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.

Looks like I have everything set... I'll be in San Diego Friday night. And with some froglogic give-aways! So come find me, or keep asking where Alex is until you do. :)


Silly icon:

This is from a cute show called The Big Bang Theory:




Aren't geeks adorable? Thanks Sho for finding and hosting! (And to the Big Bang folk, you've already had one offer to make you a custom desktop look.)

Now we need to make our own shirts like that!

ObRealKonqNews: At the SF sprint (that pre-devdays one), I started taking use cases for Konq. I was quite surprised with how people actually use their web browsers. Now if only I can figure out how to publish my notes... (photographs of my handwriting on a whiteboard, ha) A full UI review would be good to do. And I have the germ of a feature idea...

It would be nice if we were visible again. Unfortunately, if you cloak (ie change your User Agent) to work better with a site *cough gmail*, then Konqueror doesn't show up in its statistics. Furthermore, apparently sites don't check the UA for "webkit", they check for "Safari". Annoying, huh? QtWebKit cloaks as Safari...

Incidentally, if you were wondering why facebook suddenly broke, i.e. started sending you to the mobile version, well, currently if you use the default UA string, it 302s you to the mobile version. For me this bites, because a few of those apps don't work in Firefox on linux.

EDIT: I posted this when planet broke, so I'm bumping the date to hit the feed. I guess it's stale now, but oh well.

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!

I've put off blogging for a while, but I've been meaning to do a series of posts on social media/networking/desktop/soldering irons (hey, everything is "social" now). It was way too hot to post today, as least by the metric of "hmm, I've drunk half of the lemonade for the week while walking home from the farmer's market, and I'm still thirsty." But it's night now, so you'd think it would be better, except my wifi is messed up, and I had to sit on a chair, and I hate chairs. I was also catsitting my old cat. :( He's ended up with a bad tail injury. I'm a little flipped out on that. So I think you get to wait on the "social" posts. Sorry. I'll sleep, and then declare it a new day when I wake up. It'll have to be better then.

I'd like to thank Marijn Kruisselbrink (Mek) for my new hackergotchi photo.
Thanks also to Fredrik Holgrund (fredrikh) for post-processing. Check out that drop shadow, woot.
Now you can see that, yes, despite the gender neutral "Alex" you can call me by, the "A.L." I'm formally listed as on most everywhere, and the mysterious "blauzahl", I really am female. I wonder how much online harassment that has actually saved me over the years? I've gotten surprisingly little, really. Or I just expected so much worse based on stories, that what I did get seemed fine.

One reason I've put off posting is that I haven't updated trunk for quite a while... Since before GCDS! I got tired of breaking things the night before a talk/con/travel/etc (they never break otherwise!), so just didn't update. And I'm not sure how many conferences I went to right after that. I think two. And then I started my new job, which probably should get it's own entry when I'm more chipper. The important part is: I don't know what apps use nepomuk now, and who has added capabilities for it. I was stunned when I did an svn up and saw what gwenview last had. So please tell me if your app does more with it than before GCDS. :) I thought I heard that digiKam was using it now.

So we'd get back late at night, and dani_l would look at me as I'd pull out my laptop, and say, "You're going to blog? At this hour?" And yeah, I did. I think consistently, even. Well, here is a post from the auto-save of my blogging software.

Yesterday was the last day of GCDS at the university for me. I dragged myself out of early to go and do DrKonqi stuff in the morning. Lunch was more "food". Then back to do more DrKonqi. Oh no, the paintball trip... Where we were supposed to leave from the Auditorium which we were no longer meeting at, nor were we anywhere near. So an interesting calling around began to see what was going on. Most people on the list seemed to have canceled from being too tired. Quite understandable at this point, really. Anyway, the locals finally found the name and location of the place and called us a taxi. Four of us took a rather scenic taxi. Er, well, yeah. The guy couldn't find the place, and so we drove around in circles on gravel roads and got to see ruins of houses built into cliffs and some nice rocks. (They're very good at using basalt here as accents in buildings, btw.) He didn't understand where we were going, and nobody seemed to be able to give him good directions. Anyway, we ended up getting off back at the Auditorium and had people come pick us up.

