KDE News

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing Ruby, Python, C#, Lua and PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked.

Mauro Iazzi, Thomas Moenicke, Arno Rehn, Cyrille Berger, Aleix Pol
Richard Dale, Sebastian Sauer, Simon Edward

Python and Ruby are in a very good shape and stable for being used in application development using Qt and KDE facilities, while Qyoto, the C# binding is well on its way to providing the same level of completeness and stability. PHP will try to fill the gap between Desktop and Web Applications using the powerful technologies in the Qt toolkit, such as QtWebKit for instance. An interesting new star on the bindings horizon is Lua, which is widely used for scripting some well known computer games and other applications.

As a result of the meeting, we were able to get the Lua bindings running the cannon game tutorial t7, which is an important milestone in the progress of a Qt language binding, as it uses custom signals and slots. Furthermore, Lua bindings have been moved into KDE playground this week. Another technology we were working on was a Smoke to Kross bridge that allows one to share objects between e.g. Ruby bindings and Krossruby. Using it, a developer can show GUI elements using QtRuby and the underlying QObjects and QWidgets can be picked up on the Kross side. The issues discussed included how to organise modules and documentation, improving the design of the template based QList and QMap marshallers for the Smoke lib, and which modules for the new KDE APIs we should target.

An amusing demonstration of the power of some of the KDE bindings technology happened when Sebastian asked Richard for an estimate about the effort of make QtRuby applications scriptable with QtScript. He just came out with a Smoke2 module only 10 minutes later, and after an additional 10 minutes he wrote a corresponding extension for QtRuby, and we were quite amazed. More work was also done on the Kross plugins for Krita and KDevelop. On balance, it was a great meeting with great people and a nice ambiance at the KDAB office.

Now we are looking forward to Akademy and more bindings discussions there. If you are interested in developing support for programming languages in KDE or writing documentation, just hop on Freenode in the #kde-bindings or #kross channel, or write an email to the kde-bindings mailing list, and we will be very happy to help get you going.

Thanks to KDAB for sponsoring and hosting, and thanks to the KDE e.V. for supporting the event.

The SQO-OSS project aims at developing a software quality assessment platform to Free Software developers. SQO-OSS is a project funded through the European Commission's Framework Programme 6 and consists of a number of European organisations with knowledge relevant to build such a platform, among which KDE e.V.. After more than one and a half years of research, design and development the SQO-OSS developer now have made available a first demo showing some capabilities of the Alitheia system. Alitheia stands for the ultimate and business-like truth. Read on for more details.

The significance of Alitheia 0.8.1 is the core being in a reasonably stable state and able to run metric plugins. Results of those plugins are being displayed in the webinterface. Some sample projects are available in the demo. Do note that the demo only shows the front-end of the system and little about its back-end, administration system. More information about the SQO-OSS project can be found on its webpage. If you want to get in contact with the developers of SQO-OSS you can subscribe to the SQO-OSS devel mailinglist or drop by on #sqo-oss on irc.freenode.net.

If you have any questions, such as how to develop your own plugin that combines metrics based on KDE's bug database, subversion repository or mailinglist archives, the places listed above are the right places to get started.

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.

Using editable rich text (e.g. in Krita) is now possible.

Apart from much invisible, but very important work on improving core funcationality like ODF support, text handling and other infrastructure, important visible areas of progress in Alpha 9 are:

KSpread has regained support for printing. It is possible to print a range of sheets or a selection of cells.

The Kexi report generator can now generate reports in html and ODS, the OpenDocument spreadsheet file format, which KSpread and OpenOffice Calc can read.

Vector layers in Krita can contain text and vector shapes. Editable, rich text in Krita is now a reality. Even nicer, it has become possible to add filter layers and masks to Krita, delivering live filter effects on vector shapes.

The text shape object, which is the basis for KWord and provides editable rich text in all KOffice applications has gained a visual way of changing the paragraph layout.

KOffice-wide, a new implementation of guides provides snapping to guides and dragging of guides for all flake shape objects.

New for text: visually alter your paragraph spacing.

The Google Summer of Code students have been hard at work: Lukas Tvrdy has implemented the core of a chinese painting brush engine. Benjamin Cail has ported most of the .doc import filter to make it convert to odf instead of the old native KWord file format, cleaning up and improving our ODF code along the way. ODF support is really being focussed upon with both Piere Ducroquet and Carlos Manuel Licea Vázquez putting in a lot of work. Piere has been implementing document variables and Carlos has made a lot of progress converting KPresenter to use ODF natively instead of its own old file format. Lorenzo Villani is very productive and has already shown off his Kexi web forms work on his blog, until his computer started smoking! The calligraphy tool Fela Winkelmolen is writing for Karbon is coming along very nicely and is already completely usable. Fredy Yanardi, finally, is shouldering a lot of development work on Kpresenter, focussing on the presentation notes feature.

