Stuart Jarvis

This is possibly a little offtopic for many KDE peeps, but relevant to the stuff I do with KDE. It may be relevant to you if you write articles, announcements, press releases – or even blogs

I spent the last couple of days attending a “results-based writing” course hosted by my university. The main aim was to learn some things about writing concisely for scientific papers and finding a good structure for my thesis, but the lessons are applicable to all many kinds of writing. Writing a thesis takes a lot of endurance and strong writing ability, as you have to keep the reader interested and informed for thousands upon thousands of words encompassing complex topics and formed scientific opinion. While many online education sources do indeed offer some great tips on compiling a good thesis paper, it is best to take a look into face to face courses as well as you can ask questions of the teacher and other students and involve yourself verbally as it plays out.

The training I attended was provided by Cognitrix and was excellent. These are key points that I took away from the course:

• Know your audience
• Identify the concepts and how they link
• Don’t try and hide uncertainty with vague language
• See the opposite point of view
• Cut the waffle
• If you can’t say a sentence in one go then it is too long

They maight seem obvious, but many scientific papers fail on a lot of them. More detail on each follows below.

Know your audience

What jargon can you include? What explanation is necessary? On the Dot I insert hyperlinks to applications, jargon or concepts that I think might not be widely known, but mostly base that on what I understand.

Identify the concepts and how they link

We took a science paper, wrote its concepts out on paper and drew arrows to link them. Those with the most outgoing links are probably good starting points; those with mostly incoming links conclusions. Some items were not linked at all (these were mostly irrelevant and could be removed). Others had few links coming in and needed more background.

Don’t try and hide uncertainty with vague language

I know I’ve tried this in the past when I haven’t quite understood something. Not on the Dot, because there are far too many knowledgeable people reading and I’d get found out If you can’t explain something well then you probably don’t understand it properly yourself.

Try and imagine the opposite point of view

Particularly useful for science. Scrutinize statements like “it is obvious” to see whether they are true. Do you need to provide justification?

Cut the waffle

Some of us (I am guilty) can be a bit verbose. Being brutal with every word, we cut a sentence from 50 to 19 words with no loss of information.

If you can’t say a sentence in one go then it is too long

If you can’t remember at the end of a sentence how it started then the information is hard to take in. A good test is whether you can say the sentence aloud without pausing for breath.

Summary

Applying some of the above, I just cut the length of this post by 21%. I’m going to be trying to apply these lessons not just in my dayjob but also in my work with KDE. So you should read a bit less from me

Tags: background, communicating, Dot, offtopic, promotion, Science

If you’re reading this via Google Buzz then this post was brought to you by WordPress, Identi.ca, Twitter and Google. That’s either impressive or horrifying…

Social Media tools suck

On the one hand, it’s kind of nice that interoperation is possible at all, but on the other it’s a silly chain with many unnecessary points of fail. I can use WordPress to blog and that plays quite nicely with Identi.ca – I can syndicate the posts to Identi.ca and likewise list my dents here – things talk to each other. I can also syndicate from Identi.ca to Twitter, but Identi.ca (and therefore I) know nothing about replies at Twitter. From Twitter posts get passed to Google Buzz, but I know nothing about what happens there unless I happen to log in to the GMail web interface. Chances are that there are some people on Twitter wondering why I’ve @replied to them about something they never posted – markey on Twitter != markey on Identi.ca for example.

Identi.ca is made usable and useful by the KDE microblog widget – I simply wouldn’t use it if I had to actually visit the website and log in – that takes longer than the dent. Web interfaces suck. Similarly, I can interact with GMail via KMail (or I could, actually I prefer to have Google forward my mail to another server, a throwback from the days when GMail either didn’t support IMAP or it was a bit funky). GMail’s web interface, while better than other webmails, sucks. Twitter and Buzz, without convenient desktop interfaces that I use already, simply do not get visited by me on even a weekly basis.

In terms of Social Networking, I have Facebook (which I got bullied in to years ago and kinda use, infrequently), LinkedIn (dunno if I’m going to do much with that, another sucky web interface) and Flickr (only for KDE promo). Facebook and Flickr are made more bearable by the excellent digiKam image export tools

Infrastructure for KDE Promo sucks

Similarly, the KDE community wiki sucks – as a collaboration tool (it’s fine for storing info and userbase and techbase are both awesome). I need to discuss things by mail, then open a browser, log in (which requires a round trip to my openid provider if I want the same account on all the wikis). Then I need to remember how to use wiki markup. That’s my excuse for the various things I should have done on the promo wiki and haven’t done. There are things we can do better with the wiki, but the basic problems remain.

Collaborative writing tools suck too. Email is rubbish for actually keeping track of stuff. Google docs is amazing in its way, but it’s another web interface, doesn’t work in Konqueror (or does it nowadays?), is not free and is slow compared to a desktop app. Kobby (and Gobby) also don’t meet our needs – yet…

Really, I want a single “KDE Promo” app that deals with all the above. I’d like a pony too, please You can call it Kommunicator or Kollaborator if you like. The app, not the pony. He’s called Shergar.

There is hope…

Sorry if all that sounds a bit gloomy. There are some good points too The KDE microblog widget rocks. Kopete sorts out my soup of instant messaging accounts, making MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat not suck to the extent that I don’t need to care or even know what network I’m chatting to someone on. Kontact makes my email, calendars and contacts portable thanks to the magic of Kolab PIM data structures.

