https://agateau.com/tags/akademy/feedPosts tagged akademy2018-08-07T19:53:36+02:00Aurélien Gâteaupython-feedgenhttps://agateau.com/2008/i-am-going-tooI am going too!2008-07-12T22:00:00+02:00<p>I am very happy to announce it:</p>
<a href="http://akademy2008.kde.org"><img src="https://agateau.com/2008/i-am-going-too/akademy2008.png" alt="" height="178" width="320"/></a>
<p>This will be my first Akademy, I am quite excited to finally be able to meet people I only know via email or irc.</p>
<p>I won't be there for the whole week, but you can expect me to be present on the12th and 13th. Since I made my decision to go quite late, I had to book an hostel on my own. I will be staying at the Holiday Inn Express, feel free to get in touch via email or by commenting if you stay there too.</p>
<p>I am also quite happy that my employer, <a href="http://www.os4i.com">Open Wide / OS4I</a>, is partly funding me, covering my travel expenses and giving me one day off to attend the "Embedded and Mobile Day".</p>
<p>See you in Mechelen!</p>
2008-07-12T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2008/akademy-is-good-for-youAkademy is good for you!2008-08-19T22:00:00+02:00<p>At least it was good for me!</p>
<p>I have been working with KDE for a long time, first as a third-party application developer, then more closely when Gwenview made it into kdegraphics for KDE 4, but I never got the opportunity to attend Akademy. As a result, I was quite impatient to finally meet all the people I have been interacting with for a few years now.</p>
<p>While I only stayed for two days, I was lucky to be able to find most of the people I wanted to talk to. It started very early in fact, when I joined a bunch of developers having breakfast in the hostel before leaving to the event place. It was quite a unique sensation to walk in the breakfast room and being able to recognize lots of people I only knew from photos on blogs or event reports. Luckily I managed to refrain from doing silly things like asking autographs :-)</p>
<p>So in short, Akademy was a blast, and I hope to be able to attend next year!</p>
<p>PS: I would also like to join other attendees and say a big thank you to the organizers for their impressive work.</p>
2008-08-19T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2010/gwenview-in-kde-sc-4-5Gwenview in KDE SC 4.52010-06-30T22:00:00+02:00<p>
<span style="float:right;"><a href="https://agateau.com/2010/gwenview-in-kde-sc-4-5/20100630-size-in-thumbnails.png"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/gwenview-in-kde-sc-4-5/thumb_20100630-size-in-thumbnails.png" title="Gwenview, showing image size below thumbnails" height="142" width="150" alt="" class="alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-404"/></a></span>
</p><p>As usual, I have been busy with too many projects during KDE SC 4.5 development cycle, so I am afraid the new Gwenview does not feature any ground-breaking changes. Still I managed to fix some annoying bugs and integrated a few nice features. Here is a commented list of the most interesting changes:
</p><ul>
<li><em>Gwenview is now much more asynchronous.</em>
This is where I spent most of my Gwenview development time. In previous versions, operations like rotation or image saving would block the UI. This is no longer the case, all operations which used to block the UI now show a spinner on the affected image and let you continue browsing while Gwenview is busy working. It does not sound like much, but it required quite a bit of refactoring and it lays down the foundations for some interesting ideas I have in mind, hopefully for KDE SC 4.6.</li>
<li><em>EXIF information is no longer lost after a crop, a resize or a red eye reduction...</em>
I am a bit ashamed I did not fix that one earlier. Gwenview used to keep EXIF information for lossless operations like rotations, but would get rid of them as soon as you did some lossy work...</li>
<li><em>Wrap around when panning images, patch by Ismael Barros.</em>
I was a bit skeptical about this, but it turns out to be really great to be able to pan large images without having to release the mouse button.</li>
<li><em>Show image size and file size below thumbnails, patch by Aaron Seigo and me</em>
This one got started after a somewhat inflammatory review of KDE applications in Linux Journal, I am glad it's here even if it's still a bit buggy, need to fix it.</li>
<li><em>One of the most wanted option: "Disabling video support" has finally been added.</em>
This option can unfortunately come handy if you are unlucky to have videos which Phonon dislike to the point of causing crashes...</li>
</ul>
So, not much changes, but hopefully changes you will find useful.