But all KOffice developers have been working really hard on improving all components of KOffice. Please go to the changelog for more details! Or install KOffice on the operating system of your choice.

For more screenshots, please visit our visual changelog. The KOffice team would really welcome volunteers to maintain the visual changelog!

The KOffice team intends to continue delivering montly alpha releases until we have implemented all features in our feature plan: thereafter we will deliver beta releases until those features are stable. Coincidental with the release of Alpha 9, KOffice has entered the feature freeze stage.

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page. KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The development in trunk/ in Subversion has already been opened for feature development, which is going into KDE 4.2 (to be released in January), but developers are strongly encouraged to concentrate on bugfixing in the 4.1 branch for now. Do give RC1 a spin, file bugreports and fix things, there is only a week left until 4.1 is being tagged. Do have your changes in the 4.1 branch reviewed by your peers, though. Note that some users might still be suffering from performance problems with NVidia graphics chips. There is a page on Techbase that gives some more information about it. Make sure you report bugs via KDE's Bugzilla so they can be addressed and do not get lost.

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week. Aaron Seigo spoke for us all when he said "Uwe had a deep love for and belief in Africa and the role that technology can, and should, play on that continent. He put his back into it and was a great advocate for Free software in his area of the world". Our thoughts go out to his family and friends at this irreplaceable loss, we are all a little less than we were yesterday.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Global keyboard shortcuts for applets, and an Amarok and "python expression" runner in Plasma. A Java test applet and various interaction improvements in Plasma. Simple network and CPU monitors in the system-monitor Plasmoid. Initial import of PeachyDock, a Plasma-based alternative panel. The Oxygen window decoration gets the "on-all-desktops" button. Continued development toward Amarok 2.0. KDevelop gets a new context browser, and various other improvements. Initial work on SVG theming in Parley and Step. Support for OpenGL rendering in Palapeli. Enhancements for KDiamond 4.2. Nonogram switches to its own package format, with the import of a collection of game files in this format. Planned developments start to materialise in KColorEdit. Map-based searches in Digikam. Digikam-related libraries move to kdegraphics for KDE 4.1. Enhanced printing support (selections, zooming) in KSpread. KThumb, a simple command-line utility for managing freedesktop.org thumbnails. Optimisations in Kate, Dolphin, and kjs-frostbyte. Ruby bindings for various KDE facilities (QtWebKit, NEPOMUK, etc). Decibel strips some of its KDE dependencies, and moves to kdesupport. KDiskManager is removed to make way for a replacement. Mailody moves to kdeextragear. KPilot, KMobileTools, and the Kontact Planner summary plugin are disabled for the KDE-PIM 4.1 release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

As a response to recent negativity on the Internet, we've been working with Groklaw to get a story running detailing facts about questions such as "Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake", "I am forced to use the kickoff menu", "The whole KDE4 desktop interface is radically new". among others. Thanks go out to Pamela Jones for giving the KDE community a chance to rectify certain points that have recently been said in public. This way, we hope to make it easier for journalists to put KDE's direction, recent decisions and put simple myths into the right light.

The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade. "The GNOME community is very excited about the co-hosted GUADEC and Akademy" says Behdad Esfahbod, president at the GNOME foundation, "GUADEC has traditionally been a very important chance for our community to meet in person, build great working relationships and make new friends. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to extend those relationships to our KDE colleagues at Akademy/GUADEC." KDE e.V.'s vice-president Adriaan de Groot adds "KDE e.V. is looking forward to a co-located conference, where the GNOME and KDE communities can mingle and cooperate as never before in one location. Gran Canaria is uniquely located at the junction of Europe and Africa, close to the Americas and is a fitting place for a historic 'meet-your-neighbours' conference."

GUADEC and Akademy 2009 will be held on Gran Canaria, the main island of the Canary Islands archipelago. The tentative schedule plans the event from Friday, July, 3rd until Saturday, July 11th 2009 in the Alfredo Kraus auditorium and the adjacent Congress Palace in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

This co-located event will turn Gran Canaria into the capital of Freedesktop.org development for a whole week next summer.

