saturday

it's noon and i'm tired; got in waaaaaay too late last night. fortunately both my business-related meetings cancelled today. so i'm sitting on irc figuring out what to do with my day that won't hurt my head any more than it already is.

still trying to get a usability talk planned for aKademy and people are still asking the same questions in #kde about v3.2, though they no longer ask the ones they asked about 2.2 or 3.0. aaaah, progress.

i see the dstone has really started a tear on FD.o regarding official deps and lib inclusions for the next FD.o release. good on him. though when i saw the inclusion of the system tray spec i cringed. god damn do i hate that bit of braindamage. we need to replace that @ aKademy this year. i'll bring some code with me to that effect.

oh, and for people who reply to my blogs: please let me know who you are in your replies. an anonymous person stating that the gimp is great for artists is hardly useful to me: you could be a gimp developer for all i know ;-) you could also be a digital rembrandt. but.. yeah... identity people... it's mildly important. thanks for replying at all, of course =)

and to wrap it up, here's the Obvious Tip O' The Day: static QFile::exists(const QString&) works on directories too. =P

floaty head

gimp2 is much nicer than gimp1. unfortunately i still find it a PITA to use, at least for us non-graphic-artist types. i wonder what actual graphic artists think of the gimp2. i should seek some out and do some face time. this could be an interesting study in usability as perhaps it sucks for "lay-people" like myself but is great for artists. or maybe it just really does have a shitty interface. who knows. either way, i now have a crappy little floaty head. i deign to call it a hackergotchi, because that might make me trendy. i hate trendy. and yet i have a floaty head. a bad one. go figure.

life, usability, life

so. had to cab it to my soccer game last night (only to play to a tie.. bah!) since mahlah had the car and ened up being quite late from her excursion w/Petyon. =( oh well. whatever. i've had approximately no time for anything remotely interesting my computers lately between the Cell Phone Of IT Support Doom i have strapped to my ass for the next week and a half and all those other little deatils of life. the usability@aKademy stuff is coming along nicely; i have to hook up with Ellen & Jan on IRC in the next few days to nail down some stuff for aKademy. this will be the year of a coordinated, multi-pronged, all-stakeholders-involved KDE usability push or i'll eat my hat. i'm actually wearing a hat right now, which i got from a rather cool vintage store (along with the tie i'm wearing) yesterday. boo ya.

oh. and where the hell is my floaty head? ;-)

who said there are no stupid questions?

today on my blog: the silly people who are allowed to use computers, and the people who get to answer their stupid questions ;-)

yesterday's gem: "Quick question: how big is our new server?"
yesterday's gem of an answer: "2.4" (thanks wheels!)

today's gem: "we want to hook up a firewire to one of the file server machines through the usb port to load more data onto the array and are wondering what the procedure is to mount it and get it to be seen properly"
today's gem of an answer: "first, plug it into the FIREWIRE port ..."

*sigh*

Usability @ aKademy

i'm sitting here waiting for a drive array to arrive so i can switch this cluster (11 machines in total, so not too big but big enough to be fun) over to the THIRD hardware solution the hardware techs have come up with for our storage needs (multiple terabytes of data with redundant systems in backup). while doing that i'm going through my notes for usability concerns that i will be looking to deal with at aKademy this year. i've put myself out there as a volunteer ambasador for kde-usability people who are doing usability work but can't attend, as well as planning on addressing my pet issues as well. the list is probably pretty obvious: new KControl, kicker improvements, kdesktop issues, konqueror profiles. hopefully there's enough time at aKademy to get something started on each of these paths as well as deal with the larger usability issues. who knows, maybe we can get kde-usability-devel actually rocking as well. and then we'd be firing on both cylinders ;-) aaaah... i see the drives rumbling down the hallway on a trolly... IT'S ALIVE! (or so i hope, anyways. i'm getting tired of setting up filesystems)

appsy activity

every time i see that list of new apps on linuxtoday.com under "Release Digest: KDE" i can't help but be both proud of being affiliated with that desktop project and impressed with the activity.

we obviously have a devel community that is broad and active. this communicates the quality of the KDE framework and the trust people are putting in it.

we can not underestimate how important this is, on so many different levels.

Kolab, Folksters, HR, Peyton

Kolab: the admin web interface is a strong selling point for Kolab. all the same, it's too bad it sucks so much. i added multiple email alias support to it tonight for users as we need that on production systems. i'm not tracking Kolab CVS so who knows what the web interface looks like these days. but i must say, there isn't a whole lot to the web stuff which might mean it's a good time to go through there an do it "proper" ;-) e.g. warn when deleting things? support for a fuller set of Kolabs features, such as multiple email aliases? i wonder who's responsible for that beast.. hmm.. anyways.. patch is on its way to the kolab-devel list ... though i understand the kolab devs are away on vacation right now. kind of screwed up my kicker devel time. well, that and being lazy all morning. it is sunday, so maybe i can take some consolation (konsolatoin? ;) in that.

Folksters: the Calgary Folk Fest was pretty good. the main stage wasn't much fun for me, though, as i'm not into the high note frolicking of the Rankins nor much into bluegrass. Spirit of the West was pretty good though. the real show stealer was this band from N. Italy. three VERY hot women and a guy who played according. one of the women played various reed and wood instruments, another sang (she had the most amazing energy behind the mike!) and the third was a DJ on a Roland 808. they played mostly traditional Italian folk songs spiffed with the 808. great performers, all of them.

HR: i hate it when people ask me to define my relationship status with other people for them. relationships don't boil down easily to soundbites, and do people really want a multi-minute description? and is it any of their business? and can i even communicate it properly? i dunno ... i just wish people would be happy with who i am to and for them. and i doubly wish they'd be able to figure that one out for themselves by simply Understanding and Knowing our interactions. i'm not a duplicitous bastard; i am who i am and what i do.

