Thanks to Sven I stumbled upon a rather cute and very well done Free movie/musical called Sita Sings The Blues. Excellent (greatest?) love and break-up story with great music and cats. Watch it! 😉
Please share links to other great Free (short-)movies in the comments.
(image by Nina Paley)
For me KDE is:
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. – Epictetus
The KDE-Edu team is looking for feedback from their users to improve their applications and to find out where to invest the limited time they have. If you are a student, teacher or just casual user of any of these applications we are looking for your feedback:
We created a short survey (1 page – about 5 minutes) where you can tell us about the 3 problems you have with any of the applications listed above as well as give some general feedback. Those 3 problems can be small or big. We want to know about them. This feedback is incredibly valuable to the team so if you know anyone who should take this survey but doesn’t read this blog please send them a link.
PS: If you want to help with any of the programs listed above (by writing code, creating example content, documentation, promotion or anything else) please get in touch with me.
As you might have noticed from other blogs on PlanetKDE the KDE promo people have been quite the busy bees this weekend in Stuttgart. Getting together with great people, getting stuff done, having good beer and food -> great sprint. And of course a sprint with Jos and me has to include at least one proper group hug 😀
(fltr: Valerie, Kenny, Martin, Claudia, me, Rainer, Justin, Jos, Eckhart, Ingo, Stuart, Daniel, Luca, Cornelius, Frank, Troy, Frederik)
It was a great weekend which got us a lot further to the 4.4 release announcement, the rebranding of KDE, a new KDE booklet to give out at events, a redesign of www.kde.org and more. It is amazing what you can get done if you get the right people together for 3 days.
Most important for me though was finally getting to know Ingo, Stuart and Luca. It was their first KDE meeting. I hope we introduced them properly (including group hugs and old stories about KDE) 😀 It feels good to know that that part of the forum team got even closer to our community now after doing an incredible job for a while already.
Getting feedback on stuff like the rebranding discussion or the move to Git from the people who helped start KDE was very valuable. We should definitely make sure to keep this connection as long as possible. A simple “been there – done that – it was an incredibly stupid idea” can save everyone from quite some headache and bike shedding.
I miss you all already… Damn.
But the promo people were not the only busy bees. No the Amarokers decided it is time to release 2.2.1. It includes improvements to podcasts, collection scanning, automatic script updating and much more. Read the release notes and download it. Of course don’t forget it is Rokvember 😉
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).
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.
I’ll definitely have to return – not just for the massage chairs and hot-tub.
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.
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?
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:
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:
Settings for my news chat list:
How about a list of only new queries? Easy:
How about a chat lists with only channels with highlights? There you go:
Enjoy and never get angry looks from friends again for missing a query 😉
How did you tune Quassel?
Social media like Twitter, Facebook, digg and co. are all about the conversation. They are more fun and actually more useful when you have people to interact with. After all it’s called social media, right?
Now people have discussed why Twitter is better than identi.ca and the other way around. So Twitter obviously has the advantage of being comparatively big and mainstream at the moment. And this certainly has its advantages like being able to interact with a lot more people who so far have not (and maybe never will) discovered identi.ca.
Identi.ca on the other hand has the advantage of being Free Software and connecting a lot of Free Software people. However that is not the only and maybe not even the biggest advantage of it. No, actually its biggest advantage is enabling communication. Let me explain.
Twitter has @-replies. You use them to address people in the messages you send (like this: @foo I don’t agree with what you just said). Not too long ago Twitter decided to not show those @-replies your contacts send to other people in your main timeline but only when you visit their pages. So when one of the people I follow addresses someone else but me I will generally not see this. There are a few good reasons for Twitter to do this which I will not go into right now. However the problem with this is that you are missing big parts of very interesting message exchanges. The even bigger problem is however that it is close to impossible to find the @-replies someone got. Why is this a problem? Say someone asks his Twitter followers how they like a movie that just came out to decide if it is worth going to the cinema or not. You are about to go as well and would like to read what people answer him? Well tough luck. You’ll need to jump trough hoops and use the twitter search to search for his nickname and will probably get a lot of useless stuff there mixed in the useful things. Identi.ca on the other hand gives a tab to view all replies a user received so you can easily see what people replied to an interesting question or comment. Identi.ca goes even further. You get a “show in context”-link that tries to thread the whole conversation around a certain topic. It is pretty awesome and accurate. You can see who replied what to whom. Check it out!
One feature Twitter is lacking completely is groups. They are addressed with !groupname. Groups are an awesome way to communicate with a larger group of people you do not know but share a common interest with. There is no good way in Twitter to do this (no, hashtags don’t count). Groups can for example be used to make announcements or to get feedback from people also interested in topic X. They are probably the most powerful microblogging mechanism out there because they easily enable communication in large groups without much hassle. You simply join the group and then put !groupname in the message whenever you have something to share with the group. On Twitter (unless you are one of those people followed by a lot of people) your best chance of getting an important message read by a lot of people is to have it reposted (retweeted) by one of the influential people who are followed by a huge crowd. And then you still can’t be sure to reach the people you actually want to reach. One could say identi.ca’s groups make this whole process more democratic.
Summary: Twitter is a simple tool and being simple is a big part of the things that made it popular and successful. It however encourages communication from one to a few selected people who are following you. Identi.ca on the other hand encourages communication between a lot of people who don’t necessarily need to follow each other and thereby empowers people if they choose to use it that way. This makes it slightly more complicated for someone who starts using it though. So the question is: How does one explain groups in an easy and comprehensible way?
(In case you have no idea what this is all about check out my Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects for an introduction.)