Kafka is awesome. Its unique approach to log aggregation and messaging allows it to scale to Gbs/s while persisting every message (hence the “log aggregation” part). But, like everything in engineering, building Kafka required a series of deliberate trade-offs. The choices made by the LinkedIn team were pivotal in creating something fundamentally different from traditional messaging systems like RabbitMQ. Had they chosen differently, Kafka might look much closer to RabbitMQ than it does today.

In 2013 I bought a Macbook Pro 13” which came with a HiDPI display (also known as retina display). Already back then the support for a single HiDPI display was quite alright with KDE4 and a few tweaks here and there. Months later Qt5 got native HiDPI support and most applications switched from GTK2 to GTK3 and finally the outliers (chromium based apps, godot, arduino…) got support for higher DPIs as well.

Open365 is a public and/or private cloud designed to compete with the likes of Google Drive or Office365 by leveraging all the best free software out there. The service is designed to scale horizontally as well as to be resilient to components crashing or going crazy. In order to achieve this we have implemented a microservice architecure that communicate using a bus (rabbitmq) plus some other tricks so we can scale using commodity hardware horizontally.

I can’t imagine anything worse than waking up every morning without any energy for going to work. The first time I heard that statement I was 17 and it made an impression on me. It made me think of how we use our limited time, which roughly is: 1/3 sleeping, 1/3 at work and 1/3 at what we call spare time. We can’t control how much we need to sleep, but we can take a stance on the other two thirds (work and spare time).

In light of the last comments containing insults and other attacks to members of our community I have decided to make a video blog explaining my thoughts on the issue. The video contains two separate topics: Explanation of why we can't tolerate this behavior Some ideas on the actual matter (Baloo) Please, watch the whole thing before commenting and I hope we all work together to push away the trolls in our community.

This is the first of three posts where I am going to share my vision for the desktop apps of the short-term future. When I am using my workstation or laptop I find myself spending most of my time in the browser, with it I do a lot of different tasks I used to be doing with many different native applications for example: listening to music, watching videos, chatting with friends, sending pictures.

If you are reading this blog you probably know how things work in the GNU/Linux Desktop, some people develop software and then some other people distribute that software. This usually works quite well since the people distributing the software (In this case KDE software) work with us, and together we make sure that the final product is awesome. This system works as long as both, upstream (KDE) and downstream (Distributions) work together, but some times collaboration does not happen and problems appear.

Since January 2013 the BlueSystems office in Barcelona has been open for anybody related to KDE to join us, a great example has been Albert Vaca who has been coming to the office to work on his GSoC, some other examples are the mini Framework sprints that have been held in the office. Now, we are happy to announce that the Office is finally ready to hold sprints up to 30 people, and our intention is to hold as many sprints/KDE Events as possible!

After months of discontinued work we are happy to announce BlueDevil 2.0 ! The 2.0 version brings the same experience we can find in the 1.X series but using the new BlueZ5 stack which at least on our testing improves a lot the general stability and specially on sending/receiving/sharing files via Bluetooth. In this major version we have focused on rapidly adopting the new technology so we don't have many changes visible to the user, we have added though a few things we hope you will like.

Hello everybody. The Solid team that I am member of, focuses on all things hardware, a few examples of our efforts are: Bluedevil, KScreen, kde-colord, powerdevil, libsolid, plasma-nm... Since we are aware of how essential good hardware support is for having a good experience we try our best to deliver highly usable and simple interfaces that will enable any kind of user to unleash all the potential of their hardware. That is why usability is a top priority for us.

Tomorrow David Edmunson, Vishesh Handa and I will be taking a plane from Barcelona with final destination Brno to meet for a pre-PIM sprint hackathon with the Czech KDE hackers (Lukáš Tinkl , Jan Grulich, Dan Vrátil, Martin Bříza, Martin Klapetek), is in this ocasions where one comes to appreciate that we can do our jobs from anywhere. We decided to go this early (4 days before the actual sprint starts) because we all have to work on things with somebody close to the Brno RedHat office in a variety of topics:

We are really glad to release the first officially stable version of our new Screen Management tool that allows you to configure screens such TV, Projectors or Monitors magically just by plugging them while keeping an interface for those users that want or need a more custom configuration. For those who haven't read the previous announcements, here are the most important features of KScreen: The System Settings module: KScreen System Settings module from Àlex Fiestas on Vimeo.

A few days back I attended the first freedesktop summit/sprint where a few hackers from different free desktops met with the objective of working together. We were people from Razord-qt, GNOME, Unity and of course KDE. Even though we did not had the chance to discuss all the topics I was specially interested in like Notifications or Session Inhibition I did had the chance to get involved in other topics that are equally interesting like the shared Desktop Files cache or the "

After a few more weeks of hard work in KScreen we are glad to announce the release of our first release candidate. We decided to jump directly from alpha1 to RC because of all the great feedback we have received and the surprisingly small list of reported bugs We'll probably do another RC release to test some of the code that is not yet in this version, like supporting the restoration of manually added resolutions (something only needed for broken monitors).

