whenever people ask me that question, I have trouble answering. what is KDE? it’s not just a desktop environment any more, not by a long shot. it’s a whole universe of software projects (one of which is a desktop environment). it’s the libraries that we use to make that software, that helps make a KDE program really *feel* like a KDE program. it’s the community around that software, people we work with and care about.

I love kde’s approach to software. it was the beauty of the underlying design that drew me in… I want to use, and make, software that works for me instead of against me. software that integrates and works together, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. software that shares code, shares standard behaviours, etc. software that’ll remember things for me - I don’t have to know the whole name of a program if I can type the first few letters or the category, kontact will remind me of appointments, rsibreak tries to make me rest once in a while… I can use my memory for more important things while the computer takes care of those details for me. :) this is where things like nepomuk and solid will really shine, as applications begin to take advantage of them… things will Just Work, powerful things will just happen naturally, and we won’t have to spend as much time fighting with our computers instead of working on them… and then new, easier, more natural ways of using the computer will open up, as we put these tools to use and build more flexible software, software that works the way *we* want…

with kdelibs, the pillars of kde4, and qt, writing software gets easier and easier. need audio? phonon can handle it for you. need to deal with hardware? let solid handle the details while you focus on whatever your app is *really* trying to do. when you use kio, your program can read and write files locally, over ssh, over ftp, or pretty much any other protocol. kparts let you suck in big chunks of functionality from other kde software. and the more kde features you take advantage of, the more integrated the software is, the easier it is for people used to other kde apps to learn it and use it and feel at home. :) and of course there’s all the benefits of using qt - such a well-documented, coherent toolkit, where so many things just make *sense* and so many little headaches are taken care of for you.

most important, though, is the community. people from around the world, working together to make our computers a better place (am I too corny yet?), make awesome software, and have fun doing it… people who are friendly and intelligent, respectful and considerate (at least, most of them, most of the time). I want to be part of a community that treats people with respect, that welcomes anyone who is willing to act responsibly and be considerate of others, where people support each other and work together and work out disagreements without saying hurtful things. I love being around so many people who share those ideals, who believe in KDE, that we can make software that has quality, that will be useful and lasting and will make people’s computers at least a little less stressful… :)

developers, translators, writers, artists, bugsquad, usability folks, everyone who has been working to improve KDE and being a positive part of this community: thank you for making KDE (however you define it) awesome. :) I love working on KDE software, and I love working in the KDE community.

and now, I steal borrow a couple of my favourite images from Wade Olson:

well, what did I do this week? it’s been such a long week.

on monday I fixed some little bugs, and made configuration only possible while widgets are unlocked. tuesday and wednesday I was out camping… or rather, cycling 80km to the campground, sleeping, then cycling to the nearest bus. ;)

after I recovered from that, I spent a few days fighting with git. git-svn is a fragile little baby and I did something it didn’t like, so everything got all confused. :( but eventually I managed to create a new master-branch without any weird double commits, and get things working again.

yesterday, I made transparency options for plasma-overlay. you can set the opacity both for when plasma is active (meaning you moved the mouse or typed recently, and the screen’s locked) and for when it’s idle. however, the performance isn’t great, so if your system isn’t very powerful you might want to stick to 0 or 100% opacity.

I also realised something… developing in a public git repo isn’t all that helpful if nobody’s actually looking at it. I’ve had hardly any code review :/ that’s not a good thing. hopefully now that it’s in svn people will start pointing out the weird bits in the code; I’ve also hacked post-review-plasma so that I can put my code on reviewboard again. :)

I’m posting a bit early this week, because I’m feeling impatient. :)
I don’t actually have that security stuff implemented - planned out, but not implemented. but I have an excuse, I’m waiting for aaron ;) so in the meantime I… well, I procrastinated a lot, relaxed a little, and then eventually skipped ahead to next week’s goal - adding an option in the screensaver config to turn this thing on and off.

now that it’s actually possible to disable it (and it’s off by default), I figure it’s okay to let people try it out. trunk conveniently unfroze, so I cleaned up a couple of bugs and committed everything to svn (mmm, git flood). have fun! :)

however, I warn you: soc is still not over. there are still some gaping holes in my project. don’t expect it to actually make sense or anything until after akademy. it will eat your babies ;)

well, I spent yesterday lazing around on the beach reading about design patterns, so I guess I have to get work done today.
I need to audit a bunch of widgets for security, or at least group them vaguely based on how I expect the audit to turn out (some aren’t even worth doing, either because they’re trivial or they have no business being on a locked screen at all). we have a *lot* of plasmoids now :P and I’m only looking at the ones I know of. this isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, so I’m looking for any excuse to procrastinate ;)

someone on irc was bugging me about the lack of screenshots in my blog. :) so I thought, why not show another screenshot of my screensaver?

