Duncan Mac-Vicar P.

I never expected to see Kopete running natively on Windows, but the KDE-Windows guys have done enormous progress:

See the rest of the article on how to run KDE applications on Windows.

Nice surprise today:

• ITO time spent on YaST. No success yet with Wt. It does not provide something like Qt’s QSocketNotifier, or glib’s gioadd_watch which integrate themselves with the event loop. Did a hack with a standard select and a timeout, did not work. Even worse, Wt crashes on processEvents().

• Will hosted a hack session on Saturday. While I did not get any code done, I got motivated by the Kopete 4.x state to continue working on it at home. Yesterday I commited my chat window participants view code for Kopete. It simplifies the code and the signal battle a lot. I still have to fix some issues.

• The Android stuff is so cool. Read this post about Dalvik: how Google routed around Sun’s IP-based licensing restrictions on Java ME. The Activity, Services and Intents model seems natural for other scenarios, not only mobiles.

One Click Install

Help us to market one click install. Go to your software vendor and ask them to provide one-click-install links for their product, together with a install repository. They will, answer “we have no idea how to do that”, then you point them to this tutorial.

Qt

From Aaron’s blog:

Matthias Ettrich is up now doing the Qt platform directions talk, speaking about where Qt is goingin 4.4 and 4.5. He covered:

One of the topics was:

WebKit: merging web technologies and desktop applications. Things like accessing signals/slots from javascript or moving things around in the DOM from C++

Also:

There are apparently plans for at least a 4.7 and there are no current plans for Qt5. If a Qt5 were to happen, it wouldn’t be before 2011/2012 and it would not be a major API design break with Qt4 as Qt4 was to Qt3. However, they feel that Qt4 has what is needed for years of innovation to come and so there are no plans at all for a Qt5 right now.

openSUSE 10.3

From Martin Schlander’s blog:

After listening to those same complaints for a long period of time, it’s amazing that they are all obsoleted in one single release cycle.

• Cleaned up my bug list. Closed 10.2 bugs fixed in 10.3 that will not be released as online updates and other ones.

Package Kit

Richard Hughes calls for a Qt based package manager for PackageKit.

I would love to see a QT-based package manager and update icon using the PackageKit API. I’m quite prepared to make changes the the libpackagekit source if this is needed, I know I use a lot of gobject’isms. I can provide a private git server and add as much documentation as you guys need, I just need someone to take lead of such a project. Email the mailing list if you are interested. Thanks.

You can see documentation here and available backends here.

Kopete

Matt Rogers calls for more Kopete developers.

My build service packages

Upgraded and fixed builds in most packages from the security:privacy repository project in the openSUSE build service, including tor, torK, vidalia and truecrypt. torK still does not build on x86.

One of the biggest news stories out of this year’s Computex wasn’t of a new chipset, GPU, or graphics card, but rather of the announcement of the ASUS Eee PC, a small, slim, and light portable computer that is priced at $199. Introduced by Jonney Shih, Chariman and CEO of ASUS at Intel’s keynote address the first day of the show, the Eee PC has already made headlines world wide.
The Eee PC’s main competition is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project that originally aimed to bring to market a laptop priced at $100 for children in developing countries. However, the OLPC project has seen numerous delays and even a price increase to the $170 range.

Thanks Will for the link (hothardware.com)

So aKademy is over for me. While I type this I am flying back to Germany.

But not for everyone. Hundred of hackers and contributors are still in Glasgow, discussing and coding the pieces that conform the best free desktop out there.

The first social event was in a strange, but cool place called something with “Duck” in it. It was perfect except for the Dj on crack which sounded like a mp3 player with skips on a super high I/O load. People also had some obsession with fruits and flavors in beer which germans did not like.

On Monday evening, we had a nice event at the City Hall. The place was like a palace. Lot of marmol, paintings and details. The reception was in a big luxurious room, were the city authorities and Aaron gave a speech, followed by nice food and wine. We also sang happy birthday to Zack, the KDE e.V. and other people. I did not bring my camera, but here there is a picture from Nikolaj Hald Nielsen blog.

I had much fun talking with the spanish guys (plus Helio). Finally met Thiago and Charles and had a italian dinner with Will and some Trolls.

Unlike last year, I was able to get my KDE4 development environment running in no time, and spend most of the time playing with Kross and Kopete integration.

The organization was good. I liked the hostel more than the one in Dublin, especially because it had one bathroom per shared room and completely free wireless (even if it only worked the first day).

Scotland was a special place for me to visit, as the first MacVicar came to Chile from Scotland. I had the chance to meet some of family there. That was incredible! They even showed me the original letter the wife of the first MacVicar in Chile wrote to his brother in Scotland announcing his death.

• Glasgow has a nice downtown, but it is not my kind of city (Well, Dublin wasn’t too). I am looking forward to see other cities from the country in the future.
• When walking in the street. I immediately noticed something. Then I realized it was not my imagination.