In short: From now on we will be maintaining only one release instead of 4. We are going to focus on 1.3 and try to fix all remaining bugs, then we will work on implementing some of the reported wishes and release 1.4. Once that happens we will only maintain 1.4. Explanation: Since BlueDevil was released we have been updating all stable versions, which means: 1.0 (currently at 1.0.5) 1.1 (currently at 1.

One of the points we had left to implement before we can consider KScreen a replacement for the current screen management was support fo XRandR 1.1. The XRandR1.1 extension dates from 100B.C and it only knows about one screen on which you can change: size, refresh and rotation. Luckily all modern drivers implement at least XRandR 1.2 (which know about multiple screens) so you may be wondering why do we bother to support such an old thing?

Belated release announcement of the last and most stable BlueDevil release: List of unique changes in 1.3 final: 308324: Fixes crash in obexftp KDED module 304785: Fixes crash in obexftp KDED module (yes, another) 311152: Fixes crash in network-dun plugin when no adapter is present KDED crashes Do not show PANU in kiobluetooth since it is not supported Use common version number in all components (correct version reporting) As always you can download it from:

We are really glad to announce the first release of KScreen, the new way of managing screens in Plasma Desktop ! This release comes with two main components, the System Settings module which will let you configure and arrange your screens in any way you desire, and the KDED module which will remember and restore configurations whenever it is needed. We have decided to release now since we have fixed pretty much all the bugs reported by our early adopters (special thanks and hugs to them) so we feel that it is about time we let power users test it so we can fix any bug that may still exists.

As you may know Dan Vrátil and I are working in a brand new screen manager that will solve most of the issues that we currently have on the desktop, making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple. We are trying be as smart as possible adapting the behavior of it to each use case making the configuration of monitors as simple as plugging them to your computer.

Almost a month has passed since I wrote on this blog about the show, and so far everything is going great, people seem to be enjoying it and we are having a ton of fun doing it. Since I talked about it we have done 2 more shows: KDE TeaTime #8 - If you could change one default setting, what would it be? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgv0etfJdNE KDE TeaTime #9 - When to release?

In this second part I'm going to explain a few techniques to debug Akonadi we use in order to understand why my KMail installation was working bad. My configuration I'm a heavy email user, every day I receive and read hundreds of them, and I love to have my email synchronized across devices (laptop, workstation, phone, tablet) and particulary in my laptop and workstation I want to have all my email offline so I can make use of it with or without internet, specially useful on my laptop while traveling.

A few weeks ago I went to Berlin, this time to attend the October KDEPIM sprint. Though I have met some PIM hackers through the years I have been around KDE, I never had the opportunity to actually work with them, and try to figure things out, and as it is usual in our community they haven't disappointed me. I had 2 objectives for this sprint, first get a few bugs that I discover while working on WebAccounts fixed, and secondly try to track down all the KMail issues I have when I run it in my laptop.

For a few weeks now 3 other KDE hackers and I have been doing a videocast/podcast/show/thing about KDE. It is a completely unprofessional unprepared amateur show where we basically talk about a different topic every week without having any script, we say things as we think them. it Doesn't matter if they are politically correct or not. My main motivation for having this show is to open a door to the insides of KDE.

For those who don't know MTP stands for "Media Transfer Protocol", having support for it has become really important because since Android 4.0 it is a requirement in order to manage files in any Android device, even though MTP has been here for years and other products offer support for it lilke the Nokia N9. In order to have MTP support we needed a "kio-slave", which has been developed by Philipp Schmidt, and then modify some parts of our workspaces (dolphin, kdelibs and notifier) to integrate the MTP devices as if they were just regular massive storage (pen drives).

Fixing mtp support for various pieces of the workspace I realized a small paper-cut I could do to improve the experience when handling external devices such pendrive or usb hard drive. The paper cut is quite simple, before these patches we were using the "device description" for all devices, which make sense for devices always plugged into the computer for example the normal Hard Drive where your operating system is usually installed, but it doesn't make sense for removable devices.

This blogpost was written 2 months ago, mind that ! As you may know, for the last months I have been working on BlueSystems, one of my main projects has been creating a working prototype of "WebAccounts". What is WebAccounts? It is a centralize place where both, users and applications can configure accounts related to various social/cloud services such twitter, identi.ca, google, facebook, dropbox, owncloud, ftp servers... How is it done?

First of all, excuse the super late release of this post, I have been super busy up to the point where I couldn't use 15min to spellcheck this post, now I had to adapt it a little bit, change times etc. From 11jun to 18jun we had an amazing sprint in a small town near Barcelona called Pineda de Mar. This sprint was organized to gather all the developers highly motivated in move the Desktop forward, including those working in areas not strictly related to what the user sees or not strictly known as part of the desktop.

Most of you know me because of all the work I do on KDE in form of code: Kamoso, BlueDevil, Solid... It is the stuff I put on my blog so if you know my involvement in KDE because of my blog it is normal. Besides writing code, I'm starting to be involved in other areas all across our community, one of them is KDE-España. KDE-España is the legal representation of KDE in Spain, you can consider it as a sister of KDE e.

