I’ve been interested in Telepathy for some time now. And every time it was mentioned on PlanetKDE, I wanted to test it. Some things worked, some not. Now, that the important ones are functional - system settings module, contact list, chat window - I decided to start the preparations for Lancelot to switch from Kopete to Telepathy.

So far, I’ve managed to display the list of accounts, and it will soon show the contacts as well.

Plans for 4.7

AFAIK, Telepathy will not be replacing Kopete in 4.7, so Lancelot will still be using the old (current) contacts model.

With that said, there will be a possibility to use the Telepathy model in the Shelf applet - it will be available via the configuration dialogue.

For Lancelot, I’ll probably make a hidden (non-UI) option.

That’s all for now.

This is a short post about one of the interesting events that is going to happen in Randa this summer.

Usually, multiple developer sprints are not held in the same place at the same time, but now we’re gonna have four very important ones from June, 1st to June, 7th in Randa, Switzerland - Platform 11 (kdelibs and kde platform sprint), Nepomuk, Multimedia and KDevelop.

I’ll have to develop a split personality for this one since I’m planning to get involved in P11 and Nepomuk as well. My main purpose over there will be to finish the activities backends and to push a few things into kdelibs.

Join the evolution

Aaron and Sebastian have already blogged about Platform 11 and the Nepomuk sprint so I’m not going to repeat what they said.

I’m just going to add that if you are interested in smarter handling of recent/favourite documents/web pages etc. based on user’s usage statistics and not only on the last access timestamp, if you want to have the possibility to retrieve documents that are tied to a specific project/task youre working on … and other activity-related stuff, you should join us and get the opportunity to discuss these topics in-person.

You might have noticed that this is the first time activities are a part of a sprint that is not Tokamak (Plasma sprint) - it is due to the fact that we’re expanding :) - the activities are now nicely separated into the libs/data/backends (Platform 11 + Nepomuk sprint) and user interface (Tokamak 5 - soon to be held in Nederlands).

I’ve been using Blogilo for the last few blog posts, so I decided to write a few lines about it.

The Good

Well, almost everything. The program really works and feels nice like most KDE apps. Kate-based editor for the code - nice syntax colouring, code completion etc.

The Bad

The generated html code is formatted badly. It wouldn’t be much of a problem if you edit things using the ‘Visual Editor’, but it also reformats your manually entered html code.

The code in the editor gets reformatted on Preview. And on ‘Submit’, althoughit doesn’t change the code in editor, the submitted code to the server isreformatted.

Reported as BUG:268552

The Missing

The main thing I’m missing is auto-completion or a tag-cloud of the post tags used before.

The Overall

Even with the above, it is very likely that Blogilo will become my replacement for the WP’s web interface :)

I was (more than) a bit silent lately. The thing called ‘life’ happens and you get dragged away from your computer ;)

The strange thing is that lately, I’ve been doing more artwork than coding, so the new openSUSE 11.4 is fully stripe-themed and (IMO) looks awesome.

I don’t use openSUSE, but that doesn’t mean I should avoid contributing to one of the best KDE experiences out there, right? :) (Ok, this ended up being a contribution even to Gnome installs which required quite a lot more work, but I don’t really mind)

The additional thing that made my day was the openSUSE review on the Linux Action Show. Chris (one of the hosts) didn’t stick with the original theming, but chose to use the standard blue Stripes with the Slim Glow plasma theme. The only thing better than being the default is being a choice over the default. :)

Coding again

Well, after reaching the artwork stardom :), I decided it was the time to return to my true calling. The first thing in line were a few Lancelot bugs that needed attention, and that don’t depend on the future libplasma2 development. No new features yet - but stay tuned - there should be some soon.

Activities

The main reason I got involved in developing the activities system in the first place was to have different favourite applications, different usage statistics (files opened, browser history etc.) in different activities. It always seemed daft to have Inkscape, Gimp and similar in the appmenu when I’m doing some non-GUI C++ coding.

The thing that will be responsible for that kind of stuff is the kactivitymanagerd. It currently (4.6) only controls which activities exists (along with icons, names, running/stopped states…), and which one is currently selected.

The next big thing is making it track the user’s behaviour and things that are accessed on per-activity bases. At first the data was supposed to be stored in Nepomuk, but Sebastian raised concerns that it might slow down the database too much (needs to be tested) since it would require a vast amount of data to be stored.

The second option was to use Zeitgeist as proposed by Seif (the lead Z devel). Now that we have a usable Qt API for it, the second option became viable as well.

Since I’m not famous for betting all my money on one horse, I decided to refactor the current code to be able to handle different backends, and use the one(s) that is(are) available.

Features

Currently, the following is planned for the backends:

1. Rating will be automatically calculated based on usage
2. Files, locations, web pages, contacts etc.
3. If the tests show that Nepomuk doesn’t slow down when saving each event individually, this will be a ‘yes’

No-backend support

Naturally, if you don’t want to use Nepomuk nor Zeitgeist, you’ll not get the rating goodness. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be left out - per-activity recent documents, places etc. are still a possibility.

Ok, this was a bit longer than I expected, sorry for that :)

A few discussions regarding the communication between FLOSS projects are going on now. I’m not going to get involved in those for the time being (mostly because Aaron already said enough) - I’m just going to mention something that has no connection to Gnome, Canonical, or anything like that.

I’ve recently found out that Lancelot was the default menu in Linux Mint.

How did I found it out? Thanks to this bug report which states that it was a showstopper for Linux Mint 10 to use Lancelot as default. The good news is that the bug was fixed in a matter of minutes after reporting.

The bad news was that nobody from the Mint even tried to notify me of anything. How does anyone expect bugs to be fixed if those are not reported?

From my point of view, this should have followed the following algorithm:

1. Mint: Noticed a bug and they decided it was a showstopper for Mint 10 release
2. Mint: Report a bug (either by mail, IRC or BKO) stating that they would need it fixed for the release
3. Ivan: Fix the issue, commit to SVN (now GIT) and send a patch directly to Mint peeps

Would this be too much to ask?