After that misadventure in transit, we were actually at paintball. It was quite interesting to see people running around diving into crouches and stuff. It was also kinda amusing to see who was good at it, but I think it safe to say you shouldn't mess with some of our developers. It was fun, and maybe something that can happen at a future aKademy. We all went home with bruises on random spots. [Who has the group photo from this anyway? URL please!]

Walking home, as it wasn't actually that far from the Auditorium, we decided to go back to our hotels, shower, meet up for food afterwards, and then go clubbing or something and enjoy the (for-most) last night. On the boardwalk, I finally got to eat proper tapas (finally, REAL FOOD! And fish even!). We found the Amarok hotel, and decided to howl at them and see who would answer back. They did! We then grabbed some other people, and wandered around the island looking for a reasonable club. We failed. Amusingly enough, Qt development discussion came up. And there is NOTHING like running around and talking about software development at 2am in the morning. We did find some actual dancing. When I left the others at 4am, they were talking about Qt again. :D

Wandering around was interesting: KDAB has half the island wearing their shirts now we could watch for people wearing shirts from our conference and randomly (or not) talk to them. The downside of this conference is that we've been too spread out. There's lots of people I'd like to have met, that I've barely ever even seen. And people I usually talk to I've seen almost zero of. I have met new people though, and have gotten to know some from online better. I wonder how many people have left by now. [ereslibre grabbed me online wanting to know if I'd met him or if I'd met an imposter! I have no idea! Did you bring me the real ereslibre or not? Collobora party]

I'm here for tomorrow still. I'd like to go rockhounding up by the stuff we were walking by yesterday, but we'll see how blistered my feet are. I seem to have really torn them up from the combo of paintball/dancing: I should have been paying more attention to the fact that my shoes were too loose. Heh, I should pack my bag first and see just how much less I'm taking back. [I was too tired to go walking that far. I instead found that our hotel was *right* by the rocky section of the beach and that late at night was low tide. Sand and saltwater feel very good on blistered feet and I got some great rocks!]

---------------------------------

By the time I left, 2am and 4am were normal "evening times" for me. There is nothing like night on a beach... And then watching the sunrise. There was either/both a full moon or strong light pollution: even though it was dark, you could see the whites of the breakers as they crashed. It was an entirely new pattern/way to watch an ocean. And beautiful.

I'd like to thank Sealne for letting me crash in the Penthouse my last few hours there. And for suggesting the hotel in the first place. I'd also like to thank Markey & Mamarok for letting me hitch a ride to the airport with them. I guess I owe you all beers. :) [&&]

Suggestion for next year: Nokia-sponsored beanbags in the hacking room. Or bring the Google ones over.

[&&] They can even be non-virtual!

Drkonqi discussion. Now. 3-1. Till we get bored or hungry.

p.s. for some reason syndication decided to take my "music" tag and make that the subject line of my last post. bah.

For the first day here, I was able to sleep in till the grand hour of 10am. This was incredibly luxurious, although I could certainly have used more. Nobody from our place was involved in Plasma or KWin so we could skip that bof. :) We left in time to make sure we caught the bus for the trip, and ended up being early enough for me to catch the Community bof. There we discussed having party packs to give to people who were having parties to promote kde, and how exactly that might work.

After that, it was time to go on the Formal Field Trip Thing. Which involved us splitting up into 3 buses, having one (or two?) of them break down, and us standing at a balcony overlooking dunes while we waited for the rest. Of course, we went to play! I'm sure someone will post photos. Perhaps even me, at least, what I took before I did the ill-advised move of rolling down a sand dune while holding a camera. The mechanism isn't entirely happy with me atm... I'm not sure who started with sand dune rolling: I saw someone do somersaults down a big one early on. That had to hurt somewhat. The idea of it is what tempted me to go ahead and get my shoes all sandy and join in the sand dune play. Indeed, it turned out to be quite fun, and you can go very fast when doing a proper roll from a large, sharp dune. *grin* (Those physics classes were good for something: maximizing angular momentum!) You then sort of stop when you hit the bottom, sand scatters everywhere, and find yourself looking up into the world. Sand dunes tower above you, and you are somewhat dizzy for a bit. I did this at least five times. And ended up with sand all over my skin, inside of my clothes, and even inside of my ears. I kind of wish I'd done it some more. I think I had more fun doing that then playing in the ocean later. (We also later saw a lovely church, and some of the bright pastel-colored city architecture up close. I found myself studying the rock makeup of one of the cornerstones. And identifying Tomaz's beach rocks. Those geology classes were good for something too! :)

