Plasma at BDS: AC/DC!

We have a full schedule prepared for Plasma Workspace related topics at BDS, and we invite you all to join us. What will be covering? Active, Contour, Desktop and Community. Yep .. AC/DC. ;)

During the presentation tracks, we have the following talks lined up:

• Compositing after X - KWin on the Road to Wayland, Day 1, 14:00 in RM2002 with Martin Gräßlin. Supporting OpenGL ES in Plasma Workspaces 4.7 was only the first step for KWin in a longer journey that has a clear vision for where we need to go. KWin is going through a process of careful modularization and is shipping with profiles for different form factors. The end goal, however, is to drive towards the heir apparant to x.org on the Free software stack: Wayland. Come to this presentation to see just how far KWin has come on this path, what the migration path towards Wayland will probably look like for us and why we're taking this path.


• Conquering the device spectrum, Day 2, 9:40 in Kinosaal, with Sebastian Kügler. This talk will be covering Plasma Active, including what we've accomplished and both our mid- and long-term plans. Active is a big and ambitious project, one that is hitting its goals thus far I might add, to bring more Free software in a compelling way to devices. If you are interested in how consumer electronics might marry with our traditional desktop oriented vision, this is the talk to attend.


• A new activity based mobile user interface with Plasma and Nepomuk, Day 3, 10:20 in Audimax with Marco Martin and Fania Jöck. Featuring one of Plasma's primary UI developers (Marco) and Contour's primary interface designers (Fania), this presentation will be covering the new activity-centric Contour interface that is the centerpiece of the Plasma Active default user experience. It offers a unique and powerful touch-based Activities interface that makes using tablets and similar devices not just pleasant but compelling. It brings together Plasma and Nepomuk in novel ways, and they cover all the dirty details of the user interface in this talk.


• Activities - the helpful Big Brother, Day 2, 14:00 in Audimax with Ivan Čukić. This presentation delves into the engines that drive Activities as presented in Contour: Nepomuk, Zeitgeist and the code glueing it together with Contour.

We also have a line-up of BoFs scheduled, too. After the presentation track, the Plasma teams as well as anyone who finds themselves interested, curious and/or inspired by the earlier presentations will come together for discussion, planning and hacking. The BoF sessions include:

• Plasma Active: 9:00-11:00 on Wednesday, August 10th in room 1.204


• Plasma and Wayland: 11:00-12:00 on Wednesday, August 10th in room 1.204


• Plasma Desktop: TBD

The rest of the time we'll be hanging out together working on moving the various Plasma projects forward: libplasma2, Active, Contour, KWin, Plasma Desktop, etc. All are welcome to come and join us in the positive spirit of adventure and collaboration. See you there!

f/oss flash mob @ hot pasta, zürich ;)

With the KDE release day fresh on our minds and having fun checking out all the new KDE software that came out yesterday, a friend emailed me suggesting that we head for beer, food and fun this evening in Zürich and invite along "whoever else wants to join in". I'm not sure he had my blog in mind when he said that, but this will teach him! ;P

So if you're a Free software fan and/or a KDE enthusiast, user, contributor or someone who would like to get involved ... come join us sometime around 19:00 at Hot Pasta. Who knows where the night will take us .. well, ok, probably into geekdom and related conversation, but that goes perfect with beer, right? :)

See you there!

4.7!

Congratulations to everyone who has worked so hard over the last half year to bring 4.7 to fruition and bring another great release of world class Free software into the world. Features, performance, new platforms .. this release has a bit of everything while remaining on the solid, know-where-we-are-headed evolutionary road.

To coin a phrase, and in reference to the graphic above, it's all coming together .. and what timing! People are looking for modern, stable Free software and the KDE community is putting it out left and right. With the Big Release date, the Platform, Applications and Workspaces have their big day, this time joined by Kontact for the first time in a while.

