mojo rising

i stepped back into design mode on a few fronts this last week, so my commits to CVS have been fewer. but i find i need to do that every so often. i've come across some non-trivial issues with the (to) $KDEHOME (and beyond!) data/settings backer-upper program, for instance. nothing unsolvable, but it's something i want to get right the first time around.

i've been exposed to a few non-KDE desktop cultures more than usual lately and i must say that KDE's user, advocate and contribute community is refreshingly uplifting, fun and non-insane. it's easy to take for granted, but it's one of the things that sucked me into KDE in the first place. to quoth the sage: i love you all, man.

in good (if personal) news, a person i became acquainted with while traveling earlier this year but who then subsequently disappeared into the email aether resurfaced. i'm happy about that because they are one of those people that i actually find interesting primarily for reasons other than geekhood. finding people is easy, finding interesting people is less so. i prefer not to lose track of that particular variety.

and speaking of finding people, last week's crapitude seems to have worn off. not only did i meet two new friends the other night, but i found out the identity of the woman who brought my cat back last weekend. apparently she started training as my lives-in-the-apartment-in-the-back scream-singing neighbour's replacement where she works (managing a small local chain of gellato & sandwich joints), since she's going to work as a counselor at a summer camp. once they discovered they lived in the same neighbourhood, they started talking about things and the cat delivery came up. the neighbour gave me the scoop while we were eating some amazingly good chocolate and banana muffins she baked this morning. that's the good life.

the two new friends ... well, we met at karaoke. they knew someone sitting at our metatable and so had joined us. one had an amazing voice (the other was so-so) and expressed her desire for this inflatable saxophone that was a prize that night for the trivia rounds (which oddly enough i'm not allowed to partake in) so when the sax was put on the block, i gave the sax-luster the answer to the question and sure enough she won the sax. about as corny as winning a teddy bear for a girl at a carnival, but seemingly as effective. after the show they didn't have any ideas on what to do but didn't want to pack up for the night, and so asked me for some input. if only P's aunt, whose place he had been sleeping over at last night as a special treat (they have a really great relationship =), hadn't dropped him off here at 8am (she had to work today) it would've been a perfect Friday/Saturday cross over.

and while the house work is over, i need to go grocery shopping today and have some work to complete tomorrow for presentations on monday. peyton and i have been making crafts today as he loves that stuff and it's within the limits of my cognitive/creative abilities right now. besides, it's too grey and chilly to go play outside today.

(k)ubuntu

so i finally buckled down and installed Kubuntu on a machine. the install was quick and painless. i then set about fidling with the KDE install.

there are some true gaffs, like how the tabbar is at the top of the konsole window. i really don't understand how anyone who actually uses a term app can come to the conclusion that the tabs are better at the top; i mean, where are your eyes 99% of the time in a term window? the bottom.

they have a number of themes in the Theme Manager, but i couldn't find one for the default theme they ship with and the other panels (style, colours, fonts, etc) are still in the tree view. they ought to be hidden IMHO

the kicker set up is pretty conventional with a few tweaks. reminded me how much i'm unhappy with the trash applet, though.

konqueror's set up could use some heavy tweaking, including (especially?) the about: page. in fact, i'd make the about: page a true starting destination (e.g. add a link there for adding software), theme it too match the KUbuntu website and make it the Home page.

kynaptic needs a lot of work. too much jargon, a toolbar that doesn't work like a KDE toolbar, i could find search or a settings dialog to do things like turn on Universe. the progress dialog is very basic, overly verbose when it comes to unnecessary information and worst of all it's modal. ug.

i haven't yet looked at the server side of it, but that's going to be a critical aspect.

regardless, i already know i need to find Riddell and have some discussions =)

marketing wise i think *buntu is doing well with the community but lacks a compelling message to people outside of "the Choir". their web sites are full of nice touchy feely and "how to get involved as an individual" information, but nothing that would grab the people i deal with on a daily basis. (i've tried it on them ;)

so yesterday whilst in a meeting i improvised and delivered A Story that reflects the genesis and current realities of *buntu for the business folk that were in attendance. eyes that were glazed lit up with interest and understanding.

microsoft and me

tonight i went to one of microsoft's north american tour stops where they attempt to "educate" the masses. they paid for a prime rib dinner for all that came (fortunately there were lots of great veggie dishes too) and then set to telling all about why Microsoft is catching up with Open Source.

i kid you not. they had an ex-Red Hat sales guy preaching how MS was doing as well as Open Source on some fronts. the presenter wanted an open format, discussion oriented presentation. and the audience gave him that. he and i had some very good discussions, in fact.

i wish Microsoft would understand the opportunities available to them if they only accepted the realities of the desktop and it's current direction (e.g. away from them). the presenter acknowledged this quietly afterwards, and i actually got more 'thank you for coming out's than did the presenter.

most interesting to me is who Microsoft is addressing. they talked about commercial open source and discounted Debian, Ubuntu and others several times throughout the presentation - by name! they also discussed exactly one desktop, and in detail: KDE. this is apparently who they see as their competition.

personally, i wish they'd understand that the future is their platform and ours, and that the best thing they could do would be to cooperate on open standards with us. imagine if MS started working with FreeDesktop.org. sure, a number of people would be upset. but even more would be happy, and we'd be able to deliver more to our users.

unfortunately, i fear this is a quaint and distant hope.

instead, MS seems set of maligning open source, and on the desktop KDE in particular. i suppose we're making them sweat. so be it.

the P-man's first 2 wheeler

dazed and confused

as proof of how "out of it" i've been this last week, a rather gorgeous woman brought one of my cats who had gone wandering through the neighbourhood back home. she knocked on my window, waved and smiled enthusiastically and told me how the cat had come to her place and was meowing to come in and how cute it was and that she was fairly sure it was my cat so she wanted to make sure it didn't get lost or hurt, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda....

and despite it being a sunny Saturday that would've made the perfect backdrop for a "thank-you" lunch on one of the restaurant patios in the neighbourhood with her .... i didn't even ask her name. just said thank you, that yes it was my cat, see you 'round the neighbourhood. i think even she expected more than that out of me.

sad, really.

at least i didn't insult her religious beliefs, which i somehow managed to do Friday night to some random girl who had decided to spend her evening hanging out with me. while one might suggest she should have had more sense than to ask me what i thought of the Pope (though having only met me earlier that day probably didn't offer her much preparation), i can't help thinking that if only i'd remained silent then and instead used my babbling wit on the feline-fetcher the weekend would've been more enjoyable.

i really oughtent waste the twitterpating wonders of Spring like that.

