FrogBlog

It was nice to have attended Akademy again. Everything was well organized and the talks were interesting or entertaining. Or both. Particularly the improvised KDevelop presentation managed to impress.

Tampere was also a good venue. Big enough to offer a variety of place to stay, eat and hang around. But not too big as everything was still in walking distance. The Finnish people also showed their strong side of being gentle during the day and party professionals at night. One exemplary experience: while laying in a park on the “day after” some guy who apparently had too much to drink heavily throws up under a tree. As if nothing happens he opens a can of beer, lights a cigarette and walks away.

The only not so nice thing was the trip home: I had been heavily suffering from delayed baggage on several international trips during the last months. Up to a point where people around me started to switch from pity to amusement. Arrived at Helsinki airport one convenient hour before departure. More than enough time for a passenger to get on the plane. Apparently not for luggage. It arrived two days later. Granted, unlike being hit by this on the trip out it’s rather harmless at home. But I was sad about the tasty Finnish bread I imported (illegally?) being rock solid. And annoyed about the temporary shavers I bought emitting Aloe Vera and vitamin E but cutting my face until I looked like a victim in a horror movie.

Why oh why do airlines manage to screw up luggage transport so much? With all those computerized systems in place. Or because of the computers? I had long added Heathrow and Amsterdam on the list of airports to avoid. But Helsinki? I cannot help but feeling that airports accept way more traffic than they should do in order to get the fees by airlines. Airlines follow and accept too ambitious connection plans. Accepting a certain percentage of people and luggage missing their connections.

Advise for those returning from Akademy: get to the airport early. It’s not such a monster but relative to its size it’s absolutely overcrowded with people going on vacation.

After skipping the two last years I can’t help but attending Akademy again. Our company just released version 4.0* of our test tool Squish so I’m a bit more relaxed when it comes to thinking of hobbies I should have.

Also time to meet up with KDE contributors I still know and time to meet all the new ones in person. I’m also keen on seeing all the new ways to use spare cpu cycles and laptop batteries for impressive eye candy. Plus learning about latest developments from the alive KDEPIM and KOffice front.

Another reason for me going is the love for my mother country Finland. Tampere is just three hours away from the place I stay at almost each summer of my life. To show it I’m skipping the usual “I’m going to Akademy” banner and paste a picture of Lappajärvi which is my favorite of the >187,888 Finnish lakes.

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On Saturday the non-profit association eXis-unlimited.org had organized the meanwhile second meeting of the Free Software community in our home town Hamburg. This time the organizers Sven Reumann and Ozder Abdurrachman had invited into the trading hall of the former coffee exchange in Hamburg’s harbor area. Some pictures can be found here.

The event was well attended and almost 30 users groups and projects presented their agenda, work in progress and meeting details. Among them were representatives from Open Streep Map, Ruby on Rails, OpenSolaris, Chaos Computer Club, working groups of local universities and Scribus. The sidux project handed out freshly burnt CDs of their distribution based on Debian unstable featuring KDE 4.2. Being invited for a short address in our function as a company sponsor I used the opportunity to call for all local KDE developers to come forward and unite. Everyone I got to talk to afterwards had reverted to version 3.5 though and currently wasn’t in the mood for any experiments.

Everyone sitting through the presentation marathon was rewarded with a buffet and drinks being served afterwards. A good opportunity to network with members of other groups. The presentations were taped on video as well as recorded by makers of NerdAlert - a show aired by the free local radio station FSK who also conducted individual interviews. So one can expect some online and on-air coverage appearing in the next days.

Postponing support for SMIL attribute ‘fill=”scroll”‘ for a long time, I now really needed this feature for extending the Atom feed support in KMPlayer. KMPlayer comes with a flash player backend and supporting the Youtube feeds was just a too low hanging fruit to not implement.

Anyhow, to ensure that the first flash link doesn’t play automatically on first load or when clicking on a next item, I’ve added as first link a summary of the entry using the media:description and media:thumbnail tags as SMIL presentation.
Since the presentation has a fixed aspects, ie. the text scales when resizing the player, some larger description text have their text fall outside the region area.
A quick implementation attempt was to simply draw the scrollbars over the right side of the text, painting it as black with 0.5 alpha value. Now that looked actually quite nice and has benefit that the scrollbar is there but also doesn’t take any screen resources (that is, one can’t click behind it but can see through it).

