Afiestas Blog

Nobody seems to have found the eastergg.. so I won’t be giving away the N950 I wanted to… (ah, I forgot to say that? xD)

So, the easteregg was a small Network icon showing up in Dolphin at 03:02 which in BlueDevil 1.2 will allow you to launch the DUN or PANU configuration.

While I’m writing this post, only DUN support is implemented since I don’t have a device that support PANU, but don’t worry as I say in the following video support for PANU will be implemented in a few days, it is just a couple string replaces.

Mandatory video:

Direct Link

Hope you like it, and see you in the next blog post!

After releasing stable versions (boooring) there is nothing better than publish new features, and it gets even better when those features are between the most requested/wanted.

The feature I’m going to introduce may sound kinda useless for some people, but in all KDE software we offer different ways of doing things, so you can find which way integates better with your workflow.

In BlueDevil 1.0 and 1.1 when you use the kio_bluetooth (bluetooh:// in your browser), what it did was start a bluetooth discovery, meaning that the only devices going to appear into the file browser were those who had the visible mode activated. This behavior is totally counterproductive since you have to: wait 10 seconds until the scan ends and/or turn on the visibility in your device. Well you won’t have to do this anymore.

Now the first thing that is shown in kio_bluetooth are the configured devices allowing you to quickly select one device, at the same time a discovery is perform in the background so new devices will appear when found (and not when the 10seconds scan ends).

A picture say more than thousand words:

And now the mandatory video, watch it careful! I’ve put an Easter egg on it which shows about what I’m going to talk tomorrow.

Direct Link

Cya and remember, this feature is going to be available in BlueDevil 1.2, to be released in 4/6 weeks.

Between all the hard work we’re doing within the Solid community (Networking, XRandR, Power Management…) we always find time to release patch releases which usually fix small issues and help to ease the waiting until the next big release is done.  Now it is time for BlueDevil to have some patch releases.

BlueDevil 1.0.5:

• Fixed bug: 277451
• Fixed some bahaviors in kio_obexftp while copying files
• Show the file size and the speed in the file transfer (in kio)
• Start/Quit bluedevil-monolithic in online/offline mode
• Improved layout to look good in all Qt Styles
• Huge i18n improvements (fix’s and more translations)

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/bluedevil/1.1.1/src/bluedevil-1.1.1.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

In my way home from work, talking with ereslibre we concluded that would be awesome if I could fix the current “KRandR” code before starting to work on new one. With the “adrenaline boost” still in my blood I sat down and started to work on it.

After a few days of working, I’m pleased to announce that for KDE-Workspace 4.7.1 the “Screen/Display/Whatever configuration” has been hugely improve, all bug fix though but now it even seems to work!

The bugs I’ve fixed are hard to explain with words but I’m going to try anyway:

KRandRTray:

• Won’t react on external changes (won’t force its configuration)
• Will update the menu (If you remove the VGA cable, VGA won’t appear)
• Will show disconnected outputs as disconnected in the popup)

• “Unify Output” option has been added (aka you will get always the expected behavior)
• Preview/Options will update on external changes

Direct Link

Is not a secret that the last few weeks (or even a month) I have been kind of unmotivated to work on KDE stuff, and that is a deal breaker to work on something you’re not paid for and you do it only for the pleasure of doing it.

Though the reasons why I was unmotivated (or how I like to call it, kde-depressed) are still there, last Friday after finishing 3 important projects at work I felt again the adrenalin boost that makes me hack like crazy, no matter on what, but I have to hack on something. This is how one of my most productive weekends begun :p

The very same Friday at night I started hacking on some work stuff, nothing I can say here (because it doesn’t matter at all) but I can assure you that my partners will be happy once they know :p

Saturday, I started to hack on KDE stuff and decided that instead of developing BlueDevil or Solid I was going to fix these small details that annoy me every day, and so far I fixed everything I wanted to fix:

Plasma:

Panel auto-expand on XRandR events (probably will go into 4.7)

KWin:

Not let any window off screen on XRandR events (This will have to wait until 4.7.1)

After fixing these two bugs was time to give some love to the old BlueDevil :p

BlueDevil:

• Bug triage, quite a trivial task but time consuming
• Fixed bug 277878
• Fixed bug 277451
• Partial rewrite of kio_bluetooth (I will explain further in another post)
• Fixed bug 245538
• Fixed bug 253810
• Fixed bug 277665
• Show only “connection title” in systray if there are more than one service to connect to

That’s for Saturday :p

Then today, Sunday I started the journey with some XRandR hacking, the plan to’em all is almost done and it will include a coulpe of fixes for 4.7.1 (though I’m not sure of it).