There was a time, years ago when computer users only needed to keep all their files in one place, and occasionally make some backup to a CD or DVD. Then the mp3 players appeared and those users had to copy the music from the computer to the player usually via USB, that's all we needed we thought... well we were wrong :) The amount of devices we have and we use is increasing and so does the amount of data we manage, some may think that a regular non geek user has few files but if you take a closer look you will see that the average user actually has hundreds of pictures, hundreds of sounds, hundreds of films, dozens of documents.

I planned to announce this when it happened but got stuck with travels and work so it got delayed a bit (2 months :p). I'm glad to say that I will be sponsored by Blue Systems to work on various parts of the Workspace, so far we have defined two areas of work: Improve transparent file browsing (KIO) and make it available to all applications. Improve web and online services integration into the Workspace, by adding a single point of configuration.

A few months ago it almost happened to me. It was horrible. I was traumatized. I wonder, how can that happend in 2011? why me? why to my laptop? It was a worm afternoon in Madrid, the meeting I attended was so intensive I didn't get to login into the KDE Plasma Workspace session but instead I let the laptop on the KDM login page. Once the session finished I closed my laptop and put it in my bag full of battery.

Finally I have had the energy and the time to hunt the damn crashes that have been affecting BlueDevil since the beginning, fixing them has been relatively easy, be able to reproduce them instead has been quite time exhausting. Once I fixed all those damn crashes I proceeded to do bug triage and managed to fix all of the confirmed bugs, or said in another way BlueDevil is virtually bug free bug list :)

A few days ago I attended to the PA3 sprint in Darmstadt, as always I enjoyed a few days with my friends not only working but also taking beers, going dinner etc. I have had a really good time there as I always do when KDE is in the formula. As far as I know this is the first PA sprint where a lot of community members external to the project attended, this is really great for opening the project to other areas of KDE, such Solid or KDEdu.

A few days ago Mark Shuttleworth announced the HUD menu, a Unity dialog that lets you trigger menu actions in the focused application like: look for bookmarks, change your IM status execute an action contained in the menu bar. This kind of features as well of how they are executed may sound familiar to you dear Plasma Worksapce user... Exactly! I'm referring to our beloved KRunner! KRunner can do a lot of stuff in both global and active application scope (though it tends to offer more global features) , just to mention a few: Math, Bookmarks, Files, Calendar, Contacts, Emails, Devices, Change IM Status, Recent documents.

I'm sure 2012 is going to be an amazing year for Free Software and of course for the KDE community, a lot is happening within our community and we have just started the year ! Just to mention a few from the top of my mind: Calligra getting closer, Plasma Active2, 4.8 release, Frameworks 5, OwnCloud 3, Spark... I can go on for a while :) As every six month or so, here is the list of what I'm planing to work on:

Hey! long time no see :) I have been moving from Madrid to BCN, cities which are around 650km away and that is keeping me busy because I can't neglect work time for doing it and even if I could the process put pressure into your head so you spend more time procrastinating than before. Nevertheless the moving is almost complete and I'm going to be using more and more time in KDE.

This weekend I proposed myself to clean the BlueDevil's bug list, at the beginning of the weekend the list had 42 bugs (including wishes), at this moment it has 18. When I started the bug triage process, I realize that we had too much crashes so I decided to sit down and fix'em all, well I think I did and because of that we're releasing new versions for each branch including a new one (1.

Though we released the 1.2 version a while ago we decided to delay the announcement since there were some annoying bugs that now, thanks to the testing performed by the kubuntu community are fixed. Relevant posts about BlueDevil 1.2 (with videos and pictures :p): BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 released (changelog here) Support for DUN and PANU (use device as modem) kio_bluetooth improved For 1.1 branch there is only one fix that solve an annoying behavior when the wizard is invoked with pre-selected address and uuid (basically it was working behaving poorly, now it works well).

One of the most important thing that is happening in Forge 2011 is the amount of work we're doing related to usability, focusing all our efforts in tree projects: Network Management Power Management Places View In all three of them we used more or less the same methodology and because of that we have been able to reuse some work we did for Network Management into the rest of the projects; Let me introduce you to Penny and Amy.

Finally the Solid sprint 2011 (kown as Forge) has started! The day has been a little weird since sadly some metalworkers were not able to make it :/ but we had to start so, this being a "Ervin driven sprint" we started creating a kanban. That took us a few hours, good thing is that now all we have in front of us is hacking, thats it!! 3 days of non-stop hacking :D

Just a quick announce for the interested parties (distributions and advanced users). Yesterday I pushed a couple of fixes that fix annoying bugs and because of that I belive that you may want to backport them to 4.6.5 or even to 4.7.1 if you don't want or you can't wait until 4.7.2. Folder contents are not refreshing: This happens only when using a kernel with two digits uname such 3.0-ARCH for example, commit to backport is: kdelibs 7df5a79fb9f09e4a4a80cd541cc478b5fa6df00f

Hi there! These last tree weeks have been crazy, apart from being busy sorting things out where I work, I have been doing an strict diet + sport to see if I can get rid of my extra weight, so far I'm not less Àlex than I was tree weeks ago, exactly 10Kg less (22 pounds says google...). Well stop of talking about myself, let's talk about BlueDevil! BlueDevil 1.2:

After a few months of development the Solid team is proud to announce the first release candidate of BlueDevil 1.2 Changelog: Action Plugins Added support for DUN Added support for PANU A few description changed Fixed the Category mess we had in the .desktop kio_bluetooth Show known devices first Perform discovery in the background Fixed the mimetype mess we had Will work when started without Bluetooth activated Wizard Added another OUI for Apple Wireless Mice Auto select Mouse's Agent

So, a few days ago I was talking with an apple fanboy friend of mine who used to be KDE user before being abducted by the i* family of products (he started with an iPhone, he ended with i*Everything...). Anyway he is still using KDE from time to time so I asked him what is the feature he misses most when he is using KDE, the answer as you may gest was "

Nobody seems to have found the eastergg.. so I won't be giving away the N950 I wanted to... (ah, I forgot to say that? xD) So, the easteregg was a small Network icon showing up in Dolphin at 03:02 :) which in BlueDevil 1.2 will allow you to launch the DUN or PANU configuration. While I'm writing this post, only DUN support is implemented since I don't have a device that support PANU, but don't worry as I say in the following video support for PANU will be implemented in a few days, it is just a couple string replaces.

After releasing stable versions (boooring) there is nothing better than publish new features, and it gets even better when those features are between the most requested/wanted. The feature I'm going to introduce may sound kinda useless for some people, but in all KDE software we offer different ways of doing things, so you can find which way integates better with your workflow. In BlueDevil 1.0 and 1.1 when you use the kio_bluetooth (bluetooh:// in your browser), what it did was start a bluetooth discovery, meaning that the only devices going to appear into the file browser were those who had the visible mode activated.

Between all the hard work we're doing within the Solid community (Networking, XRandR, Power Management...) we always find time to release patch releases which usually fix small issues and help to ease the waiting until the next big release is done. Now it is time for BlueDevil to have some patch releases. BlueDevil 1.0.5: Fixed bug: 277451 Fixed some bahaviors in kio_obexftp while copying files Show the file size and the speed in the file transfer (in kio) Start/Quit bluedevil-monolithic in online/offline mode Improved layout to look good in all Qt Styles Huge i18n improvements (fix's and more translations) BlueDevil 1.

In my way home from work, talking with ereslibre we concluded that would be awesome if I could fix the current "KRandR" code before starting to work on new one. With the "adrenaline boost" still in my blood I sat down and started to work on it. After a few days of working, I'm pleased to announce that for KDE-Workspace 4.7.1 the "Screen/Display/Whatever configuration" has been hugely improve, all bug fix though but now it even seems to work!

Is not a secret that the last few weeks (or even a month) I have been kind of unmotivated to work on KDE stuff, and that is a deal breaker to work on something you're not paid for and you do it only for the pleasure of doing it. Though the reasons why I was unmotivated (or how I like to call it, kde-depressed) are still there, last Friday after finishing 3 important projects at work I felt again the adrenalin boost that makes me hack like crazy, no matter on what, but I have to hack on something.

Hi there ! Once again it is time for me to organize my priorities within KDE for the next 6 months, I have had to drop a few things from the list since I'm not sure how much time Solid community and KDE-España are going to take from me since the work I will be doing there is rather not technical. So, this is my list of priorities: Downstream: Downstream people are those who use our stuff to produce something else, for example: distributions, developers using our libraries, designers using our icons.

More or less 6 months ago I put myself a list of objective to accomplish in KDE, so far these are the results: Hardware: Bluetooth: We've been working hard in the last release of BlueDevil (1.1), now we can say that more or less KDE has a good Bluetooth support :)! Webcam: Kamoso 2.0 has been released, and with it rock solid support to do the basics such Take a picture, or Record a video.

Tomorrow we will be all leaving towards our respective homes and platform11 will be formally done, though the work is far to be finished. In this blogspot I'm not going to talk about that though :p I'm going to talk about how important these events are beyond the technical expects and what I'm going to say applies to my experience in this sprint. You can "Put faces" to people, you're no longer talking to "

At the beginning of the Randa sprint (platform11, multimedia, kdevelop, nepomuk) we were given a badge so other people can see who we are and so on. One day (maybe two) after that, somebody started to exchange them until the point that I've been around 30different persons in 2 days xD. Yesterday I started to look for myself again since I like to keep this things but seems that nobody has it :/ maybe somebody throw me to the trash?

We're proud to announce the final version of Kamoso Velázquez, the KDE picture/video retriever ! In this release we've focused all the effort on getting the most stable release possible, and so far we think that we've reached that goal until it's matching our expectatives. This version is more important than what it seems, with this release we're making a new technology switch towards QtGstreamer, a technology that we hope will allow us to offer a stable, consistent and scalable application.

Let's talk about "File Sending" in BlueDevil 1.1, and area that has been highly improved in this version. We had mainly three complains about the 1.0 version: The wizard was too complicated with too many pages bko No way of sending files via Terminal or from other Apps No way of sending files from Konqueror/Dolphin I'd like to remark one thing before continuing, the first point of the list was reported in a proper way in the right place, by adding a bug in http://bugs.

