Category: KDE

What People Are (Really) Saying About Windows 7

Remember my Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects? Skreech was so kind to point me to a really great un-example site: Microsoft’s social media page for Windows 7, where they show what people are saying about it. Go take a look.

Now there are a few interesting things to mention about this page.

Quite fast, huh? Lots of people talking about it. Are those messages real-time? Nope. The page is just made to give you the impression they are. I picked a few random ones and got pretty much everything between 3 hours and 8 days old. See the slider at the top? Yea you can slow it down to actually be able to read it unlike the default.

If you feel like it just watch it for a few minutes and watch the same messages appear again. It started to loop after about 10 minutes here.

Now let’s take a look at the actual content of the messages shown. Windows 7 must be the most awesome operating system out there. In the 30 minutes or so I watched the stream there were 2 messages with a slightly negative touch. Every single other message praised it. Every single one. Now call me biased but I don’t believe it. So I had a look at the actual Twitter search page for Windows 7 and Win7. And indeed you find tweets, that are less positive, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. They do however have little stabs at Linux and Apple in their selected tweets (“I though Apple had it together but with Win7 out of the door they better get moving.” and similar.). This page seems to indicate that they do indeed filter for family friendliness and so on. Fair enough. But it also says that they do not filter out the negative stuff. Uhhhhm yes you do.

The Facebook messages are taken from the Windows fan page on Facebook. Now my guess is that the audience of said fan page is slightly biased 😉 but I’ll let that one slide as there aren’t a lot of good ways to get such messages out of Facebook.

There is probably more but those are the things that immediately jumped into my eye. Please leave comments if you find other gems.

Now the sad thing is: From my quick check of Twitter and Co it seems that Windows 7 is indeed good according to quite a few people. There are indeed a lot of people tweeting about it. There would have been no need to hide behind filtering and sneaky web-apps trying to create an illusion of a lot of communication. This would have been a great opportunity to show what people really think about it and gain credibility. But it failed. It failed to be honest and instead took the secure way. If you want to take the secure way stay away from social media!

Wanna learn how to do it right? Get in touch with me and have a look at buzz.kde.org (which is indeed live and unfiltered and could use some coding help – ping me if you want to help).

Californication

Group Photo, originally uploaded by warthog9.

Leo and I went to California for the GSoC mentor summit to talk to lots of other mentors and admins about Summer of Code and whatever else was on our mind. In short: absolutely awesome and definitely worth the travel (which included lots of hours in airplanes and airports for me including an unplanned 6 hour stay in Salt Lake City – thank you very much border control).

The energy you get when you put that many geeks together is amazing. And at the same time it is quite different from conferences where you only have one project present like Akademy. It shows you that people working on competing projects are actually pretty cool people when sitting in a hot-tub with them *g*. (If course I knew that one before but it feels good to be reassured about it.) It shows you a lot of white spots on your personal open source map. Any idea what the Boost community looks like? Any idea how huge the Apache Software Foundation is? Now I do. It has definitely been interesting for me to see how different communities are managing their day-to-day business and especially GSoC. And the most surprising thing for me: Even pretty dysfunctional communities can release decent software 😀 I also learned that you can indeed have a session on minorities in free software and actually get useful results everyone can apply in their communities instead of getting derailed and discussing colors of random bike sheds. (They should all be blue and have pink doors of course.)

Check out the session notes (not 100% complete at the time of this post but hopefully soon), the one thing people learned at the summit and pics.

Thanks a lot to Google and everyone who attended the summit for making this happen. It has been 2 intense days and a great experience.

After the summit I stayed another 2 days with Alejandro to check out the area. Thanks so much for offering a place to crash. We went to San Francisco – what a great city – and met up with Gary and blauzahl who were great hosts. (Sorry I wasn’t more talkative that night folks but the previous days really drained my energy.) And it again showed me one of the best things about our community: No matter where I go on this world, friends are never far. I uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.

What a crowd!

I’ll definitely have to return – not just for the massage chairs and hot-tub.