I still have sand in my ears. Shower time. :)

We get up bright and early tomorrow: I expect we'll do some DrKonqi work where we can find a whiteboard and a somewhat unobtrusive spot. Amazingly enough, Dario has been working on keeping up with bugs while here. Otoh, he's also been sick at home lots, and is coughing up a storm these days. Hopefully he'll be well enough tomorrow.

Signing off, shower and rumor has it there is food in the Penthouse... At least, they have my gluten-free pasta and just came to take our forks.

Is what I was asked by someone after a recent meal. The answer is, no, I didn't really enjoy it, but in terms of eating out, so far it was one of the better things I've had that I didn't have cooked in one of our kitchens. The meal? One of the "salads". In this case, tuna in the center, with some tomato, cucumber, something else, and shredded egg on top. I should post a picture, they look really goofy. And not like salads at all. I have celiac disease, so I avoid grain products pretty strictly [#]. I'm going to hit the bottom of my energy bar supply after our little field trip tomorrow. So I'm going to start needing to either figure out how to pack a lunch here, decide that the plain almonds I have left are tasty, or get used to paying 6.50 euros for a bizarre salad.

Ideas?

p.s. Yes, I will admit that the water tastes kind of bad. I wonder if it is more energy-intensive to import bottled water, or to desalinate the water here. Both are pretty bad.

[#] Note that I'm also allergic to milk (yes, allergic; I thought I could just eat lots of manachego while here, but the first time I had some it turned out to be too milky. Opps. My ears are still messed up. Better not be sinus infection.) and I'm quasi-vegetarian. Quasi.

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. :)

from a talk by Simon on webkit stuff at GCDS
#webkit #qtwebkit

building instructions:
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/BuildingQtOnLinux

Overview of QtWebKit classes:
http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKitHacking
" QtWebitContrib

Get the source
http://svn.webkit.org/repository/webkit/trunk or
mirror:
http://gitorious.org/qtwebkit/qtwebkit
/fonts

Patch queue: http://webkit.org/pending-review

WebKitBuild/ Release/ WebCore/ Makefile --> make install install-layout(?)
debug
--------------------------------------------------

Upload a patch:
1) [git/svn] diff
2) WebKitTools/ Scripts/ prepare = Changelog for ex: WebKit/ qt/Changelog ... WebCore/Changelog
3) edit changelogs
4) Create new bug on bugs.webkit.org component QtWebKit
5) attach patch including changelog
6) mark attachment for review with r?
7) wait or tag someone on irc #webkit for review and pending =--> r- then 1)

WebKitTools/Scripts/bugzilla-tool
....
8) rt & fork

-----------------------------------------------------

Unit tests
WebKit/qt/tools

Layout tests
LayoutTools/
WebKitTools/Scripts/make-webkit-t{ools|ests}?

platform/qt/Skipped (?) skips half the tests

We got up early to walk somewhere to take a bus to somewhere. I am now sitting in a room, which thankfully has internet via wire. AND works. That is the upside. The downside is that only the front of this room seems to be wired, so we can't pick a corner per se. This room is rather large, so I'm not sure how well it will work for random discussion for a drkonqi thing later. If you're interested in that, btw, you should give me your contact info. I can't get twitter to my spanish cell phone... So you'll have to find some other way. ;)

Currently I'm in the secondary hacking room on the 3rd floor, btw. The other annoying thing about these is that they are all fixed desks and chairs. *cry* Not only that, the tables are VERY high up. I should have brought an external keyboard. I think I'll be moving to the floor RSN [*] as my wrists will be in pain very quickly if I'm in this bad of a configuration. Not to mention that I will bounce uncontrollably in a chair. [#] :) Chairs and I just don't get along. Our sponsors have not given us beanbags though. :)

Last night's amusement was doing laundry. The amusement part comes in with us attempting to read the washing machine (including one native spanish speaker, but there weren't exactly instructions; you could pick centrifugal amount!). I picked one of the three or four options for 40 degrees Celsius. That was last night. I went to go pick it up this morning, and found it was STILL going. That's some wash. And I'm not actually sure *what*. Hopefully my laundry is still good!

