I finally decided to move my blog. kdedevelopers.org has served me well, but now I want some more features. Blogger provides some killer features, such as using my own domain, blogging by email, or the powerful comment system. So from now on you'll find my blog at blog.cornelius-schumacher.de. See you there.

Two days of KDE Wiki Meeting are over. Danimo, Frank, Lydia, Dominik, Milian, Thorsten and me met in Berlin with the goal to get some more structure into the KDE Wikis and provide a plan for the future, where to put content. I'm happy to say that we accomplished this mission.

While we have TechBase for high quality technical documentation for a while, and the corresponding UserBase for end-user information since last year's Akademy, we were still missing a proper place for community content, especially for content which is mostly community internal, of more transient
nature, or just not finished yet. The idea to create a dedicated Wiki for this community content was floating around since a while, and now we created it at community.kde.org.

To make it clear which content belongs where, we created a mission statement, which gives clear guidance about which Wiki serves which purpose. You'll find it at wiki.kde.org in a few days. The basic idea is that userbase.kde.org provides end-user information, techbase.kde.org contains high-quality technical content for third party developers, distributors, and system administrators, while community.kde.org acts as a collaboration space for the community.

Actually community.kde.org already existed. It contained the charter of the community working group. But to keep things short and to the point we decided against creating another base, but go with the logical and short community.kde.org domain. The charter of the CWG will find a new home on the KDE e.V. web site.

With the creation of community.kde.org we can also shut down at least two places where community content ended up due to lack of a proper home. We'll shut down the old Wiki, which was available under wiki.kde.org, but whose content wasn't that well maintained, and which didn't fit too well in KDE's infrastructure because of technical reasons. We'll also move all the pages which piled up under the Projects directory on techbase, but in almost all cases didn't really belong there and also didn't match the quality requirements of being polished content targeted at technical people who aren't necessarily familiar with the community. Most of these pages find a proper home on community.kde.org, though.

In addition to the general cleanup and structuring we also worked on some improvements of the existing Mediawiki installation. Danimo replaced the OpenID login UI by a much more usable version, Milian finally managed to get rid of the annoying horizontal scrollbars inside the page on code samples, and we also discussed some more improvements, like the intensified use of templates and the introduction of a way to rate and classify documents on the Wiki to indicate their quality and make it more obvious what needs more work.

As a side track, we had an interesting discussion with some Tiki developers. They have an amazingly powerful and feature rich system, which would
be able to solve some of the problems, we still have with our Wikis, such as translation infrastructure. For now we decided for the sake of consistency and simplicity to stay with the current Mediawiki installation, but maybe Tiki is an option in the future.

Working on the Wikis was fun and satisfying because we got some concrete results, which will simplify maintaining KDE web content in the future. But besides all the work we also didn't forget to relax with a great dinner at a Chinese restaurant at Berlin-Adlershof, enjoying a great buffet, including cheese cake for dessert.

Thanks go to the KDE e.V. and Qt Software for supporting the meeting.

The next three weeks will be pretty busy. I'm looking forward to three exciting events which will take place during this time, and I'm happy to be able to attend them.

Linuxtag

First event is Linuxtag, from June 24th to June 27th in Berlin. I will be there and give a presentation about SUSE Studio as part of the openSUSE Day. We'll also present SUSE Studio at the openSUSE booth as well as other openSUSE goodness.

Linuxtag of course always has been a great place to meet the KDE community as well (I'm thinking for example of this, and that, and that). So I'm looking forward to the KDE related presentations as well, and will certainly also spend some time at the KDE booth.

As a special opportunity, if you want to sign the FLA with KDE e.V., find me and we'll get this done.

KDE Wiki Meeting

Directly after Linuxtag there will be a small KDE Wiki Meeting. We'll sit down and get some content, structure, and technology sorting done, to improve the Wiki presence on techbase.kde.org and userbase.kde.org. I hope we'll also find some time to discuss the idea to create a third Wiki communitybase.kde.org, for holding community content, which currently floats around without a proper home on various different KDE sites. This should be a place for collaboration and for content which is important to the community, but not really relevant for the general public.

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

From July 3rd to July 11th there is the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. This includes Akademy and GUADEC, and will be a fantastic meeting place for everybody working on or caring about free software on the desktop.

We have a great lineup of keynote speakers, a fantastic Akademy conference program, and much more. And of course there is plenty of opportunity to informally meet, discuss, and get some work done. It will be fun.

Marble is one of my favorite applications. I especially like it in combination with OpenStreetmap. Free software and free maps, a brilliant combination. But I also love the historical map or the moon view.

Marble also is great as a demo application. It's easy to grasp and makes an attractive showcase. To make demoing Marble a bit easier I thought it would be nice to have a Marble live CD, and as I happen to have a great application for doing this at hand, I created some Marble live CDs. You can download them from my Marble live CD page.

I'm interested in feedback. So if you have questions, comments or want to help, contact me.

The Akademy program is almost done. Speaker notification deadline was yesterday, but we are still busy sorting out some last details and haven't sent notifications yet. Please bear with us and have a bit more patience. We have a lot of great proposals, more than we can fit into the schedule. So it's not easy to decide what we can take, and the co-hosting with GUADEC adds another dimension of complexity to this task. But we are on a good track, and we will have a fantastic program. Stay tuned...

There are still five days left to submit a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2009. The deadline is on Friday, April 10th. Akademy happens as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year. See more details about what we are looking for in the call for presentations. Akademy is the prime occasion for meeting the community, and present and discuss your ideas. Lots of great initiatives were kick-started at Akademy. Don't miss out on this opportunity and submit your proposal now!

