Note: This started out as a comment on one of the Digest stories on the Dot, but I know not many people will read it there, and thought this blog a more appropriate venue than the Digest introduction section!

With the end of the year approaching, many of us are in a reflective mood, including myself.
So I decided to dust off my blog (for this limited time only!) to address the passionate, emotional and other comments about the state of my publication, the KDE Commit-Digest.

As I wrote in the first Digest after my return:
"For many reasons (like important "real-life" work and including the simple desire for a rest), the Digest has not been published for many weeks now. My plan to get up to date with current commits is to publish the weekly editions as usual on an accelerated schedule, but with no introductory content (as seen in the section above)..."

I decided that these "shorter editions" (actually, they only miss the exclusive introductory content and some extra statistics) to catch up are the best option out of the range of less-than-ideal options. It would have been much easier for me to not spend my last couple of days on these Digests, but I wouldn't do that - an unbroken history of KDE development is important to me (and you'll thank me in 5 years!). But I do wish that my decision, which was clearly explained, was not second-guessed in comments on the subsequent Digests.

I also requested that KDE developers contact me with news of their current development work. I got one email.
All the introduction features you see in every Digest issue are a result of extensive behind-the-scenes chasing by me: only extremely rarely are they "unsolicited" (usually a negative term, but i'd love to receive these kinds of emails!) as a result of an initiative of the stakeholders (aka. developers and contributors) themselves. This is something I have experienced elsewhere, with my battles to produce the quarterly (which due to lack of input seems to be now morphing into a twice-annually) report for the KDE e.V.

I don't know the reasons why we, as a community, are so reluctant to step up and introduce, announce, and celebrate our developments and progress... perhaps it is shyness, modesty, or because it could be seen as an inconvenient and time-consuming "extra" that takes time away from development. But I do know that it is a critical problem for a publication such as the Digest - and very time consuming and energy sucking for me to repeatedly chase after people and juggle the "deadline". This is a significant hidden reason behind many of the delays to the Digest (indeed, I ran out of content at the same time as I took a break), and you can see from my speedy Digest production speed of the last few days just how long this seemingly-small part of the Digest actually requires.

This really needs to change for the long-term sustainability of not only the Digest, but also the KDE project.

Many will say that an effort such as the Commit-Digest is too much for one person, and you are almost certainly correct. It is a satisfying job, but extremely demanding, not just of time, but also of perseverance - take a week off, and you'll soon know about it! But understand that changing the production model to a distributed collective of people would probably take even more of my time purely in organisation!

I will step down when I feel the time is right, and when a system is in place to continue the publication. Naturally, it will probably be me who creates this collaborative system - and that's ok - but i'm busy, and I don't have time at the moment.

Of course, nothing lasts forever: I am aware that I won't be doing the Digest forever. But when it is time for me to step down (which will be both sad, and at the same time, a relief!), I will try my best to leave it in capable hands to continue the work that I have been (and continue to be!) proud of.

With my essay complete, I hope I have explained the current situation, and welcome a discussion in the comments (and I appreciate the small handful of people who contacted me privately by email offering their assistance... i'll make an announcement at the appropriate time somewhere in the future when positions are open!).

On a personal note: though a year is always long enough to contain both ups and downs, 2008 was an amazing year for me overall. Have a great new year everyone!

For the last few days, I have been busy implementing translation support for the KDE Commit-Digest. Both the website and the actual digest introduction are now able to be translated and displayed in other languages. Translating the digest introduction every week is a much bigger undertaking than a one-off translation of the website, and so only for the hardcore.

Right now, thanks to the following people, the site is available in 4 languages (excluding English):

• Italian: Leonardo Cassarani (emc2[]) and Pino Toscano (pino)
• Slovenian: Jure Repinc (JLP)
• Dutch: Rinse de Vries (rinse)
• German: Carsten Niehaus (carsten) and Martin Pfeiffer (hubipete)

(To make a permanent selection from the (soon to be increasing? ) languages, use the Options panel)

Which I think is pretty nifty. But, of course, that is not too impressive considering the variety of languages that KDE is available in .

So, if you are able to translate the Commit-Digest website to be available in your language, get in touch (email, #digest on IRC, or midnight arrival at my house? ), and i'll walk you through the proceedure. This fun activity should only take about 45 minutes, and you'll be credited on the translation page that i'm about to make.

