annma's blog

New Little Guy

2008-05-10T18:17:00.000+02:00

This new little guy tells you on the KDE-Edu website that you can find a tutorial related to the program page. Thanks to Arindam Ghosh, you can find a tutorial on how to add words in Kanagram, in KHangMan and how to add a map in KGeography.
This will trigger more contributions and when KNewStuff upload feature is available (in 4.2 only probably) we'll have everything needed to share data. Those tutorials are fun to read and easy to follow, thanks Arindam! Anyone is free to improve them as the .odf sources are also available!

April Toulouse KDE Monthly workshop

2008-04-26T20:53:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Alexis [Darktears] we gathered again for our monthly workshop. Cyrille Berger from Krita fame joined and we were 4 steady people and others coming to say Hi like ervin, some without machines so they just chatted a bit and some to see what we do. We even had a user using this other Linux desktop but finding KDE 4 cool and also finding the idea of these hacking sessions cool and wanting to join next month and moving to KDE 4. Cyrille hacked on Krita, he also gave some info about KOffice, Alexis fixed the task manager (yeah, no more "black holes!) and filled me about the Plasma meeting and I made a few Plasma API review commits. I also worked on KAppTemplate which is nearly ready to move to kdereview (I have to finish the doc). I have to thanks "asraniel" who sent me a patch, his first KDE contribution and as I knew he wants to work on other parts of KDE I suggested he ask for a svn account which he got quickly. He fixed a few bugs in KAppTemplate and that allowed me to keep going and improve the GUI a bit. Welcome asraniel and thanks for your excellent work already!
A very productive Saturday!

Help needed

2008-04-22T09:16:00.001+02:00

The Edu meeting we had in December 2007 was surely not productive in terms of commits numbers (refering to Paul's blog which I found quite puzzling), we did not had an outstanding number of commits. But it glued the team in a way that no IRC or email exchanges could have achieved. We have 8 GSoC projects accepted, one is Step author wife (who is already hacking on Step) and she'll start an Incredible Machine like game for Step, mentored by Carsten. I believe this was made possible by our meeting and I'd like to thank all mentors for their dedication. Welcome to all students!
I am certainly not very productive, having been on a 1 week dream holiday alone with my husband (thanks to Debs who looked after Clarisse and Léah!). I am currently rebuilding trunk on a USB disk due to space problems and bad partitions management.
I am quite behind for all applications I am maintaining and I am not sure to reach the deadline in 2 weeks for the new KAppTemplate. It needs some GUI tweaking, it's a QWizard, the first page presents the app, the second page lists the available templates (KDE4, PyQT4, PyKDE4, Ruby korundum). Then the rest is not finished, the 3rd page asks for some details like author and email and where to install, it needs a 4th page with some feedback on how the template installs... It's a really easy project with little code and if you feel you want to contribute to KDE this could be a great way to get started. The code is in /playground/devtools/kapptemplate, you need to
svn co -N .../playground/devtools/ cd devtools svn up cmake svn up kapptemplate
and run cmake in devtools build level then cd kapptemplate and build it. Thanks in advance!

KAppTemplate

2008-03-05T21:00:00.000+01:00

So what I have been up to these past days? I started a GUI interface for KAppTemplate. KAppTemplate was (still is) a bash script (in kdesdk) which generates some templates projects for people who want to start a KDE app but do not want the full KDevelop. Somehow I ended up in porting KAppTemplate to KDE 4 (being bash, it was not too difficult, I hear you mumbling! true, but the templates themselves needed the port). One of my contributions in KDevelop 3 was to maintain some templates and I added some (as I began from scratch, I guess I am grateful for those tools and I want to help newcomers in KDE as much as I can).
KAppTemplate interface will be based on QWizard and the idea will be to share the templates with KDevelop (probably having a KHNS repository for them). So it's like a total rewrite in fact. KDevelop at the moment has only a Qt4 template and KAppTemplate has 2 KDE 4 templates.
I digged into model/view and also wrote 2 unit tests, thanks to David Faure and Kévin Ottens for the inspirational talk they gave at last Akademy. I took me time to assimilate the concept of tests but when I found myself writing several small test cases to check some chunks of my code, I remembered about tests :) Pretty neat! The whole code is in /playground/devtools/
KAppTemplate as it'll maybe look like:

Clarisse was 2 last Sunday but as we were away we could not celebrate properly and it'll be done next Sunday. She starts talking and is very funny, inventing syllables and concatenating words like "Joachim" (our son aged 17, her idol) and "Clarisse" give "Yo'isse" (she cannot say J or R). While as she is always around it's often difficult for me to concentrate when coding, on the other hand I'm lucky to share every step she takes. During the second week holiday I went to the "Cité de l'espace" with Léah and also to the circus. Léah will be 10 in May and is interested by everything, constantly asking questions and always smiling... To a soccer match with Joachim (our team at the moment is meant to go to the 2nd League...)

Contributions

2008-02-29T11:31:00.000+01:00

These past days I got contributions to KDE-Edu applications and that remainded me how Educational applications are different from other applications in the sense that they need data.
Pavol Pitoňák sent 5 KTouch keyboard layouts. KTouch changed the way keyboard layouts are done in KDE 4 and thus all layouts need to be redone (there's a keyboard layout editor integrated in KTouch but still you need to update keys and it can be quite tedious). Thanks a lot Pavol for these contributions!
Amine Say sent me the KLettres alphabet sounds in Arabic. Recording sounds is a difficult task as you need clear pronounced sounds. These sounds are integrated in the Arabic l10n module so all Arabic KDE users get them and they are also available via KNewStuff in KLettres.
I tested the sounds and got Arabic l10n module to further test in RTL mode. The kids theme did not accommodate the letter too well so I pushed the bear to the right a bit in the SVG background theme.

Very impressive work, thanks Amine. KLettres has now 19 languages sounds. While being quite a simple program, it's nevertheless efficient and liked by users.
I detected a couple of bugs in KLettres in the process and refactored a bit the language detection code. The program needs to scan for globally installed sounds and locally installed ones (via KNewStuff) and then to update the Languages menu with corresponding languages names in the correct user language. A crash occurred when somehow the current chosen language was removed by the user. In programming, there must always be a fallback of some sort, an index cannot be equal to -1 for example...

Quickies

2008-02-23T18:53:00.000+01:00

I was away for 1 week without internet on a family vacation in the Pyrénées. We went skiing, Léah who is nearly 10 especially misses the snow since we got back to France from Québec so she was very happy. She is very good in cross-country skiing and is full of energy! There was not much snow as the weather is too mild and ski resorts have to use snow cannons to generate snow.
Here is Little Clarisse (nearly 2 years old) and myself! Being born in Canada and being Canadian, Clarisse only got snow-aware during this week which is a bit of a paradox.

Meanwhile George added a Flickr provider to the PoDT engine (Picture of the Day) so I need to fix the Frame itself to integrate this engine. Thanks George for this addition! I have various attempts of code on my laptops, none seem satisfactory enough from the GUI point of view.
I started to play with QGraphicsWidget and I also started a GUI for KApptemplate in the form of a QWizard (KAppTemplate is currently a bash script that generates various KDE 4 projects that you can use to start programming).