huzzah! I managed to get caught up this past week, despite RL being busy. password checking is there… the config button is still there when locked, but I decided it made more sense to fix that *after* general security stuff is in place, so instead I made the dialogs hide when plasma is locked, and made it lock whenever plasma’s hidden or the timeout is reached. that way a locked screen becomes a fully-locked screen again if you’re called away :)

now that plasma essentially works, I need to focus on security. oh joy. widgets need to *not* let the user do whatever they please when they’re on the screensaver. so, I have to design some system for letting the widgets know they should be locked down (hopefully something a little better than just-lock-everything so that it can be useful outside of my project) and then get some widgets to follow it.

oh, and

when a project has one person who is significantly more visible than other contributors, speaking often and well, trying to make things happen by communicating outside the project, blogging on important issues, speaking at conferences… a funny thing happens. people seem to assume that person IS the project. they take his opinions as that of the project as a whole, believe that he somehow controls the project (a crazy notion when the project is as big and open as KDE), and some even seem to blame him personally for anything they dislike.

this isn’t good. not for the project, not for the individual. we should discourage people from treating anyone this way. we should try and keep anyone from falling into this position again. we don’t want celebrities.

after the recent drama, I imagine many contributors might want to hide away and make very very sure that they never get this kind of publicity. however, I think that would be bad. I think the problem isn’t exposure per se; it’s the relative levels of exposure for different contributors. when one person gets far more exposure than others, we run into trouble - so what we should try to do is have *lots* of people getting more exposure, such that no individual finds themselves out there alone. :)

we were discussing this on irc, and joked about creating an imaginary person to be the “king” of KDE, and have different people blog for it. then we realised that we’ve already got a place for news that isn’t from one single human being: the dot. apparently the dot editors would really like more articles. :) I think it’d be a good thing for the community if more people were to submit stories to the dot. they’d have to be a little more polished than a blog entry, but we have editors to help with that. the submission form looks a little, uhm, old - but hopefully kyle’s planned software updates will address that eventually. :)

Perhaps you’ve already written a good blog entry that could be transformed into a dot story easily (there was a nice folderview blog recently, maybe something like that should be on the dot). perhaps you’ve got something to say that’d interest the KDE community as a whole. don’t be shy, submit something! :) I’m going to try my hand at it soon… once I get caught up on soc. :P

ok, so week 5 ended a day or two ago. I normally blog monday nights, but I was coding right up to bedtime.

anyways… I was not lucky. the input issues turned out to be a royal pain in the ass. however, with help from some other devs (especially fredrikh) and a favourable alignment of the stars (seriously, I have no idea what fixed the qaction issue) - I’ve almost got it licked. :) I’m just playing with getting the keyboard input to go to the config dialogs now. [iiinteresting. the basic config is fine, but the font selector breaks the second time it's shown. hmmmm.]

once those last little issues are worked out (assuming they don’t turn into big monsters), I can get this code merged in, then start on security stuff. if I can get password checking working quickly and make those config dialogs hide themselves when plasma’s locked/hidden, maybe I can kill a bug or two as well before the week ends. :)

so, ervin blogged about about “stop energy” and the poisonous people that we’ve been failing to deal with.

“The story started several weeks ago (probably even months ago) ” - ervin, it’s been going on a lot longer than that. ever since I started trying to get involved in plasma last year, I’ve watched aaron deal with these people over, and over, and over… his patience with them amazes me. I probably would’ve snapped pretty fast if I was getting that amount of negative energy thrown at me on a daily basis. This has been coming for a while, and none of us seems to have done much about it.

The fact that he’s both the president of the KDE e.V (which is mostly just an organisation that deals with KDE’s paperwork!) and project leader for plasma (which far too many people seem to equate with all of KDE) puts him in an uncomfortably public place. many people seem to be treating him… almost like a celebrity. it’s creepy. it’s not a healthy way for a community to behave. it makes me somewhat nervous about my own involvement in KDE; I’d hate to end up in a position like that. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’d love to be able to get more involved in the KDE community in future, and do useful things beyond just writing code… but not if it’ll mess with my life like that.

So… what can we do about this? I’m glad ervin made some suggestions, because I know fuck all about dealing with things like this. Properly moderating the dot seems like a very good place to start; I think of it as the cesspool of the community. :P
I think it might also be good to have a place to send people when we tell them “this discussion has been done to death, please stop talking unless you’re sure you have something new to add.” (because how can they know whether they’ve got something worth saying until they’ve read the old discussions?) - but that’s one of those things that requires manpower, and I’m currently behind schedule on my soc project.