Sunjammer

In the last 14 weeks the Amarok team has been working hard to get Amarok 2.2 ready for prime-time. We’ve worked in dark cellars, in a nice living room in front of a warm fire, at the beach, at airports, in cabins in the wood, on the train – yea you get it – pretty much everywhere.

Today we can finally present you the result. Amarok 2.2 is out in the wild and brings lots of goodies people have been waiting for. Check out the release announcement and please digg it!

With that I say bye bye and run off to a very sunny island with my fellow rokers – oh wait, no – we gotta prepare 2.2.1. Stay tuned 😉

More serious though: I’m getting ready for the GSoC mentor summit. Soooo excited.

KDE <3 GSoC (or how to handle a big org by crowd sourcing)

I finally got around to writing the GSoC wrap-up for the dot with a short intro to what all our students achieved during this summer. 37 successful projects out of 38 is awesome. It was great to work with this year’s mentors and students alike. Thanks to every one of them for making the admin team’s life as easy as it gets.

I think our new selection process had the biggest impact on this year’s great results (besides a lot of very awesome students and dedicated mentors of course). For those not familiar with it: In previous years we had one big  IRC meeting with all KDE mentors and a few more people to select the best projects and students for KDE out of over 200 proposals. As GSoC slots are very limited and everyone wanted to get a few for their sub-project this was quite chaotic and not always fair especially to smaller sub-projects that didn’t have the power to make themselves heard in those meetings. But given the time constraints and size of KDE this was what we had to deal with.

Last year bigger sub-projects like KOffice and Amarok got a fixed amount of slots and were asked to select their students themselves.  This improved things a lot for the big projects as they got the projects they really needed and wanted without other sub-projects messing with the selection. But the smaller ones were probably even worse off than in previous years.

This year Jeff, Leo, Ian and I decided to change this and make it better for everyone. Our goal was to make it fair for all involved and at the same time give more power to the sub-projects in selecting their students because in the end only they really know what they want and need. No use in me deciding if KDE Games needs someone working on KGolf more than someone working on KPatience. Oh and of course we wanted to get rid of that hated hour-long IRC meeting.

So we started a big spreadsheet on Google Docs with a sheet for every sub-project as well as one for proposals which don’t fit in any of the sub-projects. Then we sent an invite to our mentor mailinglist and asked all mentors to add the proposals for their sub-project with a possible mentor and backup mentor as well as if the student already got in contact with our community somehow to work on improving the proposal. Then we asked them to rank their proposals, why they think this particular proposal is important for KDE as a whole and which projects they definitely need and which ones they would rather not have. Armed with this huge spreadsheet and some keeping in mind of the proposals no-one was fighting for because they didn’t belong to any sub-project the admin team sat down and created a list of the students KDE would really love to have. We ended up with a list of 60 students or so. Everyone was happy – no sub-project left behind. Everyone got the projects most important to them and no-one was going away with no student. We knew we weren’t going to get them all and we already had a few students we knew we would have to dismiss. But since they were on the maybe-list according to the previous ranking anyway that was ok. Then we got the first number from Google. We would likely get 42 slots. Ok. That meant all our maybes had to go. Tough but doable. Then the second round of slot allocations came. We got down to 35. Outsch! That would mean quite a few of our we-really-want-this projects would need to be cut. We had an emergency meeting with a few people to cut even more without having to let a sub-project go without any student at all but it was pretty much impossible. Thankfully Leslie is awesome and we got 38 slots in the end which meant we could give at least one slot to every sub-project that requested one and everyone got the projects most important to them (which turned out to also be the ones most important to KDE as a whole btw).

This crowd sourcing approach was a lot fairer because it is basically impossible for every mentor to read over 200 proposals and select the most important ones. (Though huge props to those who did!) Everyone could concentrate on their part of the proposals and really make a good judgment on whether the project is good and if the student is actually able to do it or just a poser. And I think our success rate this year speaks for itself 🙂

Claudia bought tickets for Leo and me to the mentor summit last week and I’m really excited to finally put a mark on that big white spot on my personal travel map called America 😀

Now gearheads: Is there anything you think we can improve for GSoC next year? What did you like? What didn’t work so well? What do you want Leo and me to talk about at the mentor summit with all the other orgs?

