were no Hadoop packages in the official Debian repositories. I tried multiple times to find some time to get into Debian packaging myself, I learned what “debian/rules” is all about and discovered some of the intricacies of packaging Java based software. However I have to admit that I never was able to find enough time to really finish that task.

A few weeks before this year’s FOSDEM I learned on the Apache Hadoop as well as on the Debian Java lists that a guy called Thomas Koch was working on solving bug 535861 - ITP to package Hadoop. We met at FOSDEM where I tried to raise some attention in the audience for Thomas’ plans (back then he was in need for help with a few last missing pieces). In addition I invited him for Berlin Buzzwords to get in touch with other Hadoop developers and users for further input.

I am really happy that by now Hadoop has made it into the official Debian package repositories - as soon as Debian Squeeze
(currently at testing) gets released, installing Hadoop on your Debian box will be as easy as issuing apt-get install [Hadoop component you need]:
Debian package search.

If you want to speed up the process of Squeeze being released as stable version: Help fixing the remaining bugs in that distribution. There are various Debian Bug Squashing Parties being organised around the world. Next one in Berlin is on next Monday, the one for Munich is running this weekend.

The packages are based on the upstream Apache Hadoop distribution, being comparably new they are intended for development machines at the moment. If you are using Debian and want to work with Hadoop - this is a great opportunity to help making the packages more stable by simply using them and reporting your experiences back to the Debian community.

In addition Debian now also provides packages for Zookeeper as well as HBase - though the HBase version is not yet production ready as the HDFS-append patch is still missing.

To follow the general state and progress of these packages feel free to follow the packages pages for Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper respectively.

Thomas currently plans to work more closely with upstream e.g. to tidy up the chaos in the start-up scripts and other minor glitches. So watch out for further improvements.

In addition I just saw another interesting ITP in the Debian bugtracker: Wishlist: katta. I am sure there are quite a few others as well.

Apache Lunch in Portugal

Isabel Drost's blog | 13:37, Thursday, 15 July 2010

Just read on the Apache community mailing list that inspired by our Apache Dinner Berlin people in Porto are organising an Apache Lunch event. As with the dinner here in Berlin, anyone who is interested in Apache is welcome to join - no need to be a committer or even ASF member

If you are living close to Porto, or always wanted to visit the city - after all it’s a very beautiful place, there is a beach close by, there are many tasty restaurants - don’t hesitate to get in touch with the organisers:

My xmpp is: fdmanana@gmail.com. Feel free to add me.

People interested in coming, let us known your availability during the 2
first weeks of August.

So, if you are interested in Apache head over to Filipe - I’d love to be there, however my summer vacation ended one week ago. Wish you guys a lot of fun.

Michel S.

Intuitionistically Uncertain - Michel explores computing and assorted gadgetries | 01:59, Thursday, 15 July 2010

The downside of Apple’s iPod/iPhone being so popular is that so many podcasts only publish iTunes links, instead of the more standard RSS/Atom feeds. And I know of OS X and Windows users who detest iTunes — imagine how Unix users feel!

Well, the feeds are still there, but hidden from plain sight — turns out, though, that if you pretend to be iTunes, you can actually trick the iTMS server into giving you the raw data. And with Python 2.6′s built-in support for Apple’s property lists, extracting the feed is a trivial matter.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import plistlib
import urllib2
import sys

ITUNES_VER = '7.4.1'

USER_AGENT = 'iTunes/' + ITUNES_VER

def get_props(url):
    request = urllib2.Request(url)
    request.add_header('User-Agent', USER_AGENT)
    response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    return plistlib.readPlistFromString(response.read())

def get_feed(url):
    next_url = get_props(url)['action']['url']
    props = get_props(next_url)
    return props['items'][0]['feedURL']

if __name__ == '__main__':
    for url in sys.argv[1:]:
        print get_feed(url)

KDE work day 1 - xml and nepomuk

Mario Fux | 14:09, Wednesday, 14 July 2010

I’m sitting in the train from Zurich to Burgdorf (Switzerland) and want to report, dear reader, about my first week of KDE (or atm qt) development. It was not really as I planned it, I did not work a whole day on qt and kde, but several hours during the week.

As I told you last week my first week was about an xml indenter. Some years ago when I started to track routes for OpenStreetMap.org my Garmin GPS device spat out bad formatted xml (GPX) files. Bad means here that all of the content was on one line and as I sometimes wanted to extract single tracks me and the dear editor (Kwrite or Kate) had some problems to read and understand it. So then I wished there was a simple possibility to indent and format this piece of … I’m sure there are tools for this and probably I would have found them quite fast but as I didn’t search that much … Now in the last weeks when I played with QtXml and the dom API i stumbled over a simple function which did exactly what I wanted.

