setting the record straight

yes, i am still alive.
no, i did not sleep all day yesterday (i just stayed at the residence where i could work in peace to prep for my remaining presentations)
no, i do not wear mascara. i was born naturally cute. ;)

this aKademy has been thus far much more productive in my opinion that last year's (very enjoyable) edition in Germany. this probably has a lot to do with the fact that we are running towards KDE4 with the throttle thrown wide open.

working group discussions have take place for scripting, IPC, kcontrol++, the new Oxygen art themes for KDE, next gen eye candy and probably more. we've been talking late into the night about these issues as well.

i've been here for 4 or 5 days and only been to the beach once and wandered into the heart of the old city to get lost for the evening once as well. a testament to the working attitude of this conference.

oh, and the presentations have been amazing as well.

malaga, first days

i arrived in beautiful malaga, spain a couple days ago and it's been a hectic pace since arriving.

before getting here i had a lay over in london's gatwick airport where i had a couple of hours to kill so i naturally settled in at a pub, comforted myself with pints of guinness and hacked on kicker. it was just as rainy and cool in london as it was in calgary, so it was a nice change to step off the plane into the beautiful mediteranian air where antonio was waiting to pick me up. that guy seriously rocks.

the university where the conference is being held is gorgeous:

unfortunately things were so busy (not to mention the network being available) for the first couple of days that i didn't even get a chance to check my email let alone blog. and it wasn't all bad ;) the med was a warm embrace and the hugs as we greeted each other, many of us for the first time since last year, were equally lugubrious.

in between the already intense technical and organizational discussions and work i have managed to get out on the town once or twice however. at the local mall where we picked up some previsions i managed to take the local equine for a ride:

the locals we not quite sure what to make of the scene of geeks taking pictures of a fellow hacker on the kiddie rides. oh well. that was really just a warm up for the evening that was to come. after a seaside dinner we went in search of drink and dance. instead, the first place we walked into was a brothel. upon entry we noticed the small bar seemed a bit empty. but soon we were joined by three chesty women who descended the stairs and into our lives. i suddenly realized what the sign "servicio" on the stairs with the little man and woman figures on it really meant. of course we finished beers before leaving.

and yes, we did we leave. honest.

yesterday was the e.V. meeting and i'm proud and horrified to say that i am now a member of the board. great and exciting things are brewing around the conference ...

kpresenter: cool even when broken

update: Boudewijn Rempt pointed out that the problem i had below was solvable by selecting the View -> Slide Master menu entry. apparently that text is on the slide master and you can only edit master slide elements from the master slide. makes sense, but it's a bit obtuse that there are items you can see but not edit? anyways:

i have a habit of running the devel version of koffice, and i also use kpresenter for pretty much all my presentation slides. this sometimes leads to funny occurances, but usually things go without a hitch.

currently, kpresenter has some oddnesses about it. one of which is that you can't actually select and edit the text at the bottom of the included "kde 3" template. so i thought to myself, "self, this is just a zipped document with a bunch of xml lurking inside, unzip it and fix it by hand!" now, the better approach would've been to fix kpresenter but i lack the time at the moment, so ... hacks it was!

i unzipped the files and there it was exploded and laying on the slab: mimetype, maindoc.xml, documentinfo.xml and pictures/. what to do now? well, i looked in maindoc.xml and rapidly decided that instead of trying to fix it, i'd just delete the offending object.

i zipped it back up and went into kspread to go back to editing. when i brought up the open file dialog there was maindoc.xml, which i hadn't yet deleted. and then i remember, or thought i remembered, reading about the ability for koffice apps to work on the unzipped files which makes for nice revision control possibilities. so, with great excitement (i'm easily excited by such things) i opened up maindoc.xml and lo! there was the document. i editted it, saved it, went back to my konsole session, re-zipped it up, opened the newly zipp'd .kpr file and lo! my changes were there.

ok, it's a small thing perhaps. but it made me smile.

