Well folks, it's been a while since I've had time to do anything KDE related. Fortunately, I've now emerged from the smoke mostly intact and with a few extra letters behind my name. The road doesn't end here, however, and as the figure of speech goes: "out of the smoke and into the fire". I start my M.Sc. program in Planetary Sciences (Geophysics) as of September 1st. In the meantime, I get to work for my thesis advisor for the summer and, I guess, get a head start on whatever I'll end up working on...

This means I actually get to spend a minute or two on KDE once in a while again! Whee! First up, getting my desktop box running again. It's been out of commission for a few months now, ever since I tried to install PC-BSD on it. Now, don't get me wrong, I love PC-BSD - it's a sweet system, which runs fast and stable, with a good KDE implementation. My box just doesn't like PC-BSD, and will randomly hard-lock. I think it has to do with the ATI RS-480 chipset and FreeBSD just not getting along. Works fine in linux though...

So that brings me to the next order of business. Reinstalling linux to resurrect that box. I did some poking around, after having been out of the loop a bit, at some distros, and their status (statuses, statusi, stati? what's the plural of status?). To my pleasant surprise, Slackware now has an official 64 bit variety, although unreleased, which seems promising. I used to run Fred's Slamd64, which was very nice (thanks Fred), but because of it's 64-bit status, I'd end up having to modify all sorts of things to get them to build. Fun, but time consuming. Slackware64-current comes with KDE 4 (yay!), and flash is now available in 64 bit too. Tomorrow I will attempt to install this to get my box back up and running.

That reminds me - that box no longer has a monitor attached to it - instead, I've been running it through my 1080p HDTV, which at 42" and 1920x1080 is just a really big monitor. I've set up a wireless keyboard and mouse, and use the computer from across the living room. KDE and plasma actually fare very well for this task, after some font-size tweaking. There are a few glitches here and there, so once I've reinstalled everything and have an up-to-date KDE, I'll start filing bug reports for this use case. SVG graphics really help here, and so does kwin's effects. Nuno, your artwork is fantastic! Everyone who's seen KDE running on the screen has been left breathless. Good job everyone.

Who knows, maybe I'll have some time to actually contribute more than bug reports this summer. Looking forward to 4.3, and very envious of everyone heading to the Canaries.

Cheers

Hey guys, just to keep everyone informed about the release event stuff. First wave of invites went out early last week: that wave was for KDE community members only. There are a lot of people that have not issued a reply to the invite (yes or no) yet. Just a reminder that those that have no reserved by October 21 may find themselves out of a hotel bed... I'm not saying that we'll have 100 people from the world at large sign up for the beds on October 21st and there will be no room, but we hope to fill things up fairly quickly.

The second wave of invitations went out just, thanks to Wade's insane effort in this matter. This wave targets distros, our sponsors, press, and people from the free software community at large. Please keep in mind that for this wave of invitations, we did not specify a specific person within the company that we'd like to come down. Feel free to use on anyone you'd like to see out there. If you can't decide on just one person to send, send more than one (eg: Helio and Boiko would both be nice...)

And lastly, I think I have a summer job lined up that will not only give me time off to go to Akademy, but actually thinks that what I'm doing with KDE is pretty cool. Being in geology, they asked me what kind of software KDE makes (during the interview), and I was talking about it being a functional replacement for the OS X or Windows user interfaces, plus a set a applications to go with it. When asked about what kind of apps KDE makes, they seemed most impressed by Marble based on my description of it. Maybe there's room for open source applications in industry :) Well, with CVRD anyway... (to the Brazilians out there: is CVRD a company that is worth being associated with?)

Cheers

Hey guys, we're starting to get a number of replies to the sent out email invitations within the KDE community (predominantly 'yes' replies, which is great!), but we're hoping that people do not forget about the invitation until the last minute. If you got an invite, please let us know your status. For those that didn't get an invite, we will be opening this event up to mass registration in a few weeks (this includes the remaining sponsored hotel rooms) on a first-come, first-served basis.

Additionally, we started a contest to fly out one KDE user to this event, and we're starting to see responses (a dozen or so) of which most have come from Italy. What the heck is KDE doing in Italy that gives us so many eager users out there? :P Is our translation team just that cool? Are the Oxygen artists all rock stars? Do the letters KDE mean "Let's Make Love" in Italian? Ok, I kid.

Anyway, for the *users* out there that are reading the planet but not the dot (for some reason...), please go take a look at the contest news post so we can get some more submissions. Remember, this would be an all-expenses paid trip to the Google HQ to be part of the KDE 4 release event along with related talks and community meetings. And zack already confirmed that he'd be coming, so you don't have to compete with a contest submission from him :P

Cheers folks

Hey guys, just a few breadcrumbs of information to pass along about the release event and our plan of action. First, the official announcement is scheduled for October 1st, which means that we would be past our so-called point-of-no-return. This is good, since it will force the organization team to do some of the actual work, like setting the talks schedule.