No clue where we're supposed to go for lunch exactly. But I'm wired. And just from writing this amount my wrists hurt.... OUCH. Hope the floor is cleanish. :P It looks very hard tho.
Maybe the table is softer to sit on?

At any rate, I'm wired, done writing. Time to work. Ping Dario or I on irc if you're interested in the drkonqi hacking session, especially since I don't know who is interested... Or when/where we'll meet. It will probably be later in the week, actually.

[*] For the uninitiated, look up RSI. Soft tissue injuries from overuse and misconfiguration. :} It isn't just the much-publicized-let-me-fix-you-for-$$$ carpal tunnel, it's an entire slew of injuries you can get from sports too. At any rate, no clue what I'm generating atm. [%]
[#] As I write this, I am sitting cross-legged in a chair and still bouncing. Oh, did I mention our lovely Nokia sponsors gave us lots of free drinks at our social get-togethers? I think I had 8 or so.... All caffeinated. I'm badly addicted now. :}
[%] For moving to the floor, I should have brought our lovely sponsor-provided Qt Software towel. I would have been stylish at least. Except, it's still in the laundry. Oh well, I guess Douglas Adams was right!

The infamous eV meeting (first I've attended, being a brand-new member) wasn't bad at all. The worst part was being deprived of network access randomly and having my laptop decide it would randomly power down. Which didn't really matter, since things went really fast. All too soon we were out for lunch and for the first time since I've been here, I hit the beach. Certain people die for posting those photos. :D

The water was not that cold and not that warm, and very salty. Probably also the roughest surf I've played in. Fun blackish sand. :)

Anyway, lunch finished, we went back to do one or two quick votes, then hung around and I tried to finish up some stuff. No, that's a lie. First there was a meeting of web-developer people (at least the ones that heard about it) and it sounds like we're meeting again tomorrow sometime after lunch. So some session I'm in I'll be double-booked for... As tomorrow are bofs, including the bugsquad one, a git one, and grundleborg's telepathy one. All worth attending, of course. :) Developer feedback is welcome at the bugsquad one. We'll also talk some about burn-out, recruiting, planning, and take a group photo (do we have a photographer volunteer?). I've been asked to find a Tobi(Toby?) from Gnome, who wants to talk with us later on too. So this should be interesting. Finding anyone in this place is insane: we're spread across who knows how many hotels, and rooms in two buildings on several different floors...

Speaking of hotels: Mine is amusing. I'm rooming with the infamous Dario Andres (who has probably triaged all of your bugs), and the mysterious dani_l (kde edu young'n). We've dubbed our room "funroom". Upstairs is KDAB and other people on the top floor in the "penthouse". So late at night we've often end up chilling upstairs while on laptops (of course). Ok, there might be some beer involved. We've ended up sharing some cooking, which has been fun too. Tomorrow we change where we meet for the daytime events, so we have to get up at 0830. I don't even want to look at the timestamp on this post... (But I'll have clean laundry!)

Oh, and my quick word on "the web problem" or whatever we're calling it: I watched undergrads. All they care about when it comes to the web is if youtube, gmail, facebook, and AIM work. (Ok, I guess AIM isn't strictly the web, but it is a "critical" application.) So we have a flash site, a nasty javascript site, and a site that is just a pita for us to deal with. (Oh, and a closed protocal.) Fun. Good luck getting any browser that isn't the monopoly one to deal with all that. BTW feel free to use comments to mention any websites you think are particularly important that say khtml devs wouldn't have run across naturally. Full urls please. Testcases better, toss those directly to bugzilla. ;)