And so last week on my train home (other track I took out my laptop and decided to write this little program to solve my indention problem. 50 lines and 15 minutes later it worked. You can download it here if it’s of any use for you. It takes two arguments (input file and output file name) and a third optional one (number of indention spaces) and is of cource a command line tool. And don’t forget: I’m no code peat - at least not yet.

The other project was about a Wikipedia reader or Wikipedia viewer. Almost the same circumstances here. Some weeks or a year ago I already played a bit with Qts WebView component (QtWebkit). It was amazing how easy it was to write a webbrowser ;-). So last Friday on the train (which got broken after ten minutes what gave me more time to hack (btw it was the same track as this one (and yes I like nesting ;-)) to my girlfriend I did it.

It was amazing for me how easy it was and how good the Qt documentation is. After something like an hour there was it. A simple Wikipedia reader where you just have to write the word or concept you want to search for and it shows you the corresponding Wikipedia article (hopefully even in the right language). If you are a KDE or Qt developer you’ll say how simple this thing is but for me it was a great experience.

As I did not have an internet connection on the train I could not try it out. But the internet connection where my girlfriend (and soon I live does not yet work for my Debian laptop. So on the other day I thought to myself: let’s try to “port” the Wikipedia reader to her Windows notebook which has internet access. “Port” is in quotation marks because it was not really porting. I download the Qt SDK for Windows (Open Source version of course) which was actually the hardest part of “porting” (not because of Qt or Nokia but because of the lame internet connection).

Two hours later I just copied my wikiviewer folder to a usb stick, plugged it into the Windows laptop, imported the .pro file (waited a moment and yes, I don’t like Windows Vista and yes my girlfriend will get a GNU/Linux installation and yes I asked her ;-), pushed the “Run” button and it worked. It just worked. Sorry, I know. It may be normal for you but I’m amazed.

During the last week and days I did a lot of reading. Beneath the reading of blog posts on planet.kde.org and the lurking and reading of 10 to 20 kde mailing lists I read a lot about RDF (Resource Description Framework), LinkedData, RDFs (RDF schema), OWL, etc. Almost all of the stuff where presentation slides of a course I took a year or so ago at the university about the semantic web. After some reading I wanted myself to visualize some ontologies (the meaning, semantics or vocabulary). And I (re)found the W3C RDF validator which outputs the graphs in different graphics formats.

After downloading the Nepomuk (and here we are finally ontologies in the RDF/XML format I saw that the validator takes URLs as input as well (anyway I want to work with the RDF/XML version as well). Interestingly three of the ontologies failed to produce a graph (namely the NIE core, the NID3 and the PIMO ontology). I don’t know where the failure is but there could be something wrong.

This blog post gets longer and longer and there is still some stuff remaining (hope somebody likes to read it anyway). During the playing with the Wikipedia reader I recognized that already with such small things and few lines of code a version control system could be handy. So next week I want to read about Git, work and play with it and probably set up a git server (for the Strafful project I need it anyway).

And yes (or no) Strafful will be open source and free software but I won’t publish it before it has some basic features and some things I want it to have. The earliest you’ll see a 1.0 version is January 2011. And no (or yes It will be about RDF, Nepomuk, the semantic web and the end of Google ;-).

So next week you’ll read here about Git, hopefully about my setup of a KDE development environment (and yes, we need something that easy like the Qt SDK for KDE: choose the platform, download a package and begin to develop. Qt has a great development platform but KDE’s is even better) and probably I’ll tell you what “Strafful”, the name, actually means.

My plan is still that I dedicate a whole weekday for Qt/KDE development, more or less half of it reading documenation (at least at the beginning) and half of it developing. And at most 30 to 45 minutes to write a blog post about it. Hope to be shorter next time and for something somehow unrelated: do you know www.TED.com and the TEDtalks? Great page, visit it!

BTW: Now I miss a feature in Blogilo: checking if all the links work.

A bit of Postfix and Darcs

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 08:56, Wednesday, 14 July 2010

Somehow the official Postfix documentation continues to be intractable for me. The whole reason for getting Postfix up and running on my local machine was because of Darcs. Darcs — one of many distributed version control systems, but possibly the only one written in Haskell and intrusively interactive — likes to send patches by email. It just uses the local MTA for that, so I needed one. Setup is slightly complicated by the situation my home workstation is in: while I have a domain I’d like to use for email going out of my house, I’m on a DSL line with outgoing SMTP blocked except to the DSL provider, and my local usernames don’t match the email addresses I’ve created.

So, basically I want to send all locally submitted mail to my DSL provider’s SMTP server, with the right domain attached, without my hostname, and I want to re-map my usernames. I didn’t manage to distill this from the actual Postfix Standard Configuration Examples, but Ralf Hildebrandt’s configuration examples do have the right stuff. The only change I had to make was for the username re-writing; instead of virtual_maps (since superceded by virtual_alias_maps), I used canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/canonical, which maps user and user@localhost and user@domain to email.address@domain (3 lines per user login).