waking life

i spent a rather frustrating day working on a new server a client got in that they want to start buying in larger numbers to phase out the older machines they are using. currently they are using mostly dual Xeons with a gig or three of RAM and have ~4TB of disk. they are looking to replace them with dual and quad Opterons with 8-16GB of RAM and bringing their storage up to 12TB. unfortunately this first set of hardware was a bit of a dog. the BIOS has a bug that prevents proper loading of a 64-bit OS with more than 4GB of RAM; 32-bit OS? no problem. but that kind of defeats the purpose of investing in this sort of hardware. the disk arrays (2x5TB of usable storage) have a unique problem of the drivers not wanting to allow 64bit addressing limiting one to 2TB partitions. hopefully i can work around all these problems (and next time hopefully the client won't go off on a shopping spree without getting me to do some due diligence for them). oh well...

i'm looking at what it will take to kconfigize nearly all of KControl. this will be a useful step for a lot of reasons. not least among those reasons are making KDE even more sysadmin friendly as well as providing us with a catalog of settings that should make KDE4 a bit easier to do.

i'm working on a design for a new KDE app that will make it trivial to back up, reset and restore KDE settings and data. the idea is to have a file that a KDE app can install into a standard location, much like we do with KConfigXT files, that registers all its configuration files and bits of data for this application to help the user manage. i have been playing with XML files for this, but am beginning to come to the conclusion that tagged data simply isn't expressive enough, at least not without becoming clumsy.

settings such as found in kicker or kmail are non-trivial and at times reference other files. i've thought about extending KConfigXT (something we need to do for KDE4 anyways) but that's not enough, since not all the items that need to be referenced are in KConfig files. it seems that it may be easiest to support a very simple, small and limited macro/scripting language that is run through an interpreter embedded in the back up app to located the necessary resources. perhaps these little scriptlettes could be embedded in structured XML files, but i don't think i'm going to get away with just plain XML.

gah.

and i'm also staring at Lyceum, which i need to finish soon.

and my right wrist has started to act up a bit, which it hasn't done in a few years. stupid tendons. if only i could get one of those mechanical hands like Luke Skywalker had. and a light saber.

pim on a stick

ignoring the fact that "KDE-PIM/Pi" is quite possibly one of the worst names in terms of marketability i've seen since "PCMCIA", it seems pretty cool. this Pi-Stick sounds like a very nice tool to migrate people out of the tight jaws of Outlook+Exchange. i'm going to have to give it a try and report my (hopeful) success with it =)

as importantly, it helps to bridge the handheld device gap even more. this can be quite important in an office where people rely on their hand held whenever they hit the field.

and while exploring the Pi-Sync website i found two very cool documents:

Outlook 200x To KDE Migration How-To

Outlook to Kolab Migration How-To

[edit: thanks to segedunum for finding the correct URLs for the above two links]

why khtml is important

let me start by stating what should be obvious, but which if i fail to note will result in a lot of unwanted email in my inbox: a KDE port/integration of the Mozilla suite, especially Firefox and gecko, is useful and important. go Zack and Lars!

however, this effort does not reduce the usefulness of khtml (the KDE html rendering suite) to KDE. khtml is a bridge to other projects, a way to stress test the rest of our libraries, is a source of interest for several KDE hackers and is lighter on resources that gecko making it more appropriate as a component for apps that need to show some html but whose primary purpose on this planet is not to be a web browser. but these are not the most important reasons for khtml continuing to exist and be maintained.

the biggest reason is that it provides a component to our internal set of applications and libraries that a modern desktop can not be without, and that it is the completeness of that set of technologies that gives KDE one of it's most valuable assets: agility.

others have said it before me, but it bears repeating: KDE is the only mainstream desktop that is nimble enough to push out broad sweeping changes that require application support to matter in a very short period of time (e.g. <1 year). this is due in large part to the large number of applications that are developed as part of the larger KDE project community. this include applications in KDE extra gear as much as it does those in kdebase.

Microsoft has a large stable of applications, but the internal management structure does not lend itself to nimbly changing the applications across the board. GNOME has the community oriented aspect necessary, but lacks the coherence across application projects to fully assert such changes at will from the center. (i'm noting making this up, Havoc said as much in his recent blog on his ideas for GNOME3.) Apple probably has the internal structure to accomplish this, but not enough applications.

with khtml, KDE can do something interesting and cool in a base library and instantly have it available in every html using KDE application. inline spell checking was one such cool addition in recent years. we couldn't do this without khtml.

as KDE4 comes up we'll be able to make the changes we desire and need in khtml without Mozilla becoming a show stopping blocker for us because their development cycle doesn't match ours. we can make changes to KOffice without having to wait for OOo to decide whether or not to join in and make a new release, which is especially poignant given that KOffice will be using the same file formats as OOo. we can deliver a few hundred native applications in one fell push to the download servers that coherently deliver what our libraries have to offer.

now, this does not mean we should not continue to improve our working relationships to Mozilla or OOo or other such projects, it just means we can do so without becoming inextricably tied to their schedules and priorities. in fact, KDE is probably the most capable desktop to form such working relationships because the liability involved in such cooperation is very low for KDE. this lowered risk affords us greater latitude to explore the options in the wider world, and we should take advantage of that.

viva la khtml!

kicker vs karaoke

so i haven't been blogging much in the last week or so. just haven't been in the mood. something to do with spring i think. or the lack of anything interesting to say.

i've been reading over some of the OSDL publications recently, and i think i have a blog entry forthcoming on that. the Open Clip Art Collection collaboration is coming along very nicely. i'll be writing something for their monthly release announcement regarding what we've been up to and are doing in the future. there are some very cool people there, including Bryce Herrington who has OSDL connections. see how it all comes together? "it's a small world after all... it's a small world after all" ;-)

and speaking of songs that annoy ..... i went karaoking last night. a fight broke out between two groups of karaoke singers. bizarre. surreal. and why i karaoke. it reminds me just how wonderful and odd people are. at least when you let them drink and hold a microphone at the same time.

kicker has been progressing at a nice pace, thanks to efforts by Stefan Nikolaus and myself. it's a pleasure working with Stefan: he's creative, communicative, a good coder and willing to do the full job not just half-assed patches. cookies for Stefan.

in the above shot (which has some weird graphical artifacts in it for some reason) you can see the new "flat" taskbar. the buttons can still appear if you want, as can button-on-hover and text rendered with a halo. this makes the taskbar transparency friendly and look a lot less busy. as a friend visiting the other day said, "wow.. that actually looks calm and pleasant to look at."

beyond looks, the taskbar now has mouse over effects (M.O.E.s) much like those that appear on application buttons in 3.4. they contain the full title of the task in question along with information as to which desktop they are on, whether there are unsaved contents in the window, whether the window requires attention, etc...

