kde's file dialog is a ... movie player!

kde's integration is amazing, really. even after hacking on it for the past few years i'm still surprised by it at times. like today when i went to open a file in an app after having saved a video. the file dialog obediently started in that same directory filled with videos, and since i had file previews turned on and kmplayer installed the video selected started playing right there in the file dialog.

who needs a separate video app? i can watch movies from any kde app that can open or save files ;)

p.s. thank-you, Scott Belford for the videos of the area of hawaii that i called home for some eight years. Scott, for those of you who aren't familiar with him, is a wonderful person who devotes his life (thanks in no small part to the loving devotion and support of his wife) to the hawaii open source education foundation and the trans-pacific open source software conferences. he's doing great things for open source in the islands, and he's great fun to go out on the town with =)

osdw registration begins; strange dreams

registration for the first open source desktop workshops have begun. i'm a excited and nervous all at once. we have ceiling of 100 participants for this event, to be held in san diego on the 13th and 14th of october, and i'm curious as to how fast those seats will fill up. at $50 for two days (you even get a breakfast table and lunch, not to mention access to hotel room deals) that's not going to be the limiting factor here =)

this is the first time i've put together something quite like this, but thanks to the an amazing amount of participation from the great folks at linspire (particularly Tom Welch and Heather) and the kde community (including Tom Chance for his work on pr issues, Pinheiro for artwork, Thiago for grabbing the osdw.org domain and David Solbach for hosting the website) it's been a breeze thus far.

the speakers are donating their time for this event, so they deserve an extra helping of gratitude. for future OSDW events my plan is to cover all costs via sponsorship and raise enough funds through attendee registration to pay the speakers well. they are, after all, the meat^Hanimal-friendly-protein for these events. for san diego, at a minimum, i'll be buying beers and dinners =) and who knows, maybe we'll have some extra $ at the end of it all to say "thank you" with too. we'll see.

beyond the event itself, Tom and Heather have been working hard on the PR side of it. between releases for the mainstream press wires and invites to reporters to visit the event i'm hoping to crack KDE into the american mainstream press a bit. and if we keep this ball rolling with events in texas, pennsylvania, ontario and washington state as planned we could end up with a lot of great exposure for the project, both in the mainstream software industry and the mainstream media.

in a previous blog, i'd mentioned not to go crazy linking the website around the net due to bandwidth limitations. well, www.osdw.org is now on a production system, so feel free to go crazy with it =)

but enough about osdw ... let's talk about my dreams. that's much more interesting ;) last night i had one of the odder dreams i've had in a while: a package arrived via fedex and in it were women's underwear of various sorts ... thongs, bras, little lacey things ... i was sifting through these contents trying to figure out why this package had arrived at my place, only to notice that they all had the kde logo embroidered or otherwise affixed to them. obviously my passion for kde, my fedex fetish and my sexual being are getting far too mixed up in my head. perhaps it's time to visit the doctor's couch again. ;)

past perceptions haunt us

just got clear of an interesting discussion with some users on irc. apparently kde has no good applications. now, i disagree with that, but wanted to understand what this perception was based on.

answer? having tried various kde apps several releases ago. apparently amarok doesn't have an EQ; kmail doesn't have offline IMAP; kontact, whatzat? etc, etc, etc...

during the kde2 devel days, the project certainly did concentrate more on infrastructure than app development. and rightly so: the framework needed to mature, and that takes a lot of effort. given the manpower available, that pretty much dictated the pace.

with kde3, there was a conscious movement of concentration to application development. whereas most of the development pace seemed to focus on kdelibs and kdebase up to that point, the applications became the centre of gravity and kdelibs and kdebase moved out of the spotlight..

this is not to say lots of great work continued on in the infrastructure bits, with khtml, kwin, kicker, gethotnewstuff, and many more bits and nibbles getting lots of attention. but it's hard to deny that kontact, kopete, juk, kdeedu, kdevelop, kdeaccessability and a host of other apps really started to shine and became the most exciting things to track in cvs (and later svn).

and third party app devel took off like a rocket, too! k3b, digikam, konversation, amarok, kaffeine, apollon .....

things are far, far better today application wise than they were. and yet many people tried the apps a couple years ago and just stopped trying them. people give up easy. this is why it is critical to remember to keep the user community up to date with what you are doing with your apps.