Another thing I’ve noticed; when aaron is patient and tries to reply to these trolls, people wonder why he doesn’t just ignore them. when he tries to put an end to conversations, he gets called names like “dictator”. what’s anyone supposed to do in a situation like that? as a community, just what the heck do we expect from people?

Of course we don’t want to ignore users entirely. Of course we don’t want an environment where certain people are Always Right and nobody can voice dissent. but I think we’ve gone too far in the other direction. we’ve become so tolerant of people voicing their opinions and arguing about things that we’re unable to say Enough is Enough. There has to be a balance somewhere, where users can still be heard but developers can still get on with things instead of constantly justifying and re-explaining every little thing they do.

I hope we can work towards finding that balance, before more harm is done.

communication is hard. I’m seeing things happening in the KDE community that concern me, but I don’t know enough about this community or life in general to know if I really should be concerned, or what can be done (if something should be done).

I see one person worrying about the effect developer blogs are having on users - seeing new and shiny things and then finding out the packages their distro provides don’t have those features yet, or maybe the UI to set them up isn’t done, or whatever.
I’ve seen people suggest that developers, on their blogs, shouldn’t be writing as if they were talking to other developers, because then users come along and wildly misinterpret what they read.
I’ve seen posts on the planet, in the past, that seem designed to do nothing but stir up cotroversy and fan the flames (thankfully, very few of them).
I’ve see posts that were well-meaning, but written in a way that just stirs up trouble, worrying or angering people unnecessarily.

funny. I find half my mind wanting to generalise and leave out details, avoid naming people who might take offence or pointing to specific bad posts that should be left dead. but the other half of my mind is going “no! specifics! must have specifics!”

anyways, back on topic.
on the one hand: it’s my blog, damnit! shouldn’t I be allowed to write whatever the heck I want?
on the other hand: it’s published on the planet. shouldn’t I be careful about what I say? shouldn’t I try to write thoughtful, useful posts and avoid causing unnecessary pain to the community?
as for users misinterpreting things… these are developer blogs. developers probably want to blog about technical things. they’re not marketing folks. however, it seems users will read them anyways.

perhaps what I should be asking is: what’s the intended audience for planetkde? what are our expectations for content on the planet? what standards do we expect people to meet in terms of thoughtful, mature communication? what do we do about people who are *not* the intended audience reading the blogs anyways and misinterpreting things?

I also see other things that concern me. we have a *lot* of users these days. it’s easy to spend all day trying to explain things to users and not actually get any code written. some of these users are really friendly and make us feel good about our work. some are nice, but unintentionally get on our nerves. some are a a bit of a pain. some seem to have nothing better to do than continually provoke us without being in any way constructive until we don’t want to write code at all. some are downright creepy (identity theft is not cool).

when those non-constructive people are replying to blog posts and commenting on bugzilla, it gets really hard to just ignore them. especially when we don’t want to ignore the nicer users. these trolls also make it a lot harder to be patient with the mildly annoying comments. plus, mildly annoying becomes extremely annoying when it’s repeated over and over and over.

so how do we keep communication between developers and other contributors and users open, without people being overwhelmed?

I get the impression that many developers are doing just fine. perhaps they have thicker skins, perhaps they’re working on less public bits of code and don’t have much to stress them out. but some of us don’t have thick skins. sure, it’s the internet, stupidity and trolls are inevitable. but you can’t always expect a person to just grow a thicker skin and not care so much. if we didn’t care, why would we be here in the first place, writing code, trying to improve the software we love? when you care about things, you can get hurt - but you care anyways because what’s the point in living otherwise?

I’ve asked a lot of questions there. now maybe I’ll take a stab at some answers.

“what’s the intended audience for planetkde?”
I’m really not sure what our intended audience is, but effectively we seem to have contributors, users and trolls. I think we can agree that trolls aren’t part of our intended audience, at least. :) I’m on the fence about what sorts of users should be included in our intended audience. certainly users who are interested in becoming contributors someday or are curious about what we do; not so much the users who just want an answer to their own question - which is usually something more appropriate for bugzilla or a mailing list or #kde (our blogs are not a support forum, no matter how convenient it may be to just drop questions here!).

