Advogato blog for spstarr

OLS Day 0

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:09:18 GMT

On Monday, I drove to Guelph to hang out with some friends and then take the VIA Train to Ottawa. We arrived around 5pm today.

About the only thing done that was productive today was order a Pizza and sync rawhide and pray wireless will work tomorrow morning.

I wish Other KDE people where here

[ Insert I'm Going to OLS! banner here ]

Pictures to come ...

Plasma Weather Meeting and things to come...

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:06:33 GMT

Our famous Oxygen folks have brought a taste of things to come for the weather plasmoid. This mockup is a work in progress.

Credit goes to Pinheiro and Lee Olson from Oxygen for getting things started!

I would like to propose a meeting for next week to discuss some changes for the mockup, and other features we may need. Feedback welcome on the date and time.

This is scheduled for KDE 4.2 timeframe.

And...

and wish I could

A lament for the system tray

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 04:06:28 GMT

O woe is me, your poor systray,
I work so hard to show you statuses,
and even then I get no respect.
I make your panel shine with glee,
O please say a prayer for me.

O woe is me,
I am the systray,
just don't make me display things in disarray.

Fedora Elections and Weather Applet

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:09:15 GMT

Just as everyone else SHOULD be doing....

(thanks to whoever drew the artwork)

Go HERE to vote if you're a member of Fedora

With the election going on, I believe we'll have a great board elected to continue the progress Fedora is making. So do your part and VOTE NOW!

On the KDE side of things...

I spoke to one of our famous artists Pinheiro for a mockup of the Weather plasmoid. I'm sure he'll have some interesting ideas to cook up. It looks like I won't be able to get this thing in for KDE 4.1 (sigh). With no artwork (and I'm a terrible artist), it's best to leave this in playground.

I plan on working on some other ions (data source engines) for other Free weather data sources soon if their licenses allow me to do so.

Calling other artists, anyone in the mood to write SVG weather icons? kthxbye

The Fedora 9 Release party and KDE

Tue, 20 May 2008 02:18:19 GMT

Well, a few days ago, I attended the release party for Fedora 9. There was a lot of people who showed up a few Red Hat folks who work on Fedora and packages. There were also a few users who showed up to try Fedora out for the first time. It was a big success! Thanks to all who came out

When I arrived, I was asked to demonstrate KDE for the audience. Seeing that I don't have KDE 4.0.x and that I'm using trunk ('4.1') I showed them some features in 4.1 giving them notice of the bugs they were about to encounter. All and all, the demonstration went ok otherwise.

I have to say though, we have a lot of work to do for KDE 4.x to catch up with the GNOME folks as they have more things integrated together. Hopefully by a later KDE 4.x, we'll have more integration. We took a big risk in KDE 4.x but even though all the current pain, it will be for the better in the long run.

I'd like to also dispel FUD that I still keep hearing about KDE and Fedora. As you know, historically Red Hat/Fedora have been a GNOME shop, this remains true today, however, with Fedora 9, there is full KDE participation now. We have a KDE SIG group that maintains and charts KDE's course within Fedora. There is still some work to do to building more bridges, but I am glad to see Fedora reaching out to KDE as they have now.

Special thanks and greetings to: Andrew Overholt, Behdad Esfahbod and Brian Pepple for making the party a success! See you for Fedora 10

The LinuxCaffe. Stop by for drink and food and geek fun!

Fedora people chatting and hacking

The bar area, feel free to pickup a Fedora DVD

More Cross-desktop collaborators and the eventual '1.0' release of the weather applet

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:09:56 GMT

Colaboration

I am pleasantly surprised to hear from Aaron Seigo and others that there has been more collaboration going on that most people might not know about. Learning that Qt 4.x now can use the Glib event loop gives us a lot of abilities to create glue between KDE and GNOME interfaces which is really encouraging.

Also happy to see other GNOME people such as Hubert Figuière and Rodrigo Moya are looking at more collaboration between our two teams. This can only be a Good Thing.

I personally look forward to working with other teams together to help us make the Desktop on Linux (and the other Freenixes too) grow.

I had a look at libgweather and wonder how to hook this into the weather engine but haven't examined the code yet. If it can provide similar data such as collecting current conditions as the ions do, maybe create an ion (data source plugin) to load libgweather and hook that in somehow.