<smil>
  <head>
    <layout>
      <root-layout background-color="white" width="320" height="240"/>
      <region id="image0" top="5" left="5" bottom="5" right="5"fit="scroll"/>
    </layout>
  </head>
  <body>
    <img src="elep1.jpg" region="image0" dur="60"/>
  </body>
</smil>

After that, it was a small step to extend the virtual area with the scrollbar width (so the clicking limitation is gone) and therefor added the horizontal scrollbar.
(took an image because the first reaction of my dear colleague Frerich R showing with text, was that it looked like a bug that the text was painted through the scrollbars - of course I suspect that because his knewsticker can’t show the media files like mine)

So I went to the Berlin summit this year. I might not have come if it wasn’t for for bunanson bringing my little project at a more popular level.

It was really nice to meet him in person (left on the picture, as a big thanks I bought him a german weizen beer). He also did a presentation, presenting his worldtv99 playlist.

Anyhow, the visit was really great and interesting. Mobile computing is an exciting area and, thanks to the Nokia internet tables, Moblin, Android and what not, opening up for open source.
Nokia employees presented the roadmap of their internettablet. Some insight talks about UI design. With years of experience with small form factor devices and their Symbian OS, definitely a good learning experience.
So the next device will include OpenGL-ES and on top Clutter for eye appealing applications. From what I recall, the destop will be Clutter based. Applications remain Gtk based. They’re pushing Gtk offscreen rendering for use with Clutter and there seem to be an effort for a Symbian port. So I don’t suspect this is likely to change anytime soon.
Qt is coming though, Ari Jaaksi talked about this toolkit for enabling multi-platform support for their applications. Also a Howto was presented by Nokia as one of the parallel sessions. As a froglogic Squish developer, I’m of course quite happy about this.
Exciting times for both toolkit, now competing on the same GUI. Obviously, the linux desktop as a whole will benefit from this downscaling and speedups.
Nokia UI designers seem to be quite modest about using animations though, avoid wow first, annoyance later experiences. I do suspect things like roll-down menus and such will be there. I think that animations may help hiding latencies for e.g. application loading and such.

One addition to my last blog, I already talked about the ‘handhelds GUI != desktop GUI’ thing. An UI design talk presented the minimal space for finger friendly clicking is nine millimeter, with a screen of 225dpy gives (9 mm * 225 px/inch) / (25.4 mm/inch) = 79.7 px. Now that is almost an inch on for destop screen.

The N810 is the third internet tablet that I own, starting with the first N770 that I got via the discount program.
Exciting to see that more KDE developers now starting to develop and blog about their experiences with this device. A somewhat dejavu feeling reading these blocks came about running desktop application KXyz and poor graphics etc.
I think it might be worthwhile for the new developers to catch up on the maemo-devel mailing list archives and read the lenghty threads about hardware limitation and such.
Btw. this mailing list was originally setup for the platform, but as developers prefer -devel mailings lists, changed to be targeted to application developers as well.

I have no idea what’s been said at the Academy presentations, so I hope it may be worthwhile to share my observation from the last three years as user (did some development too, but I don’t think that is very interesting to talk about).
A few weeks ago, I spent some days with friends in my home land. The N810 is really a nice travelmate to have. Listening to podcasts, reading a pdf file or watching a video while traveling, reading my google mail wherever I had Wifi access, using the GPS to find my way around, watching the latest news from the livestreams before I went to sleep and simply using it as a light source in an unfamiliar guest room.
At home, I basically use it as a mp3 player or as a TV device when drinking a glass of wine on the balcony. Since I live abroad, the Voice-IP feature is a real killer. Google talk is nice but not very common. Sip with an asterisk server is just great. I have one contact in my home land that has a VoIP account and flat rate access to the national phone network, I can dial to any number in this country for free using a second asterisk server over there.
The browser experience is okay, 800×640 is enough for most web sites. The keyboard is pretty good for responding to mails. However, the high dpi of 240 does makes reading stuff on web pages rather tiresome. A five euro +1 reading glasses surely helps a bit.
I’m not much of a gamer, did some quick games killing waiting time.

Some thoughts about software for this device. Like the first cars looked like a horse carriage without horse, the desktop metaphor might not apply on these devices.
Mouse drags, tab-and-hold for RMB, are just cumbersome, try to arrange the home applets. Now this may change in the next release, which should be more finger friendly (but this can only be about the size of widgets, dunno).
When publishing a program, keep in mind that slow application startup, slow feedback on actions are deadly. Actually, everything that consumes lots of battery power (unless the device is mounted somewhere so that it can charge constantly). What might sounds unexpected is that services listening for network data, drain the battery.

