Visa, finally got it

Tuesday next week is my last working day and I’ll be gone for three weeks, without laptop. If you have anything really urgent, talk to any members of my team, Michael or Ara, they know how to get in touch with me.

I’m very much looking forward to this one and happy to meet Mehdi of the LoCo team there!

I’ll be back on 29th September.

In the first weeks when I started contributing to the Ubuntu community about six years ago, I was constantly amazed at a number of things:

• how friendly, encouraging and motivating people were: in a very short time I made lots of friends, people who are always there for me and I’d always be there for (extended family – kind of)
• how much I learned in a very short period of time (a state of constant “a-ha! moments”)
• the incredibly strong sense of opportunity: “if I fix this bug, I not only fix it for myself, but for millions of users”

After a few months I helped out new contributors myself, answered questions and tried to give them a similar experience as I had. Learning to do something great by experiencing it first hand. The great thing is that a lot of contributors already went ahead and became involved in upstream projects and Debian.

I’m extremely grateful I’m in a position where I can do this as part of my job.

I’ve been working on a few things in the last time that will hopefully give even more people that sense of opportunity and that sense of achievement soon. Please note that all of the items below are just happening because of “a little help from my friends”, I couldn’t have possibly pulled this off all on my own.

• Daily Builds documentation and testing: with Jorge Castro and others I went through the process of getting Daily Builds up and running, we documented it, found issues, reported them and thought about how it would make most sense to package maintainers, upstreams and users. So we set up a knowledge base as well, that should help upstreams and package maintainers to figure out when a daily builds makes sense, how to sell it to their users and what kind of preparation ios necessary.
• Harvest: I had the extreme pleasure of working with Dylan McCall on Harvest this cycle. It was an awesome experience. He chose Harvest as his Summer of Code project and directly dived into the hardest things first: instead of fixing small things here and there, he implemented a great user interface that’ll be great to use. I did quite a bit of code-review and fixed a bunch of bugs myself. It’s soon in a state where it can be deployed. With Harvest out there, it will be a lot easier to find things that need doing, get a good overview of outstanding work regarding a few packages you might care about and coordination/cooperation might actually be easier too.
• LoCo Directory: Starting from a vague idea we first just set up a place where LoCo teams could register themselves, then we added team events and then started making it pretty. At times I was hacking a lot on it, at other times doing lots of code reviews, but I’m very glad to see that more and more people are starting to help out and implementing their ideas and visions into it. It’s an amazing project and hopefully helps LoCo teams to coordinate their work and make people interested in Linux and Ubuntu open source enthusiasts and contributors by giving them that great first experience.
• Lots of Sponsoring/Code Review: I still feel this is the best way to help out new contributors on their way. By explaining how things are done (also when to better get stuff upstream first), how to do them better and guide them on their way to commit access/upload rights, you do Ubuntu and Open Source a great service. Make people feel welcome, help them out, by having a good experience with the process of fixing problems for millions of people you get contributors hooked up forever.
• Operation Cleansweep: Speaking of patches and code review: we have a huge backlog of patches that didn’t follow the process and need to be reviewed and forwarded to Debian and Upstream. The team reviewed heaps of patches and I was glad to be part of the initiative. I helped with the documentation, organisation of events and reviewed a couple of bugs myself. This is an awesome way to get involved and immediately make the whole open source world benefit.

There’s quite a lot of other things where I could be helpful too to keep the ball in the Ubuntu community rolling: as member of the Community Council I do bits of organisation here and there, within Canonical I often answer questions about Ubuntu development processes to new starters and development-unrelated teams, I helped organising the Ubuntu Global Jam, Ubuntu Developer Week and other events, thankfully found a team to take over the “Behind MOTU” interviews, helped with the organisation of Ubuntu’s participation in Google’s Summer of Code, that plus calls, heaps of mails, small and big arguments keep me quite busy.

I feel very privileged being in this position and hope I’m instrumental to the open source world at large. One thing’s for sure: I still immensely enjoy it.

Members of “Ubuntu Berlin” met yesterday at c-base within the Ubuntu Global Jam. While it was nice seeing new and international faces showing up and introducing newcomers to advanced Launchpad usage, my main attraction of the day was Daniel Holbach’s notebook. He asserted it runs Maverick and starts up within five seconds, which made me laugh at first as my netbook’s startup time tripled from Lucid to Maverick to round about 45 seconds (which will at least change back until release I assume).

Ubuntu (Berlin) Global Jam at c-base

To make it short: Between bug triaging and patching Daniel showed the startup procedure two or three times on his X61s (with an solid state disk, one has to add) and as promised it started up in five seconds after Grub. Actually this isn’t more than a fast booting notebook, but it shows the results of focussed efforts from the last one and a half year. Remember the initial “10s” posting and the bunch of changes it took.

So I am happy looking forward to improvements for Maverick on my netbook. And yes: I am happy with 10 seconds, too.

[update]

Daniel noted, that it’s a X61s, not a T61. Changed.

The beta version of MiKTeX 2.9 has been released. Windows 7, Vista, XP (at least SP 3), Server 2003 and 2008 (at least SP 2) are supported, Windows 2000 no longer.
LuaTeX has been integrated for the first time and several software packages have been updated.

The final version of MiKTeX 2.9 will be released in October.

For more information visit

• the MiKTeX homepage,
• the 2.9 status page,
• the release notes,
• the blog announcement,
• the download/setup area.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

The last weeks and months i had a lot of tasks for the open source racing Speed Dreams. Towards to Speed Dreams 2.0 a lot has been done, but there is much more.

So teh project need help from designer, 3d artist and developers. A list about "how to start" and "what to do" can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/speed-dreams/wiki/helpWanted.

Any help is welcome. Fresh news and links about the game and the development are here: http://twitter.com/speed_dreams

Issue 4 of the LaTeX3 news has been published today.

If you have followed my blog and what I’ve said elsewhere you might have noticed, I’m TOTALLY looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam.

The Ubuntu Berlinians will meet in Berlin’s c-base on 29th August from 12:00 to 18:00. Please come and join us!

Original announcement below:

Freie Software lebt vom Mitmachen und das ist gar nicht so schwer, wie man vielleicht erwartet. Zum vierten Mal ruft Ubuntu zum "Global Jam", bei der weltweit helfende Hände an einem Tag gemeinsam an der Verbesserung der freien Linux-Distribution Ubuntu arbeiten. Gesucht werden dafür nicht nur technisch versierte Entwickler, sondern alle Nutzer, die Fehler aufspüren, melden und prüfen wollen, Übersetzer, die Software in andere Sprachen übertragen oder die Dokumentation überarbeiten möchten. Für alle diese Schritte gibt es einfache Softwarelösungen, die einem viel Arbeit abnehmen und den Einstieg erleichtern. Alles was man braucht ist also: etwas Zeit, die Fähigkeit, englische Texte zu verstehen und Lust, einmal etwas an die Gemeinschaft zurückzugeben. Bei einem Jam arbeitet man gemeinsam an einem Ort, hilft sich gegenseitig bei offenen Fragen und Einstiegshürden und hat dabei übrigens nicht wenig Spaß. Der Berliner Teil des Ubuntu Global Bug Jams wird am 29. August von 12 bis 18 Uhr in der c-base stattfinden. Da die c-base im Moment keine Desktoprechner zur Verfügung stellt, sollten ein Notebook mitgebracht werden. Weitere Informationen gibt es auf http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/265/detail/. Adresse der c-base: Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin U-/S-Bahnhof Jannowitzbrücke Anfahrt zur c-base: http://wiki.c-base.org/coredump/AnfahrtsSkizze http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:C-Base_Map_1.png http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:C-Base_Map_2.png

If you haven’t registered your Ubuntu Global Jam event yet, do it now!

Definitely going!

As you all know loads of teams around the globe meet this weekend and do great Ubuntu and Open Source work together. Ubuntu Jams are all about making Ubuntu and the open source world in general rock even harder. No matter which part of it you’re interested, be it Translations, Testing, QA work, Packaging, Docs or anything else, we want you to have fun with your local team!

I personally will join in on the fun in Berlin (announcement coming up soon) and will try to put a bit of work into Operation Cleansweep, a great initiative to get our backlog of patches under control. As you can see from this week’s report, it could do with getting some love:

Total bugs with patches: 2196 (-37) Reviewed patches: 420 (+11) --- Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 99 (+5) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 177 (+3) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 62 (0) Bugs with 'indicator-application': 39 (-2) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 56 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 10 (0) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 18 (0) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 3 (0)

If you’re interested in reviewing patches, check out the review guide and help the reviewers team out.

Hey all,

before I go on a short one-week vacation, I wanted to leave you a short note about the outcome of my GSOC, where I tried to revive the Quanta+ brand.

First up, I passed, many thanks to my mentor Andras Mantia. But well, it’s not like I got that for free. In a first estimation I did about 500 commits to Quanta, PHP and KDevplatform in the last three months. So I hope you all agree that I deserve the Google money :)

But lets talk about what I planned to achieve and what I actually achieved:

• the XML/HTML plugin is working quite well but is still requiring lots of polishing
• the browser preview plugin is supposedly being worked on by another studen in Brazil, I’m awaiting her first results and will polish it together with her.
• you still cannot rename tags and automatically rename the close tag as well or similar
• the multilang branches have imo nice API additions and seem to work reasonably well. At least my test cases of CSS inside HTML worked fine for me

Anyhow, on one hand I’m personally satisfied with what I achieved code wise, esp. looking at the diffs and knowing how many iterations some of the multilang structures required. On the other hand I had hoped to achieve much more. A first alpha release of Quanta is really not visible to me in the near future.

But, and here I make a promise I do intend to keep: I won’t desert Quanta. Quite the contrary. KDevelop will probably keep my main focus, but I do intend to improve Quanta, esp. merge the multilang branches into KDevplatform for example. My intended time plan contains a note to merge multilang after the movingrange branches into KDevplatform 1.2. Lets see how that works out.

The XML plugin I will definetly continue to polish and make it work as good as possible. Even now it is helpful for more than just web developers: I personally already rely on it when working on Kate language files for example. So there is a personal desire to have it working as good as possible, even though I don’t do much/any web development these days.

Bla bla bla, enough rambling and dumping my thoughts. Lets close this up by saying: Have a nice week, cya soon, hopefully well rested and ready to kick some more code lines :)

Bye

In den letzten Wochen und Monaten, habe ich mal wieder ein paar Kleinigkeiten im Netz gefunden, die ich euch nicht vorenthalten will.

Zuerst pyroom, ein netter kleiner Editor, für zwischendurch, der ohne viel Schnickschnack schnell gestartet und gut bedient werden kann. Ausserdem empfinde ich gerade sein schlichtes Erscheiunungsbild als sehr angenehm, keine Bedienelemente, Fullscreen augenschonend. Sicher nicht der Texteditor für jede Aufgabe aber eine Wohltat fürs Auge.

Ich nutze ihn gerne als Standardeditor für das Firefox-Addon It’s All Text! (dieses Addon ermöglicht das Ausfüllen von Webformularen -z.B. Kommentare in Blogs- in einem wählbaren Editor, womit ein Netzverbindungsabbruch oder ein Seiten-TimeOut nicht zum Verlust eines eben getippten Textes führt)

Eine weitere Kleinigkeit, nach der Integration von google-mail in das Indicator Applet von Ubuntu 10.04 ermöglicht nun das Libnotify for Mozilla auch die Integration von Thunderbird an gleicher Stelle.

Weiter gehts: Da haben wir diese schöne notify Anzeige in Gnome und mit diesem Tipp von Christoph kannst du jetzt auch das Ende lanwieriger Prozesse im Terminal (z. B. ein Download mit wget, ein größeres update oder ein Backup-Prozess) grafisch hervorheben lassen statt andauernd aufs terminal zu starren.

Nächste Erwähnung: localepurge endlich überflüssige Sprachdateien und Lokalisierungen loswerden. Auf meinen Systemen waren es so ca. jeweils 130MB, nun bei heutigen Festplattengrößen eher zu vernachlässigen, aber die alte Weisheit gilt auch hier “KvmaM”

Schliesslich noch der Befehl mtr eine Verbindung von ping und traceroute und nicht mal neu (Manpage von 1999)

Das wars, dann für dieses mal, aber eine kleine Nettigkeit soll hier noch erwähnt werden:  thingler.com
Online eine Todo List erstellen, ohne Schnickschnack, keine Anmeldung, beim Aufruf der Startseite wird automatisch eine neue ToDoListe generiert, der Link kann Freunden zum gemeinsamen arbeiten weitergegeben werden, sensible Daten sind hier natürlich tabu, weil der einzige Schutz ist die frei generierte URL. (Dank auch hier an Christoph Langner, dessen Blog für mich immer wieder eine Quelle an neuen Ideen ist)

Gefundene Grüße DxU

Nachtrag:

Na und wenn ich einmal am bloggen bin, hier noch zwei Screenshots als Ergänzung zum letzten Posting rund um KDE4.
Unter anderem habe ich dort die detaillierte Anzeige des Installationsprozesses von KPackageKit kritisiert. Dass es auch anders geht zeigt Synaptic, wie in den folgenden Screenshots hier zu sehen.

Standardansicht des Installationsfortschritts in Synaptic

Detailansicht des Installationsfortschritts in Synaptic

Hey there :)

As I announced on the kde-core-devel mailing list, I planned to improve Dr Konqi for a long time, as for me as a developer it is an invaluable tool. Well, yesterday I sat down and implemented the first two things which I wanted for a long time:

Scroll to KCrash

Once the backtrace got loaded, Dr Konqi will automatically scroll to the line that contains [KCrash Handler]. No need to find that manually anymore. Awesome :)

Colors!

Yeah, you should know that I as a KDevelop user and developer am addicted to syntax highlighting. That’s what I did for Dr Konqi as well now:

Dr Konqi with syntax highlighted GDB backtrace

So anyone using KDEBase trunk will now have a shiny Dr Konqi :) Feedback appreciated, esp. whether more or less should be highlighted. I personally found it overly colorful when I also highlighted pointer adresses (ignore the bug in that outdated screenshot). What do you think?

Anyhow, thanks to George Kiagiadakis for helping me find my way through Dr Konqi sources and accepting my feature additions.

Update

I put some more feedback into reality: Fixed width font, null pointers are bold and in addition common functions that lead to exits are now highlighted in red (i.e. qFatal, __assert_fail and abort):

Dr Konqi showing fixed width fonts and highlighted qFatal / abort functions

Wir haben vor einigen Wochen den Telefon-Anbieter gewechselt und bekommen nun die Telefonnummer des Anrufers übermitteln. Damit erscheint die Nummer auf dem Display des Telefons. Nach dem Wechsel haben wir erst einmal keine SPAM Anrufe erhalten. Heute aber hab ich dann wieder zwei SPAM Anrufe erhalten. Die Rufnummern der Anrufer waren:

• 0211/63559131
• 030/20164004

Nun da ich die Nummer hab, werde ich mich bei der Bundesnetzagentur über diese Anrufe beschweren. Die Anrufer sollen Bußgelder bis zu 50.000 € bezahlen damit sie sich zweimal überlegen, ob sie mich anrufen. So, jetzt muss ich zum Briefkasten und den Brief an die Bundesnetzagentur abschicken.

Ubuntu‘s development platform Launchpad recently gained the ability to create daily builds. BzrBuilder is used for creating source tarballs and PPAs are used for building the source tarballs. BzrBuilder uses a recipe that declares how to build a source from different bzr branches. In most cases you have a bzr import from the upstream version control system. Then you nest a bzr branch that contains the packaging information. This works great for

• Audacity (Recipe and corresponding PPA)

but the bzr import for these projects fail:

• Audacious: Import fails with infinite recursion (LP: #519709)
• Eclipse: Launchpad disallows valid CVS module of ‘.’ from being imported (LP: #594294)
• VLC: Code Imports does not support submodules (LP: #402814)
• XMMS2: Code Imports does not support submodules (LP: #402814)

Guess who has all registered for the fun already:

• Berkeley, California, USA
• Birmingham, UK
• Novosibirsk, Russia
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Caldes de Montbui, Spain
• Dublin, Ireland
• Saudi Arabia
• Managua, Nicaragua

Lots of other teams are discussing their events right now. We in Berlin will definitely be part of the fun.

András Bognár also worked on new Ubuntu Global Jam badges:

Awesome! Let your friends know! Get planning! This will be a weekend full of awesomeness!

I wanted to follow up on Jorge’s great blog post for a longer while already. He said:

Lately I think we’ve gotten in a collective funk of “here’s what I think about this.” followed by “Oh yeah, well here’s what I think of that”, and “Allow me to retort!” and then getting stuck in a rabbit hole of distractions.

So screw that, let’s share some stories[…]

Needless to say: Jorge is spot on!

A lot of people have been doing ROCKing work in the last few weeks and I never took the time to thank them:

• Dylan McCall has been doing amazing work on Harvest. (Dylan wrote about it too.) Harvest came a long way from a nice idea about aggregating packaging/fixing opportunities in Ubuntu and thanks to Dylan’s great work as part of his Google Summer of Code project arrived in the 21st century. We had lots of ideas at the last UDS (spec1, spec2) but instead of fixing small bits and pieces here and there, Dylan took on the harder job: giving Harvest a nice, consistent and usable interface. I’ll be a very happy man once we deployed it and it’s in active use. Dylan is great to work with: a great attention to detail, still pragmatic and a great sense of humour.
• The LoCo Directory hackers! It’s just amazing to see what people who are excited about the LoCo world manage to pull off. Lots of bugs fixed, lots of nice fixes got in. It’s a pleasure to work with everybody. Every time I reviewed a piece of code I learneed something new.
• Sponsors! A big big hug to people who review code for newcomers who can’t directly commit to Ubuntu themselves yet. The Hall of Fame currently lists these folks, who did a lot of sponsoring: Stefano Rivera, Benjamin Drung, Sebastien Bacher, Didier Roche, Timo Aaltonen, Jonathan Riddell, Martin Pitt. If you can, help out!

Seen in Berlin…

Next Ubuntu Bug Day will be all about Operation Cleansweep, which as you all know deals with reviewing patches and forwarding them to our Upstream partner projects.

Make sure you join #ubuntu-reviews and #ubuntu-bugs on next Thursday (2010-08-12). It will be a great time to get involved in Ubuntu!

Stats from last week (we can do a lot better, so join us on Thursday and get involved!):

Total bugs with patches: 2286 (-27) Reviewed patches: 379 (-9) --- Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 94 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 163 (-5) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 51 (-2) Bugs with 'indicator-application': 41 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 49 (-3) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 11 (0) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 16 (+1) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 2 (0)

Hey everyone,

as the pencils down for this years GSOC is approaching I thought it’s time to write another blog entry to notify the world about my current status.

These past weeks (boy, the time flies…) I’ve mostly spent on hardcore KDevplatform internals. Especially getting multiple languages in a single document working was not easy. I knew it would be the most time consuming and most demanding aspect during these three months, but also by far the most important. I’m confident to say now: I’m nearly there. All projects we put into the KDevelop repository have now a multilang branch in their team clones. And if you look at e.g. the KDevplatform multilang branch or the Quanta multilang branch you hopefully agree that I didn’t slack off too much. I just wasted some time to find the right approach, often by implementing one just to find out it was not practicable.

Thanks (once again) to the help of David Nolden I’m now on the right track. Finally :)

When you use the multilang branches (note: you’ll have to use them everywhere as they contain binary incompatible changes to the master branches), you should already get proper DUChain integration for CSS inside HTMLs <style> tags, which is what I used for testing purposes. I’ve just pushed the required changes to get code completion work properly as well.

This is all still in a quite rough stage and needs lots more work but it proves that I’m getting there. Once this is done I can continue to polish the CSS and XML language plugins, as well as finally writing a “preview HTML” plugin, as this was probably the most requested plugin from back then.

Looking at my tentative timeline for GSOC, I’m afraid to say that I didn’t get to do all of it. But I’m quite proud of what I achieved and hope you all agree that my time was well spent on Quanta. I won’t stop working on it probably after GSOC, quite the contrary. I still hope to release at least some alphas this fall and maybe get it into beta state in winter. What about a Quanta 4.0 release in spring 2011? Who knows :)

Bye

After 7 days in private beta, the site http://tex.stackexchange.com is now open to the public. Anyone can register there and read, ask or answer questions related to TeX. Like on the popular site Stack Overflow, the audience votes for good answers, so the best answers are easy to find: at the top of all answers.

The status of the site is now public beta. This will last from 60 to 90 days, afterwards we’ll see if the site is successful and would stay online.

Now, after 7 days in private beta, the site has 323 users and 658 answers to 242 questions.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

UGJ - I'm going!

I’m SO looking forward to the Ubuntu Global Jam. Up until now we have 4 events registered:

• Berkeley, California, USA
• Dublin, Ireland
• Saudi Arabia
• Caldes de Montbui, Catalonia, Spain

and I talked to a number of people already who are planning additional events. This will be SWEET!

While there’s numerous activities you can dive into on a Jam event, I’d love to see a lot of work being put into Operation Cleansweep. If dealing with patches is nothing new to you, you’d do Ubuntu and the broader open source community a huge favour.

Here the Cleansweep stats of last week:

Total bugs with patches: 2313 (+30) Reviewed patches: 388 (+10) --- Bugs with 'patch-needswork': 93 (+3) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-upstream': 168 (+4) Bugs with 'patch-forwarded-debian': 53 (+2) Bugs with 'indicator-application': 42 (0) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-upstream': 52 (+2) Bugs with 'patch-accepted-debian': 11 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-upstream': 15 (-1) Bugs with 'patch-rejected-debian': 2 (0)

Earlier today I went to a goodbye party of a friend who’s going to Australia for a few months. Great things that happened:

1. Party was outdoors, a few DJs played, great atmosphere, 100+ people at peak times
2. Some of my awesome office mates were there, my sister too
3. The police showed up and instead of shutting the party down, they told us where it was “OK” to have the party
4. We moved all the equipment, the generator, drinks and everything else to the new place, which was nearby, everybody helped
5. I played a 4 hour Drum’n'Bass set, which I (and others) were very happy with, they even collected money for the DJ – glad it was dark, so nobody could see if I was blushing
6. I watched the sunrise by the riverside while the party was still going on
7. I drove home on my bicycle
8. A few guys stopped me to take a picture of them and as a thanks offered me their last beer

Oh how I love this city!