While there were other excellent bids, the KDE e.V. and GNOME foundation have settled on Gran Canaria because of its position as Port to Africa and the excellent circumstances for holding such an event there. Unfortunately, having three proposals, two have to be rejected. The proposals from Tampere in Finland and Coruna in Spain were close contenders. Both foundations would like to thank those organisers for the work they have put into their proposals and encourage them to consider their cities for conferences in future years.

The conference organiser's Wiki has extensive information about the planned conferences on the Canaries.

The Amarok team have released the very first alpha version of Amarok 2, their upcoming series based on KDE 4. It features a completely redesigned interface, the PopUp Dropper, and the revolutionary "Biased" playlists. The Complete announcement is available on the Amarok Website. The Amarok team kindly asks you to report any problems you might encounter and submit patches to help make Amarok 2.0 a huge success.

KOffice, like most KDE applications, has the unique selling point that the same codebase can be compiled and run on various platforms. The latest KOffice alpha release has attracted extra attention since it ships Windows and Macintosh binaries. This naturally means a much larger audience will be able to try it out and kick the tires. Techworld has an article up where they give a good overview and plenty of screenshots. Have you already tried out a KOffice alpha release?

Akademy 2008 has published the programme of talks. Track themes include research, applications and community. There are keynotes from Frank Karlitschek of the Open Desktop sites, Sebastian Nyström of Nokia, Cliff Schmidt of KDE users Literacy Bridge. Lightning talk sessions include a Plasma Frenzy and an Akonadi Rumble with KDAB's Till Adam. It is a packed programme to start off the week, the rest of which will be filled with BoFs, Tutorials and an Embedded and Mobile Day. Register now.

On Sunday 6th July, the Bugsquad will be holding a Kopete bug triage day. The aim: to dramatically reduce the number of Kopete bug reports from the current level of approximately 530. As usual, this bug day will be coordinated in the channel #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net. There will also be a followup bug day two weeks later, on Sunday 20th July, to triage any remaining bugs.

The Bugsquad is a great way to contribute to KDE. You do not need a huge amount of time. Just 30 minutes is enough to learn the craft of bug triage - sorting and checking bug reports in the KDE bug tracker. You do not need any previous experience with programming or contributing to KDE - you just need a computer with KDE running on it and a desire to help out.

The Kopete bug triage marathon will take place on two Sundays, 6th and 20th of July, in your timezone. We will start in the morning in Asia, and continue until the evening in America. There will be expert triagers on hand in the IRC channel (#kde-bugs) to help you get started, and once you have done a few bugs you will be able to continue at any time of any day - whenever you feel like doing a bit more.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Amarok 2 gets basic video playing support, and a connection to Librivox public domain audio books. Major porting to KDE 4 continues in K3b. More work on "Fuzzy Search" integration in Digikam. The start of support for sound effects in KGoldRunner, and the addition of a sound feature in KPresenter. Improvements in the msword-odf and kpr-odf import facilities in KOffice. Start of QTestLib integration into KDevelop. The Ruby development bindings support interaction with Akonadi. KMPlayer gets a bookmarks menu and support for displaying Phonon metadata. Kst replaces the concept of tags with "dynamic names". A new, improved version of KColorEdit is imported into KDE SVN. A new module, kdeplasmoids, is created in KDE SVN to consolidate the various different scattered locations of Plasma applets. A new Plasma theme for KDE 4.1 is unveiled in KDE SVN. All of Eigen no longer depends on Qt. KDevelop 4.0.0 Alpha2, Phonon 4.1.0, KOffice 1.9.95 Alpha 8, and KDE 4.0.5 are tagged for release. Phonon moves to kdesupport. guidance-power-manager moves to extragear/utils to be released with KDE 4.1. Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Marble gets "temperature" and "precipitation" maps, and a "stars" plugin. More work on "fuzzy searches" in Digikam. Konqueror gets support for crash session recovery and session management. Runners can now be managed using a KPluginSelector-based dialog, and attention-blinking support in Plasma. Various Plasma applets move around KDE SVN before the KDE 4.1 feature freeze takes effect, with WebKit applet support moving into kdebase. SVG stuff from WebKit starts to be integrated into KHTML. More optimisations in KHTML, with KJS/Frostbyte, a version using bytecode and other enhancements, moving back into kdelibs. Start of an implemention of the JavaScript scripting API for PDF documents in Okular, based on KJS. Continued work on KJots integration into Kontact, and creating/editing links between entries in KJots. More work on theming in Amarok 2. Various improvements in kvpnc. More configuration user interfaces in KNetworkManager. Enhancements in the KTorrent bandwidth scheduler plugin. Support for CUPS printing options in KDE printing dialogs. Mailody moves to kdereview. The "OnlineSync" plugin is merged into Akregator. Initial commit of a new MSWord-to-ODF filter for KWord, and a caligraphy tool for Karbon. KDevMon is ported to KDE 4. Development of the Shaman2 package manager is moved into KDE SVN (playground/sysadmin). The PHP-Qt bindings move from playground/bindings to the kdebindings module. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines. Performance problems on NVidia chips remain, but we are confident that those will be solved by the teams over at NVidia in one of the next releases of their graphics driver. In KDE 4.1, there is also some preliminary Mac and Windows support coming up. Several apps can be tried by a wider audience on those proprietary platforms this summer already. On the side of Free operating systems, support for OpenSolaris is coming along nicely, but is not free of bugs yet.