i've added thumbnail support to these M.O.E.s, but X just isn't up to the task yet. but when it is, kicker will be in there like a dirty shirt.

also, the drop down menus on task groups now reflect the status of the windows properly for greater consistency. and startup items no longer appear immediately but have a small delay so that if the app you just launched starts up quickly you don't get a flickering taskbar due to adding and removing buttons you don't even really get to see. it's nice that KDE app start up times are getting to the point that this is a concern. =)

the pager has gained drag and drop, so you can move windows between desktops using it. in fact, you can drag from the taskbar to the pager as well. crazy cool. next will be to (optionally) show the desktop backgrounds.

but most importantly i've tracked down the reason for all the taskbar crashes that were reported on 3.4: a mistake in library design. the taskbar library, in a bid to conserve memory, has a manager class that manages a collection of window information structures. these were being passed around as pointers all over the place and the manager would signal that it was going to delete one of them and then delete it immediately thereafter. very dangerous. due to the various inefficiencies in the taskbar code prior to 3.4 it would get away with it fairly consistently, but when i tricked out the taskbar to do things in a more streamlined fashion the timing became an issue. anytime the event loop would get reentered during on the "signal then delete" actions, things stood the chance of going bad. so i ported the taskbar libs to use KSharedPtrs which manage their own life span via refcounting using the coolness of C++'s very flexible templates and operator overloading. so all is good in HEAD and i'm about to spend my day doing the same for 3.4.1.

then i can go and close a ton of bug reports on b.k.o. huzzah.

GetHotNewStuff; serindipity

Annma mentioned how Enrico Ross implemented a new GetHotNewStuff dialog. i thought i'd offer a screenshot of it:

Enrico rocks! note that this is not the final version, but a first revision. still, pretty nice indeed! perhaps fewer bevels ;)

tonight i was chatting with my neighbour in her living room about cinema and we were trying to remember the name of a certain Adam Sandler movie (it was a long path from Y tu mamá también to Adam Sandler. heh.) and as we were trying to remember the title of it the "Prime Ticket Movie" came on her television and it was ...... Mr. Deeds, the movie we were trying to remember the title of. creepy.

well, it would be if such things didn't happen on a disturbingly regular basis.

OCAL and building bridges

so i found out about the Open Clip Art Library (or OCAL) today. they've got 3000+ images in their collection, which is pretty impressive, and all in SVG format. i stumbled across this due to a comment on theDot and decided to post a message to their list to see if there were ways KDE could work with OCAL and vice versa. i think there are a number of potential benefits to this, with Get Hot New Stuff, KOffice, a OCAL browser and kde-look.org being obvious targets. we'll see where it gos.

now, there are only a few hundred KDE developers. and not all of those have the time or interest to go around looking for ways to hook up with other people's efforts to make things Better. so while KDE people can (and do) engage in outreach to the larger community, these resources are limited and the potential to miss great opportunities is high.

so if you are involved in a Great Project that you think would do well with a KDE bridge, please take the time to discover what's possible. worst that can happen is that we all decide there's probably not much that can be done of interest. but i think we'll also find some real diamonds together.

KDE is already working with Firefox, Samba, OpenOffice, FreeDesktop.org, NoMachine and a host of other projects to the benefit of KDE's users and theirs. let's see how big we can get this software orgy =)

happy birthday peyton

so the P-man turned exactly one hand (that's to say, 5) today. happy birthday Peyton! =)

since we're not having his party until the weekend after next for reasons of schedule, we all went and watched Robots. which was an ok flick. rather busy scenery, an overly complex story for kids and a rather overt political agenda. i think i was nonplussed by it. hard to say though. ;)

note to people making CGI films: just because you can easily have a thousand "extras" and a bajillion moving bits and things in the environment ...... doesn't mean you have to.

forced myself to spend a couple hours after that was all done working on Lyceum. god is that boring work. i just keep telling myself, "people will find it useful, we really need something like this, apparently no one else is going to do it, people will find it...." you know it's bad when you need a mantra.

good news on FireFox and Zack.
and sweet deal with Cornelius' PIM-DO list.
nice to see pk.o so busy with good content =)

girl of the blessed spring

8 years ago i was walking down a quiet rural street that cut through a wooded area. it was early spring, much like it is now in the Northern Hemi. i had one of my tweed Dead Man's jackets on and the sun was out but the air was still cool in that typical spring morning chill way.

i was, as i usually am when i walk alone, deep in thought. so it caught me by surprise when all of a sudden this perfectly beautiful young hippiesque girl materialized on the road a few yards away from me walking in the opposite direction.

"isn't it a beautiful day today?," she asked as she approached, as though we were good friends and had been forever. we passed, and both turned on our heels so as to keep facing the other without stopping. almost choreographed it would seem in retrospect. we both smiled, she spread her arms out beneath her poncho making angel wings. slender fingers on the ends of equally thin hands.

"yes, i love the spring," i said directly into her eyes

"indeed. we are truly blessed." and then we both turned our backs on each other, smiles echoing off the trees, and walked on. i never saw her again.

Lyceum

Lyceum was the name of the school that Aristotle founded and ran for 12 years. it seemed an appropriate enough name for the little miniproject i've been working on whilst waiting for svn to click over. a couple months ago there was noise about "UofKDE" where we'd have a community created collection of courses for people to go through.

personally, i had wanted to see a prerequisite system so people knew what they had to read first and where they were going next, optional tracking of progress so people could remember what they have and have not done, peer review to ensure quality, and some basic templating of the individual entries to ensure consistency.

so monday i sat down and did up an SQL schema and started working on some of the basics. tuesday i was in the office and was mostly busy there. today i worked on it again, and a system that implements all my desires is taking shape. it's still early days (i've only had two days to work on it), but here's some of what i've got so far:

the main page

logged in

4 steps to a new entry

scoping out a new entry

it's not the most eye catchingly gorgeous thing in the world, but i'm not a graphic designer i'm a software developer (cap'n). hopefully someone will come behind me and make it look purdy.

i'm also going to try and avoid writing the Help entries myself as well because, being overly familiar with the system, i'm probably the worst person to do it. or maybe not. maybe i'm just lazy.

there is a copy of Lyceum as seen above somewhere on the net on a public machine. i'll post the url as it gets closer to Done.

tenor for developers

so people are starting to grok the concept of what managing your files and other data will look like with tenor. but there's another interesting side to tenor that probably isn't of much interest to most users, though it will have benefits for them. to me it's one of the more interesting sides of the project, really.

an obvious problem on the desktop is managing files, so to date everyone has attacked that problem. current desktop search solutions tend to concentrate on files. from the demos i've seen, Spotlight steps out side those boundaries somewhat and extends itself to things like the control panels. and this is really the right direction.

