Wade asked for more posts about Akademy. So here's a post about a future Akademy. And not just any future Akademy, but perhaps the first one where GUADEC will be co-hosted with us.
The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation boards put out a coordinated call for bids to host a combined Akadmey and GUADEC in 2009. We didn't make it mandatory: people could still put in a bid for just Akademy or just GUADEC. The response was terrific, however.
We received no less than four offers, one of which was unfortunately too late to make the deadline for 2009's proposals. (But I hope to see them again for 2010!) We also received zero Akademy only and zero GUADEC only proposals.
To put this into perspective, GNOME received 3 proposals in the last two years combined. We received 4 proposals for 2008's Akademy, but only 3 IIRC for 2007. So even though the bar was raised considerably, our response has increased or kept pace compared to the past. Impressive.
Want to read the proposals for yourself? We're hosting them over on Behdad's (cool GNOME board member and Free software hacker that he is) web space on gnome.org thanks to Behdad being the quickest on the draw to get the proposals up somewhere we could all read them. So without further verbage, go on over to the 2009 proposals and check out the cool places we might all be gathering next year: Coruña, Spain; Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain; Tampere, Finland.
As for this year's Akademy? We already know it's going to rock. =) See you there, Wade.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
educating expectations
Celeste goes into more detail about what her concerns are. Still no actual concrete examples though, which makes it very hard to discuss, so I'll provide some in a bit.
First, from her earlier blog entry she said a few things that should be addressed. Celeste said:
That's certainly a valid concern, but if you look at OpenSuse 11.0, it's pretty obvious that a solid desktop OS offering can already be made with the 4.0.x series. It'll be even easier with KDE 4.1.0 because many of the features that the OpenSuse team merged into their 4.0.x packages are in trunk/ upstream already.
She also states:
Actually, 4.1 is supposed to be A Big One. Trying to call any specific release The Big One not only leads to warped expectations ("It'll save the world!") it also lends to a pattern of thought that leads to the problems Celeste is talking about: not understanding the flow of development.
4.1 is the release that we're comfortable with it being on people's desktops. In that sense it certainly is a big leap forward from 4.0 and therefore a big deal. It's not the end, however. It's just a really great point in time for the KDE4 series as it marks an important, though not only, milestone.
Celeste goes on to say:
See what I mean about expectations? ;) Ok, I know Celeste was practicing a bit of fun hyperbole here, but as I've observed before many of our most conservative groups, particularly large installations, often lag behind several releases, particularly around major ones. So not everyone will switch, but hopefully the vast majority of the user base that reads things like Celeste's and my blogs will be switching during the 4.1 time frame.
So, I said I'd be bringing concrete examples. Why? Well, Celeste said:
That is an entirely impossible set of questions and concerns for me to answer, because I have no idea what Celeste considers vital, what content/configuration she's thinking of, etc. What she thinks is missing might not be, it might be already slated for 4.2 or it might be something we have just plain missed noticing.
But if we provide specific examples, it starts to become answerable and those answers can lead to general strategies. Let's take folderview as an example. (Because we all love talking about that, right?)
I've noted in my blog posts and screen casts that:
All of the above has appeared in my blog in the last month. So when Celeste says this in her latest blog entry:
I'm thinking: "Well ... but I have offered all the details." So perhaps I'm not being clear enough for the lay user reading my blog.
How can we take the information regarding folderview and make it so that it is clear enough?
Honestly, I am not going to submit my time and energy to that process. I can provide source information, and in fact do. That's what my blog, my emails, etc are: source information. Compare my blogs to presentations I do, several of which were recorded and are on the internet: my presentations are summaries, with hard dates and releases in them, provisos where necessary, etc. Those presentations take a good amount of time and thought. Were I to do the same for each feature the Plasma team (let alone all of KDE!) comes out with, I would have no time left to create software. That would be a failure.
I suggest, then, that what is needed are people who can take source materials and turn them into summary materials that can be easily referenced.
I've been quietly putting together a plan for a by-the-users, for-the-users wiki and council, giving both a warehouse for reference materials as well as a voice that can be interfaced with in reasonable conversation and without swamping the developers' time. I think that might be part of the solution here.
I'm not sure it's all of the solution, though. Since this is a problem that the users who spend time reading my and Celeste's blog are encountering, perhaps those people could spend some time actually thinking about what they can do to make things better. Breaking into the participatory mindset rather than blaming others or sitting quietly in fear is critical to solving this set of issues.
