Near where I live there's a pond. Actually it is right outside of my living room. In this pond there used to be many a goldfish. Until this week.

Last Monday a sneaky thief landed in the middle of our lawn and proceeded to carefully tiptoe in the direction of the pond. This thief was a great blue heron. It took about six steps before it noticed that there were two people with big astonished eyes sitting in the house. With every step in our direction, the long black feathers on the back of its head flayed to and fro. But once it had seen us, the heron decided we might interfere with his fishing trip and flew away.

Yesterday, a big white circle of heron excrement showed us that he had been back during the day to metabolize some goldfish. Also, we saw him flying low over our house at about seven in the evening.

And today, the day where many a geek was sitting behind his computer screen in anticipation of a hardy heron, we were again surprised at breakfast by a sneaky heron (hardy is hardly the right word). This time he landed, looked around for five seconds, spotted us and flew off again.

We put a net over our pond, but I think we're out of fish already.

Google Summer of Code has started taking student proposals. This year Strigi is joining the KDE project in Google Summer of Code again. For students looking for a nice project in information technology in the true sense of the word, Strigi is the project to join.

Last year we had a great project by Alexandr Goncearenco which resulted in giving Strigi the ability to extract information from a plethora of chemical datatypes.
You can read all about his work in his blog.

This year, there are many possibilities to do great work. Here is a list of suggestions.

KDE4 Search program using Xesam

Strigi is part of the Xesam project which also includes Beagle, Tracker and Pinot. Because we now have a unified query language, we can have one search client that is a front-end to all of these search clients. It would be important to let this client integrate well with the KDE4 desktop.

Live search in Plasma

Wouldn't you like to have a plasma widget that you can give a Xesam query and which will stay up to date? It could show the last emails you received or your most popular songs. Or the latest pictures of your cat.

Integration of Strigi into K*

Take your favourite KDE application and make it completely Strigi-aware. This means: make sure the file types it produces can be read by Strigi and add a search box to the program in the relevant places.

More suggestions can be found here.
Of course you are more than welcome to come up with your own ideas too. But hurry up, the deadline is approaching.

Today we are helping novice KDE users to log out of KDE 4. Logging out of KDE 4 is nowhere near as hard as with some other popular programs. Here you do not need esoteric keyboard commands like '<esc>:q!' or 'ctrl-X followed by ctrl-c'. In KDE 4 you can easily log out by using your mouse.

Stop 1: move you mouse to the bottom left of your desktop and click on the picture of the K in the cogwheel.

Stop 2: Now you see the 'kickoff menu'. From here you can start programs. But you can also stop using KDE. Move your mouse the the button labelled 'Leave'.

Stop 3: Hmm, that thing called 'Leave' was not really a button. Clicking does not help you, but simply hovering (moving your mouse over it) does help. By doing that, you unlock a new batch of buttons. And there are many of them too. Such a plethora of choice: there are various degrees of 'stopping with KDE'. You can choose between:

Logout

This means: stop all programs and stop KDE but do not stop the computer.

Lock

This means: keep all programs running and stop other people from using this computer.

Switch user

This means: let someone else use the computer while your programs keep running in the background.

Shutdown

This means: turn off the computer.

Restart

This means: turn off the computer and start it again immediately. What the computer does when it restarts depends on how you installed it.

Stop 4: We decide we want to 'Logout' so we move the mouse to the button 'Logout'. You can press it. It really is a button.

Stop 5: Now your screen becomes gray and a single window stands out in the middle. Are we logged out now? No we're not. Not for another 58 seconds. You can check this from the countdown on the bottom of the window. If you want to experience the full satisfaction of logging out click 'Logout' once more.

Goodbye! Come back quickly!

When logging out of your desktop session, you want all programs to shut down quickly. Strigi is one of the programs that can linger while it is analyzing a file. I've done some work to improve this latency and have measured the current latency after some improvements to analyzers that can potentially take long on some files.

Here is a graph with the analyzer latencies of my current version:

You can see that there is a 5% chance that stopping an analysis takes more than one second.

This graph is just an example. Regardless of statistics, it should never take more than one second to shutdown an analysis. So I'm going to try to eliminate all delays longer than one second. Detecting the delays can be done with a simple assert(timeSinceLastCheckpoint() < 1) in the checkpoint function. Finding which analyzer should do more checkpointing might be a bit harder.

What a surprise we had today! A coworker came to my desk and told me 'Guess what Nokia has done.' I thought for a bit and tried to infer Nokia's move from my colleagues demeanor. 'They decided to use Windows mobile on their telephones.' was my guess. As you all know by now, the right answer was much more interesting and much less gloomy.