With the 1.1 BlueDevil version, the system tray has been improved adding new features as well of revising the usability, this is the new aspect: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="302" caption="BlueDevil 1.1 system tray"][/caption] And this is the old 1.0 system tray: [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="299" caption="BlueDevil 1.0 system tray"][/caption] A few changes can be notice here: The most common actions have been placed at the top and at the bottom The configuration action have been merged to just "

Fourth patch version or our KDE Bluetooth Stack, this time containing an important fix: Unregister the agent correctly (important) Don't launch the wizard if the input device doesn't require pairing Downloads: BlueDevil tarball: md5sum: 016e8b048bd834548a436fb0440667a9 download: here Note: This version, as the one before (1.0.3) depends on libbluedevil 1.8.1, so be sure to ship them both! The tag and tarball for 1.1 are done, I will try to publish a graphic/video changelog shortly!

In a few days we will be released the fourth "patch version" of our KDE Bluetooth stack together with the second "featured version" 1.1. After that point, we will be changing our release policy to a "Release Soon Release Often", which is the natural next step since BlueDevil reaching maturity. For the next days, I will try to make a post each day explaining the new features and changes in BlueDevil 1.

In my way to work I have been thinking in something that happened the other day, I was showing/explaining to a coworker some mobile applications made with web technologies and discussing about Android/MeeGo/iPhone development. After a few minutes of good conversation the next chat happened: coworker: Maybe we can even create a Windows Phone application me: I'm not going to install nor use Windows and even less I'm going to write an application for Windows Phone.

While working on BlueDevil 1.1 we've found time to release the third "patch release" of our KDE Bluetooth Stack, so here is the changelog: Fixed requestPin helper by flushing cout buffer Fixed requestConfirmation by passing the correct arguments BUG: 267302 (crash reproducible for example with an iPhone) Improved wizard device name detection. Fixed "Send files" in some system by being sure that the defaultAdapter is NOT discovering. With this version we're releasing also libbluedevil 1.

The second minor version of BlueDevil (KDE's Bluetooth support) has been released and it is the most important release since 1.0 because it adds support for some basic bluetooth feature we have been missing since 1.0, regarding Device Pairing. The full changelog is: Added support for Bluetooth 2.1 (SSP pairing) Do not pair devices that don’t need it Better automatic mode (Updated PIN database) Randomized the default PIN Random PIN of 6 characters, shrink if needed (depending on device) Improved the wizard flow for a lot of devices Do not show actions in systray when offline Handle possible obex-data-server crashes (This is the cause for a looooooot of troubles receiving files.

A lot of people has been asking me (or complaining) what is Kamoso and what we intend to do with it, so I've decided to use a blog post to explain it. Short Description: Kamoso is an application for taking Pictures and Videos using any webcam. Long Description: Kamoso is an application between two worlds, "Multimedia" and "Toys". While its main propose may be seen as just "Take Pictures" and "

After few months of work, we're glad to announce the availability of Kamoso 2.0-alpha2. Despite of being an alpha version, it has demostrated to perform quite stable in all the test we did during the alpha1 (this was a private release), in fact judging by the feedback we got this version is way more stable than 1.0.5, so give it a try! Changelog: Kamoso now uses QtGstreamer Improvements in the interface (by Andrew Lake) New semaphore Make "action" non hidden features by adding a new button to "share".

Hi there Since we released 1.0, we've been working hard to stabilize BlueDevil as much as possible and after fixing a bunch of bugs in kio_obexftp, now it's turn for the wizard. This is the changelog: Added support for Bluetooth 2.1 (SSP pairing) Do not pair devices that don't need it Better automatic mode (Updated PIN database) Randomized the default PIN Random PIN of 6 characters, shrink if needed (depending on device) Improved the flow for lot of devices As you can see, there are plenty changes for a minor release and that's why we need some testing before release BlueDevil 1.

The first minor version of BlueDevil has been released. The changelog is: Improve the overall stability of kio_obexftp Fixed "Empty device name" bug by making the wizards scan until the name is fetched. The arbal can be downloaded here with md5sum: 4558dd739a58978b93d513a45d6e6b35 A new minor release can be expected in a few days, fixing some possible bugs in the Agent.

Today I have been working on a small Proof of Concept which intents to demostrate that improve the Help menu by adding an "Actions Lookup" is possible.  At the moment this is not a planned feature, so is not going to be in KDE Platform 4.6 or even not in 4.7. If the overall feedback I get during the next days is positive I will start a brainstorming (in kde-usability I guess?

Everybody that has been a KDE user for the last 2 years knows Nepomuk and its bad reputation, maybe it was desired in the past, but no more. This morning I decided to get my Nepomuk up and running again, and I have to say that it is impresive! just take a look at this video: The only thing I had to do is modify a kernel configuration, but I had to do it because my distributionb (ArchLinux) didn't for me, others like Ubuntu or OpenSuse have the correct value.

After months of being almost a dead-zombie project now the Kamoso development has been resumed, we can say that it is in better shape than ever! Motivated by the QtGstreamer project, Aleix and I decided to port Kamoso to it and see how it goes (it has been the perfect excuse to revive the project). So far we didn't regret the change. Besides the technology switch (we we're kind of ok with libvlc), the change has given to us new forces to work on the project, let's see what we've got so far: Current features: Take pictures Upload pictures to facebook (kipi plugins export interface) Record video Upload videos to youtube Burst mode Smoother thumbnails view Fancy overlay icons to indicate what files are being uploaded Work in progress: Add some logic to decide what microphone to use (depending on platform).

