So… I brought up activities on plasma-devel again the other day. One of the reasons for this was that I noticed the word being used in a few different ways – mainly by me – and wanted to clear up confusion.

Well, it turns out I was the source of that confusion. :) What I’ve been referring to as “Activities” should actually be called “Context”. That’s what aaron was calling it, months and months ago, and somehow I remembered the word as something completely different and was avoiding it. Oops. So, when you read my old blog post or see my presentation from campkde, just replace 99% of the times I say “activity” with “context”.

Some other good things came of that discussion, but I have several essays to write so I don’t feel up to doing a long blog post on top of it all; either I’ll blog next week, or after we’ve discussed it at tokamak. :)

So, just to be extra clear: an Activity is a group of widgets on your desktop (what developers call a desktop containment). Context is all the stuff you need for what you’re doing right now (windows, files, etc). And if you only have one monitor, chances are you’ll have one Activity per Context anyways.

There’s lots of activity in #plasma the last few days. lots going on. :) With 4.4 being tagged on wednesday, that’s not too surprising… but it’s still nice to see everyone working to get this release as stable as we can in the little time we have left.

Although I haven’t quite caught up on my homework since campkde, I’ve still been chipping away at things where I can. There’s more screensaver fixes, and a panel bugfix too. I’ll go back to panicking about homework on wednesday. ;)

Thanks to rrix, practically all the widgets in kdeplasma-addons have had their security re-checked, and we’ll probably deal with kdebase tomorrow. :) hooray for security!

I’m already counting the days to tokamak, too. so close, and yet so far…

it’s hard to believe it’s over already…
Thursday evening, everyone who was left had a proper dinner together in an actual restaurant. :) It took them a while to make a table long enough for us. Oh, and wade was there – I forgot to mention he made a surprise appearance wednesday evening. :)
Friday most people were gone – but me, jos and frank were still around. We discussed kde and the cloud and things over a delicious lunch (there’s a little place called.. Rick’s? Just one block from the hostel) and (eventually) made our way downtown for some shopping. :) i didn’t really mean to buy anything, but I found a few nice things that were on sale.
That evening we ate at Rick’s again, and james joined us, and we ran into little william and his family :) jos and frank had fun learning to eat crab legs; I’m sure there are photos somewhere.
Back at the hostel the power was back on downstairs, but off again upstairs. We talked to the staff, and soon we had power everywhere. I fixed the toilet in my dorm, too. :)

Saturday morning it was just me and jos – and the sun! :) Of course the weather’s beautiful the day I have to leave. :P It’s sunny and warm and wonderful. And here I am, sitting on a plane, about to fly back to canada. *Sigh* well, it’s been a great conference. I’m really looking forward to the next one (tokamak – in just one month! :)

so last night went well; after the qt training we stayed at the uni. it’s still stormy out there, and apparently we missed a flash flood. I got several bugs fixed and backported (screensaver stuff again), so I’m happy. :)

anyways, wednesday was the normal qt training; today is embedded training. not embedded like the n900, but embedded as in framebuffers and really tiny devices. we all got livecds with the embedded environment, and spent some time getting that set up (several people don’t have cd drives, others want to run it in a vm, etc…). Then we got to actually run an app in the virtual framebuffer and make a hello-world app (without instructions… but it was basically just a new qt app + the embedded project settings).

after lunch the training continued… and… holy crap it’s 7pm. where’d the time go?
and it’s the last day, too…. :(

we’re off to a restaurant for dinner now (at least I think we are; it’s been fast food all week). most people are leaving tomorrow; I’m leaving saturday. it’s been a great week, despite the hostel and the weather… I wish it wasn’t ending already.

huzzah! training day today.

technical difficulties continue: when we got back to the hostel last night, another section had lost power, including my room. blarg. we were all tired though, so after a halfhearted attempt to put on a movie we just went to bed. in the morning, we arrived at UCSD… only to find none of us had the key (it was with jeff, who was waiting for someone else at the hostel). luckily there’s some lady upstairs with keys, though.
oh, and since last night identica won’t let me post anything. I get error 400 every time and I can’t figure out why. :/

Anyways, we’re doing qt training right now. model-view and events and threads, oh my! ;) I’ve learnt lots of interesting things already. One pattern we commonly use in KDE is actually not ideal in qt4: using a singleshot timer with timeout 0 to do delayed stuff. Using QMetaObject::invokeMethod with a queued connection does the same thing, and can even take arguments. :)

We had some lovely sunshine this morning, but the storm’s back now… Troy claims he’s going into the ocean tonight regardless. What is it with kde developers and cold bodies of water? ;)

huh. it’s tuesday evening already? time flies…

sunday evening me, troy and rrix got out the karaoke machine. :) the song selection wasn’t great, but that just made it more entertaining. ;) by the end everyone was joining in, I think.
karaoke tends to involve drinking, though… I had a bit much, and didn’t really want to go anywhere the next morning. After I got up and got lunch, the weather was getting stormy… I decided to just stay at the hostel for the rest of the day. :/ I wish I hadn’t missed that cmake training.

so then I discovered just how unprepared for rain california is. the power went out in the common room, so there was no internet… the corridor was a river, half the table was being rained on, and one guy’s bed was under a leak too. :/ we had to resort to crazy old-fashioned things like talking and playing guitar ;)

Eventually someone ran an extension cord to the common room, which gave us tv and partial internet. :) I stopped playing backseat-scrabble and joined in the wii games and movies. Pan’s Labryinth is.. a slightly dark movie, but good.