So what will Nokia do with Qt? Many people are worrying about the Nokia's commitment to Trolltech's products. This huge move (for us and for Nokia) certainly requires some analysis. Let's have a look at what Nokia is saying. This image is from their press release:

source

What is clear from this image is that Nokia will use Qt for their business phones and for the accompanying desktop applications. Nokia is planning to release software for the Linux desktop. And they are planning on using Qt (apparently not Qtopia) on their Series 40 and Series 60 smartphones.

But will allow Trolltech to continue to release brilliant Qt versions? This is what they say:

• The acquisition supports Trolltech's company vision of driving Qt adoption in the commercial and open source markets (Qt Everywhere).
• Trolltech has benefited greatly from the feedback the community has been providing while using Qt to develop free software. We respect the symbiotic relationship Qt has with the community and we wish to continue and enhance this relationship.

source (emphasis mine)

According to these quotes and the emphasis in the image, things are looking good from the Nokia side. It seems very likely that the market (IPhone, OpenMoko, Android, Windows Mobile) has forced Nokia to embrace a more open development strategy. Nokia has tried to build a developer community in Maemo. This has worked really well considering how young the project is. Of course they partly built upon the popularity and developer pool of GNOME. But Maemo is not nearly big enough to take on the world of smartphone software: the IPhone is a locked down machine without an SDK and it has more 3rd party applications than Maemo!

Nokia seems to have seen this too and they have decided to buy a project which has been selling itself as the perfect developer environment: the K Development Environment. Of course they cannot buy KDE outright, so they bought Trolltech.

So how do we feel about being bought? Personally, I feel pretty safe. We have a good contract with Trolltech which ensures that Qt, the basis for our project, will remain Free Software for ever. And at the same time, Nokia is (probably) giving us the opportunity to deploy our work on tens to hundreds of millions of computers and smartphones. Computers and smartphones on which people do not necessarily expect to find Windows XP or Vista.

So where will this leave Jambi? S60 supports java development via Eclipse, so Jambi might actually be a key technology in the eyes of Nokia, although Jambi is not J2ME MIDP compatible.

And while I'd love Nokia to give me KDE4 on my N800, that is not something they will be providing. Which is fine with me, because I like Maemo.

The big message today is that the power of Free Software is growing. Even if Nokia puts a closed source version of Qt on their machines, it is unlikely that they will close off their machines to our software. If they did that, the KDE project would take a huge publicity hit and so would Nokia. Right now, people are skeptical about both Android and Nokia and OpenMoko is being delayed again and again. Nokia can use Qt to build a healthy ecosystem where Free and proprietary software can thrive. Let's hope they will.

I wish the Nokia Trolls all the best!

Yesterday we had an IRC meeting to plan our activities on Strigi for the near future. It was good to have an IRC meeting again after having been practically offline for over two months.

We put a status document online. Don't read too much into it, we were focussing on the work we can do next. We came up with a planning that I posted on our mailing list.

While browsing the other planets, I came across a nice little KDE 4.0.0 review from a longtime KDE user.

And because I did not see Sebastian Trueg's blog post on this planet, I'm linking it here: Soprano 2.0 has been released!

Today at work, a new building was opened. To celebrate the happy event, Hugo Rietveld came to open the building. To do this, he needed keys and these were brought to him by a barn owl (church owl in dutch). The bird flew through the cafetaria and landed in front of Mr Rietveld with the keys.

But the relatively small barn owl was not the only owl present. There was also a specimen of the largest european owl: the eagle-owl. This is an enormous bird. And this bird too flew across the room. It almost touched my head as it aimed for the small mouse that was held up for it at the other end of the room.

Both of these birds are from the same order: the strigiformes (owl), the bird that gives Strigi its name.

I consider this event on the day of the KDE4 release a wonderful omen. KDE4 has been released and Strigi is flying!

The owls came from the medieval shop and owl center Dragonheart.
They are really wonderful creatures and it was great experience to see these animals up close.

Today Dutch parliament discussed plans of the ministry of Economic Affairs to encourage Free and Open Source Software in government. All major parties seem to understand the issues. Even news agencies are talking about 'vrije software' which is the right term ('Vrije' means 'free as in freedom').

It took five years for Economic Affairs to answer to a parliamentary request to do this. In the meantime, the (previous) government supported the attempted European legalization of software patents despite the wishes of parliament.

Like many KDE application, strigidaemon uses DBus to talk to other programs. Debugging inter-process communication is never very convenient and strigidaemon is no exception. So far, there are no unit tests for checking the quality of the DBus communication in Strigi. I set about to write some and found it was not so easy, so I'm documenting what I did for the benefit of all the other developers using DBus.

The recent events in chinland are well explained by todays Dibert.