Eike has been collecting KDE sightings in movies and tv series for quite a while already. It seems he’ll have to add books as well now. One of our attentive users (thank you!) brought this to my attention today:
Amarok gets mentioned in “The Fuller Memorandum”, the new SiFi book by Charles Stross. Rocking! đ
When walking in a big group of people you have to check every now and then for the slower ones so you don’t leave them behind and lose them. It’s the same in a community like KDE. Every now and then you have to check if everyone can still keep up and if not take the necessary steps. That’s why for the second time now I’ve asked KDE developers to tell me which parts of KDE they think really needs some new blood or more helping hands. This is the list of answers I got:
Quite the mix – surely there’s something exciting in there for everyone. So if you are someone who wants to contribute to KDE and looking for a place to start or an experienced contributor looking for a new project, this is where your help would be really appreciated. Choose your direction and get your hands dirty đ
I’m back from conference touring (which was awesome btw – more about that later) and Tom reminded me that the release parties for 4.5 are not planned yet. And the release is planned for August 4th, so in a bit more than a week. OMG!
Clearly it is time to fix this situation and give the world a chance to meet some cool KDE people. So go to the 4.5 release party planning page and check if there is one near you already. If there is one then sign up for it and have fun. If there is none yet it’s time to start one. Pick a date and time (preferably within 3 weeks of release) and reserve a place in a local restaurant, bar, meeting room, university, whateverelsefits. Add it to the wiki page, spread the word and then have lots of fun.
Of course it’s my pleasure to announce the first of hopefully many release parties: Stuttgart, Germany on 7th of August. Exact place and time is still to be determined. Check the wiki page every now and then for updates.
For those who have never planned or attended a release party: You can do pretty much everything you want from simply getting together for a beer and chatting to full day event with talks, workshops and so on. It’s up to you. You can find a few tips on the community wiki. Everyone is welcome from active contributor to interested user. Just let the person organizing it know you’re coming so they can plan better.
(more akademy blogs including write-up of my talks will follow later – just need to get this out before I leave to Portland to join Jeff, Valorie and Knut for the CLS and a bit of OSCON)
Not long before Akademy Tomaz told me about the awesome Qt/KDE courses he and his team are giving at Brazilian universities to a few hundred students each. (They seriously rock!) At the same time he was working with a student who wanted to do his internship that is required by university with KDE and I was in a similar situation looking for a topic for my diploma thesis. And I’m sure you’ve all heard about Kevin ruling French university students and giving them KDE projects to work on to help them learn how to work in a large distributed team and develop software in the open that is actually getting used by a lot of people. (Unlike a lot of the code I have written so far for university…)
So there we have a few KDE contributors doing awesome stuff – teaching students about KDE, KDE software and how we develop it. We sat down at Akademy with a few more people and talked about how we can adapt what Tomaz and Kevin are doing to other universities (and maybe schools?). And the first step in that direction is the creation of the kde-teaching mailing list. If you’re interested in helping out or are already doing something similar please subscribe. There is a lot of awesome waiting there (and maybe some cookies) đ
Ever had the urge to be a chair? Not the wooden kind with 4 legs. I’m talking about session chairs for Akademy. The program committee is still looking for session chairs and this is your chance to help out and do your part to make Akademy rock. (If you don’t have anything to help out with yet you should feel guilty right about now ;-))
What would you need to do? Easy enough. You pick a track you want to chair. At Akademy you’d help the speakers of your track get set up, introduce them to the audience and make sure they finish on time.
Sounds like something you could do? Awesome. Leave a comment, email me or ping me on IRC.
So as you might have heard KDE is going to host its own git infrastructure. This means that the projects currently on gitorious will have to be moved one by one. Amarok and Konversation made the move yesterday to once again test the waters and make sure it is good to go for everyone else.
To quote Jeff’s email to the Amarok lists:
Amarok, along with Konversation, is trailblazing, and today the new official location of the repository is at git://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok.git
If you already have an existing checkout, simply edit the .git/config file and change “gitorious.org” to “git.kde.org” for the main repository (not any personal clones you may have in remotes).
If you are a committer, the clone URL is git@git.kde.org:amarok/amarok.git. SSH keys have been migrated from those used for your KDE SVN server account.
You can browse the repository via cgit at http://git.kde.org/amarok/amarok or via Redmine at the Project page on http://projects.kde.org/projects/amarok — both are still a work in progress (there is e.g. no KDE theming, and accounts on redmine have yet to be set up for all but a few of the KDE sysadmins), so please keep in mind that this is still a test infrastructure.
Thanks to our rocking sysadmins (especially Eike and Jeff) for setting everything up so quickly.
Please let us know if there is still any docu left to update due to this move that we missed so we can update it quickly.
Last year around this time everyone was getting ready for the Desktop Summit. I couldn’t make it and I could still kick myself for it tbh. Watching it remotely was rather painful as the information flow wasn’t as good as it could have been. So I promised myself two things for this year’s Akademy: 1) I’m soooooo going to be there. 2) I’m going to help make it easier on the people who can not go for whatever reason.
So here is the run-up of resources you will need to keep up-to-date on all things Akademy while it is happening in 2 weeks:
Most of them have RSS feeds you can subscribe to – use them đ
If there is anything else that would be helpful please leave a note in the comments.
Now if you are going to be in Tampere and going to make the world rock more, spread the coolness:
And you might have guessed it already…
(Special thanks to my employer ontoprise and the KDE e.V. for paying travel and accommodation. It would not be possible without you. *hint* individual supporting membership *hint*)
Hmmm and while I’m at it I might as well create some buzz for my talks, right? So I’ll be doing 3 talks it seems:
Be there! You know you want to đ Â I’ll also be doing 3 BoF’s on git, community and wikis for those interested. Oh and I’m writing on a paper on mentoring to accompany my community talk. I’ll post it here when it’s published.
CU in Tampere! đ
Amarok 2.3.1 “The Bell” has been released. Check out the release notes, download, install and enjoy rediscovering your music đ
I’m back at home from the multimedia and edu sprint in Switzerland (yea the one some people call cheeseland and others chocolateland) and things are finally getting back to normal so time for a bit of blogging. It was productive, fluffy and awesome! Those three pictures sum it up pretty well đ
Check out my Flickr page for more pics.
Having a lot of projects at the sprint was really great. For example I’ve worked with j-b of VideoLan fame on some announcements and website restructuring and helped the edu team with promo and community building advice. A lot of progress has been made on the VLC backend for Phonon which will hopefully solve a lot of the small pain points we still have in Amarok. Besides getting the VLC backend in shape the next weeks in Amarok land will be spend on improving startup time for example. New script bindings by Ian and Richard should help quite a bit with that hopefully. Colin did not have an easy job being the PulseAudio guy but he was a really good sport in not-so-friendly territory ;-). We also had a telephone meeting with the QtMultimedia guys in Brisbane which cleared up quite a few things even though the setup of the meeting was a bit adventurous. Sharing knowledge not only inside the KDE teams but also meeting with other free software teams like this is invaluable and should be done more often.
A big thank you to everyone who helped make it possible. You’re fluffy.
Oh and btw: Car trains rock.
I have two very enthusiastic Season of KDE students who need a mentor for writing a new AI for KSirK. However it seems the games team doesn’t have anyone who is free to mentor this.
So if you think you could mentor this please get in touch with me via email. Thanks! You’ll get cookies at Akademy đ