As you may guess, I'm in Ireland like a lot of other hackers attending the MeeGo conference. I've been here since Saturday and so far I love the city and the people in here, lovely place. Today (Monday 15) has been the first day of the conference and it has been great, good organization and a good general mood provoked by a mix of "enthusiasm and desire change things". Maybe the worst part of the day has been discovering how little bit people know about us (KDE), many people know more or less what we are (A Desktop), but nothing solid, even some of them got surprised when I told them that the entire KDE SC is made by using Qt, definitely we've room for improvement in spreading our community and our software.

Today, is the last day of my holidays, I could say that it is pity, but it is not, I'm addicted to my work :$ During this relax vacations, I've dedicated a part of the time into analize the current situation of KDE, and with that try to find my spot between all the work that needs to be done. Probably during the next days I will publish some blog entries with the cloncusions got, but this entry is about what I'm going to do in KDE in the follow 6 months.

One of the objectives that the solid team is currently working on, is the deprecation/removing of HAL as KDE dependency. We hope to accomplish it for KDE 4.6, but of course at the moment it is just that, a wish. Anyhow the complete remove is now a step closer, thanks to Dario Freddi and Lukas Tinkl I just committed the "PowerDevil 2 UPower" backend. Right now, it is build by default but is not used if the hal backend is compiled too, so in case you want to test it you have to edit powerdevilupowerbackend.

Almost 1 week has passed since Solid Sprint took place, and I'm already waiting for the next event, where I can hack side by side with KDE hackers from all the world again (Maybe in the Meego conference?). It was a short sprint but intense, productive and funny, on where we discussed and worked on some different topics. Let's began from the start. Organisation: The organisation of a small Sprint doesn't require a huge amount of time (at least didn't this one) basically the tasks to do are:

Surprisingly everything is ready for the Solid Sprint that is going to take place in Madrid, we got 1Gb connection, 50" flat screen, food, drinks, beer, coffee and of course a lot of code "hungry" :) Sebas is already here to attend some KDE e.V stuff together with ereslibre (vice-president of KDE-España), we have had a good dinner (typical spanish bar) and now is time to sleep so tomorrow we can be with our hacker skills at 100%.

So, almost everybody is here finally (Albert will come tomorrow Saturday), and it has been a very profitable day. We have finished the "boring" stuff like discussing who we are (We're the Solid team now! be aware of that :p), discussing how we can improve the upstream communication (driver developers, blueZ, u*disk/power etc) and stuff like that. After it, we've done some hacking (not a lot in my case), but we managed to get Bluetooth-DUN and Bluetooth-NAP working, and we did it in like 5minutes.

After a lot of work, and a lot of testing done by a lot of people the RC4 is here and we hope it will be the last one before the final release. Highlights: Fix a crash in the file receiver Fix a crash in the KDED Cleaned audio UUID's (less false positives in the wizard) Added Audio Sink support in the systray application (Patch by Peter Korf) some i18n work (not perfect tough) A lot of work in kio_obexftp, it should be stable now, test it!

Hi there As you may have noticed, BlueDevil RC4 is not out (yet), and there is a reason for that. We're mainly 2 developers working on it, ereslibre and myself. Ereslibre is studying hard because he has like 5 exams in 2 weeks, and I'm looking for a new place to live downtown (still in Madrid), so those things are stealing our KDE hacking time :( But don't worry, BlueDevil development is not paralyzed, luckily our company (ufocoders) is allowing us to work on BlueDevil all Fridays, and this is why we're moving the releases to that day.

This release has been delayed 1 week (as you can see) because we didn't had anything to release (no commits, no fixes), sorry for that! vacations are in the middle :) Highlights: Huge improvement on systray application stability, should not crash anymore Fixed a crash in the Wizard Fixed some small bugs in the KCM Errata: Take a look at the error list in: KDE Bugtrack Also, this release is not ready to work on i18n, it is expected in RC4 (finally!

Hi there As promised, we have released a new RC of BlueDevil. Highlights: Removed BlueZ documentation to avoid licence problems Build system fixes by George Kiagiadakis and Kishore Jonnalagadda Improved the stability of the kio_obexftp (the / bugs has been fixed too). Fixed a crash in the KCM Fixed crash in the "reception of files". Errata: Take a look at the error list in: KDE Bugtrack Also, this release is not ready to work on i18n, it is expected in RC3 or 4

Hi there Even if we don't want to, our brains need to rest, they need to disconnect from everything and break with the routine of every day, and this is for what the holidays are for. So tomorrow my actual vacations start, I will be in Paris (again :p) having some family time for a week. I will be online on irc/jabber and I will try read my email everyday but do not expect a quick answer.