As every Beta, we release this software to gain feedback and to provide a preview of our upcoming technology. When encountering problems during testing, please help us by reporting bugs through KDE's Bugzilla so developers are aware of them and can make the necessary changes. When trying this release you will encounter a number of new things, most of the new features are listed on Techbase, make sure to check out that list and give the next KDE a whirl.

openSUSE 11.0 has been released (screenshots), offering KDE 3.5.9 and an excellent experience of KDE 4.0. There has been a huge collection of changes and additions in this new release. For an overview of the improvements in KDE, see the KDE Sneak Peeks article over at openSUSE News, which features an interview with KDE developer Stephan Binner. He talks about the challenges faced, plans for the future, and what changes you can expect in the upcoming KDE 4.1.
KDE 4.0 The openSUSE 11.0 release includes an installable Live-CD with a SUSE-polished KDE 4.0.4 desktop, while the DVD contains KDE 3.5.9 as well. While many applications such as the openSUSE updater applet (with an optional PackageKit backend) have been ported to KDE 4, not all KDE applications are ported to KDE4 yet. In these cases, KDE3 versions of applications such as Amarok, K3b, KOffice or KNetworkManager (adapted to NetworkManager 0.7) are used, which integrate pretty seamlessly. A native KDE4 NetworkManager plasmoid is in development and will become available via openSUSE Build Service repositories. There has also been a whole horde of Plasma updates and fixes put into the release. As KDE 4.0 doesn’t include KDEPIM (Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer etc.), therefore openSUSE 11.0 includes beta versions of KDEPIM 4.1. These applications work fairly well, and will be updated to final versions via official online update as soon as possible. The online repositories contain many more KDE 4 applications, such as Dragon Player, Okteta, KSystemLog, and Yakuake. Webkitpart is optionally included which makes use of the WebKit part of Qt 4.4. YaST Ported to Qt4 openSUSE's administration and installation tool, YaST, and SaX2 have been ported to Qt4 for this release. This allowed the YaST developers to use CCS-like Qt stylesheets for the installer, giving it a themed look: YaST is now using Oxygen icons to give it an integrated look in KDE 4. KDE 4.1, KDE Four Live While KDE 4.1 did not manage to make it into openSUSE 11.0, its packages will be available via 1-click-install in the openSUSE Build Service. You can track KDE4's development by using the regularly updated KDE 4 snapshot packages. The openSUSE-based KDE Four Live CD will be based on openSUSE 11.0 in future releases.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Improved drag-and-drop of applets, and enhanced usability using the "Panel Controller" in Plasma. Grouping of notifications in the "Notify" Plasmoid, and continued progress in the "NetworkManager" applet. Animations in the "Pager" applet. SuperKaramba integration into Plasma is revived. More work on theming in Amarok 2.0, with the "Current Track" and "Wikipedia" applets re-enabled. A return to work on the Raptor menu. Initial steps toward a "satellite layer" plugin for Marble, with initial support for molecular editing in Kalzium. Copy-and-paste of vocabulary entries in Parley. "Singmaster" moves functionality in Kubrick. Support for searching the database by GPS position, and "fuzzy searches" (using a user-drawn sketch) based on the Haar algorithm (from imgSeek) added to Digikam. A "start page" is added to Gwenview. More functionality added to Beagle KIOSlave. A "quick reply" function is added to Mailody. Kontact gets a plugin for KJots. An import dialog added to assist in migrating from the KDE3 to the KDE4 version of KTorrent. Full support for the Windows platform in KTorrent trunk. Optimisations in the next-generation tile system of Krita. Work on loading ODF presentation notes in KPresenter. KNewStuff2 moves to Goya for handling and displaying items. Support for AIFF and RIFF audio file formats in TagLib. Initial import of Nonogram into playground/games. libkscan replaces libksane in kdegraphics. kdelirc moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Phonon moves from kdelibs to kdesupport, "the never-freezing new home of Phonon". Read the rest of the Digest here.