Now darcs send does what it should. I can also point KMail to use local sendmail and that gets the job done, too. KMail is actually simpler, because it sets up the outgoing From and envelope addresses based on the identity in use, so it doesn’t need the rewriting at all.

I’m starting to find Darcs a little bit interesting; the idea that every patch is a branch based on what it actually needs is intriguing. Or to put it in other words: if I have one patch to file A and one patch to file B then I’ve created two branches; there’s no need to consider the two together. If I make another patch to B then that branch grows longer. My working copy displays all the changes from the branches I’m working with, that is the merge of all my branches. If I were to add a patch that changes both file A and B then the two branches merge there. Darcs uses tags to slam a line across all the files and all the patches and to merge all the open branches, which prevents a gigantic proliferation of possible branches.

The upshot is that when I do ‘darcs send’ I have the option of sending any branches I have open — and any sensible sequence of patches within the branch — so that I can very carefully upstream patches while keeping them all visible locally.

What I really miss in Darcs is some of the Mercurial workflow: seeing a graphical representation of the current branching structure (hg glog) and being able to quickly merge multiple commits into a single one for upstreaming (hg qfold). On the other hand, the darcs behavior on commit (darcs record) to ask you about every changed hunk is really nice (sometimes, at least) because it helps avoid accidentally committing debug bits or whitespace changes that you didn’t intend to do.

[[ ObKDE: and somewhere underlying this all is my need to get a Python application to talk to KWallet; why oh why didn't I have enough lunches with Richard Dale in Finland? ]]

Now available in English: AEIOU mnemonic for Open Standards

Matthias Kirschner (I love it here) | 15:02, Tuesday, 13 July 2010

In 2008, I first wrote about Reinhard’s idea to remember the criteria of an Open Standard with the help of an mnemonic. When we used the the German mnemonic in our latest German PR about market standards, Kai Eckert, picked it up mnemonic. After I contacted him, I send that for proofreading to our English editor team and now we have can use it for press releases on Open Standards as well:

• applicable (without restrictions): free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model,
• existing (implementations): available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.
• independent (of a single vendor): managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties
• open (specification): subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties
• untainted (with dependencies to closed standards): without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves

Hope it will also help you to remember what makes an Open Standard. Thanks to Reinhard, Kai, and the editor team!

—
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

Vive la liberté: RMLL in Bordeaux

Karsten Gerloff's blog (Free Software, policy, open standards and all the rest) | 14:04, Monday, 12 July 2010

I spent the weekend at the Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre in Bordeaux, France.This is the biggest Free Software meeting in France, and the community is tremendously active. There are lots of groups doing great work, from April via Aful and user-operated ISP French Data Network, and I met many impressive, smart and dedicated people.

Benjamin Bayart, the president of French Data Network, asked me an interesting question: Outside France, are there any other user-operated ISPs in Europe? A quick poll of FSFE’s booth staff didn’t turn up any, so I’m passing the question on to you, the lazyweb. If you know other user-operated ISPs, please tell me in the comments.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t come earlier and attend the talks taking place during the week. But the public show of Free Software projects this weekend was right by the river, bringing in lots of people who just wanted to have a stroll. As is the custom with traditional French villages, it was very well organised and tightly run by a competent and respected village chief:

From here, I’m going on to the Basque country in Spain, where I’ll give a number of talks and we’ll have Fellowship meetings in San Sebastián and Bilbao. Hope to see you there!

Idea of her Majesty’s Treasury: Switch to Free Software

Matthias Kirschner (I love it here) | 10:35, Monday, 12 July 2010

What ideas does her Majesty’s Treasury follow in those days to reduce costs? First they asked 600000 people working for the government about that, got 60000 ideas out of it (that equals one idea per 10 people asked), processed them and put that into 31 proposals. Two of them deal with Free Sofware:

8. In terms of spending less - what about migrating the whole of government (the NHS, Education etc) from Microsoft products to Linux and open source software like Openoffice. (List 2)

28. Annul the government’s agreement with Microsoft to provide software and operating systems (OS) to government departments and switch to open source software and Linux based operating systems. This would reduce costs by: Reducing the need to update hardware in line with new Microsoft OS releases. Linux OS and open source software has a lower whole life cost and is less susceptible to viruses. Support a more diverse spectrum of the IT industry, instead of one corporation; generating additional UK tax revenue. (List 5)

Good they realise that Open Standards are a step in the right direction, but that in the long run you should switch to Free Software to have the control over your computing and your data. Beside explaining them the economical reasons for Free Software, do not forget explaining them the political and social issues involved, too.