* Aftershave doesn't make for good shampoo. Opps.
* People are happy to trade ice cream tickets for coffee tickets.
* We've had network from day 1, I hear this is unusual. However, the packet loss...
* SVN konvi doesn't scroll right. I cry. Also apologies for disconnecting every two seconds.
* I have not figured out celiac food here at all...
* That hasn't mattered, as I mostly haven't been hungry, as I was dehydrated instead
* They are obsessed with bottled water here. Water rant follows:
Isn't this a first world country? I shouldn't catch anything from it, right? Am I wrong? Are all the pipes lead? I can't tell why exactly it isn't "safe to drink". I've had one person say it was chlorine in the water. But apparently plastic in the water leeched from plastic water bottles is safe to drink. I don't mind chlorine, I like my water dead. This has resulted in me not getting enough water... (One place refused to serve tap water; I had to spend 2 euro for a tiny tiny bottle) So I've been getting mostly bottled distilled water: zero salts at all. Little food, none of it containing salt... I went and bought a thing of salt and salted some water to make a rehydration drink. Water started being appealing again. Looks like I'll be drinking salted water from now on. Glad I brought my water bottle.
* The beach might as well be in another city. Vs. Jamaica, where we all sat on a deck next to the beach & coffee and hacked, here you have to find someone to leave stuff with and walk more than ten feet. I haven't made it there yet. I wore my swimsuit today tho, so maybe this will change. Having the hotel farther away doesn't help either... Hopefully things will improve once we change venues. (Having neither beach nor network is VERY frustrating. I seem to prefer network. :)
* Work! I gave two lightening talks. The first was one about DrKonqi that Dario and I put together. The second was on BugSquad in general.
* Collaborate! One of the Gnome bugsquad-equivalent people is now interested in us and will track me down. I'll note that BugSquad has a bof on one of the bof days. We'll do some planning and have a group photo. Everybody is welcome to come: you can drop by and say how much you love us or how much you hate us. If you want to drop by and say how we can effectively triage your bugs, that would be great, I'm happy to write up some kind of supplemental documentation to our stuff.
* Photos. Of course I have photos. Maybe they'll get posted someday. Especially the "tall guys" one.
* Qt gave us all green towels. Way cool and useful.
* I've met so many people I only knew from online before. Including one gnomey I knew from way back when. He was rather drunk and probably doesn't remember tho. (The meeting or who I am.)
* Dfaure said he liked seeing new faces... Perhaps those of you who didn't want to ask the eV for travel help should do it next year. ;) Make David happy.
* I can't hear properly: I had too milky of cheese the first day. It hasn't gone away yet! Apparently I'm speaking too softly. :P
* My hotel has Bugsquad, KDAB, and Kubuntu people in it. We've cooked food for each other and hung out at night, it was cool.
* I have an Ultimate frisbee. Who wants it?
* I terrified people with Twinkes and Sno-balls.
* Dario Andres of bug triage fame is here. He's one of my roommates. :) Tell him hi.
* KDE group photo tonight after awards, I'm being told.
* Did I mention I've met interesting people? One way to guarentee this is to offer to trade something with them, it turns out. Do I owe somebody lemon-honey-almonds? Do you need sunscreen?
* Er, many things I've forgotten. (Like plastic wrap for my laptop on the beach!)

Currently I send identi.ca-->twitter, and I usually microblog via SMS-->twitter. So I got a temporary Spanish phone... Except, twitter won't send to Europe atm. And I still can't SMS-->identi.ca. This all leaves something to be desired. Especially as it might be nice to tell you what I'm doing in Gran Canaria atm. And yes, I did eventually make it there, after much airport badness. Note: you cannot make it from one side of the Madrid airport to the other (which is practically in another city, you take a bus to it), and through customs and immigrations, and the slow luggage handlers in half an hour.

We'll have some kind of DrKonqi development session/meeting/pool-gathering at Gran Canaria. Also, there's a BugSquad Bof, and you should feel free to come and complain or laud. Or just join.

Oh, there's a lightning talk on it too.