So folks, on October the 1st, we will be emailing pretty much every KDE developer we can find (in North America) with an official invitation, plus quite a few to go out to KDE developers abroad. The official invitation includes sponsored accommodations and food for those getting the email, however we have 200 sponsored spots available, and less than 200 people on our list. After 15 days have passed (to ensure that those getting invitations have had a chance to RSVP), we will open up the remaining sponsored spots to anyone who can find a way to get there.

Once you have received your official invitation, we recommend booking flights ASAP to get better prices :) This event will be happening on January 17-19th even in the event of KDE 4.0 being pushed back past January, so your tickets will not be wasted.

The KDE e.V. will be providing us with a small travel budget, however funds for travel are tight, and flying dozens of people over from Europe will not likely be possible unless they get partial funding elsewhere. As our goal is to have this event focus on the KDE community in the Americas, I will hypothesize that funding for travel will likely be given to those that are less likely to be able to attend Akademy in Belgium this summer.

But that's okay, as this event here is our chance to build up our presence on this side of the pond. The Philly Akademy team (which was not selected for July 2008) has contacted me about turning our January event into an annual event by reusing the infrastructure that they put in place for their previous Akademy proposal. This may be the birth of a second annual "Akademy" conference, although it's likely to find a different name to avoid confusion :)

In addition, from a marketing perspective, I pass along a few insights into our brains: we want to market KDE 4.0 as an 'early release of KDE 4', and to make sure that the atmosphere around this event is one that celebrates all the great progress we've made so far, but is focused on the future of KDE 4.x, rather than just 4.0 itself. Yes, we are calling it the KDE 4.0 Release Event, but the actual release announcement/keynote only occupies an hour of the total event schedule.

We plan to cram as much as we can into three days by filling the schedule with BoF's, talks, planning sessions, press seminars/interviews, and of course some partying too :) We want to make it worth the trip and the two days off work/school for a KDE event that can help further refine our post-4.0 strategy and strengthen our community links...

After all, marketing KDE is a weird thing. The thing we're "selling" to companies when we market KDE is not a product, but rather the community that exists around the product. We don't necessarily want entities to just use KDE, we want them to become an active part of our community.

So when the press or corporate types comes to our release event, we don't necessarily want them to think they are coming to see some software. When you download KDE, rather than feeling like that software now belongs to you, you should feel that you now belong to the KDE community. By inviting press and distro partners (and so forth) to this event, we want them to feel the KDE love and feel pride in being part of the KDE process. The fact that we're showing off KDE 4.0 will be a sort of side-effect that gives the press something to write about :)

(And now, thanks to the above paragraph, I can be accused of being communist pinko scum by the yankees! whee!)

Anyway, if you have something KDE that you'd like to talk about at this event, please email myself or Wade via the release-event@kde.org email address and we'll make sure to set aside a reservation for you when they go out on October 1st. I'll put this tactfully: if you're short on travel funds, but are making a presentation, the e.V. would be more inclined to sponsor some travel expenses. (Note: this does not represent a published opinion of the e.V., just a working theory on who they would most likely sponsor :P)

Cheers folks, more details on Monday.

So I've been thinking recently about KDE's overall marketing strategy, and I think that I've got a handle on my own vision of KDE Marketing, which is malleable and adjustable to accommodate varying strategies. I won't spam the whole planet with the details, since it might be lengthy, and only a few people will care enough to read the whole thing. This strategy is what I will be focusing on with my work within KDE over the next while, that is, if I don't get too distracted by the allure of coding :) ( Read On )

This last Friday, I had the pleasure of attending a lecture put on by one of the professors at the NRI (Natural Resources Institute) at my university (U of Manitoba) as part of our homecoming lecture series. The talk was about environmental/resource conservation projects in so-called third world countries where they were trying to provide a way to define a successful project.

The method they came up with was by measuring the number of entities involved in any given conservation project, be it local governments, international NGOs, universities, etc. They threw up some slides showing the networks that existed for a number of the more successful projects versus the networks for the less successful projects. The conclusion was that the conservation projects that were successful were not only well networked vertically, but more surprisingly, they were very well networked horizontally.

Now if I've lost anyone yet, vertical networking was in this case defined as links between the various levels of organization, such as local->regional->national->international government support. This example would have 4 levels of vertical networks, which is pretty good to get a project started, but not enough to sustain it for the long term as it has many points of failure. If any one member of a vertical network stops supporting the project for any reason, the whole project would collapse.

On the other hand, horizontal networking refers to links between entities that are on the same level. This would refer to multiple local governments all having a shared interest in a single project, or having the support of several regional institutions (like universities) rather than just one. Having horizontal links in the network would substantially improve the resiliency of the network to any single entity dropping out.