When we got back from dinner, some old Dune movie was on. I walked in at just the right time to see Chani introduce herself – and she pronounced it properly! yay :) nobody at the hostel has any excuse for getting my name wrong now ;)

Tuesday morning started off nicely with pancakes and bacon, thanks to rrix. :) Then we were off to storm brewery for a nice little tour and a yummy lunch (have I mentioned I love the food here?). The storm was blowing tree branches onto the road that afternoon… We split up when we left the brewery, with some people going to the aquarium, most going to UCSD and then most of the people at USCD going to Fry’s electronics. that took a lot longer than I would’ve liked, but I finally have a proper charger for my n900 – and I found some nice headphones too :)

Now we’ve got delicious pizza and snacks, and we’re sitting around hacking and whatnot, at the nice *dry* university. :) I’m lookng forward to the qt training tomorrow, but I already miss the people who had to leave early.

another day of talks and dragon photos. :) this time we actually had both dragons. the talks were good, but my mind’s rather blank at the moment as I just finished my own talk. it seemed to go pretty well; I wasn’t sure I was explaining things coherently but there were lots of good questions at the end so it can’t have been too bad. ;)

the number of questions in general has been quite high here, actually. it contributes to our being behind schedule, but it’s really nice; people are listening and thinking and getting a lot out of the presentations (not just sitting in the back hacking ;)

between frank’s and my presentation, my thoughts are on the future of kde…. but there are still bugs in 4.4, so I’ll try and bring my attention back to the present later this week. :)

Well, the internet here has flaked out, but I’ll write a blog post anyways and post it when I can.
Campkde is great so far; good food and good friends. :) I wandered around downtown for a bit when I arrived, finding delicious mexican food and plenty of open wifi. The buses aren’t particularly punctual, but I eventually arrived at the hostel, where there were several familiar faces and a couple of new ones. :) It’s right by the beach, and while the weather isn’t really beach weather, it’s nice to hear the waves crashing in the background.
The hostel… Well, it’s a hostel. There’s beds and bathrooms and a nice big table to drink hack at. :) And… A karaoke machine! And rockband! :) Ok that makes the hostel a *lot* cooler.

Anyways, the first day of talks was very good. I squeezed my way into the tiny dragon costume in the morning and stumbled around for a bit. :) Several people wanted photos with the dragon. Hopefully tomorrow there’ll be two dragons. :) Jeff started off the talks, and then we had a great keynote, and continued having great talks all day (with a break for yummy yummy lunch). Check them out when the videos are posted.

I like san diego; there’s good food (I’ve had mexican for 3 of my 4 meals so far) and mild weather. Being with kde people again is great. speaking of which, I think I’ll rejoin the socializing now. :)

My, how time flies – I’m already a week into the new school semester. I had a really nice holiday (an *actual* one, where I actually *realaxed* for once ;) and the pace is picking up again now…

At the beginning of the holidays I was planning to work on git documentation; that didn’t really work out. I realised it felt like homework, and KDE isn’t supposed to be a chore, so I needed a break. Over the holidays I spent most of my time reading books and seeing friends. :) I did return to kde eventually, of course; I worked on a little feature I’d been dying to implement, then unbroke the poor neglected plasma-overlay stuff. I’ve still got a handful of little things to do before 4.4 is released – hopefully I can do them at CampKDE, because school’s getting busy already. :)

I’ve got four courses this semester, which is one more than usual… and there’s going to be a *lot* of writing. in fact, my first essay is due in 14 hours (how to tell who your real friends are: ask them to review your essay for you ;). That’s for my cognitive science class, which looks like it’s going to be really interesting (and full of essays). Then I’ve got a technical writing course that I think will be really easy – if I’d known it would be like this I would’ve found a way to get it waived. My algorithms course might be interesting, though – I’m still not sure what I think of the teacher. Unfortunately the course I expected to be most interesting – a linguistics one, “the science of speech” – has been fairly dry so far. Still, at least I don’t have any *bad* teachers :)

