So, after Saturday's FOSDEM KDE Group Picture, perhaps it's now time to give a slightly fuller account of FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures). Since most of my pictures from the main tracks were too blurry anyway, I'll just focus on some of my pictures related to the KDE FOSDEM 2008 presence (leaving out some pics of individual persons and overview shots). Photos have only been resized and cropped where somewhat appropriate. Perhaps to do for next year: buy a lens which captures more light, or a bigger flashlight (Shooting at ISO 1600 is rather noisy )

Let's start with a picture of the KDE stand, featuring Adriaan and his fancy box (btw Adriaan, another piece of consumer electronics that people willingly pose with would be the OLPC).

The first KDE talk was by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen about Amarok 2, and introduced a live mascote for Amarok. I noted that Amarok 2 really should try to get the ability to download and manage live performances and other music available from the Internet Archive. Let's hope they try that again (given that he actually looked into it already).

The following talk was by me about KOffice 2, but since I did that talk myself, I don't have pictures of that I was followed by Sebastian Trüg talking about Nepomuk. I could really have used his proposed feature of using FOSDEM speaker information to find mails from them

Knut Yrvin then talked about Free Software in telecom. Not only did he pass around a Greenphone (unfortunately no decent pics of that), but he also gave away a free book to the first person in the audience that could answer a tough question about what code TT GPLed at some point last year. It was so hard that he had to ask an easier question to be able to give away the book

Unfortunately I had to miss most of Holger Schröder's KDE on Windows in order to meet someone, but I was still able to snap some pictures of him in action (actually I made more decent pictures of him than of most other speakers, intriguingly enough).

The last talk on Saturday was done by Josef Spillner. He talked about multiplayer gaming for KDE4 games, which apparently exists already even though the functionality is hidden somewhat. I can't really check that because I don't actually compile KDE4 games, but it's still interesting to know about.

The first talk on Sunday morning (way too early for my taste ) in the Crossdesktop room was done by the dynamic duo Simon Peter and Kurt Pfeifle (Simon doing the talking, and Kurt demonstrating Klik on his laptop/the projector while Simon discussed it, very nice interaction). They talked about Klik (2). I guess their target audience was me, because they showed a Klik error dialog about Krita not working

Unfortunately I had to leave early during their Q&A session, because I wanted to see part of the Xen main track talk. I arrived late, and the room was completely packed and rather hot. So instead of staying in that room for the next talk about VirtualBox, I left in the break to go to the other main track about build tools, just in time for the SCons talk. (I was planning to meet a friend of mine during the CMake talk anyway, so now I just met him slightly earlier.) It was a lot less crowded there, and even a bit too cold (but that might've been because there was a draught). While I moved rooms, I was still able to quickly make a picture of the questions section of Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kuegler's talk on KDE4.

After the CMake talk I had to leave early again (and miss the next devroom talk), because we had a small meeting on the grass field next to the devroom about the upcoming aKademy 2008 in Belgium. That meeting finished just in time to catch another talk by Knut Yrvin, this time on Free Software in Education (he gave a total of 3 devroom talks, but his other talk about Free Software and phones was scheduled at the same time as the Klik one). No free books this time, but he did tell us about how teaching young kids how to use an office suite is a bad idea. I guess Inge won't like the sound of that

After the main track CMake talk by Bill Hoffman, we also had our own version of a CMake talk, this time by Alexander Neundorf. I guess I should really try if that excluding of unit tests also works with the Krita unit tests, since that does sound like a nice feature to use. Bill attended the talk as well, and gave a free CMake book to a happily surprised Peter Rockai (mornfall) during the questions section, after Peter asked a question about integrating Java in CMake projects.