The trend observing is that the UI tends to become larger and more finger friendly. Which means that applications GUI’s diverge from their desktop counter parts already and becoming simpler.
The more popular provided open source application may show what makes sense currently. Various game emulators seem to be quite popular. Home automation, remote controls etc, surely are useful applications.
Analyzing software has its place. Bluethooth, Wifi, GPS, microphone and camera inputs allows things like network scanning, motion detectors etc (tricorder, anyone?).

Office or whatever management application are limited to mail and scribble/notes programs. Probably due to the troublesome way to enter enter text or do anything that requires lots of menu access and lack of overview given by the small display. I hope that this will improve, e.g. presentation software.
Interesting read is the thread from an Apple Newton developer in the maemo-devel archive. I really wonder if this device came too early that made them fail or that manipulating documents simply has no place on these gadgets,
I do suspect that perhaps in the propertarian world, things like invoice or whatever management in a client-server setup certainly may have some potential.

I hope the new KDE develops come with lots of new ideas. Qt surely lowers the barrier to get started.

Now that KDE 4.1 there is some time to think about new features again. As almost every piece of KDE the KHTML library had been heavily affected by the changes in the underlying infrastructure. The switch to Qt 4, replacement of DCOP with D-Bus, new networking code and others required adaptions (and consequently bug fixing) that did not leave much room to even think about adding new features.

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The end of the day at the office is nearing. Sitting at my desk, going through the list of people who have requested a trial version of Squish today. Of course several from the usual suspects, i.e. large
international cooperations. But what never ceases to amaze me is the sheer endless number of yet unknown shops of all sizes and domains that exist around the world.

I notice a high-pitched whistle filling my ears but can’t make out the origin. The harddisk of my machine started to sing its final song? A technician from the lab below passionately grinding a dental prosthesis into shape?

With our crew decimated due to vacation time it’s a bit more quiet than usual. Clearly audible are Rainer and Roberto fighting their last table soccer match of the day. Rob is busy with a new internal test library. Andreas and Frerich are discussing their major rewrite of our test development GUI. Just checked: no modal dialog blocking the user’s flow, yet. Aaron would be proud of them.

Looking at how much code I wrote myself today: not much. Busy with customer care, administrative tasks and design discussions. But that’s fine as long it allows the others to concentrate on their projects. We have a new product in alpha, another about to start later this year and of course many more planned. SO MUCH ONE COULD DO. If you want to join us on this trip and know how to hack in either (or all of) C++, Java and/or Python let me know!

Note to myself: reserve many hours of KDE coding time for the weekend. Investigate redoing the the tokenizer of KJS. With the recent performance improvements of the execution engine the parsing phase starts showing up in profiles. Should be able to do better than my simplistic implementation from ‘99.

Next of the senses that gets stimulated: the cooking school downstairs has started their daily evening course. One scent more tasty than the other coming in through the open window. Hmmmmm. A master of the profession must be at work again. Getting extremely hungry, going home. Bye.

With the application deadline for this year’s Google Summer of Code being over now (and the list of accepted projects to be published soon) I’d like to point those looking to make a bit of money working on Open Source software to another initiative.

Matt’s Bargain Basement Summer Of Code is privately funded which I find quite impressive. Matt is offering bounties for fixing issues in several components of software he is using every day. If you are interested in working on one of the tasks contact him. If you want to discuss some details do so. I can confirm that he is open to suggestions.

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A while ago, KDE branched the 4.0.x releases into their own subversion branch directory. This reminded me that I’ve been using a little script for a while which comes in quite handy when you want to commit a patch to multiple branches.

The script is called ‘ilc’ (which originally stood for ‘integrate last change’ but it actually integrates any revision you specify) and can be found at http://ktown.kde.org/~frerich/ilc. It’s a little Bash script which expects you to have separate checkouts for the different branches (so it doesn’t integrate the change “in place”).

For instance, in my directory layout, there’s the KDE trunk checkout in ~/src/kde/trunk and the KDE 4.0.x branch checkout in ~/src/kde/40. I usually work in the trunk branch, but every now and then I want to backport something (usually a bugfix) to the 4.0.x branch. So after hacking away, I eventually do this:


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ svn ci
Sending settingsdialog.cpp
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 765024.
frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$


So SVN gave me the number of the revision I just committed. Using the ilc script, all I need to do to integrate this change into the 4.0.x branch is


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ ilc 765024 ~/src/kde/40


The script will make sure that the affected files in the 4.0.x checkout are up to date, then apply the patch, and finally it’ll let me inspect the patch it did, abort the merge, or commit. When committing, it’ll use the original log message plus a prefix like “automatically merged revision 765024:” so that I can lateron still see that this commit was actually a backport of something else.