Now here's where I had an 'aha!' moment. I started to contemplate how open source communities function, and the open source world in general vs. traditional software development.

In a business, if there were horizontal links at every level, each working on essentially the same thing, the business would be considered inefficient. Any good manager would start to work right away to remove the redundancy in order to save money. And in fact, we have a lot of people who think like this when observing the open source world, telling us that there is no good reason for multiple projects to exist that tackle the same problems.

The answer to this is that open source is infinitely more resilient due to this redundancy. Now there are a lot of examples of this within the open source world that occur in almost every single project type.

Just consider, for a moment, KDE's multimedia support. Previously we had a pretty hard link to the aRts project, but it was definitely not the only multimedia project that existed during KDE's history. There has been a wide array of suitable libraries that could have done the job, but KDE was pretty concretely linked to aRts. This would be a sort of vertical link between KDE and aRts. The problem was that aRts was no performing the job that KDE needed, so we started to form more vertical links to other projects, like Xine or GStreamer to circumvent aRts. This would not have been possible if these projects were not simultaneously working on a more-or-less similar goal. In a company, if that portion of the software project had failed, we would not have had such a readily available backup plan (management would have axed it years ago!).

This same thing happens on a number of levels all throughout the open source community. People wonder why PostgreSQL and MySQL are always locking horns. Why we need ulibc when glibc already exists. How come we keep developing zsh when bash is almost ubiquitous. Why does KDE really benefit from GNOME's existence?

Well, just like our multimedia example from earlier, imagine that one day GNOME fails for some reason (why? I dunno, I'm talking hypothetically). Well, if GNOME was the only desktop project that existed, open source would take a huge blow. Thankfully, it isn't the only project. KDE would step in to fill the whole right away with little long-term implications to the health of open source in general. And while in this scenario, it would seem that we'd be down to one desktop, it wouldn't actually be the case at all. Other desktop projects are always nipping at the heels of KDE and GNOME, projects like XFCE or ROX would rise up to meet the challenge.

The open source world will always be fractured, with multiple projects for any single task, but in this lies the strength and longevity of the world-wide community. These horizontal links provide redundancy which allows projects that live above or below you to come and go without the whole thing going to hell.

One side-effect of looking at it this way is that the project that communicates the best with it's vertical links (KDE's dependencies upstream, and distros downstream) will likely be the most popular selection amongst the choices at any given level. The CMake team communicated really well with KDE, incorporating suggestions from KDE into later versions and so forth, which made CMake an excellent choice for KDE. The same was not true of some other build systems, which may have been able to handle a large project like KDE, but were less communicative.

Turn this scenario around and we have distros that are choosing a desktop environment. They will choose the desktop environment that is more willing to listen to their needs. We (and even I am guilty of this) have been of the impression that this communication is the distro's responsibility, but this philosophy will only drive distros away from KDE. We need to behave like the CMake developers and go out of our way to ensure that the distros are happy, and KDE will thrive.

We ought to create a working group entitle Downstream Relations or similar, where people actively seek communications with the distributions. Now, I know that there are hundreds (thousands?) of distros out there, and this is a huge task, but KDE penetration can really drive forward in the long run with this ideal. I will do my part.

So I got quoted in some print media in Minneapolis/St. Paul about my trip to Glasgow and the various delays and 'inconveniences' I had in one single trip. I've never been referred to as "Unrau" in any context outside of hockey before, so it's weird to see myself referred to that way.

I'm posting this from Mandriva 2008 which I'm testing on a spare hard disk. I tried Compiz Fusion this way for the first time on this machine. Since my only experience with Composite on this particular machine is KWin from trunk, it further emphasizes the performance problems I have with Composite in KWin. I'm not sure if it's just a setting problem that can be worked around in the Nvidia driver, but I'll look into it more later.

And now for a discussion that seems to come up within KDE every time a new release is getting closer - a KDE program installer. Attempts have been made in the past, but they have all (except klik) failed to catch on at all. Here's my crack at the ol' whip.

Liquidat recently posted a few words about the development of klik2. I must say that I'm really happy that they are moving to an LSB base rather than the debian base as it makes klik2 even more distro-neutral. I don't know if they solved the problem with packaging for separate CPU architectures yet though, but that would be nice :) But KDE supports (or will support) other platforms as well, such as BSD or Windows, so why not unify the whole program installation thing across our supported platforms and distros.