Personally I'm particularly interested three kinds of presentations:

• First I would like to see presentations about the beauty of KDE. KDE 4 shines, and I would love to meet the people who make it shine at Akademy, and hear how they did it, and what we can expect in the future. That's not only limited to beautiful graphics. Elegant code, organic user interfaces, beautiful APIs, engines which enable a beautiful desktop, fluffy-bunny themed Chuck Norris, all this falls under this category.
• Second I would like to hear about projects which go beyond KDE or which serve as a foundation for KDE. The state of X, cross-desktop infrastructure like Akonadi or other freedesktop.org projects, general interesting desktop computing concepts, all this would make great presentations for Akademy and the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in general.
• Third, and that actually might be the most important category, I would really love to have lots of application developers at Akademy, especially the people who stand behind the thousands of "third-party" applications which create the richness of the KDE experience. You might think that your application is not important enough for a big conference like Akademy, but that's not true. All the little tools, which were created to scratch a special itch, they make up for an essential part of the KDE software universe, and they should be represented at Akademy. This also includes all the nice Qt applications, which only use a small or no part of the KDE libraries. They share the same base with every other KDE application, and are a natural fit for the KDE community. So, if you are the author of one of the great applications on kde-apps.org, don't think twice, submit your abstract.

I'm looking forward to a special Akademy in a beautiful surrounding with lots of exciting content. Be part of it, submit a talk.

I'm doing my last preparations for FOSDEM right now. Together with the other SUSE guys I will go to Brussels later today.

On Saturday at 17:00 there will be a presentation about SUSE Studio in the openSUSE Track. Daniel Bornkessel and me will show you how to create openSUSE based software appliances with just a few clicks. As special guests we will have Andrew Wafaa and Jordi Massaguer Pla at the talk. They will tell a bit about what they have done with Studio so far.

We also will show Studio at the openSUSE booth and have some DVDs and USB sticks with us, so you can get your own customized openSUSE live media created there.

I'm looking forward to the event. See you in Brussels.

I'm developing and maintaining a small application called Plutimikation for my daughters. It's a math learning game for children. Today I did a release of the current state as Plutimikation 0.2. It's the second release. The first release was four years ago. It's interesting how tools and infrastructure have evolved since then. Today releasing software is almost fun.

Four years ago I hosted the code in a private Subversion repository and manually built a package for SuSE Linux 9.1, which was the current SUSE version back then.

Today I host the code on Github, and the openSUSE Build Service builds packages for openSUSE 10.2, 10.3, 11.0 and Factory and for SLED. It's amazing how much more easy it has become to develop free software openly and distribute it to the world.

There are some small pieces still missing, though. Getting the source code from github to the build service still involves some manual work. I would prefer to just type in the URL of the git repository in the build service and let the rest be handled automatically. It's just a little bit of code, which is missing here and it could be added easily as the build service is free software. Would be a nice project for a cold winter evening.

The other missing bit is the distribution of the software. SUSE has the fabulous one-click-install mechanism, but apparently it requires some work to create a one-click button I could put on the homepage for Plutimikation. I see no reason why the build service couldn't provide the HTML for such a button automatically. This would probably mean dynamic creation of the ymp file which is used by the one-click-install mechanism and a suitable graphics. Another nice project for cold evenings.

So even, if for perfection there are still some bits and pieces missing, the tool chain for maintaining and releasing software has become incredibly great.

One thing hasn't changed in the four years. I'm still using the KDE 3 platform for Plutimikation. It provides everything what's needed to develop this kind of small application in no time, including stuff like translations. There is not much to be wished for here. That really tells about the quality of the KDE platform.

But the next version of Plutimikation will use KDE 4, so it also gets all the beauty, portability and functionality goodness which other apps already enjoy for a while. I'm looking forward to Plutimikation 0.3.

It's Friday now and hackweek comes to an end for me. It was exceptionally fun and we got some decent work done. The team was fabulous, a combination of SUSE and external community guys. Frank was here for the whole week and worked on the API and the opendesktop.org implementation of it. Sebastian joined us for two days and we had a lot of interesting and useful discussion how to put Nepomuk into the picture, Dirk started to write a Plasmoid for showing the activity log on the desktop, and Zack was here this morning giving us moral support and inspiration. We didn't completely realize the "Social Desktop" yet, but we laid some groundwork. The most visible result currently is this screenshot:

It shows some people from opendesktop.org on my desktop. The interesting bit is the technology behind it, because it uses the Open Collaboration Services API to retrieve the person's data and feeds it into Akonadi which then is queried by the UI.

Obviously there still is a lot to do. The client library for accessing the Open Collaboration Services API has to be extended to cover more of the API, the Akonadi support has to be completed and then of course we need more and better user interfaces. One thing I would like to provide is something like a person widget, which can be used to easily integrate people into applications. It would give access to the community by providing links to related people or could be used for direct communication.

Another thing which I would love to see is an application to view and interact with groups of people, which is a bit more oriented at the people and not so concentrated on the data as current addressbooks are. This could provide a more natural and useful way to interact with all the data about people which is distributed over the desktop and make it easier to keep in touch with people and keep track of what's going on in the different groups you are involved with.

Finally it would be fantastic to solve the problem of multiple data sets of the same person. The more person data we are able to pull in the more frequent you get multiple entries of the same person in your addressbook. We need a way to merge these, so that there is only one entry per person containing the aggregated information. A possible way would be to use Nepomuk for this and there already is some code which could be used to achieve this goal.

I'm looking forward to do more hacking on this project. There are lots of interesting ways this could develop. Let's see where we can go with it...

While browsing through kde-look.org I found a cool idea for visualizing a daily agenda.

This reminds me of the Akonadi architecture diagram and I even have code (probably not up to date) for drawing this kind of diagrams. So I guess it would be doable without too much effort to implement a daily agenda viewer like this. Would be a fun project.