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...)

http://threatswatch.org/rapidrecon/2009/06/unimaginable-horror-in-tehran/

http://aricmayer.blogspot.com/2009/06/turning-point-in-green-revolution.html

Axes? Attacking people on pedestrian bridges and trying to throw them off?

"Allah - you are the creator of all and all must return to you - Allah Akbar -"

If you haven't watched any of the youtube videos, find one of people calling Allah-u-Akbar from the rooftops. Hopefully things turn out ok, and people we know are ok.

Don't forget. ;)
Due to the thing called "time zones", for me it'll start Friday night. So if you're in the Americas, feel free to pop in then. Have to find some food first. ;)

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. ;)

In case you've been under a rock, feature freeze is Monday (the end of or UTC?) and string freeze is the day after. Also, you may have noticed that the new drkonqi is in trunk now. There are a few screens and scenarios that will make usability cry... We are working on them! Code is probably changing as you read this! Although it might be a bad to less bad thing... If you happen to be more of a specialist than me (and I'm not), and have run through these a few times, drop by #kde-bugs and let's talk. Suggestions are welcome for strings too, but you should wait for me to checkin stuff.

If you don't have debug symbols installed, only have part, or if you don't have the Qt ones installed, this is a case you can actually help BugSquad! :D See what you think of the auto-backtrace analysis and how many stars you get for various real-world crashes.

All thanks should go to Dario Andres and George Kiagiadakis, cause they rock for doing this!
All flames should go to me. ;)

p.s. After freeze look for some improved how-to-build kde documentation and lots of BugDays.

So I seem to have been put on the conference circuit recently. This has been pretty interesting, as they've all been slightly different in terms of organizing and what I've learned. :) This one was different because almost all of us were giving talks.

So, this past weekend, Linuxfest Northwest was held in Bellingham, Washington, which is north of Seattle. Josh Berry (CondorDes on irc, kopete, bugsquad) and myself were the first to arrive from San Francisco to the Seattle airport. Once there, the lovely Karsten Wade (fedora, not kde) and company (including a pack of kids all with XOs, sooo cute!) picked us up as they passed through the area. We saw some great signs along the way. Like, "try nitrogen" and "tulip information here". Or the NRA sticker on the bumper of a truck that proudly declared itself to run on biodiesel. We were wiped out by the time we got to the hotel, but went to a place called The Copper Pig and met up with a few other presenters/organizers/Mousey-of-boxer-fame. Chani Armitage (chani, plasma, gsoc) & Pete Lypkie (doviende, bugsquad) arrived sometime around then (biking in from Canada), but the front desk couldn't tell us that... Instead we found out by waking them up when we knocked on their door. Opps. Jeff Mitchell (jefferai, one of the campKDE organizers & amarok dev) arrived last and we all crashed. Well, eventually. I fought presentation software first. Who does kpresenter? I'm bribing you to develop faster. We need you! :D

Next day, armed with some candy and a flat of Pepsi from Costco, we hit the floor. There were a few companies, the usual non-profits/distros/LUGs, and some interesting local groups, including a room of robots for kids. As usual, our booth was really busy. All too quickly, afternoon started, and so did our talks. Bang bang back-to-back: myself, Jeff, Chani. At the booth, there were tons of newbies to Linux and some people who had run kde3, so I was surprised to find that a large portion of people at my talk were reasonably familiar with KDE4. I had projector problems, so I talked sans slides at first. Des had it fixed around when the presentation needed them, though, so that was good. Everyone else's talks went pretty smoothly, yay! By the time the talks were over, so was the day. So off to the afterparty! Which I was tired enough for, that I don't remember much. Except for the person playing around with a laptop which was inexplicably hooked up to a projector. And trying to use KDE with compiz. And crashing. Hordes of KDE developers descended. :) And I talked to the opensuse guy, "Zonker", and a bunch of others. At some point we headed back to the hotel and played poker with fake sugar packets. And I met all kinds of cool people. I later found out that I'd been talking to Randal Schwartz. Oh!

