making things suck less

Kopete and Telepathy

mattr — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:33:12 +0000

So in my last blog about the new MSN plugin that Kopete has, I got some comments about wanting updates on the integration of Kopete and Telepathy, which from the KDE side of things, involves Decibel as well.

The update is that no work has been done to integrate Telepathy in to Kopete. Why? Because we don’t have the people to do the work. (I don’t count the Telepathy plugin that exists, since that’s just POC). For the most part, Kopete sees only some very light maintenance work (bugfixes and such) because we just don’t have the manpower we used to have.

Integrating Telepathy (through the use of Decibel) into Kopete is something that the majority of the team wants to do, but we need more people to help because it’s going to be a massive undertaking with all the various design and coding tasks that will need to be done to make that happen.

Another reason is the barrier to entry is kinda high. One would have to learn about D-Bus, Telepathy, Qt, KDE, Decibel, and Kopete to really get going. If people are interested, the folks on the kopete-devel mailing list and on the #kopete IRC channel will be glad to answer any questions anybody has.

new MSN plugin for Kopete

mattr — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:35:10 +0000

I’ve just imported the new MSN plugin (now called WLM for Windows Live Messenger) into trunk for KDE 4.2. This new plugin provides support for MSNP15 and in general lays the groundwork for way more stuff to be added to Kopete’s MSN plugin. The new plugin uses a library called libmsn which you can get from SourceForge

Thanks go to Tiago Salem Herrmann, Gustavo Boiko, and Roman Jarosz for doing
all the heavy lifting.

Now go install libmsn, update your trunk checkouts, and start testing!

reporting of windows bugs fixed

mattr — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 01:40:09 +0000

If you were having issues filing bugs for windows related things on bugs.kde.org then you will be glad to know that I just fixed those problems.

new bugzilla

mattr — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:17:46 +0000

Ok, so Dirk surprised us all and upgraded Bugzilla to the new 3.0.5 version. There have been some growing pains associated due to the conversion. There’s more info on dirk’s blog about the reasons behind the quick conversion. All in all though, can’t say that it went too bad.

We’ll be continuing to improve things as the next couple of weeks go by, and you can always file requests on bugs.kde.org.

Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging about some of the additional features that the 3.0.5 version of bugzilla has over the ancient 2.16.1 version we were using, so stay tuned.

Sunday - 07/20/2008

mattr — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:04:41 +0000

Went to see Hancock today. Enjoyable movie. The Dark Knight is up next. Tons of people waiting in line for the next showing (1.5 hours from when we got to the theater). Completely crazy. I want to see it, but I’ll wait until the theaters are a bit more empty.
Completely skipped out on the Kopete bugday today. I figured I was going to have to miss one of them, and it was just too busy today for me to make it.
Started setting up development stuff on the OS X side of the laptop today. Fink has gotten pretty nice since the last time i tried it.
GTD reboot is the reason for going back to the OS X side of things. A few nice applications there that I need that there aren’t open source (or even Linux-based) replacements for. If I can stay better organized and contribute to KDE more by using OS X rather than Linux, then that’s what I’m doing.

Quickies - 07/11/2008

mattr — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:36:21 +0000

The first Kopete bugday was a great success. We managed to reduce the number of open Kopete bugs by 68, confirm a few more, and have some fun doing it.
Just saw Dennis Nienhüser’s visual changelog for Kopete in KDE 4.1 which is totally cool. To be honest, I hadn’t really fired any instant messenger up since my daughter was born and I’d forgotten all those features had been added. Thanks to Dennis for putting that together.
Still working on the bugzilla update. Dirk found a few more things that I had forgotten to take care of, so I’m working on those and then we’ll see where we stand.

Kudos to the bug triagers

mattr — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:20:25 +0000

Some recognition for the bugsquad: in the last month, there have been 140 more bugs closed than bugs opened, and I would guess that at least a little bit of that is due to the work that they’ve been doing on triaging Konqueror bugs.
Also, thanks to Andreas Pakulat, for going through the KDevelop wishlist bugs and knocking the number of open wishlists down by nearly 150. That’s awesome work!
The bugsquad will be hosting two! bug triage days for Kopete in the month of July. I’m looking forward to working with the rest of the community those days to get the Kopete bugs triaged a bit more, helping the few developers Kopete has to prioritize their work
Speaking of Kopete, as with any open source project, it could use some more contributors. Please email kopete-devel@kde.org if you’re interested in helping. Artists, coders, people interested in helping with the web site, bug triagers, all are welcome. Update:For those interested in coding, there is a Junior Jobs page at http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Kopete/JuniorJobs
Bugzilla 3 update: I’m working on some data conversions and have the simple-dup-finder.cgi left to port before I think we’re ready to convert. No timeline yet on when that’s going to be done due to my limited time

blog is back

mattr — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 04:54:33 +0000

blog is back. only managed to lose the last post, since i posted it after i did my backup. oh well. not that important anyways
so far so good with fedora on this box. quite happy about that. more stuff to get copied over and reinstalled tomorrow

No more dailies

mattr — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:46:57 +0000

I’m sure some of you will be sad, and a few others very happy, but I don’t really have enough material to do daily blogs anymore. What the dailies did do for me though is to get me into the habit of blogging again, so hopefully I’ll start doing more of that.