because the problem with finding files is just one manifestation of the larger problem. it's the one that the most people can empathize with quickly, but it's one of many similar issues.

the real challenge facing the desktop is managing large mountains of information in a more human(e) way. control panels represent a huge amount of information; so do the applications you have installed on your disk; so do your addressbook contacts; so do application interfaces; so do your projects.

taking that last example, it would be very nice if there was a simple way to just "pile" up bits and pieces of information that you are working on together. some applications do have the concept of "projects" and if you are very careful you can create projects using directory hierarchies.

but application-centric projects fall down as soon as you leave the scope of the application. for instance, KDevelop has an extensive concept of a "project" and yet you can't add the spec doc PDF to your project in KDevelop in a meangingful way. sure, you can pop the file in there, but it just sits there inert and KDevelop has no way of knowing why its there or what its supposed to be used for.

using on-disk hierarchies, things rapidly fall apart when you wish to switch from one project to another or when you have items that belong to multiple projects. a couple years ago i was talking with some KDE users about how they work when viewed from the concept of "projects". it's just so much work right now to manage it properly; applications, web site, files, emails, schedules.... and then in January i spoke to a fellow attending TPOSSCON in Hawaii and he reiterated the exact same needs. they still weren't being met. =/

with a contextual linkage engine, however, it is easy to "throw" a website into a project alongside PDFs, application shortcuts, and more. these items don't have to move anywhere on disk, they just become related.

here's a trivial example: i used to play nethack a bit. it's a fun game. but keeping track of all the goodies you can get and what they do meant either having a really great memory, or consulting a reference guide. i found such a thing in the form of a set of HTML pages. i also had some scripts i'd run that would periodically "back up" my saved game just in case ;) so before i'd start playing, i'd open a couple web browser windows and load up the reference guide. then i'd start playing, and periodically run my scripts from another xterm. not much fun to set up playing. but with a proper concept of "project", could simply have made a "nethack project" and in that pile would be the websites, the scripts and a link to the nethack binary itself.

how would you do that today? manually.

how will you do that with tenor? by throwing related objects together into a named pile and accessing them later.

projects are just one example, but it's a good one to show the difference between a "search engine" and a "contextual linkage engine". the latter is a tool to build with. of course, users probably won't know nor care that this cool projects concept is only possible because of contextual linkage.

now, it's interesting to note that there are programs that do provide the ability to create piles of objects. basKet, for instance. and they are a lot of work to get going and get right, and they are pretty much standalone. and to make them truly expressive is even more work. a contextual linkage engine makes these sorts of application easy to create and immensely expressive. because, remember, you'll be able to do searches through these project piles as well.

there's an app on OS X called QuickSilver that would also be fairly easy to implement by building on top of tenor. and so on...

... and don't even get me started on the possibilities of networking multiple tenor instances together. (that's a couple years off i think, so i'm trying not to get too distracted ;)

i really don't know all the things that will be possible with tenor. but i do know that one of the fundamental challenge points on the desktop that we see just about everywhere we look is the inability to create relationships between arbitrary (to the computer) things in a way that the computer can then build representations for.

oh yeah, and you can do full text searches. heh.

if red is the new black

emanuel lubezki is the new tim burton. omfg.

20 years of some of my favourite mainstream films and i never realized.

it's funny how sometimes one misses the common thread behind so many wonderful things.

Hotel Rwanda; fish://; FD.o

summaries time!

FD.o

in short, here's what i think would help FD.o:

1. create a clear, concise "what the heck we're doing" mission statement that has no wishy-washyness to it. then publicize that. public perception is not in line with what FreeDesktop.org is doing, and that causes problems for those of us promoting it


2. be honest about what we're doing on FreeDesktop.org. it's not another SourceForge; it's a place where software and specifications are created in the hopes of becoming de facto standards. there is more responsibility here than simply being a place to slap software around.


3. be less cavalier in the software design process and include more of the community that is actually involved in the specific areas. in other words, make the software projects side of it less of a self-selected group and more of a cooperative invitational affair. reach out to those it will affect, reach out to those already working on the technologies in question, get rid of the "my pet project" mentality.

this is part political and part practical, but both are important. i want to see FD.o succeed, but it's becoming harder to support that aim when the perception of it erodes amongst the audiences it tries to address.

to date the software projects on FD.o have been less than successful. Cairo is being used by Gtk+, but pretty much everyone else i've talked to is unhappy with it (though the consensus is that things are moving in a positive direction and eventually maybe one day it'll "get there"). DBUS is not the best technical solution for KDE right now (i won't speak for anyone else), and the recent API breakage really screwed things up for KDE's media ioslave. (thank the goddess we don't use it in more places yet). pkg-config has been an interesting experience... i could go on.

and it's not because the people working on these things are poor hackers. they are some of the more intelligent people i've run into in my life with some serious skills. it's the process that is being used that is helping the projects coming out of FD.o consistently underperform. as FD.o moves on to ever more serious and critical issues like configuration systems and file system abstractions we can't have this and have a sustainable FD.o.

if you're wondering where i get these viewpoints, it's from talking to and, then more importantly, listening to a rather large number of people in a number of venues who work with, or at least try to work with, these technologies. this is not a set of phantoms of my own making, but the collected impressions of those who quietly succeed, struggle or suffer with the processes of FD.o.

on the joys of questioning the status quo

btw, in case anyone wonders: no, i do not enjoy questioning the status quo, because it usually results in a very non-fun personal experience. there is twice the burdon of proof put on the one questioning the way things are than there is on the person supporting the way things are (this is natural). there are also a lot of people out there who do not react well to the concept that things may not all be fine.

i think we coasted for a good while with more cheerleaders than critical thinkers being heard. we're rounding a corner, though. i'm seeing more people stepping up and saying, "Ok, let's change things." that includes the people in leadership roles at FD.o, it includes people i've met in the more traditional side of the industry of late, it includes people who are coordinating things in KDE.

i tip my hat to these individuals, because i do realize that it is not an easy ride all the time. it's rewarding, but that's something different.

fish://

i've received a lot of feedback from my last blog entry about fish:// ... so many of our users were unaware of its existence or still don't know how to make it work.

here's the skinny on it:

if you have an ssh account on a machine, you can access your files on it via fish. let's say you have an account foo@bar.com and wanted to get at /var/www/html. the url would be fish://foo@bar.com/var/www/html. it's just that simple. there's no need to set up anything on the server, just a plain ol'd ssh account.

btw, if the username you are logging into on the remote machine is the same as the one you are currently logged into, you can just do fish://bar.com/var/www/html. wicked!

