Preface: I’ve started putting a list of Topics (read “tags”) at the top of my blog posts so that planetkde readers can choose whether to continue reading or not at first glance. I’m kind of nice that way. I haven’t figured out how to do it automatically in Wordpress though, without some PHP hacking (I presume). Mere tinkering with the theme doesn’t affect the content that is sent out through feeds.

2009 Q1 is almost over and already life has been showing it’s ugly side. I barely survived this last semester. Entirely my fault, of course. I’m resolved to go over my subjects again this summer break, this time more thoroughly, as I feel I merely skimmed through the whole course this year. Blaming stupendously horrible textbooks is not really an excuse.

That’s not to say the whole quarter was a mess. The N810 was probably the biggest saving grace. Finally getting a real usable desk (and cleaning my room to take advantage of that) was also a bonus. I have been able to work on some of my mini-projects for KDE and Source Mage, like hunting down the cause of an ugly bug in Konsole that affected Yakuake, creating a theme for the Source Mage wiki, etc. My list of pending todo’s is far from empty, though, particularly setting up a Maemo SDK on Suzaku (my desktop). Maybe I should keep a list of accomplished feats for some source of inspiration…

But what made the last two months hell on earth was less technical and more emotional. I’ve come to the conclusion that of all kinds of problems I encounter, I handle emotional stress worst. Emotional baggage brought about by family and personal problems and whiny and insatiable users/people (but probably well-intentioned… I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, I really do) really forced me to wave the flag and walk away for a while. And even begin to ask whether it’s all worth it. Unfortunately, I still don’t have an answer to that.

In the meantime, I’m probably going to try to keep myself busy with activities to avoid thinking “bad stuff”. But I need to be careful, as someone noticed that I easily crash and burn whenever I go into an intense “marathon”. Although at this point, I don’t know how I can keep up with my todo list if I don’t. Up next: Maemo SDK and figuring out how to get Qt and KDE apps on the tablet, Yakuake website (almost ready), reviewing Textpattern for my own site, and starting my own dream Qt/KDE apps.

(Wish me luck… I’ll need it. Lots of it)

2008 was an exciting, if not turbulent, year, personally and FOSS-wise. It was a year of many changes. It started with a bang with the first release of the KDE 4 series on January 11. I’m not going to talk about whether 4.0 was a success or not. History will be the judge of that and, as far as I am concerned, it is already in the past, with KDE 4.2 just around the corner. Needless to say, those were trying times for the KDE community. Big, revolutionary changes, even if they are for the better, ruffles feathers. And some birds squawk louder than others, sometimes unnecessarily.

One good thing that came out of storm was the realization of a need to nurture the community and its members, whether they are developers, contributors, administrators, or end users. Thus, the KDE Community Working Group (of which I am a part of) as well as the KDE Code of Conduct were born. Later on, facilities such as UserBase and the new KDE Forums appeared to answer the growing needs of the community.

Last year also saw the rise of a new generation of mobile computing devices (netbooks, Internet tablets) and a renewed interest in smartphones. Nokia Internet Tablets, Asus Eee PC, HP Mini-note, MSI Wind, the iPhone, and Neo FreeRunner, just to name the most popular ones. And there are a lot of less known but equally powerful and interesting devices out there (a lot coming from Asia). While some are debating whether this is just a passing trend, or whether so-called Linux netbooks actually do more harm than good to Linux and free software, it cannot be argued that these devices have shifted a lot of attention towards mobile software platforms (Maemo, Android, OpenMoko, LiMo, netbook distributions) and the usefulness of Linux on those platforms. It may have also influenced a new lifestyle. The road warrior’s life has just gotten more exciting.

On the personal side of things, 2008 was also a sea of changes. I was able to go back to school for my second degree (Diploma in Computer Science) through a home study/distance education program. It has its ups and (major) downs, but at least I get to study at home for a degree that I’m really interested in. I’ve also gained some more responsibilities in our parish community. This means more things to do, meetings to attend, and people to work with. That’s the easy part. The hardest part for me personally is that I will be dealing a lot with Microsoft Office software and documents. I’m not a purist, but I would rather be using native GNU/Linux free software apps than having to deal with these. Unfortunately, some of the layouting/numbering in MS Word documents makes using OpenOffice.org unreliable.