I'm going to arbitrarily list the requriements of my dream package installer system for KDE:
1) self-supporting - a single downloaded file containing all of the dependencies required to use the package (assuming some base, like LSB + kdebase or something similar on each platform - this is like klik)
2) self-installing - using an installer that works both graphically, or at the shell if required (like PBIs or perhaps .dmg files)
3) installs into a self-contained location (like PBI's with /Programs, or ROX's Zero Install)
4) Solve library sharing issues by installing symlinks as appropriate (Like PBI's or GoboLinux)
5) Are easily updated (see PBI's once again)
6) Are easily removed (like klik's)
7) Have a mechanism for easy creation (see klik or GoboLinux recipes)
8) Have some mechanism for cross-platform support - such as separate packages for each platform KDE runs on (x86 and x86_64 on LSB, FreeBsd, OpenSolaris, Windows, etc... OS X already has .dmg files which would work just fine for that platform) -- each platform would likely have it's own unique file extension

So the question then becomes, how hard would this be to implement? Would the KDE community even care? Can this be developed cooperatively with klik (for example, reusing recipes) or the PBI folks?

If this idea does not seem unreasonable, I think I'm going to try to make this a reality for 4.1. I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so I'll see if anyone (from the other projects) is receptive to this idea and use that as a base to start work. I know that klik is heading in a somewhat different direction for klik2, but that doesn't mean that we can't work together on recipes and such :) And the PBI stuff from PC-BSD already has a pretty nice kcm module for updating and removing packages and similar actions which may be useful.

Now back to other topics: the release team's updated release schedule (including the early Developer Platform release) looks good. My only concern these days has to do with plasma, and only plasma. In all honesty, the rest of KDE 4 is in a mostly usable state, less a bug or two that's still floating about. I know that right now the plasma team's focus is just on getting something that is a functional replacement for kicker, and that's good because we cannot ship without it.

But, I really do hope that it's still being done in a way that is not going to come back and bite us. We rushed to get aRts into KDE 2, even though it wasn't really ready, and that came back to haunt us. So while Aaron and Robert and a number of other great coders are hacking like mad to ensure that we have something that can 'replace' kicker more fully, I hope that we haven't lost our original design considerations, like ensuring that every data source is accessible from other applets.

For example, the default appearance of the panel in 4.0 will not necessarily be the prettiest but should at least be usable. If the data engine design goes as planned, users will be able to create replacements that will look or function in unique ways. Like Pinheiro's panel mockup, which looks beautiful and would really be a unique panel for KDE, but has some usability complaints (like Fitt's Law). The beauty of the plasma concept is that someone can implement Pinheiro's concept within plasma without sacrificing the existing code - it's simply another plasmoid that shares the data source. In later versions of KDE, we can likely expect a darwinian approach where the best plasmoids for a specific task are included in the release, which should be cool.

Lastly, someone on IRC was complaining about Plasma not being a real KDE application. So my question is then, what defines a Real KDE application? Does it need to implement a File Dialog? KStyle-rendered widgets? Link to libkdecore? When does an application count as a KDE application?

Who invented the phrase 'eat your own dogfood' - it's so much fun to say! Although the idea of taking it literally is gross for some reason...

Overnight, Ars published a review of mine that corresponds roughly to Beta 2 (I checked out the sources about 24 hours after beta 2 was tagged). Ever since I built that specific version last week, I've been living in KDE 4 full time. And you know, it hasn't even been that bad.

I've found a couple of bugs in my so-called day-to-day tasks that I'll bring up here just to give everyone and idea of the severity of the problems remaining.

Okular had a little zooming problem. I even fixed that bug with a one-line, whee!. The simple bugs I can handle, but not everything is that simple.
KSnapshot takes shots of static when composite is off, and when it's on, it only gets parts of windows.
When I use Konq and I enter an https address, nothing happens when I press enter.... but the https ioslave does work as I can log into other https-enabled websites by following links. Weird bug, but I think it's a bug in the address bar.
Composite is quite slow - I have a supported card, but I only get two or three frames when the minimize animation happens - so not really smooth yet. I'm not sure if it's a problem with kwin or my X though.
The contrast in the Oxygen style is a bit low making things slow for me to interpret visually, but I'm sure the Oxygen team is well aware of whatever problems still exist.
I get repainting problems when scrolling up (but not down) - this happens with or without the Oxygen theme, so that is not the cause of this problem.
I get an error message when starting Dolphin about Nepomuk - a pretty wordy error... unfortunately the error message doesn't tell me how to start the Nepomuk services so I've been left scratching my head...
I originally got crashes when programs were closing - that's since been fixed (thank you to whoever did that!)
Noatun gladly opens video files (I presume this it thanks to phonon), but I don't get a video window. This could be related to an older version of libxine perhaps as the stable kubuntu doesn't have packages for the required bit-release.
There seems to be some sort of glitch in the automatic resizing of the taskbar buttons where sometimes they don't shrink after the window title gets shorter.