Hotel Rwanda

tonight i watched Hotel Rwanda. if you haven't, i would recommend it. something in the horror of those days in Rwanda that the film documents tugs at me saying, "this is part of the thing that we are striving to fill in, to heal and to become aware of."

while it is impossible to truly know a horror that one has never experienced, it is perhaps possible to help prevent such things from needing to happen. our small daily efforts in life are not limited in impact to propelling our economy, or to allowing us to afford another vacation or to producing wonderful solutions to technological puzzles.

we are all capable of conscious compassion, as well as its opposite nature. as a collective of humans spread across the planet but increasingly connected we each have an impact on the totality.

i've pondered the why of life since i can remember; the first time i remember discussing God and his potential existence was when i was 4 .. i don't remember a time when i was not compelled to consider the broader existence. but i still don't have explanations or answers, not even close =) i still do not know how to explain the mechanisms i perceive at work all about me, the great whirring of humanity: a beautiful thing, but unconscious even yet.

experiences like Hotel Rwanda, however, seem to offer a glimpse into the greater depths.

1001

so i was informed this evening by Maksim that i closed my 1001st bug report on bugs.kde.org. holy crap! i'm in the 1000+ club! =)

"This is a dead parrot!" "No it's not, it's a Freedesktop.org"

ok, the Monty Pythons are going to hunt me down and kill me for slaughtering that line, but hey. i've done worse.

Havoc replied to my earlier blogs regarding FD.o quite succincntly: we don't have to worry because FD.o isn't a standards body.

but hold on now... i never actually claimed that FD.o was a standards body! i simply claimed that it's where standards get made and that DConf was looking to become a desktop standard. that's the whole point of DConf. the title of this blog starts to make sense, doesn't it?

so let's examine whether or not FD.o really is about standards or not. there's a whole list of standards over on FD.o. and the main FD.o webpage says:

'freedesktop.org is not a formal standards organization, though some see a need for one that covers some of the areas we are working on [..] Unlike a standards organization, freedesktop.org is a "collaboration zone" where ideas and code are tossed around, and de facto specifications are encouraged.'

so Havoc is right, it's not a standards body. but it is where we have created many of our standards and continue to host the documents that define those standards. call it what you will, this is a dead parrot.

Havoc also said, "freedesktop.org right now is the equivalent of Sourceforge, essentially, except that projects have to be desktop-related." ignoring the fact that this is only true on a strictly technical level, the question is begged: is that what we need, another SourceForge? i mean, don't we already have three or four of those around? and if we're honest with ourselves, isn't that what most people are involved at FD.o for, to bridge between the projects? again, this isn't a SourceForge-for-the-desktop, it's a dead parrot.

there are couple of things Havoc nailed, though. first, that the "platform" is not about technology pimping. amen. but here's the real nugget of gold:

"While some people may have other ideas, I will again reiterate that KDE and GNOME can veto anything by simply not going along with it. That's the core reason I don't understand any paranoia here."

he's absolutely correct, we can simply decide to not use something. the problem is that if the FD.o collective puts out major pieces of software with the intent of bridging systems (and that's the whole point of DConf) and yet fails miserably due to flaws in the process, FD.o loses value. this is what i don't want to see happen.

it seems that both Waldo and Havoc think i'm afraid of FD.o pushing bad ideas on KDE or GNOME. but what i'm really worried about is FD.o becoming irrelevant. because then we'll have put ourselves right back to where we were all those years ago before we had a place to discuss and come up with standards, even if they were de facto.

BBQ at my place this weekend!

i'm hosting a BBQ on my front lawn Sunday afternoon. you are all invited. bring your own food and drinks, the BBQ is communal. at my BBQ there are two simple rules of engagement:

0. keep the flesh on the right-hand side of the grill so it doesn't touch my veggies 1. have fun

if you can't make it, feel free to send food and drink for us to consume in your stead. we'll be sure to toast you and yours as we consume mass quantities of goodness.

It's not the virtues, stupid ; or, more D-Conf fun

Waldo blogged about the virtues of a common configuration system.

he made some good points, like how it's a configuration system, not a format. yes, there is a distinction and i chose the wrong word in my haste. my bad. he also notes that a standard system for configuration is a good idea, something i agree on now as i did when i wrote my blog.

but he decided to ignore the actual issues i raised and simply recite the happy song of "we like standards". as such i'm highly dissapointed; Waldo simply dismissed the uncomfortable points instead of addressing them.

first, he says that Havoc and he are on the list and they are principles behind gconf and kconfig so that's Good Enough(tm) for having people writing these systems involved. how myopic.

there's a broad world outside of gconf and kconfig. i mentioned Samba for a very good reason. it's a desktop centric application, they have worked up a new backend for configuration and they are itching to work with us. there are also a number of people who have worked on configuration in KDE and there are people working on it now. i named one of them in my last blog, as a matter of fact.

saying "by all means, join the fun" as an invitation to get people in the conversation completely misses the whole point of "extending outreach". this is the #1 reason why FD.o has 10x the noise it should and faces 10x the opposition from developers i talk to than it should: FD.o represents a self selected group of people though it is attempting to (and often successfully) standardizing other people's work and projects. if you don't see how broken that is, i suggest going for a walk in the wonderful spring weather (or fall, if you are in the South half of our planet) and pondering that point.

i'd also love to hear why Waldo thinks FreeDesktop.org should be in the business of software development versus standardization. i don't like software written by committee and i have little faith in the ability for software written specifically for standardization to be as good as software written that is written to be innovative.

i appreciate the time Waldo took to respond to my blog, but maybe next time he'll actually respond instead of deflect. i know he's really into making standards, and i think that's an amazingly critical goal. but we ought to do it right so as not to be left with a desktop platform that's standardized but tastes like cold porridge. because if we do, someone will break from the pack just like has always happened and you can kiss your hard earned standardization goodbye. we had standards on X before this, but they sucked. in part because they were proprietary, and in part because they were designed by committee for standardization not goodness.

we can pretend challenges don't exist or we can deal with them. which will it be?

fish:// + web forms == happy aseigo

i've got my life spread out over several machines. some are at the office, some are at home, some are at co-lo's around the town ... so when i'm looking something up on the web but i want to save a file to a different machine, what do i do? fish:// in the Save dialog, of course!

what do i do when i need to upload something that's on another machine? fish:// in the file upload entry, of course!

with other browsers i'd have to first move the file locally to the machine i'm browsing from and then do something with it.

but when i use Konqueror, i'm just one URL away from all my data. a lot of companies have talked about the network being the computer, and i think that's a sweet idea. but it's KDE that ended up delivering on that.

