Constant Motion

Alexis "DarkTears" of Solid Notifier fame (hey, it works superbly!) already blogged about our monthly KDE workshop in Toulouse. This originated from ervin and is gaining success: out of 8 people here on Saturday, 4 were newcomers in KDE! So what do we do here? We help people building KDE, we help them starting contributing to KDE like Florian who is steadily translating to French (Élodie as well but she was sick and could not make it, hope you get better!), some would like to get started hacking. It's all very relaxed and helpful. I showed KDE 4 in action and tracked down dome crashes but I did not achieve much first because I was still under my Boston bad luck and second because I forgot my glasses at home (I only wear glasses to see close stuff). Thus I lived a blurry day! But it did me good to be there.
The best thing I like during these workshop is that we set a network and we use distributed compilation. Alexis and Kevin have very powerful little beasts as Alexis showed on this screenshot so I always make the most of it and on icemon you would have seen my flavour colour (was peach) getting everywhere it can!


A lesson I got after that day: how time can be wasted in development: you want to refresh a handbook and you start writing some text. Then you need to refresh the screenshot and fire the app. The screenshot needed me to download Danish from KNewStuff and that crashed. Got the back trace then ran 2 other apps Kanagram and KStars and got more backtraces. Talked with jpwhiting on IRC and started looking at some code. We decided to merge the KNewStuff branch which took time. Ran more apps, looked at more code, found another bug... hmmm, what was it that I wanted to do in the first place?
Well, fortunately, most of the time you can get focused on 1 task and get done with it!

Good idea from Aaron to get a KDE 4 polishing day rolling next Saturday. Please join in #kde4-krush on IRC and the more efficient people the better! If you can arrive there using a new $KDEHOME it helps having clean config settings!
Yesterday I hijacked the family PC and built KDE 4 on it (shame on me, I was not even able to do it swiftly, while it was I who originally wrote the first version of the techbase tutorial). I got lost in scripts... In the end I suceeded so I now have 2 KDE 4 setups (well, until the end of the week, when the kids come back). I could reproduce the crashes I had on KNewStuff download and I also could reproduce the crash Gianni had on KAlgebra (X crashes on that one). Weirdly the backtrace points to Phonon while there's no sound involved in KAlgebra. Few people can reproduce this crash so it's very difficult to try to debug it. Conclusion: come on Saturday to help!

You may have noticed my Dream Theater renewed frenzie. Their last album "systematic chaos" is superb and I'll be lucky enough to get to see them live (with Symphony X) just a few kilometers away from my house! (the show is in Toulouse suburbs) Looking forward to it :) I got my Ovation guitar repaired last week and am picking up some British rock like Muse and Coldplay...