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Below are the 13 most recent journal entries recorded in the "blauzahl" journal:
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12:16 pm
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Phonon Bugday
Woke up to find the Phonon BugDay is going well. They're halfway through, but could still use some help with the second half! Also needed: someone with an external usb sound device and someone using KDE on MS-Windows. Join in, #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net!
Tags: bugday, bugsquad, kde, phonon
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08:13 pm
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Collaboration!
Was told my bof was the most collaborative yet. Bugsquad met up with Tobi, one of the Gnome people, and we traded secrets. We also talked with a few developers, some prospective helpers, and I managed to see Dario and Grundleborg in the same room. :)
Tonight was the Collabora party. As the evening wore on, the early trend of swapping nametags rapidly picked up. It became a game to see just whose you could get. I'm not sure who has mine right now. But I have ereslibre's, which is neat, because I didn't realize he was here, and I wouldn't have met him otherwise. Which is the downside to this conference: it is rather large. If you don't know who you are looking for, you might not necessarily run into them. All the same, I did run into and manage to talk to Sumana for a bit, which was pretty cool, as I haven't seen her since she moved out to NYC.
I was kinda dubious about to what extent having GUADEC and aKademy together would work, but some things do seem to have been perhaps more useful than they first seemed (not to be). Given who I've seen talking to each other in the hallway, anyway. And the conversations I got into at lunch. Anyway, late now, so signing off. But I get to sleep in tomorrow. :)
Tags: bugsquad, collaborate, gran canaria, kde
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05:52 am
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BugSquad helpers rock! BugDay redux and thanks; countdown to gcds....
Another BugDay done... Something I shouldn't forget to post is the list of cool people who joined us:
siyuan *
dtritscher
freinhard *
Edulix (developer on hand, but he triaged too :)
xxtjaxx *
anselmolsm *
aalpert *
MJD *
Dario_Andres
myself
I put a little * next to all the new people. Check out how many that was! Very dedicated too, most came back later in the weekend. Thanks everyone! Thanks also to old-timers on the list, and to Pino, who helped run/train.
Now I'm just panicking: I leave for GCDS in under 24 hours! Ack! (Then the cat and cat sitter get to take over, happy cat...)
Tags: bugday, bugsquad, kde, konqueror, panic
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05:37 am
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BugDay this Sat
As was mentioned in that one dot article, there's a BugDay this Sat. I think we decided to do Konqueror again, as we haven't for a while. I took a survey, and what I thought was true, really was true. People very quickly moved from doing bug triage to further contributions. So it really is a way to meet and join the community and learn about how kde works. You don't have to know programming, or anything really. I found someone at a local uni who thought they couldn't do any free software work because they'd only had two years of C++...!!! Please, this is not true! That person has done C++ longer than I have! You are most certainly qualified to sort through bugs if you have had that many CS classes. :D In fact, all you really need is an eye to detail, a certain tendency for pedanticism, and the ability to not make people unhappy when you close their bugs (ok, that one is an art; but you can always ask for help and backup!), oh, and the ability to drink our kool-aid. Blah blah want to help kde and give something back, we actually seem to believe it, as silly as it might sound. Besides, you get to laugh at some really wacky bugs people have filed. So there's entertainment value! (Did I convince you to help us yet? How about that Konqueror is relatively easy to triage compared to some of the other softwares? Does that work?) See you Sat on #kde-bugs! (And of course, you don't have to wait that long. Drop by now. ;)
Oh, and I did actually buy my tickets for gran canaria, so you'll see me there. BugSquad is going to have some sort of bof. Bug us on irc if you have opinions on what time/day. Or just write something on the wiki and we can have edit wars. :D :D :D
We'll also have some kind of development/planning session/sprint/igloo for DrKonqi, so keep an eye out for that.
I've been compulsively reading stuff about the Iran elections and protests. I hope people we know there are ok.
Oh, and for various reasons I've been not reading my email lately. You can kill me in person at gran canaria. ;)
Tags: bugday, bugsquad, kde
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05:07 pm
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Yay BugSquad birthday! We're one year old today!
Well, Monday, actually. But today we happen to be off on #kde-bugs and having fun triaging. Our stats from Saturday:
We've gone through 150 bugs or so
lyteyn is one of our brand new people, and several other newbies have poked in and helped or asked for help
We have 8 people who have signed in.
So happy birthday us! We're still going on for Sunday, so drop by.And have some virtual cake.