On the topic of KDE developers themselves spending even more time carefully couching our blogs with warnings, disclaimers and extra clarity, she says:
Perhaps we should have a disclaimer on planetkde.org that warns readers about this? But I know for a fact that if we rely on developers always marking up their blogs with things like version targets that we'll forget to do this from time to time (relying on people being unerringly consistent is a brittle process) and that people will likely blog less as more rules are put into play. That's obviously not great.
I again come back to users: I wish there was a way for people with a certain amount of clue and trust to annotate my blog with pieces they feel need clarification. It would be awesome for, say, FiNex to be able to pop a "in 4.2" tag on a paragraph talking about wallpapers in folderview on my blog. I might forget, but I doubt everyone reading it will. This is perhaps a current technical failing of blog software.
Does anyone out there know of a blogging software that allows this kind of "wiki-blog" process? If so, and it's not otherwise braindamaged, I'll switch to it in a heartbeat.
There's one more, rather concrete, issue that Celeste touches on in her last blog entry:
I completely agree with this, word for word. The answer is education, and the source for that education can not be KDE or any other upstream. The source of this damage is absolutely the distributions.
When a distribution releases software to their audience, they absolutely must communicate what it is. When I called 4.0 a "will eat your children release" and when I say that 4.1 is meeting an important milestone of "being ready for daily desktop use" that is what I was doing for KDE. If a distribution puts out an ISO or a set of packages in some other form that they expect their user base to actually use, if they do not also accompany that with the following information they are doing a disservice to their users, to themselves and the upstreams they present to the users:
KDE can't do this for OSVs, anymore than the OSVs can speak authoritatively for us. Celeste notes:
Absolutely. If "regular" users are grabbing an OSVs testing releases, the OSV has a communications issue. Is there something KDE can do to help OSVs having trouble with this? I don't know. Perhaps the OSVs could offer some insight and suggestions here.
First, from her earlier blog entry she said a few things that should be addressed. Celeste said:
"I want to know if I should begin worrying early if we’re risking the Kubuntu brand"
That's certainly a valid concern, but if you look at OpenSuse 11.0, it's pretty obvious that a solid desktop OS offering can already be made with the 4.0.x series. It'll be even easier with KDE 4.1.0 because many of the features that the OpenSuse team merged into their 4.0.x packages are in trunk/ upstream already.
She also states:
"But 4.1 is supposed to be The Big One."
Actually, 4.1 is supposed to be A Big One. Trying to call any specific release The Big One not only leads to warped expectations ("It'll save the world!") it also lends to a pattern of thought that leads to the problems Celeste is talking about: not understanding the flow of development.
4.1 is the release that we're comfortable with it being on people's desktops. In that sense it certainly is a big leap forward from 4.0 and therefore a big deal. It's not the end, however. It's just a really great point in time for the KDE4 series as it marks an important, though not only, milestone.
Celeste goes on to say:
"This is where everyone switches to KDE4 and the world is a better place."
See what I mean about expectations? ;) Ok, I know Celeste was practicing a bit of fun hyperbole here, but as I've observed before many of our most conservative groups, particularly large installations, often lag behind several releases, particularly around major ones. So not everyone will switch, but hopefully the vast majority of the user base that reads things like Celeste's and my blogs will be switching during the 4.1 time frame.
So, I said I'd be bringing concrete examples. Why? Well, Celeste said:
" but there still seems to be a lot of content/configuration missing. Are there really going to be that many content changes between now and the July RC candidate that will address all of these issues? If so, then I’m too early to worry about anything. But what vital pieces are still going to be missing?"
That is an entirely impossible set of questions and concerns for me to answer, because I have no idea what Celeste considers vital, what content/configuration she's thinking of, etc. What she thinks is missing might not be, it might be already slated for 4.2 or it might be something we have just plain missed noticing.
But if we provide specific examples, it starts to become answerable and those answers can lead to general strategies. Let's take folderview as an example. (Because we all love talking about that, right?)
I've noted in my blog posts and screen casts that:
- folderview is appearing in 4.1
- "desktop icons" as a feature of the default activity container (aka "your desktop") is replaced by folderview
- folderview can also be used as a full screen activity container (aka "your desktop")
- folderview lets us do really cool things like showing file sets tagged/searched using Nepomuk; the Nepomuk fun (which has nothing to do with Plasma or folderview) is being developed in playground right now with no set delivery date yet that I personally know of
- background painting for folderview in full screen will be in 4.2 (as we split background rendering out into their own plugins)
- picking your activity container will appear as another combobox in the desktop settings configuration dialog, right above your wallpaper settings, also in 4.2
All of the above has appeared in my blog in the last month. So when Celeste says this in her latest blog entry:
"Perhaps also try to be more clear about UI options versus what can only be done in configuration files and what isn’t even available yet."