—
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

Home from Akademy

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 12:16, Sunday, 11 July 2010

I snuck away from Akademy on Friday morning. My intention was to sign some legal documents (part of a resolution of the AGM of the KDE e.V.) and say good byes to all and sundry, but that got terribly sidetracked. The usual experience of walking into Demola is people saying “Hey, [ade], I need to talk to you.” I don’t imagine this is unique to me — there’s so much coordination that goes on at Akademy when you finally have every sub-project on hand to chat with. So I ended up with a long talk with Elias about truth in advertising, and then I tried to print and sign and scan the document at hand. Kaare, a guy I’d exhanged some banter during the day trip, wandered over. It turned out that Kaare is the Skanlite dude, so I took the opportunity to thank him for his work.

Then rushed goodbyes — I skipped the whole of floor 4 with the BoFs — and off to the bus. Milian, Niels, Richard and Lubos were on the same flight, and everyone who flew onwards from Helsinki to Amsterdam had their luggage left behind. So it was 9pm before I got home, sans backpack. Like Harri said, it’s not so bad on the way back. My luggage was finally delivered at home at quarter past eleven in the night (darkness!) in a violent thunderstorm.

So, yeah. Akademy rocked. The Mexican has pictures that give a good impression of the atmosphere there.

Michel S.

Intuitionistically Uncertain - Michel explores computing and assorted gadgetries | 11:45, Sunday, 11 July 2010

I used to dual-boot Moblin and Fedora on my old netbook — but when I had it replaced due to battery and SSD failures, I stopped doing it on the new netbook, instead exclusively booting Fedora, and relegating MeeGo to a USB stick with persistent overlay. Thankfully, MeeGo’s image creation tool (mic2) is derived from Fedora’s livecd-tools, so I can simply use the latter to burn the MeeGo image to USB with overlay, without messing with the image by hand.

(as an aside, the only way to flash an image to a partition, instead of wiping the entire disk, is using Fedora’s tool, and by extension MeeGo’s — but with the latter, only if one used the Fedora-derived command-line tool, mic-livecd-iso-to-disk instead of the recommended ones)

There are several reasons for this, in no particular order:

Storage

Moblin supports ext3 but not ext4; MeeGo adds btrfs to this mix but there’s still no ext4 support. I buy the rationale that ext4 is the SVN of file systems, and that we’ll eventually all migrate to btrfs anyway. But on the other hand, btrfs is not quite there yet — I switched back to ext4 after the SSD failure, when I realized that btrfsck does not yet handle bad sectors properly, unlike e2fsck. With other Linux distributions increasingly switching to ext4 — which can be easily migrated to btrfs later on — the trade-off (slight disk usage increase vs easy access to other Linux partitions) is surely in favour of supporting ext4.

Moblin/MeeGo also does not support LVM, which is used by default by Fedora’s installer, but this is a minor issue — someone deciding to use MeeGo and Fedora can just partition the disk without using LVM.

connman vs NetworkManager

I used to be agnostic as to how my network connections are configured — as long as it just works. This is why my new netbook is a Sony — because unlike other vendors (shame on you, especially, Dell) it does not use a Broadcom WLAN chip with a proprietary, badly-documented, buggy Linux driver (shame on you, Canonical, for helping develop it if only had Canonical put its considerable weight to getting specs and firmware released). Instead, it has a nice Atheros chip.

The same is true when it comes to the software stack. At the beginning I did not pay much attention to the connman vs NetworkManager controversy — prior to version 0.7, NetworkManager had its warts, and connman happened to work just fine on the home wireless networks I tried. This changed when I try connecting to a work network that uses 802.1X security. The MeeGo GUI does not support this, and the developers don’t consider this important at all. The command-line tool is badly documented — documentation is non-existent — and throw cryptic error messages. Makes one wish Java-style checked exception is more widely used; that way, at least developers have to *think* about the exception propagation, instead of just exposing them by neglect to the users.

GNOME 3.0, Fedora MeeGo stack

Fedora 13 already comes with a preview of GNOME 3.0′s shell, and work is in progress on having  MeeGo available. There are some annoying integration issues — the network-manager-netbook applet that integrates the Moblin/MeeGo desktop with NetworkManager is not as well supported as the default connman-based applet, and MeeGo’s window manager has some incompatible modifications that has not been merged back upstream. But, like NetworkManager’s Dan Williams, I believe that the way to improve the Linux desktop is to improve the existing tools that work across all sorts of devices, rather than reinventing them to solely target mobile devices, and in the process having to solve the same technical issues over and over again.

My GeoClue talk from aKademy 2010

Henri Bergius (Motorcycle Adventures and Free Software) | 14:04, Friday, 09 July 2010

aKademy 2010 was hosted in the sunny city of Tampere by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, an organization that I'm a steering group member of. In addition to helping a bit with the arrangements and organizing the Midgard Gathering there, I also gave a talk about GeoClue, the positioning framework for Linux desktops.