Aaand finally another bug fix of these small annoying things:

Fix notification behavior

Now time to rest, who knows if tomorrow I will continue with this adrenaline boost.

Cheers!

Hi there !

Once again it is time for me to organize my priorities within KDE for the next 6 months, I have had to drop a few things from the list since I’m not sure how much time Solid community and KDE-España are going to take from me since the work I will be doing there is rather not technical.

So, this is my list of priorities:

Downstream:

Downstream people are those who use our stuff to produce something else, for example: distributions, developers using our libraries, designers using our icons…
A few months ago, motivated with the need of giving a better support of how BlueDevil should be packaged I started to interact a lot with people working on different distributions. Because of that I was sponsored to go to the UDS and there I finally could understand more or less how a distribution works, how Kubuntu team works/thinks etc.

So, in the next 6 months I will continue working with “downstream” focusing my efforts in organize a meeting with people from all distributions so at least we can be synchronized in the lowest common denominator.

Solid:

Solid is now the sub-community within KDE that cares about hardware. We work in quite a few areas right now like Network/Power Management, irda …
I have to say that since last November we’ve pretty much catch up with other workspaces for example now people assume that KDE NetworkManager interface should work, and you know what? it does! Also our UDisk/UPower/UDev support is in my humble opinion excelkenet.

So, in the next 6 months, I want to see the Solid community growing and getting more projects into it, for example Printing or Input would be perfect candidates.

Kamoso:

Kamoso is a webcam application to take pictures and videos from cameras, this is what I call my “Pet Project”. The status of Kamoso is quite good right now, we’ve reach the 2.0 version which is demonstrating to be a really rock solid release.

Now that he project is providing the basics (it is stable and you can take pictures/videos) is time for us to move to the next step. which can be summarize in one word: effects. To get there we’ve defined this abstracted roadmap:

• Kamoso 2.5: Kamoso ported to use camerabin2 (technicall stuff)
• Kamoso 3.0: Effects and maybe some QML magic

BlueDevil:

BlueDevil is the codename of the KDE’s Bluetooth integration on which we’ve been working for a year now. Though the project may seem complete since it is fulfilling all the Bluetooth needs a normal user could have it is not perfect, or putting it in another word it is not excellent. So the target for the next 6 month will be reaching excellence.

• 1.0.5: i18n will be improved and a few bugs fixed.
• 1.1.1: i18n will be hugely improve, and bug fixing.
• 1.2: Most changes will be on the KIO’s, also the wizard will be further improved.
• 1.3: Port the project totally to obexd, deprecating the support for obex-data-server.

Finally, between this versions we may work on plasma-active support, which basically means write QML interfaces around.

Project Silk:

From my humble point of view, the laptop/pc is becoming a complement of two things: Our gadgets (cell phones, tablets..) and the so called “Cloud”. It is quite obvious that a computer without internet is only useful for those whom want to do some work on it, but for the rest of the users it would be useless. Because of that we’ve to accept our new role as a complement of something else and stop thinking that we’re the central piece of software or that even the user care about us.

KDE’s projects are doing quite a fine job integrating with the cloud, for example:

• Akonadi supports exchange servers and of course Google
• KDE-Telepathy is near the corner bringing to the table IM integration
• Kipi-Plugins supporting facebook/picasa/…
• Kamoso supporting youtube
• Choqok and Plasma on microblogging…

Despite all that, we’re still failing on truly integrating these services into the desktop. To start fixing it here comes my proposal:

We need  a central place (maybe a KCM) where the user can configure her/his online accounts and we will do the rest, for example:

When I add my Google account, the KCM should offer me to auto-configure my account in: Telepathy (Chat), Akonadi (synchronize calendar, contact, rss, todo’s…), Choqok (microblogging)… Also some applications like Kamoso should be able to access to that account and use it for example to upload videos to Youtube.

Also, some good integration with Rekonq would be awesome.

I don’t have concrete plans of when or how I will do this but almost sure it will start just as a proof of concept (I don’t have time to do more).