EDIT: make that 9 people. Ruchir just appeared. Rumor has it "Beer_" will be back too... So maybe ten. Not a bad number, but we can always +1. So come join us and make history. If you've used KMail, you can come help. Maybe we can beat our record. :D
Oh, and we're looking for people with:
a) a lotus notes server
b) cram-md5 authentication on a pop server
c) a home folder on a network share and a dimap account
d) japanese input methods
e) S/MIME
f) a lotus domino server (imap)
g) an IMAP server on which calendars/todos can be stored (courier or cyrus?)
If you have one of these, we have a bug for you! (Yes, so far, just one (each). It will be quick and easy for you. ;)
Tags: anniversary, bugday, bugsquad, kde, kmail
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01:29 pm
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Tired of Useless bug reports? Dario to the rescue! && Bugday April 4-5 2009
You may have noticed a "Dario Andres" at the top of the bug-closer list for the last... well, a while now. I think he got tired of all the useless plasma backtraces, because he and George Kiagiadakis have been cooking up a rewrite of the crash dialog you get everytime something goes *boom*.
It's sweet to watch BugSquad members get more involved with KDE, and that's what happened with both of these people. Speaking of BugSquad, it just so happens that our one-year anniversary is April 6th. So we're celebrating by having a BugDay. :D We're starting Saturday and will be going Sunday too. I bet people will be around to do the standard mop-up on Monday too. So come join #kde-bugs and say you want to help. We're doing it on KMail, and feel free to stop by early. You don't need any programming knowledge, you just have to be perhaps annoyingly pedantic. ;) We'll teach you everything else you need to know, and then, who knows what you'll be doing for KDE next? :) I tried counting up everyone who has ever signed in for an official bugday: 93 is what I got. I was a little surprised, to say the least. Everyone should feel free to come back. :) I'll have to run more statistics....
Anyway, my little ad done, let's look at some screenshots. Incidentally, if you want to try it out, the code is under /branches/work/drkonqi-newdialog. Now, I've seen a zillion UI mockups for this, but this is out of what is currently in SVN. Some of the hardest part is the non-technical issues:
* How easy do you want to make it for people to report bugs? We want to discourage bug reports that are completely useless, but "useless" can vary a bit by project. If your app never crashes, knowing that someone just crashed it is useful information, although you can debate how useful the information is depending on how much they can tell you. If they can give you steps to reproduce it, then you can always go and generate a backtrace yourself though, so we take that into account. If your app gives you tons and tons of crash reports, and all of them are things you know about and just fixed yesterday, but you can't close any of the reports because they all have the accursed ?? of no debug symbols, then you really don't want to see them. Finding the right balance is the fun part...
* How can you teach a user a little bit about how to file a good bug report? It would be great if it were self-documenting, or at least very intuitive and friendly to do. UI here is very important, see what you make of what there is right now:
We'll skip the "advanced" tab and pretend to be a newbie here. Note the "note:", if this box terrifies them, we want to let them know that they can close it and not worry that their system will be attacked by gremlins. I'm not sure that I'm happy with the X icon, but... You can directly restart your app from here, which is nice.
Is this screen superfluous? If so, how do you combine it with the next?
Here we get to the first of the logic bits. The stars show how good a backtrace is. If it isn't, then we want to send them off to get debug symbols if they want to, and then come back and hit that reload button. No screenshot of that atm, but it exists. EDIT: I'm compiled with full debug, so yes, I hit full stars. If I weren't, then I get other options.
Here we hit UI/string issues. What is the shortest, easiest way to explain this? Also, note those checkboxes.
Now I didn't check any boxes in the above. Since I'm not willing to help developers, I get an automatic "this crash isn't worth reporting". But here you see more logic going in for an attempt to tell users if their report might be useful. Does this seem clear to you?
It goes on, but you get the idea. And I'm not posting all possible combinations to hit various screens. ;) Check it out and see what you think.
And drop by this weekend for our triage party. ;)
Tags: anniversary, bugday, bugsquad, drkonqi, kde, ui
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12:14 pm
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FAKE! But soon to be real!
Warning: fake fake fake!
I went to LinuxWorld today, so I'm behind on bugs. I saw way too many penguins, though, and even a few wobbly windows. Photos of me with penguins will follow shortly. For now, you can enjoy Seli's fake blue hair. Thanks to Half-Left for the coloring.
