Earlier this week at GUADEC, the always affable Dave Neary presented his GNOME Census work. Unfortunately, I was not there to see it, but I read his excellent post on the topic. One of the reactions from the survey was that Red Hat are responsible for 16% of the contributions to GNOME whereas Canonical are responsible [...]

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After many months kubuntu.org got a new look, complete with new logo. Many thanks to Ofir for his patience in seeing this through.

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During the Platform sprint in Prague I took Aurelien Gateau, doko and a couple of nice chaps from SuSE Prague canoeing on the awesome whitewater course near the city centre.

Looking confident at the top

This flatwater is easy

King of the wave

This blury photo is the last anyone has seen of Aurelien, if you live downstream of Prauge please look out for him in his blue canoe


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Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam! In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the [...]

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Last week I was in Prague with my team; the first with Ahmed since he joined. It was an awesome week and it was useful to checkpoint our progress. We also took the first ever full team photos of us, first in our room and second at the end of the week having a drink: Thanks to [...]

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Nova, my first daughter, is now 6 and Glenn, my first son, is now 5. As a GeekDad I ensure to bathe them in geeky goodness. I've been thankful that Glenn is obsessed with Lego. The kool thing about it is that of course, I get to help him, so its just a great time.

This got me thinking back to my own youth. I had a box of Lego's but not a lot of sets. The one that I did get was in 1988, when my parents got me perhaps my favorite (but forgotten until recently) toy of youth: the Lego Technic 8865 "Test Car".

That set was amazing. I proudly displayed it on my shelf in my room, both because of my pride in building it as well as just how outright kool it is.

Since that time Technic has grown up as much as I have. Take a look at the Technic Lego 8421 Mobile Crane:

So tempted to buy that.

But most fun of all... this week Glenn is in a one-week Lego Pre-Engineering class. For 3 hours a day they geek out and build all manner of fun stuff.

One thing I'll throw out there for Dad's... Lego has an Education dept: Lego Education. Of particular interest to Tamarah and I, is they have a complete Homeschool Curriculum and various kids, including robotics kits, for education. A really amazing resource for parents.

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Damon Edwards (DTO Solutions) & John Willis (Opscode) are the two guys really pumping out the "good news" of devops. They started a new podcast, Devops Cafe several weeks ago. Already on episode 8, having featured guests such as John Allspaw, R.I. Pienaar, Andrew Shafer, and more. Highly recommended.

Whats interesting is that John & Damon really aware of an outcry from the community, that is: "How do all these devops shops do it!!" We want to emulate them, know what tools they have, how they use them, what works, what doesn't, etc. So to facilitate just that, they started a videocast sub-series called: Open Mic.

Open Mic 1: DevOps Metrics and Dashboards at Shopzilla from dev2ops.org on Vimeo.

In the first episode, they take us into Shopzilla, where Juan Paul Ramirez shows us their tools, metrics, and talks extensively about how they got to where they are. Excellent content!

If you haven't already seen, perhaps the most popular talk this year at Velocity, "A Day in the Life of Facebook", in which the Facebook Ops team introduces us to their tools and organization.

Whats really great here is that we're not share deeper information about how we're doing things, such that we can be a community of organizations. In the past, only a handful would really share and they were always far removed from useful pratice. I really hope this trend continues.

Big thanks to John and Damon for helping fuel that fire!

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KMag used to zoom into part of the screen got just today an additional mode: Follow Focus Mode. That means that kmag can now follow either the mouse pointer or the keyboard cursor.

