Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with my team at work and while this may not seem like a big deal, it was to me. Being that I’m currently working remotely, it’s very easy to feel isolated and alone and disconnected most of the time. Until I figure out how to build a virtual presence robot (like Twiki, maybe, except instead of  Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck, it would be a webcam of me?!?), I don’t get many opportunities to feel a part of my team and get the kind of feedback that you normally get in a job by seeing how people react to you just by being around them. But anyway, it was a WHOLE lot of fun. I had never heard of, much less played, Tetrinet before yesterday, and I got my butt kicked soundly. But the camaraderie and laughter and fun was exactly what I needed.

On Tuesday, I got to spend the whole day in my dining room with a friend and co-worker from VMware and got some really cool Linux work done. It was actually some really sweet stuff that he did earlier in the year as part of his internship, but part of it got backed out due to Windows build issues. We worked through all of the issues (and found a couple of problems in GlibMM along the way) and he brought me up to speed with the features and implementation details and we did a pretty good job at documenting it all to boot. I can’t say exactly what it is, just yet, but if you’re a fan of VMware’s Unity mode (guest VM windows showing up inside your host, like normal windows instead of being contained inside the guest OS window), this work will make things just that much cooler. I’m working on Unity stuff for our next Workstation and Player releases and I’m hoping we get to include this coolness!

I’ve been using the Logitech VX Revolution Cordless Laser Mouse for a couple of years now and it is extremely cool. The neatest thing about it (other than the fact that it works perfectly in Linux and has a gazillion buttons, and the little storage compartment inside the mouse for the USB dongle) is the scroll wheel. They call it a “hyper-fast scroll wheel” and it is just that–you give it a good flick and it keeps going and going and going… awesome fun and really useful for long documents/web pages. But last week, I saw the Logitech Optical Marble Mouse and after reading all the reviews and talking to a friend who had 5 of them and loved them, I decided to give it a try, and I absolutely love it. It has the same kind of scrolling awesomeness as the VX Revolution wherein you flick it with your fingers and it keeps going much longer than a normal mouse wheel (albeit not nearly as long as the VX), but it also keeps your hand stationary to help prevent or improve RSI problems. It took just a few hours to get used to it after having used a normal rodent for decades, and it is now my favorite mouse. But it does take a little bit of configuring…

Silly me, but I am so used to having to hack things to do my bidding in Linux that I wasted a bunch of hours researching how to get the Marble Mouse to do horizontal and vertical scrolling. You see, the mouse only has 4 buttons, and no scroll wheel, so you use X’s EmulateWheel option and then tell it which mouse button to use (EmulateWheelButton) so that when you hold that button down and move your mouse, instead of moving the mouse cursor, it scrolls in that direction. REALLY cool! It seems, however, that the particulars of how to configure this mouse in X changes with each vesion of X, or at least between distributions. BUT, if you’re using OpenSUSE 11.1 as I am, just use YaST and change one of your mouse definitions to be the “Logitech TrackMan Marble FX (PS/2)” (even though you’re connecting it through USB), and you’ll find that it works beautifully (DOH! Should have tried that first!!!). I set my EmulateWheelButton to “8″, which is the little button on the left side of the mouse. I’m LOVING it! BTW, if you’re using Ubuntu Intrepid, there’s a drastically different way to get this working involving either HAL fdi files or a simple xinput script. Anyway, if you find yourself using this mouse and getting stuck on how to get it to scroll, add a comment to this post and I’ll provide more details.

I also got a chance to spend some time on Ye Olde KPilot this week, which felt really good. Truth be told, it’s darned necessary and scary, since KDE 4.2 is nearing release any day now. But I fixed a bunch of KPilot issues (layout, configure dialog, crashes, sync problems) and even got KPilot to successfully sync my calendar and contacts once. I need to spend some more time this weekend in trying out different sync scenarios to make sure we’re rock solid before the release, but the good news is that contrary to previous versions of KPilot, we’ve tried extra-special-hard to not lose your data. You may find that (right now), we err on the side of giving you  more data than less, meaning possible duplicates until we get those bugs fixed. So, right now would be a really good time for all you KPilot users (both of them?) to come on out and help us test KPilot. We have about a week to find and fix any problems. =:/ Oh, and I also went through the open Ubuntu KPilot bugs and triaged them a bit too, which felt good.

Along those lines, I actually did get a chance to talk to a couple of KPilot users this week (both of them, I think!!) and look through some problems they were having. I spent a large chunk of time looking into a bizarre problem a Kubuntu KPilot user was having from the Kubuntu 4.2 beta2 packages. Along the way, I learned how to find the kde_plugin_version in one of our .so’s (“gdb foo.so” and then “p kde_plugin_version”), and I added some debugging that should have been there all along anyway in KPilot, so it’s not all bad. But it turns out that the Ubuntu KPilot package is missing libkpilot_akonadibase.so, and so none of the new conduits work. I’ve discussed things with Jonathon Thomas on the Ubuntu bug page and this should be fixed for the next Ubuntu KPilot packages.