As you can see, the nature of the problems I am facing are mostly of the bug variety. Some of which might be considered show-stoppers. In reality, I've been using a full session of KDE 4 for 5 days now, rebuilding periodically, and with the except of bugs and inconveniences (which are shrinking with each rebuild), I really do think it's time for the whole KDE development group to "eat their own dogfood" if they really want to see the shine put on this release. Who knows, maybe if we do enough bug fixing early, we won't need two release candidates and we'll be out before December.

Most of you are far superior coders than I am, so I only do what I can. Anyway, I'd just like to say a big thank you to everyone that has been working hard on this release. It's nice to see things really starting to come together.

Cheers folks

So, I know I'm not alone on this topic but I will represent these opinions as my own for the sake of taking the brunt of the fury upon myself alone. I recently wrote an article about the complex relationship that exists between various open source projects, especially when it comes to dealing with upstream projects.

Now, the reason I wrote this article in the first place is to compliment a few distributions on how they are (as a result of KDE 4.0) sending some of their better work upstream to KDE. Some examples include: Ark Linux's recent announcement that they'd be moving all of their hardware stuff into Solid (which is awesome and I hope all the other KDE distros follow suit), and Kubuntu's contribution of System Settings to fill the void of KControl being mostly decommissioned. We, as the KDE community really need to applaud these distros when they take steps in the right direction and keep the upstream happy, and I for one would be happy to give press to any distro making contributions to KDE *nudge nudge*. This is really the only positive reinforcement that I can offer to the distros to take this action as I am only an individual.

But the way that the distros deal with KDE is not always rosy, and there are a lot of examples in the past where a distro has done its own thing to KDE and their own detriment. I will provide a few example here, but what I'm really looking for is comments on what the KDE developers and users consider to be the worst examples.

Example #1: OpenSuse managed to make it so that KDE 3.5.x does not depend upon aRts for multimedia, which is nice. But instead of making a KDE 3.6.x branch or similar within KDE's sources, they did it in an internal fork of 3.5.x. Now I recognize that KDE is moving fast towards KDE 4.x and would not really want to deal with releasing a KDE 3.6 series at this point, but it would have at least been nice to have it live somewhere within KDE's source trees so that other distros can more easily take advantage of this rather useful improvement. But instead, we now have users joining #kde with multimedia problems on opensuse that we cannot help in any way, since they are using a fork. (On a side note: Phonon should put this problem to rest once-and-for-all in KDE 4, finally!)

Example #2: Kubuntu changes many of the menus in Konqueror, which is designed to simplify the whole interface. This is a noble objective, and is good for their users (as long as their users don't need any support from the KDE community, or don't want to file bugs against KDE). The problem is that they've broken a number of things as a result. For example: in the default Konqueror menu, there's a "Save View Changes per Folder" checkbox in the "Settings" menu - this menu item was removed, and set to True by default. Now the only way for Kubuntu users to change this setting is to edit the config file by hand. A better solution would have been to put this setting into Konq's config dialog, and removed it from the menu upstream, in KDE, so that all users could benefit from removing a seldom used menu item.

These are only two examples, and many distributions are guilty behaving in this fashion. With KDE 4.0 here, it is the perfect chance for these distros to cast aside their patches, or to get them into KDE proper, and I really want to encourage the distros to accomplish this goal.

So, as part of my gentle nudging, I am looking for comments. What do you find are the worst changes that distros have made to KDE in the past (as well as a note if the problem was resolved or not)? What are some of the best changes made by distributions that should have been merged into KDE proper?

And to the distributions, what are the prospects of getting this work moved into KDE? (Remember, I can give good press for these contributions, which makes your distro look more appealing to the general public - mindshare and so forth.) I don't really want to negatively reinforce the major failures so much as I want to positively reinforce good behaviour via press.

Cheers folks

Edit: Oh, by the way, the 'recent' article I refer to in the first paragraph is available at Ars Technica and is only like a day old. It's probably worth reading as I talk about KDE a lot in that one. Inge Wallin tells me I should blog here every time I have an article worth reading, just to draw attention to them - but I'm not sure if that's shameless self-promotion, or just allowing people to find my stuff easier :)

Hey folks - didn't mean to spark a minor flamefest with the last journal entry...

Anyway I have two things for this entry:

First: I'm looking for everyone to comment on what their favourite media outlet is that covers open source news, computer news, or even free culture in general. I'm building up a list of press contacts to invite to the KDE 4 release party event (more details forthcoming shortly). Press that is local to the Bay area of California is a bonus, since their travel costs will be lower, but hopefully I can get a huge list of interested parties. This can include magazines that publish in other languages, Technology TV shows, famous bloggers, and more. By adding a comment, you are helping to spread the word to the world about KDE 4 :)

Beat.