<p>
In other news, I am happy to tell you that I will be in Finland next week because
<img src="https://agateau.com/2010/gwenview-in-kde-sc-4-5/igta2010.png" alt="" height="200" width="380" title="I'm going to Akademy 2010"/><br/>
Jonathan Riddell and I will be doing a "What's cooking in Kubuntu for KDE" BoF. This could be a great way for you to learn what I have been working on instead of hacking on Gwenview!
</p>
2010-06-30T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2010/back-from-akademy-2010Back from Akademy 20102010-07-11T22:00:00+02:00<p>I came back from Akademy 2010 held in the nice town of Tampere, Finland. It was exhilarating and motivating, I really enjoyed it.</p>
<p>I am not going to try to narrate everything precisely, so here is a bullet-point summary, in somewhat chronological order:</p>
<ul>
<li>Decided to leave my digital camera at home because I was paranoid about my cabin luggage becoming too heavy for Finnair strict limits (8kg!). Big mistake. I missed it quite a lot.</li>
<li>Attended lots of interesting talks, including "UI Design for Developers" by Davide Vignoni and Nuno Pinheiro. This talk motivated me to finally add <a href="https://agateau.com/2010/back-from-akademy-2010/20100711-inlinerenaming.png">inline renaming to Gwenview</a>.</li>
<li>Received the "Best application Akademy award" for my work on Gwenview, color me proud! Congratulations to Anne Wilson for the "Non-technical contribution award" and to Burkhard Lück for the "Jury award"!</li>
<li>Attended my very first KDE e.V. meeting. It went quite well: I have been told finishing on schedule was a recent habit for this meeting.</li>
<li>Spend way too much time playing <a href="http://www.arcadeathome.com/shots3.php?raiden|200">Raiden</a> on the MAME cabinet at Demola. It brought back a lot of memories, thanks to whoever set it up! I am thinking about resuming my "install MAME on XBMC box in living room" project...</li>
<li>Successfully passed the Qt certification test.</li>
<li>Finally got my port of KAlarm to KStatusNotifierItem (KSNI) committed. This was the last KSNI patch waiting to get in, so I am quite happy to be done with it.</li>
<li>Promised mock-up to improve KAlarm alert windows, but failed to deliver. Will work on it later.</li>
<li>Started to use KDevelop after sharing a cab with one of its developers who told me about the powerful magic it came bundled with. I still miss some of my Street-Fighter-like Vim moves, but I like the way KDevelop gives me a more global view of the code. I also like the ultra-powerful code-completion.</li>
<li>Presented DBusMenu, how it is used in the system tray in KDE SC 4.5 and in the upcoming global menubar which will be part of the next Kubunutu (hopefully it will get into KDE SC for 4.6). Received interesting suggestions to optimize it.</li>
<li>Created a <a href="https://agateau.com/2010/back-from-akademy-2010/add-widget-e1278885892283.png">mock-up for a new "Add widget" user interface</a> for Plasma, which unfortunately got rejected.</li>
<li>Tried sauna and loved it.</li>
<li>Played a strange Finnish outdoor game named <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6lkky">Mölkky</a>. I am going to build my own to play it again at home.</li>
<li>Ate way too much sausages, blood sausages and potatoes! Luckily my hotel was not too close from Demola so I could burn a bit of those during the daily 20-minute walk.</li>
<li>Fixed some layout issues in Plasma Battery applet: The battery in the extender is no longer drawn over the rest of the extender text, even with French translations installed.</li>
<li>Failed to check my mail. Whenever I am at a developer meeting, I somewhat switch to a "real-life only" mode and tend to completely forget online communication. Happens to me all the time. Unfortunately that habit caused me to miss the closing Indian dinner at TOAS on the last Akademy day.</li>
<li>Got a <a href="http://developer.qt.nokia.com/duck">nice rubber duck from Nokia</a>. I haven't yet tested the integrated debugger, but I confirm the "keep your toddler busy" feature works quite well, as can be seen here:<br/>
<a href="https://agateau.com/2010/back-from-akademy-2010/antonin-rubber-duck.jpg"><img src="https://agateau.com/2010/back-from-akademy-2010/thumb_antonin-rubber-duck.jpg" title="Antonin playing with Nokia rubber duck" height="225" width="300" alt="" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-430"/></a>
</li>
</ul>
<p>All in all it was a blast, and I would like to thank everyone involved in the organization for there awesome work.</p>