XRandR:

Last but not least here comes my new obsession: fix the overall kde-workspace XRandR support. Right now our workspace supports XRandR more or less well but it is far from being good enough for me. I will publish an entire blogspot about my plans here but bottom line: I will try to fix everything for 4.8.

Well this is it, let’s see how much I can finally accomplish and see you by the end of the year.

More or less 6 months ago I put myself a list of objective to accomplish in KDE, so far these are the results:

Hardware:

• Bluetooth: We’ve been working hard in the last release of BlueDevil (1.1), now we can say that more or less KDE has a good Bluetooth support !
  
• Webcam: Kamoso 2.0 has been released, and with it rock solid support to do the basics such Take a picture, or Record a video.
• XRandR: The job has been started, I’ve in a private repository a fork of xrandrtray libraries, and the “configuration” has been decoupled from the actual XRandR code. More important I have a plan for it now.
• LibSolid Async: Nothing on this area, -10 for me
• Kevin Ottens former maintainer and overlord of Solid is transferring to me the responsibility, challenge accepted!

Zeroconf and Friends:

• Samba has been fixed by rbelem (Rodrigo Belem), there is no place for me there :p
• NFS support has been removed (by rbelem too), it has no place between modern user-land protocols.
• UPnP: The work on UPnP is about to be merged, I haven’t touch a line though I’ve read a lot about it.
• Avahi: KDE Already has a good support for Avahi, though we’ve to improve how we present it to the user. No plans here and I won’t be working on it anytime soon.

Documentation:

• Almost nothing… Though I’m still willing to work on it starting by analyzing the current situation.

I have to say that I’m quite proud of myself though I haven’t accomplish everything I wanted since right now my priority is my “real life” job.

Anyway, next post is going to be about what I’m going to do for the next 6 months… stay tuned!

Tomorrow we will be all leaving towards our respective homes and platform11 will be formally done, though the work is far to be finished. In this blogspot I’m not going to talk about that though :p

I’m going to talk about how important these events are beyond the technical expects and what I’m going to say applies to my experience in this sprint.

• You can “Put faces” to people, you’re no longer talking to “dfaure” or “apachelloger” or… you’re talking to a person, you know how they’re and more or less how they think, and that makes the communication much more efficient.
• Brotherhood is enhanced, after don’t let anyone sleep because there are 3 people in a “snoring championship” you get some confidence with the group :p this improve the way we work.
• Knowledge is transfered: Do you know the reason why KToolInvocation is using KLaunch to execute apps and at the same time KLaunch is using kdeinit ? I didn’t know before a dinosaur told me the reason :p
• Unify positions: During this sprint I’ve seen people saying NO! to something end up by saying yes, the amount of things that can be discussed in person are way bigger than via email or irc.
• Fast integration feel for newcomers: People that have been contributing into KDE for month’s or even years started the sprint saying: You have to… When you… and end up saying: We have to… When we…

So, to sump up:

Sprints are NOT only about core, are also about People and because of that, they’re extremely important for the health of KDE.

Thanks you all that make possible to organize such events, and particularly thanks for Joining the game!

At the beginning of the Randa sprint (platform11, multimedia, kdevelop, nepomuk) we were given a badge so other people can see who we are and so on. One day (maybe two) after that, somebody started to exchange them until the point that I’ve been around 30different persons in 2 days xD.

Yesterday I started to look for myself again since I like to keep this things but seems that nobody has it :/ maybe somebody throw me to the trash? xD is impressive how small things like this can become incredibly funny when you’re in this kind of events.

This is clearly not me :p

We’re proud to announce the final version of Kamoso Velázquez, the KDE picture/video retriever !

In this release we’ve focused all the effort on getting the most stable release possible, and so far we think that we’ve reached that goal until it’s matching our expectatives. This version is more important than what it seems, with this release we’re making a new technology switch towards QtGstreamer, a technology that we hope will allow us to offer a stable, consistent and scalable application.

These are the main features of Kamoso 2.0:

• Take pictures from your webcam
• Record videos from your webcam
• Per device video settings
• Support for multiple cameras
• Upload the pictures  directly to facebook (need kipi-plugins)
• Upload the videos to youtube

The source tarball can be downloaded from:

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/kamoso/2.0.2/src/kamoso-2.0.2.tar.bz2

md5: c2125e3cbe10ddc397ec4308891a9f4c
sha1: 3eb081446cb1a4ced6602f01cc3209fb188d0b96

Cheers!