Of course, we have a lot simmering in the pots that are still on the stove, too! While we've worked hard on the Plasma Desktop and Netbook 4.7 releases which feature several performance improvements as well as feature enhancements, not least of which are improvements to Activities and the use of OpenGL ES for window managaement, we've also been pushing Plasma Active forward relentlessly. Some times I wonder where we get all the energy from, and then I turn around, look at my team mates as well our greatful users and remember where it comes from ... :)

In one week's time I'll be boarding a train with some of the Swiss KDE Contingent as we head off on an overnight train to Berlin to take part in the Desktop Summit. It is there that we will take stock of where we are in light of this terrific release and take another bold set of steps forward.

While our users will be enjoying the "fresh off the presses" 4.7 releases, we'll already be hard at work on turning KDE Platform into KDE Frameworks, bringing Plasma Active and the whole Active movement further into the sunlight, bonding with others in our community and forging new relationships across project boundaries.

So tonight, as I sit watching the people of the Internet spread the word of 4.7, I just can't help but look forward. Viva la 4.7! Viva la git master! :)

Enjoy the release everyone, and I'll see many of you in Berlin really soon!

on a cloudy wednesday

It's a cloudy day, yet again, in what is turning out to be a rather lackluster July here in Zürich. We've had hints of Summer weather, but the month has been dominated by decidedly Spring-like weather. If nothing else, it prevents me from feeling like I'm missing out by staying inside as I work away on things. When it does get nice, I have been making a point to get out in the sun to enjoy it however: I played some soccer last week and went to the Kaztensee, a pair of lakes within walking distance, yesterday in the late afternoon to enjoy some sunshine and thoughts.

Yesterday was also the day that the Ausie couch surfers went home. Aside from leaving little stuffed kangaroos all around the house for me to find (they had a great sense of humor and adventure), they also left behind some nice memories such as when one of them pulled out their laptop with a rather old version of Linux on it running Xandros with KDE. Crazy! She's now looking to upgrade to a new system but isn't too smitten with the idea of Windows and had been looking at a Mac. While here, I had my laptop out for work and what not and she shoulder-surfed a bit. The result was that she asked how she could get a computer pre-installed with Plasma Desktop on it. Just seeing what it looked like and how well it works on a commodity laptop was enough to create that desire.

When I read Alex's blog entry on some new Bluetooth features in BlueDevil, I found myself watching his screen cast and thinking: it looks so beautiful. With features like those covered in his blog entry and the amount of polishing work we're all doing as well, there are times when it is very satisfying to just sit there and look at something like a Dolphin window with the nicely blended and therefore solid feeling window title and content, the in-window notifications and information, the little animations and interface simplifications ... all while knowing the power and functionality that it contains. It's very uplifting, and it even moved me to do another round of improvements on KRunner today which included a few little bug fixes (one of which sadly will not be fixed in 4.7.0 but only 4.7.1 due to timing) and a few performance improvements.

This is where we start to get into those positive self-reinforcing cycles, or virtuous circles: one person's response begets another person's positive efforts which dominos into another person's movement which ... In an environment where critique and division is so easy to create due to the open and participatory nature of collaborative creative work (as open source is), paying attention to ensuring the virtuous circles are kept in movement is critical; and, ultimately, rewarding.

With that in mind, I've received a few requests lately to comment publicly on some turns of events in the Free software ecosystem, I assume with the expectation of a critical analysis. I've touched on the requested topics in the past, which is probably what elicited those requests, but I'm just not in the mood. In fact, I feel we have fewer positive champions than we probably need right at this moment and in the spirit of "be part of the solution" I'm going to spend more of my time doing just that.

Today, other than the hacking, I also put out a call for people to share their plans for the upcoming Berline Desktop Summit on kde-core-devel. In the last few months I've been to an inspiring kick-off event for Plasma Active, a terrific Tokamak for Plasma in general and a terrific Platform 11 where we plotted the future for KDE's shared technologies (libraries and runtimes, in other words). Others have had similar experiences this year at other developer sprints that they have attended. Berlin can be yet another stepping stone upwards for us all that builds on these recent successes and helps move KDE forward in terms of participation and achievement. Our community is in an upswing right now, so the summit comes at a perfect time. After a dip in development efforts while the community was processing a combination of winter weather, the migration to git and news from Nokia, we're back on track in terms of development pace and volume. I see many groups within the community re-assessing where they are and where they want to go, which is also a good sign of renewing energy. KDE Games just started this conversation, and when the Games are busy .. that's always a good sign. I don't know what that correlation is about, really, but there's a reasonably strong correlation there. Or maybe my monkey brain is just looking too deeply for patterns to track. :)

