TheBlindCow

This is something that has been worrying me for a while and it’s coming stronger every day, and today a blog post pushed me to start a blog post about that.

We, free (libre, as in freedom) software users are used to prefer open source software over closed source, and I think it’s great, I’m not going to discuss about that now though, there’s plenty of literature about that. My concern today is about distributed services (some people call it the cloud if you wish). A lot of them have appeared lately, and that’s great, but as great as it is I’d like to discuss how much do we want to embrace that, just having a free client is not enough freedom, implementing an open protocol if there are no free servers is not enough freedom. We can compromise, but we don’t compromise by default.

We all want to be able to access our data everywhere, with multiple clients, multiple platforms, etc. It’s so great we’re writing software to support distributed services, distributed systems are great. The problem is we’re providing them our data just by exchanging some “I Agree” contract when signing in which we think could protect us to some extent. We wouldn’t trust on that locally, why do we when distributed?

I think the inflection here comes to the “Am I capable to install that service on my own server?”. If we have an alternative, it’s just our choice to be using the distributed service or not. I think we don’t want to introduce people to closed source software just because it’s easy. Do we?

PS: Yes, I have a Skype account and use it.

Today when I got home I felt like doing something big, something new and something fast. As many other times, this turned into some KAlgebra coding rush but today it was a bit different, because it involved a new project in KDE: Cantor.

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!

Hi, I will be giving a talk about KDE next sunday at 11:00 am in the UPC university, on the Campus nord and I am posting this blog entry because if you are in Barcelona and interested in KDE you might want to come.

Here you can find all the information about how to go, schedules and (yes, there are other talks you might want to go too ): http://www.fiberparty.org/

See you!

I’m back to you today to show something that we have been baking lately for KDevelop. It is its new documentation integration.

With KDevelop 4 we have been focusing on putting together the information that the user will be willing to read every moment. Until now, while browsing the code, we were only showing the information gathered by the C++ support. Since the last week this is no longer true, we can now show the documentation provided by the different documentation plugins. We only have a QtHelp plugin for now, but I hope the architecture will be flexible enough for the new plugins we will have on the future, such as, maybe, a Doxygen’s, cmake’s or anything the reader can imagine.

Here you can see a couple of screenshots that might give you an idea of how does it work so that you can see KDevelop 4, love it and try it.

- The information shown when hovering the DUChain:

- The tool view on the right showing the requested information:

Last week Albert and I made a couple of talks related to KDE on the Térmens Lan Party event. One of these talks was about KDE-Edu. We reviewed every application one by one, showing some of their strengths.

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.

Yes, this year you will have to put up with me with another Google Summer of Code project (well, mainly Matt Rogers, who is mentoring me again ). This year I’ll try to get KDevelop (KDevPlatform) to be able to use plugins written on different languages through Kross. Great!

On the other side, this weekend I’ve been at València, attending to the Guademy conferences, where we have been discussing about interoperability between free software environments (or should I say KDE and Gnome?) among other things related to free (libre) software. It was quite interesting so far, despite I had to a bit earlier due to some personal issues it’s been great to be there.

Back to reality, now I’ll have to concentrate a bit more on the university before starting the summer of code hard work… But still I want to put some code that I have been baking lately related to KDevelop’s cmake support…

C’ ya!