i went to the gym and got my ass kicked by a girl

before i relate my ass kicking (it's not as dramatic as it sounds ... or is it?), i'd like to note that it's really cool when a project comes together. recently matt broadstone put up a plasma developer wiki. after getting asked for the n'th time what easyish tasks there were to tackle, i decided to put up a tasks page that listed various things and announced it on the plasma devel list. next thing i know people are taking up tasks and throwing them down. wow! kudos pedro, michael larouche and matt for their work.. and wilco grevin, though he's just more self motivated i think than anything ;)

so, on to the ass whoopery. on sunday t. took me to a gym. not just any gym, but the space gym. the name isn't a reference to extraterrestrial areas of the universe, but to the interior of a building as an interior decorator would refer to it. it's nestled in the south of calgary amongst warehouses and when approaching you get the distinct feeling of having walked into a sylvester stalone boxing movie: the small alley way with quaint hand welded rebar window bars and exposed brick exterior. inside is just as rustic. well, at first glance, anyways. and then you begin to notice the mirrors which are either free standing or in really cool frames. then the various art installations start to hit you, like the 10 foot tall lenin head in the small courtyard just outside one of the sets of doors they leave open.

we started with a warm up consisting of a yoga session. we did this in a large narrow room with hardwood floors, sunlight streaming in two large windows that are yellowed with age and mirrors propped up against one of the exposed brick walls. behind a sheet of wood is large hole in the wall that opens up into an art gallery. but i soon lost track of the details of the space and was into full burn mode as t. led the way. she's been doing yoga for years and is, to say the least, pretty friggin good at it. i'm not.

then we did some bicycling, weight machines, free weights and then finished off with a yoga warm-down, after which she demonstrated some of the martial arts stuff she does. she kicked ass. we're going to do this every weekend, so i may end up transforming from aaron the geekweenie to aaron the fit. or at least aaron the not-getting-his-ass-kicked-in-the-gym. we'll see.

i finished up my presentations for aKademy today, bought a power adapter for the laptop and grabbed some euros. laundry, dishes .. tomorrow it's the final house cleaning before i leave, sometime around 34 hours from now.

working on my interview skills

so someone pointed me to a transcript of a phone interview i did a week or so ago for linux mag. i wasn't aware they were going to put up a verbatim transcript of the interview. oh well. it sucks, but not much i can do about that now. would have been nice if they'd have spelled "Qt" correctly at least. i suppose i'll have to be sure to spell it out in future interviews.

so now i have something else to work on: my phone interview skills. *sigh*

language fetishists: it's not the semantics

java. ruby. python. c#. dylan. bah.

that last word isn't a language, but rather the expression of my disatisfaction with the language fetishists of the world who go on constantly about how cool their languages are. or how about "common language runtimes". oooh, aaaah!

i've worked with a number of languages in my career and it's true that there are some really great powerful languages (e.g. c++) and some really fun and consistent ones that make development quick (e.g. ruby) and ones that just suck (e.g. lisp or fortran).

(how long until i get my first "but lisp is amazing, you insensitive clod!" email? to be honest, even if i overlook the obsessive use of parenthesees, i just have a hard time thinking functionally the way lisp wants me to. it's doable, just odd.)

but it isn't the language at hand that has always been the biggest hurdle for me, it's been the way we still write code. it really hasn't changed much in the last, what, four decades? we open up text files in text editors and pound away at the keyboard. we've given writers tools like word processors, typesetting apps and even screnwriting programs that have freed them from pounding on typewriters, but have yet to really free ourselves from the prison we have invented for ourselves. and most of us are hardly aware of it, i think.

we happily continue to create header and implementation files, or come up with different ways of splitting up classes into manageable sizes (gotta love those 15k line files!). and let's not even get started on directory layouts.

but we must realize this sucks, because we've invested innordinate amounts of time building text editors that do funky syntax highlighting, block collapsing, bookmarking and more and then throw those inside complex environments which manage projects and pull apart the code symantically to give us code completion and the ability to jump around semantically such as by class.

and when we want to re-use code? or refactor large bodies of it? well, we search through the text files! so we've built source code search engines and tools to autogenerate api documentation and on and on and on ...