OPAA (On Pictures And Acronyms)

2008-02-01T21:54:00.000+01:00

I had this idea to add Wikipedia Picture of the Day to the Frame applet and as there are many Pictures of the Day around, I started an engine to fetch them, based on the Comic engine code (which is great btw, thanks Tobias!) So far I did 3 providers: APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day), EPOD (Earth Science Picture of the Day), no, IPOD is not the 3rd one actually, it's OSEI which displays NOAA weather satellite images. The Wikipedia one is probably the most difficult to code, the ones above are quite easy, the only trick it to extract the pic name (varies each day) using QRegExp and some math calculations from the http source of the main page. I'll check tomorrow if the various providers still display the new pic...
At the moment, I did not include this in the Frame code (except locally for testing). I don't want to overload the Config Dialog GUI which will be redesigned by Jeremy (jpwhiting) to match the Desktop background setting dialog as both have quite the same functionalities. The only addition Frame has is to configure the Frame border. I also plan to have a right click setting which will allow to put the current Frame picture as a wallpaper.
Plasma is still very much a WIP (Work In Progress) but as you can see from the Planet posts, we're moving forward!
The pic shows today's APOD which is the first Explorer, launched 50 years ago!

Toulouse Release Event : a success!

2008-01-27T14:06:00.000+01:00

On Friday evening was the start of the Toulouse KDE 4.0 Release Event. People started filling the room at 7h30pm and at around 8:15pm Thomas from our LUG introduced the event. The 90 seats room was almost full! Kévin Ottens (ervin) then gave a stunning presentation of KDE 4.0 with bits of the keynote with French subtitles. Kévin presented the KDE community and explained the Be Free concept, he detailed the pillars and all the KDE 4 technologies. At the end of his talk he called all people in the room who already contributed to KDE in any way to come forward. That was a nice ended touch! Then there were some questions and we had some food and drinks while talking with people. David Faure's train did not depart so he arrived during Kévin's talk while Laurent Montel and Aurélien Gâteau got there in time.
On Saturday morning, we started at 9:30am which was early but people were present and the 20 seats room was also almost full all day! Alexis started with a presentation on how to contribute to KDE and we alterned technical presentations with lighter ones. All presentations were very well done and there were pertinent questions for each one. Users suggestions were noted.
The day ended at 6pm and we concluded with a good dinner in a nice restaurant.

Thanks to Alexis and Kévin for the perfect organization, to the sponsors, to David, Laurent and Aurélien for coming to Toulouse, to Toulibre people for helping (thanks Alex) and to anyone who attended! It was a pleasure for me to talk to various people!

Alexis (darktears), Laurent, Aurélien and David.

Be Free (soyez libre )

2008-01-24T10:04:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow evening is the French KDE 4 Release Party in Toulouse, if you're from the area, please join us, either for the conference on Friday with Aaron's Keynote and food and drinks or on Saturday. Several key KDE developers will present KDE 4 in depth all day long: CMake, Qt, Plasma, KIO, Phonon, Solid, the French translation team and KDE-Edu (guess who's gonna do those). If you live in the area, even if you're not a KDE user, it'll probably be interesting to discover how such a big project lives and how so many different people achieve to develop this nice piece of software.
As I think about it, I'm very lucky to be have landed in France near Toulouse where the Linux User group Toulibre is so active. Apologies for my lack of involvement since September though, family management prevented me to participate to most meetings.
I'm finalizing my slides (Latex Beamer), the Translation talk had been reviewed by the French l10n team, thanks to them!
Since the 4.0.0 Release I did not achieve much on the coding side. I was busy updating the Edu website then doing some 4.1 planning. We posted some Junior Jobs tasks regarding KDE-Edu. You don't need to be a developer to get involved! For example, Stephanie, Jeremy's wife, started contributing to KDE-Edu by updating and improving some KTurtle demos. Then she wrote and put together the Edu Tour on the website. She also coordinated the transcript of Aaron's talk as we needed it for the Toulouse event. Amazing work Stephanie, warm thanks! So, yes, you, dear reader, can be invoved too! There are design tasks, icons, videos, doc tasks! Writing as little as a few lines for updating a doc will help. Thanks in advance.
I also updated the techbase Plasma tutorial to make it par with the latest API so if you want to get started on developing an applet, it's a good tutorial!
Finally, warm thanks to Jeremy and Jason who represented KDE-Edu at the release Event!

Today ...