2010-07-11T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2012/walking-the-extra-mileWalking the Extra Mile2012-06-28T22:00:00+02:00<p style="text-align:center;">
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/thewendyhouse/3718336710/"><img src="https://agateau.com/2012/walking-the-extra-mile/humps1.jpg" title="Humps for 1 mile" height="300" width="400" alt="" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1135"/></a>
<i>Humps for 1 mile by <a>Wendy on Flickr</a></i>
</p>
<p>If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know I tend to get obsessed with fixing little details in KDE applications which annoy me. I like doing this, but this is the kind of task which cannot be done by a lonesome coder if one wants to make a significant difference.</p>
<p>Other free software projects have launched initiatives in the past to get those little details ironed out. You may have heard about Ubuntu <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut">Papercuts</a>, Fedora <a href="https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fit_and_Finish">Fit and Finish</a> or Gnome <a href="https://live.gnome.org/EveryDetailMatters">Every Detail Matters</a> initiatives.</p>
<p>I want to start a similar initiative for KDE. To do so, I registered a BoF this year at Akademy, named "the Extra Mile". The goal of this BoF is not to get started at fixing bugs right away, but rather discuss how we can organize ourself to make this initiative a success. I want to discuss topics such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Which communication tool should we use (Bugzilla, Community Wiki, Forum, Mailing Lists?) and how should we use it</li>
<li>How to approach those bugs. Should we work on many apps at a time, fixing common bugs? Should we identify and fix as many bugs as possible within one app? Or should we go for a mix of both?</li>
<li>What is the best way to engage with application developers and raise awareness on these kind of issues</li>
</ul>
<p>We are going to need people with different profiles to get this to work: developers interested in fixing bugs in their and/or other applications, UI specialists, but also users willing to report and triage those issues.</p>
<p>If you are interested, the BoF is scheduled on Thursday 10:30, room 227. I also created a <a href="http://community.kde.org/Akademy/2012/Extra_Mile_BoF">wiki page</a> for it.</p>
<p>PS: Please do not use the comments on this blog post to report issues you want to get fixed. It's just not going to scale :) When the BoF is over we will announce how we are going to tackle those issues, at this time your input will be very much appreciated.</p>
2012-06-28T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-2012Akademy 20122012-07-11T22:00:00+02:00<p>I was in the beautiful town of Tallinn last week, attending Akademy 2012. It was great to hang out again with other KDE developers around a laptop or a drink.</p>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/7552052094/" title="2012-07-04_20-25-44 de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7112/7552052094_d09d7a704f.jpg" alt="2012-07-04_20-25-44" height="375" width="500"/></a>
<p>We had an awesome Karaoké night which started slowly but got a lot more fun when MC Aaron grabbed the microphone and convinced us to sing... Sébastien Renard and I even thought we could sing "Born in the USA". our interpretation was later described to us as "courageous" :). There are <a href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-zN_xH4phua0/T_lceeU1o8I/AAAAAAAANzo/WM5xUOrNxOA/s753/IMG_5616_v1.JPG">pictures of us</a> in action, hopefully no video of this performance is online...</p>
<p>On a more serious note, I noticed a recurring topic during this Akademy: Bugzilla. Jeroen van Meeuwen delivered a great presentation explaining the way Kolab Systems AG uses Bugzilla and how KDE could benefit by doing the same, we also had further discussions on how to take advantage of milestones, setting appropriate bug statuses, or integrating bugs.kde.org with our wikis. All those discussions got me motivated to improve my Bugzilla skills. In particular I'd like to try using milestones for the next releases of Gwenview... we'll see how it goes.</p>
<p>My BoF session about <a href="http://agateau.com/2012/06/28/walking-the-extra-mile/">going the Extra Mile</a> went well. It felt great to see many contributors willing to give a hand there. I plan to write another blog post to get things started once I am done with a few preliminary tasks.</p>
<p>Another very interesting session for me was the color management one. I think I am finally starting to understand what this is all about. After the session I spent part of the afternoon with Boudewijn Rempt of Krita fame, working on adding color management support to Gwenview. It is not done yet, but I am confident it should be ready for KDE SC 4.10.</p>