First, a little bit of historyFirst, a little bit of history It Seems that was yesterday when a year ago in the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Victor sent a file to me through Bluetooth and kdebluetooth saved it in a hidden folder, the file is still there "~/.kbluetooth4/Vídeo003.3gp". That fact is what made me decide to use my spare time working on kdebluetooth. After months of work in kbluetooth (the kdebluetooth fork I did), it started to work, but that spent hours made me realize that the kbluetooth never would be stable, it is a clear example of spaghetti code.

We're proud to announce the first release of BlueDevil, the new bluetooth stack for KDE SC. Description: BlueDevil is a set of components, which integrates bluetooth within the KDE SC, for example adding a system preference module (KCM), or allowing to browse the files in a cell phone from you favorite file browser. The list of already implemented components is: System preference module (KCM) to configure all the options regarding Bluetooth (also fully activate/deactivate it) Integration with the KDE input/output system (KIO), which allows to discover and explore all bluetooth devices around from your favorite file browser A wizard to pair your devices, and connect directly to the compatible services, such input (mouse, keybaord, Wiimote) and audio (headsets, phones) Systray application integrated with the last KDE SC 4.

Hi there I have been quite busy these days, between Akademy and everything. So thought about writing a small blog entry with the status of the projects where I'm involved: KBluetooth: I'm sorry guys to announce it in that way, but KBluetooth is almost dead. I'll release a new version (0.5) trying to fix all the crashes we're having, and it will be everything from my part. I hope to release that version withing this week.

We're a lot of developers in KDE, and each of us like to use one or other tool to write code, for example, is known that I love KDevelop, others like vim, emacs, kate, qtcreator, eclipse... But you know what we all do? ask for help :p So we've develop a new Plugin for KDevelop which will give us direct access to where all the KDE knowlege is stored

Day 2: Trip to Zermatt This day was marked by the trip to Zermatt but not by the outward journey but by the return one which I did (as the major part of the people) walking. We went through the forest crossing 2 rivers (well, jumping 2 rivers xD) and of course, talking about software, akademy, politics etc. By the night, a mysterious KHTML crash produced by gcc appeared in my laptop sadly I lost all the hacking time figuring out that gcc was the problem :(

For those who know what QuickSand is you may wonder "What is the relationship between QuickSand and Multimedia/Edu?" the answer to that question is quick and short, none :p but it is what I did today. What is QuickSand? QuickSand is an alternative interface for KRunner, it is integrated in KRunner (the code is inside KRunner), and since the major part of KDE users seems to like the default interface almost nobody knows his existence :p, but it actually exists and I can prove it!

The train network in the middle of Europe is awesome, but by awesome I mean really awesome :D you can travel from almost all big cities without using the plane, which is by far more comfortable and green than doing it. To reach Randa we had to take 4 trains, that can be painful in some countries (in Spain for example) but in Switzerland the trains have an atomic precision so you don't even need to know the name of the station where you have to "

In my way to Randa where the Multimedia Sprint will take place I'm doing a stop in my brothers house, among the obvious reasons (see my brother) I'm here because the overall price of the travel was 20€ cheaper and because I love "Nutella crepes" :) In the plane I have been working on QuickSand (the KRunner alternative interface), basically what I'm doing is to remove the hardcoded colors so that it can be used on any kind of colors scheme (I'm using a dark one right now).

Finally, the most wanted feature has landed in KBluetooth, support for Audio! The support is divided in 4 blocks: Pair the device The support for pair the devices should be working, not only for HEADSETS but for everything. Connect to the service KBluetooth will detect if the paired device has audio service, and connect to it. Support for PulseAudio PulseAudio rocks, and since it rocks it will detect and configure the new device automagically :) Support for Alsa

I'm not a fussy user, I mean I don't really care so much about interfaces or usability (as an user of course, as a developer I try to do my best), wherever there is a terminal I feel like home in there. However, in the other hand, when I'm developing I need to feel comfortable with the environment, including the application I'm developing. It's for this reason that I've prioritized the GUI polishing of the wizard (the old one pissed me off every time I had to test something).

As my friends know, I'm addicted to read KDE/Free Software/Open Source/etc.. blogs when taking my morning coffee, and what I'm going to explain is a good example of why I love it. Before continuing reading, be aware that I'm not an usability guy, I lack any kind of design or usability sense/knowledgement, In fact, I have been I'm using KDE for years and I never succeed to configure my desktop in a beautiful way (only by copying the others configs), so please keep that in your mind when you read this post.

Hi there! no, this post is not about Kbluetooth nor KTuberling or any development/technical stuff, is more a user-like post, so common! keep reading this time :) A few days ago, I was in the office with ereslibre showing something to him (I don't remember what), when he noticed something in my desktop that he didn't liked, my fonts. I laughed quite a lot because I thought that it was a "Yet Another Small Detail That Ereslibre Cares Of".

Hi fellow users and developers, sooner than I thought, I have more things to share with you about KBluetooth, so let's go :) Happens that month's ago Apol lent me his Apple Wireless Keyboard so I can give support to it in KBluetooth. After small research I concluded that the keyboard wasn't standard, so I just pull it over. Then, a few days ago, Ereslibre was playing with a Gnome and I decided to try to pair the Apple keyboard using the Gnome Bluetooth System, and guess what.