2008-01-11T07:59:00.000+01:00

... I remember when 3.0 got out but more on a personal side as the kdeedu module was integrated in the release for the first time. I was very much of a KDE newbie at that time!
Today is more of a community celebration of what has been more than 2 years of work, vision, adjustments, nitpicks, achievements,... This path somehow is reflected for me by Clarisse who was born in March 2006 and is now able to walk and speak (a little) and seems to start appropriating herself the world.

So Today the Release will be announced. Great work from the Promo Team who made an amazing Visual Guide, already translated into several languages (Bravo to all l10n teams!). As said Jos, digg it, spread it!

We'll have a Release Party in Toulouse on 25th and 26th January. On Friday 25th, there'll be an evening with a KDE 4 presentation and Aaron's video talk translated (he speaks too fast for us common Frenchies) followed by a cocktail. On Saturday 26th, a whole day has been set so that people can come and see KDE 4 in action. We'll give technical and user-oriented presentations, several French core developers are present such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Aurélien Gâteau and of course the Toulouse crew lead by Kévin Ottens and Alexis Ménard. Presentations will range from KDE 4 pillars, CMake, KDE-Edu and Qt to Contributing to KDE or learning about the translation process within KDE.

Good things already in 2008

2008-01-03T23:47:00.000+01:00

This morning while shopping for food with Clarisse I saw a French magazine "Gnu Linux Pratique" with an article about KDE 4. I quickly had a look and bought the mag, something I don't usually do. The article is analyzing all the new things coming in KDE 4.0 and is very accurate. The section about KDE-Edu is very nice, praising the work of the whole team and mentioning Marble, Parley and Kalzium with a screenshot for each one. Small preview on http://ed-diamond.com/feuille_lpra45/index.html, pages 12 to 17. My kids also had a look and recognized the Frame plasmoid on the screenshots!

Another thing that pleased me yesterday was Eugene the artist telling me he removed the cigarette and cigar from KTurberling and put an umbrella instead. Thanks Eugene for your dedication! I'm glad this makes it to KDE 4.0!

We're finally hitting KDE 4.0 freeze tonight and I have been in a translation frenzie, like many many KDE people, judging from the commits. I also did a few of last minutes fixes! Now to prepare things for the Release Party in Toulouse, a great thing to look forward to!

Getting Closer

2007-12-28T20:17:00.000+01:00

This morning I had to get up at 4:45am to get Blandine (#2) to the train station as she needed to go to Paris to get her visa for Brazil where she'll do voluntary work during a gap year. I hope that I'll be able to visit her and maybe go to a Linux event at the same time (time to get Parley in action and learn some Brazilian!). Anyway, back at home I was alone as the rest of the house lazily got up around 8:00 so I removed my KDE 4 install dir and my KDEHOME in order to have a clean KDE 4. I reinstalled kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase. First thing I need to do with a clean setup is to set the keyboard to French. I foolishly installed my distro using English as I prefer it but every OS I know assumes that if you choose a language then you have the keyboard in that language. Wrong, I have a French keyboard. I started System Settings in regional & Language to set the keyboard in French and found a Junior Job (meaning something a beginner can do): redo the layout of this module tab as the keyboard list can barely show 2 items. This is still open if someone wants improve it without changing strings.
I found a few bugs here and there and even found people to report them so I could work on waiting things like testing Ukrainian files for KHangMan. Most of these bugs were fixed during the day, thanks to the devels dedication! This shows that indeed we're in full fixing mode despite the holidays.
I also concentrate on KDE-Edu fixes and translation to French. A KTouch dialog was too wide to fit in my 1280x800 screen when translated so I had opened a JJ for it. It was picked by Arnaud, a new comer in KDE and he sent a patch which I tested and committed, the dialog is now much better! Thanks Arnaud! Anyone can help and starting with bugs like that is a good way to get involved.

