Afiestas Blog

Where are a few hours away from ending the year 2011 (some countries are already in 2012) so I feel like it is the perfect moment to look back at what happened during 2011 so tomorrow I can write what I hope will happen during 2012

If I had to sum up in one word what I have done this year in KDE I’d say BlueDevil. In the first entry from 2011 I’m asking for help on testing the 1.0.2 version, now 12 month later we are ready to release 1.3 which fixes “all known bugs” and we are preparing ourselves for 1.4 and 2.0.

Let’s take a look month by month on what happened in this blog:

• January: we ask for help on testing 1.0.2, we’ve fixed SSP pairing which is a super important Bluetooth feature.
• February: Aleix and I release first snapshot of Kamoso 2.0 which uses QtGstreamer and is demonstrated to be rock solid. By the end of the month we release BlueDevil 1.0.2.
• March: BlueDevil 1.0.3 is released improving stability.
• April: BlueDevil 1.0.4 is released and a lot BlueDevil 1.1 features are presented to the community.
• June: Aleix and I release Kamoso 2.0, currently it only has 1 reported bug we can’t reproduce. Also I’m part of Platform 11 which for me was an turning point, since then I really feel part of the KDE community.
• July: I explain my priorities for the next 6 months, I consider that I’ve done 5/6 which is not a bad rate. I spent one weekend fixing a few bothering bugs. A few days after I sat down and decided to fix the current XRandR code before I start to write the new one, patches are included in 4.7.1. BlueDevil 1.0.5 and 1.1.1  are released. I finish the firsts improvement of BlueDevil 1.2 [1] [2] and made a video of nepomuk awesomness.
• August: Apart from attending Berlin Desktop Summit, BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 is released.
• September: New plans for BlueDevil are done while I continue to work on it.  Another weekend fixing annoying bugs in kuiserver and KDirWatch. Forge 2011 take place,
• October: The month started while Forge was taking place, we continue with usability changes, and though I didn’t mentioned it in my blog I manage to understand a lot better libsolid as well of fixing few bugs here and there. Finally BlueDevil 1.1.2 and 1.2.1 are released.
• November: I attended to UDS (damn I have to blog about this) and found little time to release BlueDevil 1.0.6, 1.1.3, 1.2.2 and 1.3-rc1. During this month I confirmed that I was moving back from Madrid to Barcelona.
• December: Even though I haven’t blog that much I have been working on XRandR and more recently in some Calligra bits I will explain in a future post.

I’d say this year has been quite intense in the KDE front, I have done less than I wanted (which is normal) but more than I expected so I’m happy with the result. Also it is worth to mention that I’m now “Solid Overlord” though I haven’t done much yet I know for sure that 2012 will be the year to amend that.

Happy new year 2012 which for sure, Is going to be a good year for KDE as it was 2011

Hey! long time no see

I have been moving from Madrid to BCN, cities which are around 650km away and that is keeping me busy because I can’t neglect work time for doing it and even if I could the process put pressure into your head so you spend more time procrastinating than before. Nevertheless the moving is almost complete and I’m going to be using more and more time in KDE.

In what I’m going to use my KDE time:

BlueDevil:

• Finish 1.3 release
• Bug triage, fix’em all
• Fix a known bug in Wizard

This weekend I proposed myself to clean the BlueDevil’s bug list, at the beginning of the weekend the list had 42 bugs (including wishes), at this moment it has 18.

When I started the bug triage process, I realize that we had too much crashes so I decided to sit down and fix’em all, well I think I did and because of that we’re releasing new versions for each branch including a new one (1.3) which is the only one that includes a huge change in the KDE Daemon that fixes a bunch of crashes.

Fixed in 1.0:

• 270064: Crash in bluedevil-wizard while broswing a device in dolpin
• 280908: Crash in bluetooth input helper
• 282280: Crash upon removing bluetooth device
• 269814: kde service krashed on blueman-manager start
• 271427: bluedevil crash renaming a disapeared device
• 277992: Removed mouse from device list in KCM while using the connection wizard crashed the KCM
• 273144: Crash after recieve a file
• 274772: Cancelling transfer from mobile phone results in technical error message
• Fixed pairing when the PIN is asked from outside (this happened only some times)

Though we released the 1.2 version a while ago we decided to delay the announcement since there were some annoying bugs that now, thanks to the testing performed by the kubuntu community are fixed.

Relevant posts about BlueDevil 1.2 (with videos and pictures  :p):

• BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 released (changelog here)
• Support for DUN and PANU (use device as modem)
• kio_bluetooth improved

One of the most important thing that is happening in Forge 2011 is the amount of work we’re doing related to usability, focusing all our efforts in tree projects:

• Network Management
• Power Management
• Places View

Finally the Solid sprint 2011 (kown as Forge) has started!

The day has been a little weird since sadly some metalworkers were not able to make it :/ but we had to start so, this being a “Ervin driven sprint” we started creating a kanban.