innovation on the desktop? i got it right here. it's blue and it's got a K in front of it. =P

the stupidity of dconf

Waldo Bastian wants it. Havoc Pennington wants it. Scott Wheeler wants it. same for a bunch of other people. so whatever it is, it must be good, right? in this case i think the answer is "yes" and "no".

what i'm talking about is "dconf", which is currently vapourware. the idea of dconf is to create the One True Unix Config File Format. that's a cool idea and something that is badly needed. but i think that the discussion on xdg is a very good example of how messed up FreeDesktop.org is becoming.

there are two good kinds of standards: ones that document successes that already exist and were, really, already "standard" before being canonized as such, and ones that are such great technologies that people run to adopt them.

in the case of dconf, i fear that it will reflect neither of the above. certain people want a unified configuration system, and don't really care about what it really ends up looking like. they just want SOMEthing, anything. who cares what it is as long as it unified, right? lots of people.

for example, everyone who isn't afflicted by the problems of configuration fragmentation. or those who have additional needs and wants from a configuration system beyond "the same everywhere". to all those people on the xdg list who behave like standardization is obviously the most important thing imaginable: not everyone is like you! and those who aren't, are not necessarily wrong! wow! diversity!

now, where is the incentive to change for the people i mentioned in the last paragraph if all standardization does is create a standard and nothing more? it just ends up feeling to these people like stagnation and the opposite of innovation. and i don't blame them, because it is: it's boring and it slows down our progress.

(as an aside: it also doesn't help that there are certain idiots amongst us who feel that FreeDesktop.org is a great way to canonize their pet project or to somehow push their desktop's technologies "down the stack" so as to force them down other people's throats. these people make it harder for those who do have the right intentions. honestly, i wish these people would go find a new life flipping burgers or watching over the kids at public swimming pools because they'd do a lot less political damage to things i care about if they were.)

back to dconf, though, here's the recipe for getting buy in: people need to realize that a new configuration system should do more and be better than what's there. so actually talk to the people making these systems. do not say, "well, they should be here on xdg if they cared!" because that is equivalent to saying, "we're the right game in town, play with us or else you don't count." and that's a great way to ensure you fail to get buy in. it's also a great way to appear like a giant walking dick, since that would be an accurate description.

next, be ready to scrap everyone's configuration systems for something newer and better. here's a clue: gconf sucks. kconfig sucks. so does everyone else's. they each suck in their own way. let's not replicate their suckiness by blessing one of them, not even by "basing the standard" off of one of them. we're going to cause a lot of work by changing configuration systems anyways, so let's do it right. this has the nice political side effect of not making it feel like "project X is being forced to adopt project Y's config system because someone peed on it and called it holy". on other words, we'll get better buy in and we'll get better technology. it's not as convenient for the Standardizers but creating technology isn't supposed to be easy, that's not why we do it.

i dare say that if the people who are currently myopically looking at what dconf could be poked their head up and looked around they might take notice of things like Samba 4's new configuration back end. i know Ian Geiser has, and i know the Samba people are all excited about being able to work with others on it. he's working to see if KConfig would be based on it for KDE 4. wow! real research and development, not just pure standardization wanking, even though it would create standardization between Samba and KDE!

now hold on, wouldn't it be great if the desktop standards also reached out into the server world? and don't servers also do configuration? and might not someone like Samba have a start to a good system given the challenges they face with configuration? and wouldn't it maybe, just maybe, make sense to see what others who are interested in innovation as opposed to standardization are doing right now?

would it be great if those who were interested in standardization did so by adopting the most promising work of the innovators as opposed to struggling with them at best and just ignoring them at worst?

but that would require that FreeDesktop.org start behaving like a healthy system with a clear mandate to help with standardization again as opposed to the self-important disappointment its on the way to becoming. and for those who haven't been hit by the clue stick, let me make a pinata out of you: FD.o should not be about software development.

so here's my challenge to Havoc and Waldo (i'll pick on them because i like them and feel they are moral leaders in their respective camps with good heads on their shoulders): dare to make dconf innovate and dare to harness people's efforts that aren't yours. try and actually standardize in a way that won't require tons of convincing and forcing. if your emphasis truly is standardization (which i think it is) versus agenda pushing (which it appears to be to some), then let's do this one right. let's not replicate DBUS and the mime type standardization here ok?

configuration is too important to get wrong and it's touches too many people too deeply to not have global buy in for this. and we can achieve that. it just means realizing what your real goals are and what the goals of others are, too.

i am not irish (or am i?); pager dragging

so tonight's kicker hacking was slightly more productive, fixing a number of drag and drop related bugs. but perhaps most noteworthy: you can now drag windows between desktops by dragging from either the taskbar or the pager and dropping it onto the pager. wooooo!

i was out yesterday evening, wearing The Hat, with a couple days of scruff and my getting-shaggy-and-needing-a-trip-to-the-salon hair. (yes, salon. i have a pretty strong feminine side, and she's a nasty bitch if i don't take care of her.) there was karaoke happening and i got up and sang U2's With or Without You. upon sitting back down a nearby table of women got my attention (not hard to do) and asked as the opening line, "so... are you, like, really Irish?" hahahaha...

(note to self: laughing at someone you don't know is probably not the surest route to an invite home, or even a second meeting)

we did have a nice conversation once we got over that hilarity, though. =)

the best quote from Berlin came from Scott, who observed while i was in mid-antic, "You are so 8 years old." i think he meant that with fondness. all the same, at least i can navigate picnic tables, even when i am drunk. =P

and the best description of the Theme control panel i've heard belongs to Cornelius who described it as the "meta-ugliness panel". ahahaahhaa.

does the desktop matter? hell, yes!

i keep hearing things like this:

"Conquering the desktop doesn't really matter anymore. Most of the really interesting software these days runs on central servers. We access it via our PCs through the Internet or a corporate network." - Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0

Erick couldn't be more wrong, and here is why....

what percentage of people do their word processing, presentations and other such content creation using an application on a server? very few. how many desktop users actually want that to change? very few. this is the lever by which Microsoft keeps people on their platform.

moreover, as Erick correctly notes, we access server based applications via our PCs (or handhelds, as the case may be). and what happens when the PC doesn't have software that works with that application? look at how Outlook has helped create a dominant position for Exchange, or imagine how many people would use Google's GMail if it didn't work with with most popular web browsers? it's a rather simple matter of manipulating client compatibility to make future adoption of certain server applications untenable or undesirable. as an example, climbing the slopes of Outlook compatibility is probably the #1 obstacle for groupware server projects.

until we have Free as in Freedom desktop applications in the double digits for market presentation (which in turn requires a Free Software desktop environment for continued longevity) all those applications that are built on Free as in Freedom server technologies remain at risk.

