A twist on the Mojave Experiment

“The Mojave Experiment.”  Sounds like science fiction.  Like the Manhattan Project.  But with lasers.

Does anyone remember more innocent times (a couple of months ago) when Microsoft was still trying to get you believe that Vista was a consumer perception problem and not a debacle?  Their sleight-of-hand marketing campaign that boiled down to, “It’s not us, it’s you.”  There’s a reason it doesn’t work in break-ups and a reason that doesn’t work with multi-million dollar ad campaigns.  The results of that experiment were so conclusive and reassuring that they promptly decided to release a brand new OS ASAP.  Why didn’t they use this experiment on their own execs?

Well, some cheeky bastards at ZDNet Australia have taken this experiment and turned it on its head.  Or done an orthogonal experiment.  Or made a perpendicular point.  Here’s the video (in flash on their site).  If only WordPress would let me directly embed their video.

Now, I’m sure this will fuel the fire that “KDE just just copying the look and feel or Windows” or vice versa.  But can we just set that aside and appreciate for a moment a clever concept with a Top Notch ™ dream sequence effect?  Thanks for the tip.

UPDATE: Slashdot has this story on their front page now.  Thanks again to Renai LeMay of ZDNet for giving me the scoop on their article.

UPDATE2: Now on Gizmodo.

Camp KDE 2009: Final two days

How did everything end?

• Sebas was forcibly removed from his laptop; we made him interact with other humans.
• We went to Rick’s Cafe to watch cliff diving.  I chickened out.  Jeff Mitchell and Pardus Dude #1 (not to be confused with Pardus Dude #2 who never got his luggage) manned up and dove in from about 14 Leaning Tower of Pisas in altitude.  That 22 bathtubs full of rope in height for those that need help with the conversion.
• After Rick’s we went to visit a lighthouse and Jeff bought some cool trinkets.  Unbelievable views.  I need to upload my photos.
• Went to the Appleton Rum Estate for a tour.  Sit down because I’ve got some shocking news: they serve rum samples there.  That’s right, I said it.  We learned that Ade and Chani combine to make one C++ savvy mule.  And peacocks are lazy.  Would it hurt to strut around a bit?
• I eventually got used to the way people drive there.  If I wasn’t placed in a near death situation every 10 minutes, I started to drift off to sleep.
• We got to hang out in a broken down abandoned bus bar that was next to a broken down abandoned bus that wasn’t a bar.  Maybe someone should open up a competing bar there?  One of us, not saying who, got a lesson on how knowledgeable local drunks can be on american politics that hang out in broken down abandoned bus bars.
• ASpehr trapped me into rambling on film for roughly 7 minutes.  Although I have my suspicions that this tape will never see the light of day.  Wait, now that I think about it, the same can be said for ALeisse.  Can I go 2-for-2?
• We need to interview the Pardus Dudes (1 through n).  They have some really interesting things going on.  Also, we need to figure out how to get these guys to future events, they’re cool Dudes ™.  If you’re wondering: yes, I will always refer to them as the Pardus Dudes.
• For some pocket change, you could live next to Usain Bolt.
• Jeff got most of the presentations done for video uploads.  Now that I’m home, I need to get two pulled and sent over to him.  I’ll try to do that tomorrow night.
• Have you seen Davide Battio’s photos from the event?  Here’s what you don’t know:  He walks around with a tiny camera and takes random photos in a split second.  And then they all turn out great.  When you see his awesome photos, you’d think he sat and planned each one.  Not the case.  It’s all natural and immediate.  I cannot do this.  Sebas can do this, but only with the assistance of a 3-hour burst mode on his camera.  Well done Davide – I have no idea how you capture such photos so effortlessly.
• I realized I am only allowed to hang out with Kyle Cunningham outside of Minnesota.  He lives 10 minutes from me, but I have only seen him when we’re both over 1,000 miles from home.
• I am really happy that I got to spend some Quality Time (not tm, but patent pending) with Zack, Sebas and others I know, but also got the chance to learn more about people I didn’t know well.
• I am bummed out that Pradeepto, Ken Christiansen, Soren Howard and Eugene Trounev weren’t able to attend and give their presentations.
• I am also bummed out that I didn’t get to meet some of our sponsors face to face.
• A good sign:  The Jamaican organizers can’t wait to queue up to host again.
• A good sign (part deux): Others are already queuing up to host an event next year.  We just need to know where to send Ade and his cookbook.
• The Jerk Chicken at Wendy’s (airport) had a similar presentation as if Violet Beauregarde was left to die in a blizzard and then served up with severe frostbite.  Translation: Somewhere short of appetizing.  At least the frosty was top notch.  In other Wendy’s news: Jeff learned the hard way not to custom order Pheasant Under Glass at an airport fast food chain.

