sandsmark's blog

Akademy karaoke night

martinsandsmark — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:51:51 +0000

For whomever it may concern, there is an ongoing karaoke night at Karaoeken Koti Killinki.

going to akademy!

martinsandsmark — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:37:59 +0000

since everyone else is doing it:

I am going to akademy 2010!

I have somehow managed to volunteer my laptop for installation during the talk Laszlo Papp is holding about Chakra, so I guess I should make sure my backup is working.

I love blurring

martinsandsmark — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:45:30 +0000

Since I wasn’t able to sleep yet, I thought I’d blog.

Inspired by this after installing the latest beta on my workstation (which has a cool enough graphics card for the KWin blurring), I added ~4 lines of code (3 calls to Qt to set a transparent background on the widgets, and 1 to turn on blurring) to Filelight to get this:

I won’t commit this now, because it is more of a quick hack to see how simple it was and probably not very usable, but I’ll see if I can make something a bit more usable with transparency and blurring later on in Filelight.

Goodnight.

GSoC, CloudSync, moving from Firefox, Phonon release

martinsandsmark — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:58:05 +0000

So, I’m participating in GSoC this year as a student, working on ownCloud, or more precisely using ownCloud in desktop applications.
Firstly we need to expand the OCS (OpenCollaborationServices) API to handle private key/value-storage for individual users, and then implement support for using this API in libattica. OCS and libattica already has support for notifications from the server to the clients, to easily synchronise all clients when some setting or data is updated.
The only non-trivial problem to solve is of how to handle deletions, especially when some client was disconnected when the deletion was pushed to the server, but I timestamping all items should solve this (if an item doesn’t exist on the server, and hasn’t been updated locally since last synchronization, discard the local one).

Then, when this is working and tested, I intend to write an Akonadi bookmarks resource using libattica for storage, so that we can easily synchronize several sources of bookmarks (there is a del.icio.us resource in playground already, for example). I also want to integrate (optional) support for this in KWalletManager, or maybe in a separate application. Lastly I think synchronization support in the note-taking application Basket would be neat. If someone has good ideas for other applications that could enjoy some cloudifying, please comment, and I’ll look into it, and see if it is easy/feasible in the time I have.

Another thing I started on after a couple of glasses of wine, in a hotel room in Tokyo, was something tentatively called CloudSync, which I intended as a Dropbox/Ubuntu One “killer”, only that it didn’t rely on a proprietary webservice, it only needed something that had a kio-slave (like webdav/owncloud, smb, nfs, sftp, etc.). It’s not usable yet (and relies on some KIO behaviour from KDE 4.5), and the code is close to what I would call a proof-of-concept and generally a mess (I blame the wine). But some students got in contact because they wanted to work on something similar as a SoK-project, so maybe something will pop up there (or I will get bored one evening and finish my app and clean it up).

Also, I’ve been using Firefox for a while now (mostly because of Mozilla Weave, since I’ve been using a lot of different machines, and I suck at remembering stuff). And since I like eating my own dogfood (yum-yum), I thought I’d switch back to Konqueror for a while (or maybe try rekonq since everyone keep raving on about it). But I still suck at remembering stuff, so I wrote a small utility to automagically export all my credentials from Firefox’ password storage. The only problems is that there are ~4% of my passwords that it is unable to decrypt (and I can’t say I enjoy working with NSS, to be honest, and therefore I’m tired of debugging that part of the code), and that Firefox doesn’t store the name of the form the username/password fields belong to, which KHTML/kdewebkit uses as a key to store the credentials under. So I enganged Mr. KHTML (Maksim), and hopefully KHTML in the future will fall back to using the credentials imported from Firefox (and probably kdewebkit too, if someone fixes it).

And finally we just released a new version of Phonon (4.4.2), not much to be excited about, it’s a bug-fix release.
And it seems like the GSoC students working on Phonon are well under way, very exciting stuff.

