Who would have thought that my enquiring about the probability of releasing KDE 4.2 on January 27, as scheduled, would lead to 12 registered KDE 4.2 release parties all around the world. It all started just so we could determine the best date for one short KDE 4.2 presentation in Kiberpipa/Cyberpipe, here in Slovenia. With encouragement from KDE Promo team this evolved into a call for organisation of KDE 4.2 release parties and now… well, everyone knows about the parties now.

Regarding the Slovenian party, the one short presentation expanded into a nice event with four presentations (about KDE 4.2, Plasma, Amarok 2 and, D-Bus), three workshops (creating a Plasma theme, creating a Plasma widget, and helping with translation), and after that some free socialising with some snacks and drinks. We tried to get Mr. Lancelot (Ivan Čukić) from Serbia as our guest speaker, but unfortunately there was not enough time to get the visa. Next time we sure have to start getting papers in order earlier.

What follow is the announcement of the party in Slovenian.

Zabava ob izidu KDE 4.2

Kdaj: 27. januarja 2009
Kje: Kiberpipa, Kersnikova 6, Ljubljana - zemljevid

27. januarja bo izšel KDE 4.2, ki je končno primeren tudi za širše občinstvo in ne le za razvijalce in preizkusne uporabnike. KDE 4.2 predstavlja pomemben mejnik v razvoju KDE in skupnost KDE bo pripravila vrsto prireditev in zabav ob izidu te nove različice.

Tudi v Sloveniji bomo organizirali prireditev ob izidu KDE 4.2, in sicer v torek 27. januarja ob 18:00 v okviru Pipinih odprtih terminov.

Program

• 18:00 - Predstavitev KDE 4(.2) (Andrej Vernekar)
• 18:30 - Plasma (Jure Repinc)
• 19:00 - Amarok 2 (Andraž Sraka)
• 19:15 - Adijo, DCOP; zdravo, D-Bus! (Gašper Fele-Žorž)
• 19:30 - Delavnice
  • Izdelava teme za Plazmo (Jure Repinc)
  • Izdelava gradnika za Plazmo (Ambrož Bizjak)
  • Kako pomagati s prevajanjem (Andrej Vernekar)
• 20:30 - Pogostitev/druženje/pijača/zabava

Če nameravate obiskate katero izmed delavnic, se je nanjo potrebno prijaviti na tej strani.

Update 1: Photos from the party are available in Kiberpipa’s KDE 4.2 Release Party Gallery

Update 2: Videos from the party are available: Video 1 (Youtube), Video 2 (Youtube).

Tags: kde, kde4, kde42, desktop, free software, prosto programje, open source, odprta koda, slovenia, slovenija, linux, lugos, cyberpipe, kiberpipa

There’s less than one month left until the beginning of this year’s Akademy conference in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium. Just a few moments ago I’ve finally arranged everything for the trip. The room at youth hostel Domein Roosendael is paid for and the plane ticket is registered. One more time I have to thank Linux Users Group of Slovenia (Lugos), who are paying for the flight. This will be my second time to Akademy and this time I’m staying for the whole week. The only thing left now is to decide which talks from the two parallel tracks I will be attending. Looking forward to meet cool KDE contributors!

Tags: kde, desktop, akademy, akademy 2008, free software, open source, belgium, linux, lugos

During the past two days I’ve been at this year’s conference of TransAlpine Chapter (TAC) of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). It was hosted by HERMES SoftLab here in Ljubljana. Since I work quite a lot on translating KDE and other open source software and sometimes also help with documentation I sure thought it would be interesting to attend the conference. One other reason for me to be there is that, as of late, I’m more and more thinking about how it would be to have a career in technical communication (translating, writing documentation and all things related). At first it looked like I wouldn’t be able to be at the conference because the attendance fee (195€) was quite high for a student. Luckily Linux Users Group of Slovenia (Lugos) stepped in and sponsored me.

The conference itself was well above my expectations. I anticipated to meet more or less older and more reserved people, but it turned out they are relaxed, fun, overall cool and in average younger than expected. The talks were also very interesting and they covered a broad range of subjects. Just goes to show how wide the spectre of technical communicators’ knowledge can be. To me the three most interesting presentations were:

Pictures and profits: how visual information design and simple usability studies can save your company millions by Patrick Hofmann

Very interesting how creative you often must be to convey some mesage or concept in a graphical way. A lot also depends on culture an end user comes from. In the end all makes users of documentation happier, because it is easier to understand. This, together with reduction of messages to translate, can save companies a lot of money.

Brave new world: How one writing team moved to DITA-based authoring by Helen O’Shea

DITA is not only a new XML format for technical documentation. It also brings a new way of thinking in topics as basic and complete chunks of information. Topics can later be assembled into different deliverables like books and online help. During this presentation I was constantly thinking how DITA could be used for documentation in KDE. Is there need (and will) for another conversion?