• Presentation slides (PDF)
• Video of my talk

We initially started the push for location-aware desktops around 2006, and now the efforts are finally starting to bear fruit. Both Zeitgeist and Nepomuk are looking at indexing documents based on where you accessed them, Telepathy can share your location with your friends, and hopefully soon also your desktop clock will switch timezones when you travel.

It is very cool that this development seems to be happening on both GNOME and KDE at a reasonably similar pace. GeoClue is also a service in MeeGo and I've been told another major mobile phone manufacturer uses it. Maybe soon Mac OS X will not be the only platform with location APIs built in?

Photo by Alexey Zakhlestin.

GOLEMs are better than “Intellectual Property” - Passing criticism on “IP”

Matthias Kirschner (I love it here) | 13:37, Friday, 09 July 2010

Have you ever heard someone saying “Intellectual Property is a dumb term, please do not use it” in the parliament? Well it happened in the German Bundestag: Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoeren said it during the internet enquote this week. Afterwards one of the other experts, Prof. Rainer Kuhlen supported him and added that collecting societies abuse this term “so they can get goods with licensing agreements and circumvent copyright law”. (I already wrote about that in German blog entry.)

I could now argue why I also dislike the term “Intellectual Property” (IP), and why the Free Software Foundation Europe encourages people use better terms. The good thing is, others already did that job. In 2003 Georg Greve wrote in his article “Fighting intellectual poverty - (Who owns and controls the information societies?)”:

:

The issue that many governmental delegations would prefer to not deal with at all are so-called “intellectual property rights” (IPR), a term primarily covering Patents, Copyright, Trademarks, but also business models, geographic locators and other things that people wish to denominate as such.

All of these are very different and usually unrelated areas of law with very different effects on economy, politics and society. Mixing them is not only counterproductive for qualified scientific dispute, the term also puts forward the notion of thoughts being property. What it could mean to possess a thought remains unclear to the sceptical mind.

However, all these do have one thing in common.

It is both their function and their purpose to establish limited monopolies on intellectual creativity. For the remainder of the document, “Intellectual Property Rights” (IPRs) will therefore be referred to by what they are and do as “Limited Intellectual Monopolies” (LIMs).

A bit later in 2004, Richard Stallman also wrote about that topic, in his article “Did You Say ‘Intellectual Property’? It’s a Seductive Mirage”:

It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely.

Richard’s alternative suggestions are:

“IMPs, for Imposed Monopoly Privileges, and GOLEMs, for Government-Originated Legally Enforced Monopolies. Some speak of “exclusive rights regimes”, but referring to restrictions as “rights” is doublethink too.”

We also have a petition “Towards a ‘World Intellectual Wealth Organisation’, which you can still sign if you agree with its message.

But the most important thing: Use appropriate terms. When you mean copyright, say copyright. When mean patents, say patents. When you want to talk about trademark, say trademarks. Do not limit your thinking by using a bad term like “Intellectual Property”! If you want a term to put those three together talk about there the neutral term “Limited Intellectual Monopolies” (LIMs), if you are a friend of funny acronyms just call them GOLEMs. There are way better than the bad term “intellectual property”.

LIMs exist to support society, we are working to keep it that way. Support us in our work dealing with GOLEMs: join the Fellowship of the ring FSFE.

—
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

GSoC Update: DBusTubes work!

Dr. Danz's blog (Just another FSFE Fellowship Blogs weblog) | 13:08, Friday, 09 July 2010

“D-Bus Tubes allow you to share a private D-Bus bus between two or more clients, proxied over Telepathy.” Basically this means that your client can create a dbus object and share its methods and signals with a client run by your contact (you can find more information here).

Here at Akademy in Tampere we fixed telepathy-qt4 and now Telepathy DBusTubes can be used in KDE!
You need to patch qt and you need to patch telepathy-qt4, but they do work!

We also set up a small demo application called KWhiteBoard, that is a shared white-board that allows you to draw very beautiful black and white drawings with your favorite remote friend. Well, the functionalities are quite limited at the moment, but it will get more soon!

If you want to try KWhiteBoard or just DBusTubes in your application you need to rebuild patched Qt and telepathy-qt4, but if you ping me on #telepathy-kde, (or if you are in tampere, I’ll be here until sunday morning) I’ll be happy to help you setting up everything!