And then I returned home to face an entire weekend of plumbing issues.  Still not done.  Thanks again to Roger, Dmitri, Jeff, Gamaral and Paul for assisting with this event.  And to our sponsors for lending a hand on such short notice.

Camp KDE 2009: Day 4

Easing up on the daily Camp KDE reports now.  Yesterday mostly consisted of:

• Till continuing on his educational rampage.  This time on concurrency.  I really don’t hear the term “mutex” enough.
• More meetings in the ocean.  Like spies and the feds, we do it to make sure to minimize the threat of wiretapping.
• The last day of catered lunches.  They went out with a bang: banana cake that was off the charts.
• Nothing firm, but there is the real potential of a sponsor meeting and hiring a developer here based on presentations and work done.  This is exactly as it should be.  Developers, take note!  You do great work and these conferences provide great visibility.
• Jeff started on the daunting task of mastering presentation videos.  He showed us the newest version of Kdenlive, and we were all quite impressed.  It’s made great strides in recent releases.  To be honest, if it continues to improve, we need to consider this app one of the shining stars.  Great work Kdenlive team, this program is already quite stable and capable.
• Kyle continued to work on the new Dot site in preparation for a transition.
• Sebas and Till were focused like lasers on some Plasmoid/Akonadi integration.  For hours on end.  I”m pretty sure Till downloaded knowledge into Sebas until he promptly declared, “I know kung fu.”  However, Sebas has yet to learn there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.  We may or may not have footage of Till kicking his ass in a virtual dojo.
• The bar/restaurant consider their assault on our ears with their skipping CD player and desire to play songs on loop.  And when it’s not repeating a certain song, Casey is.
• Saw this coverage.
• Arched my eybrow at this.
• Hope for the best with this.  Not sure I trust McNealy.
• Oh yeah, and although I avoid politics on this blog.  I wept today for the first time in a long time.  Took time to watch the inauguration.

KDE Handbook

On thing that has been universal in agreement at Camp KDE?  Everyone is impressed with and loves the KDE Handbook that Pradeepto mentions in his blog.  The team that worked on this handbook have a lot to be proud of.  It has all of the elements for success: It’s well thought-out, logically organized, professionally presented, the approach is welcoming and the writing is well done.

If you plan on attending a conference or expo, it should be a prerequisite to have these and distribute them.  It sets the bar high enough that we shouldn’t accept lesser quality works in the future – we’re capable of very friendly and polished output.

This group has of course now doomed themselves to keeping it up to date (screen shots, current features/functionsand release dates) and having curent versions on hand.  And getting them out to groups.  And dealing with inventory.  Time for you to buy a Supply Change Management theory book.  Again, thank you for this handbook – we all think it’s great.

Camp KDE 2009: Day 3

Coding in comfort.  It continues to happen here.  Not this comfortable, but life is still good.  I’ve almost forgotten the snow back home.  So to the experts who are a little down on January 19, I can confidently say there’s a group of people that are statistical anomalies and are doing just fine today.

The morning started a little later than usual, as people found the wireless signal just fine on the beach deck, and had little or no incentive to go inside to do the same work.

But today’s events were dominated by Till Adam’s tutorial and presentation on Qt concepts.  Mainly a model/view tutorial in the morning followed by a coding exercise.  Proxy models after lunch.  I haven’t seen Till in action as an instructor before, and he’s really quite talented.  Translation: I can see why he gets paid to do this.  He is much more fluid and coherent in explanations than I would be; and I’m the native speaker.  He makes sure to engage the listeners as witnessed by Ade playing a model in a demonstration.  Not a stretch though, I’ve heard of storied catwalk days for him.  Oh wait, you mean a “model” as in a data abstraction representation?  Well, that doesn’t explain his high heels.  Or why he was sipping champagne in the back of the room with Valentino later on.

