KDE Blogs 

In response to Aaron's blog about D-Conf I explained in my previous blog why I think a common configuration system is desirable. I didn't go into the issues that Aaron raised about FreeDesktop.org because I wanted to stay a bit focused and I found Aaron's blog a bit too confusing as to what his point with FreeDesktop.org actually was. This week I managed to dicuss the issue with Aaron on IRC and I think things have become more clear to both of us. Let me share me my new understanding here with you. What Aaron somewhat correctly noticed is that there is a certain aversion growing among some members of the KDE community against FreeDesktop.org . The reason of the aversion seems to be a fear that FreeDesktop.org could become an unstoppable influx of bad technology. Although it may be easy to dismiss that, I think there is indeed reason to be concerned. In my experience open source projects are vulnerable to well intended people adding badly thought out code or concepts. Once added to a release a project is often doomed to maintaining such code until it is possible to drop it at the next major version. It happened to KDE and, acoording to Havoc, Gnome hasn't been spared either in this regard. There are two factors that make this a bigger problem with FreeDesktop.org. Within a project like KDE there tend to be developers around that are comfortable enough to challenge bad ideas before they end up in a release, such challenge is often backed up by the reputation that the challenger has build up in the project over the years. But within an environment like FreeDesktop.org such safeguards are much less likely to work, challengers run the risk of being branded one-sided agenda-pushers and a reputation among developers of project A is less likely to bear any weight among developers of project B. The other factor is that KDE can filter contributions based on the "show me the code" concept: show me the code first and then we can discuss whether it's suitable for inclusion in KDE. Although tempting to use the same approach in relation to FreeDesktop.org as well, I think that for a FreeDesktop.org project to be successful it's more important to build a solid mutual understanding about the problem and the direction to venture in before any code gets written at all. Having code out there without a solid mutual understanding only flames the fear that the codebase may not address the right problems and concerns but will somehow still invades other projects. If the above is the problem that faces FreeDesktop.org, the question then becomes what we should do to let FreeDesktop.org overcome these problems? I think the first thing here is to understand and acknowledge that there will be FreeDesktop.org projects that are bound to produce very bad technology, be it misguided standards or badly written software. This is no different from KDE, we have large kdeplayground repositories, formerly known as kdenonbeta, full with software that is most likely never to see the light of day in a KDE release. Still we cherish the kdeplayground repositories because once in a while, out of maybe 20 failed attempts, one piece of software emerges that is truly worthwhile. And just as we have learned in KDE that along with such a success we have to deal with a fair share of failed attempts as well, FreeDesktop.org is likewise doomed to produce the really bad in the shadow of the really great. So now that you know that FreeDesktop.org is going to produce some really bad standards and software, how are we going to prevent such bad technology from ending up in your software? There are two answer to that. The first one seems trivial and childish but is probably the most important one nonetheless: If you don't like it, don't use it in your software. It's important because the value of shared technology comes from the fact that it is shared. The fact that it is commonly used makes it extra valuable, if it isn't used it's sharing value drops to 0. Developers working on to-be-shared technology who realize this, will also realize that they will need to make a real effort to reach out to others to adopt their work for the sharing value to materialize. [1] The second way to prevent bad technology ending up in your software is by being actively involved to make sure that the right technology decisions are being taken. After all, it's your software we are concerned about and you know probably best what the technological requirements and constraints are for your software and what, from the perspective of your software, makes the difference between bad technology and good technology. So go out there and make your concerns heard. If you don't raise them who will? In all this there is a large responsibility on those who work under the FreeDesktop.org banner. There is a responsibility on all of us working under FreeDesktop.org to reach to others who could be affected by our work, to take note of their requirements, to acknowledge their concerns and then to work together really hard to address all that and make things work for everyone. I think it was Aaron's point that this sometimes doesn't happen enough. I think the above explains a major problem that FreeDesktop.org faces and how to deal with it. I would also like to point how not to deal with it. That is by looking at FreeDesktop.org as a standardisation stamping organisation that blesses technology that everybody should be using. FreeDesktop.org mission page puts it like this: Read More

Uhm, yeah, random notes on my online life as of right now: Matthias Kretz and I had our KDE Multimedia Roadmap talk accepted for LinuxTag. He came over a yesterday and we spent some time today hashing out the outline for our paper and deciding who would write what. I've got 801 Tenor related things that I'm in the middle of, but the basic structures are pretty close to working properly. I really need to get around to doing a TagLib 1.4 release with the standard run of bug fixes beforehand. Michael (Pyne) seems to be back. Coolness. ;-) Like Boudewijn I've been messing around with painting lately. I'm much worse than him. It reminds me of when my college friend Ruth would come over and dye her hair in our bathroom. The whole bathroom was splashed with red crap, but her hair always came out exactly the same color as it was before she started. My painting is like that -- I've got a mess of champs, but my paintings are, well, just saying bad is kind. At any rate, it's fun getting a feel for the brushes, blending colors and whatnot. In other artistic endeavors I've taken to recording some of my improvisations on bass so that I can prove when I'm old that I once was actually good at the thing. I've decided to call them Memes for Bass and have been throwing them here. Seeing usability talked about so much on the Planet lately makes me happy. I'm in serious need of KExtendedDay lately. That will be all for now. Read More

Canllaith seems to start liking to fly gliders. Hey, I can certainly understand that! This experience is sooo just incredible.... feel how the air is able to carry the weight of your wooden (or plastic) bird... hear the wind's always present noises change with the flight state, mixing with the excited beep-beep-beep of the vario, once the pilot has successfully centered his circles in the thermal... get surprised by the centrifugal forces pressing you into your seat in tight curves... Hmmm, and feel your stomach and guts all at once jumping close to your throat, just because the pilot decided to be a little mean to his only passenger and do a sudden nose-dive. Read More

Today was my second glider flight. I try not to mention the first one. The discovery that I was lactose intolerant at 3000ft after drinking an inhabitual hot chocolate on my way to the airfield was fairly traumatic for both myself and the pilot. Read More

First all let me answer the question as to why I rarely release the code I have and when I do I usually stop maintaining it soon afterwards: when I hack, I do it for fun. There's no deep meaning behind me sitting in front of GNU/Emacs. It's just a challenge of creating something that was seemingly impossible that makes it fun. Once whatever I was hacking on is at the stage where it's working, the challenge is gone and hence it stops being fun. And if it stops being fun I move on. And yes it sucks because a lot of the things I worked on and made publicly available deserves better. Read More

Last week I went to Norway to do the paperwork and see the Trolltech office. I loved Oslo which bodes well for the next few months. I'm back in States but will be moving to Norway in the next few weeks. Read More

There's been lot of discussion on the XDG list about a proposal called 'DConf'. Unfortunately, it seems to me to have missed some rather important issues. The most obvious question in any sort of common configuration is system is 'What configuration can be shared?'. Read More

Here's an example of an easy and compact way to simuate the trinary operator in python. It is not short circuit like the one in C, but it is pretty simple: Read More

I'm too lazy to register to post comments, so I'll just go through Derek's post more or less point by point. This isn't tenor, I haven't looked at the code. Search and pattern matching is a fascinating intellectual exercise, and here is the product of my feeble ruminations. Read More

At the last aKademy the openusability website was demonstrated with the idea that usability experts (mostly people that do this for a living) will describe problems in open source projects with suggestions on how to fix them. Sounds great! There was one thing I found less then great; those poor usability experts had to write their report in an XML to make the website understand. Read More