<p>Finally, after a busy week, my wife joined me on Saturday and we went for some sightseeing over the week-end.</p>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/7552083360/" title="2012-07-07_16-43-11 de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8001/7552083360_a96e8f57c0.jpg" alt="2012-07-07_16-43-11" height="375" width="500"/></a>
<i>Russian dolls and jewelry</i>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/7552175298/" title="2012-07-08_13-33-19 de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8159/7552175298_9a292607c9.jpg" alt="2012-07-08_13-33-19" height="375" width="500"/></a>
<i>Invulnerability!</i>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/7552204344/" title="2012-07-08_17-47-24 de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8145/7552204344_c199b5ca44.jpg" alt="2012-07-08_17-47-24" height="375" width="500"/></a>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/7552238540/" title="2012-07-09_12-13-08 de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7112/7552238540_5eac3c0226.jpg" alt="2012-07-09_12-13-08" height="375" width="500"/></a>
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/7552244420/" title="2012-07-09_12-26-11 de Aurélien Gâteau, sur Flickr"><img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7108/7552244420_54e61c41ef.jpg" alt="2012-07-09_12-26-11" height="375" width="500"/></a>
<p>(More pictures available <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/12502017@N08/sets/72157630533828002/with/7552071038/">on Flickr</a>)</p>
2012-07-11T22:00:00+02:00https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012Akademy-fr 20122012-11-26T17:40:05+01:00<p>This weekend was the second edition of Akademy-fr, a French KDE event organized by
<a href="http://www.toulibre.org">Toulibre</a>, and co-hosted in Toulouse as part of <a href="http://www.capitoledulibre.org/2012">Capitole du
Libre 2012</a>.</p>
<h2>Saturday</h2>
<p>Just like last year, Akademy-fr 2012 was a two-day event. On Saturday we held a
KDE booth and gave talks. I didn't give any talk this year, though, instead I spent most
of my time on the KDE booth.</p>
<p>Our booth was equipped with two laptops running latest release of KDE SC as well
as two Weetab tablets running Plasma Active. Thanks to the hard work of Kévin
Ottens we had a nice set of demo materials on all machines: videos, music,
pictures and other documents as well as real-world-like KDE activities.</p>
<p>Tablets really are visitor magnets: if you have tablets on a booth you want to
put them in front to attract people. Our demo scenario usual went like this:
catch the attention of someone with our tablets, then demo the way Plasma Active works
and introduce them to the concept of activities. After this, transition to the
laptops, explain the activity concept exists on laptops as well, and continue
with a demo of KDE there.</p>
<p>On the merchandising front, we didn't try to sell anything as there was already
a <a href="http://freewear.org">Freewear</a> booth selling KDE T-shirts, mugs, cushion and
other goodies. Having nothing to sell saved us from having to handle cash.
Instead we gave away KDE stickers and buttons. Thanks to Kévin Kin-Foo and
<a href="http://pixcyl.free.fr/">PixCyl</a> we also had a nicely done KDE leaflet in French and A3-sized KDE Akademy-fr
posters.</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/leaflet.jpg"><img alt="thumb_leaflet.jpg" src="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/thumb_leaflet.jpg"/></a></p>
<p><em>KDE leaflets. Top-left: a stack of them. Top-right: content. Bottom-right: additional page inserted inside</em></p>
<p>Before flying to Toulouse I printed two A2-sized posters: a big K logo and a
poster intended to recruit testers. As you can see it took me a few attempts to
get proper prints :)</p>
<p><a class="reference external image-reference" href="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/preparing-a2-posters.jpg"><img alt="thumb_preparing-a2-posters.jpg" src="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/thumb_preparing-a2-posters.jpg"/></a></p>
<p>I was quite happy with the way the recruiting poster ended up, but unfortunately
didn't get any success on the tester recruiting front :(.</p>
<p><em>(The SVG document for the recruiting poster is available <a href="https://agateau.com/2012/akademy-fr-2012/kde-qa.svg">from here</a>,
should you be interested in re-using it. French texts should be easy to change.