and what about revisioning and unit testing? yep. yet more external tools.

at what point do we step back and go: "wtf?! we keep making flat files, but we don't really want flat files. instead we keep trying to make them into relational databases and semantic webs because that's actually how we work." apparently we haven't reached that point.

now, before get the wrong idea: i'm not leading up to saying we should program visually. that's a load of crap suitable for only the most encapsulatable and simple of tasks. textual programming is fine. how we store and manage that text isn't.

so all you language fetishists and ide developers .... how about concentrating on the thing that really makes programming suck? build an environment that puts all the pieces of the code as i type it into a semantic web and shove it all into an indexed database somewhere.

revisioning, unit testing, build conformance, api documentation, code cross referencing (and thereby code completion), design recovery, searching, re-use and refactoring ... all of this would be so much easier, faster (as in fewer cpu cycles and fewer tools to set up and master) and natural if the data was stored the way we use it.

i have a dream, and in this dream there are no more flat files sitting on my hard disk full of code as if it were 1970 all over again. in this dream my unit tests are run when i commit code which happens when i save the file and mark it as "final" in my editor without me having to set up one darn thing. and in this dream it doesn't take a server to provide the horsepower needed for indexing and api documentation flows as a natural course of creating the code. and in this dream when i make a change to trunk/ porting it back to 3.4 and then porting it forward to 4.0 isn't a pain in the ass that takes up a bunch of my coding time.

</rant>

the universe is my jester

something i take for granted is how many just plain odd interactions with people i have. when someone new comes into my life they remind me about it because they generally aren't used to it. my reasoning is that the universe is my jester and she simply does her best to keep me amused. or confused. one or the other, i can never remember and they do rhyme, so ...

today it was the random woman who came up whilst i was examining the placard menu outside the new tubby dog (i'm not making that name up, it's really called "tubby dog"). peyton and mahlah were with me, so it wasn't like i was alone or anything. but she comes and says with a mischievous smile that tubby dog must be the king of junk food. to which i noted (sarcastically) that any meat product wrapped in bacon and then deep fried must be good for you. she laughed and then embarked upon an account of the years she spent in malaysia. people seem to feel the need to share these things with me.

yesterday it was the 60-something year old lady who randomly approached t. and i in the food court we grabbed lunch at and asked if we'd heard the "married couple" joke. we said we hadn't and she proceeded to tell us a most wonderful, if ever-so-slightly off-colour, joke. she then bid us adieu and left the mall (we watched to see who else she would hit up with her stand up comedy, but sadly she just had the one joke in her it seems)

the day before that it was the young street couple traveling to montreal together who sang t. and i a song they'd written about a friend who lost her breasts due to doing crystal meth, entitled "crytal meth took away her boobs".

after years of these little daily interactions with people it just becomes part of one's existence. as mahlah observed today, "yeah, eventually you just get used to it being part of what happens when you hang out with aaron." must be that "i may be insane, but i'm friendly!" aura i cast. *shrug*

trolltech schwag

so i got a box of trolltech goodies today. i'll be bringing them with me to shows and whenever i do speaking things. there's a box of pens, a dozen or so shirts and a stack of mouse pads. but i think i've discovered something: trolltech is actually a front for an intelligence agency (think: MI6 or the CIA). why do i say this? well, all the schwag looks innocent at first, but actually has another more fascinating (and occasionally sinister) purpose.

the mouse pads are round, thinish and have that perfect rigid-to-pliable ratio. this makes them perfect frisbees. in fact, perfectly deadly frisbees. peyton managed to fire one directly into mahlah's head this afternoon. they travel at great velocity and with cunning aim. obviously an assassin's device, or perhaps a way to take out the guards at the door when infiltrating the enemy hideout.

there are three types of pens. one is a basic if ergonomic ballpoint with a handy metal clip. but they are peculiarly weighted at the bottom so as to have a perfect bottom ballance. we have discovered they are actually throwing devices and have dubbed them "dart pens". yet more enemy hideout infiltration gear if i ever saw it!