I'm thinking: "Well ... but I have offered all the details." So perhaps I'm not being clear enough for the lay user reading my blog.
How can we take the information regarding folderview and make it so that it is clear enough?
Honestly, I am not going to submit my time and energy to that process. I can provide source information, and in fact do. That's what my blog, my emails, etc are: source information. Compare my blogs to presentations I do, several of which were recorded and are on the internet: my presentations are summaries, with hard dates and releases in them, provisos where necessary, etc. Those presentations take a good amount of time and thought. Were I to do the same for each feature the Plasma team (let alone all of KDE!) comes out with, I would have no time left to create software. That would be a failure.
I suggest, then, that what is needed are people who can take source materials and turn them into summary materials that can be easily referenced.
I've been quietly putting together a plan for a by-the-users, for-the-users wiki and council, giving both a warehouse for reference materials as well as a voice that can be interfaced with in reasonable conversation and without swamping the developers' time. I think that might be part of the solution here.
I'm not sure it's all of the solution, though. Since this is a problem that the users who spend time reading my and Celeste's blog are encountering, perhaps those people could spend some time actually thinking about what they can do to make things better. Breaking into the participatory mindset rather than blaming others or sitting quietly in fear is critical to solving this set of issues.
On the topic of KDE developers themselves spending even more time carefully couching our blogs with warnings, disclaimers and extra clarity, she says:
"This would help users distinguish what should be in the environment versus what is under development and preempt a lot of their questions and concerns."
Perhaps we should have a disclaimer on planetkde.org that warns readers about this? But I know for a fact that if we rely on developers always marking up their blogs with things like version targets that we'll forget to do this from time to time (relying on people being unerringly consistent is a brittle process) and that people will likely blog less as more rules are put into play. That's obviously not great.
I again come back to users: I wish there was a way for people with a certain amount of clue and trust to annotate my blog with pieces they feel need clarification. It would be awesome for, say, FiNex to be able to pop a "in 4.2" tag on a paragraph talking about wallpapers in folderview on my blog. I might forget, but I doubt everyone reading it will. This is perhaps a current technical failing of blog software.
Does anyone out there know of a blogging software that allows this kind of "wiki-blog" process? If so, and it's not otherwise braindamaged, I'll switch to it in a heartbeat.
There's one more, rather concrete, issue that Celeste touches on in her last blog entry:
"There is a naive trust that if it is released and nicely packaged from their distro, it must be OK. This is probably because they come from a world where no sane company would risk their brand by releasing buggy software to the public. They have no deep-rooted loyalty to KDE yet, they just want a Linux system that works. We don’t want to lose these users because they have a bad experience trying a development Live CD or packages published by their distro."
I completely agree with this, word for word. The answer is education, and the source for that education can not be KDE or any other upstream. The source of this damage is absolutely the distributions.
When a distribution releases software to their audience, they absolutely must communicate what it is. When I called 4.0 a "will eat your children release" and when I say that 4.1 is meeting an important milestone of "being ready for daily desktop use" that is what I was doing for KDE. If a distribution puts out an ISO or a set of packages in some other form that they expect their user base to actually use, if they do not also accompany that with the following information they are doing a disservice to their users, to themselves and the upstreams they present to the users:
- State who the release is for. It's OK to make releases that should only be used by those able to deal with generating backtraces, for instance; but you need to communicate that loudly.
- State what the risks are in using that release. Can it disrupt work? Can it lose your data? Is is reasonably stable?
- State how it fits in with the rest of the releases. This gives the potential user both context with which to gauge the advice as well as a way to judge whether they should use this one or another one without feeling that they have to try this release.
KDE can't do this for OSVs, anymore than the OSVs can speak authoritatively for us. Celeste notes:
"The problem is that the users who are testing and debugging are a different class of users than these “regular” users I talk about here."
Absolutely. If "regular" users are grabbing an OSVs testing releases, the OSV has a communications issue. Is there something KDE can do to help OSVs having trouble with this? I don't know. Perhaps the OSVs could offer some insight and suggestions here.
living passionate in a passive world
When a person responds from that place inside that we might label their "heart", their "soul", their "inner being" ... the assumption too often is that the person has taken something "personally". It's as if it the only imaginable object of passion can be our own self and that which we have entangled our deepest self-image into.
History is full of people who were passionate about things outside themselves. These same people had private lives, too, which were often not at all tracking the things they were visibly passionate about from the outside. These people brought us the great art, the great governments, the great thinking and the great sciences of our world.
Of course, it hasn't been just the greats. I've known more than a few people who have walked their life with great passion for the things they lived with. I knew a man who was more passionate about the plants in his gardens than most people are about .. well .. anything. He truly loved his plants as he took care of them.