to us as developers, our progress is incremental. our users see the differences in 6-12 month chunks (or more!) so it's often revolutionary. they also tend to give a piece of software only one or two chances before giving up on it, after which they need to be reminded that the things they missed then are there now.

if you are a kde application developer, ask yourself: "compared to 1, 2, 3 and 4 releases ago, what mis(sing)features would a user have wanted addressed?" make some screenshots of those new things and blog about them; msg canllaith for inclusion in the "what's new in svn" guide; write a theDot story giving an update on your app.

and if you feel that your app isn't deserving of that attention, that it's not significant: remember that to those who use and depend on the software you write it is very significant. they'd appreciate an update now and again.

peace 'n luv.

the 'r' word

in (email) conversation today with T, the 'r' word was uttered: relationship. it's been a long while since i've been in one of those things, especially one where it felt like it all really fit together properly.

i was noting that august is going to be an insane month for me: my todo list is insanely huge, the p-man (that's my son, for the uninitiated ;) is with me for pretty much the entire first half of the month and then i'm off to spain for the last week of it to do aKademy. not much allowance for a social life left in there. at which point she noted that i shouldn't worry about it affect our relationship, were i so concerned.

and so it hit me: toothbrush at the house, using the 'r' word, daily conversation ... holy feck! and yes, that is a big, stupid grin on my face. ;)

a kitchen full of cooks

since plasma keeps getting attention despite it's youthful state of being, we've had a fairly consistent inflow of developers appearing on the plasma-devel at kde dot org email list looking to pitch in. it's gotten to the point where there are more hands than really needed.

this obviously shows that there are a lot of interested hackers out there. half the challenge in attracting them is offering something that is, well, attractive. too often we talk to the users only in our public messages, and too often we speak of things in overly complex and unsexy terms. most of software development is complex and unsexy, but there's also something very alluring about it. otherwise most of us wouldn't be here. it's the things that reel us in that we need to communicate.

meanwhile, i'm going to start trying to pawn off these new comers to other parts of kde. the hard part is that many of these people wish to work on kde4 stuff. this is just one more reason to get your apps ported sooner rather than later. as we begin to tell the story of kde4 development to the word, something i expect to start in earnest at aKademy, we will likely find an influx of new developer blood. let's be sure we tell the right story and that we have a home for these new people.

<sound of gears shifting> i was in a brief meeting today with a graphic artist who seems to specialize in art for software. he, like many of our artists in kde, is half-geek / half-artwizard. near the end of the conversation, in which we discussed various bits about kde, he burbled that he loved kde and saw so much potential in it. "the first time i logged into kde, i fell in love," he said, "it's the best desktop i've seen." given that "loves kde, has knowledge of linux" wasn't in the description of the individual we were looking for, this caught me slightly off guard. happily off guard, though. =) it's amazing how many kde users there are in this town these days.

keeping track of aKademy 2005 using korganizer

aKademy 2005 is right around the corner. if you want to keep up with the schedule of things, click here for the conference calendar. if you have korganizer installed, it will open the calendar and install it as a resource. you can also add it manually by going File -> Import -> Import Calendar in the menu bar. and poof:

and i must say, it's nice to see how generally uncluttered korganizer's interface is becoming. even when embedded in kontact it's nice. i might turf the "WhatsThis" icon in the toolbar, but it's pretty tight these days =)

it also handles my local calendar, kolab2 calendaring (which has several shared calendars in it), karm and various remote ics files rather nicely, to boot.

episode two: attack of the taps

it's been 9 days since my neighbour couldn't figure out how to work the washing machine, so i suppose it was just really time for a new event.

this time it's a knock on my door at 07:00. i'm not a morning person in the least so a knock on my door at that time of the day is not only not particularly welcome it's rather disorienting. i put on a robe and go to the front door: nobody. i hear knocking again. it takes me a few seconds to figure out that it must be the shared door. oh no. the neighbour. what could it be?

turns out she'd broken the tap in the kitchen sink and the water was rushing full blast and she was afraid the sink would overflow and flood the place. this was making her a bit hysterical since the reason they moved in here is they were flooded out of their previous place during the rain storms we had here in alberta in the last month. she wasn't sure what to do.

so... i looked under the kitchen sink: no tap. great. down to the basement then where i turned off the water main to the house. not only am i up at 7, i have no water. she's calming down now because things are under control but i have no water. fortunately i had enough water in the kettle from yesterday to make tea, so i made some for both of us.