Tags: akademy, blue hair, bugsquad, kde, seli
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01:37 pm
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Seli vs. BugSquad: 3 weeks till blue hair?
I'll believe it when I'm not in the commit digest. ---Luboš Luňák
We haven't done that bad. If you look at the aggregate of the last 60 days, Seli is at #8. For the last 30 days, #11. He took a vacation last week, so that can't really count. I think the aggregate stats are a little off, though, because he did one or two binges. Usually he seems to be around #10.5. So how do you exactly count? We talked about it, and decided that if he makes the commit digest (which counts the top ten) anytime from now till aKademy, then I lose. So 3 weeks.
Then I'll have to start figuring how to pull off not losing Ossi's bet, which would actually give *me* blue hair...
P. S. He was a tease, and wouldn't tell me if he would actively thwart me, so this should be interesting. Can I get the BugSquaders who are doing SoC to come back if we need you?
Tags: bets, blue hair, bugsquad, kde, seli
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10:17 pm
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Kopete BugDay: ...sweet! Thanks and we love you all!
A proper report this time: Grundleborg and I, along with Matt Rogers, our wonderful onlooking Kopete developer coordinated a nice turnout of 13 other people (in no particular order): PhilRod, gaurav, hays, zarvox, knusperfrosch, plus first timers: kwilliam, mcirsta, Aikurn, fhp, CondorDes, konjani, Romanesen, RedLizard.
Look at that! Eight first timers! Wow! And it looks like we are between 40-60% through all the kopete bugs. (The number is unclear depending on people finishing their bugsets, and of course, people are /still/ going. :D )
Feel free to join in, we're triaging, which mostly means we look and see if a bug is still there and if we can reproduce it. The first link in the topic of #kde-bugs is fairly self-contained and explanatory.
At one point, we had an Amarok Bugday:
From Amarok, we had around Nightrose, Nikolaj, sebr, and Mamarok. Plus their SoCer, Ramblurr. Also joining: Grundleborg, Kage_Jittai*, Mdhowe*, Aides*, lemma, annma, progger1986*, Krop, Leuty*, Bram85. (That's five first timers! yay! I put little stars by their names. :)
While I'm at it, I'll further catch up in name listing: Konqueror BugDay 5: jtamate, sahaqiel, azuriel, dpalacio, Ramblurr, knusperfrosch, Krop, katastrophe, Frank78ac, FiNeX, gaurav, zarvox, hays
And I'm going to thank our incoming triagers. We've had a ton of bugs come in with the 4.1 beta release, and a few people went on a tear over the last month:
Our top 10 in order:
apaku, aseigo, krop, Pino, FiNeX, wstephenson, Mamarok, Ack Seli! Peter Penz, & Bram.
Resulting in 1980 bugs opened, 2151 bugs closed in the last 31 days and who knows how many verified, duplicated, commented on, analyzed, etc. We don't really bother to do statistics for that yet, so this isn't entirely accurate. And seriously, I think that apaku and aseigo were possessed by demons... Definitely apaku, he single-handedly removed KDevelop from the top 30 list of "most open bugs". Plasma has the unique distinction of having the most incoming opened/closed bugs. Note that Aaron is on that list, and probably shouldn't be wasting his development time dealing with bugs. So want to come help triage?
Tags: bugday, bugsquad, kde, kopete, triage
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02:39 am
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And the winner is.... Kopete!
For our next BugDay, we're doing Kopete. So put all of your accounts and passwords together, and come join us. I bet we can knock it down a few places in the rankings. Again, you don't have to know anything about programming to do our work, although if you do, and are curious in working on kopete, this would be a great way to start learning the codebase. And I know they'd love more developers.
Meanwhile, konq is below 2400 open bugs! I think it was over 2800 when we started. And lots of modules are suddenly green, which is great! Especially if they stay that way... And how did Seli get to be #7? Probably because people are getting heavily into their SoC stuff, or decided to go walk their dog or something. So come be our newest member of bugsquad! Join #kde-bugs and soon you can see your name in the commit-digest and Seli's hair turn blue. (And Ossi's hair, let us not forget him. But Seli first...)
If you want to do some advanced triaging, kmail, kdelibs, and kio all need some love. Big thanks to Will Stephenson for writing our newest techbase page on triaging systemsettings bugs.
p.s. If you need poetry, maybe this will do. It might be about hair, I'm not sure.
