A boringmost blog about bugs

For one, otherwise I won't notice that you did. Two, unless I know your nick from elsewhere, I won't have the foggiest idea who you are. You might as well tell me. Three, you may want other methods of communicating with me...

In hopes of getting some of our projects a logo (BugSquad, Calligra are both looking...), I'm holding a logo bof. I'll quickly go over what you should consider when designing a logo or t-shirt, and then we can brainstorm ideas for anybody who tells me they want a logo. :)

This blog site's mobile version doesn't work, and the non-mobile version takes too much bandwidth, so look for me on identi.ca or irc.

Last of the talks today. Afterwards there was football and volleyball. Lesson: sign up for things ahead of time if you want to get a t-shirt. They didn't have enough made from the morning's count. There were lots of people at volleyball. I met bug triager gkiagia, and the kivo guy who was here all the way from China. There were a bunch more, some of whom were really good volleyball players, but I'm pretty bad with names... You're all great anyway! Especially the folk that hadn't played for a long time, or had never played and were still willing to play! Hope your bruises aren't too bad.

The network has been very sad, I finally switched to 3G to be able to post to identi.ca. I wish people were better at using the offical conference tag (wasn't it #ds2011?) on all their posts, but I guess it hasn't been announced as widely as it could be. As a result, to get all the posts I have to search on #desktopsummit, #ds2011, etc. On twitter and identica. Over flaky network.

There were awards: BugSquad's very own Dario Andres won one for unwavering dedication to bug triaging. Also, Martin Graesslin got one for doing all kinds of cool stuff to kwin. And one to Mirko Boehm for Desktop Summit organizing work. And one to the sysadmin team, but they couldn't quite do that, so they "went older" and picked Toma. Gnome had their traveling pants award. Matthias Clausen won it with a standing ovation...

There are some really shrill voices out there of people predicting doomsday or saying how quickly they will leave to some other non-Qt toolkit. Honestly people! Take a Valium and come back on Monday, once we get more details. This was big and secret from everyone, it will take time for Nokia groups to get details. It is very silly to be calling for a Qt fork at this point.

Incidentally, I got up at 5am and watched both parts of the screencast, and they seemed pretty cagey about Qt and MeeGo. One slide came with two disclaimers: "not including MeeGo devices" and "not actual numbers". Not quite that wording, but you get the idea.

So wait and see.

I'll leave it to others to say why KDE should be unconcerned at this point.

She did a lot of work to keep things running smoothly for everyone! Furthermore, she covered for me during my frequent travels, especially when I was stranded at Heathrow for six nights! And let me say that was a horrible experience! I'm also not impressed with British Airways having me on hold for 40 minutes to say they "couldn't" refund my return fare, and in broken English at that. The earliest flight they could rebook me on (that ended up not being canceled) was on the 25th! I wasn't about to spend the 24th in an airport, so left and took a ferry to the Netherlands and a solid internet connection. I understand that under EU law, they are required to refund it, so I get to waste more time and figure out how to force it. Since this blog syndicates to tens of thousands of people, I

I should also thank my employer, froglogic.com for being understanding during my Heathrow adventure. We're probably still hiring, btw. ;) Hamburg is a great city, and if you're a sales engineer, we're looking for someone in the USA.

I'm really happy with how Google Code-in went! If you check the youtube KDE channel, you'll see some of the new Konqueror screencasts. There is one that shows off the JavaScript debugger too! We also have some screenshots for promo/etc, and a new FAQ. Here's a report from one of our triager students. Meet one of BugSquad's newest triagers:

My name is Samuel Brack and I'm a 18-year-old student from Germany. I participated in the Google Code In contest and here's my summary of what I've done.

It all started in November with a blog post in Nightrose's blog mentioning a contest where you get mentored by KDE people and do some useful work. Additionally you receive a T-shirt and some money if you participate. Since I wanted to collaborate in KDE for a long time but never took the steps to find for a task myself, Google Code In was the right place.

So, I set up an account and started working. Today I've done 11 tasks for KDE and one for the operating system Haiku. Unfortunately, my coding experience is not high enough that I can produce good code, so I decided to do only tasks where I didn't have to program.

My first choice was writing a tutorial for using Jabber in Kopete. That was quite a lot of work but I learned some features I didn't really know in Kopete (even though I use it daily) and was proud to have contributed in the KDE community for the first time. Thanks to my mentor Anne for helping me with this.

My next task in KDE was cleaning up bugs in the Amarok section in the KDE bugtracker. My mentor Myriam introduced me into working with the bugtracker and it surprisingly pleased me to work there (especially when you find a duplicate or – better – can close a bug report), because before this I thought bugtrackers were big unsorted blackboxes. ;-)

Following up on that, I found a quite small task – writing an article for the Amarok Insider about the project „Amarok LiveCD“. After having installed it and playing around a bit in a virtual machine, I wrote this article. Thanks to Valorie for mentoring me in this case.

The last eight tasks I did in KDE were all of the same kind. My work was to clean up some bugs either in the Konqueror or in the KDE area of the bugzilla. I went through 160 bugs in these days and could close some of them (thanks for the permission to edit bugs), too. I now know Konqueror and especially khtml much better than before and am able to sort and test bug reports, which is actually useful in the KDE community. Thanks to Alex in these tasks.

All in all, I can say that the GCI helped me to join the active KDE community and it showed me how things are organized within the project. Thanks especially to my mentors and to Nightrose, who coordinated all that stuff on the IRC channel.

Things that could be done a bit better in future contests are mainly the Google Melange website, that's quite slow and querying the task database needs very much time. The rest was very fine and I'm looking forward to participate in GSoC one time perhaps, since this is my last year in school.

Konqueror's students were some of the first ones done with tasks!

We have a spiffy new FAQ (there is a task to further expand it!), some new screenshots, and a screencast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO3fIAPPZGs



Thanks to Snizzo for the screencast! You've had lots of compliments on irc. The other task results will get added to the website (http://konqueror.kde.org) and where promo people can find them.

If you are interested in one of the current tasks, feel free to join #khtml and ask questions. There are more screenshot and screencast tasks!

Also: There are bug triaging tasks. If you would like to triage bugs, you can join #kde-bugs and learn how. Once you know what you are doing, you can finish triage tasks very quickly! If you know javascript, you can write testcases.

Looking for a good way to contribute and got some spare time this weekend? KDE BugSquad is holding a Bug Day revival this Sunday 1st of August and still looking for people who'd like to help out with getting Dolphin bugs under control.

We'll be gathering in our IRC channel (#kde-bugs) starting around 10:00 AM european time zone. As always, no coding skills required. All you need is a recent version of our beloved KDE Software Compilation. Senior bug triagers will be around to help you get started.

More info on: http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/BugDays/DolphinDay1 (available soon)

See you there! :-)

Can't make it then? That's ok, we'll have another. Promise.

But feel free to drop by anytime, bug reports always come in, and somebody has to look at all those duplicates!

Then the big question: do we hold our Bof in the back of a bus next year too? It makes it hard to take a group photo!

First froglogic CampKDE t-shirt sighting!
On the left is the second youngest attendee, Ryan, newly turned 18. (Youngest would be Cryos' one-year-old.)

If you don't have one yet, come find me. I think I've given out most of today's batch, but I'll have more tommorrow.