What is goya?

The other day I mentioned goya in a posting, and liquidat replied that goya is not very known to users, and to explain what it is/does. Really, from a user's standpoint goya is just magic that makes it easy to put buttons, etc. into cells of a view. We get fast searching on lists/tables/trees, etc. by using Qt's Model/View framework, and now with goya we can easily put buttons, lineedits, and other interactive controls besides just text and icons.

1.1.3 firmware trick

Just a quickie for anyone that upgrades their iphone or ipod-touch to 1.1.3 firmware using linux to put music on their jailbroken device. /var/root/Media is now /var/mobile/Media on the device. I must have spent the last couple hours writing and re-writing to the wrong place and wondering why it wouldn't find my music... Guess the ipod-convenience script needs to put the path in the config file now too ;-)

Progress

Well, haven't given any progress reports lately, so here's what I've been up to (in case anyone cares).

KHotNewStuff's download dialog has a major overhaul on my desktop at home using ereslibre's goya library to draw buttons etc. It's much faster, just need to work out some details in the actions coming off the toolbuttons. I think I have an idea for how to handle caching and loading stuff from the internet concurrently (the current model doesn't work, because it falsely assumes reading the disk cache will always finish before loading a provider from the internet.)

In other news, I spent a bit of time playing with kttsd the other night (inserting debug statements, etc.) to try to track down a bug where the output is clipped. Turns out the phonon mediaobject was saying it was done a bit early, so kttsd deletes the job, etc. which causes it to clip. I've installed newer xine libs and will see if that fixes the problem. Until then you can set kttsd to use the alsa audio device and it works fine. I also found out how to get kttsd into the system settings when it's installed, and now speech notifications are persistent because kttsd is run on re-login again :) (time to remove those test notifications on window minimize, etc. before they drive my wife crazy ;-)

devs.clone();

I've been testing more and more features of kde4 lately, and have noticed some things I'd like to fix if I had the time... I'm betting others have some of these also. I'd really like to fix up kttsd and get it working well again, as that is one of the things I miss from kde3 (listening to irc, etc.) It is somewhat working now, but could definitely use some love. Seems the maintainer ported it while kdelibs was in fluctuation, but there are still some things that look like they were written with Qt 3. Other kdeaccessibility apps could use some ui love also, simple things like finding out why &Language: can't be a buddy of a KLanguageButton in the kmouth setup window, etc.

I almost wonder if other devs have these side projects in their mind they'd like to work on also, if we should start pointing people to a page with junior jobs, or side projects we could help a newcomer figure out and maintain. There's a mentoring site here: http://www.kde.org/getinvolved/development/ that we could use, or something on techbase could be made possibly.

Anyway, I think we are doing great work, but we could use a few clones ;-)

Day 1, Building relationships and brainstorming

Today was a long day, but a very good one.

This morning we had some good prep time. I sat at a table with Inge and Benjamin mostly, and updated/switched to the branch, to make sure all the Edu apps I'd like to quickly demo were in a usable state. I also got some presentation tips from Anne-Marie and Frederik on irc and from Inge in person. Tom helped me polish the presentation so it looks a bit better, and saw some Edu apps running on Benjamin's Mac.

There was an interesting Bof before lunch about Marketing, that had a lot of discussion back and forth about who we should target and how, and what the message should be. After lunch a bunch of people left to go on a tour of Google, and the rest of us worked in the relative quiet. I did a dry run of my presentation tomorrow to the 2 kde-user contest winners, Jason Harris, and some others that were curious. It went well, but I found some things to change for tomorrow.

Late afternoon there was a well-attended Bof but it was mostly Aaron explaining plasma ideas, which was pretty useful, but the bus schedule kept us from breaking out into some further discussion groups. It'll probably happen saturday though I bet.

The evening was very enjoyable. There was good food, good company, and lots of KDE talk going on. I met Peter from OSU and spoke with him a bit about the things going on there for Education, other open source software being developed there, etc. Spoke with two Amarok developers (Jeff and Leo), then found Edit(Frank) who runs kde-look.org and kde-apps.org, etc. Spoke with him for a while about knewstuff2, and some things we can do to make it work well with the new features (upload, rating, collaboration). I think we'll get something started tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm going to finally crash for the day, I'm sure you'll hear more tomorrow about the event itself, and all the presentations that are made there.

pre-release event first thoughts

Hey, Tom (my brother) and I got here yesterday afternoon after a long 10 hour drive (taking turns so we didn't get too tired). We were greeted by a group of people I knew, but had never met before, Troy, Holger, Helio, Martijn, Jos, and Riccardo. We had a nice meal down the street _a few blocks_ where those from out of the country enjoyed our local steaks and burgers with a few more that showed up as we were leaving to eat.

The atmosphere is very excited as many are meeting people they've known on irc for a while for the first time (I'll never forget what Wade said when he met Danny for the first time :) and having a good time.

Momentum

I know I'm a day or two late, but just a couple observations of the release tagging:

665 checkins the day before tagging, and though I only made 2 of those myself, I have to echo previous statements of a job well done. It was a bit crazy there at the end with lots of discussion about last minute fixes/check-ins, etc. but it's done now, and is what it is. Allen Winterz put it well the other day on irc when he said we did good and should be proud of ourselves. All is good, right? Wrong! now is the time to try to keep the momentum and realize the dream even more :) (As well as fix things that are still not complete of course)

Looking back for a moment, it's awesome to think about what has happened during the time leading up to this. I only joined the project May of last year, and even since then the project has grown by leaps and bounds (it probably grew much before then also, but I was not around to witness it) The first time I ran a kde 4 session back then, it often crashed, but was still fun to play with. Now a lot of us (hopefully all) are using it full-time which is awesome.

I spent part of today trying to fix a bug in the desktop containment, then spent some time with the family. When I came back to it, I noticed it was fixed. Alex Merry, (randomguy3) you rock!

Looking forward, for 4.1 I'd like to get KNS in better shape, get some small fixes into kanagram, help Frederik with keduvocdocument lib a bit, and hopefully get kpicross ready for full-time.

Lastly, I hope to meet anyone who will be at the release party/event in a couple weeks. I'll be there all three days probably.