Secondly: when I was at Akademy, I talked to a few people that were doing personal research projects into making a lightweight webbrowser for KDE around WebKit codenamed "Napolean" (aka, the "little Konqueror", a clever enough play-on-words). At the time some people raised objections to the naming thinking it was akin to calling a project "Hitler", so if anyone is working on it, it'll likely have a new name by now.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I forgot who I was talking to in reference to this project, so I can't follow it up to see if any work is being done, or if it's an idea that sitting dead. I recall being in a discussion in the hacking room -- dfaure was there, but I cannot remember who else was in that discussion... Maybe I'll have to poke david to see if he remembers. The real reason is that I'm hoping that someone is already working on this project, but would like to do it in collaboration with a few others. There are a number of people in the Webkit camp that are rumbling about making a new, fully open source browser on top of webkit and they'd rather not see a duplication of efforts from the beginning. So they asked me if I can find out who it was that was talking about this project back at Akademy. Can anyone help here?

Cheers folks.

So I was over at headrush.typepad.com as I randomly surfed the interweb, and found a funny image there, which I repost here. (Hopefully attribution is enough to satisfy the copyright types, and forgive me for my hotlinking...)



And this explains why KDE 4.0 is an important event, and why we never would be able to get there with incremental, *ubuntu-style releases. This is also why Gnome is just now starting to talk about their long term future, since they've been stuck in the incremental stuff for a while and I'm getting the feeling that some of them feel trapped in the cycle.

Cheers to KDE 4 and the crossing of the Big Fricken' Wall.

So, in my previous post, I listed some of my motivations for writing the story about Webkit and KHTML. It seems it has not gone fully unnoticed.

You see, when I wrote my article, motivation number one was to have KDE mentioned every time Webkit is mentioned: I know that this is 'in-house', but it's still nice to see the Apple writers over at Ars Technica talking about KDE in their Webkit articles now.

Plus, that article is about the Webkit project as an open source project, not as a pet project of Apples. It's great that way.

In addition, I like the new, officially stated goals of the webkit project: "In addition, we strive to create a courteous, welcoming environment that feels approachable to newcomers. WebKit maintains a public IRC chat room and public mailing list where the ideas of contributors both new and old are heard and discussed with equal weight." and later "We want to make it reasonable to port WebKit to a variety of desktop, mobile, embedded and other platforms. We will provide the infrastructure to do this with tight platform integration, reusing native platform services where appropriate..."

I think that with this sort of new-found openness on their part, the Webkit team is trying to put their best foot forward.

So it seems that OpenID is finally gaining that critical momentum it needs to become truly a popular choice for web authentication. I am very pleased by this development, but interested to note that people are mostly unaware of OpenID's origins: did you know that it was invented as part of another open source software project? That project is LiveJournal. And the only reason it got as popular as it did was due to the massive popularity of LiveJournal and it's software.

You see, other websites started to spring out of the ground that used LiveJournal's software which created an inter-website authentication problem. Well, rather than harassing these websites to use LiveJournal's own accounts, they created a rather unique, open and distributed authentication scheme so that users could use the accounts they have at LiveJournal or DeadJournal or wherever else in cooperation with one another. But when they designed it, they made sure that it wasn't restricted only to users of LJ's software. A good idea, and now it has much momentum. I guess though, with KDE using OpenID, it'll provide even more incentive for other community sites to start using it for authentication. It's like MS Passport but done right - open and distributed.

Anyway, enough OpenID goodness.

I'm spending this weekend in the North at the "in-laws", which I put in quotes because they aren't really my in-laws since I'm not really married, but would be considered to be common-law married under most definitions of the law. Unfortunately there isn't a good word in the English language to say in one mouthful "common-law-in-laws". If anyone can come up with a good term for this, I'll use it forever :) Then we can bomb the internet with the term until it becomes so frequently used that M-W or Oxford have to pick it up as a real word. Ideas?

Speaking of terms, in my last entry I had you folks playing the reverse acronym game with the letters KDE. The responses I got back didn't really give anything that I'd be willing to suggest as a replacement for the existing acronym, but it did yield some neat responses. For example, as a wallpaper slogan or similar, "KDE Does Everything" is a great recursive acronym. Other comments agree to simply "undefine" KDE altogether, and I'm not sure this is a fully terrible idea. The problem with undefining it is that we have some momentum to fight against when trying to get people to use it in a more liberal context.

I'll present an example that I've encountered through my early writing over at Ars Technica. When referring to KDE as a community, I can write things like "Basket is a software project that is developed in association with KDE." Is KDE here referring to the Desktop Environment, or the community of people? In this case the usage is ambiguous, and either one would work. However, to the editors at Ars, they have only ever used the term KDE in reference to the actual software, and have difficulty when I write "KDE is debating the use of OpenID" or similar. In this sense, I am referring to KDE as an entity in much the same way that one would use the term "Apple" or "Google". They get hung up on this since they thing that I cannot use a product name as the entity name. This is the problem that led to the previous post about redefining KDE. Leaving it undefined will not solve this problem. The best response was some anonymous newbie on irc suggesting "K Digital Enterprises" to be used when referring to the entity. Not bad, if you ask me (which I'm sure you don't :P).