So, to apologize for the unreasonably long entry, here’s a funny and cute kitten:

API documentation

martinsandsmark — Fri, 21 May 2010 23:34:41 +0000

Since api.kde.org has been down a lot lately, I generated some Qt Assistant-compatible documentation from kdelibs, and put it up on my server, and also linked to it from the topic in the #kde-devel IRC channel.
But since not everyone visits IRC, I thought I’d mention it here too.
So, fetch kde45.qch and save it somewhere save, launch Qt Assistant, go to Edit→Preferences→Documentation→Add… and navigate to where you saved the file and add it. You should now have a fully indexed, searchable and browsable API documentation for kdelibs.

In other news, I’ll be working on desktop synchronization with ownCloud as a GSoC project this summer. The plan is to first extend libattica and ownCloud to be able to store and retrieve random values by keys (so a key/value-store), and then utilize that in for example kwalletmanager (for synchronizing passwords), rekonq (to synchronize bookmarks) and Basket (to synchronize notes).

There will also be two students working on Phonon this summer (on AV-capture and low-level audio APIs, much like QtMultimedia, only in Phonon). I’ll try to get them both on planet so they can introduce themselves properly.

Also, I unfortunately couldn’t make it to Randa to the multimedia sprint due to some really lousy exam dates. I wish I was there.

R. I. P. Jan Mette

martinsandsmark — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:43:38 +0000

Saturday afternoon I got a private message on IRC from a childhood friend of Jan Mette; primus motor of the old KDEmod package repository for Arch Linux, and initiator and primus motor of the Chakra Linux distrolet, that he had died friday morning.

Although I never met him in person, we spent a lot of time together on IRC and packaging kdemod before I started maintaining Phonon, and I’m having a hard time putting down what I’m feeling. He had quite a profound impact on my life, and I’m certain I wouldn’t be the same today if we hadn’t crossed paths.

I also grieve for the friends and family he left behind, I can’t really start to imagine what they must be going through now.

More information here.

Droidbattles, Phonon bugs, Dragon Player

martinsandsmark — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 18:05:32 +0000

Sup peeps.

I noticed I hadn’t blogged since the Phonon bugday; meh. The bugday was a raging success, with many nice people showing up and helping. Also especially thanks to Mamarok, she was doing an absolutely fantastic job, and is still continuing doing a fantastic job in the bugzilla now sorting and triaging. Many thanks to her and the rest of the people who showed up. I hope to spend some quality time in the bugzilla during this christmas.

The reason I haven’t blogged is that I’ve been pretty busy with the final exams, but they are now behind me. But while reading for exams I did, as is usual here in Trondheim, have several projects to distract me. I started a port of DroidBattles to Qt4 (a game where you program robots in assembly, used to play this quite a bit), continued on my port of Kredentials (a Kerberos ticket handler for KDE), made a patch for Qt 4.6.0 to include a newer Phonon version, and finally continued the work on moving Phonon to Git (I got as far as to get svn2git to crash with my ruleset, the history of some Phonon elements isn’t entirely trivial to keep track of…).

I also fixed the two most annoying bugs for me in Dragon Player, the one where the toolbar isn’t hidden in fullscreen mode, and the one where the mouse isn’t hidden. I also tried to fix the screensaver handling, now only DPMS is left to disable (which shouldn’t be too hard, a couple of lines copied from the `xset` source code should do it). I hope this makes Dragon Player usable for other people again, too.

Lastly, I’m also building KDE 4.3.82 for Chakra now, for all of you impatient Arch Linux users wanting an unstable desktop. They should be finished and uploaded by tomorrow morning, in the kdemod-testing repo.

Phonon bugday

martinsandsmark — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:00:57 +0000

So, today (technically for me, I’m about to go to bed), Sunday the 8. of November, we’re having a bugday for Phonon. This is to try to make bugzilla a bit easier for Phonon developers, for bug triagers, and for plain old users who need to file bugs.

What we will do is try to work our way through all the open bug reports filed against Phonon on bugs.kde.org, and plain old cleaning up. You can find more details here: http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/BugDays/PhononDay. Thanks a lot to Myriam Schweingruber (aka. Mamarok) who set up this page, and is helping out with the bugday. Also thanks to the KDE Bugsquad who’s doing an already excellent job of triaging in the bugzilla, and for taking some extra time to help with this bugday. Lastly, thanks to the (former, current and future Phonon developers who have agreed to show up and provide insight and help.