We're having nice Christmas holidays, just being the 7 of us all together is a joy, especially as Blandine will be far away soon. Tomorrow Debs's boyfriend will come for a few days which is nice. We don't have a big house (we're thinking of buying one in fact as Clarisse still sleeps in a cot that can be put in a small corner but soon will need a real bed) but we're having fun. Joachim our son got Guitar Hero (yes, I know, he uses this other OS) and the kids are doing contests which generate a lot of laughs.
I wish you all a peaceful and resting time!

OLPC

2007-12-16T13:51:00.000+01:00

Following some chat with Bruno Coudoin (who has a real OLPC and ported GCompris) a few months ago, I decided to install Fedora on the family PC in order to build Sugar, the OLPC interface (Fedora is the best to do so, it's almost impossible on other distros). The build succeeded and I got the Sugar interface in a Xephyr terminal.
The family PC being the family one, I don't have access to it so much and thus left it alone. A few days ago someone asked about KDE-Edu apps on the OLPC on KDE-Edu mailing list and I thought I would look at it more. Rebuilding Sugar was a pain, I had to remove some sources to restart from scratch but after insisting on it I got it running up-to-date.
I used this page: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sugar_on_Fedora for the build.

I then googled to see what I could digg about Qt and the OLPC and found a Qt4 Activity template from Arklinux. I set to build it and it persisted not to find my Qt4 moc but I overcame this by generating the .moc files manually. Please note that I used my system Qt4 and what I don't know yet whether it is easy to get Qt build for the OLPC. The result can be seen here:

Looks like it's not so difficult to have Qt-based Activities on the OLPC!

KDE 4 in French

2007-12-13T07:46:00.000+01:00

For 2 days, I have been running KDE 4 in French on a new $KDEHOME. This allows me to first detect some translation inconsistencies and also to test a lot of programs in another language. This is very important as usually French (and probably other countries as well ;) don't understand English and on Edu progs where there is data available (like KTurtle examples and translated commands), everything should be in French when started in fr_FR.
I found that KTouch training lectures and keyboard files were in a silly order. Some training files had a title in their language, others were in English. I thought a bit about it and browsed in the bugs database where I indeed found a bug report about that. I remembered that KGeography extracts strings from xml to translate thus I called Albert "tsdgeos" at the rescue. He provided a patch so this is now fixed. Thanks to Albert for always being there! Also thanks to all translators, your work is one of the most important for reaching users. KHangMan got Greek support yesterday as well, that rocks!

Feel it

2007-12-06T13:24:00.000+01:00

During the Paris Edu meeting, I put together a Ruby script to get Step packaged from playground/edu (the ruby script originated from Amarok then was used for Kalzium then I adapted it for Step and cmake). I also tarred gmm for convenience as it is needed (so if you don't have the whole kdesupport, grab this tarball as well) and you can find those 2 tarballs on the Sourceforge Step webpage.
To install those, it's easy:


- untar the tarball (starting with gmm if you don't have it): tar jxvf nnnn.tar.bz2
- cd into the dir
- mkdir build
- cd build
- cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIRS -DCMAKE_COLOR_MAKEFILE:BOOL=true
DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull ..
- make
- make install (or su -c 'make install')

Step will not be shipped with KDE 4.0 so you're likely to get some crashes but I am quite sure you'll enjoy the neat and intuitive interface, the pre-loaded examples, the interactive help, the integrated context info and the list of available bodies and forces. As Vladimir puts it on the Step website: "With Step you can not only learn but feel how physics works!"

Some Paris pics

2007-12-03T18:45:00.000+01:00

Jeremy (jpwhiting) and Frederik (Parley), the new Edu hot duo!

Vladimir Presentation of Step, everyone is subdued.

Patrick tasting French gastronomy! He said he did not come just for the food though!