Before I started testing KPilot, though, I needed to get my PIM data in order. I’ve been meaning to put my contacts and calendar into Google for a while now, and this was the perfect time to do that. So I found this neat LifeHacker page about using Dropbox and KeePass for synchronizing all your private and important information, and cleaned up my contact information and put everything that could be considered sensitive or important into KeePassX, which is REALLY nice, and I highly recommend it. Excellent functionality, good strong encryption, and a beautiful Qt4 GUI to boot. I’ve not looked into using Dropbox yet, but that’s just an added benefit. After that, it was a simple matter of wasting 3 hours trying to format my kaddressbook-exported-to-csv file into something that Google likes, pulling my hair out, finally giving up in frustration, saving my std.vcf file to a shared drive, opening it up with OS X, importing it into the Mac address book, and then using A to G to create a CSV file and then importing that into Gmail’s contacts. *sigh* What a pain in the butt!! Someone seriously needs to write a Python script for this or something. Honestly.

I also discovered, much to my chagrin, that Firefox and Konqueror both consume ungodly amounts of memory with a 16-meg web page (to the point of exhausting all of my real and virtual memory and crashing X), like the error page I was getting from our internal sandbox compile machine, but Opera handles it beautifully. So I’m using Opera again, quite happily. Oh, and since Google now allows you to customize your Gmail keybindings, I can finally get around the annoyance of “#” not working for “delete”!! I’ve set up “d” for “delete” and now my Opera/Gmail experience is glorious again. Now, if we could just get THEMES in Google Apps For Your Domain, that would be AWESOME!

And in closing, the latest Street Fighter IV videos from shoryuken.com look amazing! I’m going to have to go to GameStop today and plunk down my pre-order money.

Me (vanRijn), blauzahl, hays, and greeneg.

Thiago, Olivier, Frans, Simon, Ariya, Alex (blauzahl), Harri Porten, Andreas Pakulat, greeneg, me (vanRijn), hays, and Charles (njaard).

Me and Leo! Unfortunately, I was an idiot and this was the only shot I got of we two KDE GSOC mentors.

KDE threesome (Thiago, Jason, and Leo), plus the Qt foursome (Thiago, Ariya, Simon, and Olivier), meet the Android!! Oooooh, Aaaaaah! We’re not sure what the dog’s name is. =:/

Anyway, I digress…

As this year’s Google Summer of Code winds down to an abrupt end (Pencils down on Monday?? Already??), I am once again very satisfied and impressed with the job that Bertjan has done. He’s continued last year’s outstanding job with our base synchronization conduit and made it even better. He’s finally brought category synchronization into KPilot (how have people not been complaining about this??), thanks to our outstanding base conduit foundation. And he’s ported the ToDo, Contacts, and Calendar conduits to the new Akonadi back end! Woot! I just tried syncing contacts and calendar changes and am very happy to announce that they did sync successfully into Akonadi–even the categories! Woot, again! Job very well done, Bertjan! =:)

Now, is KPilot perfect and ready for release with KDE 4.2? No, not just yet. But it is miles ahead of where it was before the start of this year’s GSOC–and that’s exactly what we were aiming to accomplish. And, even better, I believe that it’s very possible to iron out the rough spots in time for 4.2, thanks to Bertjan’s work, which really excites me.

Please take a moment, if you use KPIlot, to encourage and thank Bertjan on his hard work this year. =:)

Woot!!

Although they don’t explicitly list KMail as a supported client on their setup page, it, of course, works just fine.  And I’m ecstatic that I can now get rid of one more layer of technical complexity (okay, it’s a stupid, ugly, storage-duplicating hack, just like everybody else has had to do) in my email setup.

Again, Woot!!!

Google: you have made a big step just now in not doing evil.  Thank you!!!  Please give everyone involved in GMail over IMAP a big raise.  =:)

(Google people: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE add an IMAP interface to Gmail!!! The workarounds suck!)

Anyway, I digress…

The second thing that irks me about Gmail’s web interface is that it has no API for syncing contact information whatsoever. This absolutely sucks, but I expect that with Google trying to position itself as an online “all your information are belong to us” provider, that they’ll either remedy the ridiculously bad contact handling themselves or replace it with an acquisition. Please? And let me sync it with my Palm PDA??

