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

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