Ok, the point I’m trying to get to is that all these amazing new social tools we have are limited because they don’t interoperate by open standards, only allow some limited syndication. I want to operate my Identi.ca and Twitter and Buzz accounts as one. I don’t want to have to point Google Buzz at Twitter because they didn’t implement the Identi.ca API yet. I want my Facebook stuff and my Linked in stuff in a single view in Kontact or a Plasma Widget, not in some web browser or web browser widget.

Frank Karlitschek covered some similar ground a bit more coherently in his Camp KDE talk – be sure to check out the other talks too. Together with grappling with the Promo pages on the community wiki and discovering Google Buzz, that’s what has really prompted this post. The new services we’re seeing are exciting and can be useful and Google are helping to remove some of the suck from browser-based apps, but you have to wonder why they fix the browser rather than just using the desktop. ownCloud may have some of the answers, complemented by KDE software (reimplementable by anyone else by using open standards too). Perhaps we can even succeed in, as it were, “freeing the web from the browser”. Only time will tell.

Tags: Camp KDE, community, Free Culture, promotion, rant, suckage, web technology

Hello KDE fans, I have a couple of tasks for you:

Design KDE swag

KDE has a new spreadshirt store with a couple of nice t-shirts by Sebas and some badges including some work by Ingo.

We’ve been formulating some ideas and designs on the wiki and some, like mine, are in need of some proper artistic input. There are also several ideas that haven’t been developed into draft images yet.

So, what’s in it for you? Well, you get to say you contributed to KDE and might get to see your creation wandering around Akademy, plus there is talk of giving the designers a free copy of the t-shirt, or whatever, containing their design.

Here’s some additional info courtesy of Justin on the kde-promo mailing list:

1. We do have some existing logos and things you may want to use or at least be aware of which are stored on the Community wiki. Logos are in the KDE clipart link at the top.
2. Spreadshirt allows for both “vector” and “pixel” designs but due to the nature of of the t-shirt medium it is highly advisable to design in a program that produces the vector graphics so we can scale them as needed without distorting your images. Though I think in some cases if we only have “pixel” versions we might be able to work with it if the resolution is high enough.
3. Since this is printed media you should design everything in CMYK colorschemes rather than RGB.
4. More details about the Spreadshirt “design” uploading process can be found on the Spreadshirt site
5. “Be Creative”…”Be Inspired”….”Be Free”

Provide your science photos for LabPlot

Something I started working on a number of months ago and have recently come back to is working on a website redesign for LabPlot.

The current draft is at lp.asinen.org (there’s still a lot to do, integration of the logo in the header definitely needs a lot of work). One of the things I want to have is a rotating image in the sidebar. I have a few already – one is displayed and the rotator is implemented but I’ve lost the copyright info for the others so only displaying one at present. It would be great to get photos from actual KDE people in Science – I’m after things that are fairly simple, optionally quite abstract from any branch of science. You should be prepared to license the image under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (or something more liberal). You can send images to me at stua…@gmail.com (click on the dots to solve the CAPTCHA) or just put a link to an online image in the comments. Please specify the license and make it clear that you’re the copyright holder in your comment or email.

Tags: artwork, community, help needed, photography, promotion, Science

Long time, no post… “Real life” is unfortunately keeping me busy.

Nonetheless, something I did back in November came to fruition this week. A few months ago Jos got in touch with the folks at Linux Journal to see if they might be interested in some KDE related articles for their February issue. It turned out they were and so the latest issue has plenty of KDE content with Jos’s interview with Aaron and Sebas about KDE’s future, Riccardo‘s article on writing Plasma Widgets and my article on running KDE software on Windows.

Linux Journal uses a subscription model, but they make their archive available for free a month or two after publication and (if you didn’t use it already) you can get a free PDF trial copy of the current issue by filling in an online form.

Tags: KDE in the news, promotion, reviews

How do we get more people interested in KDE software? We can talk about it being Free (and free), point out that it does everything that the proprietary competition can do (if that’s true) but there is always a cost in changing software: you have to learn new stuff. Therefore our biggest openings are when the alternatives suck and so people are looking for change or when our stuff just leaves the competition for dead. The latter one is about the wow factor – something in our software that makes the casual observer sit up and take notice and think “I want that”.

The wow factor could be visual, but it needn’t be. Here are a few things that have prompted people who see me using KDE software to ask what the application is:

• KWin – the desktop effects are really pretty slick now (this one works best on people who don’t use Macs)
• Konqueror shortcuts – I use the gg shortcut for Google and have set up ‘go’ as the shortcut for Google I’m Feeling lucky (it’s shorter and, to me, more intuitive than ggl). Several people seeing me use ‘go bbc news’ (or whatever) have been pretty much dumbfounded – “you mean you can just tell it where to go without knowing the address?”
• Kopete – “You’ve got all your chat accounts in one app?”
• Amarok – the Wikipedia integration, mainly
• Okular – people love that presentation progress indicator
• KRandR – people are suprised I can just plug a projector in and activate it with a couple of clicks
• Digikam – it’s just so cool all round, but the Facebook upload plugin is a particular winner
• KRunner – it looks fairly funky and people are impressed by the speed of launching applications (most menu launchers suck)
• Marble – fairly cool anyway, but fire up the OpenStreetMap view and people want it
• Kile – simple things like code completion and syntax highlighting impress people trying to use Notepad for LaTeX
• Gwenview – it’s just so shiny, particularly in full-screen mode

Several items in that list surprise me a little, because they’re things I take for granted (Konqueror’s web shortcuts for example) and I’m sure several of them would leave a lot of people cold. So which can we push when promoting KDE software, which can we demonstrate at events and what others can we add to the list?

I’ve started a page to track these on the wiki, so please add your own or comment below.

Tags: help needed, promotion, wow factor