So if you’re looking for ways to contribute to KDE, and more specifically Phonon, please don’t hesitate to join. There aren’t really any requirements for helping triage bugs on a bugday, apart from showing up.

Phonon bug-day, Filelight release

martinsandsmark — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 19:16:24 +0000

First things first, first: set off the day 8. of November. Then we will arrange a bug-day dedicated to Phonon, to clean up duplicates, close fixed bugs not marked as such, and generally try to make it easier to file new bugs and fix bugs. More information should be forthcoming. I’m trying to get as many developers who know anything about Phonon to set off the complete day, so there should hopefully always be someone active who are familiar with Phonon.

So if you’re either someone who has used Phonon, worked on Phonon, likes Phonon, likes bug triaging, or simply want to lend a hand, please show up on #kde-bugs the 8. November.

Screenshot of Filelight 1.9

I’m also very close to releasing my KDE 4 port of Filelight, I think I’ve fixed all regressions from the KDE 3 version in SVN now. Yes, yes, I know it has taken almost a year now (if not more), but I hope I can compensate with a very solid first release.

If you do know of any regressions, please tell my ASAP (either file a bug at http://bugs.kde.org/ or ping me on IRC (`sandsmark` on Freenode, IRCnet and EFnet).

We’re also soon finished with arranging Norway’s largest cultural festival (UKA), only 6 days left. After that, I hope to have more time for free software and Phonon in particular, so far this fall it has been mostly administrative tasks, and getting to know the rest of the multimedia stack in Linux.

Multimedia frameworks in Qt

martinsandsmark — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:35:06 +0000

So the three multimedia API’s that are planned for inclusion in Qt are as follows:

Phonon. The first multimedia API in Qt, written mostly by Matthias Kretz and with some help from Trolltech to Qt-ify the API, and included in Qt since 4.4.0. Written as a ‘replacement’ for various multimedia libraries (like Xine, libvlc, gstreamer), abstracting the API away, so the application developer doesn’t have to worry about which multimedia library they use, and if it got abandoned (then it would just take someone to write a new backend, and voila, all the apps worked again, without having to be updated to the new API).
QtMultimedia. A low-level multimedia API written by the Qt Brisbane office, and to be included in Qt 4.6.0. It will probably make sense to use as much of this API as possible in the different Phonon backends, as it provides platform-agnostic access to audio outputs, inputs, and some video handling. I’ve talked a bit with the KMess developers and with Matthias Kretz, and we will probably try to get webcam/video input support into QtMultimedia, and then eventually provide a convenience API for this in Phonon. This will probably also make it easy to simplify and crossplatformify parts of the KDE platform plugin for Phonon (which manages sound devices, amongst other things).
QtMobility/multimedia. I don’t think it is intended for inclusion in Qt, but in a separate “mobility” library (Qtopia^WQt Extended?). I replicates a lot of the functionality in Phonon, but I think that maybe is intentional. I would like to see some more information of what was lacking in Phonon, though, and why they wanted to start from scratch.

If I’m mistaken in any way, feel free to correct me in the comments (I moved my blog to wordpress.com, because I’m lazy and didn’t feel like implementing comment support in my django-based blog).

In semi-related news; I’ll be taking the job as the semi-official maintainer of Phonon until Matthias gets finished with his thesis (at least). That means I’ll be trying to keep the unloved parts of Phonon from bitrotting (like the tests…), fixing bugs, reviewing patches that come in, etc.

I’ve also started the work on an advanced configuration dialog for Phonon-Xine, like the Xine configuration dialog in Codeine (the Xine-based video player in KDE 3), exposing all the available options, without having to edit the config file by hand.

I’m also conspiring with blauzahl to hold a bug-day for Phonon, there’s a lot of untriaged, duplicated and otherwise unsuited bugs against Phonon, bordering on unmanagable. So stay tuned, if you think bugs are fun.

Lastly, in completely unrelated news, I’ve started porting Kredentials to KDE 4. It’s a tiny tray-application for managing (acquiring and automatically renewing) kerberos tickets. I’m also almost completely finished with the KDE 4 port of Filelight, I think I nailed one of the last regressions today (the cutting off of edges of the radial map).