KDE-Edu Meeting - Day 2

2007-12-03T08:08:00.000+01:00

Yesterday we started a bit later than planned as Aurélien's Mandriva pass did not work. So we waited in the hall and Johannes tried a new record in KTouch (he is very fast typing already) while Albert tried to break his own Blinken record.
We then settled in the room and started to work. At 11:30 I had a few slides ready for the KDE 4.1 Roadmap: we agreed to include Step and reintegrate KEduca as Matt Williams is maintaining it now. KBruch and KPercentage should be merged in a single math exercises application, oriented to 8 - 12 maybe. I stressed the existence of the ODF lib from KOffice and I also pointed KWord Kid mode (but had no time to demo it, especially as my laptop did not want to recognize the projector). Interaction with Office applications is something that will happen more in the future.
Mauricio worked hard to fixe KTurtle potential showstoppers and at the end of the meeting we were happy to declare KTurtle fit to stay in the module for 4.0. The examples all work swiftly in all languages, recursion works, the actions which were not working either were removed or fixed. Carsten also fixed a lot of things in Kalzium. Having moved, Carsten was offline for 2 months and he was very happy to hack on the laptop Mandriva prepared for him. I was very pleased to meet him as he is part of KDE -Edu nearly from the start and it was the first time we met.
On Friday Damien from Mandrima gave me a flash key to update the Classmate PC to Mandriva 2007 which was swiftly done. So we could have a look at our applications on this small machine!
Some of us started to leave and at 6:00 pm, we left Mandriva Office.
I am still in Paris, having found a 24 hours wifi connection for 3€ at the hotel. I'll meet various Mandriva people today to discuss Education and Press Releases. I'll then reach Toulouse with a night train.
Everybody was very happy and enjoyed working with others. I must say it was even better that I had imagined it! Everyone will be home with new motivation and new ideas and a better sense of being part of KDE.

First KDE-Edu Meeting - Day 1

2007-12-02T15:55:00.000+01:00

On Saturday, we arrived at Mandriva a bit after the planned 9:00 am and Anne was waiting for us. We started the meeting by a welcome word from her and me. Mandriva had prepared 2 laptops for Carsten and Pete with a very much up-to-date KDE 4 installed along to KDE 3. Thanks to the technician who prepared them! Everybody presented himself and explained his/her goals for the week-end. We started to work and to have informal meetings. Johannes and Frederik met for Parley work, I helped Carsten and Peter to get kdeedu from svn trunk on their laptops, I ran a scheduler for the Icecream network. We got out to get lunch in 2 groups, then Patrick explained the work on the KDE on Windows team. It was very interesting. At 5:30 pm, Vladimir presented Step, a physics simulator he is working on with his wife Oliena who was also present (yeah, another girl!). Step will be included in KDE-Edu for KDE 4.1 and is already a stunning piece of software, very well featured and with an intuitive GUI. I told Vladimir to come to next Akademy and present it because it really deserves to be known.
Around 7:00 pm, after a very productive day, we went out to visit Paris, lead by Benoît and had a good time getting to know each other better.
Meetings like that are very important because instead of working alone we can better see why we do it. It also allows to make better choices in development: Step for example will use Eigen2, the math lib, instead of GMM that it is using right now. This is the result of real world discussion.
I am tweaking a Ruby script to easily extract Step from playground/edu so that you can all try it with the next rc2 release and after. A lot of bugs were fixed, tests were done, in English and also in Slovenian (JLP) and French, TODO were decided.
The atmosphere was very friendly and relaxed and you could feel that it was a real team spirit driving everyone.

First KDE-Edu meeting - Day 0

2007-11-30T18:36:00.000+01:00

We started to invade Paris, Jeremy from USA and Frederik from Germany were the first to safely arrive yesterday then Mauricio, Patrick, Vladimir and his wife and myself joined today. Vladimir and his wife, from Moscow, got their visa only yesterday evening! At one point I phoned the French embassy in Moscow then my husband sent them faxes but in the end it all went well. We had an appointment with Anne from Mandriva at 4:30 pm and were warmly welcome in the Mandriva offices. Wifi and icecream are already roaming and we started to get to know each other and to update our sources. The room is big and very nice. We have quite a full agenda, I noted some more ideas while in the train (my son suggested that Step includes 'Incredible Machine'-like puzzles), an idea that I'll discuss with Vladimir. I will also test a ruby script that I need to refresh in order to be able to package Step from playground and to have it make its "débuts" in the wild!
Parley is implementing KNewStuff.
Keep watching this blog for more news about this meeting!

