June 2008 – life at the end of the universe

Aaron, we love you!

Looking at what is happening here makes me sad. For a long time, Aaron put up with needless crap at levels far greater than anyone should be forced to, but he isn’t the only one. Several people have approached me lately having problems similar to Aaron’s, if not as extreme. Something needs to change, and I think it is the way we all react to the crap we as a community put up with. We look away when other members of the community are being harassed. We look away when people that do not contribute anything useful to KDE disrupt its development. And the result is that an amazing community is spoiled by a few outsiders having fun by belittling others.

I hear a lot of “Don’t feed the troll!” remarks, where what is really meant is “Let them talk and do whatever they want and just ignore them.” But this will just build upon itself to lead to still more trolling and other disruptive behaviour, even outright harassment, becoming accepted. Worst of all, it will make the victim of the harassment feel alone. And that’s the last thing the friendly KDE community should ever encourage.

Something has to change. We can’t control what people say, but we can control how we react to it.
Therefore:
I will not be silent when people use the mailing lists as their personal vendetta grounds.
I will not be silent when seeing a comment on the dot that is spreading hate.
I will not be silent when people harass contributors on IRC.

This is not calling for censorship, but rather for sanity. Let’s get back to being the awesome community we are, and stand up not only for ourselves, but each other.

Let us all make sure that this will not happen again!

Who is with me?

What a Sunday…

Whoa what a ride 😉

The Amarok bugday was a blast. Thank you everyone who took part. And an even bigger thank you to those who are still hugging the beasties. YOU ROCK! The goal of flooding my inbox with bugmail has been reached 😛

Kubuntu tutorials day went very well. To my surprise I got the honour to pitch in for nixternal since he couldn’t make it.Â Thanks nixternal; also for the notes 🙂 Logs of all talks can be found in the KubuntuWiki.

Lots of love for my little FolderView intro. I didn’t expect that to be honest. But it is nice to see that more and more people realise what a powerful and beautiful tool they will be given with KDE 4.

In the comments I was asked to show screenshots of the menu of FolderView. Since this was not implemented in time for KDE 4.1 Beta 1, which I am using right now, I couldn’t provide them. But fear not. Yours Truly asked and was given 😉 Thanks Tony.

FolderView is the awesome?! [updated]

So there has been a lot of confusion about the KDE 4 desktop and FolderView lately and some nasty stuff I don’t want to go into right now. In the comments to Aaron’s blog someone said they don’t see how exactly it will be better and help them be more productive. So let me show you it 😉

For those who don’t know about FolderView: It is a Plasmoid you can add to your desktop in KDE 4 to show files. It can also be used to emulate the “normal” desktop (for those who really really want it) but let me show you a few more very nifty things you can do with it.

This screenshot shows my self made todo plasmoid. I have a ~/tmp folder where I throw in all the stuff that is, well, temporary. This stuff needs to be moved somewhere else and I was just too lazy to do it right away or is stuff I need to look at and that can be deleted afterwards. And there are also a few TODO files in there that need my attention. So Plasma to the rescue! I created a FolderView that shows the content of my tmp folder and (here comes the nifty) filters it to only show me the stuff I really care about. Which is files with TODO in the filename.

But what about this cool thing: In KDE we have KIO and it is just fantastic. And of course you can also use KIO in FolderView and show all kinds of remote folders right on your desktop.

Here it shows the folders that keep my irc logs on the server my irssi is running on.

And here some files on my ftp server:

And of course you can also show something totally boring like my home folder 😉

I hope this shows how powerful this already is now.
But it will become even more awesome once Nepomuk search can be used with this. (Or can it already?) Imagine showing all files tagged with “todo” across your whole file system. Or how about showing all files related to your thesis? Just tell it to show all files containing words related to your thesis.

Get creative people! There is a lot of nifty ahead of us 🙂

How are you going to use FolderView?

And before someone asks: You will be able to use it just like a “normal” desktop.

UPDATE:

Daniel, the SoC student working on Nepomuk integration in Amarok, just send me this:

Sweetness 🙂 (It is still a work in progress and therefore in Playground.)