The KDE Project today announced the eighth alpha release of KOffice 2, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. Work continues in the same vein as before, with a strong focus on finishing and polishing our new features that will set KOffice. This is a work in progress, showing the changes that have been made over the last month by the KOffice developers. Most features that will be part of the final release are present now, and bug reports are welcome for the more stable components.
OpenDocument Improvements

One of the highlights of this release is the work on saving and loading Open Document Format documents, especially for the text shape, thanks to the sponsoring of Girish Ramakrishnan by the Dutch NLNet organisation. Girish has added scores of tests to check for ODF compliancy.

It is also worthy of note that now KOffice is able to load and save images in text and presentation documents. Shapes can now be animated and associated with events such as sounds.

Multiplatform

Importantly, for the first time, KOffice is released simultaneously for the three main platforms: Unix/X11, Windows and Mac OSX. KOffice is the only office suite that is available for all three platforms using a single codebase.

Early testers

While KOffice applications, generally speaking, are not ready for bugs reports, some applications are more ready than others. The developers of KSpread, Krita, Karbon and the report component of Kexi welcome user feedback. The season is open for bug reporting!

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A wordprocessor-like ruler for repositioning and resizing the Plasma panel. Scripting support re-enabled in KRunner. More developments in the NetworkManager Plasma applet. Initial work to allow closer interaction of Plasma with KNotify's popups. Work on theming, Magnatune membership support, and the ClassicView in Amarok 2.0. Work on adding support for plugins to Marble. General work across KDE games, with many new application icons. Work on project management handling and Ruby support in KDevelop. Functional improvements to the Sonnet spellchecking engine. Undo/Redo support in Krone. Exploded pie charts in KChart. The start of work on notes in KPresenter. Scripting support for images in the Kexi "Reports" plugin. A KOffice Flake shape which uses Marble to display a map. A return to work on the Raptor alternative menu. Initial commits for KaffeineGL, and the next-generation tile system of Krita. The start of a vi input mode support is merged into Kate. Winning themes from the first Plasma Theme Contest added to KDE SVN. KsirK and KBreakOut move from kdereview to kdegames, ksaneplugin from kdereview to kdegraphics. Goya moves into kdereview. guidance-power-manager, written using Python (PyKDE), is added to kdereview, for later inclusion in extragear/utils. KSim, KMilo, KLaptopDaemon move to the unmaintained module of KDE SVN. KWorldClock is officially replaced by the world clock applet of Marble. Read the rest of the Digest here.

To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.

Here is the list of available videos, with their original french titles:

• Présentation de KDE 4 by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (207 Mb, 58 minutes) and slides. We also have Aaron Seigo's keynote using the french subtitles, a commercial for KDE 4 and a demonstration.
• Contribuer à KDE, Bienvenue à tous ! by Alexis Ménard, vidéo Ogg Theora (97 Mb, 26 minutes) and slides
• Présentation de Qt by David Faure, vidéo Ogg Theora (210 Mb, 43 minutes) and slides
• Tour d'horizon de CMake by Laurent Montel, vidéo Ogg Theora (140 Mo, 36 minutes) and slides
• Solid: intégration avec le matériel sans utiliser d'aspirine by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (302 Mb, 1h and 3 minutes) and slides
• Plasma: une nouvelle approche du gestionnaire de bureau by Alexis Ménard, vidéo Ogg Theora (112 Mb, 28 minutes) and slides
• Les feuilles de style de Qt by Aurélien Gâteau, vidéo Ogg Theora (201 Mb, 49 minutes) and slides
• Phonon: multimédia facile pour vos applications by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (157 Mb, 39 minutes) and slides
• Guide de contribution à la traduction de KDE by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, vidéo Ogg Theora (87 Mb, 31 minutes) and slides
• Présentation KIO by David Faure, vidéo Ogg Theora (271 Mb, 42 minutes) and slides
• Des logiciels éducatifs dans KDE by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, vidéo Ogg Theora (91 Mb, 28 minutes) and slides

Meanwhile for English speakers Aaron Seigo's talk from LinuxTag KDE 4: Desktop interfaces in a mobile Web 2.0 world is available in video form. And coming up this Sunday is Kubuntu Tutorials Day with IRC talks on Usability, Plasma with Python and more.