After that, we first had Øyvind Kolås (pippin) talking a bit about GEGL (we had to switch his talk and the Deb Packaging Jam, unfortunately). It seems that the current development version of Gimp has a checkbox in the main GUI to 'Enable GEGL', which is rather interesting (amongst other things, it provides them with live previewing of filters, a feature the current Krita development version has as well, and which I also demonstrated the day before). As seems to be typical with talks by pippin, he used a custom presentation interface to do his presentation (this time it appeared to be a graphically 'enhanced' file system browser )

Following that I had another scheduling conflict: there was both the Deb talk, and another Klik talk (this time as a main track). I resolved it by quickly visiting Simon and Kurt to take a picture, and then go back to the Crossdesktop room where Jonathan Riddell explained us all about making Debian Packages. He did this by using the rather amusing example of packaging the GNU Hello World program.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances, we had to cancel the last devroom talk, so no pictures from that. After that, I hung around a bit with mornfall and Pino Toscano (who doesn't like me taking pictures of him, yet is on the group picture ). After Holger talked a bit with us, FOSDEM 2008 was unfortunately over already. Let's hope next year's FOSDEM will be at least as good as this one

PS: I bought a Debian T-Shirt at FOSDEM, I guess that makes up for my rant about them I actually wanted to buy one last year already, but they were sold out then. I made sure to buy one on Saturday this year, and indeed they still had some (FYI: like said in the comments there, that issue has been temporarily fixed in their kernels now. I tested it, and it indeed works, yay ) (And generally speaking, I really like Debian, and that's mainly why I get angry at it sometimes: I care about it)

Edit/PS 2: Seems like Jonathan Riddell put up all of my KDE related FOSDEM pictures on his Flickr account, so now you can have a more extensive view of them

So, not only is it FOSDEM this weekend, I also organized a group photo for the KDE related people who are here. We went to the small field of grass in front of the KDE devroom. Luckily, the sun just started breaking through the clouds, so there was nice lighting (unfortunately I forgot to switch my ISO back from 1600, so it's a bit noisy nonetheless).
Here's a very small version (WiFi is a bit slow here, so no big version yet)

Just so that you won't all forget: next weekend there's FOSDEM in Brussels. You can find the complete schedule in a handy grid layout here. For KDE people, I guess the most interesting non-main track talks could be those in the KDE devroom and the Crossdesktop devroom.

Due to reasons beyond my control, I find myself yet again doing a talk in the KDE devroom about KOffice 2 (the original speaker is unfortunately unable to come). I hope you'll enjoy it (for those keeping track: I'm a big fan of LaTeX-beamer for making presentations, though the brainstorming plans I saw for KPresenter2 might make that appealing for me as well in the future).

For the KDE and GNOME people attending: we'll be doing KDE Group Photo on Saturday noon (presumably followed up with a picture together with the GNOME people, if they come: it's not advertised on their track's schedule), it might be fun if you'd drop by!

Edit: this one is for pino: *hug*

So, given that I'd be on a holiday next week, I thought it would've been a good idea to do an upgrade of my Debian install on my laptop, in the hope that it'd use less power. The good news was that it seemed like it did, with slightly lower temperature (I guess due to tickless timer on AMD64 in the 2.6.24 kernel). The bad news was that I couldn't even try to quantify it at all: all my battery-measuring tools wouldn't work at all anymore. In particular, no KDE Battery Systray icon anymore, leaving me without any indication at all about how much battery I have left. Hoping it'd be just a KDE update fluke, I checked my other favourite power-related tool, powertop. Unfortunately it also failed to show any relevant information about power usage...

I must say, it's real fun to lose the ability to see your battery status a few days before you leave on a holiday. Particularly funny, given that at the same day that I discover this, I read a post on the planet about some people getting double battery information.

Which of course pointed me directly to the most likely cause: a change in the kernel. Some googling later, it turns out that, once again, I am pretty angry at the Debian people. It seems like they switched to the new way of doing this kind of stuff, sysfs style. Unfortunately, they completely disabled the legacy support for the procfs way of measuring things, leaving all applications that use the old way in the cold.

Now, you'd think that once you'd point this out, the Debian people would try to fix this post-hase. But nooooh!, apparently having people's applications and systems become useless and being userfriendly is less important to the Debian kernel maintainers than keeping their kernels clean of 'deprecated' /proc entries...