Microsoft shifted the server side choices in the 90s by leveraging their client side hegemony, and there's no reason they can't (or won't) do it again.

we need to stop the wishful thinking that the desktop is a detail and that it's ok that we've not succeeded yet. we need to make sure the Linux desktop succeeds, or else watch the Linux server phenomenon slowly crumble into dust as the years march by.

consistency in message

the transcript for the Linux Box Show interview has reached over 8500 unique visitors in the last two days. that's not bad given the rather specific topic of the interview, the relatively low profile of the Linux Box Show and the websites it was announced on. discussion about it is popping up in a number of different places on the 'Net, many of them not KDE specific, and it's generating excitement. that's pretty cool.

in light of that, stop for a moment and consider: what is KDE?

i'll bet that you came up with a lot of different answers, and i'll also wager that your answers won't be the same as mine. your answers are probably correct in the sense that they describe certain aspects of KDE accurately, probably as a reflection of your experience with KDE and your general hopes for it.

but to everyone on the outside of KDE this can be a very confusing and unhelpful thing. unfortunately, getting a commonly agreed upon definition from KDE itself is not very easy to arrive at. perhaps it's not even particularly useful for the project to do such a thing, and not because it wouldn't be nice but because the social structure which drives KDE as a technology platform so successfully makes it difficult to do so. it would be horrible to damage our ability as a technology project (which is what KDE is first and foremost) by forcing the culture in a direction it isn't designed to go in just to get a public message.

one of the side effects of Appeal is that it is taking a specific subset of the entire
KDE message and presenting it in a way that is consistent and even catchy. this message isn't pinned to KDE-the-project. it does come from a group of people who are KDE hackers (and so hopefully is largely accurate), but it's done under the umbrella of something that isn't KDE-the-project. a kind of best of both worlds affair.

i see similar potential with things like KUbuntu. Knoppix has also managed to do this for KDE for some time, even though that isn't it's primary purpose. over time it will be interesting to see if the these individual "working groups" harmonize their messages over time and if we see the addition of highly targgeted messages. for instance, i consider Studio to Go to be presenting a "what KDE is" message for those into music recording.

sometimes we expect KDE, the technology project, to be all things to all challenges. i don't think that's fair to the project, and i don't think it's productive. history seems to be on my side in this one.

i am spam

had a very frustrating night hacking on kicker. i'm working on three sets of patches: making the system tray use a qlayout and fixing a number of performance and painting bugs; optional text on buttons (B. Metin helped out by submitting a draft patch) and drag and drop issues with the pager and taskbar. while working on each i ran into various unexpected snags that i could just leave well enough alone.

i'm tired and its time to go do something else, but i'm left with a bunch of unfinished work which isn't very satisfying.

i did get a pair of nice detail oriented patches to make some of the menuext buttons obey global kicker settings from Richard Fujimoto. they were simple patches at least in part due to kicker now using KConfigXT and making that available in libkickermain for all kicker bits and nibbles to use. hooray!

on a more humourous note, blogger emails me whenever someone comments on my blog. i commented on my own blog (in response to someone else, i'm not that vain... yet ;) and it arrived marked as spam by spamassassin! heh. I AM SPAM!

boy i've blogged a lot today. wtf.

appeal, a haiku

breathtaking beauty
clarity in interface
creativity



(code at 11. =)

change in decentralized organizations

trying to go for dinner with people at a KDE gathering can be an interesting affair. often a bunch of people will decide to go get some food and will make it as far as the curb, but then the mass will cease movement and start discussing various things. it isn't until someone, anyone decides to start moving in some random direction that the rest of the crowd finds their legs again. if the movers stop, so does the group. it's an interesting phenomenon to watch. or, if you're hungry, frustrating.

the KDE project as a whole sometimes works like this. the self-herding cats concept works really well for many development needs. i mean, KDE is absolutely full of examples of the kinds of amazing things that can be accomplished when a small number of people Do Their Thing(tm). but there are a lot of things that just don't come out very well when this is the only mechanism at work. for instance, it's really hard to get consensus on what does and does not belong in base libraries at times, or what our interface guidelines should consist of. what it takes is someone, or preferably a few someones, to start off in a direction and then, if it doesn't appear that they are walking towards the edge of a cliff, others will lend their support.

we have a lot to accomplish with KDE 4. it needs to kick serious lamma ass (to use a geiserism =). some of the things we need to do will require some leadership. this was discussed at great length in various forums at aKademy in August but little came of the discussions. we all just stood on the sidewalk, bellies rumbling.

for me, one of the most exciting things about Appeal is that it represents a small group of people starting to walk towards the metaphorical restaurant. and this is close to what some were looking for at aKademy. if Appeal has a good thing going and we aren't all full of crap, then others in the project will probably join in and start pulling in a similar direction as well. if we are full of crap, then nobody (or at least very few) will join the party and it will come to nothing. this is the strength KDE derives from its decentralized nature.

over the next few days i'll be blogging more about about what Appeal means to me. and you can tell me that i'm full of crap, but i think it's at least equally likely that you'll think we're on to something interesting and add your own unique contribution to wherever it is we're headed.

life as a series of odd events

i love films where the characters experience a life that is punctuated, embellished and even defined by moments of oddness. especially if that oddness is inspired or beautiful. no, not "a plastic bag floating in the wind as a metaphor for the seemingly random and even tragic beauty of existence" oddness; i'm thinking more along the lines of Orlando or maybe Being John Malkovich. (the marionettes!)

perhaps this is because i feel more personally connection with those stories than what i see in the day-to-day lives around me.

last night my neighbour, who lives in a studio apartment attached to the house i rent, knocked on my door at approximately 23:00. she wanted to know if it was alright if her and her friend who is visiting from out of province did a little "screaming". see, she listens to hardcore and on occasion likes to, um, "sing" along with it. this takes the form of a particular sort of loud growling scream. she likes to warn me before she does this if i'm around so i'll know that nothing's actually wrong. (implying that if i hear screaming and she hasn't told me about it that i should break the door down or something, i suppose.) i had a guest over and was up anyways, so i told her i really didn't care.

so for the next 90 or so minutes there was an amateur hardcore concert happening on the other side of a door in my house. my guest found it ... interesting. Peyton found it hilarious. to me it was just another typical backdrop for a scene in this film called my life.

i mean, what's more normal than two early-20-somethings scream-singing in the middle of the night. especially when she also brings me baked goods from time to time and looks after my house and cats when i'm gone? she's also into Jesus. of course.