Note that this mostly not my work, I started from a <a href="http://kde-look.org/content/show.php/KDE+SVG+-+Konqui?content=19173">Konqi wallpaper from
Pilaf</a>,
removed the background, slightly adjusted the eye direction, created the "wall"
and drew the pointing hand)</em></p>
<p>At the end of the day we had a nice chat with David Revoy, who gave a great
presentation about Krita. David is an artist who now creates all his artwork
with Krita, MyPaint and GIMP. He worked, among other projects, on
<a href="http://sintel.org">Sintel</a> and <a href="http://tearsofsteel.org">Tears of Steel</a>, the
latest movies from the Blender Foundation. This was really inspiring, you may
want to visit <a href="http://www.davidrevoy.com">his website</a>.</p>
<h2>Sunday</h2>
<p>Sunday was a workshop day. David Faure and Kévin Ottens ran a KDE Frameworks 5
workshop, Sébastien Renard ran a translation quality workshop, I ran a "UI
Clinic" workshop.</p>
<p>My clinic was not overcrowded: I had only one patient. Jean-Nicolas Artaud came
to discuss Calligra Stage. Together we came up with a good set of changes to
improve slide thumbnails as well as many of Stage toolboxes. Some of those
changes should also benefit other Calligra applications as well, which is nice.</p>
<h2>After-thoughts</h2>
<p>I had a great time at Toulouse and I am looking forward to the 2013 edition. I
am also very happy about the demo data files Kévin put together. This is
something we always thought of creating after each Solutions Linux exhibition,
but never actually did.</p>
<p>We were discussing the best way to share them: the whole set is quite big
(2.3GB). There is a already a <a href="https://projects.kde.org/projects/others/kde-promo/repository">git repository for KDE Promo
Material</a> but a
git repository is a bit impractical in my opinion: Storing big data files for all languages in one
git repository means one has to get all languages when cloning the repository.</p>
<p>I think the solutions are either to use Subversion (which allows for partial
checkouts) or to setup separate git repositories per language|country. I see the
Brazil team already has a separate repository, so maybe we should follow them
and create a French repository. Subversion would however have the advantage of
being able to checkout only parts of the repository using non-recursive
checkouts, which could be handy when you are trapped with booth-quality
internet access and want to download a few files.</p>
<p>I also thought a bit about this "UI Clinic" idea. I was actually lucky only one
person show up: we ended up spending two hours on Stage, and could probably have
spent more if lunch and having to fly back home had not interfered. This is
similar to what happened in the UI Clinic BoF at Berlin Desktop Summit: I spend
3 hours on two applications, luckily Nuno was also there to help and worked on
other applications. This organization simply does not scale.</p>
<p>I would like to try something different for next Akademy: recruit some "UI
doctors" early, contact application developers before Akademy and see if they
are interested in discussing UI improvements for their applications, have the
"UI doctors" study applications before the event and schedule individual 1 or 2
hour sessions, one for each application. This should be more efficient.</p>2012-11-26T17:40:05+01:00https://agateau.com/2018/i-am-going-to-akademyI am going to Akademy!2018-08-07T19:53:36+02:00<p>So after a (too long) break, I am going back to Akademy this year! Having been away from KDE work for a while now, this will be the first time I attend the conference as a user. It's going to be interesting to see how this feels. In any case, I am looking forward to the sessions and to catching up with old friends.</p>
<!-- break -->
<p>I will only be attending the first two days unfortunately, but I will try to make the best of these days to meet as many people as possible.</p>
<p>Now time to go packing, as I am actually landing in Vienna tomorrow to do some sightseeing before the conference. See you there!</p>
<p><img alt="Akademy" src="https://agateau.com/2018/i-am-going-to-akademy/akademy-banner.jpg"/></p>2018-08-07T19:53:36+02:00