So, how do we fix this? I just wasted my time making my own debian kernel package. In particular, in the make menuconfig, go to
Power management options --->
ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) Support --->
And then just enable
[*] Deprecated power /proc/acpi folders
(If you're particularly pissed, you could perhaps take it out by disabling [ ] Future power /sys interface...)

Luckily the walkthrough was clear enough, except that the package's name prefix had slightly changed. I just had to issue a dpkg --install ../linux-image-2.6.24_Custom.DebianFuckwits.0_amd64.deb to install the kernel, and then edit my grub file manually (bah!).

After a reboot, I had restored full usability of my power-measuring tools. Turns out my laptop seems to have an increased power use. No idea why, but at least now I actually know it is the case.

Anyway, this isn't doing pretty well in trying to prove to other people that Linux is decent to use. In particular, one of my colleagues pointed out to me that this is exactly the kind of crap (noting something doesn't work, wasting time googling for the problem, hoping someone else has described a fix, trying to apply the fix) he is so happy to have left behind him by switching to OS X...

While idly browsing through Wikipedia, I came across something very cool: the McGurk effect. Just read the Wikipedia page, and try it out with the linked YouTube video. I found the effect rather weird to experience (You can watch YouTube without creepy Flash plugins using ffplay/mplayer and the Konqueror YouTube servicemenu. The HTML for the YouTube site apparently got changed recently, so you'll have to manually patch the servicemenu script according to the last comment in that page).

I want to bring to your attention the fact that the deadline for scheduling FOSDEM's devrooms is coming up soon. There are as of yet only very few talks proposed, I'd like to see some more ideas! We'll be sharing the room with the GNOME people on Sunday, where we'll have some talks that will be related to issues that are interesting to both of our audiences. That also means that if we don't have enough KDE talks, they'll easily fill in the gap for us
So, hurry up and add a talk proposal on KDE's FOSDEM Wiki Page (or mail me, or query me on IRC). More information about KDE's FOSDEM presence on the dot article.

Once again, there's a wonderful treat for people who want to take a look outside at night. Less than a year ago, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to see comet McNaught with the naked eye. This time, it is comet Holmes giving us a surprise show by suddenly brightening! More details are all over the net, like here.

Just like last time, the weather in Belgium sucked these past few days. Today the clouds finally opened somewhat at night (not completely, but still), so it was only a few moments ago that I was able to have a real look. And I was once again not disappointed at all. I was able to see the little fuzzy bulb with the naked eye just fine. Looking at it through binoculars is pretty amazing, even though it does look more like a blob rather than the stereotypical head-with-long-tail. If you're near the northern hemisphere, you might want to try and have a look as well.

As for the final KDE-hook: it appears the comet is also findable in everybody's favourite KDE-Edu application KStars, so if you can't figure out where the comet can be found by use of the sky charts in the above links, you could try to find it using KStars

So, Akademy 2008 will be in Belgium! Yay \o/ ! Some of you might have known this already if you'd have read the planet closely (troy leaked it already...), but still I'm terribly excited to be able to say it officially After all, I've been asking about Akademy (the yearly KDE Developer's Conference+Hacking/BoF sessions+eV General Assembly) coming to Belgium for like 4 years already... The location will be the De Nayer Institute in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, and the pictures I saw of the building we'll be in look pretty awesome.

I don't know about you, but there's this hugely annoying behaviour of QDockWidgets. Since Krita 2 uses them, I tend to run into it a lot. The symptoms are simple: if you have a floating dock widget and Krita loses focus, the dock widget gets hidden.

Sounds like a rather silly annoyance, you might think. I'd agree with you, if not for the fact that I run into this all the time. Not only that, but I can actually provide a plausible scenario that would make using some configurations of KDE4/Krita2 impossible to work with.