so here i sit bleary eyed listening to norah jones, teeth unbrushed, hair unwashed, tea now gone. i want my old neighbour back. she even used to bake for me. =(

kde in north america

so there was a bunch of blognoise over the last couple of days regarding the recent desktop linux conference (dlc) in ottawa and kde's appearance there, or relative lack thereof. i don't care to comment on the dlc as i wasn't there so have no first hand knowledge.

that's right: i live in the country and i wasn't there. granted, i'm a four hour airplane ride away, but still: why wasn't i there? because up until this month i have been your typical north american kde developer.

that is to say, i've been working my ass off at a day job, juggling family and a social life and then hacking on kde in all that time i somehow managed to squeeze out of the day (often the squeezing what done to my sleep and weekends). when one then realizes that there aren't all that many of us in north america (just take a look at the map at worldwide.kde.org) it becomes pretty obvious that there probably isn't a lot of kde specific promo time available on this continent.

making matters worse, when kde hackers have been picked up to work on kde related tech, they usually move to europe to do so. we have a number of american kde hackers over in europe, including scott wheeler, zack rusin and charles samuels who spends much of the year attending university in england. this hasn't helped our relative man power in north america. and we don't even have a "kde canada" or "kde usa"; and it's not for wont of desire but for wont of time available to those of us here working on kde.

contrast this situation with that in europe with the scads of kde developers, multiple regional kde groups and it becomes fairly apparent why the conference coverage and involvement is so much better there than it is here.

but lo! this may be coming to an end! for instance, with my new found kde hacking day life i'll be able to attend probably all the major north american conferences and i'll have a lot more time and energy to devote to increasing the public awareness of kde both here and elsewhere.

additionally, the Open Source Desktop Workshops will be starting up in october with the idea of marching this show all around north america training up new developers who can spread the kde goodness around the continent. you can see the OSDW draft website here, but please don't submit it slashdot quite yet. it'll be moving to a faster server and needs copy adjustments before we do that ;) the pr engine around OSDW is about start this coming week, so we'll have lots of time to spread the word about it!

and finally: who knows. maybe some energetic and enterprising kde fan, or better yet a gaggle of energetic and enterprising kde fans, will set up a kde north america regional kde group and, to quote emeril, kick it up a notch.

peace, luv, happiness and kisses all around.

death to dualism: eye candy AND performance

it's funny ... when i blog about eye candy, some people think i mean to say "slow". and when i blog about performance, there are the people who think i mean "plain jane". just like how when i write about usability, that gets translated into "no features" for some people. =P

well, i don't believe much in dualism. i find such things don't exist in life except in artificial circumstances. life is mostly greys. even the black and white issues are more charcoal and eggshell usually ;)

so when i blogged about plasma needing to be performant, i wasn't saying it needs to look boring. it needs to look sexy and be performant. and this is totally doable.

yes, i want it all. give me my cake and let me eat it, and all that jazz! you can ask others in kde project who have had to dealt with my "no! we can do it! we must do it! i will not accept nor be content with a compromise here!" moments about that ;)

*waves to seli*

houston, we have lift off

the plasma website is now up and running again, thanks to gracious hosting by david solbach who has hooked us up with ample disk space, computing power and bandwidth. thank David! now maybe we'll be able to withstand the next slashdot stampede. =P

it's also a well known fact that my life is not nearly public enough and that i'm an intensely farly private individual. (yes, i'm being sarcastic.) well, danny allen to the rescue! he's made this interesting little website called myscreen.org. basically it allows you to invade my (and currently 5 other kde hacker's) privacy and see what i'm up to.

it's updated every 5 minutes and i've got a button on my kicker that turns it on/off locally. i'll try to keep it on whenever i'm hacking on KDE stuff and not doing something overly sensitive. it's a cute idea and a rather well done site.

it's like reality television meets open source hacking. all it's missing is "the confessional" ;)

another vote for kolab

riddel recommended kolab to jorge and i have to agree.

why? because i'm using it and depending on it and it hasn't let me down yet. i have a kdemail.net account that uses kolab2, as do many other kde developers. the company that i've been consulting to for the last several months is also running kolab2 and they rely on it's calendaring and mail services to keep their business running. what's more, they are an IT services company and are starting to roll out kolab2 to several of their customers based on the success they've had with it. cheaper than exchange and it integrates with outlook, web browsers and kontact for groupware =) spam filter, virus scanning, web admin ... heck, it's even got server replication built in!