Speaking of patterns ... MeeGo news continues to appear, this time in reference to Tegra 2 based devices which opens a whole new category of devices that are interesting to me and I presume many others. I will be bringing at least one tablet with me to Taipei next month, but now I'm wishing I could also bring one of these nVidia powered beasts.

I've also found that having moved to rekonq motivated by a combination of QtWebKit being more than good enough these days and Firefox becoming less and less robust for my use, that I've made a small but significant change to my tab usage habits. While rekonq has a nice location bar, the sort we already take for granted in modern browsers, the web shortcuts page is set to be my "home page" and instead of typing in the start of the address of common sites I go, I just hit Alt+Home and select what I want from there. Middle clicking opens the page in a new tab, which is what motivated this change in behaviour: I can open several commonly visited sites in quick succession. Nice. :)

++performance

Plasma uses a lot of files from disk, particularly when using QML and scripted Plasmoids, but also whenever something requests an image from the theme. The Package class is responsible for the former functionality and the Theme class for the latter. We already cache the results of the Theme rendering, but not the results of looking around on disk for the requested image. There is essentially no caching at all for Package: every request for a file sends it looking on disk for it.

The impact of this is relatively low thanks to caching by the operating system, but it isn't negligable. When we start thinking of smaller devices it becomes even less negligable. So while working on libplasma2 I decided something needed to be done.

This past week I started a refactoring of the Package classes so that less memory was used, both by using a smaller data structure on devices and by using an implicitly shared pointer for the private data (which improves things on all targets, including the desktop). PackageStructure went from being a data bearing class to a mutator of Package, which allows them to be properly shared between Package objects. I then added a lookup cache to Package.

The result was that the copy test (100k copies and deletions) went from ~2700ms to ~37ms, while 100k copies, file lookups and deletions went from ~3900ms to ~40ms. All while the memory footprint shrunk. Unfortunately, this isn't really backportable to libplasma1 as the changes that were required to achieve this were significant. These changes were on top of previous changes made in the refactoring of Package and PackageStructure which drew the data "closer" to Package and cut out a lot of collection creation and copying. So reasonably good wins there.

Theme also got a lookup cache, and the good news is that this is backportable and has, in fact, been cherry picked into both the 4.7 and master (will be 4.8) branches. There the results were striking as well: 100k lookups of 3 different files in the theme dropped from a little over 6 seconds to ~1/4th of a second. That's an order of magnitude improvement. Unlike with Package, overall this will end up taking a little more memory, but we're talking about a few kilobytes at most which isn't particularly significant compared to the time savings. Since Theme is used heavily and the same SVGs are asked for over and over again during a Plasma applications execution, this should have some very nice impacts at runtime.

I still haven't done the screencasts and snapshots I need to for my Share Like Connect blog entry, but I was busy today finishing this stuff up ... and attending telco or two, and doing presentation prep for next month and dealing with the construction people who put in the new decking today... so the usual distractions. :)

public transport plasmoid looking for your input

The Public Transport Plasmoid is a rather useful and pretty cool tool to look up information on, as the name clearly implies, public transit in your area.

I really like the ability to quickly see route information with times and associated alerts for my home station, and with multiple instances of the Plasmoid I can keep track of several stations quite easily at a glance. The journey features are also indispensible.

Using it with Contour, which is getting support for random Plasmoids in addition to the Nepomuk-derived resources that are associated with an activity, is going to be very, very nice for someone like me who travels a fair amount: I'll end up with one Activity on my tablet per trip with all my files, contacts and even transit information agregated in one place that I can switch to with a simple thumb swipe. Oh, yeah!

A new version was released today and I noticed that the author of Public Transport has put together a set of polls asking people what they think of the UI changes in the new version, which transit systems you use it with and how you get and install it.