next are the nicer silver pens with the mushy rubber ergogrips at the bottom. really nice to hold. and then you click them on and ... they light up in trolltech green! obviously a secret penlight for when you are rifling through papers in a dark office.

and then there are the USB pens. nuff said. nothing is more james bond than taking the false top off the very stylish pen to reveal a usb jack.

and finally the shirts. they look sweet. and we all know that rule #1 of being double-oh-seven-rific is looking your best.

spanish? yep!

after mentioning the spanish translation of the whatsthis tutorial, Pedro Suarez Casal spent some time and made the necessary changes and sent them in. i love this open source thing.

whatsthis tutorial update; open source archivists; ATi

Jaseon Lee sent in an update to the Adding WhatsThis Help To KDE Applications tutorial i wrote last year changing all the sections mentioning cvs with proper svn details. the tutorial has been translated into spanish which is cool, but now it is out of date due to the svn changes. perhaps someone who writes spanish could take a look at it. after aKademy i'll be moving it all to lyceum.

speaking of such things, lyceum is meant to address issues of information retention and transaction from those who create or obtain that information to those who lack it. it occurred to me the other day that another place where we have this same problem is on our mailing lists. there are a number of important discussions that languish afterwards in the mailing list archives. inevitably someone new (or with a short memory =) comes along and starts the conversation all over again. those who have the information tire of repeating themselves (and going through the same arguments over and over) and those who felt they weren't heard last time take up the topic with renewed vigor. what would be great is if there were archivists who kept track of these conversations and recorded them in a way that was meaningful and useful for those who came after. a wikipedia of KDE discussions, if you will. i don't expect the developers to do this: they are already too busy. i also don't know how we'd attract the people necessary to do the work: it's not very glamorous, though very valuable.

the kde commit digest is similarly valuable. Derek Kite recently announced that he was going to have to take a hiatus for personal reasons and apparently got a number of volunteers who stepped up to help. this is great! they've started to mobilize on the old kc-kde list (remember those?) which was a nice surprise to see when i read my email this morning. sometimes all it takes is asking for a hand =)

when i asked for people to help out with the Ohio Linux Fest, for instance, two people volunteered to help out on that same day so we now have booth bodies and even demo machines. very nice!

in ++cool news, ATi contacted the plasma project to get us on their beta program so we can be sure that plasma and kde4 kick ass with their hardware. this is yet another nice step in the right direction for the open source desktop when it comes to graphics capabilities. kudos to ATi.

akademy, callinng all ohioans, kat

the userconf and devconf schedules for akademy look rather interesting to say the least. should be a great four days of sharing.

it looks like i'm going to be in columbus, ohio at the beginning of october for the ohio linux fest and i'd like to set up a kde booth. i'll be speaking during the event and really don't feel like lugging too much crap with me. i will be bringing a kde banner and my laptop (though i'll need that for my presentation(s)), but we will need a couple more machines running kde 3.4 or better and a body or three to help run the booth during the day. so if you live in the area and are a kde fan interested in helping out with this, please drop me an email (aseigo at kde dot org).

in other news ... kat, which is a file system indexer and search tool, will be appearing in the next mandriva release as the featured search tool. the kat team will also be joining up with the tenor team to make the contextual linkage engine (CLE) project come to life. this is great as kat has a couple of brilliant and dedicated developers who find search interesting. one of them even claims to have an ego that eclipses my own. we'll see about that. ;)

in my digging through the innards of kat this week, and various bits of relevant kde technology like kfilemetainfo, it became apparent that while there are rough edges to kat it is evolving into a nice file system indexer and full text searcher. these are are two of the key ingredients needed for a desktop CLE. the kat team is currently reworking the scheduler and various other bits of the system, and i'm doing my best to convince them to look seriously at building on top of clucene for the full text side of things. then we just need to finish up the application facing APIs, provide the linkage data store (which is now on revision 4) that compliments the content store (aka "full text index", but also includes things like thumbnails) and mush the whole thing together into a coherent system.

obviously what with plasma, kicker for 3.5, speaking engagements and what not i've got just so much time for this ;) thankfully we've got scott (wheels) and the kat people around to do a lot of the heavy lifting. so if you were wondering why there was so little plasma movement from me this week, now you know.

summer rain

thought i'd share the view out my kitchen window onto the backyard from about 5 minutes ago. it's a beautiful, rainy summer day. the cool air, moisture and reminiscent-of-the-west-coast grayness makes me content.

thoughts on kiosk in kde4

• we need to change its name. this is the #1 comment i get from people who discover it's beauty because the name is usually what prevented them from trying it out sooner. people hate it when you hide cool stuff on them like that.