He grafted apple trees together to form these beautiful fruit bearers; in fact, he once drove out to a house he had lived in 30 years prior to see how the apple trees that he'd planted there had done. I know he did this because he told me of it a few years< after visiting those trees, and the passion in his eyes as he recounted the experience of seeing these "old friends" was unmistakable. He didn't confuse himself for the apple trees, or lose self worth when one of the trees or other plants didn't make it ... He simply felt a passion for what he did with his hands. Amazingly, he had a few such passions in life: his faith, his wife, philosophy .. and sometimes I suspected ping-pong, given the vigor with which he would play it. ;)
That particular man, passionate about many things, was to serve as my father figure in daily life from the age of almost-5 until the day I turned 12 when we moved far away and to another country. When I returned later as a young man, he was still there, still passionate.
I learned to approach life with passion in part due to him, but also in part due to reading about those in times past who accomplished great things at heights that I can only dream of ever reaching. They, too, lived with passion outside themselves.
We live in a world where many exercise true passion only when it comes to their own being, or things that prop up its existence (romantic love, money, fame). Perhaps this is why when someone responds with passion in their eyes, we tend to assume they must have taken something "personally" and then respond in kind. It's a coercive cycle that builds walls between us and the ability to throw ourselves whole heartedly into things.
For the passionate liver, it's dislocating to share from that center place and have someone mistake it for something else.
Perhaps it is an interesting question to ask what would become of the things we devote the time in our lives to if we cared about them in ways we have come to reserve only for ourselves. Maybe it would "only" result in a dinner meal that tasted that much better, or a wonderful grove of apple trees sitting in someone else's backyard ... but maybe it would also allow us to affect the changes and accomplish the feats we dream of.
History is full of people who were passionate about things outside themselves. These same people had private lives, too, which were often not at all tracking the things they were visibly passionate about from the outside. These people brought us the great art, the great governments, the great thinking and the great sciences of our world.
Of course, it hasn't been just the greats. I've known more than a few people who have walked their life with great passion for the things they lived with. I knew a man who was more passionate about the plants in his gardens than most people are about .. well .. anything. He truly loved his plants as he took care of them.
He grafted apple trees together to form these beautiful fruit bearers; in fact, he once drove out to a house he had lived in 30 years prior to see how the apple trees that he'd planted there had done. I know he did this because he told me of it a few years< after visiting those trees, and the passion in his eyes as he recounted the experience of seeing these "old friends" was unmistakable. He didn't confuse himself for the apple trees, or lose self worth when one of the trees or other plants didn't make it ... He simply felt a passion for what he did with his hands. Amazingly, he had a few such passions in life: his faith, his wife, philosophy .. and sometimes I suspected ping-pong, given the vigor with which he would play it. ;)
That particular man, passionate about many things, was to serve as my father figure in daily life from the age of almost-5 until the day I turned 12 when we moved far away and to another country. When I returned later as a young man, he was still there, still passionate.
I learned to approach life with passion in part due to him, but also in part due to reading about those in times past who accomplished great things at heights that I can only dream of ever reaching. They, too, lived with passion outside themselves.
We live in a world where many exercise true passion only when it comes to their own being, or things that prop up its existence (romantic love, money, fame). Perhaps this is why when someone responds with passion in their eyes, we tend to assume they must have taken something "personally" and then respond in kind. It's a coercive cycle that builds walls between us and the ability to throw ourselves whole heartedly into things.
For the passionate liver, it's dislocating to share from that center place and have someone mistake it for something else.
Perhaps it is an interesting question to ask what would become of the things we devote the time in our lives to if we cared about them in ways we have come to reserve only for ourselves. Maybe it would "only" result in a dinner meal that tasted that much better, or a wonderful grove of apple trees sitting in someone else's backyard ... but maybe it would also allow us to affect the changes and accomplish the feats we dream of.
Monday, June 23, 2008
wave your hands in the air!
I like waving my hands in the air. It's fun, mostly because it's one of those liberating, body moving, get the blood flowing things to do. It expands your personal space and it's hard to do without smiling. It's also great for getting someone's attention or moving along with a crowd at a concert during the slow songs. Unfortunately, hand waving doesn't do much more than that.
Hand waving is pretty much exactly what I think of when I read Celeste's blog entry about KDE4 today.
I'm sure it was liberating to write, but sadly I don't know what to do with it. For instance, she quotes some user who says they can't figure out how to make their Plasma look like what I use. There's no mention of what they can't figure out, what screenshot they were looking at ... nothing.