Sunday, we were asked to give an encore talk. Your wish is our command! Des gave a talk on how to install a KDE developer environment using mypne's software. Look for slides and some cleaned up http://techbase.kde.org pages on the topic in the near future. (Newbies: irc.freenode.net #kde-devel can help you. User questions to #kde :) We then had some frantic fun figuring out shipping and packing, so we ended up leaving late. (This is at a school, so they can't do the usual type of shipping.) We did catch our plane though!

All in all, it was a great weekend, but I wish we'd had more time to talk to each other. Still, we all met at least one KDE person we hadn't met before (*wave to Pete*), and I hope we get a few new developers (and users!) from our talks. People at least seem to have added me on social networking sites. :D

Do you have one? Not just a screenshot, but something that clearly shows "this is a phone-type-thing". I'd like something I can use for a slide in a talk.

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. ;)

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. ;)

This is actually a test blog post, I'm not syndicating it. But this is one mockup Dario came up with.

Saturday was the first day of booths. As you can see once I link in my to-be-uploaded pic, we had a pretty impressive looking booth. It was really neat to meet more people who are in California!

We were deluged even before the floor officially opened: other exhibitors came over. And from there it was almost non-stop talking to people and demoing KDE. The interesting thing is that people seemed to be either total newbies to Linux, or they knew a fair amount about KDE. There didn't seem to be much in the way of middle ground --- it was a very informed crowd. And very supportive too.

Gamaral started doing live feeds from his camera (http://qik.com/video/1088813 ?), and Aaron Johnson went to give his talk, and I stayed in the booth. After the floor finally closed, we met up with Dilip, one of the Redwood City Qt guys. Where he promptly won a case of Cocaine for us (OK, it's a soft drink!). We socialized some more and all crashed.

Friday started off the Southern California Linux Expo. I've never been, so seeing the difference between it and LinuxWorld has been really interesting.

The first day was just talks. I went to the "chick track", thinking I'd just go to one or two of the talks, but they turned out to be much more interesting than I thought they'd be. Although... Possibly not for the reasons they wanted them to be. The track was sort of a confused mixture of "things related to women" and "things related to newbies", which has the unfortunate implicit assumption that women = newbies. At any rate, I learned things that newbies expect. Most strikingly, that they expect to find answers in forums in a sticky at the top. Now we have http://forums.kde.org recently set up. But do they have the content they need?

I also found out that conferences(*) are always looking for speakers, and that some have problems getting them. I think I can conclude from this that we should have more KDE people who are willing to give speches. And we should have the materials that would make it really easy. Jos started something... ;)

(*) Ontario Linux Fest at http://onlinux.ca is looking for one.

I'm not sure which is annoying me more right now:
a) setting up a non brain-dead set of a directory hierarchy with branch and config-files to deal with it all, plus the fact that I can't seem to find documentation for it or
b) that the California state budget, probably trading small children and fish for tax cuts, is currently being worked out by 5 people, with everybody else unlikely to have a chance to even read it before voting on it, or pestering those who vote on it

Maybe I should worry about zombie invasion instead. But I can actually fix a) and maybe write some documentation in the process. In the category of things I can't do and would make my life easier: not memorizing backtraces.

We recently upgraded Bugzilla from 2.x to 3.x, which means all the custom APIs need to be ported. These are in Perl. One of the things included is what let us search for duplicate backtraces... Having that back would be very nice for developers and BugSquad's triagers. So, here's my plea: are you good with Perl? Can you momentarily put aside your stockpiling for zombie invasion and help? (We'll just send the zombies to California legislature.)

If so, email mattr AT kde.org or you might be able to find him active on irc as mattr. Active is the key phrase here, he's got a small child to protect from the zombies.

Standard bribes apply.

http://flickr.com:80/photos/blauzahl/sets/72157613171373906/
Enjoy! And maybe I'll get around to putting up more.

Plus one video of the flaming drink. Although I haven't checked to see what format they put that into and how restrictive it is.

Ah Jamaica! And hey, I can finally spell it! I played with flickr, and seem to be able to upload photos now. So here's a teaser. I'll have to go through the rest and wonder who will kill me if I put what up...

(SF: Meet at Sparky's, 7pm. We'll drink milkshakes then contemplate heading to Zeitgeist.)