Plasma Development

In the meantime, I spent a night of debugging to track down some new behaviours the Plasma Sprint has introduced. Needless to say, some of my code changes to fix the applet seem like ugly hacks but they might be part of a bug somewhere in the new API I hope. Now that I'm Plasma Ready(tm) again, I'm planning for a simple applet release in time for KDE 4.1 (for extragear).

Now, in previous postings I've talked about all sorts of wizbang features and things, but those are the goals of the project. This first version is going to have a 'button like' look, much like other simplistic applets. It will utilize the SVG skin theming only for now not icon theming. We don't have a free set of icons to use other then kweather's icons. Maybe this will make the Oxygen people cry and demand new icons

Since I'm going for simplistic right now, it will only display current conditions. Let's get something out the door that works. As for KDE 4.2, things should become more exciting.

It was important for Plasma to break the API and even if that slowed down Plasma development, this will give us a much better framework to work from.

Calling all cross-desktop developers! Let's make crossdesktop colaboration more important in Free/Libre Open Source

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:23:19 GMT

It's been a little while since I've last posted an entry. My own personal life has been busy and hasn't given me much time to work on code. That will change soon though

I post here today as a KDE developer and moderate in the support of cross-desktop collaboration and friendship. Myself and a fellow GNOME friend have created a channel on Freenode and irc.gnome.org (Gimpnet) called #freedesktop-cafe. The channel is designed to have GNOME and KDE (and other desktop camps) developers (and users too if you like) come together for casual (non-developer) chat and to help build friendships. It's not meant to be political. The channel relays its messages to both networks. I'd like to know what you all think.

This channel is not sponsored by either KDE or GNOME. I hope in future we can work together more, despite our language differences and technologies. You can't work with people if you aren't friends with them.

Sometimes, you just have to do it

Tue, 8 Jan 2008 04:06:42 GMT

You know, it's just in my nature. When someone falls, you help them up. When someone needs help you provide assistance. Well, the same goes in the online world. You see, ever since Aaron Seigo and Siraj Razick wrote up the CIA.vc applet, I sort of had a small crush for it. After watching it bitrot, stumble and cry for help. I thought it was time to make it smile and feel loved once again.

I bring you the updated CIA.vc applet. There are some small goals to come for this such as, adding a config dialog to display (or allow) you to type the CIA project you want to monitor and finally fix some of the rendering issues near the bottom of the plasmoid (if the current layout functionality in 4.0.x lets me).

Just remember, when you see code wallowing with sorrow and shame, cheer it up and make it grow and shine!

Happy New Year! And a little present

Thu, 3 Jan 2008 08:05:50 GMT

Well, the homestretch is near, I've had to dropped some functionality to get this finished for KDE 4.0.0. So, no Icons for this version. But, you can see It should replace most of the functionality kweather did. This applet does not support dropping onto the panel or If it does, it might not render correctly.

I decided to just leave the name 'Weather Applet' for generic reasons. Maybe the name will change for KDE 4.1 we'll see.

Next, I have to write a HOWTO for people to write ions (data source backends) to get other weather sources from your local country (if available).

If you know of any countries that provide XML data or freely available data, do let me know. I'd be happy to write a backend to add to this list

Here's a busy screenshot showing various places. Some of the data sources (ions) report warning/watch information. Only the Environment Canada one at this time provides this information.

Comments welcome, please note this is just for KDE 4.0.x, KDE 4.1 I will implement the features mentioned in previous blog postings. We just ran out of time folks

Goals for the Weather Applet (I need a name for this) and testing KDE 4.0 post-Beta 3

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:09:09 GMT

Given the time constraints for KDE 4.0, I have decided to downgrade the functionality for the weather applet. In this release, my aim is to replace kweather functionality completely. This should be feesable to do for the 1.0 release.

Given that Plasma will likely have changes for KDE 4.1, It would make sense to hold off until more of the plumbing has settled down then all the eyecandy can be added in.

I gave KDE 4.0 post-Beta #3 (October 21nd build) a go last night. For the most part, I was able to use KDE functionally. Konqueror crashed a few times, but expected. Composite worked, exploding windows and all I could not log out or lock screen as it would deadlock X for some reason.

Given I've been ridiculed on IRC for complaining about KDE 4.0's release time/schedule, The best thing I can do is to look at what bugs that can be fixed which I can start looking at tonight.

I would note the Oxygen window decoration is nice however on LCD screens - gamma adjusted or not - it there is no contrast between white windows. I hope the theme will get gradients so that one could distinguish between different windows.