No Educational devroom at FOSDEM 2008

2007-11-29T07:48:00.000+01:00

For those who wanted to see Free Educational Software development more prominent at FOSDEM 2008, I applied for a devroom but it was refused (I got some mails asking me if I was following what I informally started last year).
I am quite disappointed by the whole thing as it was very difficult to make the request. First I filled a form on the FOSDEM website and second someone told me I have to send a mail. From the form I got no acknowledgment. Then of course I was put down. "Of course" because I am a newbie in that game (meaning I don't know anyone in the FOSDEM board). Also because they want the name of a project and thus they probably thought I wanted the DevRoom for KDE-Edu. As my "father-project KDE has a devroom" (quoting them) of course KDE-Edu cannot have one.
Probably my request was not clear enough (they could also have asked for more info) but I wanted a DevRoom for Free Educational Software in general, not a KDE-Edu room... Last year FOSDEM opened with an OLPC talk, was that only to surf the hype wave?
Next year I hope to get more support and help for lobbying the organization board and make the point for all people who care about Free Educational Software Development and would like to see this topic in one of the leading European conference.

Images and Words

2007-11-27T20:02:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday we had our monthly Toulouse KDE workshop meeting. We were 9 people, Élodie had to live before lunch but had time to ask me more tips about KDE translation to French.

I was not very productive because I messed with my nvidia driver and had to reinstall everything. But as we had an icecream setup, building KDE 4 was a breeze. It was longer to svn co qt-copy than to build it in fact (damn doc). Kévin (ervin) finished hacking the frame applet and made it resize nicely. Alexis (darktears) hacked the device notifier and we both asked (Dr) ervin for explanations on this resize problem.

(Alexis above) I then was able to fix a few applets according to Aaron explanations regarding the resizing.

We also talked about the KDE 4 Release Party we want to set up in Toulouse in January. It'll be maybe the only party in France so if you're French and want to join, keep on reading The Planet!

The KDE-Edu meeting in Paris is nearly there, let's just hope no strike will get our ways, both in Germany and in France. If there's trouble with trains I can still drive but it would be a long and tiring journey. I'd really prefer dozing in the TGV while listening to some music (Dream Theater, the show I went to with Debs was awesome and I even bought a hoodie, to replace my gray one which was starting to fall into pieces...). If all goes well I'll arrive in Paris on Friday before lunch and have an appointment with Anne in Mandriva to finalize the preparations. We'll be 14 Edu people with lots of ideas and the desire to tackle a lot of subjects.
Oh, and I saw on TV this morning that The Champs Élysées are ready for Christmas, glowing in all sort of amazing lights. Paris in all its glamor!

"En route" to KDE 4.0...

2007-11-22T14:32:00.000+01:00

... or the first KDE-Edu meeting ever! We'll be 14 developers (if Vladimir and his wife get their visas, fingers crossed) meeting in real life in Paris (France) on the 1st & 2nd December. The meeting is hosted by Mandriva, thanks a lot for making this possible. Thanks also to KDE eV for sponsoring travel and hotel. I think 5 people never met any KDE developers in such a meeting. Geographically, we'll have Jeremy from USA, Mauricio from Brazil and Vladimir and his wife (Step) from Moscow. Parley author Frederik also is an enthusiatic new comer! Looking forward to meeting you all!

KDE-Edu is taking the path I had somehow dreamt it would right at the beginning when with Eva we started it. More about the meeting in due time!