Hi! Here comes the (hopefully) last version of KBluetooth stable branch. The change list is not very huge (only fixes) but if there is something I'm glad to have fixed is the speed calculation of the file transfers, it was so annoying for me to see the text blinking ;( Changelog: Fix speed calculation when receiving and sending filesI Pairing request are accepted also when clicking on Trust button Important dialogs are modal, so they're not hidden by other applications Fix a crash that happens when the sender device disconnects before the file transfer is accepted A small note, the Modals will be removed in the next version, this is a bug fix release so the less code I change, the better.

With a week of delay (almost) is time to write my sum up of FOSDEM, which by the way was my first one. Friday 05/02/2010: Wake up at 3:00 AM to take a cab to go to Barajas airport, I have to say that Gate 2 is uglier than the Gate 2 of El prat airport (and smaller), but one point in favor is that it was full of power sources :p

In 0.4 release I asked to the distributions to update they packages, some of them did and some of then not, but the best of all is that I got a lot of feedback from the packagers, and here comes the payment for that feedback :) With the last release I added a crash when receiving files, I gare say it was not my fault, the KBluetooth code is a mess and I can't fix it without rewrite it from scratch (thing that I'll explain hopefully in 2 days).

Seems that this year a lot of KDE hackers will go to FOSDEM and I won't be an exception :)! I have not defined my roadmap (yet), but at least I'll have a couple of meeting regarding the future of KBluetooth, and sooner than you think I'll come back with great news about Bluetooth+KDE. If you're in the FOSDEM and you have doubts or ideas about Bluetooth+KDE ping to me I'll be around *KDE* stuff in there.

Months ago, I started to take care of a forgotten piece of KDE, kde-bluetooth. After a lot of work and an almost clean the bugtrack of bugs, I'm proud to announce KBluetooth 0.4! These are the highlights: The official name is now "KBluetooth". A lot of crashes have been fixed, KBluetooth should not crash now. File transfer (send/receive) reported to work for everybody with any kind of device. Improved the input pairing (Almost all devices working).

Hi! Is time to resume my adventure in the lands of KDE, I had to stop it because of work, I'm creating a new business together with ereslibre and edulix and we are kind of busy. Returning to the topic, in this second part of the adventure I'm not going to change my focus, so I'll continue hacking on kbluetooth, kamoso and ktuberling. Here comes a small todo list I'll try to accomplish:

At home! After my "small" holidays in Paris, I'm back home. Despite my intentions of finishing some ktuberling/kamoso/kbluetooth work on this holidays as you may have noticed I didn't, sorry for that :( I only had time to keep myself up to date with kde planet/mailist/commits, leaving only the last 3 days of kde activities as homework to when I'll come back. So now, I've read everything I had to, as well as answering dozens of emails and I'm ready to hack on KDE again and to finish my kde homework's.

As everybody should know by now, tsdgeos is moving to another city (Dublin) and of course is getting a new job. Is because of this job that Albert is not able to continue with his collaboration with anything that have to be with games. Life sometimes has this unintended consequences :/ So well, as you know, I created a patch some month/weeks ago which adds a small feature to KTuberling (will be available in kde 4.

As maybe you have noticed I'm kinda offline these days, this is because I'm in Paris in some sort of holidays. While I'm here my internet/code hours will be reduced to the mornings, from 10:00 to 14:00 (local hour), I'm using the rest of the day for walking trough those beautiful streets. Well, this is it at the moment, tomorrow I'll announce something in this blog, something that lot of people has been waiting for :p

Hi again! Seems that was yesterday when I wrote my last post, but the truth is that almost 1 month has passed sorry for that :( Despite not being posting with regularity I have been working hard on KDE, mainly focused on Kamoso/KBluetooth and researching something that might become my third KDE contribution/project. Well, the next week I'll take a break of all my duties (work/kde/free software) and I'll travel to Paris at my brother's home, I hope that will be there where I'll find more time to post on the blog.

Hi everybody! Two days ago at morning, I was very bored I don't remember exactly why, so I decided to hack a bit on Kopete, which is imho the KDE application which needs more love. I was wondering what I can add to it and after a few ideas I decided to implement the idea apol gave to me some days ago, be able to take pictures from the webcam, and set it as an avatar.

Hi everyone! After a few days of "non-computer" I'm back with the batteries charged at 100% :) and with a small list of things to be done in the next days. This is the list: Reach kamoso 1.0 version (I hope in 1week max): Kamoso is the codename for a project I'm doing with Aleix pol (apol) and in theory with ereslibre (he's kinda offline), is a Photobooth/Cheese clone, written in Qt/C++.

In case you have lost it, now you've the chance of view it in video! the kde-commtis channel full of people waiting to know who will win the 1M commit! Finally as you maybe already know, ervin with an akonadi commit won the one million (thanks you?) commit. Kde 1 million commits: You can download the video from here

My name is Alejandro Fiestas, and I have a problem... I'm a addicted to the free software. People could ask, why? what the software libre give to you? I'm not sure but I've some theories :) The software libre gives to me the motivation I need to jump of the bed each morning thinking: come on Àlex! you've code to write! or come on Àlex, you've a community to help, to talk with, to work with!