“what standards do we expect people to meet in terms of thoughtful, mature communication?”
I think it’s quite reasonable to expect people to think before they post, and try their best not to spread FUD or provoke people or fan flames.
I think it’s also reasonable to expect people who aren’t so good at it to try and improve - or rather for *all* of us to always be trying to improve our communication skills. it’s one of those things that’ll help you in all aspects of your life, really. I hate this communication thing, but I keep trying, for the sake of my future self. ;)

“what are our expectations for content on the planet?”
well, developers need a place they can blog about technical things. most aren’t marketers. I don’t think we can expect them to suddenly become marketers, or dumb down their posts for the sake of nontechnical users. the users seem intent on reading their blogs anyways, though. I briefly entertained the idea of having a separate planet for nontechnical blogging - but isn’t that what the dot is for? (I don’t even *read* the dot any more. the comments there just got too inane.)
Perhaps we can do something to remind the users that these are mostly developer blogs? I don’t know what. I’m certainly not going to start putting a “not intended for end-users” disclaimer at the top of all my blog posts. :P
could we remind the users that the screenshots they’ve come to expect are from trunk, and their version might not have this stuff? perhaps. I think everything I’ve blogged about has been brand-new at the time, and if people don’t realise that software released months ago won’t have the feature I wrote yesterday there’s not much I can do for them. anyways, lately we’ve been mentioning version numbers a lot, talking about what will and won’t be in 4.1 - so the more I think about this, the more I believe it’s a non-issue.
I do think developers should try not to scare users; I don’t think they should be expected to go out of their way to accommodate them or turn a technical post into a non-technical one.

“what do we do about people who are *not* the intended audience reading the blogs anyways and misinterpreting things?”
damn, I don’t have an answer for this either. some people disallow anonymous comments, but personally I don’t like to do that - plenty of nice comments are anonymous too. can we try to teach people that these blogs aren’t meant to be marketing pieces? that we’re just humans, writing about what’s on our minds?

sometimes I think I should set up a separate blog somewhere far away that either can’t be linked back to me or isn’t open to the public, because there are some things I’d like to blog about but don’t really want exposed to a bunch of random internet-strangers. but that’s not really relevant here; I think that posts about my kde work naturally belong on planetkde.

“so how do we keep communication between developers and other contributors and users open, without people being overwhelmed?”
hmm. there’s a big question.
for starters, I think having a bugzilla that didn’t suck would be nice. :P I don’t know if I can expect that to happen, though. there is some new version in the works, but I don’t know when it’s coming or what improvements it’ll bring. it’d be nice if bugs didn’t just have one huge dump of the entire history of the bug. it’d be nice if I could take bugs offline and work on them. it’d be nice if I could search without using that godawful query page. it’d be nice if we could send bugs upstream or dowstream instead of just closing them and telling people to go talk to $project instead.

maybe it’d also help if there was somewhere to send users that are asking a question that’s already been answered a dozen times. a techbase-for-users or something. of course, that’d require people stepping up and setting it up and maintaining it n’stuff. any volunteers? ;)

there are many users, and few contributors… it doesn’t seem to scale very well in terms of communication. now I kinda understand why gmail has only a user forum, and no bug reporting or email addresses or developers to pester (you just have to wait for a developer to reply to a forum post - if they choose to do so). I still don’t *like* it, but I understand it.

I took a bit of an unscheduled break this week. didn’t write any code until sunday (although I did read and think about and talk about code). :) it was nice to just relax for a while.

unfortunately I haven’t *quite* got my goal for the week finished. input is somewhat partially working; I can click on things, and keypresses are going through, so the basic stuff is there. contextmenus and plasma-dialogs work, although they’re drawn below the semitransparent containment background (it’ll be fully transparent later, but this is useful for debugging). the add-widgets dialog and config dialogs aren’t showing up, but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere. ;) what bugs me right now is that qactions’ keyboard shortcuts aren’t working at all, and I’m not sure how to solve that one.
the code for this stuff is currently in the ‘input’ branch on gitorious.

if I’m lucky I’ll get those bugs ironed out tonight or tomorrow and be back on track for this week’s goal - requiring a password to unlock plasma. and if I’m not lucky… well, that’s why week 6 was left blank. :)

oh, and my email got pretty backed up while I was relaxing. I’d only been keeping up with things addressed directly to me and a few important parts of lists, and ended up with around 2500 unread messages! :/ it turns out that a little over two thousand of them were plasma bugreports; I hadn’t touched that folder in about two weeks, and before that I hadn’t quite been keeping up with it (it was hovering around 500 for a while).

so, I gave up and marked the folder as read. it’s starting to fill up again already. :/ ick. there are way too many bugreports there. being busy with soc, reading them isn’t really a useful way to spend my time anyways, I guess.