I don't know if the problem is that they are using 4.0.x, or 4.1beta1 or if they've run into one of the usability issues that remain such as the drag handle for resizing panels not being obvious enough for many.
Celeste talks about features she sees in blog entries but doesn't say which blog entries, which features, which content or really any concrete detail at all.
This leaves someone like myself staring at the entry and feeling absolutely, entirely helpless. There's a stated general problem but with absolutely no real world examples to discuss, no actual problems to address ... just a vague waving of arms in the air.
So if you, dear reader, wish to be helpful versus just leave me with things to stare at with a very uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, be specific. Get the handing waving in, sure, but then give me something to grab onto: extend your hands with one or two artifacts of your experience that we can share and discuss.
One of the great fallacies of conversation is that you can discuss generalities without specifics and still arrive at useful results. Unfortunately, unless you're discussing the taste of the colour pink or something equally abstract, without specifics a group discussion will almost always result in uselessness.
Hand waving is pretty much exactly what I think of when I read Celeste's blog entry about KDE4 today.
I'm sure it was liberating to write, but sadly I don't know what to do with it. For instance, she quotes some user who says they can't figure out how to make their Plasma look like what I use. There's no mention of what they can't figure out, what screenshot they were looking at ... nothing.
I don't know if the problem is that they are using 4.0.x, or 4.1beta1 or if they've run into one of the usability issues that remain such as the drag handle for resizing panels not being obvious enough for many.
Celeste talks about features she sees in blog entries but doesn't say which blog entries, which features, which content or really any concrete detail at all.
This leaves someone like myself staring at the entry and feeling absolutely, entirely helpless. There's a stated general problem but with absolutely no real world examples to discuss, no actual problems to address ... just a vague waving of arms in the air.
So if you, dear reader, wish to be helpful versus just leave me with things to stare at with a very uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, be specific. Get the handing waving in, sure, but then give me something to grab onto: extend your hands with one or two artifacts of your experience that we can share and discuss.
One of the great fallacies of conversation is that you can discuss generalities without specifics and still arrive at useful results. Unfortunately, unless you're discussing the taste of the colour pink or something equally abstract, without specifics a group discussion will almost always result in uselessness.
what did i accomplish today?
I have spent the entire day thus far going through bug reports on bugs.kde.org for plasma and krunner. This has resulted in a number of fixes and patches. Unfortunately the bulk of my time has been spent triaging bugs that really don't end up providing value; worst are the ones where I triage them and the reporter decides that, despite my response, I haven't quite understood things properly and so continues to engage on the bug report further wasting my time. As such the cost to the user (less software) is too well hidden compared to the cost of reporting a new bug or replying to an existing one (which is the least expensive thing to do).
There no real moral to this story, really. I do wish we had a better bug reporting and triaging system that supported real work flow, external bug repository tracking and other sane features, but I really see no solution to broken user habits. There are too many users, and too many stubborn people.
Update: It just occurred to me to mention that if you have a request or a thought about things (versus a straight forward bug report, e.g. "I did $FOO and Plasma crashed" or "I searched in KRunner for $FOO, but it returned $BAR instead"), try the mailing list (panel-devel at kde dot org) first. bugs.kde.org is insanely inneficient compared to the mailing list both in terms of time it takes to use it as well as discussion usefulness (threading, for one). If an action item comes out of the mailing list discussion, then create a report on bugs.kde.org that is succinct and to the point.
On a more positive note, I went out to Banff with my houseguest, W., on the weekend. We spent time wandering around the town (buying waaay too much fudge =), wandering through museums, wandering through forests (where we took pictures of various deer and ate wonderful little sandwiches we made amongst the trees) ... essentially a lot of peaceful wandering in the sunshine.
Much less stressful than dealing with bugs.kde.org all day, but also less productive for Plasma ;)
There no real moral to this story, really. I do wish we had a better bug reporting and triaging system that supported real work flow, external bug repository tracking and other sane features, but I really see no solution to broken user habits. There are too many users, and too many stubborn people.
Update: It just occurred to me to mention that if you have a request or a thought about things (versus a straight forward bug report, e.g. "I did $FOO and Plasma crashed" or "I searched in KRunner for $FOO, but it returned $BAR instead"), try the mailing list (panel-devel at kde dot org) first. bugs.kde.org is insanely inneficient compared to the mailing list both in terms of time it takes to use it as well as discussion usefulness (threading, for one). If an action item comes out of the mailing list discussion, then create a report on bugs.kde.org that is succinct and to the point.