this morning i'm in the office even though this is not an office day for me. i'm covering for a fellow who's mom had a heart attack yesterday afternoon. he asked if i could come in and take care of a few things that he was supposed to get done today, and i said of course i would. so here i am, though i'm not "really" here. i'm like the guy in The Sixth Sense. and everyone else in the office can see IT people. ;)

walking past reception i noticed a small hair poking out of my sweater. (black Canadian army surplus sweater; the armed forces make some great clothes, i swear) so naturally i start pulling it out. and out. and out. and out. the girl at reception, who's current title is something about office administration, just stared as i pulled this purple hair that was well over a meter long out of the knitted garment. i know who's it is, and i haven't seen her in many months. (M, where are you? =) the (blonde) office administration girl blinked and said, "well, it's not mine."

did The LinuxBox interview today. hopefully it came out ok. always nervous about that after the fact. i also need to get a transcription done for it.

xwinman.org

here's a shout out to Matt Chapman who runs XWinMan.org for updating the KDE information page with our new logo, information about recent releases, links to our screenshot pages and even a live feed from theDot. [ Ed: apparently they've had a feed from theDot for a while. still cool though. =) ]

as a side note, there's a vote for your favourite window manager or desktop environment poll on XWinMan.org, if that's your sort of thing. ;)

the little ships; photos

if we were to adopt a maritime metaphor for the IT landscape, the enterprise installations would be the supertankers while the SMB (small / medium size business) market would be an armada of smaller ships ranging from small sail boats to luxury cruise liners. the supertankers take a long time to shift course, and on the on the technology seas, they tend to watch the flotilla of more agile smaller craft for early signs of directional changes.

due to the number of craft in the SMB fleet and how they are used navigationally by the supertankers out there, it's so very important that we keep an eye to making inroads in that market. the nice thing for those promoting KDE is that unlike the supertankers, the SMB ships can be convinced to change headings by individuals with the right approach.

look around your geographic community: are there SMBs that would do well from a switch to Open Source operating system and desktops? do you know people that work there? are their application needs met by KDE and other Open Source desktop apps? if not, what are the holes we need to fill?

it is often seen as a weakness for KDE that our user base is widely spread out amongst a large number of individuals and SMBs, as traditionally that would mean a general inability to address the supertankers. but this is actually a strength in disguise as this is the perfect sort of body to start a dramatic trend in the SMB market. there are groups shaping up who can address the supertankers, but that's only part of the needed response. KDE is uniquely positioned to address the rest of the field.

this is guerrilla marketing at its best.

coming back down to earth, i added a photo albums page to my website. there are currently four albums up, including some pics from my recent trip to Berlin, Germany.

kicker for kasbars

Rich bemoaned kicker's handling of extensions recently and with good reason.

"problems manifest in things like kicker’s autohiding of kasbar (kicker doesn’t both to tell anyone when it does this)"

this is one of the things that will be changing. the extension and applet classes will be modified to be more "environmentally" aware. for instance, signals will be emitted when something is being hidden.

additionally, the extension settings that traditionally kicker has kept to itself will be exposed to the extension. this means pulling the KPanel* classes out of kdeui (which is fine, they don't belong there anyways) and into a publicly installed libkicker which will be a conglomeration of libkickermain, these kdeui classes, some currently internal kicker classes and some addition "applet toolbox" classes.

i actually hope to remove a few layers of classes in pulling all these things into one place as well.

"supporting the idea of applets painting their own backgrounds"

one thing's for certain: the transparency hack will be going away. kicker will rely on COMPOSITE for this in the future. and not just the current "make the kicker window N% trans" either. the transparency will be a bit more selective and handled directly by kicker on a container-by-container basis, i think.

beyond that, the drawing of applets will likely be changing dramatically. this depends largely on the results of the artist's dreaming =)

" A size handling system that actually works"

oh yeah, this is totally broken. it's easy enough to fix, though. it just requires not relying on min/preferred size hints, but also offering maximum size hints. it also means signaling containers when size changes are needed and/or about to happen.

what's amazing is that with all these current flaws, kicker basically works for the vast majority of people. it's all the corner cases and limitations on Cool Development that the current kicker imposes.

hijacking reality

while looking for a name for a project i'm working on i took a break and stumbled upon a video of a Lecture Musical, which is a wonderful reality hack perpetrated by a group called Prangstgrüp. this is the kind of thing that i consider to be one of the highlights of being human: creative, quirky happiness.

i'm working my way through my backlog of kicker patches. various things are coming, such as drag and drop between the taskbar and pager (and hopefully drag and drop within the pager too!) and buttons with text. minimizing the number of patches distros feel the need to add is nice, as is making kicker more consistent and featureful for users.

the real exciting work of rethinking the actual containers that this all happens within is coming up shortly, with KDE 4 devel not that far away. i will be looking for quite a bit of input from the more artistic people in our community during the design phases.

Peyton and i went for a walk yesterday. he came back with a very nice haircut (on the plus side) and a fever (on the minus side). the fever is gone today, but his appetite hasn't fully recovered.

looks like i'll be on The Linux Box show next week.

just another manic ... saturday?

the day started with me cooking french toast, a favourite of peyton's, for breakfast. after which i sat down and did a bit of KDE related work, and then we went for a walk. ended up getting peyton's hair cut; he looks ++cute now =)

i am actively looking for a "proper" name for klink. while doing so (yeah, that's my story and i'm sticking to it!) i stumbled across this: a lecture musical. whenever i stop to consider what the essence of humanness is, it's things like this that spring to mind.

the rest of life is just various flavours of dreck dressed up in different suits.

speaking of drek.. kicker now places new icons, applets, etc more appropriately when creating them thanks to a patch by Waldo. cool beans. i've got a backlog of kicker patches that i'm slowly working through. some are of higher quality than others, but most of them will probably make it in for the next release. we may well have selected buttons with text in the next release. then it'll just be a matter of deciding when and how to use that feature so that it doesn't suck.

one of my minor goals with kicker is to eliminate the need for distros to apply odd patches to it.

also, the kicker art search will be underway soon ... so all you artists out there, get your creative juices flowing. you may end up shaping something that appears on millions of desktops for years to come!

trying something new

as an experiment, this month i'll be purposefully dedicating ~50% of my work week to KDE. we'll see how much more or less productive this makes me. =)

basically, i've scheduled my in-office work around an "every other business day" schedule, which leaves the days in between for KDE. i'll still be doing my evenings and weekends stuff, and i'll also be doing a fair amount of things that aren't directly coding. today was a great example of that, where i spent most of the day doing coordination, design and writing tasks. i did get a bit of kicker hacking in though. overall i hope to spend more time coding than not, however.

it's a bit of a struggle for me to not fill in these empty days with paying work, but one month shouldn't hurt. we'll see how it goes.