Teddy in Portugal

Isabel Drost's blog | 20:32, Thursday, 08 July 2010

During the past two weeks my teddy was on vacation. As destination he chose to fly to Portugal. One day was reserved for a visit to Lisboa, the capital city of the country. He also took a few really nice pictures there:

On his return, he was no longer alone. Seems like he found a cute little portugese girl friend:



In addition he brought the following image. However he promised that he was not in California, but explained that the bridge actually does exist in Lisboa, being constructed by the same company according to the same blue prints that already were used for Golden Gate bridge:

Making mistakes in my talks

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 19:57, Wednesday, 07 July 2010

When I give a talk, I usually take people in the audience as examples. This is why people who know me usually sit two or three rows back if they possibly can help it, or all of a sudden they’re likely to be labeled the Evil Software Corp. or something worse. "You there, you’re BSD licensed, and over on this side we’re GPL, right?"

Usually these things work out OK, but when people end up associated with companies, I do make mistakes. So the Fedora guy (not rrix, Jakub, I think) with a red hat on in the audience was my example for companies that might be concerned about the effect of the GPLv3 on their ability to ship KDE as part of their embedded products. That’s utter bollocks, though. Red Hat have been one of the bigger GPLv3 supporters throughout the process, and they ship plenty of GPLv3 products. So scratch that example, should you watch the video. Next time I’ll pick someone with a different-coloured hat. other than that, I think the talk went pretty well.

Upcoming Conferences: Linux Kongress

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 17:38, Wednesday, 07 July 2010

Linux-Kongress 2010, Tue, Sep 21 to Fri, Sep 24 at Georg Simon Ohm University , Nürnberg, BAYERN, DE

[quote] Linux-Kongress is by far the most traditional Linux conferences with a focus on development and cutting edge topics. GUUG will organize in 2010 the 17th edition of this event, first started in 1994 in Heidelberg, Linux-Kongress made its trip through a variety of German cities, Netherlands and to the United Kingdom (LinuxConf Europe). Since its start 17 years ago Linux-Kongress has been evolved into the most important meeting for Linux experts and developers in Europe.

The conference focus is kernel and lower-level technologies and things like desktops don’t show up in the programme, but there’s a couple of intereresting bits for the creators of user-level technology, I think: performance tools and IP stack conversions. The former would be interesting to apply to KDE bits in general; the latter will probably just need to be done once at the right level (Qt) to have everyone switched.

Completely unrelated: There’s also a bunch of fairly nice words at the Register about OpenSUSE 11.3.

Akademy D+5

Adriaan de Groot (Bobulate) | 10:47, Wednesday, 07 July 2010

Strange how things jump from D-2 to D+5 with possibly no time at all for blogging. The conference days were of course full to the brim of just watching talks and helping the program along. While I do visible things like the welcome address and introducing speakers and waving this year’s whip about, the organizing team is making it all possible and probably much more truly busy. Sanna, Matti, Ilkka, Karen, Taru and the others from COSS, the Finnish Open Source Centre. Kenny for the videos and Claudia — Claudia knows everything.

[[ OK, I have explained the whip thing a bunch of times, but let's do it one more time for the record: at Akademy 2008 in Mechelen, I met Matthew Rosewarne for the first -- and, sadly, last -- time. He had spontaneously brought a bright pink riding crop which he presented to me as a gift just minutes before the opening of the conference. So I opened the conference with a whip in hand. Now, a riding crop -- firm nylon core, braided outer covering and a leather loop at the end which does the "snap" when hitting things -- is a useful device; you can point with it, herd people off the stage, and strike the table to attract everyone's attention. Unfortunately, striking the table will also fracture the nylon core, so you end up with a limp whip. Matthew went to Brussels to get me a new one, which firmly cemented the whip in my repertoire of things-to-do-at-Akademy. Matthew passed away in 2009. His whips directed the very first Desktop Summit, GCDS in Gran Canaria. At legal conferences I get questions from lawyers who have seen me active during KDE events: "where's your whip?" Well, whips are KDE things. I do try to keep that separate from my activities in the legal and licensing field, although I've since discovered that every lawyer harbours a deep dark secret talent. During the FOSS Nigeria conference in Kano this year, I bought a new whip in preparation for Akademy. It's a strip of twisted goat hide. Very simple and straightforward; depending on how you twist you end up with a slightly thicker handle or a flexible whip part. Dried, the strip hardens until it's functional. In Kano this kind of device is primarily used for driving donkeys and cows, not for directing conferences. Because it's more flexible, it is harder to point with and harder to aim with, but I'll practice. Shame Paul Adams (co-hosting the Masters of the Universe, well worth listening) isn't here to bear the brunt of that practice. ]]

Monday the KDE e.V. meeting went through in record time which left unexpected hacking time, which became things like introducing people to each other, then being summoned to a sauna and then it was midnight and still light out.