And I'll have more announcements shortly

So, it is that time of the week again... commit-digest time!
Read the latest issue here

This week, I have enhanced the commit-digest.org site quite a bit (though I am certainly not finished) - now there are actually links in the sidebar, so it is now a functional random strip of blue, and I have implemented the options page that I always wanted. This means that you can now modify how the digest looks in your browser, for example, if you don't like the italic quotes, change to regular. And if you want the sections to be a bit more defined, turn on "highlight headers". These are all features that have been requested, so hopefully at least Pino will be happy

I've also extended the archive by adding another 32 digests, extending back to 3rd January 2003. I still have a lot of work to do on the archive, as it doesn't even have entries for all the digests that existed yet. But it it moving ahead. I need to think about how I am going to extract and then represent the information from the CVS days, as webcvs is now offline... i'll be adding all the introduction segments from the digests to the archives first, as they are the most interesting to the casual reader.

Enjoy the latest digest, and don't forget to leave any comments at this dot story!

p.s. To be notified at the exact moment each new digest goes online, subscribe to this RSS feed.

The KDE Commit-Digest, written by Derek Kite for many, many issues is back... only this time, i'm producing it

So, here is the first issue of my new digest: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2006-04-09/

It is from last Sunday (yes, it is 2 days late, but what is 2 days after 6 months? ) On the positive side, that means you only have 5 days to wait to the next issue - which will be better, I promise It might even have

If you go to http://commit-digest.org/archive, you can find the issues written by Derek - the archives are currently incomplete, but should be finished by this Sunday.

The people I need to thank are: Pino, for listening to the result of my poor PHP and HTML skills, Paleo for hosting my website projects and of course, Derek, for firstly bringing us the digest for so many weeks, and for answering my questions about the digest production process.

Things learnt so far: that my time predictions are too optimistic, and that perl is unreadable

Anyway, please leave any comments/suggestions in the comments section on the dot story (keeping in mind that this first issue is not an example of the completeness of the next issues!).

I have now extended a certain myscreen feature kde-wide... buzz ratings!
Check the charts at http://myscreen.org/buzz

As this is the first calculation, naturally the "change" indicator is flat - however, I will probably run the calculation once a day.

Now, to stop everyone asking me how they are calculated, here is what I have written on the FAQ page:

"...a number of sources, including commit activity, mentions on webpages, and short-term news and discussion. Each source is weighted based on overall importance and influence on "buzz", then added together to produce the buzz rating."

If I have left you or your application out, it wasn't really on purpose - if you want to be added to the charts, find me on IRC.

More to come soon.

So, by writing now I am keeping my last promise that my next entry would be about the project that I have been working on. However, maybe I should have written earlier than exactly 2 months later.

Anyway, as the title of this entry says, my project is myscreen.org - an interactive way to watch various KDE people work and play. As of this entry, there are 14 people from all areas of KDE. As well as viewing the screen of the user, you can also view stats about them, which are also updated live.

The map at http://myscreen.org shows all the users on the site - the red dots are people who are active at this very moment! Some people are more active than others, but you can bet that whenever I am at my computer, I am active at http://myscreen.org/dannya

That's enough about the site for now, I think

Also, for you superkaramba users, there is now an applet available now, so you can watch us from your desktop. Grab it here: http://myscreen.org/applet

Oh yes - and if seele asks you to complete a survey in #kde-devel, help our usability people out and say "Yes!"

More soon...

Some of you may now have guessed the project that I hinted at in my last entry. Well, I am not going to talk about that this time (I will in my next entry, I promise!), other than to say that it is running fine after switching servers - sorry for using so much of your traffic allocation, cmk!

Working for the past few months with in kde-edu with Albert (of KPDF fame), we have been creating a new educational game for KDE, called KSimon.

KSimon is a clone of the electronic "Simon" game that many of you may remember from the late 70's. The gameplay consists of ever-increasing sequences of lights appearing, which you must re-enter in the correct order. We think it is a lot of fun

As we believe that KSimon is now a fully-functional, ready-to-be-released app, we invite you to test it (yes, software testing can sometimes be fun!). KSimon is currently located at kdereview/ksimon.

Enjoy, and don't forget to tell us what you think in #kde-edu!

Finally time to write a first entry.

There have been so many things to do lately, which means that I won't get bored - though my head may explode

Within KDE, I work with the kde-edu project. I also created the monochrome iconset for KDE 3.4

In the kde-edu realm, nice things are happening. KSimon and Kanagram are getting to a nice stage, and we hope to get them into KDE 3.5 - for those that have tried KSimon, do you think it should be in kde-edu, or kde-games?

I felt the effects of yesterday's plasma slashdotting, the second link of that submission linking to my mockups. As cmk generously hosts various things for me, his site (kde-forum.org) was also taken down. I feel bad about that

It seems that I will have to use bittorrent for the plasma *video* that I am preparing.

Also hosted at that server is a project that I am working on, that I hope to show you all very soon. Though this situation has slightly put back my plans, I am now back in business

p.s. Enjoy your holiday annma, you deserve it!