KDE @ FOSS.IN/2008 – I’m Missing it. :-(

Last year, I was at FOSS.IN and this played a major factor in increasing my enthusiasm for FOSS contribution. I saw and met a whole bunch of FOSS Developers, primarily KDE and Debian contributors, particularly Till Adam (KDE), Kartik Mistry (KDE.IN, Debian) and Christian Perrier (Debian) and that really drove me to contribute. The same night, I went back and built KDE 4.x on my desktop, which I had ‘given up’ after some stage earlier. Thereafter, I produced patches more frequently than earlier.

This year, I really wanted to go to FOSS.IN – It’d have been a ‘debut’ as a “developer” – but the schedule of end-semester examinations at my college matches perfectly with that of FOSS.IN, preventing every FOSS enthusiast / developer here from attending the event.

That the KDE.IN team has done a lot more this year than the last is very obvious. This time we had a significant number of people helping with the planning. I have been out of the loop this semester, unfortunately, due to academic work (or so I claim. Anyway, it was a general observation amongst my friends that I was more ’serious’ when it comes to academics this semester), and didn’t help much with the planning. But the signs are very clear that it is going to be bigger and better than last time.

Recently, there were these ‘Pillars of KDE’ posters that the KDE.IN team made for FOSS.IN and they’re put up here in Pradeepto’s blog. Like the transition from KDE 3.x to KDE 4.x, at first sight, the posters seem to have gathered a significant amount of ‘visual appeal’ from FOSS.IN/2007 to FOSS.IN/2008. Kudos to Kamaleshwar Morjal for such brilliant posters!

Waiting for FOSS.IN to start. There’ll be a lot of live blogging, as usual, I presume.

KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon – Day 3???

Day 3 was a flop show for me .
I got up at 1:00 PM, when the Hackathon was _over_. But, well, that was a slightly well-deserved sleep. I joined the folks from the Hackathon over lunch, just like that. Shashank taught me how to enable his Panaromio plugin, and I think I must investigate it sometime.

Great, so I’ve done nothing today, other than fart on the way to the BIAL (seeing of Pradeepto and Sharan Rao). And I hope to start right away.

Well, I will put a consolidated blogpost about the KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon and the photos sometime. Unfortunately, I have not been able to capture anyone in an uncomfortable position or doing something funny, and they are straight, honest photos. But before that, I must thank:

• Atul, for sponsoring the event via GEODESIC and FOSS.IN
• Tejas, for giving good hacking company, and helping us get comfortable at GEODESIC
• Pradeepto, for organizing the whole thing.
• Gopala and Shashank, for being great hacking company
• Shreyas, for giving us someone to GNOME-bash all through, and for making good company too

I’d like to have more hackathons. There’re four of us in Bangalore till 17th… so maybe?

KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon – Day 2

Day 2 turned out to be very productive for me. As you have figured out, my hacking ends only by 3:00 AM, back at home. It’s just that the “spirit” of the Hackathon gets carried home with you, because when you leave a problem half-solved, you have the itch of solving it completely.
I am completely satisfied with today. I’ve made about 8 commits today.

Today, I made some improvements the Conjunction Tool. To think of it, the conjunction tool is a very generic tool – it can do eclipses, lunar occultations, planetary conjunctions and shortly should be able to do comet rendezvous too. Now, those are four different names for the same problem – that of finding the occurances of small separations between objects. I like the conjunction tool all the more, because it was the first feature I added to KStars (with Jason’s help, of course). The changes I made to the conjunction tool:

• Add Deep Sky Objects and Stars (named) to the conjunction predictions
• Double click on a conjunction and you see the conjunction happening!
• Add Comets and Asteroids to the conjunction predictions

Other work that I did, on my GSoC:

• Test whether the duplication is solving the expected issues with proper motion – things worked beautifully
• Modify binfiletester to check star data files for jumps in magnitude or other inconsistencies – this revealed a lot of inconsistencies in trixel N000
• Modify mysql2bin to correct the error causing the inconsistencies, and create/commit the new data files
• I am also prepared to move deepstars.dat (Tycho-2 Deep Catalog) to the Get Hot New Stuff feature, and have already requested for commit access to GHNS

So, here are my TODOs for tomorrow:

• Remove restrictions on second object in a conjunction and make it possible to have a comet / asteroid as the second object
• Implement Jason’s idea of filtering by Ecliptic Longitude
• Move deepstars.dat to GHNS
• Merge the summer branch into trunk
• Start work on the Auxinfo hash??

And as for the rest of us (a brief summary of what everyone else did, from twitter):

• Gopala “ported NoteWidget to use TextItem classes” (although I don’t know what that means! )
• Pradeepto did some good research on writing unit tests and the Qt test libraries
• Tejas worked on a rather interesting bug encountered in Kopete, attributed to Qt
• Shashank made significant progress on his Marble – Panoromio integration. (I could see pics hanging all over the Globe. I’ll probably go and investigate more tomorrow )
• Gopala also ported ActivityWidget
• Sharan Rao taught us the use of EMacs / KDE EMacs / EMacs + GDB scripts. [Screencasted]. GDB integration rocks bigtime!
• Tejas quickly learnt to use GDB+Vim!

We had a really nice chat about KDE development, KDE developers, aKademy, Contribution to KDE from India etc. over coffee. Dinner time was more of general talk.

I’m sorry for such a disorganized blogpost, but that’s all I can write at 3:00 AM in such a sleepy state. Goodnight!