Improving the quality and usability of error messages by Katarzyna Kostorz

Yet another presentation where I was thinking about how all that was said could apply to KDE. First we were shown some examples of bad and good error messages and what are the properties that make them bad or good. Next we could see how error messages are handled by IBM. Not only is the short version shown in GUI, the longer explanation and possible further actions to be taken (by different type of users) are all part of the documentation.

At the end of the conference I was asked if all that I’ve learnt has scared me away from thinking about being a technical writer. I answered that I don’t get scared so easily. Quite the opposite, I can now say that I’m interested in a technical communication career even more. STC membership application is already filled out and ready to be sent across the Atlantic Ocean.

Congrats to the organisers for such a great conference. Hopefully I will be able to meet all the people once again next year.

Tags: transalpine chapter, tac, society for technical communication, stc, technical communication, technical writing, documentation, translation, dita, kde

I’ve been to Maribor last Thursday where the 1st Day of Open Source event was organised at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This was my first time visiting Maribor and my first impression was that it is a very nice, clean and lively city.

At the event itself you could attend various interesting talks about Linux and Open Source Software in general. I even had the honor to be the very first speaker. I presented FLOSS, it’s history, licensing and after that talked a bit about Lugos, the Linux User Group of Slovenia. Too bad I missed the talks at the end of the day but I had to catch the last train back to Ljubljana.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the number of attendance. A quick count showed that there were constantly at least 150 people in the room. By comparison, the day before this event Microsoft organised a similar event, where there were only 30-50 people. Despite Microsoft having better promotion and they even tried to bribe students by some expensive prizes.

Anyways, hats off to Oto Brglez jr. and the Students Group. They did an excellent job organizing the event and I sure look forward to the 2nd Day of Open Source.

Tags: open source, free software, floss, linux, lugos, maribor, slovenia

The meeting was in Paris during the past weekend. I’m glad I made it there and back safely, and without any complications. Well I did manage to make a long detour while going from Gare du Nord to La Chapelle métro station. Two streets had a very similar name and I somehow ended up on the wrong one which confused me a bit. Me and my roomies, Aleix Pol and Albert Astals Cid, were the last to arrive at the hotel.

After a nice breakfast the next day we went straight to the Mandriva office where the meeting was actually taking place. First Anne-Marie Mahfouf, who we all have to thank for the organisation, had a short welcome talk and then everyone introduced themselves. We have then set up an Icecream network for speeding up the compilation. My laptop with Gentoo for some reason decided not to cooperate. Maybe because I had the tools compiled with CPU specific optimisations or maybe because I was the only one running in 64-bit mode.

During the first day we had two presentations. Patrick Spendrin told us how and why he is porting KDE applications to Windows. There are so many great free and open-source educational applications in KDE that it would be a shame if people on Windows couldn’t use them. Well with KDE 4 this will finally be possible. Later Vladimir Kuznetsov prepared a demonstration of Step, an amazing interactive physical simulator, a virtual physical laboratory for your computer. He started working on it during Google Summer of Code 2007 and it has come very far. Step has many cool features, even more than some similar expensive commercial applications. Every physics teacher should definitely check out Step.

On the second day we started working later because the security card didn’t work and so we couldn’t enter the office. Lucky those who decided to sleep an hour longer that morning :). We continued our work and then had a presentation about the future of KDE Education project. Later Patrick managed to get Step running on Windows. At 5pm I was sad as I had to leave the meeting and travel back home.

During those two days I was checking out how translations work in educational applications. For that I also needed to update some of the Slovenian translations. While testing I noticed a bug in Kickoff menu which didn’t show search results of entries without GenericName specified in their desktop files. Albert quickly fixed this and while we were debugging I found out about DDD frontend to GDB and learned how to teach GDB so it is able to print Qt data (look into kdesdk/scripts/kde-devel-gdb), for example QString data. Another “important” thing I learned was how to add Plasmoids to the container that replaces kicker. When you have the Add Widget dialog open you have to drag the Plasmoid directly to the panel. Thanks to Benoît Jacob for this, and for the trip around Paris.

I had a really great time in Paris and it was nice to meet all the people and get to know all the faces and voices that are behind IRC nicknames. With face to face meetings like this our community only gets stronger. Can’t wait to meet them all again next year at aKademy 2008 in Belgium.