• we need to provide a way to make kiosk self documenting, preferably via KConfigXT files? i'm thinking we ought to extend the XML syntax to document kiosk related settings and effects.


• kiosktool v2. nuff said =)

are you going to be at aKademy and interested in taking kiosk to the next level? find me in malaga and let's talk. since becoming the kicker maintainer and doing more kiosk presentations lately i'm starting to build a healthy respect for the value of the system and how we need to improve it.

oh, and if you run into issues with kiosk, please communicate them. it seems people often just sit on their frustration. this is just a good way to ensure your frustration will be repeated ;)

working with artists

visual presentation is a very important aspect for software these days. and it can be very rewarding do sit in front of an application you've written that looks as amazing as it works. well, most of us aren't artists. fortunately we have more and more artists contributing to kde. but to get to "amazing" you usually need to go through several revisions with an artist and you need to communicate your needs clearly to the artist.

an example of this came up the other day. i was working with an artist the other day, Ali Honarvar (aka hon), along with Matt Broadstone (aka [mX]) for a bit of plasma related art for the new developer wiki. hon came up with a really cool bit of work, but it was too large and didn't scale down well. so he tweaked it down. the text in the image was too chromy and didn't fit in with the text on the plasma logo. so hon tweaked the text. then there was a "jaggy" in the image that just shouted out to me. i noted that plasma is about "smooth" and so the jaggy had to go. after discussing what i meant for a while, hon found a great solution. finally, there were some plasma blobs that just didn't look proper and hon fix that too.

it was an enjoyable and rewarding process and we came out with something truly kick ass IMHO. i didn't try and tell hon what to do, just what the requirements were. i trust hon to do a great job (which he did, of course) with that.

it's much like when a user says to me that she needs the application to do "feature X". as a software developer, i need to figure out what they really are asking for (which isn't always exactly the same as what the asked for in words) and find a way to meet that need. when it comes to art, i become the consumer and the artist the creator. it's an interesting reversal of roles at times =)

it's also a process that our artists and developers need to practice more often, in my opinion. the result will be more highly polished bits of art that we can all be proud of and which our users (which happens to include us too =) will be happy for.

supporting the commit digest

derek just put out a call for aid to help him keep the weekly kde svn digest up.

i wrote the kde kernel cousin, which tracked mailing list discussions rather than commit logs, for well over a year and so i can tell you from experience: it ain't easy to do on your own. it is enjoyable, rewarding and simple enough, however. it's just a time drain.

so please, if you've ever thought about helping out with kde in some way, here's an opportunity to ensure that a very valuable publication keeps firing on all pistons. give derek an email if you're interested.

and derek: you've got my respect and gratitude for your efforts. i owe you beer. come to calgary some time, we've got more pubs than nelson does ;)

end of night, konqueror thoughts

first, great article, kurt! very enjoyable read indeed.

i also just realized that in my blog from earlier i forgot to mention a conversation i had with a columbian kde developer who will be teaching a university comp sci course in which they will be doing practical work using kde libraries. he wants to have the 17 students work during the practical section (some 3-4 months) for 8-12 hours a week on projects that can be useful to kde. neat! he asked for some input and help finding projects for the students to work on. i couldn't be happier to do so, really. i'll report more on this when there is more to report on =)

tonight's event that i attended was really great. an amazing open discussion between a number of people who represented a number of different political ideologies in their thinking. democratic discourse at its best.

thought about konqueror some more on the way home. i started with a question: if we took konqueror and created three refined interfaces for: web browsing, file management and content browsing/viewing (think "universal doc viewer + content manager"), what technologies that we currently use would be rendered unecessary, unuseful or even unused?