Lastly, before I quit my rambling, I want to make a few statements (publicly) to clarify my motivations when I wrote that KHTML/Webkit article that I'm sure most everyone has seen floating around. I will quote portions my own email that I sent to Harri about this topic, and I figure should be made public. My goals were, during the writing of that article:

1) To create mindshare for KDE - I'm trying to make it so that when any journalist mentions webkit in any context, they are mentioning KDE (giving credit).
2) To encourage discussion amongst the various contributors to ensure that forking does not get out of hand. This is one of the fears that Apple has with webkit as other companies and projects all start to use it.
3) To encourage those that remain firmly attached to KHTML that the general public would not turn on them for working on Webkit.
4) To [help] heal a wound created in our community due to Apple's original inability to understand how to properly work within the open source world: I will attempt to do this by positively reinforcing their actions whenever they make steps to bring the community in, such that they are more likely to take further steps in the future.

I wrote the original article upon the request of a few of the KDE KHTML folks that are now working within the webkit infrastructure, and my original impression was that consensus was a lot stronger than I now believe. That said, I have stated my goals, and they are valid still. I offer no apologies for it, but I will confess that I will be more cautious in the future when announcing consensus.

So folks, it has come to my attention through various conversations with people involved with open source, but not KDE, that we have an image problem. The problem is that KDE has outgrown its name. It used to be Kool, but now it's just K. It used to be Desktop, but it's outgrowing that metaphor. So all we have left is the Environment.

So rather than calling ourselves the KD Environment, we need to sit and think about this for a while.

The other problem we have is that the KDE community is growing and branching to include a lot more than just a "Desktop/Development Environment" as was the original acronym's definition. We now include applications for other platforms, and a whole lot more.

So do we just call our organization "KDE" and refuse to define the acronym anymore? Well, companies have successfully converted to using just an acronym in the past: see IBM, for a good example. They've been using just their acronym for ages now to refer to the entirety of their operations, even in cases where it isn't at all related to business machines.

So what we should be doing is calling KDE the organization, and not the product. KDE is not a Desktop Environment, it's a community that produces an Application Suite, a Developer Platform, a Unix Workspace Environment, a set of open standards (via freedesktop.org for example), a series of related applications called ExtraGear, and more.

So perhaps we shall drop the Desktop Environment portion of the acronym altogether and be known simply as KDE. But, if you're like me, you want to have more fun with this idea.

Let's begin the first round of the Reverse Acronym Bazaar! Open comments for new definitions that suit the letters KDE. Who knows, maybe one will stick.

<troy> we should come up with a new reverse acronym for KDE... like the K Development Entourage or something silly like that which refers to the community rather than the product :)
<aseigo> troy: KDE Destroys Everything .. no. too negative. ;)

*note: this exercise is just for fun at this point. KDE is not (yet) officially changing it's definition or anything.

You see, when I started to write for the dot, I wrote very liesurely about all of my topics, and it was well received by many. No pressure at all. Now, however, I have become aware of the sheer number of people that read my work (whereas before I was somewhat ignorant of the whole thing) and the whole task now seems rather daunting.

I've really only published two things since Akademy, while I have rough drafts for a dozen more that I am simply not happy with. The problem is that I've now become my own worst critic in the worst possible sense. Every paragraph I lay down is crap in my mind, and I'm letting good articles fester while I write, rewrite and then get annoyed that it never seems to be good enough. (My apologies to the Krita folks, who are patiently waiting for my article on that topic...)

On top of this, Ars Technica has now officially (soft)launched their dedicated open source journal, with a tentative name of #open.ended... these articles are supposed to be rather informal and informative about the events going on within the open source world. The problem is that I'm trying to write each of these articles like they are my life's work, and as a result, I am not writing a lot. I really need to get on this thing, since it is seriously lacking any real KDE content so far... :/

Oh well. On the other side of the coin, my "real life" activities, including my geophysical field work, are going quite well. Still no sign of my luggage from the Akademy trip though.

And now you're up to date. I wonder when Wade will bring out the next 'Gearheads' comic :)

As a followup to my previous entry, "The Airport Experiences", I guess you folks should be wondering if my trip home was any better... Well, this being my first trip to Europe, they figured they'd better make it as strange as possible for me :)

I never did get my luggage in Glasgow, although KLM claims that your computer tagged it as heading from Amsterdam to Glasgow... only it was never tagged in Glasgow upon arrival. So I was wearing the same pair of pants for 9 days... did anyone notice that I smelled?

