Well, at the moment for me, it is no longer having my PhD thesis to work on, having finally handed that in last week. That means I’m now moving into job hunting (like some other people on the Planet – I may post more about that in a bit). It also means I have again a little time for KDE.

MeeGo is dead, long live MeeGo

No, you read that right. Intel are switching to Tizen and this time it is going to work (just like when they switched from Moblin to MeeGo). But for those people and companies who care about a real collaborative effort at a mobile-optimised Linux platform and those who think that there is more to app development than HTML5, MeeGo lives on. With the likes of Plasma Active as a user interface, we could build a compelling case for mobile software freedom.

KDE eases out of puberty

KDE will shortly be 15 years old, just about the age where its hormones will start to settle down. However, it may begin to get interested in girls – or boys, depending on KDE’s gender and preferences – or start experimenting with things it shouldn’t, so there may still be some turbulent times ahead.

Either way, we’ll be asking you to show your love for KDE on its 15th birthday – keep watching the Dot for more details. It’s almost time to celebrate 15 years of desktop freedom.

To finish, a little rant about 1&1

It’s not often that I rant here, so please forgive me but I feel the need to end with this…

• If you want a web host whose control panel does not work in Konqueror
• If you want a web host that buries renewal information in a mystifying maze of submenus
• If you want a web host that sends you renewal invoices without specifying the domain that is up for renewal
• If you want a web host where you cannot cancel a contract without logging into a whole different website, clicking through a confirmation email and harassing their customer service reps*.
• And, most of all, if you want service with a snarl…

…then please sign up with 1&1.

If not, you might prefer another webhost. For example, I’m very satisfied with my main host, ICDSoft.

*Actually, I’m still not sure it’s done. I wish they’d give me the freedom to cancel

However, he needs help to determine the results of 13 remaining tests that need a colour printer, something Gérard does not have access to.

If you have a moment, please check out one (or more!) of the following testcases in Konqueror 4.6.5 or 4.6.4 (it’s important that you are using that latest versions). Then report your results in the thread on the KDE Forum.

You might also want to check the thread first to see which tests still need checking.

9 testcases requiring a color printer:

1. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/at-import-008.htm
2. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-box-000.htm
3. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-break-margins-004.htm
4. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-container-000.htm
5. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-container-008.htm
6. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-container-009.htm
7. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-margin-000.htm
8. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-margin-001.htm
9. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/page-margin-002.htm

2 testcases where Konqueror hangs or refuses to print, but Gérard needs someone to confirm this behaviour:

1. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/table-footer-group-004.htm
2. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/table-header-group-004.htm

2 testcases UNKNOWN – several characters are not displayed, but this is possibly due to font availability; Gérard needs someone else to confirm and verify this:

1. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/text-transform-bicameral-011.htm
2. http://test.csswg.org/suites/css2.1/20110323/html4/text-transform-bicameral-012.htm

Gérard has been working on this for 8 months. Please take a few minutes to help him get it finished.

I’m a little underwhelmed with both.

As I explained in my blog post on Diaspora, I like some of its concepts. But I’ve used it very little since joining. Part of that is due to the network effect (not many of my friends have pods) but it is also, I think, due to a general apathy towards social networking. Afterall, I hardly use Facebook now either. If I cannot be bothered to check one website that has most of my friends, I’ll hardly take the time to check three of them.

Google+, from a quick explore, looks kinda nice. They’ve got a similar concept to Diaspora with ‘circles’ rather than aspects. It looks generally a bit nicer and more controllable than Facebook. They do however, by default, sign you up to share information to other sites, but at least they let you know during the sign up and let you disable that. Whether Google will show any more respect for users’ privacy than Facebook remains to be seen.

Google+ - just like Facebook? (Image from xkcd.com under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence)

The key question for me is interoperability. Will Google make Google+ part of the open web, with proper interfacing to other services such as Diaspora? If so then some of the goodies like GMail integration and live chat could make it interesting. If not then it’s just another walled garden and I have no more interest in that than in the closed web portals of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I don’t want a better Facebook, I want an easy way to subscribe to what my friends are doing, whether it be via their blogs, accounts on places like Facebook and LinkedIn or photo sharing sites. I also want to be able to publish my information, but with control over who sees it (so not via something like RSS). I also want it all accessible via open protocols so I can, for example, view something like the Facebook homepage feeds right from a PIM application like Kontact, or in a desktop widget or dedicated app that can sit in the system tray and notify if something interesting happens.