Besides Till’s Titillating Tutorials, here are some other random thoughts from today:

• The local that have shown up have all been really cool.  I’ve spoken to Donavon Campbell the most, who I’m sure you’ll be seeing in some photos from Sebas that I took.  Donavon is at D3 Techologies in Kingston, a linux and open source tech company in Jamaica.  Cool.
• Mauricio was sitting next to me working on Brazilian Portugese translations via Lokalize.  I was somewhat ignorant of how KDE does all of its translation work and the standard translator workflow, so he was kind enough to take the time and show me.
• The catered lunches continue to be great.  Nice work by Roger and Dmitri in finding this place.  All the different options we gone today, which tells me that everyone is finding something to their liking.  Our plan is working out pretty well: take care of all breakfast and lunch needs (provide and subsidize), then let people go out and choose where to eat in the evenings.
• In particular, the local fruits are really something.  I mean really something.  Apparently growing native fruits in a humid tropical climate yields better results than mass farming done followed by shipping the product to the land of polar bears.  Who knew.
• After fondling/using Sebas’ camera, I have a slight case of camera envy going.  12.2 MP Canon -  I’ll have to get the exact model number and the type of lens he now has on it.  With about 1500 autofocus points less, mine is starting to feel outdated.
• Last night, I was so laid back and relaxed I walked away to buy drinks for Sebas and I while people were on my laptop – I noticed this morning that apparently I replied to Chani’s blog.  I ignored him changing my font DPI for the sake of his work on my graphics driver.
• Like any good distro representative, Gokmen had a Pardus CD with him to help troubleshoot Ade’s laptop.
• Kyle continues his work on the new Dot.  We have promises from him.  I’m printing this in public solely to put more pressure on him.
• With the presentations done, we need to get them online somewhere.  Be patient.
• I need to spend some time with Ron Copeland of Nokia.
• Rumor has it that we have more than two birthdays to celebrate here – we may have Bill Hoffman’s wife Naomi’s birthday as well.  I’ll have to confirm.

Ok, back to listening about delegate theory.

Important update: I did not in fact miss Ade’s cookies.  He (and several helpers) just walked in with several trays.  You’d think there was a fire in the building as fast as people moved.  It’s really a stroke of genius on Ade’s part: There’s just something simple and endearing that comes from home cooking and cookies.  You can’t lose – it’s just perfect for bonding at events.  Who doesn’t like cookies?  Whoever they are, they sure aren’t welcome in KDE.  Go drown some puppies or beat up some children, all you life-hating non-cookie eaters.

Camp KDE 2009: Day 2

Who loves free software and KDE?  Here’s one tip: People that travel to Camp KDE on their birthday.  Can you imagine that a person would spend their birthday at a KDE conference?  Would you believe two?  Yes, both Gokman and Orville have their birthday today.  Yes, both had “Happy Birthday” sung to them.  It may be on film.  Whether they have to endure every culture’s birthday celebrations such as spankings/wedgies/tappers/double nuggins/tickles/fisties/paddle tunnels and the Dreaded Rear Admiral ™ – this remains to be seen.

As expected, Jos will give more in-depth commentary on the event in some Dot articles, but I’ll continue to give brief summaries in real-time.

KDE and Business Software: Guillermo (gamaral) gave a really good speech.  He needs to do more.  Not trusting that the audience would understand his high brow humor, he thankfully provided us with notes on each slide on when to laugh and/or applaud.  Gamaral touched on points about Mexican culture, small business owners and their software needs, and the challenges of growing a free software community there.

Amarok 2 and libplasma: Fresh off a new Amarok 2.0 release (although the Amarokers refused to rest and have already had subsequent releases), Leo gave insight on the goals and challenges during 2.0 release process, and lessons learned/best practices involving libplasma.  The presentation on the video might have a slight hiccup as we had to switch microphone batteries mid-speech.  During the downtime, someone (who shall remain nameless) questioned whether Leo’s shirt realy needed to be worn.  Are all people named Leo heartthrobs?  These are the questions that keep me up at night.  The talk concluded with plans for further improving the Amarok UI.  It’s always good to hear dev teams so focused on making the best user experience.

KDE and Mac (Taming the Leopard): For those that haven’t met Orville before (like me), he’s one cool cat.  If I stand next to both him and Zack, I’m pretty sure I would get Quad Damage and the Kool Aid Guy would bust through a wall.  Orville (birthday dude #1) spoke about the background, processes and decisions involved with Mac packaging.  In a story told again and again, he explained how he showed up in a chat room one day, and before he knew what hit him, he was fully involved with KDE.  Stop me if you’ve heard this before.  But the best part involving his speech may have come after is was complete.  Leaving the stage, he didn’t sit back down before going right over to Bill Hoffman (Kitware) and Ade (who blogs regularly about his travails with Solaris).  Not 30 seconds after he cited some less-than-ideal issues in his talk, and there’s a discussion about how to improve it (CPack).  Only at conferences like this.