as for installation ... if you're running debian it's a 10 minute job to set up using the provided debian packages. throwing kolab on top of kubuntu, for instance, is a dream. if you aren't running debian, it's pretty much the same set of steps but it takes more wall clock time as the install script has to compile the packages from source.

moving web servers, what plasma needs to not do

after being /.'d off the face of the internet for the second time in as many weeks , i'm moving the plasma website to another server. d solbach stepped up to offer a really decent package to ensure that the site will be able to withstand future pain. sweet!

on the other hand, it would be really nice if people would let me know when they are about to hose my bandwidth by posting something to a place like slashdot. really, i was hoping to have this kind of attention in a few months, not so much right now when there are fewer concrete results to show.

but hey, nothing like mounting the pressure on by raising expectations, right? ;)

now, it's always better to define yourself in terms of what you are rather than what you aren't. i've tried to present plasma in this way, but sometimes there are some things you just have to say "we aren't this." something that plasma must not become is bloat: it must remain lean and fast. this is not optional. it must look sexy and it must be performant. i commit to testing it on my pII-400 with with old matrox video card in it and use that a low-end baseline. this is an achievable goal, as long as we keep performance in mind from the very start and are willing to allow looks to be sacrificed to speed when running on a machine that lacks the horsepower.

one of the reactions people are having to the concept of a new, modern desktop/panels concept is "oh no! i'll need a dual opteron with 2gb of ram and a wicked fast graphics card!" well, i don't want to see that happen. i can't let that happen. let me tell you a story:

today i was depositing a cheque into an atm machine at the bank. they have a spanky new interface on their atm's that they recently installed. it looks nice: little throbers where they belong, nice transitional effects, beautiful buttons, cutesy little mimic of a ballance sheet on screen while entering your deposits, etc. but it feels at least 3-4 times slower now than the old interface

contrast: when i take money out of a machine in germany, i'm always amazed at how bloody fast they are. input my pin *bam* next screen! say how much i want *bam* money pours out. i don't even really remember how sexy the interfaces are, just that i'm blown away by the speed of the transactions. and you know why? because that's what matters: i'm trying to do banking, not be entertained.

now .. given a choice between a fast atm and a fast atm that has a sexy and intuitive interface, i know which i'll choose. but if i have to drop either "fast" or "sexy", i'll take fast any day. because every time i've gone to use my bank's atm in the last month i've been totally pissed off at how much of my time they are wasting just to wank off in my face their ability to hire a graphic designer or two.

screw that. give me speed and let me get my work done, baby.

sometimes to go forward you first have to go back

so kicker is a lot more boring in the kde4 branch that it is in trunk/ (which will be 3.5) at the moment. button tiles and "transparency" have been removed. the former looks very dated now and the latter was a huge hack with many undesirable side effects. with the new theming systems these features are deprecated so the code was simply in the way. with it gone we can more easily refactor some of the classes involved and start thinking about how to implement new visual features.

sometimes to go forward you first have to go back.

last night i picked up pumpkin, pi, and lost in translation. we made it through one of them, i never made it home.

hacker cat and other psychic phenomena

last year before flying to aKademy i did something i have never done before: i had my fortune read. now, i had never done this because a) i think most "psychics" are full of crap and b) i've had unnerving experiences with such things before. while living in hawaii i had my palm read a few times by people, including once by an otherwise normal appearing woman who spontaneously approached me on public transit and asked if i would let her see my palm. but none of these people would tell me what they saw. to this day i don't know if i was simply inscrutable to them or if they had some reason for not sharing whatever it was they saw. either way, it left me creeped out about the whole fortune telling thing.

but on that sunny day i was passing by a park on foot and this fellow had a blanket laid out on the grass with a sign that said he'd read your tarot for a donation. i immediately got really good vibes from him and thought, "aw, what the hell. it'll be fun, or at least funny. hey! maybe i can blog about it!"

well, the guy was amazing. using his cards, he described my recent past and the present with startling detail and clarity. and then he told me that what i was hoping to happen that summer would not occur. but not to despair, since i was sewing the seeds that would sprout next summer. given his accuracy on the past and present, i wondered if his foresight would prove equally sooth. well, it's next summer now.

so fast forward to today, which by 17:00 had felt like a loss. i had spent the entirety of the day in meetings getting virtually nothing done, other than filling up on pizza, coffee, kahlua and beer. well, that's not particularly accurate. things did get done, but nothing that made me feel like i'd spent the last 12 hours fulfilling my purpose on the planet.