The tricky bit is going to be not falling behind while I’m off at campkde. (omg! less than a week away! and I’m giving a presentation!?) I always *mean* to work ahead beforehand but somehow it never happens. :) I haven’t figured out which courses I can safely ignore yet, either, and it seems I have several teachers that do activities in lectures instead of just talking. Still, it’ll work out somehow. :) And then when I get back, I’ll have my evenings busy with martial arts and things…

Tokamak will be happening in february, too; I get a two-week vacation because of the olympics and the second week I’ll be out in Nuremberg with the rest of the plasma team :) I’m hoping to work on Activity stuff out there, as well as finding solutions to some little things that have been bugging me. And having a ton of fun, of course. :)

I have a feeling this semester is going to fly by faster than ever… It’ll be fun, and challenging, and oh god I’m going to need another vacation when it’s over ;)

So a week ago, I got my green belt in modern arnis. Through hard work, practice and persistence I earned this honour. This semester has been one of learning, of growth. Of awakening.
I took on a group project, and although it was in many ways not quite what I’d hoped for, it turned out all right. I found myself joining another project, and that one was more fun – and stressful at times. :) I started the semester with a workload I knew I could handle, piled on more things until I was feeling overloaded, scaled back to what I could manage – and then loaded on more again and found a way to pull it all off. I’ve discovered things I’m quite good at, and some I’m really not. I’ve made mistakes, and hopefully learned from most of them ;)
I feel as if a whole new world has been opening up before my eyes. It’s scary and tough, but I feel like I finally have the strength and desire to face it and show that world what I can do. :)

I was a lot calmer for my green belt test than I had been for my yellow a year ago. It’s hard to believe it’s been only one year. Four other students had their yellowbelt test the class before, so on the day of our test (me, G and L) it was a sea of yellow – just one white belt there. :) Quite a change from most semesters I’ve been there – being on-campus there’s a lot of churn. L has left for another university already, actually. Anyways, the test went all right, and next semester we’ll probably get started on the blue belt requirements. Plus working on the weak areas of our green belt stuff, of course. It’s a really great experience being part of that class… martial arts with a good teacher teaches you so much more than just self-defense and exercise. :)

As for the robocup project… I have mixed feelings about that.
Most of my initial fears turned out to be groundless, but motivation was a real problem. I found out I kinda suck at research – but that was soon irrelevant because the base code never did what it seemed to do. We ended up spending most of our time trying to understand and fix it, which wasn’t much fun. I’m still not sure whether starting from scratch would’ve actually been faster…

Everyone in the program was a good student (however the teachers measure “good”) so there were no serious issues with group dynamics, but it still wasn’t perfect. One group member dropped out just after the initial code sprint, and that combined with the infeasibility of building AI on top of a buggy base threw a lot of confusion in. I have a feeling the experience was much closer to that of a real job – we were all competent with at least *some* experience, but our motivation went down steadily, the project goals got revised considerably, nothing was as it seemed on the surface, and all the code we had available was strange and underdocumented (what few comments there were were just as likely to be german as english). The project wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t a clear success either. :/

Then there’s the maemo project. I ran into my friend’s teacher at Qt Dev Days, and he convinced me to help with their project – I got to borrow an n900, how could I resist? ;) So I spent some time building the UI for that project with my friend, and we got to show it off at a nokia event at the end of the semester. I got some good experience from that, too – communication was difficult at times, and we were having trouble understanding what each other’s requirements were (some other guys were writing a c library that our c++ code would use) but we got it sorted out in the end – or didn’t, as it turned out, but the misunderstanding simply made integration easier anyways. :)

At some point in… er.. november? The git migration team started having weekly meetings, too. ohhh, meetings. We had bikeshedding galore… confusion everywhere… I’m pretty sure I contrubuted to the confusion even when I was trying to reduce it. :P It’s been an… interesting… experience, and I gained a new appreciation for the term “cat herding.” ;) We’ll get there in the end, but we’ll be sure to argue over every single bikeshed along the way (and several we passed ages ago). :)

So many other things have happened this semester – some good, some bad; some big, some small. I certainly can’t write about all of them, nor should I. It’s been fun, it’s been painful, it’s been everything in between. I’ve made new friends and met lots of interesting new people. (There’s someone I’m forgetting to call again, isn’t there?) I seem to have lost a friend, too, which really sucks. The semester is over; my exams are done. It feels more like a beginning than an ending, though.

My reason for being in school right now isn’t really the classes – it’s learning how to deal with people. Learning about computers and math and stuff isn’t that hard, I can figure it out on my own if need be, but people are *hard.* Communication is hard. :P I think I’ve actually made some progress, though. Yay :) There’s so many things I still don’t get, and it seems the more I learn the more there is to learn, but still. Progress. :)

So now I’m going to take a few days to myself to actually relax (or more likely: spend half a day relaxing and then get sucked into kde things again). I’ve got plenty of things I’d like to do over the holidays, but if I start talking about them they’ll start to feel like obligations, so I think I’ll just let it be, and see what I find myself drawn to. :)