If you're a user of Public Transport, register your vote to help Friedrich know how to continue improving it. If you aren't a user of this Plasmoid and you use public transit in your area .. go install it and then go vote. ;)

Contributing new transit system backends or improving the existing ones is probably also very welcome. I noticed recently that the SBB backend doesn't seem to work nicely for journeys anymore, which probably has to do with their recent website upgrade which changed things significantly. Since the SBB doesn't provide a public API (though they have one!), Public Transport is just page scraping which is pretty brittle. I don't know if that is the cause of the errors, but I wouldn't be surprised. Anyone who wants to give me a nice gift could fix it up (I unfortunately do not have time right now to do so with everything else on my plate *sob*). :)

.. and in case anyone at SBB is reading this: open up your API already. It's public information and you're only hurting the society you provide service to with your policies that come straight out of the dark ages.

a quiet house

S. is currently in the US visiting a university there and taking part in an invitational program for a few weeks, which leaves me alone in the house. With the windows closed it is such a silent place. Even with the with the windows open, it's pretty quiet due to being right next to the countryside. Mostly, however, it is the lack of another person in the house that makes it so amazingly quiet. There is no movement and no sound save for my own.

Besides being used to living with other people in the house, as has been the norm for many years for me now, I've also tended to live in less sound proof places. In North America, I preferred to live older houses as they have more character and less of that "built to fall down" and "made out of as much cheap synthetics as possible" feelings I get from so much of the new construction out there. One downside of older houses is that noise, as with heat, tends to leak in and out them. In Hawaii, windows are always open out of necessity and the sounds of people in the neighbourhood routinely would filter in. The new place here in Zürich, however, is stone quiet.

This really struck me yesterday mornng. I woke up when my body decided it was time to and everything was utterly, perfectly still. I could practically hear my own breathing. The absence of others was palpable even with my eyes closed. It reminded me of my early childhood in rural Canada: a perfect stillness that requires the absence of others to achieve.

While I don't think I'd want to live in perpetual quiet and solitude quiet this complete, it is nice to get some ultra-quiet time everyone once in a while to let the senses unload and relax for a couple days.

This morning was a slightly different story: I was awoken by the ringing of the door bell by some workers coming to measure the deck area for some flooring they are putting in on Friday. Tonight some couch surfers come by, so there will be people about again.

Right now, I need to push some bug fixes to git and then hop in the shower before my first telco of the day. No matter how quiet it is inside the house, life itself is always full and busy.

--annoyances;

After doing some fixes to KRunner last week which I blogged, I later fixed a few similarly small annoyances in KRandrTray. Today I cleaned up a small issue with the notifications widget: the tooltip would show even when the popup was open, resulting in less-detailed information in the tooltip obscuring the purposefully open and more detailed job and notification information. This was right after reading Alex Fiestas's blog entry on having a very productive KDE hacking weekend in which he nailed some Plasma Desktop annoyances of his own.

While we're all working on lots of new things (like Plasma Active) or important retoolings of old things (e.g. libplasma2), I believe it's also important that we try and make some time to pound out the little dents and smooth out the slightly rough edges of what exists as well. A lot of these fixes take only a few minutes, though admittedly some can take a few hours of trudging through code, though that usually means a number of other cleanups can and likely do happen as well.

Usually, though, these fixes take much less time than trolling through the dozen or so bug reports needed to find one that's valid and addressable.

This is all a bit of a reminder to myself to do these kinds of little "makes me enjoy this software more" fixes more often, and an invitation to all other KDE hackers (and would-be KDE hackers) to also take the initiative similarly with the code you work on. Or, like Alex, on Plasma code. We welcome your help! :)

(Which reminds me, it's now Monday at nearly 17:00 and I still haven't gotten out my blog on Share Like Connect. Gah!!!!)

krunner updates, COSCUP

While I'm pretty busy working on libplasma2, Plasma Active and related items, I do put aside time to improve other things that exist .. mostly because I'd go nuts if things I use on a daily basis didn't improve over time. ;) For instance, yesterday, a person wandered into the Plasma irc channel and noted that the top area of window thumbnails that show when one hovers on the taskbar didn't respond to clicks .. which I fixed, along with a few other cleanups in and around the area.