Tags: kde, community, meeting, education, physics, free software, open source, linux, windows, paris, france

On 1st and 2nd December this year the KDE Education project is preparing its first meeting. I’ve already been to a similar event during aKademy 2007, where one day was dedicated to free and open source software in education and schools. I enjoyed it a lot and was very happy that Anne-Marie invited me to the meeting which will be happening in a little more than a month in Paris. I’ve already booked my flight and I can see that there are currently 10 more people registered at the travel page. Can’t wait to meet them all. Thanks to Anne-Marie for hard organisational work, thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring the meeting and thanks to Mandriva for allowing us to use their offices.

As a preparation for the meeting I have started to check out how to use Valgrind which helps you find memory leaks in the code. I used it on KStars and it revealed a problem in constellation boundary highlighting code which leaked about 13 MiB of memory on my short test run. As I had some more free time today, I also updated the Slovenian keyboard layout for KTouch and converted it into the new XML format. Blinken didn’t escape me as well.

These were my little contributions to KDE today. Now I have to prepare for a lot of work that awaits to have as much KDE 4 translated into Slovenian language as possible when it gets released.

Tags: kde, community, meeting, education, free software, open source, paris, france

Skipped the breakfast today, since I forgot to set up the alarm clock and was already running late. Went directly to the university, because I wanted to be there about half an hour earlier to connect to the internet. The connection was not working and it was strange that there were no people. Luckily Mario Fux came by (he forgot his power adapter) and told me that the talks are in the Livingston Tower across the street.

We had three talks in which we were told about three actual deployments of Linux in schools over Europe (Norway, Switzerland, Spain). It was shown how much money a school can save by using free and open source software, in what way the money is saved and how the deployments are made. It is sad that at first school administration is often very afraid of Linux in their school, because they don’t know anything about it. After they actually see how well it works and how many benefits it brings they eventually want more Linux. It was also very interesting to see what and how many customizations are made during deployments. Either to make a better fit for school’s special needs or to work around deficiencies in existing Windows servers, which often don’t work nicely with the rest of the world.

There was a chance to see One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate PC side by side and we also got them into our hands. I was quite surprised that Classmate PC actually feels lighter. What I also like about Classmate PC is that it appears to be a more capable machine for which it is easier to develop applications. The model at the presentation actually had a slimmed down version of Mandriva Linux installed, with KDE desktop and OpenOffice.org. And everyone knows how heavy OpenOffice.org is when it comes to system resources.

The guy with OLPC also showed us around GCompris, a suit of educational applications. I’ve heard about it before, but never checked it out. It has over 100 educational activities and is definitely something to check out in more detail and see how well it is translated into Slovenian language. Later Marble was presented. It is a widget for showing geographical data that is ready to be used in Qt or KDE applications (for example in KStars to set location you are observing from). In addition, it is a full application, which is similar to Google Earth. During the presentation Summer of Code student managed to get GPS support working. Another application presented was KAlgebra, which can be used as a bit more advanced calculator and is also capable of drawing 2D and simple 3D graphs. It is also very nice to see that KAlgebra is based on MathML standard.

At the end we had a discussion where we collected a few topics, on which it would be nice to work in the future. For example more task oriented and simplified desktop and applications. Another idea was to set up a web portal and mailing list where people interested in free and open source software in education could work together. Maybe SchoolForge could be revived and used for this.

Another very interesting day indeed. And if you would like to know all details about what was happening be sure to check out KDE Edutainment pages some time later. You will be able to find all the presentations and some notes there.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland, education, olpc, one laptop per child, classmate pc

This year will be my first time attending aKademy conference, a meeting of KDE users, developers and contributors. Akademy 2007 will take place in Glasgow, Scotland from 30th June to 7th July 2007.

Air plane tickets for me and my sister have just been booked, thanks to Jure Koren, who helped with his credit card (I don’t have any of my own yet). We’ve already arranged for accommodation in Glasgow Euro Hostel about two weeks ago. So everything is ready for the departure. Well almost, I still need to buy a power socket adapter.

Big thanks also go to LUGOS who will be paying for my plane ticket and the room. Without them this trip wouldn’t be possible, or it would be very hard. Can’t wait to meet you at aKademy 2007!

P.S. If you’re coming don’t forget to add yourself to the list of aKademy 2007 attendees.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Yesterday I attended the fourth and the final part of a free Plone workshop that was organised by Kiberpipa (Cyberpipe) multimedia centre here in Ljubljana. My main motivation for taking part in this workshop was LUGOS. You see, the web page of our Slovenian Linux user group is running on Plone. So I thought it would be a good idea to learn Plone to also be able to help in this department.

Each part was about two hours long and during the entire workshop we’ve learned the basics about Plone. First about Zope application framework and server and how Plone is a product that uses it. Then we took a look at the main parts of a Plone-based portal. We also installed Plone on Linux machines there (it was very easy: unpack, run installation, start the server). After that we learned how to add various types of content and how to organise it. We also found out about packages that add functionality to default Plone, these packages are called Plone products. Portlets were introduced and techniques to modify the layout and looks of the Plone portal were presented. At the end even concepts like states, transitions, workflow, roles, groups and security couldn’t escape from us.