Video of KMag with 'Follow Focus' mode

Extending for example KWin's full-screen zoom plugin can be done with something like;

QDBusConnection::sessionBus().connect("org.kde.kaccessibleapp",
    "/Adaptor", "org.kde.kaccessibleapp.Adaptor", "focusChanged",
    this, SLOT(focusChanged(int,int)));

This is work in progress and only works with Qt and KDE applications. Adding support for
others shouldn't be that difficult with qtatspi. To try out checkout kdeaccessibility from SVN trunk (>=r1152354) and;

export QT_ACCESSIBILITY=1
kmag

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Interviews

I did some 30 second video interviews at Akademy in Helsinki. You can download them to get a feel for the people and place of Akademy. Unfortunately I've been unable, in the limited time I've devoted to it, to convert them to Oggs, ffmpeg doesn't want to do it. I've also been unable to find a simple HTML5 video gallery script that would make a simple HTML page with the videos embedded. Do let me know if you have the answers to those. I recommend Frank's interview for an insight into what our board spends its week doing.

Eben Moglen Talk

Before Akademy I went to see Eben Moglen give a talk at the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Eben is a much overlooked rock star of free software, having written the GPL licences and made many other significant contributions.

His talk was about the dangers of embedded software, taking the example of the software in cars because it is a topical issue but also in other life critical areas such as aeroplanes and medical devices. Failures in the software result in people dieing but unlike other life critical engineering there is no regulatory overview. Various governments have strong regulatory requirements and testing for the mechanical parts of a car but none for the software. Given the complexity of the software that would be the a difficult job even if regulators cared, which they should start to do after the Toyota issue. Eben's solution, predictably, is to make all such software be required to be free software. That way all bugs become shallow and problems can be quickly fixed. Unfortunately the current situation in Europe is not promising, the EU Commission bans software on medical devices from being free software. This is in the belief that it would be a security problem if such software was modifiable. There does need to be controls on who can modify such software, but banning it from being Free Software (and the breaches of the GPL which result) is clearly a bad idea.

Some questions from the audience including one from Fred Macintosh who very nearly become my MP a few weeks ago, if he's put "interested in Free Software" on any of the 67 leaflets his campaigners put through my door I'd have been far more likely to vote for him.

Travels

I left Akademy at the end last week and travelled to Helsinki. My Friend in Helsinki wasn't in so I gatecrashed a group of international cancer researchers and played Pictionary instead. Later I went to the beach and went for a canoe around Helsinki harbour.

No rest from travel though. This weekend I caught a ferry to Amsterdam then a sleeper train to Prague for Canonical's Platform Sprint. Journey was all good (except for the frightening number of stag and hen parties on the ferry). As usual booking land based international travel is a pain with several unconnected booking systems. Prague turns out to have an awesome artificial white water slalom course so I spent the day surfing on the waves.

Politics

The Liberal half of the new UK government set up a website to discuss repealing laws. Predictably enough most of the ideas are nuts so I decided to see if the site would work for what it was intended for, repealing bad laws. If you are a UK citizen, please give your rating to repeal the obscure Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act which bans comics. I like (some) comics and a law which bans them, even if it doesn't get used, is a bad law. I wonder if Nick Clegg will listen.

Helsinki Sun Set

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With Akonadi most operations are running behind the scenes, carried out by background helper processes called Akonadi Agents.

While we do have respective progress monitoring in KMail2, users will eventually take advantage of fact that they are no longer tied to specific applications. At which point they might want to be able to check on the status of these background processes without launching some front end applications.

Back in April, during one of our development sprints, I've created a Plasma DataEngine which provides information about running Akonadi agents.

I was kind of hoping that somebody with actual widget skills would be curious enough to try some Plasma widgets on top of it, alas this didn't happen.

Therefore I sat down today and wrote one myself, using the opportuntiy to also have a first real attempt in doing some KDE<->JavaScript coding.