New roles, new responsibilities, poor time/goal management, and personal procrastination. This meant that a lot of my personal TODO stuff went the way of the tide. High tide or low tide? Depends on the moon. Some got done, other got half-cooked, and at least one got dropped. I was finally able to finish my own C++ studies and reading my Qt book (sadly for me, that same book is now available for free from Qt Software). But of course, reading and doing tutorials is one thing, actually coding is another. Then there are documentation projects that I’ve done for Source Mage GNU/Linux (enough to warrant initiation into their circle of mages) and UserBase, as well as a Yakuake website. Sadly, while those exist, I’ve left them in an unfinished state. Hopefully not for long.

But the greatest casualty for me this year was Kubuntu. Partly because of my schedule, partly because of personal reasons, but mostly because I haven’t really been using Kubuntu as my main distro for almost a year, my contribution and presence in Kubuntu declined severely, to the point that I felt that it was no longer reasonable for me to remain as a Kubuntu member. So I said my goodbyes as I wait for my membership to expire at the end of the month (which also means goodbye to Planet Ubuntu). That said, I promised my friend(s) that I’d still help with the local Ubuntu community whenever possible, to help promote FOSS in general and ensure a KDE presence in the Philippines.

Yes, a lot of changes in 2008. Some good, some bad. Some revolutionary, some evolutionary. Whatever they were, these changes paved the way and laid the foundations for even greater things. Onward to 2009!

And now off I go to take my midterm exam… binary system and assembly language :/

1. KDE UserBase: Together with other members of the CWG, I almost spent a whole week working on the wiki. It was a sort of rush work since we wanted to have a “launching” Friday last week. So far, everything’s looking good. It’s far from complete, of course, specially since it is something that the KDE community would need to build up. I’ll blog about it in more detail next time.

2. UPOU: School’s over!! We finally had our final examinations for the first semester last Saturday. So I spent the whole week before that reviewing. Actually I was practically reviewing only one subject. But I’m tired of whining about the deficiencies of that one subject, so I’ll just be glad that it’s over. Now I can read the supplementary book that I read without pressure of deadlines. I’m looking forward to more interesting subjects next semester (“Computer Organization” and “Data Structures & Algorithms”) and hopefully better teachers.

3. KDE, Source Mage: I got too new e-mail redirects! One from kdemail and one from Source Mage, the latter basically meaning I’m a developer now, much like an ubuntu.com or kubuntu.org email redirect. I guess I have another set of stuff to keep me busy the coming days.

4. Software Freedom Day 2008: Last September 20, , some of my friends from Ubuntu-PH attended one of the SFD celebrations held in Metro Manila (there were other simultaneous gatherings), though not really representing Ubuntu Philippines (I wore my KDE shirt, again ). Two of the SFD celebrations on that day catered to IT students as their primary audiences. IMHO, it was wise to target this sector because these students would be the ones populating the IT industry soon. So it’s best to start them early with Free Software. Here are some pics from the event. Again my apologies for the quality. I am definitely not a photographer. On an unfortunate note, I think there is still some need for more education about free software, even (and probably especially) among those tasked to spread it. One speaker practically labeled “Yahoo! Messenger” as “Free Software”, equating “free software” with “freeware”. I’m just hoping the speaker meant otherwise (they were going back and forth between two groups of people).

5. N810 and Maemo 5: I finally found (thanks to jsgotangco) a local store that sells the device that I’ve been dying to have since last year (wow! it’s almost been a year now). Lo and behold, it costs Php 24,000!! That’s US$ 533, more or less. That is practically the price of a high-end Eee PC or an HP Mininote, basically a Netbook price. And then another blow came to my plans: Maemo 5. All the talk of Maemo 5 goodness and future Qt integration with it makes me want to think twice about getting a N810 now. Not that I have the money to buy one anyway. I still have to figure out a way to raise Php 24,000, hopefully within this lifetime… My sister recommended oDesk.com, but that brings in whole lot of different personal issues.