kparts? no. dcop? no. xmlgui? no. kio? no. in fact, i couldn't think of any. it occured to me that it would actually require refining each of these and granting them a bit more power. up to now we've somewhat randomly used each of them in forming konqueror. to their credit, this actually resulted in something very useful and very powerful.

now imagine if we used these technologies with purpose and clarity. perhaps we may even end up with a proper doc viewer that embeds the view but also sports a nice "edit this document" button prominently in the now cleared up UI so you can switch from reading to editing quickly.

heck, imagine if we had a universal editor that used kparts that were designed around consistent sets of functionality. the user may only perceive half a dozen apps. i think this is where koffice was always trying to head, just as konqueror has been striving towards unversal viewing.

and perhaps that is what matthias was trying to suggest. of course, i'm not in his head so i don't know =) maybe he'll expound more in his next blog.

i still believe in single click however ;)

babies and bathwater

so today i wrote almost no code =( that's rather frustrating, because i enjoy writing code. and the fact that peyton is on his summer holidays and his mom is out of town until wednesday doesn't particularly help with the coding. but on the upside i got TONS done.

i had a conf call with ian geiser and his business partner jason about osdw. we figured out what ian would be speaking about and arranged to probably fit jason in as well to speak about agile development processes such as test driven design using kunittest.

we also discussed setting up a kdevelop meeting the day after osdw as three of the speakers are kdevelop hackers as well. i put out a couple of emails and linspire has offered the use of their offices for this, which is very nice of them, and i'm waiting on the travel arrangements for trolltech's developer days in san jose (which i'll be at) to be finalized to see if harald or roberto might also be able to join us.

i also gave a quick interview to linux magazine today for their web site, discussed an invitation to speek at a university in milan, sent back a speaker proposal in response to an invite to be a guest at the ohio linuxfest, worked out some details regarding my attening the trans pacific open source conference (more on that in a later blog, as there are some exciting possibilities for kde to come out of that), completed my final set of items to take care of for osdw with tom from linspire and discussed the possibility of visiting the netherlands in november for an nluug event right after the trolltech developer day in munich.

(if you live in any of the places i'll be and would like to meet up, let me know)

30 degree weather and parenting at the same time made it a full day. i did get to play with some qt4 painting stuff, however, which was enjoyable and i hope ultimately fruitful for plasma buttons.

i expect things to calm down quite a bit between now and aKademy though. partly because i don't think there is any way i can do any more travel this year beyond what came up today, but mostly because i'll simply be shutting myself in starting next week to finish up my presentations (using the new KDE3-themed kpresenter template dannya contributed to koffice!) and get some plasma work done so i'm ready for malaga.

right now (18:30 local time) peyton and i are going to listen to an author speak on sustainability and economics. in fact, peyton has his shoes and backpack on and is waiting for me at the door.

kisses.

ahoy manyoso!

i think adam made some sage remarks about the shift from kde3 to kde4 and how some view the possible changes with more concern than excitement. and, as adam pointed out, rightfully so: kde3 rocks and a lot of people have come to like how it rocks.

the gauntlet in front of us is to make kde4 better, not just different. to learn from kde3's strengths and its weaknesses. for instance, we can make a better file manager than we have right now. i happen to love konqueror for file management because it does a lot of things well; in particular i love it's remote capabilities (fish:// especially), it's thumbnailing and little things like spring loaded folders and dragging between tabs and split panes. but it also has its issues, such as when you view a file in an embedded viewer ...... how do you switch to edit edit? or with single click, how do you easily and reliably select an icon?

more on the latter point for a moment here as well: Matthias said that maybe single click wasn't such a hot idea. i disagree (and so did people like Raskin, btw). single click is a god send for the average user as it makes the interface more predictable and consistent (not a mish mash of single and double click) and is kinder on the hands. unfortunately, there is that one piece of the interface not designed well for single clicking: the file manager icon.