Tuesday I mostly tried to write email, guarded Claudia’s bottle of raspberry liqueur (for girls only), sat in on Alex Neundorf multi-platform build-farm BoF with Ubuntu ARM, SUSE x86, Solaris SPARC and Windows x86 in attendance (among others). There was a KDE e.V. BoF at six. The purpose of that session was to give people the opportunity to ask the e.V. board members about the association, or to discuss purposes and activities of the e.V., or to make suggestions on the inner workings. We got a fair bit of all of those things done, with both e.V. members (old and new) and non-members in attendance. The KDE e.V. website says some things about the association, but it’s necessary to repeat regularly as well. So:

KDE e.V. is the association that supports the KDE community by doing what the community needs when the community cannot effectively do that in itself. That includes legal things, like (say) server ownership which isn’t something that can be effectively left to individuals. The members of the association are representative of the entire KDE community, (although we’re developer-heavy — once more I suggest you listen to the KDEMU interview with Anne Wilson to find out how to contribute to the community in other ways). The board of the e.V. can represent the community in contracts and the like. The members show additional commitment to KDE by doing the support work — let’s call it secondary contribution, because it doesn’t directly advance the software, but makes it possible for the software to advance.

Every member of the KDE community is welcome to join the association, though the admittance procedure as described on the e.V. webpage. If you want to support the KDE community as a whole not with time and effort, then the individual supporting membership programme might be something for you (it is for Vincent).

After the BoF it was dinner, football, drinking and dancing and then it was a quarter to five and still light out.

As a consequence, I’ve chosen to stay at my hotel for a bit today in an effort to actually get some writing and hacking done. It’s almost four in the afternoon, so I should head out for breakfast and then over to Demola any time now.

How much is it open ? And how much is it free ?

Saint's Log | 11:36, Tuesday, 06 July 2010

For a company project I am working with both Alfresco and Liferay. You can download the community edition, and I am working on it. Extending this stuff is not easy, at least it’s not easy for me. Where’s the Fine manual ? Where can I find some docs indexed in a way that does not generate the answer “bananas” when I am looking for “apples”.

I tried some books from PACKT, I would not advice them.

And forget the supplied localizations. We are still recovering from laughs.

One doubt. Yes, I got it under LGPL, but with all those obstacles on changing it, how much are they free ?

I want to develop (for) KDE and I will!

Mario Fux | 20:48, Monday, 05 July 2010

From now on I want to dedicated at least one work day each week to develop and program. Of course not all the 24 hours but something between 8 and 9 hours.

It’s not the first time I start my kde code contribution but hopefully it will be the last time. This blog should be something like a diary for this experience. There were already some blogs some time ago here on the planet about people’s first experiences with kde development. But this blog won’t be a howto or step by step introduction but a blog with links and what I’ve done on this day and about what I plan for the next week.

And by this way probably my big project "Strafful" will become alive or gets at least a first 1.0 releason in something around half a year or a year from note. I’m taking notes about it, about a manifesto, about milestones, different widgets, different platforms, a lot of stuff but the first public release will be 1.0. But more during the next weeks and months.

Btw this won’t be, as I already told above, my first first experience with Qt and KDE. A year ago I already worked through (and btw I hope my english will get better during the next months as well Daniel Molketins Qt4-Book (german homepage here). A really nice start. And I’ve done some smaller experiments and little project with Qt and Co. Like a toponym detector for a computational linguistics exercise (together with a collegue and foma: a finite-state machine toolkit and library. And I’ve read several Qt tutorials and tutorials and articles on KDE’s great techbase pages.

So here is something like a teaser for the next blog of my KDE work day. As I’m doing some geo tracking for OpenStreetMap.org from time to time a problem appeared to me that my Garmin devices spits out horribly formatted GPX files. And as I worked with Qt dom xml stuff lately I’ll do a short xml formatter next time and a simple wikipedia reader. These are the plans for my first real KDE work day. Let’s see what the outcome will be.

My secret about the KDE multimedia meeting 2010

Mario Fux | 09:46, Friday, 02 July 2010

I’d like to tell you a secret of why in fact I organized the KDE multimedia meeting. It was completely egoistic. I just wanted stable versions of my preferred multimedia software. And the success is finally arriving. On the 31st of May Christoph Pfister released the long awaited 1.0 version of Kaffeine for KDE 4. Thx a lot for this. And k3b’s Michał Małek released the 2.0 stable version some days ago as well. Thx a lot!

But this was just an introduction and not really the main topic of this blog post. It’s about some statistics of the meeting. I did a questionnaire, which you can find here in pdf form. And 25 people completed it. The day before yesterday (when I started writing this blog post some weeks ago I put all the ratings, remarks and data into rkward (a KDE tool for statistics) but today they all disappeared :-(. I don’t want to blame rkward because it’s becoming a really great tool worth a look! Fortunately there were some plots but the rest was undiscoverable. Today I recollected the data in OpenOffice.org-Calc and here are the results of the Swiss jury (yes, I like the Eurovision Song Contest ;-).