But back to the point, one thing that is lacking in using Gmail’s web interface is the ability to click on a “mailto” link (or right-click in Firefox and do “send link”). Apparently, there are Google-provided solutions to this on OS X and Windows (Google people: please treat the Linux desktop as a first-class citizen too??) but they’ve not done anything for this functionality on Linux. However, I came across this nice little HOWTO from the Gentoo folks, which does the trick quite nicely. I’ve modified the shell script slightly to try to stop Gmail from going into some kind of a loop and not actually working if there’s no recipient passed to it (like what happens when you RMB click in Firefox and do “send link”), but I’m not sure if it’s something goofy with GAFYD…:

#!/bin/sh
BROWSER=”firefox”

ME=$(basename $0)
DEBUG=/tmp/$ME.debug

echo “$(date)| incoming uri: [$1]” >> ${DEBUG}

# remove the ? and mailto from the uri and convert “subject” to “su”
uri=$(echo “$1″ | sed -e ‘s,subject=,su=,’ \
-e ‘s,\?,\&,g’ \
-e ‘s,^mailto:,,’)

echo “$(date)| outgoing uri: [$uri]” >> ${DEBUG}

if [ "$uri" ];
then exec $BROWSER “https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=$uri”
fi

exec $BROWSER “https://mail.google.com/”

[[ UPDATE ]] A zillion thanks to Giuseppe D’Angelo, who pointed me to the Better Gmail firefox extension.  This rocks a LOT!  =:)  So the above shell script still has relevance for KDE/GNOME url handling, but isn’t as necessary for firefox mailto’s…  =:)

I had absolutely the most amazing time at this year’s Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Summit. I’m sure I’ll sound like quite the gushing fan-boy, but so be it.

I’ve been involved in the KDE project for the last couple of years. I can thank Adriaan deGroot fully for getting me hooked, and also for being a great mentor and friend throughout. Until this last weekend, I had not actually met any other KDE geek in the flesh. Living in the United States as I do, I’ve met many a GNOME zealot and developer, but nary a KDE kindred spirit. And so, I am still coming down off of the “high” of getting to spend this last weekend with both Thiago and Seb. Yeah, there were a bunch of other Open Source developers there too, and I’ll get to them in a second. But first, this weekend did much to further cement my feelings about the KDE project and our amazing community. We, the KDE geeks, are a really rare and cool thing. Oh sure, we have our share of flame wars, passionate people, and occasional un-professionalism. But at the end of the day, we have an extremely talented group of people who share a common vision, try to treat each other with respect and professionalism, aim to mentor and grow each other and new-comers, and can even have some serious, geeky fun together. I see a lot of Open Source communities (and no, I’m not going to point fingers) who don’t have all this going for them. And after a weekend like this last, I am once again excited about being a part of our community, the KDE team.

To add to the above, it was an absolutely amazing opportunity that I shared with Thiago and Seb to represent KDE at Google’s SOC Mentor’s Summit. It was a surreal experience. I mean, just being at the Googleplex and interacting with the Google staff was wild. Chris DiBona is a real, honest, down to earth, cool guy, and he spent a good hour at least chatting with a group of us about anything and everything that came up. You know… just like a real person. And then there was the opportunity to mingle with, talk to, make friends with, share ideas with, enjoy mass quantities of pizza with (thanks Leslie!!), have some drinks with, pay $44 for a less-than-stellar dinner with, and in general hang out with fellow FOSS developers… many of whom have written software that I’ve been using and enjoying for years! Too cool!!! Kind of like listening to Sting for the last 15 years of your life and then getting to go out to dinner with him and spend a day chatting. =:)

So (noticing that it’s now 1:47 a.m. and I have to be at work in 7 hours), to summarize…

1. We, the KDE community, have a unique and amazing community. Let’s keep it that way!!
2. Google’s Summer of Code project was a huge success for an awful lot of FOSS projects. Let’s all (FOSS community-wide, I’m talking) get even more involved next year. Let’s challenge ourselves to bring more students in and get more mentors involved! Check out the pix…
3. Oh yeah… I’m moving to Palo Alto.  You may now congratulate me and then go out and buy a VMware product of your choice (I recommend the free Player product).  =;)  I’m going to have a heck of a time hiding this smile….

We’re working through finalizing the Use Case, with me helping out with some word-smithing and architectural review (http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdepim/kpilot/conduits/base/design/ ).

Bertjan has started doing Class and Sequence diagrams for the main and alternate flows (http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdepim/kpilot/conduits/base/design/bouml-design/ ).

We’re pretty much on-track according to our schedule (http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdepim/kpilot/conduits/base/design/SOC2007-schedule.ods?view=log )

And Bertjan has set up some info on his blog (http://bertjan.broeksemaatjes.nl/), and has done some level of progress-updates as well ( http://bertjan.broeksemaatjes.nl/node/4).