Tune your Quassel!

If you would do a quick analysis on which programs I use the most you’d probably get Firefox, Quassel, Amarok and Kopete (in this order and Firefox being way ahead of everything else). Using those programs extensively of course leads to optimizing workflows.

Quassel is the fourth IRC client I use now. MIRC back on Windows. Then I learned to love Konversation when I switched to Linux. At some point I got tired of missing stuff when I was offline so I got shell access on a friends server to run irssi. It was ok and I customized the hell out of it to fit my needs pretty perfectly but I always missed Konversation’s nice GUI. I’m just not the type that really enjoys a CLI app (well except for listadmin maybe – but more about that another time). And then came Quassel, developed by a good friend of mine. I got a GUI and always-online in one app without hacks. Heaven! Well ok – close to heaven. There were a few usability issues that thankfully got fixed with help by Celeste. But one thing is still problematic: Quassel keeps all queries (private chats) in your default channel list. (Konversation had (has?) this nice feature that it closes inactive queries after a while and they are gone after a restart anyway so your channel list doesn’t grow too huge.)  With a huge list of queries (not hard to achieve if you’re using IRC for a while) you easily miss new messages in Quassel. Since I noticed a few people having this problem I’ll share how I tuned my Quassel to never miss queries again.

I have 2 chat lists. One with all my channels and queries and another one with only new stuff – that means unread channels and queries. It looks like this:

Quassel channel buffer

Once I read and leave the queries again they are removed from the news chat list – same for the channels. A nice side effect of this is that I can easily manage a lot of channels even on the small screen on my netbook without scrolling.

To set this up go to View -> Chat Lists -> Configure Chat Lists.

Settings for my All Buffers chat list:

Quassel All Buffers

Settings for my news chat list:

Quassel news chat list

How about a list of only new queries? Easy:

Quassel queries-only

How about a chat lists with only channels with highlights? There you go:

Quassel highlights-only

Enjoy and never get angry looks from friends again for missing a query 😉

How did you tune Quassel?

it’s all clear now

We’re happy to release the first beta of Amarok 2.2. It comes with many goodies like playlist sorting, UMS device support, the ability to customize the program layout to your liking and much more. For details please read the release announcement and this nice review.

Enjoy rocking 🙂

Oh and don’t forget to send feedback, bug reports and patches (and maybe some cookies and hugs?) so we can get it in perfect shape for release in about a month.

Paros, Greece

social media guide for free software projects

Lately more and more people come to me with questions like “What does $randomsocialmediaterm mean?” or “How does $socialmediasite work?” or “How do I do this on $socialmediasite?“. It seems people start to understand that social media can be a huge thing for free software projects but don’t really know where to start or where to look for help.

So I sat down for a few hours and wrote the Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects. Download it and find out how social media can help your project stay in touch with your users and make it rock even more. Learn about digg, Twitter, identi.ca, Linked.in and more. The guide includes basic intros to different sites as well as advanced tips for how to deal with social media in general.

Enjoy and please leave feedback for the next version of the guide 🙂

amarok_forum->improve()

When the KDE forum team started they came to me asking what to do about the Amarok forum. It was fairly active and working ok. So we decided to keep it and just link to it from forum.kde.org so people looking there would find it. Lately the forum software was causing more and more problems though and we are low on moderators as well. Luckily since they started the KDE forum team has done an amazing job, making the KDE forum so much better than the Amarok one.

I’m happy to announce that we moved the Amarok forum to the official KDE forum at forum.kde.org to  enjoy a better forum, reduce maintainance and reduce the number of needed accounts for KDE websites.

All content and account data have been migrated. Migration of attachments and avatars is still in progress. Some nicks conflicted. If you can’t log in with your nick try your email address. If you want nicks changed/merged in this case please get in touch with me or the KDE forum team in #kde-forum on freenode.

Thanks to the KDE forum team for handling migration and Jeff for helping on the Amarok side.

Now go and enjoy a much improved Amarok forum 🙂