Long story short: Great past 2 weeks. Busy as hell, but was well worth it. Going to have another busy week or even month ahead. I’m Looking forward to it.

… patches

On the KDE side of things, I was lucky enough last month to have two of my patches committed to svn. The first one is quite an old patch that I made for Konqueror 3.5.x last year and “ported” to Konqueror 4.x. It’s not that big, just a simple patch that adds a checkbox to enable closing a tab by middle-clicking on it, a feature that has been in existence sinde KDE 3.5 but had no GUI configuration. It’s disabled by default for the sake of sanity though.

The other one is a bit bigger code-wise and I definitely did not do it alone (nor could I do it alone). It’s a simple It’s a patch for Konversation that gives an option to add a channel to your auto-join list when you right-click on the channel tab. I needed a lot (and I do mean a lot) of hand-holding for this one, and was basically my first experience in “collaborative” hacking. Thanks a lot Sho for your patience. D

… autostarting

I’m currently trying to write a guide for managing sessions and autostarting apps in KDE 3.5. For the past month it’s been one of the most FAQ in both #kubuntu and #kde that I got tired of repeating the same steps over and over again. So I decided to try to make a central, newbie-friendly guide, combining references from KDE’s docs, as well as possible 3rd-party utilities to automate the task. I’m planning to put it up here, in the KDE user wiki and in Kubuntu’s wiki, with lots of reformatting.

P.S. Dear lazyweb: any suggestions on a fast and painless way of converting HTML to MoinMoin? I’m looking into asciidoc for a “central” format to export to HTML, DocBook, and PDF, but I don’t know if it does MoinMoin (and MediaWiki) too.

… Kubuntu… or Ubuntu rather

I recently had to reformat my laptop’s drive for some reasons and decided to wait until Hardy’s release to reinstall Kubuntu. In the meantime, I installed Ubuntu on it and took it for a few test spins. I must say, I’m impressed (though not as much as to actually switch to GNOME). Ubuntu makes GNOME/GTK+ very pretty and GNU/Linux very easy to use. Part of me wishes Kubuntu were the same, but we have our own road to travel. Eventualy, specially with KDE 4, I believe we can get there very soon. And there’s something about the tidyness/cleanliness of GNOME dialogs that sort of get to me. Dunno… more like an irrational feeling. *shrugs*

… speaking of KDE 4

I recently made the switch to KDE 4. Ok, not fully since I run it as another user and then running my necessary KDE 3 apps as my main user. But, hey, it’s Plasma and KWin 4, so it’s KDE 4. Anyway, I will find myself installing and reinstalling various versions of KDE 4 trunk at least 2 times. I’m currently “auditing” Source Mage’s KDE 4 spells to make sure that we got our dependencies straight. But our spells only track SVN Snapshots and I want to build from trunk, so after that I’m going to build from svn but using kdesvn-build. And if that doesn’t turn out as good as I hope, I’ll go the standard route of doing it by hand.

… and in more personal areas

I may have finally found a sport that I like and really want to invest in. Partially and strangely inspired by anime, and by watching some matches in sports channels, I’ve returned to playing tennis. Since I absolutely dislike basketball (the most common sport here), I’ve been looking for a replacement. Luckily I’ve discovered that I have some neighbors that like to play too. Hopefully this is a start to better health, although I’ve already experienced my first two sports-related injuries in two weeks.

Now I’m off for some “me” time this week, as I need to do a lot of personal stuff like cleaning, rearranging, reprioritizing, etc. A week, or even just a weekend, retreat in a quiet, rustic or mountainous area would be nice. But woe is me, such can only be a dream. Besides… the lure of the intarwebs is soo…. inescapable.

* So I finally submitted my application for UPOU two weeks ago and got their “received your application” e-mail the other day. Now comes the agonizing wait for news whether I get accepted or not. They said they’ll probably have the partial list in the website by the end of March or in April, but I still have to wait for an official parcel before I can enroll.

* My writeup about Dispel, the spell remover part of Sorcery, Source Mage’s powerful BASH-based package manager, is up. With fancy charts!