this is not to say that i know what that purpose is exactly, but i certainly know what it isn't. and it isn't sitting around singing the business version of campfire songs over fancy pizza.

but then i got home and everything got better. well, almost everything. a cheque i was expecting to arrive didn't, but ... oh well. so i checked my email and got two pieces of good news:

a) i'm going to spend the evening vegging out on a couch watching a movie with a wonderful human being

b) i'll soon be working on kde full time

holy crap. the dude in the in the park was right!

though i wonder if he foresaw my cat's recently acquired habit of sitting on my lap while i'm working, putting his paws on the laptop and generally annoying me by clicking stuff by tapping on the trackpad. GAAAAAAAH!

 

and for a blog-outro: the plasma button art competition has already generated 1257 views and 5 submissions. and it's still friday here in north america! i wonder what monday will bring......

more signs and portents

so i deuglified the window list button in the taskbar and am mostly done implementing a wishlist item for ken wimer, the only guy that i know of to have a piece of art named after him that ships with kde. (wanna see where? open konqi, browse a directory of files, go under the view menu and select "configure background").

kicker in the kde4 branch now builds so its time to start making things works properly. thankfully many things do, but there are still easy to spot problems in places, and i can only imagine how many non-easy to spot problems await. but this concludes the initial port to Qt4 a whole 2 days ahead of schedule.

however, not all is comfort filled. my new neighbours, whose first impression of me was attained by knocking on my door at 9:30 saturday morning looking for howard (the property manager) and instead finding me rather disheveled and in my robe, are cause for potential distress.

you see, the female half of the pair knocked on my door that leads to the basement with a query about the washing machine. she was doing their laundry and the washing machine stopped mid cycle and she wasn't sure how to get it going again. she asked for my assistance and being a good neighbour i obliged her. once in front of the machine i see that yes, indeed, the wash has stopped mid cycle and the washer was full of clothes and water. i could see this because the lid was open.

i examined the dials and they all seemed to be on the right settings, the lights were on so it was getting electricity.... pondering what might be the issue (and hoping that it wasn't broken) i closed the lid and instantly it sprang to life!

to which my neighbour says, "oh. you have to close the lid. i guess that's smart, for safety and everything."

oh. my. god.

signs and portents

while looking at my online itinerary for my flights to and from aKademy in malaga, i happened to notice my confirmation code: DEADZY. i kid you not.

i hope they don't ask me for it because that will be rather awkward. "yes, my confirmation code is 'deadzy' .. dee ee ay dee zed why.. 'deadzy' *pause* no, i'm not kidding. you think i'd kid about something like that?"

on the radar? all over the freakin' map!

those who read my blog may recall when i wrote about attending a microsoft event here in calgary and how the only open source desktop they showed in their slides was kde.

well, now they are showing kde to their "partners" at their worlwide partner show (yes, that same show they said we had 1.3% of the deployed desktop space)

so we're not just on the radar, our front lines have been spotted and plotted on their map.

the bad news is that they are waging a quiet war of misinformation that is based on damning with faint praise. we need to sort out the truth from the lies, address the truths by making sure kde4 fills in the remaining gaps and address the lies by setting the ledger straight.

expect to hear this line often in the coming months: "linux (and kde) is more flexible, but windows is more integrated and user friendly." really, "integrated" is just a nice word for "we've made the choices for you" and says almost nothing as to the quality, fitness or usefulness of the software. it does say a lot about vendor lock in and a lack of "right size" solutions.

as for user friendly ... well, i've had to use windows 2k3 a bit this month due to a work contract and all i can say is this: ahahahahahhhahaha.

another interesting thing to note from that same article is that microsoft is starting to use the fact that open source is available on their platform to encourage people not to leave it.

hm, that's twice i've blogged about microsoft and kde this month. that ought to be enough for the rest of the year ;)

kde4, ho!

so the plasma team has started ripping into the kde4 branch. Maksim had been puttering away quite doggedly at it for a few weeks now with much progress having been made. now the rest of us are either there or on our way and things are starting to happen =) i've done a half dozen commits this weekend to the branch, including moving all the kpanel* classes out of libkdeui and into libkickermain which will eventually evolved into libplasma and lib .. um.. libsomething. libplasma is for applets, libsomething will be for the extensions (various panels and the desktop)

i removed the clock applet while i was in there. that was soooooooooo cathartic it isn't even funny =) we'll have a new clock applet in plasma, so i didn't want to waste any time on the clock. it's already injured me psychically enough not to follow me into kde4.