Today, I reached my "can't take it, must be fixed" threshhold with some items in KRunner: pressing tab or the down arrow would send focus to the list of results .. but the first item will still be selected. Not overly useful as it means having to press tab or down arrow twice to get any useful effect. Also, when results would come in and the window would automatically open up, if the mouse happened to be positioned over the results entry it would highlight the item beneath it. This was practically never the intended result and just looked a bit sloppy. Well, all that is fixed now. Huzzah.

In other news, I will be attending COSCUP next month a couple weeks after the Desktop Summit in Berlin. COSCUP is the Free Software event in Taiwan and I'm quite excited about going there to speak. I'll be meeting up with the local KDE community in a BoF session at the end of the first day and have a couple extra days after the event for meetings and follow-ups before I start the trek back home. I'm looking forward to meeting as many people and companies as possible while I'm there to discuss KDE, Qt, Free software and devices. Thanks to Armijn Hemel for helping hook this up and KDE e.V. for travel support.

PandaBoard first impressions

This week I received a couple of PandaBoards, courtesy of our friends at Canonical by way of our friends around Kubuntu. The goal is to get Plasma Active running well on the platform.

It is very much a typical developer board: no cables, no boot device included and lots of "this won't work until you add this other software over there" to it. I really can't fathom why a basic set of cables and a basic boot disk is not included. Yes, it would inflate the cost of the box a bit, but a "bare bones" version would be easy to offer in tandem. The result would be that a few days of work by the manufacturer (prepping the boot system) along with procuring the cable sets would eliminate untold hours from developers wanting to get involved and give that much-needed "instant gratification" feel.

Which is to say, my first impressions were not great, and it had nothing to do with the hardware or the software. Both of which, I might add, look pretty darn good. :)

Once I have more of this beast up and running, I need to send the second device on to someone in the Plasma team to join me in working on it. I understand that Martin "KWinning" Graesslin also has one to continue working on KWin's GLES support to ensure it works well on these kinds of smaller ARM devices.

We'll keep you all posted as we make further progress. I'd love to see a downloadable bootable image with Plasma Active on it as a final result.

barcelona

Last week I was in Barcelona to present at the 10th edition of the local Jornades de programari Lliure ("Free Software Conference"). It was well attended for a local technical event and the presentations were good (though I gauge this on the slides, the audience satisfaction and audience interaction).

My two local hosts, Orestes Mas and Aleix Pol, were terrific. I was met at the train station and the travel arrangements went off without a hitch. The local food and sights were wonderful as well as I made my way out in the afternoon after plowing through work and KDE code.

(Side note: Travel by overnight train is a new thing for me, and I find myself rather in love with it. Whether this is purely due to the current novelty of it for me remains to be seen. I can say that I do not miss airports.)

My presentation was the only one in English, and I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. Hopefully I succeeded. :) I presented on a topic we've been talking about for some time but which I haven't done a full presentation on before: the concept of the device spectrum and what that means for F/OSS and KDE in particular. The slides I used, which need much work still before I'm nearly happy with them (as all first time presentations start out), and partial notes to go with them can be found here. The slides are fairly large due to the images in them (some 18MB), but that was probably to be expected.

The presentation is very much my opinionm, rather than "official KDE dogma", and reflects how I see things currently. It has a fair amount of what I'd call philosophical content in it. The essential message is: writing software for one form factor or one modality for data retrieval is phasing into history, and it is software that can successfully span physical form factors and erase data locality as an issue that will have a long term competitive advantage. This idea is based on where we are now with technology and comparing past technological occurrences (and some biological evolutionary systems) under the pretense that the future mimics the past since the systems underlying these kinds of change are largely immutable.

Anyways, I was asked to present on the future of F/OSS and so I did my best. I thoroughly enjoyed having that opportunity and look forward to more great tapas in that Catalan city by the sea.