* Last year I had this plan to write about some of my favorite KDE 3 apps, focusing on how to use them and/or special features that make them wonderful. Procrastinator that I am, I let the idea sleep for a while. And now KDE 4 is here with a brand new set of amazing apps. Aaron has started his own series about falling in love all over again with these apps. So I’m kinda indecisive (no surprise there) whether such writeups about KDE 3 apps are still worthwhile.

* I’m currently in the middle of *trying* (and probably failing miserably) implementing a feature request for Konversation, under the watchful guidance of Eike. It’s my first real attempt at creating (not just copying) a feature in a real-world application. This is me, straight from the pampered world of C++ in books (more on that some other time). The process of trying to figure out how things work, (which, in my work process, is an essential part of figuring out where and how to insert a new feature) is exhilarating, adrenaline-pumping, and frustrating all at once. It’s fun *and* annoying. And I like it! Yeah, I’m crazy that way.

* I was able to buy a book on user interface design, “About Face” (first edition) by Alan Cooper. I think it was a pioneer book in the field of UI Design, dating back 1995. I didn’t expect much from the book at first being old and from “the father of Visual Basic”, but it actually turns out to be very nice and not so Windows-glorifying as I thought it would be. I also learned later that he’s one of the big names in the field of usability. I guess what really made me happy about the book (so far) is that it’s probably the first book I’ve seen where someone is advocating User Interface Design as a discipline/field, a subset of Software Design and distinct from Usability. I’m not sure if that ever came about or whether it is really distinct from Usability as a field. And I think Alan Cooper moved from emphasis on “User Interface Design” to “Interaction Design” in the most recent edition of About Face. As a side note, it’s quite amusing to see how some of his suggestions have been or are being implemented in KDE (or almost everywhere) today.

January was as busy as December was, which didn’t give me much time to settle down after the holidays and do anything substantial, at least by my standards. I didn’t even get the chance to really digest the KDE 4.0 release and subsequent events, such as the KDE 4 release party. I’ve used KDE 4.0 for a few days now, but I’ve returned to 3.5.8 since I’m not sure what use I have for KDE 4.0 right now, or what I can do to help. So in the meantime, I have returned to a relatively problem-free setup.

The last 2-3 weeks have been pretty gruelling, more psychologically/emotionally than physically (but you’d notice that your body sort of “catches up” to your state of mind) and I’ve been treated to a few real-life lessons in dealing with people. I also had my first encounter with MS Office 2007 as well as meeting MS Publisher once more. I’d say that working with Publisher was quite easy, specially for simple purposes. The new ribbon interface in MS Office 2007 was a bit daunting at first though. Luckily, Publisher didn’t have that new UI. The most interesting (and frustrating) experience I had was that a publishing/printing house could get by with just having MS Word and Excel installed on their computers. Not even Adobe Photoshop. Quite intriguing.

In the meantime, I’ve been able to finish my C++ How to Program (Deitel & Deitel) book, although I just sort of skimmed on the last few chapters, unlike my intensive focus on the first ten chapters. I was pretty much disappointed by the quality of the material near the end. There were very obvious errata and it felt as if the last 10 or so chapters were written a bit hurriedly or, in this case, probably not fully revised (since this is the 5th edition). For a book that aims to be a classroom textbook, that’s a bit unfortunate. Anyway, I think I’ve gotten enough C++ to be able comfortably start learning Qt. This puts me one step closer to KDE and world konquest.

Hopefully the coming days will be better.

The second is my third (lame?) attempt at some “seasonal” KDE artwork:

(Note: “Lumaya” means “Be Free”; “Atin ito” means “This is ours”)

Congratulations to the KDE community, developers, translators, volunteers, contributors! KDE 4.0 is finally out the door. The foundations have been laid, and now everyone can put their efforts in building the vision of KDE 4 on it (as well as partly cleaning up that other, well-built building, KDE 3.5). The road to KDE 4 was a bit rough, and the road ahead might still be, but it stretch far and wide. So good luck to everyone involved!

Maybe this year, I’ll earn my KDE wings and fly!

(KDE 4 Packages available in Kubuntu and Source Mage)