well, back in march when i was in germany at an appeal project meet up and brought this exact issue up ... with a proposed solution, no less. so, inspired by Matthias' "let's get rid of single click" concept i'm going to spend tomorrow doing up a live example of my proposed solution. then we can all play with it and see what we think.

and i think that's a healthy way to approach these changes. someone notes there's a problem somewhere. i don't want to chuck the baby out with the bathwater, but have to agree there's a problem. so let's try and fix it. more excitement, less fear, right manyoso? =)

oh, and speaking of appeal, we're actually going to unveil the website next week. there was some ball dropping in the last couple of months there, and i've spent some time fixing that today along with some of the others involved. since march appeal had a meet up and it looks like we just might have another one in november. but i want to let everyone see what we've been up to. it's actually kind of anticlimactic, but like many boring but interesting things, there's value to it. anyways.. that's for monday =)

indiana; driving

this is awesome news for kde: seems that linspire has managed to get desktop linux into pilot schools around indiana state in the u.s.a. this means a large number of students will get experience working with kde starting at the end of this month. and if all goes well, linspire (and therefore kde) could end up on some 300,000 student machines. wowzers!

last night i went to a backyard bbq slash birthday party with t. and peyton. turns out it was an hour's drive away. it also turns out that t. is as directionally challenged as i am, if not more so. this is a scary thing, especially when we're driving across the countryside. we made it to the town the party was in, but got lost in the town and ended up going to the wrong house numbered 220.

we knocked on the door and this mildly puzzled looking man came to the door and introduced himself and so i introduced myself and shook his hand. t. followed suit, thinking he must be a relative or something of the guy whose birthday it was. the guy was about to invite us in when he asked why we were there. we said for the party. more puzzled looks. eventually we figured it all out.

well, actually. eventually we phoned the house the party was at and someone came and got us. t.'s car has the word "unix" on the front license plate. the truck that came looking for us had "linux" on the front license plate. we were the geek patrol. the lost geek patrol.

upon arrival and introductions, the first thing that was said was, "i loved the thong." apparently the kde underwear blog had been passed around t.'s group of friends the day before. good times.

the party went well from there on out. well, until we attempted to navigate back home. we started out 5 minutes west of the road to calgary, but we accidently ended up half an hour east of it in short order. we figured this out when we started passing through towns with names like "blackie" that we didn't recognize. that and the rocky mountains being on the wrong side of the car.

moral of the story: don't let either of us navigate if we're driving somewhere together. drive, sure. navigate, no.

full-time kde: the company that's making it possible

so i've mentioned the fact that i've got a new gig a few times in my blog recently, but i've remained fairly cryptic about the details. well, i'm finally allowed to say something about it, and let me tell you it had been several long weeks while i sat on the news. so without further ado, my new sponsor is:

because of their generous support, i can now concentrate on kde development full-time. in particular i'll be working on plasma and kde community activities, though i'll probably hack on the odd thing here and there as usual. there is just no way how i can overstate how cool this is for me; it's the fulfullment of a dream i've held for a couple of years now.

i will remain hq'd in calgary but i will be travelling a bit more to attend more conferences and giving presentations on occassion about qt and trolltech. you'll also see references to trolltech in my .sig and what not.

all i can say is: it feels more than a bit surreal and even more than a bit amazing. trolltech rocks =)

the kde thong. and i don't mean footwear.

remember that dream i had about getting kde branded lingerie in the mail? well, today i got exactly one piece of mail in the post box. it was a large white envelope which contained a gold foil package. in the gold foil package was a small note that read:

it's all about Package Management

and a little gift:

talk about dream fulfillment. i wonder if t. likes red? ;-P

getting our world perspectives straight here

so Luis Villa, a prominent member of the GNOME project, wrote a blog entry today wondering why kde gets so much press attention. i'm not really going to address that issue (maybe some other time) but it did get me thinking about things..

first, Luis lists a bunch of metrics by which, in his mind, one can say thir project is popular. primarily it came down to listing companies interest in GNOME and something about deployments. then he says:

and they (KDE) have Linspire

that's it. that's his whole list. he did have Intel there but then scratched it out later. what i'm curious about is whether Luis and his fellow project members (and perhaps the general population?) are really so ignorant of KDE's partners that he could only list "Linspire"?