Google has the userbase, the coolness and the money to be the driving force behind the leading open social network. The question is, do they have the motivation? If Google is right and we really do want to use our web browsers for everything in future then perhaps a walled garden of Google+ and GMail and Google Docs and the like will prove compelling. But for me, it’s looking like Google+ will likely just be another, albeit nicer, implementation of Facebook that I can ignore in much the same way.

WebWorld continues...

More on the websites

Today we have been looking at content management systems to see if one can fit our needs for kde.org. As part of this I have played with Joomla for the first time (having used only WordPress and Drupal before) which takes a little bit of getting used to.

It is also quite scary, going through the kde.org pages to see which ones are out of date or at least not as good as they could be. Hopefully if a CMS works out for us it will be easier for more KDE contributors to go right in and update pages as needed (no knowledge of SVN/Git or PHP needed, just basic HTML and an account on identity.kde.org).

WordPress plugin for identi.ca?

On another webby note, my plugin for syndicating my posts to identi.ca seemed to have stopped working (it was “Network Publisher”, I’ve just switched back to “Identica Tools”, which may or may not work for this post). Does anyone have a recommendation for a plugin that syndicates WordPress blog posts to Identi.ca?

Food

Eugene has once again come up trumps with the food. He should start a KDE catering team…

KDE Time

Apart from the WebWorld tasks, I’ve also been able to spend a bit more time on KDE tasks, including being a bit more active on KDE.News than I have been recently.

Energy

It’s hard to put into words what it is like to be at a KDE sprint, if you have never been. The best way to sum it up is “energy”. Many of us were working until around 11pm last night and ready to go again at 9am this morning. There are few things better than working with fellow KDE enthusiasts on doing awesome and getting away from the distractions of “real life” boosts KDE productivity immensely.

Userbase

Part of the team has been working hard on Userbase, fixing issues, changing editing guidance, exploring anonymous editing, improving translation tools and tweaking the look and feel.

The Main KDE Website

The rest of us worked on the kde.org website, considering how the ideal layout should look, what links are really necessary and how they should best be arranged. We also considered the best backend means for supporting the website and making it easier for contributors to keep pages relevant to their areas up to date, while also not wasting time re-inventing the wheel for each of our websites.

We also spent an enjoyable 30 minutes or so critiquing the websites of other free and proprietary software organisations.

Other Websites

KDE has an obscene number of *.kde.org subdomains, many of which contain outdated content or content that is duplicated – or easier found – elsewhere. We worked on criteria for when subdomains should be granted and started collecting more statistics to see how people are using our websites.

A snazzy logo

After much harassment, Eugene has proved once again that he is not only an excellent at organising a barbecue, but also a talented artist. Unveil… drumroll.. the WebWorld Sprint Logo:

KDE WebWorld Logo

Sunshine

And it’s still sunny and warm here in Essen. In contrast to Randa where it all seems to have gone a bit quiet. Has the weather in Randa left our intrepid KDE contributors cold and sluggish?

Web, by Curt Smith

We had a combined sprint back in 2009 when the current version of the main KDE website was designed in consultation between the two teams and KDE’s artists. The result was a site that much improved on what we had before, but there is still more to be done.

The last few years have also seen the growth and improvement of KDE’s wikis, from the phenonmenal UserBase that should be the first stop for any user of KDE software experiencing difficulties to TechBase and our Community Wiki. However, these could integrate better with one another and with the main website and – importantly – all look like they belong together.

The Web Team comprises many of KDE’s unsung heroes, so in addition to building links between them and the Promotion Team, I’ll also take the opportunity to blog about the cool things they are working on and get some interviews done to raise the profile of their work a bit. Like many (all?) teams in KDE, they need more help to progress at an even faster pace and to help us all get the most out of *.kde.org. So if you’re interested, keep an eye on the Planet and the Dot for more information

Facebook has had a download feature for a while and I decided to have a play with it (not that I’ve put valuable stuff on Facebook without also having it elsewhere, but really just to get a snapshot of what I had uploaded).

I used Wordle to generate word clouds from my wall posts, private messages, friend list and profile itself (which includes things like favourite quotes). The results are quite illuminating for just how banal most of it is.

Wall Posts

Words from my Facebook wall posts

It seems that I and my friends quite like the word “good” Otherwise, a few of the names that are highlighted are quite surprising as I would not think of them as prolific posters on my wall.

So there is nothing really at all interesting in that text, but I’ve always seen the wall as a very public place so that is not too surprising.

Private Messages

Words from my private messages on Facebook

Private messages are, of course, Facebook’s answer to email. The disadvantage being that you can only use it like webmail (well, support is coming in Kontact), can only use it with other Facebook users and – under original T&Cs at least – give Facebook a licence to publish anything of it they like.

So when someone messages me on Facebook, I generally reply by email…

The dominant word here is “curry”, reflecting the main use my friends and I have for Facebook messaging – organising regular curry nights among colleagues at the university where I work.

Friend List

My Facebook friends

The Facebook friends Wordle also shows a few things both predictable and not – bigger text indicates that I have more friends with these names, not that I have more interaction with those people.

I know that I know a lot of people called Chris, but I did not know that I had so many Davids, Annas and Helens among my friends. Smith and Jones are both common family names in the UK – Jones particularly in Wales where I worked for three years – so it is no big surprise to see that they are large.

Profile

Words from my Facebook profile

I guess this one is the most personal as it contains mostly things that I have chosen to add to my profile and broadcast to the world.

So we have “KDE” quite prominently. Also “Southampton” (my current home town); my school, “Hylands”; my birth town, “Chelmsford”; my university, “Warwick”; my current workplace, “NOCS” (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton). The slightly odd one, “Crunch-CRUNCH”, is from one of my quotes – an advert taken from Craigslist that refers to an unfortunate incident involving a turtle (strong language and turtle death) and references a favourite breakfast cereal of mine, Grape Nuts.

Bored Yet?

So, there you have it – my life on Facebook. Do we really need these social networks so much?

About Diaspora

(As most of you probably already know) Diaspora is intended to be a distributed social network software. The idea is similar to Status.net (which powers Identi.ca). Any computer running the Diaspora code (or using the published interfaces) can interconnect with any other. So you can choose your Diaspora provider in the same way that you can choose your Status.net and email providers and interact seamlessly with anyone using another provider. You can, of course, also run the software yourself and become your own provider.

This has some (positive) implications. Lock-in is avoided as you can switch provider at any time. Privacy is also likely to be improved both because you can run your own server and retain total control over your data and because the lack of lock-in means that providers who do not respect your privacy will know that you can easily move elsewhere.

Unique selling points

The above probably appeals to people using free software and preferring open standards, but is not necessarily at the top of the mind of your average person in the street. As far as I can see, the other killer feature of Diaspora at the moment is “Aspects”. Think Facebook friend groups, but done right.

Aspects in Diaspora

You can tag your contacts with as many aspects as you like. So for example I have aspects for people I know from my undergraduate degree, people I know from KDE and friends (there is a lot of overlap in those groups, of course). When I log in, I can click on tabs at the top to restrict my view to what is going on with contacts from those aspects. Similarly, when I post something, if I can easily select an aspect (or multiple aspects) to which to post it. This enables me to both cut down the noise I receive, by using the aspects as filters and to cut down the noise I broadcast by only sending updates to particular aspects. Whereas limiting Facebook updates to a group is not exactly straightforward, in Diaspora it is easy.

Limitations

Diaspora is still described as Alpha software. It seems quite stable and polished (from the web interface) although it does not work well in KHTML. However, there are quite a few desirable features missing.

Syndicating content posted on Diaspora to Facebook and Twitter is possible (so is syndication to an RSS feed, which is quite cool for stuff you really want public). At the moment there is no syndication to Identi.ca (or other Status.net powered services). However, this does appear to be under development.

It is also not possible (yet) to syndicate from other services to Diaspora – so you cannot get your Facebook or Identi.ca/Twitter posts imported automatically into your Diaspora profile.

Network effect

Joindiaspora.com is currently also quite empty, so there’s a bit of a lack of enough people there to really make it compelling. However, if they can get other social networks on board, either using Diaspora or providing transparent interoperability, that could soon change. Being able to import posts from Facebook and the like would also make it far more interesting.

Web suckiness

I’m not a big fan of web interfaces in general. The main reason I am still on Facebook is because I use its instant messaging network quite heavily in Kopete (using Facebook’s XMPP chat support). Hopefully the open nature of Diaspora will lead to the production of real desktop apps that interact with the service (and others).

Imagine a KDE application, maybe even part of Kontact, that gives you a view to all your Diaspora data and lets you post to your aspects. I know Facebook support in the KDE PIM apps is increasing and that will make Facebook a bit more useful for me. I don’t expect to still have a Facebook account in five years time, but Diaspora (or something similar) accessed via a proper desktop app – that could be actually useful.

However, Tony’s email was prompted by a discussion on LXer about why KDE does not listen to its users (that was the point of view of many of the people making comments, you can make your own judgement about whether or not that is a fair criticism). On the suggestion of an LXer reader, Tony brought his concerns to us. We in turn discussed them with some members of KDE’s marketing team and Tony and I had an exchange of emails, now published by LXer.

What is KDE?

Now, Tony is an experienced user of free software as well as a scientist and – from his emails – clearly an intelligent and inquisitive man. So it was a real surprise to me that he and other LXer readers were so ignorant about how KDE works. I do not mean ‘ignorant’ in any kind of offensive sense here, merely that both Tony and the other LXer readers really did not seem to understand how KDE operates or who we are. Here are a few questions (paraphrased) that really took my by surprise:

• Who controls KDE?
• Who funds KDE?
• Can we contact KDE?

These show a few things to me. First, some (many?) people think of us as having a hierarchy like a company, as if we have a leader or set of leaders who tell everyone else what to do. Maybe these are the people who pay us and if it is possible to get in contact with those leaders then they might be persuaded to redirect the efforts of all the code monkeys.

Of course, KDE is not like that. We don’t have leaders. We have prominent community members, but they tend to operate within their own areas of expertise. I would not tell Aaron how to develop Plasma, or Frank how to design ownCloud and neither would they tell me how to set the editorial direction of the Dot. Even within teams, those who do the work tend to decide or a consensus is reached. If you wanted to change our software significantly then you would have to contact key people in every team and convince them of your vision. Then, when some of them got busy and new contributors came in, you would have to contact them and convince them too.

Challenges in talking to ‘KDE’

This of course raises some interesting questions. How do we keep things consistent? Well, to some extent we do not. Our applications can look different and handle things in different ways, but thanks to building everything on the KDE Platform, which provides easy ways of coding common tasks such as open and save dialogues, there is a strong degree of consistency in KDE software.

There’s also the question of who you need to talk to if, as an outsider, you need a particular feature or want to discuss something. Tony came to Justin and I more or less by chance, probably because we are mentioned on the MWG page. He could just have easily have contacted the KDE Promo team, but sometimes people prefer a named contact and keeping discussions small can lead to quicker results and a more personal feel to the communication.

It is probably similar for a company wanting to work with KDE. Say you want to use some of our software in your device, who do you contact? Strictly, you do not need to talk to anyone as long as you respect the free license terms of the software, but talking – particularly if you can identify or offer improvements – is good. Probably our press contacts and the e.V. board are often points of contact in this case. Perhaps we should think about having more – so that for example there is an ‘external contact’ for each large team in KDE.

For people unhappy with Plasma and Platform 4 software in general, the way to influence things is to engage. Turn up in mailing lists and offer assistance. Or even just get stuck in and code things your way – that is how things like Rekonq came about. Write the code and see if people agree with your way of doing things.

Weird is Good

KDE and free software communities in general are quite odd things. Lots of volunteers working mostly on things because they interest them, but still managing to communicate enough to create something that is consistent and better than most of the big budget proprietary competition.

KDE is a frustrating, infuriating, remarkable inspiring mass of individuals that find enough of a common goal and philosophy to unite them to create wonderful things. It shouldn’t work, but time and again, it does.

And, if the current set of KDE software doesn’t work for you, in the worst case you are free to do your own thing.

Navigating the web

This will be taking place at the LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany. The sprint will bring together people working on the KDE web infrastructure, the wikis, the forums and the promotion team. Among the topics we will be working on is reviewing the current web presence of KDE and looking at how to improve communication between the various teams while strengthening the wikis such as UserBase and TechBase.

I have had the pleasure of meeting some of the attendees at the combined Booth, Web and Marketing Sprint (when the current KDE website design was first developed) in 2009 and at Akademy 2010. I have worked with most of the others over mailing lists and IRC in the meantime. However, it’s always good to get to meet people in person and, with a five day sprint, we should be able to put the communication structures in place to better manage KDE’s web properties and also make some tangible improvements during the meeting itself.

In other news, we will hopefully be holding a promotion team sprint in May, in which we can look at the next challenges in promoting KDE and our software to new audiences.