Akademy Day 3/4

Akademy just keeps getting better and better, and this year's location
couldn't have been more perfect.

The Demola office, if it could be called that, is the perfect
hackspace. Lots of tables strewn over the place, no partitions, sofas
to relax on and even a retro arcade game!

Yesterday and today and the rest of the week will be hackdays and
BoFs, so there isn't really much to report.
But at the end of today I just took a random walk across Tampere, and
its a beautiful city as you can see.

Tomorrow I plan to take the free walking tour that takes place everyday in Tampere, any other KDE
hackers planning to go?

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Akademy Day 2

Today was the day of fluffy, hands down! Frederik Gladhorn gave a
super lightning talk introducing his quite serious pet project

Other than this I attended Lubos' performance talk, and Milian and
Aleix's great KDevelop feature promo. I mean if Ctrl+Space can give a
complete program, why am I even learning C++? :) In addition Casper
gave a very nice talk about getting KDE to work on windows, and hats
of to the KDE-Windows team for there efforts.

The show-stealer was of course Aaron Seigo's keynote, exhorting all of
us to strive for 'elegance' now that KDE has achieved a great
technical base. The simple brush paintings, which I assume are done
with Krita, complemented it perfectly. So here's to more elegant
software.

I spent the rest of the day tracking down a pretty annoying bug in the
UpnpSearchCollection and then find out that UPnP has no way to group
searches to clarify precedence. So I have to think about that
tomorrow. The thing with the first two days of Akademy has been that
by the time you settle in to do some coding, there is an interesting
talk :) So with that done, I am planning to get quite some work done,
not only with the GSoC but a few kwin and Amarok things too.

I will also attempt the Qt certification to see if I'm good enough.

The most important thing is that we had free icecream today, thanks to
the basyskom guys.

Unlike yesterday's party, today was a relaxed evening, with the TOAS
sauna running. I attempted it, but my body's capability to produce
sweat is very high and I had to get out in 5 minutes. I did some
random stuff, met some more people and figured out where the laundry
room is!

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Akademy Day 1

Into the sea of existing akademy posts enters another one.

Technically its my second day in Finland. I arrived on the 2nd with Pradeepto from mumbai. We met seele and Justin at Schiphol itself, while blauzahl and Mek were on the same flight! If that wasn’t enough, the bus from Helsinki to Tampere found aseigo and Hans Chen on it too, making it the Akademy bus.

The Student House TOAS city is an awesome place to live in, with rooms just like in college, a bit better :)

The Finlayson area hack room was really cool too, and yesterday I spent a few hours there getting to know quite a few people, including Vishesh Handa. I also bought my KDE shirt. At 8:30, the sun was still high up in the sky, at 11, its like evening in Mumbai which was bizarre. Akarsh and Prakash also caught up after a delayed flight.

Today was even better. The keynote was pretty good, its great to see KDE going deeper into the mobile space. Meanwhile (Qt made sure to give us all a rubber duck)[http://developer.qt.nokia.com/duck].

I met a lot of people who have been mentors, helpers and friends over IRC – Martin Grasslin, Leo Franchi, Nikolaj Nielsen, Friedrich Kossebau, Martin Sandsmark, Lydia Pintscher and many many more, whom I have to talk too about various topics.

Thomas Thym’s talk about principles in open source communities was very interesting while both Nikolaj and Leo conveyed social music capabilities and Amarok’s role in it very well. During the few talks I didn’t attend, I tried to do a bit of work, but it was a little hard due to all the excitement :)

Now Martin had written a plugin for the match, but I couldn’t stand not watching it and missed his talk. I wasn’t alone. It was great fun to travel 9000 km to watch football with other KDE developers. And since KDE has a large number of Germans you can guess who was supported. Germany were amazing with a 4 goal trouncing of Argentina, and with this form they can easily win the Cup.

With all the talks out of the way, me, kstar and pinocchio went to the downstairs supermarket. I had a strawberry-pineapple bread and rajma-chawal for dinner :) followed by liquorice sticks.

The KDE Akademy party was at the Love Hotel on Hameenkatu and it was fun meeting a lot of people and talking non code stuff and enjoying the Spain-Paraguay match. But now I’m really tired and have to crash if I want to be attentive tomorrow, particularly with performance, UX and cloud talks.

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A new kind of happiness

http://www.zacharyburt.com/2010/06/release-yourself-to-the-church-to-the-stat...

The Apple marketing machine created a tribe, giving to the rise of superfans whose identity/self-image hinges on being one of the first to own a new product. I don’t know if it’s Apple you should really blame, though. You should blame our culture for allowing the media to manipulate us, brainwashing us, shaping the behavior to work jobs we hate so we can buy things so we can be happy.

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Test

First post

This is a test of posterous

print "Hello World"

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Notification madness

Planet, my slave went awry :(
I terminated the processes, but is there a way to kill all the notifications at once.

GSoC Week 4: Experimenting with Collections

I didn't write a post last week, and it looks really bad in my form completion :) but I didn't have any user visible updates at all. This week is much better. First the visual then the text.



That's cover art fetched from the UPnP device when the Content Directory has it available!

Other updates include smoother full and incremental scanning of the Collection. This is one area which needs a lot more improvement. The kio slave is now threaded and continuously monitors the UPnP device for updates. This is used by the Collection to mirror the actual contents whenever possible. The slave is also now fully normally evented, without pesky internal event loops and blocking. I learned a lot about how signals and slots work in the mean time, and uniqueness and disconnections. Certain thread related things have been sorted so that the slave is much more bug free, although Bart Cerneels still made it crash :)

Now today I'm stopping work much earlier, because its time for the World Cup to begin, and I'm supporting Germany! I hope my excuse is good enough.

Oh, by the way:

Here's to meeting a lot of KDE devs soon...