KDE works with and is invested in by the likes of Trolltech, SUSE/Novell and Mandriva. we also have received help from IBM, HP, Intel and other big names. if we start lining up the likes of NoMachine, Xandros and Linspire the list gets quite long. and when Luis says that they have "a thriving environment of small professional developers", which i'm sure they do, i immediately think of KDE's KDAB, Intevation, erfrakon, the OpenUsability folks, SourcExtreme, Staikos Computing, Danka, credativ, theKompany, myself and on and on. it's more than a little annoying to have a large and varied industry around KDE only to have it repeatedly dismissed as non-existent by those who ought to be our closest allies. this has to be frustrating not just for us within the project, but also for those who are in that group of KDE's supporting players.

we evidently need to do a better job of documenting and publicizing our industry involvement. here's a task: see if you can find the page that lists our sponsors on the kde project website. and when was the last time we talked about those people publicly?

edit: stephan binner reminded me to mention the KDE::Enterprise business directory. this is indeed a good starting point.

i also think it's interesting that when the city of Vienna moves to KDE and linux, the pr around it continuously fails to mention KDE. we need to somehow do a better job of letting the world know that these deployments are using our work.

but you know ... there's more to do here than compare schlong lengths as measured by industry involvement and what not. what we need to remember is that we shouldn't be clambering over each other to see who can beat the other; we're much better served these days by promoting our brands in a harmonious way. the real target is not each other but the 90%+ share of the desktop market currently held by microsoft windows. sometimes we waste far too much effort being concerned about comparing our couple of percent to their couple of percent.

this leads us to doing things like unnecessarily excluding each other from events and opportunities and even publicly trivializing each other as Luis did today. and then we turn around and expect, at times even demand, that our developers work together towards common standards and technologies. i have a very long blog about something that happened in this vein this past weekend that i'm sitting on at the moment, actually.

in any case, it seems that our combined public relations and development organs sometimes seem to be working to different ends and on different wavelengths here. that's not healthy because our developers, users and the general market watch and are influenced by these things. i can only help manage the kde end of these things along with the numerous others who do tremendously positive work for kde in these matters, and that's really just half the solution. it's up to GNOME to manage their end responsibly to provide the other half.

of course, maybe that's why KDE gets more mainstream attention.

holiday hacking

it was a long weekend, as it always is at the beginning of august in canada when we have our "civic holiday". the idea is that we're not supposed to work or something. so i did my best not to, being a good canuck and all. at least i didn't work on sunday.

instead i went out for brunch with a friend and then to a pot luck with t. and the p-man. the pot luck dinner was great, as it was really just a segue into what is a regular meet up of a group of people involved in a communications and social change workshop here in calgary. it was the first time t had been to this particular group, but she apparently really enjoyed it. which was terrific as i'm not really used to having another adult around who is also into these things. usually my lovers find my interests intriguing by alien. hooray for change.

i woke up at the usual time today, did some dishes and then cooked up a nice lunch for all and we ate in the back yard. afterwards i hacked on kicker's new add applet dialog. i improved the keyboard navigation so that you can actually use the keyboard with the dialog (hooray for the antimouse) and generally cleaned it up.

then i remembered njaard saying that the most annoying thing with that dialog was that when you added something it was hard to notice where it was added and that a little visual cue would be nice. so now when you add an element to the panel using the add applet dialog a little tip box appears and moves from the entry you selected in add applet dialog to the location on the panel where it appears.

this draws the eye quite nicely from the dialog to the applet. as canllaith said on irc, "it's almost like the applet itself is bouncing out of the add applet dialog and jumping onto kicker". and if the panel you are adding items to is hidden, it unhides long enough for you to see the applet.

i've got a few more tweaks to do to it yet, but i like the concept. so kudo to njaard for the inspiration, canllaith for her usual faithful beta testing and my sponsor for letting me spend my days fretting over these kinds of details.

heck, i even worked on lyceum on saturday.