My personal annoyance is because of my Krita coding workflow. Often I break some feature, and then debug it with gdb. What I do is sparkle some breakpoints around Krita, and let Krita run into them. Since I have plenty of screen space, I scale my Krita window so that it fits in the top half of my screen. That way, I can trick Krita into triggering a breakpoint, and see gdb breaking on the bottom of my screen.

So far so good. But if I now transfer focus to my gdb, the unplugged dockwidgets suddenly disappear, while my Krita window stays there.

'Ok', you say, 'but I don't debug like that!' Sure, but you might run into it anyway, as a user! Maybe you like focus-follows-mouse. And perhaps you like to style your Krita like the GIMP (don't laugh, some people like this) by undocking the tool docker. This combination is, unfortunately, impossible at the moment.

This afternoon, I finally got so fed up with it, that I decided to try and fix it, at least for myself. After wasting a time figuring out exactly what was going wrong, I came up with 3 possible fix vectors. The first one was looking into KWin, as I am still unsure if this is a Qt bug, or a KWin bug (I'm betting Qt, since it's always easier to blame ). Since my Kate was already filled with Qt4.3 source files, I decided to stick with fixing Qt.

The second possible fix was changing the isTransient function, forcing windows with a Qt::Tool windowtype to not be transient. This worked, but had the silly side-effect of adding my dock widgets in Kicker's window list.

Leading me to the third and final fix of forcing the window type of dock widgets to not be of the 'utility' type. This doesn't have the previous silly side effect. As a bonus, though, the dock widgets are listed in Alt+Tab, just the way I like it! (This has the minor silly issue of labeling the window in Alt+Tab as '&Tool Options', but I can live with that .)

This is the patch (against an ancient svn revision of qt-copy 4.3.0, which is kinda outdated) (the 'tt' tag seems to lose indending spaces, weirdly enough, but I'm not willing to use nonbreakable spaces here; probably looking in the HTML source will give you the right formatting):

Index: gui/kernel/qwidget_x11.cpp
===================================================================
--- gui/kernel/qwidget_x11.cpp (revision 671344)
+++ gui/kernel/qwidget_x11.cpp (working copy)
@@ -563,7 +563,8 @@
net_wintypes[curr_wintype++] = ATOM(_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_TOOLBAR);
} else if (type == Qt::Tool || type == Qt::Drawer) {
// utility netwm type
- net_wintypes[curr_wintype++] = ATOM(_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY);
+ if (!q->inherits("QDockWidget"))
+ net_wintypes[curr_wintype++] = ATOM(_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_UTILITY);
}

if (dialog) // dialog netwm type

The reason I'm posting this here instead of bugging TT, is that I'm actually quite sure this behaviour is intended: the detached toolbars already behaved liked this, even in Qt3.x. But since I don't detach regular toolbars, that never annoyed me. For those that are annoyed by it, though, this could be a place to fix it for you, too. Also not that I can give no assurances that this fix is actually correct! I have absolutely no knowledge at all about windowmanager specs and so on, so this might as well break your system (Unlikely, but one never knows...)

There are other things I hate about my KDE4 install atm. The most hateful one is the 'Temporary KColorScheme change' by Matthew Woehlke, but at least there I know which patch causes it

Sometimes KDE makes me want to cry out of frustration (like tonight, because of Qt using select(2) instead of poll(2), breaking my akregator), but sometimes it just fills me with so much joy that I could also cry =) Like just now, when someone came in #koffice to ask if he could somehow print his presentation notes that he put in KPresenter. Unfortunately, I did not know how to do that (quite likely it's just not possible), but it took me just a few minutes tinkering around with DCOP (yes, people still use KDE3.5 technology for work ) to make a tiny script that just prints out all your notes!

Of course, the person already copypasted all his notes manually, but for posterity I hereby present my small shellscript: kpresenternotes. Have fun with it (or not ).

Example output:
$ ./kspreadnotes.sh
The notes of page 0 are:
Ladielala
Notes for slide 1
The notes of page 1 are:
Having some notes fun on slide 2
Done