Tags: blond hair, blue hair, bugday, bugsquad, kde, ossi, seli
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09:30 pm
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BugDay4 redux; super quick note because zzzzzz
I don't know if it was Seli's challenge or what, but we had double the turnout we've had before. At least 12 completely new people! So somebody must read this?
I'm also hoping that my Silly Seli challenge isn't actually a bad idea, as I hear certain other software projects greatly increased their incoming bug reports after overzealous closing. And I really don't want developers to hit me. So those of you who have or are about to get your bugzilla perms, tread carefully. Remember, our goal really isn't to outcompete each other in closing bugs, it's to make KDE better.
Having said that, Seli with blue hair would be nice. But getting twenty people to consistently do triage isn't going to be easy. Or is it? How do we get there? I really irc way too much, and tend to forget that we have this thing called a mailing list. So it's time to talk about long-range planning. And that's probably the place to do it. BugDays are great for training people, but then what?
p.s. Thanks for helping out everyone, and new people do drop back by irc to help cleanup. After string freeze and sleep though, please?
Current Mood: zzzz
Tags: bugday, bugsquad, kde, seli
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01:03 pm
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Seli doesn't think we exist: help us turn his hair blue!
So Lubos/Seli made disparaging noises as to whether or not BugSquad would do much good:
"I'll believe it when I'm not in the commit digest."
Now if you look at that query I put in my last post, you'll see a bunch of people with brand new bugzilla accounts (plus some old-timers!) who are all in the top. (FiNex, nixeagle, lemma, pino, brams, grundleborg are all accounts I recognize.)
Unfortunately, you'll also see l.lunak clocking in at #5. So he has a point. And it's a good one: we'll be self-sustainable in the long-run if it isn't just a few people doing this. If we can get people to do regular triage, and continue to participate in BugDays, we should easily have ten people who will kick all the developers out of the top ten.
So upon further talking with Seli, he told me he'd dye his hair blue for aKademy if we could reliably kick him out of the top ten*. This is totally doable for us! He closes about ten bugs a week, so all we have to do is find enough people to beat that, and we're set. Now this doesn't mean you can just look at ten bugs and close them. Odds are they'll be valid, and verifying them is important too, even if it won't put you on the commit digest. So at the risk of making people bug-closing crazy (remember: even if a website isn't reachable, sometimes there's still enough information to reproduce what the underlying issue is), I give you this challenge: Close more bugs than Seli. Help us turn his hair blue!
(If you've helped out before, drop back by channel, and we should be able to give you some closable bugs. And a woot to katastrophe, jtamate, Jannex, Talavis, and szotsaki for having started on "Sunday"'s BugDay already! Some of us are going to have to finish work first.... Thanks also to Grundleborg for setting up this week's page! Oh, hey, look, that's eleven people already... Ha, I should also thank Seli for being such a great sport about this. :)
* [Edit: this said twenty at one point, but we actually agreed to "ten", since that is what the commit digest counts. Ossi went for the top twenty. Edited to reflect that.]
Tags: bugsquad, kde, seli
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09:05 pm
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BugSquad's BugDay #3!
This Sunday we're having yet another BugDay, and are going to see how many of the "Konqueror - general" bugs we can get through. I say Sunday, but as usual, you can start now and stop whenever. Also, we still have a few bugs from earlier that need special setups like a yahoo account or something. If you can replicate it and make a testcase, that would be great! Join #kde-bugs to get more directions.
Coming up: Two weeks after that, we're doing a complete switch to something else...
To find out what top secret thing, come help us organize! Join the mailing list (bugsquad) or the irc channel (#kde-bugs)!
And hey, check out all the new names on the commit-digest! We are rockin' the stats! Have we made a difference? See for yourself! Konqueror has moved from being 559 in the red a year ago, to being solidly in the green the past several weeks. Let's finish up the old stuff in it!
Developers: Your app may be next! But we need your help! We need application-specific documentation. We need to know how heavily your app has been triaged in the past, and if old bugs are likely to still be valid or not. Is there anything special to know? Are you a lurker in your favorite app's irc channel? If you've been reading and memorizing an applications general issues, we want you to join us!
BTW, your memory hasn't failed you, I'm new: Thanks Clee, for adding me on!
Oh? And who am I? Well, obviously I do BugSquad. I do a few other things, one of which you'll find out RSN. :)
Tags: bugsquad, clee rocks, kde
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blauzahl's journal