All in all it was a very nice workshop and I think I’ve learned a lot of useful stuff about Plone. It has also surprised me to see how many sites use Plone. I visit some of them (like Trolltech, The Free Software Foundation, Open4Business) more or less frequently and I didn’t even know that Plone is behind them. A special thanks to our mentor Rok Gerbas who has done a great job introducing us to the powerful Plone content management system.

Tags: plone, zope, cms, content management system, internet, web, web design, open source, free software, python, kiberpipa, cyberpipe

The new year has barely started and good news for Linux and free/open source software just don’t stop coming in. This time story goes something like this. A headmaster of a school in Russia got accused of software piracy. Now Russian schools are so afraid that authorities would find unlicensed software on their computers, that they have started to look at alternative options to overpriced Windows and software for it. And Linux operating system and free and open source software is the perfect choice. Not only will they be able to stop worrying about freely copying the software around, they will also save a lot of money, get safer and more stable platform, which in addition has higher educational values. The philosophy of free access to source code, collaboration and sharing that is behind free and open source software is just a perfect fit for schools. And it is a great way to finally put an end to software piracy. Way to go Russia! More about this on CNews. And to learn more about the use of open source software in education visit K12 Open Source wiki.

Tags: linux, windows, russia, free software, open source, floss, foss, education, school, schools, k12, k-12

New year of 2007 is almost here and you can be sure that there will be plenty of astronomical phenomenon to wonder at in the coming year. Whether you use a telescope, binoculars or even the naked eye, many celestial objects are worth to gaze at. To help you explore the night sky there is an excellent book, that is prepared just for the year 2007. It title is What’s Up 2007 - 365 Days of Skywatching and was written by Tammy Plotner. The best part about this book is that it is available for free download. A perfect gift for any amateur astronomer, beginner or experienced one. If you like the book, you can also buy it in printed form and by doing so also support the author. He deserves it. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for the post with a pointer to this book.

Tags: astronomy, space, science, books, education

A couple of hours ago Harish Kukeja submitted quite a lot of new source code for Physiks into SVN repository at KDE. The basic features of the physics simulation framework should mostly be functional now and I’ll have to take some time later to take a look at the new code more closely. Probably I will also have to brush up my knowledge of the C++ that is related to this code. If I’ll have enough free time, I may try to write some simple Qt application to test the current state of physics engine and see how it feels using it. Maybe I could also start working on a web page for the project. It would also be nice to come up with an icon that represents something (someone) that immediately makes you think about physics. But first I have to catch Harish on Jabber so we discuss about this idea.

Tags: physics, engine, simulation, simulations, education, kde, linux, soc, summer of code, programming

While updating my local copy of source code from KDE SVN repository and reading the latest issue of KDE Commit Digest (I’ve translated the interface into Slovenian language) I noticed that Harish Kukreja has imported Physiks into the repository. The original name for this Google Summer of Code project was KPhysics (you can read a bit more about it in my previous post), but since many new KDE applications have dropped the K prefix KPhysics was renamed to Physiks. Now I have its code on my hard drive and I will keep my eye on the development so that after the SoC is over I can start to help as quickly as possible and help make Physiks a great tool for physics teachers who will use it to show virtual physical experiments to students.

Tags: physics, kphysics, physiks, education, open source, free software, linux, kde, google summer of code, soc

Let me remind you there is less then a month until the beginning of the 2nd international Linux training camp, which starts on 20th and ends on 27th August here in Bohinj, Slovenia. Last year’s Red Hat Summer Camp was a huge success. For this year Red Hat and Housing prepared a program with 4 different tracks to choose from: Pingo Linux (for beginners and people new to Linux), RH300 with RH302 (get certified for RHCE), RH133 (Enterprise Linux System Administration) and Lab track (MySQL, PHP, firewall). In addition to learning about Linux, each track includes sport activities (adrenalin park, canyoning, rafting…). I hope you come and visit us here in beautiful Triglav National Park.

Tags: linux, training, red hat, summer, camp, bohinj, slovenia

Nekaj trenutkov nazaj sem končal tudi s posodobitvijo prevoda programa KStars. To je odličen astronomski program, namizni planetarij, ki je namenjen predvsem ljubiteljskim začetnikom v astronomiji. Zelo prav pa lahko pride tudi pri učenju astronomije v šolah. Zaslonski posnetek poslovenjenega KStars si lahko ogledate tukajle.

English summary:
A few moments ago I finished updating the Slovenian translation of KStars, a great astronomy application. Screenshot of KStars with Slovenian user interface is available here.