Colors

2007-11-21T19:46:00.000+01:00

The world is not as black and white as it seems. Yesterday morning I went to the supermarket to do the usual food shopping and the cashier was a woman in her mid 50s, looking like someone's grandma. We chatted a bit as I shop there 3 times a week and Clarisse wins everyone over so I'm sort of known over there. Then in the afternoon I decided to upgrade my Linux installation which was 1 year old and my partitions were quite bloated. I quickly came back to the supermarket and only bought a magazine I noticed which has a Mandriva 2008 DVD in it. The same cashier was still there and she looked at my mag and said "oh, you're installing Linux?". On that I thought "come on, what can she know about that" and I said vaguely "well, yes" and she went on: "I'm more on graphical stuff than on technical, I do website design, flash,..." I swear nobody would have said that she would be able to draw on a PC... The wonder of uniqueness behind every human, sharing something you care about with someone you think is very far from you: that makes my world colorful.

So I installed Mandriva 2008 on my laptop and a few hours later, I got my KDE 4 built again. The process was very smooth and quick, installing the development packages ensured that I had everything I needed to build KDE 4 without the hassle of getting every -devel rpm. Sound is working out of the box (I could not previously hear the headphones without the speakers) wifi was more painful but that's the fault of this stupid Livebox, nvidia driver got configured with the help of #mandrivafr. I even cleaned my /home (which I didn't reformat of course) and removed a few Gigs of music, videos, tarballs and thus went from 98% to 28% of the 16Gb here. Having a clean install will enable me to carry on debugging KDE 4 without asking myself: stale config or bug? In the past 2 weeks, I tested a few patches from bug krushers, I fixed System Settings locale tab, kdelibs fonts dialog, and overall tried to tackle issues noted on the techbase krush page.

Saturday := KDE 4 Debug Day

2007-11-09T10:09:00.000+01:00

Last Saturday was the first KDE 4 Krush Day and if you did not take part, here is your chance to redeem yourself: tomorrow is Saturday again! And it'll happen on #kde4-krush on IRC.
This techbase webpage explains everything you need to know.
First of all, you need the latest KDE 4 possible, from svn trunk or from a Live CD. If you had KDE 4 already and are updating, it's better to backup your ~/.kde or ~/.kde4 and run KDE 4 with defaults config. Also if you have phonon/sound related problems please rm ~/.config/kde.org/libphonon.conf and retest.
So, what to do and how?
Pick your favourite program and start looking if it behaves as intended. If not, jump to the techbase page and look if the problem has already been mentioned. If so and if you cannot add anything useful, please don't clutter the page, add "Confirmed" and your nickname.
For crashes: always attach a backtrace otherwise it is useless to report a crash. Please use pastebin for the backtrace. Explain how to reproduce the crash in details. If possible find someone who can reproduce it. All about backtraces is explained here.
If you have svn trunk and reported a bug last Saturday, if the bug was fixed you can test if the fix works for you.

Remember that you can test all programs! And if you want to fixe some bugs, feel free to do it and please send your patch (neat HowTo here) to the kde-devel mailing list or post it on pastebin and link it to the bug on the techbase page with your nickname.

I enjoyed meeting new people last Saturday and working to debug some programs. Not sure I can participate very much tomorrow as I'll look after a 1-year old baby so my friends can prepare their boxes for their move without their daughter wanting attention!

Success!

2007-11-03T20:27:00.000+01:00

The KDE 4 first Debug Saturday has been a success! It started yesterday evening which was already today for some people. Several Edu programs were tested and we already fixed some bugs (Jeremy aka jpwhiting fixed several!) Personal thanks to "jstubbs" who was simply amazing! All the bugs are there: http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/KrushDays and you can either confirm or fixe them. Please add your nickname and if you fixe one, add the svn revision number.
Next time, in order to monitor the impact of such a day we can add something like KDE4-Krush in the svn commit log.

It's been very nice, people were eager to help and very keen to retest or explain. Thanks to everyone who came here and if you did not, it's still Saturday somewhere!