- Recent
- Popular
- Tags (0)
- Subscribers (2)
- KDE Videocast Episode 3, November 29!November 28
-
Episode 3 of my KDE videocast will be broadcast live at 17:00 UTC on Saturday, November 29nd over at UStream.
This week's show will look like this:- Hello, viewers!
- Week in review: KDE 4.2 Beta 1, Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and a developer activity recap.
- The Headline: The realities of meeting modern user needs, or "Why do Amarok and Akonadi use MySQL?"
- Feature of the Week: It's a two-fer! Migrating to Akonadi using kres-migrator and finding places with Marble's new search capabilities.
- Town Hall: Bring your questions to #aseigo on irc.freenode.net, or leave one in the comment section below if you can't show up! I'll have my sack of answers at the ready at showtime.
- Developer Corner: Using Phonon to add rich media support easily to your application.
A non-flv version with all the media and text files used in the show will be offered via bittorrent after the show so you can download it for offline viewing, in addition to the usual online clip at UStream. The torrent will also have the files provided individually this time versus the (bad idea) of a single archive.
See you there tomorrow! - on my other perspectiveNovember 27
-
I didn't mention it in my last blog entry on supppy chains because .. well .. it's not anything I can really say much about at this time, but: I'm currently spending some time consulting to a commercial project where one of the integral components is based on a Linux distribution. (Holy crap, how is that for vague?)
So for a good part of my days over the last while, I've had the experience of being downstream from KDE as well as the distributions who are KDE's downstreams. Some days it feels like I'm in a mobius loop as I shift positions in the production sequence. =)
It's been nice to be able to hold that perspective for extended periods of time, though. Being downstream (once removed!) from KDE (and the rest of the stack) is a rather different experience and mindset from being upstream to a distro. That's probably stating the obvious, but it's certainly another part of what has gotten me thinking about these issues more deeply.
Holding both experiences concurrently has given me the context to do things like explore negotiating with myself, role playing both sides of the conversation. (I don't actually self-negotiate when it comes to the real-world work issues; this is more a "mental exercises for hot showers" type material.)
More practically, I have to apply my goals and needs as a downstream without prejudice because I have a team that relies on and demands that; in a different point of the week (or sometimes the same day - free software supply chainsNovember 26
-
Over the past few months I've been quietly tracking our upstream and downstream interactions. The motivation for this has been my experience with the KDE 4 series, in which we have both been on more people's radar (when was the last time NVidia mentioned KDE 3 in a driver release?) and seen more trainwrecks both up- and down-stream from us.
In particular, the "distribution backporting" issue has really gotten out of hand. It's no longer just individual unbaked features that are being backported and shipped with stable KDE releases, but now entire applications are being pulled from pre-beta SVN and shipped with stable KDE releases. I know of two different applications this has now happened to.
Just as disturbing, some downtreams feel that they have the right to speak for us as an upstream to their communities and have, by doing so, misled people and abused KDE's relationship with users in doing so.
Of course, I'm still reeling from the issues Plasma has run into all across the X.org and Qt map. Features those projects have advertised, in some cases for years, simply were not mature or tested until we showed up and found out the hard way by running headlong into pointy skewers of buggy or simply featureless code bases which got that way due to not having real world applications at the ready to tease them into shape.
The losers in this are all around: users get sub-par product, KDE's relationships are damaged both with users an - KDE Video Cast, Episode 2: Torrent it!November 23
-
I got up early this morning so I could luxuriate in a hot shower, get dressed and go over my notes before the video cast this morning. It was an hour earlier and the second episode, so live attendance was down a fair amount: it peaked at "only" 194, which was 27 fewer than last week. I expected a spike on the first week (curiosity) and I knew shifting the time by an hour would suck as well. Oh well =)
I did, however, manage to figure out how to put text messages on the stream as well as videos hosted on Youtube. Unfortunately, these only show during the live broadcast and are not part of the resulting recorded version. I put a link to the show notes on the screen during the live broadcast thinking that would help people downloading it later, but ... fail. Additionally, UStream dropped out twice. My internet connection was fine (I was still in the chats), the server side just thunked out twice in a few minute span.
On the plus side the audio was better, I used a solid color backdrop, and the downloaded version is in mpeg format this week instead of flv's that won't work for anyone. Also included in the torrent are the show notes and the media I reference in the show, including a short Kopete screencast and a couple of JavaScript Plasmoids.
I am learning exactly what I want from a DIY broadcast software and am becoming increasingly tempted to see what Solid+Phonon in KDE 4.3 are capable of doing for me. For now, I just learn the qu - Video Cast Episode 2, Nov 22nd!November 21
-
This week's show will be one hour earlier than the usual schedule calls for: we'll be going live at 16:00 UTC on Saturday, November 22nd over at UStream.
This week's show will look like this:- Hello, viewers!
- Week in review: KOffice beta, Amarok release candidate, bugs.kde.org improves and developer activity recap.
- The Headline: Entrepreneurial opportunities and the Free Software desktop: where is all the diversity?
- Feature of the Week: New MSN bling and graceful interfaces in Kopete
- Town Hall: Bring your questions to #aseigo on irc.freenode.net! I'll have my sack of answers at the ready.
- Developer Corner: Writing a Plasmoid in JavaScript.
An ogv will be available via bittorrent after the show so you can download it for offline viewing, in addition to the usual online clip at UStream.
As for why the bump up by an hour this week: There is a winter fair at the P-man's school on Saturday, and we'll be there for much of day. So I'll be broadcasting at 16:00 UTC instead. Apologies for the inconvenience, I hope you can still make it! We'll be back to the regular time next week.
Update: Due to popular demand metelliuscode's suggestion in the comments section, if you can't make the live broadcast for