The code for it more or less looks like this:

layout = new LinearLayout( plasmoid );
layout.orientation = QtVertical;

engine = dataEngine( "akonadiagents" );
agents = engine.sources;

resources = new Array;

addAgent = function( name ) {
  label = new IconWidget();
  label.orientation = QtHorizontal;
  layout.addItem( label );
  resources[ name ] = label;

  engine.connectSource( name, plasmoid );
}

plasmoid.dataUpdated = function( name, data ) {
  label = resources[ name ];

  label.text = data.name;
  label.icon = data.typeIcon;

  label.infoText = data.statusMessage;
  if ( !data.online ) {
    label.enabled = false;
  } else {
    label.enabled = true;
    if ( data.status == 1 ) { // running
      label.infoText = data.statusMessage + " (" + data.progress + "%)";
    }
  }
}

while ( agents.length > 0 ) {
  agent = agents.pop();

  // ideally this would be using the agent type's capabilities, but the DataEngine::Data as returned by
  // DataEngine::query() is not accessible from within JavaScript (or at least nobody on #plasma knew)
  if ( agent.indexOf( "resource" ) != -1 ) {
    addAgent( agent );
  }
}

I am sure this is not very pretty from the point of view of skilled JavaScript users, you are welcome to beat me on that

Anyway, screen cast of the Plasmoid in action, as usual on blip.tv

It shows the widget running in plasmoidviewer side by side with Akonadiconsole to demonstrate that the data engine really exposes the same data.
I start with toggling a local VCard file resource between Offline and Online state, which the widget visualizes by disabling/enabling the respective item.

Finally I synchronize all collections of the IMAP resource, showing status and progres reporting.

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Hope all of you lovely people are doing well and are primed and ready for an awesome Community Leadership Summit 2010 this weekend on Sat 17th and Sun 18th July 2010! We have an absolutely incredible list of registered attendees and the event is shaping up to be an fantastic opportunity to discuss community management, [...]

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I am pleased to announce that Ahmed Kamal has joined my team at Canonical to build the Ubuntu Cloud Community. Although Ahmed’s formal background is Electronics and Communications engineering, he was always a Linux geek at heart. He touched his first Linux CD in 1998 with Red Hat 5.x and has been hooked ever since. He [...]

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Today we published our final Shot Of Jaq. You can listen to it here. Shot Of Jaq was our experiment into whether podcasting could be turned on it’s head a little and instead of being a long show (such as what we did with LugRadio, could be a short, sharp burst of content to start the [...]

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I am totally digging the sound menu that is shipping in the development branch of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat: It feels well designed, implemented and sleek. Great work mpt and Conor!

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A very sad day indeed... Planet Solaris is dead. Just another in a long line of bad signs. Please use Planet.OpenSolaris.org instead. A big thanks to David Edmondson for running planetsolaris.org for so long.

I am partly responsible. Sorry to everyone that the blog has been so quiet lately. Given that state of Solaris right now, its unclear what is dead and what is alive. It feels futile to blog about features that may never really be viable. Couple that with OpenSolaris which still hasn't delivered and the fact that many of the features that need documenting are really pretty uninteresting to me (ie: IPS/AI).

The exodus still continues. Lots of engineers have left Sun and many more are considering leaving. I'm told by folks that its not a huge problem because while the big name guys are leaving, the real down in the trench do-ers are still there and working away. But it certainly is disheartening.

The most recent news out there was that Oracle yanked HP's OEM License, so if you run Solaris on HP Prolient servers, your hosed. See? Not a lot of positive stuff for me to blog about.

Personally, I've been more interested recently with the growing 'Devops' movement and IT standards. I've spent a lot of time in ITILv3, ISO 20K/27K, CobiT 4.1, COSO, NIST SP800-53, etc, etc, etc. A whole new and interesting world to me because I came to it instead of a company hoisting it on me against my will.

I have several articles to get out for SearchDataCenter which I'll plug here, and then will start rolling new content out here in a bit.

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Coming live from Akademy over IRC later today (Finnish today anyway) is Kubuntu Tutorials Day.

Alan Alpert from Nokia will teach you about Qt Quick and QML. You will need to download and install Qt Creator binaries before the tutorial. Qt Creator from the archive is not new enough.

Johan Thelin will give an intro to coding in Qt. Make sure you have Qt development files and Qt Creator installed: sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev qtcreator

We also have sessions on Beastie Hunting, Packaging and Merging with the Ninjas and Kubuntu Maverick. Do join us on #kubuntu-devel from 18:00UTC on Wednesday.

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