When I tried to leave on the morning of Saturday, the 7th, I ran into new wrinkles. My plane was supposed to leave at 5:55 AM, so I was there early, checked in, ready to go. Sweet, we board the plane on time, and sit there on the tarmac for a while. This is a familiar place for me to be sitting, on a full to capacity plane at the Glasgow airport, but not moving.

They inform us that we have had some technical problem with the cabin pressurization, and that it'd be a few minutes before we could leave. Half an hour later, we're loaded off the plane and back to the terminal while they repair the plane, or presumably grab a replacement. An hour later, the flight is cancelled. Shit. I will now miss all of my connections, and miss coffee with Wade in Minneapolis on one of my layovers.

Well, okay there's another wrinkle. If you bought anything at duty free after you went through security, you cannot take liquids through security on the second pass. People are upset, which is a fairly typical response to the security measures as a rule.

Neither KLM or Northwest actually have a presence in the airport, and deal though a proxy called Servissair or somesuch. Servissair is totally incompetent, and a full 8 days after the car fire, do not have their computer booking systems up and running yet. I mean, how hard can it be to reinstall those systems anyway?!

We wait for hours and hours - all other flights to Amsterdam are full. We wait. At 11 AM, they put us on a bus to Edinburgh to grab the last Amsterdam flight that evening. We wait and wait some more. Everyone sleeps on the bus, so I can't even say if the countryside was pleasant. At about 1PM we are at Edinburgh at the Servissair desk there. Well, at least their booking system works, but by now everyone is upset about being late and demands refunds and they fly out using different airlines that depart earlier.

The flight leaving Edinburgh is delayed. We eventually board and get out of there, but since we're late, everyone misses their transfers again. The KLM desk in Amsterdam has a lot of angry flyers...

KLM rebooks me to a flight the next afternoon, and puts me up in a fairly nice 4-star hotel in Amsterdam. They had a really nice building stone for their countertops, an anorthosite featuring labradorite plagioclase with a beautiful schiller effect... I'll make my countertops out of that when I have the money :)

Finally, we leave Amsterdam at 3PM the following day. I am 27 hours behind schedule, and will not be able to meet Wade. Pfft.

As we approach Minneapolis, we start circling the airport since it's been closed from a bad thunderstorm. After a few circuits, we touch down. Finally back on the ground on the right side of the pond, yay!

Oh, wait - my flight to Winnipeg is delayed. I collect call my girlfriend to let her know as she was going to meet me at the airport at home. Our flight gets delayed on the tarmac again as we're missing the co-pilot... half an hour later, I'm finally in the air for the short hop to Winnipeg. My cuter half is waiting for me just outside of customs (which are orders of magnitude friendlier than their American counterparts). Time to go home and relax. Whee!

An Anecdote:

While on the plane I was in discussion with an American businessman who was in Europe to drum up some business. He worked for a private enterprise, and so they didn't have to answer to shareholders all the time, and as a result, they've had an easier time doing the ethical thing with regards to energy and the environment, even if it cost a little more. This included things like buying up paper recycling plants, and then expanding their business. A nice guy who was generally interested in how open source worked.

One of the things he said stuck with me however, when comparing the difference between the Americans and much of the rest of the world. He said: "Americans love their country, but don't give a damn about their countrymen, whereas other countries do the reverse."

I got to thinking about how this related to the structure of KDE and realized that every KDE contributor will say the same thing when asked what keeps them contributing: "well, the community is amazing."

If KDE were a nation, we'd be a nation that loves our countrymen :) Perhaps that philosophy explains why we are doing well in those markets that are outside of the US :P

Cheers.

So KDE has received a large number of mentions in the press recently, including reprinting much of the dot.kde.org storm that is our Akademy coverage. Here's a few that I'd like to point out for those that are not showing up on the dot or the planet, or are republishing something that we already know about (so we can be aware of the exposure). So, after some judicial application of google news searching, here we go:

• First my own work (got to uphold my reputation as a diva): The Classmate article is live via Ars Technica. It's been picked up by places such as osnews.
• General Akademy coverage from: Heise Online, eWeek, PC World Magazine, LWN.net (they've been pretty much republishing everything the dot has pushed out),
• Alpha 2 coverage from: Desktop Linux,
• Mandriva has been busy claiming NEPOMUK as their own: Computer Business Review, OS News
• As well as publishing news about the fact that they gave us all USB keys: Press Release
• Mark made a splash - I guess any time we get mentioned in PC World is a good thing, even if we don't agree with him.
• And of course, Liquidat has had fairly good coverage of the event as well, even though he should really be present next year instead of writing from a thousand kilometres away :P

Of course, more coverage will be happening, but I though it was important to note that KDE is getting some reasonable press from Akademy 2007, even if half of it is Helio :P

Edit: Oh, and this one too, about Helio's other toy.