Next week I’ll be going to San Francisco because I’ll be attending to Camp KDE. It’s specially interesting to go there because it’s a very nice opportunity to get in touch with a KDE community that is not usually around in the events I’ve been going (it’s going to be my first KDE meeting outside of Europe). There I will be talking about KDevelop and KDE Edu (no wonder), two beautiful projects from a beautiful community like KDE, can’t be more proud of it .

The day after I come back I’ll be going to Bilbao where we’re celebrating this year’s KDE Edu sprint. I feel like it’s an important step for KDE Edu because it will be the first time where we are celebrating it in an education context and because we will be gathering some important people from this country who is interested in education. Hopefully we will be able to take our project to the next level, so yay us! (again ).

And last but not least, I’ll be going to Vigo the week after that, where I will give the KDE talks in the Free Software master by the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Igalia. I’m happy to see these initiatives happening here and proud to help to take it to the next level. (yay us! bis bis).

And last but not least, thanks to all the sponsors the KDE eV board and, in the end, all the people who makes this kind of things possible . See you soon!

I’d also like to remind you all that we’ll be celebrating the KDE 4.6 dinner in Barcelona (well, this time Badalona, but it’s still close the next 19th february, if you want to come, please just follow these instructions: http://community.kde.org/Promo/ReleaseParties/4.6#Barcelona

Last but not least, it would be good that anyone interested in coming to this year’s KDE Edu sprint says so on KDE Edu mailing list so that we have a correct appreciation about how much people is interested in coming. There will be hacking, talks to the local community and lots of fun with the local folks in Bilbao .

See you soon!

First of all, it’s great that since we’re based on Qt as a development environment we have the opportunity to get in the mobile sector. It’s not great, it’s awesome. I’ve been willing to develop there for many years and with the new Nokia platforms I will be able to use my projects there. After getting the N900, I have developed 3 applications in Maemo, just one of them has been released in the open. For Qt projects, it just works.

Let’s focus on KDE now.
- Everybody tells me that we should develop for Meego: for Meego we don’t have any KDE packages whatsoever (or at least I couldn’t find them) and AFAIK there’s no device that ships it and there won’t be any until 2011, I can put it but not even Nokia supports it. Yes, it’s a great target.
- I have Maemo, it’s an awesome Debian and there’s even some packaging already done in files.kolab.org/local/maemo/. These packages are good for testing, I could compile KAlgebra in my scratchbox. My problem with these packages is that they depend of some Qt4.7 experimental, so kdelibs in Maemo depend on something huge that I don’t need . Additionally we don’t have kdelibs packages in Maemo repositories (there are -devel repositories, it’s not like we have to stuff anything on Maemo systems), that means that if I wanted to release KAlgebra in Maemo I should add them? Doesn’t sound very community friendly.
- Why does KDE people keep telling me to trim KDELibs usage? KDELibs is useful, it makes no sense to not use it just because we don’t have packages for it. We want to share code! It’s what has made KDE great since I’ve been around at least, why do we forget that as soon as we don’t find KDE packages on some system?
- Why isn’t there people interested on packaging KDE on these systems? Probably because these distributions aren’t community-friendly enough, or because these don’t have enough users. Personally, I like to focus on development, do we really expect to push these platforms if not even developers can’t have their applications on their devices to be able to test them.
- Is it that creating packages for these platforms is just technically hard? Maybe we should address that first.

Going back to my experience, it was such straight forward with Qt apps that I convinced myself to port KAlgebra, now i have a version that just uses kdecore and kdeui (according to KDAB packages kdecore+kdeui+kalgebra, this should be less than 2MB, instead of the >10MB if I use their packages with their dependencies).
I guess that KDE development on mobile devices is kind of stale because the only applications that have been ported are huge (like Plasma or Kontact) or they just don’t use KDE (like Marble or Qthello which forked KReversi somehow, AFAIK). What would happen if we consider KDE a project and work together a little? I’m pretty sure we could bring KDE Edu or KDE Games all together into Maemo with little amount of work, why do we have people who would contribute these stopped because the lack of packaging in Maemo?

Maybe I should just consider that KDE is not supported on these devices and spend my time somewhere else.

PS: I didn’t mean to despise anybody’s work. It’s not hatred, just frustration.

If you’re close and interested on the subject feel free to come and we will discuss anything you like!

See you there!

For starters, I spent last week with the KDE Edu and KDE Multimedia teams in Randa where we gathered to get our projects some steps forward. Personally it was a great experience, I was actually looking forward to discuss some issues with the KDE Edu people mostly and I think we did great, we’ll see how it turns out in the future but I’m quite optimistic about it . Also I could meet Percy, our new KAlgebra contributor in person, so we could discuss about some technical issues we found and about how are we going to rule the world in the future.
On the other hand, with my Kamoso developer hat on, it was a nice experience also to get to talk to some VLC developer to sort our problems out which is going to mean a new version soon. \o/ Great, and kudos to Alex who is doing some really tough work (VLC has bugs too! we had a hard time to realize that). And last but not least it was great to be able to show KDevelop to some KDE developers who had not realized its awesomeness yet, I even think I convinced some of them so, yay us!

Other than that, I keep working on my GSoC, I’ll have some flash visit home tomorrow and much more to come .