KDE and Distros: A bit of an experiment here.  Two people from two different countries that had never met that work on two different distros, giving a talk together about how each interact with KDE.  Gokmen (of Turkish disro Pardus and birthday dude #2) and Marcus (of Gentoo) both spoke about typical activities for distros, challenges and what is unique to their respective distros.  Both seem to have one foot in the distro community, but their other foot is squarely in the KDE family.  Both make sure that KDE gets any patches/fixes/improvements done – a point that can’t be overlooked with distro relations.

Graphics Architecture/Acceleration: For those that saw Zack’s Akademy 2008 speech, this was fairly different.  The former was fairly casual and humorous (in his blatant attempt to win the Funniest Presenation vote), this was all business.  As he noted when starting the talk, this was almost more of a lecture than a speech.  The information came fast and furious, and this is a video people will want to watch slowly to absorb.  So serious that when he was talking about a rasterizer, I fully held back on yelling out “It’s a rastah-rizer mon!”  Yes, it’s true.  Conclusion?  OpenCL – get used to it and prepare for it.

Completely unrelated note: Chani ran up to Zack in front of me and declared, “This hug is from Aaron!”  Was there a hug, handshake, pat on the back, tip of the cap or even Dreaded Rear Admiral (non-birthday version) for little ol’ Wade?  No.  My theory is that the request from Aaron was “Run up to Zack and hug him for me in front of Wade.  Then ensure awkward silence until you see tears well up in his eyes.  Conclude with a stomach punch.”  I have no proof yet.  Yet.

KDE Games and EDU: Eugene Trounev was unable to attend as a presenter (in addition to his help with Camp KDE Graphics as an organizer).  Thanks to this group for recommending Mauricio  to come out and give a presentation instead on short notice.  And more thanks for Mauricio for accepting.  Marcus also got on the stage again to discuss the kick-butt Avogadro and Kalzium.  Not to be outdone with the birthday guys, Marcus and Mauricio both announced that their wives are both expecting – so two new KDE EDU users.  Talk about an incentive to improve educational software.

Enterprises and Open Source Coders: Jeff wrapped up the conference by talking about typical open source coding habits/strengths and how OSC’s are likely much more beneficial and desirable to enterprises than they might think.  And I agree.  Dealing with distributed teams (multiple ofice locations), different cultures (off-shore programming), peer review….these are all traits and working conditions that OSCs take for granted but are anything but common.  These skills are often not represented or brought up during interviews, but are centrainly central to success.  In a parallel to OSCs being modest or understated about their skills, Jeff is a much better presenter than(I’d guess) he gives himself credit for.

Look for Dot articles to start appearing – Jos is cranking them out.  Now everyone is back to the beach.  Later!

Camp KDE 2009: Day 1

Chani started with “Day 0“, but I’ll try to stay positive.  That’s a math joke people.  Other attendees have beaten me to blogging, and everyone seeing to be enjoying themselves.  Oh sure, people are privately coming up to me and complaining, “Why Wade, why am I forced to spend time with friends and talk about free software in the Caribbean?”  But through sheer determination, blackmail, threats and old fashioned intimidation, I’ve kept most people silent and pretending to be happy.

A quick run-down of the speeches:

Introduction: That’s me.  Not a key note, just an introduction.  We started late due to getting the A/V set up properly, so I cut the talk short and got out of the way.

Global Culture: To kick off a KDE conference series on this side of the globe (marble), it was important to me to start off this conference discussing cultures.  Unfortunately, the Global Government Illuminati conspired against me and kept Pradeepto from arriving and giving the speech.  I haven’t see him in a while and was really looking forward to it.  Till and Ade gave the speech in his absence and did admirably.

Akonadi: Ade left the stage but kept on the Indian attire fore the day) but Till was not allowed to leave just yet.  He discussed past/present/future of Akonadi.  From original issues with contact management that led to the quest for a better solution – to Akonadi in 4.2 an what’s planned for the future.  Being a back-end service, a lot of users may not be familiar with Akonadi or understand it’s benefits.  But a phrase I’ve been using lately is “source of truth” – making sure that a singular location is known and agreed to be “source of truth” for a certain type of data.  Data types lose power and completeness when pockets of data are stored separately, in different locations, in different formats, etc.  Akonadi needs to be the source of truth for contact info, and apps need to hook into it and exploit it.  It’s that simple.