Peyton: learning addition and how to use a dip pen. ah, low-tek! he knows how to use a computer quite well, but i don't want modern high-tech to be the extent of his know-how. i wish i could bring him with me to aKademy; he'd love the trip, and i think most of the people there would love him too...

things to do this weekend

Calgary Folk Fest on Saturday. work on kicker Sunday while slumming on IRC. sleep in between. oh, and do the dishes.

OLS

wanted to be at OLS this year, but a project which i am doing one part of ran over schedule due to hardware issues (it's a cluster thingy and i think all the hardware came from the Bermuda Triangle... or has formed one of its own... or something like that)... anyways, that meant that the "go-live" date got pushed to this week which meant ...... aaron no go anywhere.

feh.

read clee's blog entry @planetkde and got jealous. instantly. not only am i not there in OLS getting drunk off my ass and coding a frenzy with other like-minded hackers as clee is, but i still don't have a disembodied floaty head thing yet either. and as we all know, when it comes to blog syndication, it's all about the disembodied floaty head things.

I'll take Things Without GUIs for 100, Alex

KDcop, kdebugdialog ... we tend to expose the hidden bits of KDE through cute little GUIs that we developers need ( while (itch.itchy()) { itch.scratch() } ) but we often do not afford our users the same niceties. three cases in point: session files, autostart files, servicemenus. i've wanted to do something about the latter two for a while. had a bit of time at work today, and the other stuff i'm puttering on is @ home, so... i started in on a control panel for autostart files. it doesn't do everything under the sun possible with autostart files (e.g. X-KDE-UniqueApplet), but the people who need this UI probably don't need much. then i'll see what more people want from it through feedback and decide what, if anything to add.

Why I didn't blog for so long

so... here's my story/answer to the question that i'm sure at least 2 individuals out of the 6x10^9 people on this planet are wondering about:

WHY DIDN'T AARON BLOG FOR SO LONG?

well.. besides the busyness i eluded to in my last blog entry, there were other issues. not only did i feel rather bad about not being around KDE hackingland as much as i wanted to be, but i had an unthankful run-in with the International Online Stupidity Club.

see, i used to blog @kdedevelopers.org. since i'm ostensibly a KDE hacker and that domain has the letters K, D and E in it that must mean that everything i said there is somehow tied very tightly to KDE. or, if you are a reasonable person, not.

now, i'm quite aware that i'm not one to go quietly into the night. but in the right circumstances, i don't believe that's a bad thing. in the process of open, collaborative, creative design we must encourage and engage in open discourse. politics must be secondary to the pragmatic pursuit of peer review and "heated innovation". seeing as these days we are working a lot outside the boundaries of KDE itself, e.g. with Freedesktop.org (which i'm speaking on @ aKademy, btw!) and GNOME, i believe that our discourse needs to include those broader horizons. (and vice versa, of course)

unfortunately, some people in the GNOME camp were none too happy about a KDE developer waxing poetic, or at least waxing frankly, on interoperability and usability. so much so, in fact, that some KDE people were told at a coordination meeting that they may not be welcome @ GUADAC this year! when this news came back to me, i was stunned. of course, they did go and it was famously successful, but the threat was, to me, quite a blow.

if you don't agree with my ideas, refute them.
if you don't like me, tell me ... tell the world ... spurn me ... whatever

but don't take it out on other people who just happen to be in the same project. don't threaten the increasing cohesiveness of the Free Software desktop. why not just come out and say to my (virtual) face, "Aaron, you're a dick, and here are the facts to support that." why not blog about my blog (aka "engaging in discourse") instead of dropping a ton of bricks of my project-mates?

it made me feel like my words had far too much reach and far more power than i was prepared to accept. (which, even as i write this now, sounds beyond stupid.) it made me feel exposed; that i'd somehow unwittingly (aka stupidly) endangered a process i hold very dear and care about. it also made me feel very angry with certain individuals in our larger Open Source community who seem hell-bent on territorial pissings and fighting irrelevant and non-existent political battles.

it was, in a word, disenchanting.

so. now you all now. and now i'm blogging again on neutral ground, and feeling just fine about the world in general. if anyone has issues with that, let me know. blog about it. call me on the phone. hell, i'll even buy the beer if you want to meet at the pub to duke it out =)

A little bit of forever

wow... it's been (relatively) forever (if you live on Internet time) since i last blogged. i'm sure you all will be happy to notice that i still haven't learned how to use the shift key. assuming anyone notices anything at all ;-)

so i pretty much completely missed the 3.3 devel cycle. my partner and i moved out in January after living together for >5 years; things are generally copascetic but it meant moving into a new place, dealing with scheduling changes around how we're dealing with our son, etc... ch-ch-ch-changes! work decided to kick up in a major way at the same time as well. i had more to do than i knew what to do with. good for the people i owe money to, not so good for my spare time.

but it seems i'm finally back, more or less =) i've got kicker changes all over the place, which unfortunately won't make it into 3.3 due to the freeze and my untimely demise. er, distraction. `cvs diff kdebase/kicker kcontrol/kicker | wc -l` gives me a count of 4425. gah. and i still have lots i wish to do on it. hopefully we can do some more cool stuff to it at aKademy and get it all in CVS for everyone to hate^Henjoy.

similar story for kjots.

anyways... i'm VERY excited about starting work on KDE4. we have a huge opportunity to do some kick-ass things. i'm VERY excited about going to aKademy (first time to Europe for me! first time i'll have met KDE core developers!) i'm VERY excited about being able to engage in face-to-face discussions about usablity processes in KDE @ aKademy as well. so much to look forward to.