Also, I had a very interesting conversation with the inimitable JPR on Friday about a little bit of this and a little bit of that… and we chatted a bit about KPilot and OpenSync and other things. Anyway, just for the record, I was aware as I was chatting with him that I don’t know if I’ve clarified my intentions regarding the future of KPilot and OpenSync play-together-nicely-ness. It’s kind of become a religious war as of late (OpenSync, kitchensync, KPilot, etc.), and it’s easy to bash us KPilot folk for having the audacity for continuing to ply our trade instead of throwing full effort in with the OpenSync and kitchensync guys. But here’s some things to consider…

1. OpenSync is still trying to stabilize itself. 0.30 was just released very recently, and as of yet, it doesn’t have the full complement of plugins that are necessary to make it useful. That’s not to say it’s not a viable thing to be working towards, but it does mean that there’s some lead time before it’s a viable replacement, imho.
2. KPilot, when it works correctly, is the best syncing solution for Linux that I’ve seen and/or used (imho). It synchronizes very nicely with the KDE PIM suite, which I have currently convinced myself to use.
3. KPilot does things that OpenSync does not do. That’s not to say that OpenSync can’t be made to do them, but currently, it doesn’t. For instance, last I checked, OpenSync (at least kitchensync’s usage of it) does not allow for a constantly-running daemon that handles syncing for you. KPilot users have come to rely on this, and not having it would be a regression at the very least.
4. KPilot’s conduits are good at what they do but are lacking in having a common code base underneath. This is actually the entire focus of the SOC project this year for KPilot–to finally give KPilot’s record-based conduits a common and solid framework. Once this framework is in place and the conduits are ported to it, we could conceivably leverage the OpenSync framework for the lower-level common syncing algorithm. That’s my hope, at any rate.

So, anyway, hope that clarifies something for someone (man it’s getting late)…. The goal of this year’s KPilot SOC project is to stabilize, refactor, and re-architect KPilot’s conduit code so that it can be maintained going forward and at some point in the not-too-distant future, synergy with kitchensync/OpenSync would actually be a doable thing.

In other news, my darling bride encouraged me to splurge on a $100 Krups coffee/espresso maker. I have yet to master the fine art of frothing. And from what I’ve read, the hard water that comes out of our well will require me to also learn the fine art of descaling/deliming. Any suggestions on good products for said espresso-maker-maintenance-foo?

Update Thingey (TM):  I spent some time talking with Dan Gollub (Hi Dan!!  =:) ) the other day, making sure that my take on the current and future state of OpenSync holds water, and was pleased to find out that I was not talking out of my ear (read: yipee, I knew what I was talking about!).  So, my plans hold and at some point after: 1) KDE4′s KPilot is usable and stable, 2) KPilot’s Summer of Code project is finished, 3) KPilot’s conduits are ported to the new SOC-produced architecture, and 4) KPilot has a functional Keyring conduit, I will start moving towards 5) helping to improve OpenSync’s palm plugins, 6) looking to replace pieces of KPilot’s syncing logic with  OpenSync, and 7) looking for synergy/commonality/duplicate code with kitchensync.  Oh–also, other examples of some things that KPilot does that OpenSync was not designed to do include installing databases, doing scheduled backups, dealing with Palm’s VFS, and managing the Palm’s userid/username stuffies.  Okay, bye.

Well, along comes some spectactular 5+year-old(?) technology by Mark Lyons called GMail Loader. It handles a variety of e-mail storage formats, like mbox, and maildir, among others. Since I have been using disconnected IMAP with kmail for quite a while, I had a nice local copy of all of my old e-mail from my IMAP server. All I had to do was put in my GAFYD MX record SMTP server into GMail Loader and point it to my dimap directories and watch it go.

A couple of notes, though… First, GMail Loader forces you to select a file in its “Find” dialog. So, for using a Maildir (like kmail stores your dimap mail in), you have to browse to a /cur/, select it, and then backspace to /. Secondly, make sure you leave the trailing “/” (slash) on the directory name. For example, let’s say you have a mailbox that you want to import into GMail from your kmail dimap cache. First, find which directory in your ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/ contains your account. Kmail happens to call my account “719735571″. My IMAP server puts everything underneath INBOX, so I have INBOX/attaboys, for example, in kmail. This translates into this directory: “~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/.719735571.directory/.INBOX.directory/attaboys”. So, in this example, point GMail Loader to ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/.719735571.directory/.INBOX.directory/attaboys/cur/SOMEFILE, then backspace over that until it reads “~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/dimap/.719735571.directory/.INBOX.directory/attaboys/” in GMail Loader’s Find text field (don’t forget the trailing slash!).

Another annoyance was that as I was importing things into GMail, half of it kept going into my Spam folder in GMail. I’m guessing it’s because the mail looks funky being of such an old date, etc. But I had to keep marking my mail that was imported as “Not Spam”. The next annoyance was that I had to keep Archiving everything that showed up in my Inbox from GMail Loader, but I guess that’s to be expected.

So anyway, I’m all done importing now. It actually does import the mail pretty quickly. Now I can use the GMail interface to my mail to search mails I’ve kept for the last 8+ years! =:)