kasbar is also disabled from the build at the moment, waiting on rich to join in and start maintaining it in the kde4 branch.

and this is just the beginning. things are going to be wild for a few months with kicker as it morphs into the beginnings of plasma. what i'm not looking forward to is porting all the applets spread across kde's svn. in fact, this may be a good time to cull them down to a reasonable core and perhaps start from the beginning again? haven't really decided there.

i'm impressed with how active the kde4 branch is starting to get, but we really do need more hands. many of our application developers will be diving in on or around akademy, but if you're looking for something to do before then .... =)

*pssst* and join kde4-devel on the freenode.net irc network

ah, numbers.

if you wish to convince me of something, you ought to try and use arguments that are plausible. Michael Sievert, microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows product management supposedly claimed that 0.013% of deployed desktops run linux at a recent koombayah-around-the-campfire meeting for their partners.

now, i'm not sure what he means by "deployed" exactly, but i'm going to assume he's using it in the way most people do and is referring to the number of actively used desktop computers in the world. and just how many personal computers are there in the world? well, a quick dig on the intarweb turned up the number 593,085,000 for 2003 (though some of the numbers used in that study were from 2001 or 2002). if we assume an additional 16 million units shipped per year (based on 2004 numbers) with no attrition (unlikely) we're somewhere about 600,000,000. wow, that's a big number!

so how much is 0.013% of 600,000,000? 78,000. ok, that number is very, very wrong.

alright, so maybe the number got twisted. maybe it was supposed to be 1.3% and we can chalk up the gaff to the common malady of mathematical illiteracy. that lands the number at 7,800,000. that's a number i could swallow, though i suspect it's still on the low end. microsoft isn't going to go with high numbers, so 1.3% would be the absolute rock bottom number they would feel comfortable going public with.

and if we go with that number, that means somewhere around 4-5 million KDE users. that's pretty cool. how many people get to make something that gets used by that many people? especially willingly and happily? =)

and remember, that 1.3% is against the deployed base, which stretches back at least into the mid 90s which is when KDE was just starting out. if we assume 50% of our growth has come in the last 2 years (which is a complete shot in the dark, but not unreasonable imho) that would mean some 2 million or so new KDE users during that time which would be ~6% against new shipment numbers. add the GNOME camp to that and it's even better! this means we're growing, and if you pay attention to the news you'll see that the pace is quickening.

let's keep the heat turned up high!

is it friday already?

after a very distracting week where i got very little done, i can hardly fathom that it's friday already.

peyton and have been hanging out this evening putting together his new star wars lego. he got four boxes of the stuff, each with 2 constructions and a couple star wars guys. we now have quite the collection of space ships, buildings, heros and villians from the movies. his two favourite things these days is lego and star wars, so this is right up his alley. we walk through the instructions together and he does pretty much all the construction. i help with the some of the small pieces, but that's about it. i think it's a great excercise for his mind on so many levels.

and despite getting very little done for KDE this week, the plasma meme spread like wildfire. first on slashdot, and then on golem.de and pro-linux.de. i understand these are some of the higher profile german linux/oss sites, so that's really cool.

more people are visiting #plasma and bouncing ideas around. matt broadstone and i spent some time hammering out design details for extensions, applets and extenders today there. the qt4 porting is going decently, though there are some major rough spots still. all in due time.

more ram arrived for the laptop today so that'll make developing on it a bit more fun. but on the downside, the depressing show of animal humiliation and brutality combined with insane overdrinking and endless parties that is known as the calgary stampede has begun.

more progress was made on the san diego devel workshop, with both intel and trolltech coming on as sponsors and the speaker list being settled. there's another very high profile company that is this close to committing to sponsorship, but i'll hold off on naming them until it's "in the bag". the website will be up next week containing details on travel and lodging, the speakers, the topics and online registration. tom chance and linspire's heather are tag teaming on the marketing, so i know that we'll get some good press coverage =)

and then my goal is to hold similar events in texas, new england, southern ontario and the pacific north west before the end of next year. that's one every 3 months, which may be a bit ambitious, but we'll see.