On a more positive note, I went out to Banff with my houseguest, W., on the weekend. We spent time wandering around the town (buying waaay too much fudge =), wandering through museums, wandering through forests (where we took pictures of various deer and ate wonderful little sandwiches we made amongst the trees) ... essentially a lot of peaceful wandering in the sunshine.
Much less stressful than dealing with bugs.kde.org all day, but also less productive for Plasma ;)
Sunday, June 22, 2008
if distros wanted to be useful...
... they'd ship packages of beta software with debugging symbols included by default. it's absolutely useless to get backtraces with "undefine symbol" repeated 100 times. for release packages: sure.. split out the debugging info: it slows things down and shouldn't (in a perfect world) be ever needed anyways. but for the love of $DEITY, include debug symbols in pre-release packages so we don't have to link to this page endlessly in bug reports, many of which end up in complete limbo.
Monday, June 16, 2008
ok, then how about a video (more folderviewing)
In describing what we're doing with folderview I used text and achieved a rather spectacular fail grade with some of my readers. So then I tried pictures. The result was a bit better, but still not crystal clear for everyone.
Discussing this issue with a blogger who was trying to get clear on the ideas by email, we came to the idea that maybe a screencast would help. Morecowbell bandwidth!
Without further ado, here is that screencast. Hope it helps, because if it doesn't then the next step is a road show where I pack up my laptop, hit the road and come to your home town. Since that's not particularly realistic, I'm really hoping the screencast does the trick ;)
update: half an hour after i pressed the publish button, Marcel (see comments section in this blog) has uploaded it to youtube. go-go-community-action! you can catch the youtube version of the fullscreen folderview screencast here. thanks, Marcel... =)
Discussing this issue with a blogger who was trying to get clear on the ideas by email, we came to the idea that maybe a screencast would help. More
Without further ado, here is that screencast. Hope it helps, because if it doesn't then the next step is a road show where I pack up my laptop, hit the road and come to your home town. Since that's not particularly realistic, I'm really hoping the screencast does the trick ;)
update: half an hour after i pressed the publish button, Marcel (see comments section in this blog) has uploaded it to youtube. go-go-community-action! you can catch the youtube version of the fullscreen folderview screencast here. thanks, Marcel... =)
Sunday, June 15, 2008
father's day
Today is Father's Day here in Canada (and I presume elsewhere as well). I woke up after my first really, really deep, sound and lengthy sleep this week (I deal with occasional bouts of insomnia) to the living room laid out with several colourful home made cards, a couple of signs and the white board covered in Father's Day art. While he may think I'm a good dad, I know for a fact that it would be difficult if not impossible to find a better son. We went out for brunch at the diner followed by a walk in the sun. It was .. wonderful.
Yesterday I went to a day-long workshop discussion on interacting with and activating community. There was one elected official from the Alberta government, lawyers, doctors, educators and social workers among others. There was age and ethnic diversity as well, so it made for a really interesting day.
I brought up the topic of power creation, rather than redistribution, borrowing ideas from economics and applying them to political venues: if we can "create" wealth, why are we always framing discussions of power as if there was a limited amount of it? Why aren't we looking to power creation, instead?
Others brought into the discussion issues surrounding First Nation issues, addressing voter apathy, finding a way to make community process itself into a "leader" rather than waiting for individual leaders to lead community.
It was a full day, and the discussion was both inspiring as well as mentally intensive. Lots to think about, lots to learn, much to grow with.
So if you were looking for me online in the last 36 hours, now you know why I wasn't to be found ;)
I'm off to do some grocery shopping., house cleaning and other mundanities (is that a word?). I have a house guest coming in this week to stay for 10 days, and P. is off to see his mom and interview at a school in Vancouver starting Thursday. So it's going to be another busy week. One that I feel, at least at this moment, ready for.
Yesterday I went to a day-long workshop discussion on interacting with and activating community. There was one elected official from the Alberta government, lawyers, doctors, educators and social workers among others. There was age and ethnic diversity as well, so it made for a really interesting day.
I brought up the topic of power creation, rather than redistribution, borrowing ideas from economics and applying them to political venues: if we can "create" wealth, why are we always framing discussions of power as if there was a limited amount of it? Why aren't we looking to power creation, instead?
Others brought into the discussion issues surrounding First Nation issues, addressing voter apathy, finding a way to make community process itself into a "leader" rather than waiting for individual leaders to lead community.
It was a full day, and the discussion was both inspiring as well as mentally intensive. Lots to think about, lots to learn, much to grow with.
So if you were looking for me online in the last 36 hours, now you know why I wasn't to be found ;)
I'm off to do some grocery shopping., house cleaning and other mundanities (is that a word?). I have a house guest coming in this week to stay for 10 days, and P. is off to see his mom and interview at a school in Vancouver starting Thursday. So it's going to be another busy week. One that I feel, at least at this moment, ready for.