KDE and Windows: Holger relayed the great progress of KDE applications on Windows.  He definitely caught me off-guard when he showed Plasma running on Windows; I thought there was an original consensus that trying to get any level of Plasma working was a new level of insanity.  Stick to safer activities like training cobras or sword swallowing.  But there he was, spinning plasmoids around on the screen.  The KDE Windows team seemed to make some sensible design decisions, like avoiding using the registry or OS env variables.  This allows for true portability – the install is basically a self-contained directory.  You could throw it on your USB stick, burn it on a CD, or put a zip file on a server http://wadejolson.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/plasmoid-prognostication/and allow for downloads.

Plasma and Small form factors: Sebastian was up next.  I had actually recently blogged about different screen sizes in “Plasmoid Prognostication”, but whereas my blog was open speculation and daydreaming, he dared to actually discuss the situation coherently and discuss very specific concepts to keep in mind when designing and programming for device with a wide variety of CPU strengths, power constraints and display differences.

Kitware and CMake: Bill Hoffman, representing one of our sponsors Kitware, spoke about Kiware, their open source products and their interactions with the open source community.  Bill is sitting next to me right now, so in case he looks over at my screen, let me state now he by far gave the best presentation of the day.  Bill’s family is here and his kids are awesome.  They seem to be having a blast and are either in the pool or the ocean at any given time.  Or possibly going between the two.  Needless to say his wife has her hands full.

The second day of talks is currently underway.  More blogging soon.  Oh before I forget – We did it!  I was initially going to post a blog upon arrival entitled “Triple digits – yes we can!”  The temp was officially -21 F in Minneapolis when Molly and I left for the airport.  And 81 F when we landed.  Over 100 degree increase.  Good times, almost makes me forget about my frozen pipes and broken water main back at home.  Almost.

Plasmoid prognostication

Let’s put the following four ideas in a blender:

1. During my day job (which is also unsurprisingly my night job and weekend job), we create re-useable java portlets for our enterprise (this decade’s version of applets and EJBs).  As the size of this portlet repository grows, and as the ubiquity and re-use of such portlets grow, so the value of our contributions increase.
2. I knew making iPhone apps would be popular, but I had no idea how fast the number of apps would reach well into the thousands.
3. Aaron recently wrote a great entry on community growth.  Don’t leave expansion up to chance and serendipity.  As I recently heard a lexicographer on TED state (paraphrasing) on serendipity: “When you find things you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.”  Of course, when is “building clocks” with Plasma a metaphor, and when is it also just “building clocks“?
4. Nokia’s Qt announcement in conjunction with bindings progress will open the door to many new contributors.  And what better way to cut your teeth than with a small-self-contained app?  To me, they continue to “do the right thing” in the post-acquisition process.  And if there’s one thing that manufacturing giants get, it’s economies of scale, re-usability and target markets.

So what do we have?  In my mind, a huge repository of cross-platform apps/plasmoids that can be on your desktop or on your phone.  What I am not saying: that there will not be significant hurdles; that this should be some “for-profit” store to charge for them.  I just look to the day when a Nokia phone owner can browse a huge repository of plasmoids/gadgets/widgets and then go home and use the same familiar ones on their desktop.  Will WebKit in Qt allow Google Gadgets et al along for the ride and take some of the air out of Android?

Plasmoids and maybe Plasma (or derivatives) itself on everything from 3″ phone screens to 30″ LCD panels, with every size of netbook and laptop inbetween.  This, gentle readers, is why you stay forward thinking on technology (Plasma framework decisions) and keep your usability experts happy.  This can and will be massive.

Disclaimer: I like to daydream and overly simplify, and have no affiliation with Plasma development (which is a good thing for everyone involved).

Thank you Nokia (YATYNP)

Back with the “What does KDE mean to you?” image series, it was important to note the tone of the phrase “KDE is ours.”  It’s unfortunate that humans can be greedy and think the phrase implies exclusivity or ownership.  But nothing can be more inclusive in the tone and the imagery.  And today it gets more inclusive.  The family gets bigger.

As many note, Qt 4.5.0 will be relicensed as LGPL.  Thanks to Qt Software members that orchestrated the initiative, to Nokia and Qt Software at large for taking this leap and to the FreeQt foundation.

The barrier to KDE participation just keeps getting lower.

Camp KDE 2009: Just days away now

Tomorrow in Minneapolis it will not get above 0 degrees F.  And it will snow again.  From the 270th day in a row (+- 265 days).  The temperature differential from when I get on the plane Friday in Minneapolis and get off the plane in Montego Bay will be about 75-80 degrees F.  Warmer.  For the benefit of those that cannot understand what I’m describing without a hastily-done inaccurate chart using a paint program, I present to you:

Really makes things clear.  And because I surprisingly haven’t used this handy representation yet, let me do so now: