One thing that always thrilled me is the idea that physics today is quite similar to software bugs triaging. You have a currently (or previously) accepted theory, and you make experiments that will show that the reality sometimes does not work according to that theory.

That is essentially what happens at CERN and the CMS experiment. There were suspicions (theories) that the universe contains more types of particles than we supposed at some time. In order to show that, physicists decided to build a large particle collider and measure monitor for events that don’t fit the previously accepted theories.

Now, when these ‘bugs’ in the fabric of reality are found, the scientists do not try to fix them (you can’t change reality), but rather to make a mathematical model that describes the real world better than the last one.

Fixing bugs in Plasma

This is where software developers differ. We also try to make collisions which will expose problems in our software, but we are allowed to change the reality and fix the bugs instead of ‘just’ writing a new specification of our programs that includes the bugs as its essential parts.

My main task at the Plasma sprint we had in CERN was to actually perform as many collisions I can with the activity switcher, and fix all the bugs that I could find. Sometimes the collisions exposed issues outside the switcher – in other parts of Plasma.

I am glad that I can say that I’ve fixed quite a few issues where most were not previously known. Plasma 5.6 will have a more streamlined activity switcher than it used to because its back-end was completely revamped, and it will be much more stable thanks to all the bugs that went away.

Plasma is for scientists

We usually tend to cater to ordinary users, and computer geeks, and tend to get excited every time we see a computer screen with KDE software displayed on some popular TV show or a movie.

But I have to say that all these screenshots that many of us collected during the years fade a bit in comparison to seeing Plasma running on most computers in the control centre of the CMS experiment.

Plasma, KWin, Dolphin, and all the shebang. :)

Some time ago, I saw that CERN people had their own clang tree with a few addons, most notable one being the C++ REPL (C++ interpreter) called cling.

Now we had a presentation by Pere Mato from CERN who talked about their ROOT data analysis framework. It seems like a really nice and powerful piece of software.

The software is around 50 million lines of code, mostly C++. Some of it is python, but it is only used for quick-and-dirty testing of new ideas.

Another cool thing is that they use Qt for writing UIs, and that they also run Linux and KDE Plasma.

Starting on Monday, the Swiss part of CERN will become a home to a dozen Plasma generators. Apart from that, it will also have to store quite a few VDG and W2L components.

We expect a few new developments in the Plasma research, including an improved miniaturization ray that can shrink it to small screens with improved efficiency, and improvements on the Wayland purification system which will provide a tearing-free environment for Plasma consumption.

All this would not be possible without people who support KDE. Please consider supporting us.

For some time I used the Mirakel application to manage tasks on my phone and to synchronize it to the TaskWarrior on my main system. Unfortunately, Mirakel devs do not have the time to fix all the issues the application has with TW synchronization, so I’m unable to use it anymore. (yes, I could contribute to the app, but I’m not a fan of Android as a development platform)

I had to find an alternative - I needed just a one-way sync - to be able to create a note on the phone, and to have it pulled into TaskWarrior when I come home.

One of the (unfortunately not Free Software) services I’ve started using some time ago to collect clippings from the Web is Evernote. And it has a nice integration into Blackberry and Android.

I’ve decided to write a small script that pulls notes from Evernote that have a specific tag, and to put them into TaskWarrior.

The script does not have many features at the moment (it will get a few things more soon), but it works.

It can be found on github - https://github.com/ivan-cukic/taskwarrior-evernote

One of the things that bugged me for a long time in my workflow is that I sometimes forget that I have something running in another activity, and then get surprised that after a reboot, I have a couple vim swap files and similar.

At first, I was planning to add a simplified visual representation of active windows to the activity switcher similar to what the desktop pager does.

After some discussions, we realized that, while it may look cool, it would add unnecessary visual noise to an already information-filled space.

Instead, I decided to go for something simpler. The main information is whether there are any windows in an activity, not the count, and especially not their locations on the screen.

And here it goes:

And Plasma becomes the main product of CERN