Hug the beasties! and Kubuntu tutorials day

Amarok bugs, here we come again! We are going to have a bugday with the KDE BugSquad on Sunday. The goal is to clean up a little and close a lot of bugs for Amarok 1. If you ever wanted to contribute to Amarok or KDE in general this is the right time to start. Join us in #kde-bugs. We will start at 0:00 UTC and go on all Sunday in all time zones. Members of KDE BugSquad and Amarokers will be around to answer your questions and help. All you need is a working Amarok 1.4.9.1 and preferably Amarok 2. For more information check the wiki page. Let’s hug the beasties 😉

Don’t forget to join us for the Kubuntu tutorials day in #kubuntu-devel. Lots of interesting stuff to be talked about and a perfect opportunity to join the awesome Kubuntu team.

links of the day: categorical imperative and Severed Fifth

Heya Planet Ubuntu

Just wanted to introduce myself to Planet Ubuntu as that seems to be fashionable lately 😉 . Since yesterday I am a Kubuntu member and got elected to the Kubuntu council together with Celeste and Yuriy. The council members now are Riddell, nixternal, tonio, seele, yuriy and me. Looking forward to working with everyone and to a lot of new Kubuntu members 😉

A little intro for those who don’t know me yet: I am a student of computer science at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany focussing on medicine and linguistics. I spend a lot of my free time on free software as Amarok’s community manager and by doing various things in KDE. For more check my wiki page and blog.

Let’s make Kubuntu rock even more than it does already 🙂

Linuxtag wrap-up

Whoa, finally back home and no longer sleep deprived after Linuxtag in Berlin. It was a lot of fun. Got to meet some KDE people I had not had the pleasure to meet so far. And they were as great as I expected them to be. Every single one of them. The four I’d like to point out are Alexandra, Claudia, Monika and Franziska who made the number of women at the KDE and Co booths sky-rocket with me. You rock! Aaron even has a photo of the KDE booth that proves that the KDE team is 50% women :PÂ But seriously: It is great to see that more and more women are turning up in the KDE community lately and the benefits of this could clearly be seen at this years Linuxtag. Thank you for being such a welcoming community. It really shows that we are doing a good job at being an inclusive community no matter who you are and that we are good at attracting people who are reluctant to join other FOSS projects. In the 3 categories I can see in the free software world (1. actively excluding – 2. indifferent – 3. actively including) KDE definitely belongs to the scarcely inhabited number 3 and that makes me proud. This is one of the things that is making and will make KDE successful in the future. Or as Wade puts it: “Let’s all be different together!“.

Of course we worked hard at the booth every day showing people the awesomeness that is KDE 4 and Amarok 2. To make up for that hard work we had something planned for every night. After arriving in Berlin on Tuesday we went to the fair ground to set up the booth and then went to have dinner with around 30 KDE/Amarok/Kubuntu people.

On Wednesday we went to an Indian restaurant. Delicious food!

Thursday was reserved for the official social event which was at the same location as last year which was very nice but a little too crowded for my taste.

On Friday we were invited to the Trolltech and friends dinner (Thanks to the Trolls for that.). After that karaoke was planned as I already mentioned. Boy, that was fun! We will have to poke danimo to publish the videos 😉 I now know who would win the KDE vs. Gnome song contest and who has the better dancers 😛 I will keep the result secret though for my own world domination plans. One never knows when things like this are needed 😉

On Saturday Ubuntu-Berlin did a great job at organising a BBQ again. It was at C-Base this time, which is a great location modelled after an UFO landing side. Very different and very cool.

The two talks I was giving together with Sven and Harald went well and people really seemed to have liked the Amarok talk which was pretty much a “This is the new stuff in Amarok 2”-talk including the Summer of Code and Season of KDE projects and the new internet services.

And now I am back at home \o/. No more events/conferences for me until Akademy. I need a break after all these events.

Oh and to the people who take care of matching booths and projects at events: Please get Amarok and KDE booths as near to each other as possible. We belong together and tbh I hate having to switch from one hall to another all the time. (Before someone ask, yes we did ask for booths next to each other. And this was the 3rd event where we had booths that were way too far apart.)

(photos by Aaron, Carlos, Markus and me)