So what happened? Cantor is an interface for mathematical engines (supports Maxima, Sage and R) that works on worksheets instead of just a console as we do in KAlgebra currently, like many other programs that you might know like Maple for instance. What I did was to implement a KAlgebra backend for Cantor.
I have to say it was quite straightforward. Alexander Rieder, the developer, has been helpful and everything worked fine, which is great and surprising for such a young project, so kudos for Cantor!

This backend already supports code completion, syntax highlighting and some embedded help, it doesn’t support plotting or latex exporting ¿yet? though, but I hope this will be added at some point. I’d like to remark that it’s good to have such backend because it makes Cantor a project that properly integrates the tools that KDE-Edu provides and doesn’t just rely on (probably better) choices from 3rd parties.

So now we have 4 KAlgebra interfaces: GUI, Console, Plasmoid and Cantor. What’s next?

Here you can see what it looks like:

Enjoy!

There was a teacher in the audience (who is concerned about free software, afaik), he said that he was trying to get to use gnu/linux on his school but that he was facing some problems when it comes to use KDE.

One of the issues he mentioned (and that I don’t really know about) is the lack of accessibility tools, the other one is that KDE-Edu applications don’t really fit teachers needs.

It is this second point the one that I would like to focus now. We have quite good applications, but we developers (despite the ones that are both developers and teachers, of course) do what we ponder that’s useful, but not what it is in the actual classroom, so I just wanted to point out that we are open to requests, or at least I am.

In this direction, I wanted to mention that someone contacted me since he wanted to see some features happening on KAlgebra because of some study he is doing. I’m just mentioning that because it was a feature that I was not intending to add in a near future but that can indeed be useful in a real scenario, and it is implemented and hopefully will be in for KDE 4. Here you can see a screenshot of it and you can download and try it here if you wish, even if it is not ready still.

In conclusion, I just wanted to say that if you miss anything, just ask for it. If you don’t know what we have, just check all the (maybe too little) information we’re offering and if you want to contribute but you don’t feel like coding, you can help to improve this communication channel, that is actually failing, so that this education software reaches its goal, students.

Said that, I’d like to thank all the people that have supported to get KAlgebra into KDE-Edu and have helped me through the way.

A week ago I was a bit worried, because I had exams. I said to myself “It won’t be nice if the next KAlgebra release, with KDE 4.1, looks all the same as the 4.0″. I really was! I had lots of plans in my head and I thought that I would find any time for KAlgebra. Well, since my last monday’s exam I have been working on KAlgebra, and I have been making some great changes (IMHO).

The first one is that I am adapting it to the MVC, so that we can share the variables and functions all over the session.

The second one is that I have been adding the possibility of using multiple types in KAlgebra expression, so that we can work with Real numbers and Vectors, Matrix and so. By now I only have the Vector support working, but I think it will be useful.

Before the meeting, I had some doubts about it, I didn’t really know how could a meeting improve KAlgebra or overall KDE-Edu. Everyone can talk to me (by e-mail, irc, etc.) and if there is any issue that should be discussed, I am open to talking to everyone. The reality is far from that. Everything flows more naturally when talking face to face, and that’s what the meetings are for: talking, discussing, knowing people and getting yourself to be known to others. I think it was very healthy for KDE-Edu, it gave me another impression of the project and makes me feel more confortable with it.

Also I had been in a sort of creational crisis for some time, I didn’t have many ideas, but after talking to some people (more precisely Frederik, Benoit and Vladimir) I am more motivated to keep working on it, so that we can have a better KAlgebra for next releases.

Said that, now I am looking forward to KDE 4.1 mainly. I just have some little issues to be solved for the next 4.0 version and then I’ll get to work on the 4.1 version. I am not going to talk about these things now because they don’t exist now, but I will when they do for sure.

Just before getting back to work:
Je voudrais remercier Mandriva, Benoît, KDE ev et surtout, Anne-Marie pour avoir fait possible cette réunion.

Au revoir!

We had some talks Saturday in the morning, Pau Garcia talked about cmake and its different features (cmake, dart, ctest, cpack), I talked about KDevelop+cmake, Alfredo Beaumont talked about KOffice and ODF technologies and Thomas Nagy talked about Semantik, which is a very interesting mindmapping tool for document generation.

After having lunch we had some more talks. For first I talked about KAlgebra (I think they are fed up about me ), then Rafael Fernandez (aka ereslibre) talked about Goya, Albert explained what developement technologies we have in KDE4 based on KTuberling (everybody loves KTuberling now!) and finally Isaac Clerencia and Javier Uruen presented us Inspektor and explained us how did they program it.

The night after we had the social dinner with the organization, where we arrived too late because we (ereslibre, albert, alfredo, antonio and me) became stuck in a lift for some minutes, until the hotel technician arrived. The dinner was fine. Good food, a lot of people and fun . After that we went to take something in the center where we ended up with some problems.

The next day, Antonio Larrosa had his talk about KDE4 environment and then people began to go home. The people from Barcelona we spent the time we had before the bus departure at the Hispalinux premises.

I had a lot of fun these days, I hope we will have another oportunity for another meeting!

You can find the program and presentations here and my photos of the event here.

Bye!