Friday, June 13, 2008
maybe people will understand a picture.
Sometime last night I started a "21 bug salute": pick 21 bugs and fix them one after the other. Closing bugs that are already fixed, are upstream bugs or are WONTFIXes don't count. Only bugs closed with patches do. Currently the count is 11 down, 10 to go. The goal is to be done before the weekend is through.
I keep getting interrupted, however, by the continuing fallout from what has become one of the biggest faith-in-the-community destroying events I've experience. Having read a couple more angry FUD filled blog postings on this matter, proving squarely just how confused people are at the moment, I figured a picture might help.
So here it is:
What you're seeing there is a Plasma workspace with 5 activities (aka "desktop Containments") zoomed out so that you can see them all. The third one in the top row is a folderview. folderview, you see, is both an Applet as well as a Containment; in fact all Containments are also Applets. This purposeful design decision allows one to repurpose certain applets as "things that cover my screen" or "things that appear in a panel" (to name but two possibilities).
You can click on the folderview containment to zoom into it and it takes up your whole screen, covering it with icons that float "under" the widgets. Flashbacks to kdestop + superkaramba ensue.
I tried to explain this previously with words, but lost too many of you in the process. I'm hoping a picture will do the trick this time. In case anyone of you are idly wondering, that actually isn't a screenshot of my Plasma or the folderview's primary author's Plasma, it's another Plasma developer who has been doing things with the ZUI.
Now, you may notice that there is no wallpaper behind the folder in that screnshot. In 4.2 we'll be breaking out background rendering and context menus into their own plugins so that they can be freely mixed and matched: Containment A with Background Renderer B with Context Menus C and D. The ZUI will also provide a nice graphical means to easily select which Containment types you are using, similar to what we do with Widgets now.
Other than the breaking background rendering out into their own plugin set, which is something I only realized we'd need to do about 2 months ago, what you see above is pretty much exactly the design envisioned some two years ago. It's fun to see it come together, and now I hope some of you can see it more clearly as well.
I keep getting interrupted, however, by the continuing fallout from what has become one of the biggest faith-in-the-community destroying events I've experience. Having read a couple more angry FUD filled blog postings on this matter, proving squarely just how confused people are at the moment, I figured a picture might help.
So here it is:
What you're seeing there is a Plasma workspace with 5 activities (aka "desktop Containments") zoomed out so that you can see them all. The third one in the top row is a folderview. folderview, you see, is both an Applet as well as a Containment; in fact all Containments are also Applets. This purposeful design decision allows one to repurpose certain applets as "things that cover my screen" or "things that appear in a panel" (to name but two possibilities).
You can click on the folderview containment to zoom into it and it takes up your whole screen, covering it with icons that float "under" the widgets. Flashbacks to kdestop + superkaramba ensue.
I tried to explain this previously with words, but lost too many of you in the process. I'm hoping a picture will do the trick this time. In case anyone of you are idly wondering, that actually isn't a screenshot of my Plasma or the folderview's primary author's Plasma, it's another Plasma developer who has been doing things with the ZUI.
Now, you may notice that there is no wallpaper behind the folder in that screnshot. In 4.2 we'll be breaking out background rendering and context menus into their own plugins so that they can be freely mixed and matched: Containment A with Background Renderer B with Context Menus C and D. The ZUI will also provide a nice graphical means to easily select which Containment types you are using, similar to what we do with Widgets now.
Other than the breaking background rendering out into their own plugin set, which is something I only realized we'd need to do about 2 months ago, what you see above is pretty much exactly the design envisioned some two years ago. It's fun to see it come together, and now I hope some of you can see it more clearly as well.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
is it a desktop?
Havoc Pennington wrote recently in his blog about reinvigorating GNOME development and reflects upon the idea of delivering yet another "desktop system" to the market. I'm not going to comment on the GNOME parts of his blog (I'm not really appropriately positioned to do so), but I do want to comment on this (and unfortunately his blog doesn't seem to allow comments?):
There are two problems with this statement:
Plasma itself is designed from the ground up to take KDE into places where we haven't been really very appropriately shaped for in the past ... without having to rewrite vast amounts of code to get there. Once libplasma is in place, we can re-use all sorts of code such as DataEngines and Plasmoids, on devices as different as phones, televisions and laptops (to name three rather different sorts of things).
We're also bringing new ways of interacting with these components, some of which are still in their infancy such as the ZUI, pervasive text input control (runners) and relocatable widgets (meaning moving plasmoids between devices over a network with seamless bridging using a service oriented architecture). It is these things that are, in my mind, Plasma. The desktop is just one possible implementation use.