Sunday - 06/15/2008

mattr — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:20:09 +0000

Happy Father’s day to me. It’s my first one.
Off to the pool in the morning. S. seemed to enjoy the water more this time, most likely cause it was warmer.
Lunch, naps for the girls. Dad around in the mid-afternoon with (belated) birthday present. My laptop now has a 250GB drive in it, which is (once again), installing Fedora 9. 3 installs in the last week - that needs to quit, or I’ll never get any work done.
Nice to see the Yzis revival. Guess I need to blow away my svn checkout and learn mercurial now. Although it’s not like i’d have a lot of time for that anyways.

Saturday - 06/14/2008

mattr — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:13:40 +0000

Up, breakfast, somewhat groggy from falling asleep on the couch while coding.
Poked at various bits of code throughout the day, mostly spent finding way to make better use of what little time i have for coding nowadays. Found a snippets plugin for vim that says it will behave like TextMate snippets, so I’ll be checking that out soon.
Various mundane bits throughout the rest of the day that aren’t worth mentioning since they’re basically the same as every other day.

Friday - 06/13/2008

mattr — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 04:02:32 +0000

Filled in for the PMO representative on the all SCRUM meetings today. Will do so again on Monday. We keep notes from the daily standups, so that’s what I did.
Spent the rest of the morning after that looking at an issue that’s currently affecting the field. Found a fix (just configuration) and passed that on to the support group for them to finish up getting the two restaurants affected going again
Some more work on my GTD app in the evening. Started on the UI. Perhaps I’ll have some thing in a week or so.

Thursday - 06/12/2008

mattr — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 03:58:46 +0000

Lots of meetings at work today, in fact, most of the morning was taken up by them between SCRUMs and an interview with a candidate for one of our Linux Application Developer positions. Poked at source code to try to figure out the various file formats and input/output flows of the project that I’m currently working on. Ran around in circles, mostly.
Got the rest of KDE 4.1 proper compiled. Need to get on extragear and playground now though.
Lounged around in the evening. Read another chapter in my “Practices of an Agile Developer” book. Lots of good stuff in there. Hopefully I’ll finish by the end of the weekend.

Wednesday - 06/11/2008

mattr — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:45:30 +0000

Work most of the day. Today is my one year anniversary with Pizza Hut. SCRUMs in the morning. Paired with another developer between SCRUMs and planning meeting in the afternoon. Installed OpenSUSE 10.3 on my pilot test box. Got much farther in getting the software to build, but still some issues to work out.
Started on my Fedora 9 reinstall during work. Started recompiling KDE 4.1 in the evening. Got through kdelibs, kdepimlibs, and kdebase. Thank you icecream.

Tuesday - 06/10/2008

mattr — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:40:50 +0000

Up and off to work. Poked at our software to try to get it to build on OpenSUSE 11.0. Gave up at the end of the day. That box will get OpenSUSE 10.3 tomorrow. gcc 4.3.1 was just not going to work with our 10+ year old code.
Home in the evening, spent a couple of hours attempting to install OpenSUSE 11.0 on my laptop after seeing the prettiness at work. Although very pretty and the install being very fast, it was basically unusable for reasons I don’t remember. Laptop will get Fedora 9 again tomorrow morning.

Monday - 06/09/2008

mattr — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 14:10:36 +0000

Up and off to work. Demo of NX as a remote support tool for the restaurant helpdesk in the morning. Well received. Spent most of the day working on getting OpenSUSE 11.0 installed on a box that I’m using for a pilot project. We don’t work natively on Linux boxes at work (yet) unless we’re doing testing. The majority of development is done via PuTTY or VNC sessions, but as we start to do more GUI stuff, that won’t scale too well, and I think we can be more productive anyways, so I’m getting to test it out and see how it goes.
Home in the evening, playtime with S. and then some more work on my GTD app, then off to bed.

Sunday - 06/08/2008

mattr — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:37:29 +0000

Up, breakfast, bath for S. and by the time it’s all said and done, it’s only 10am. C. off to the store for groceries while S. sleeps.
Lunch, worked on the C++ support build time debug configuration while girls napped.
Dropped S. off at C.’s parents, then dinner out. Visited with C.’s parents for a bit after dinner.
Committed the C++ stuff late in the evening, then off to bed.

Saturday - 06/07/2008

mattr — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:51:43 +0000

To the pool with the girls in the morning. Water was a bit too cold, so we didn’t stay long.
Messed around with my bugzilla data import, gathering ideas on how and where to make improvements. Specific ideas that anybody has can be logged at bugs.kde.org. it has it’s own bugzilla product

Monday - 06/02/2008

mattr — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:01:21 +0000

Up and off the work close the normal time. Ran late trying to get everything together. Gave an intro to TDD presentation in the morning, seemed well received.
Home late due to talking with a colleague about software testing. Spent the evening playing with S. and reading Chapterhouse: Dune.

Sunday - 06/01/2008

mattr — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:01:05 +0000

Slept in again. I love weekends. Leftover birthday cake for breakfast. Can’t go wrong there. Poked at more new bugzilla stuff. Might be ready soon.
Home Depot and Lowe’s in the afternoon looking for cabinet pulls and knobs. Found some we liked, decided on one after we got home and got to see them on the cabinets.