That took us a few hours, good thing is that now all we have in front of us is hacking, thats it!! 3 days of non-stop hacking

At dinner time our usability messiah arrived, showing us the light in how to do an “user centred development” model, I will blog about it if nobody else does :p

I’m arriving at the office so the rest of the blog entry will have to wait until later.

Happy Hacking !!

Ps: Donations of high quality Sticky notes are welcomed :p

Just a quick announce for the interested parties (distributions and advanced users).

Yesterday I pushed a couple of fixes that fix annoying bugs and because of that I belive that you may want to backport them to 4.6.5 or even to 4.7.1 if you don’t want or you can’t wait until 4.7.2.

Folder contents are not refreshing:

This happens only when using a kernel with two digits uname such 3.0-ARCH for example, commit to backport is:  kdelibs 7df5a79fb9f09e4a4a80cd541cc478b5fa6df00f

Empty jobs:

Some times jobs are shown empty though the job itself is working fine, this happen in a random situation depending on the system load etc, it was no easily reproducible but thanks to my slow and lovely computer I could then I fix it.

commits to backport are two in kde-runtime: 329a4fe6fe7b8a9262d5ef7fefba255e9c29fade and d769c74a5cab576e124666174a0b2bc5e2af8cde

These two fixes will be released with 4.7.2.

Cheers!

Hi there!

These last tree weeks have been crazy, apart from being busy sorting things out where I work, I have been doing an strict diet + sport to see if I can get rid of my extra weight, so far I’m not less Alex than I was tree weeks ago, exactly 10Kg less (22 pounds says google…). Well stop of talking about myself, let’s talk about BlueDevil!

BlueDevil 1.2:
Probably tomorrow we will be releasing the 1.2 version, since we released RC1/2 we have good good feedback, no new bugs seems to be reported so we think that we’re good to go.

BlueDevil 1.3:
This version was not in the plan, but after starting to work in the 2.0 version we found something we think that have to be “backported” to the 1.X branch. Basically more than a year ago when we started to work in the new stack, we found ourselves in a situation where the use of a thread  seemed correct and needed, so we use it. Now after a year 100% of the crash reports we get apparently came from that thread and so far we have not been able to find a solution since the crash is kinda random… I can’t reproduce it so I can’t fix it basically. Well the good news are that we found a way of removing that thread so in theory after this change we will be virtually crash free, yay!

So, to summarize: The 1.3 version will have only one change, which is the removal of the “AgentListener” thread in the BlueDevilDaemon (kded).

BlueDevil 2.0:
This is the next big version of BlueDevil, don’t worry we won’t be breaking anything Currently we’re using obex-data-server for a few things such receiving files, the problem is that it is almost un-maintained for example this bug which is quite critical for kio_oebxftp has not been touched though I pinged the author via bugtrack and email. But not worry, the BlueZ community has been working in a replacement for months or even years it is called obexd. We are already using obexd for sending files and so far it is working great so the idea is to port everythiing that uses obex-data-server to obexd.

There is one problem though, obexd is not done by desktop in mind so we will have to do some patching there in order to add the needed settings we need.

Dates, dates, dates, everybody love dates…  this is the non-strict non-hard schedule:

1.2: Tomorrow
1.3: Next Friday
2.0: By the end of the month

I will be focusing myself in BlueDevil the entire month, the sooner we finish these changes the sooner we can work in other stuff, personally I will work in KRandR.

Cheers!

After a few months of development the Solid team is proud to announce the first release candidate of BlueDevil 1.2

Changelog:

Action Plugins

• Added support for DUN
• Added support for PANU
• A few description changed
• Fixed the Category mess we had in the .desktop

kio_bluetooth

• Show known devices first
• Perform discovery in the background
• Fixed the mimetype mess we had
• Will work when started without Bluetooth activated

Wizard

• Added another OUI for Apple Wireless Mice
• Auto select Mouse’s

Agent

• Be able to use Return or Enter to introduce PIN

Monolithic

• Use Configure icon on the configure option

KCM

• Use KMessageWidget if compiled against 4.7

So, a few days ago I was talking with an apple fanboy friend of mine who used to be KDE user before being abducted by the i* family of products (he started with an iPhone, he ended with i*Everything…). Anyway he is still using KDE from time to time so I asked him what is the feature he misses most when he is using KDE, the answer as you may gest was “Smart Folders”.

According to Apple a smart folder is:

With Smart Folders, you can organize files by what they have in common, instead of by their location on your disk. Because they use Spotlight, Smart Folders can organize files by their contents, as well by attributes that describe those contents and how they were created. For example, you can create one Smart Folder with all your spreadsheets, another with the documents you modified today, and another with the presentations that mention a specific project.

Well, you know what? we already have this and we’ve had this for a few releases, let me show you proof:

Direct Link

And as an extra:

Direct Link

So as you can see we’re only lacking a few GUI pieces to complete the puzzle, any takers? would be awesome to have this for 4.8 don’t you think?

Cheers!