I think we were all amazed by the number of people. It really felt like a big group (just check the group photo). You rock guys.

My photoset is here.

Martin Vidner succeeded in making possible to use YaST UI:: from the language bindings. This means you could write a complete module in Perl, and get the benefits of the abstracted Qt/ncurses/gtk user interface.

These changes means that my Ruby bindings will be able to support it too.

I also got the code as yast2-bindings-ruby in the build service, it doesn’t build yet, but soon will appear in the home:dmacvicar project.

Srinivasa Ragavan is working on Desktop status awareness, which means trying to do useful tasks when you are away from your computer. I pointed him to the Kopete motion-auto-away plugin I hacked some years ago in order to set the user away in the messaging client if no motion was detected in a webcam stream.

Participating in a opensource community has lot of advantages, you get to know really cool people. You learn lot of new things… but also strange anecdotes happen.

Some time ago I was talking with Will, and we both remembered one of the most funniest (now) things ever happened in #kopete irc channel. We laughed a lot, until Will told me. “I still have those logs somewhere”. I said “Really! I think it is time to blog them.

April 3, probably 2003 or 2004. I was in Chile by then. It was sleeping time for Europa. In the channel you can see Sean Egan, GAIM’s lead developer, and myself. Until….

The following takes place between 5 am and 6 am… Events ocur in real time.

(more…)

On my recent post mentioning Kopete’s skype plugin, I got a comment:

OpenWengo (http://OpenWengo.org) is completely open source (GPL), uses Qt for its GUI, and has a better voice quality than Skype.

This comment is very valuable, as it touches a very sensitive topic. I already got some flames by fanatics on my blog just because mentioning non-free software on previous posts (like Flash). This time the comment was in the right approach, link and promote the free alternative.

I fully agree OpenWengo is the way to go. I already know OpenWengo and I have some credit in my wengo account. To be honest I have never been able to make it work well, but to be honest I haven’t tried really hard. Well, a user should not spend time trying. But definitly Wengo is the way to go.

Now, messaging systems are social networks, so the value of it it is not given only by it’s license, toolkit, or whatever, but some function on the number of people using it. I am a Jabber user sice long time. But I was never able to use Jabber until Google transformed it into a product, because Jabber before that was a technology, not a product, and there were not massive products based on it around.

Same happens with Word files. Why even KWord tries hard to import them, why do we care? because even if .doc sucks, the word processing document is part of a business social network were thousands of employees and private people use(missuse) it for information exchanging (and virus exchanging). The value is there. So OpenWengo works fine to call a normal phone. But go and try to convince all your friends to abandon Skype. You can’t because if your friends are not in a SIP based system then you can’t talk to them, but your friends have exactly reason to not to switch.

The right thing would have been not to allow proprietary centralized systems like MSN, Skype, etc to grow like they did. But they did and lot of people use it. You won’t win the battle telling your friends “hey jabber is much better it is xml it is open and opensource blahblah”, “Who can I talk with?” (before gtalk) “ehmm… with the author of the client?”.

We will have to provide some kind of support to closed technologies that have high social lock-in. Then you make the open alternative rock more, and then is when the average use does viral marketing to convince friends. Not before.

So the reason for somebody to implement a Skype plugin for Kopete is not to enjoy Skype cpu usage, and it’s proprietary protocol, but just being able to talk with people that is not going to switch yet. It just allow you to integrate your Kopete contact list with skype contacts, and doing the calls over skype.

Going back to wengo. I am interested to know how can we use its VoIP component only in Kopete, because the new WengoNG seems to replicate a full messaging client, including support for the common proprietary networks.

++Skype is a C++ library for skype add-on platform independent software development. It is platform independent, easy to use, and easy to extend because of the flexible library design, inspired by modern C++ design ideas. Performance is one of the goals: only compile-time polymorphism is used.

(got my attention as Kopete has a skype plugin, using dbus though a thin layer IIRC.)

home page here, getting started here, tutorial here.

It is LGPL. The last version can control Skype not only via dbus, but also via the X11 protocol.

As you might know, Kopete in KDE 4 depends on QCA (Qt Crypto Architecture). Also, KDE 4 uses cmake as it build system. QCA was imported into KDE’s svn, but it uses qmake as a build system. This is not a problem at all. But as qmake was not enough, they decided to implement its own configuration system to compile QCA, and of course you have to hand compile it.

I am not going to get deep into QConf, its description files with embedded C++ code, etc. Just the good news. If you are developing on KDE and need to compile QCA, I managed to get a basic cmake build enviroment wich compiles QCA core, 2 plugins and 2 examples. The black magic is already there, and adding the rest should be piececake repetitive work. The only part I haven’t figured yet are the testcases.

I will post the patch to kopete-devel.

I broke my glasses, so I get tired really soon with the screen