forward looking == no email

so it's official, plasma is a "forward looking" project. i mean, if slashdot says so it must be true, right? unfortunately plasma.bddf.ca is also where my email arrives. or, rather, would arrive if there was any bandwidth left for it to arrive on. so i'll be without personal email for a day or so here. if you send something and it bounces back, that's why. just hold on to it for a day or so and send it again.

where in the world is carmen sanseigo?

i had quite the agenda this weekend; finish up an article i'm working on about setting up regional kde organizations, org for the san diego workshop, trying to figure out why kde4 kdebase is giving me such a hard time.

but then someone came along and managed to utterly distract me by loosing gravity's hold upon my feet.

oh canada!

so today was canada day. and what a wonderful country it is.

i think pride in one's home is a beautiful and wonderous thing. nationalism, however, is stupid. there's a difference =)

so we were out celebrating being canadian (starting the night before ;) and had a LOT of fun. party, party, hack, party, hack, party party. i ended up at a house of cool geeks. which is to say, there is a certain trend here for the underground cool to proclaim to be geeks. one of the hotter girls was wearing a shirt that said, "i *heart* nerds". and she meant it. i didn't unsheath my own geekhood as that would've been just too odd.

but the music was great, the weather even better. only the fireworks sucked (alberta doesn't seem to understand how fireworks shows are supposed to start).

oh, and we found the first hot dog vendor to offer veggie dogs on the street in calgary! woo hoo! mahlah and i each got one and thanked him for offering something for the rest of us. he said he was just ahead of the curve and others would be following. yes, the vegetarians will inherit the downtown core! ;)

p.k.o look

go over to p.k.o, one of the premiere places my blog is syndicated.

it looks ok, but just ok. i wish it looked amazing. gorgeous. something that made me go, "woah."

to the artistically inclined who read my blog, please come up with a sweet-ass layout so we can finally upgrade clee's wonderful service (that's p.k.o, for the uninitiated) into the new millennium.

what say ye? (preferably in css ;)

esr on the gpl; esr on kde

just finished reading this interview with eric raymond. he's recently gone on a "the gpl is bad" tirade, completely missing the point and purpose of the gpl and how it was critical to the success of corporate adoption of open source software. the gpl, and licenses like it, have been the capitalist treaties that enable cooperation and sponsorship of open source software.

but i've come to expect this kind of tripe from esr. i remember back in january of 2004, when i was blogging elsewhere writing about how esr had proclaimed the demise of kde on the linux show. i vowed to remember and remind him of his utter failure at prognostication in years to come. well, i don't forget these things. here we are a year and a half out and kde has more direction than ever, more steam behind it than ever and a growing community of both contributors and users. so much for death and irrelevance, and so much for esr understanding our community. when we release kde 4 in another year and a half from now, perhaps we can revisit it.

back to the more recent esr interview, i did agree with some of the things he said, in particular:

Freedom is the oxygen of innovation, not its enemy.

when asked why, if open standards are good, people write open software to interoperate with proprietary standards, he said:

To support users who don't want their data to be trapped in proprietary applications under vendor control.

true. and i'd go one step further: if you create an open implementation of a vendor controlled standard that becomes popular enough, you can turn that proprietary standard into an open standard for all intents and purposes. samba would be my first exhibit in this case.

of course standards that start open and remain open are the best.

linux journal reader's choice awards

i noticed tonight that the next round of the linux journal reader's choice awards voting is underway. lots of great kde apps in there! be sure to vote for your favourite stuff...

looking over the ballot, there's some interesting stuff in there. at times i was scratching my head, and at other times i was smiling.

it's cool to see how the kate editor has seem to become one of the unix editors as it keeps making it into these things put up against vim and emacs, and puts in really great showings to. how close will it get to vim this time?

the amarok vs xmms voting will be interesting as well, as it really contrasts two different philosophies in media players: the skinable (read: non standard UI) app that plays music and that's about it and the immersive media app that uses standard widgets and delivers an experience around your media. what are people wanting these days?

but the big head scratcher has to be the email and office apps categories. evolution is in the email category (up against thunderbird), whilst kontact is in the office apps category. how the heck that happened is a mystery since it makes zero sense. thunderbird is an email app, but evo is groupware (of which email is one element); so even that comparison is a bit odd. and just how does one choose between kontact (groupware) and open office (word processor and spreadsheet) and latex? it really ought to have been kontact vs evolution in a groupware category IMHO.

oh well; it provided some entertainment for me while waiting for my kde4 checkout build.