The questionnaire consisted of a part about the person (sex, age, first time in Switzerland and group), a rating part and two last questions about the idea of another KDE group which could come to Randa and if they want to come back themselves. But first some general information about the meeting and the location.

We had 45 persons there which means developers, artists, organizers, bug fixers, etc. The house has a capacity of up to 100 people with something like 20 single rooms, 6 group bed rooms, 4 group rooms, one big group room under the roof, a chapel, two dining rooms, a club room, a chief office, 4 restrooms, a kitchen and some other infrastructural rooms. And there is a BBQ place outside surounded by a big green field.

Randa is located at approximately 1440 meters above sea level. We did a trip to Zermatt (1600 above sea level and 12 km away) walking back to Randa. And some of us even went up to the top of the Klein Matterhorn which is at 3883 meters above sea level.

From the 45 participants where 10 female and from the 25 questionnaire fillers were 6 female. In the picture below you see the age distribution.

We served almost 500 meals during the 5 days (thanks a lot to the cook Hadrien Eggs who was on holiday and cooked for us the whole week) and spent 15 EUR or 10 CHF for the food and drinks (excluding beer per person per day. The alcohol drinkers at the meeting (i don’t drink any) emptied 360 bottles of FreeBeer. The network helpers (thx Oliver Summermatter and Co) distributed several dozens of network cables and 6 or something wifi accesspoints.

We had more the 150 guest-nights in the house. And I hope (and think, because of the fresh mountain air most of the people slept well even tough the wooden floor of the old house was sometimes quite noisy (btw I slept in my families chalet nearby where the plasma meeting Tokamak3 happened ;-). But now back to the questionnaire and its results:

As 6 people are female who completed the questionnaire there must be 18 male people who completed it as well (one was missing ;-). Of the 25 people 11 were already in Switzerland and for 14 it was the first time. The average age was 29 years. The group distribution shows 8 people from amarok, 10 from the kdeedu team, 1 from the games team and the remaining 5 ticked off “multimedia general (other)”. Now to the rating questions where I always indicate the average rating (scale: 0 = not good, 1= could be better, 2 = good and 3 = very good).

1. Accommodation: Bedrooms: 2.32
2. Accommodation: Group and meeting rooms: 2.417
3. Location (house) in general: 2.6
4. Location (area, geographically): 2.8
5. Food (Breakfast, lunch & dinner): 2.917
6. Transport/travelling to the meeting: 2.375
7. Infrastructure: Power: 2.28
8. Infrastructure: Network (cable): 2.318
9. Infrastructure: Network (wireless): 1.76
10. Information about the meeting beforehand: 2.36
11. Organization staff friendliness: 2.96
12. Organization staff competence: 3

So as you see most of the items are between “good” and “very good” except of the item about the wifi. As I heard and experienced wifi is always a bad point at conferences but nonetheless we’ll do better next year. And yes there’ll be probably a next years meeting. More information to come…

On the proposal and remarks site of the questionnaire we got some valuable information: “real coffee” was missing, we need a “more formal registration system” next year and the house was sometimes noisy where we can’t fix a lot unfortunately. In the last question I asked if the people know of another KDE group which should have a meeting in Randa and the answers where between “yes”, “no” and “Nepomuk (the same and all the others” ;-). All want to come back to Randa, nobody ticked off “no” ;-).

And to end this post and staying somehow in the row of all the other posts here on the planet: I’m not going to Akademy. But if everything worked out fine I’ve a proxy there for my vote at the KDE e.V. agm. And I’ll read and watch everything that happens over there so write and capture a lot!

Oh an btw: I begin to love Blogilo! What a nice piece of furniture …ah… software.

Kate syntax highlighting for Linux New Media articles

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 15:41, Thursday, 01 July 2010

Since I'm occasionally writing articles for Linux New Media and they have this bogus syntax they expect you to follow when writing articles, I decided to put an end to my suffering.

Most of the I use Kate for writing articles (I use Vim mainly for administration). Therefore the logical solution was to wrap those syntax rules into a highlighting file for Kate. Now I can finally make heads and tails out of the whole mess!

So, in case you write for any of their magazines^[1], you can now download my Kate syntax highlighting file and enjoy the goodness :]

BTW, if you want to write your own syntax highlighting for Kate, check out its online documentation and/or this article. Taking a peek at the already existing XML files in /usr/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ and ~/.kde4/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ might be a good idea as well

Someday I may even write the same highlighting for Vim.

hook out >> sipping tea and writing an article about FOSS solutions to cloud computing for Linux Magazine

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[1] Linux New Media are releasing a huge amount of GNU/Linux magazines all over the world. Amongst others: Linux Magazine, Linux Pro Magazine, EasyLinux, Linux User, Linux Technical Review and many others.
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