The second point above notes that people do demand a desktop. Believe me, I know all about just how strongly people demand that. Why? Because people use it. Ok, that sounds obvious, but when you have huge numbers of enthusiast users alongside deployments doing things like bringing educational needs to 50+ million students .. moving away from a desktop form factor just isn't in the cards. Not only does the desktop idea essentially work in many cases (though there is huge room for improvement over existing implementations), there's a certain inertia there that guarantees decades more demand for the desktop form factor (this includes not just desktops, but also laptops, tablets, etc).
So in KDE4, which has as part of its deliverables a "desktop workspace", we are absolutely obligated to provide a desktop appropriate implementation.
Oh, what to do?
Plasma lets us provide on top of libplasma a fairly traditional style desktop system: taskbars and launchers and system trays and pagers and ... The strategy here is to find a way to bridge between the desktop, and so maintain our existing audiences that we've worked so hard to service in the past, and the new form factors that are slowly trickling into our world at various speeds.
The goal is to break through the file centric, desktop form factor concept as our one trick and emerge on a variety of platforms ranging from desktop to point of sale to mobile to web to home media to $YOUR_CRAZY_IDEA_HERE and back again with a consistent, open and interoperable set of technologies for the primary user interface across all of them.
I don't think we have to throw out the baby (the desktop) with the bath water (only providing a desktop form factor) in the process. It may make Plasma deceptively "boring" to people such as Havoc, but I'm OK with that: this goal is long term success, not just in the short term to impress.
This "all/and" thinking, as opposed to an "either/or" approach, is in my opinion a road directly to what Havoc later says in that same blog post:
Amen, brother. Plasma is dong this without overly extending the risk to the umbrella project (KDE) while also giving our current audience something relevant to them today.
"GNOME 2.0 and KDE 4 are bad models for change. They rewrote and broke the code, but from a user-goals perspective, they are the same thing as before. [..] The fact is that people already have a desktop. They don't want a new desktop ..."
There are two problems with this statement:
- Plasma is not a desktop shell, though it provides one
- People demand a desktop regardless of what we think
Plasma itself is designed from the ground up to take KDE into places where we haven't been really very appropriately shaped for in the past ... without having to rewrite vast amounts of code to get there. Once libplasma is in place, we can re-use all sorts of code such as DataEngines and Plasmoids, on devices as different as phones, televisions and laptops (to name three rather different sorts of things).
We're also bringing new ways of interacting with these components, some of which are still in their infancy such as the ZUI, pervasive text input control (runners) and relocatable widgets (meaning moving plasmoids between devices over a network with seamless bridging using a service oriented architecture). It is these things that are, in my mind, Plasma. The desktop is just one possible implementation use.
The second point above notes that people do demand a desktop. Believe me, I know all about just how strongly people demand that. Why? Because people use it. Ok, that sounds obvious, but when you have huge numbers of enthusiast users alongside deployments doing things like bringing educational needs to 50+ million students .. moving away from a desktop form factor just isn't in the cards. Not only does the desktop idea essentially work in many cases (though there is huge room for improvement over existing implementations), there's a certain inertia there that guarantees decades more demand for the desktop form factor (this includes not just desktops, but also laptops, tablets, etc).
So in KDE4, which has as part of its deliverables a "desktop workspace", we are absolutely obligated to provide a desktop appropriate implementation.
Oh, what to do?
Plasma lets us provide on top of libplasma a fairly traditional style desktop system: taskbars and launchers and system trays and pagers and ... The strategy here is to find a way to bridge between the desktop, and so maintain our existing audiences that we've worked so hard to service in the past, and the new form factors that are slowly trickling into our world at various speeds.
The goal is to break through the file centric, desktop form factor concept as our one trick and emerge on a variety of platforms ranging from desktop to point of sale to mobile to web to home media to $YOUR_CRAZY_IDEA_HERE and back again with a consistent, open and interoperable set of technologies for the primary user interface across all of them.
I don't think we have to throw out the baby (the desktop) with the bath water (only providing a desktop form factor) in the process. It may make Plasma deceptively "boring" to people such as Havoc, but I'm OK with that: this goal is long term success, not just in the short term to impress.
This "all/and" thinking, as opposed to an "either/or" approach, is in my opinion a road directly to what Havoc later says in that same blog post:
"Different is when you don't have to ask people to switch, but instead ask them to do something new or in a new way or new context."
Amen, brother. Plasma is dong this without overly extending the risk to the umbrella project (KDE) while also giving our current audience something relevant to them today.
