KStars with experimental OpenGL support in RC2

Well, this was a little hurried and late, but I introduced some largish changes into what’s going to become RC2 just a few minutes back. No new strings, to the best of my knowledge. Let me explain what they are.

Harry de Valence worked with KStars this summer and his (GSoC) project involved writing code that would render the sky map with OpenGL, while still keeping the native QPainter drawing, to ensure that KStars doesn’t crawl on older hardware without hardware acceleration. Well, Harry’s task was rather tough, because he had to deal with badly structured code, but he was able to give us a working OpenGL sky map with a few regressions at the end of his project. The most important unsolved problem, however, was that there was no way to switch between the two paint engines at run time.

We decided not to leave the code in Harry’s branch, and merged it into trunk, so that the code would be more accessible, and we might arrive at a solution at least before release. When 4.6 was branched out from trunk, we had a version of KStars that would throw up a black screen with some text at the corners upon launching! This was one of the regressions with OpenGL — you couldn’t use infoboxes (those boxes that tell you what KStars is looking at, what the time of the simulation is etc.) with GL, so you had to manually disable them to see the sky map. And to add to that, we had a couple of other problems with GL. And you couldn’t switch out of GL without rebuilding KStars.

Of course, one of the solutions was to just disable GL and fallback to QPainter, without adding any new functionality, but lots of new code. I didn’t want to subscribe to this — it gives me this feeling that I’m doing what some proprietary software companies do to enforce DRM.

Our solution to this problem involved breaking up a class that’s very central to KStars — the SkyMap class, which took care of the sky map in totality — painting, projection, events. Not good. Harry had already broken away projection, and in the process of cleaning the code, solved several really strange bugs in KStars. What was left was to break up painting and event handling, so that we could change our canvas at run time.

This time of the year being the winter break at UT Austin, I thought I should finish this. My implementation of this (warning: physics student trying to write code) is now merged into the 4.6 branch. I should’ve probably done it before, but yeah, it stretched to fit the time before RC2.

The only regression I observe with this change over the usual native painting functionality, is that infoboxes flicker when you drag them around. I’m sure that’s a very small thing to trade for the awesome speed and smoothness that GL gives you, when you need it.

So you can now switch backends at runtime:

Switching to OpenGL backends at runtime!

Testing

We most certainly need a whole lot of testing. Please help the KStars team by seeing if it builds, renders fine, switches backends with no issues, and file any bugs you may have on bugs.kde.org. We will try to fix them before the final tag.

Thanks for reading.

Time for me to get back to physics now!

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.

Hello (KDE) World

This is (hopefully) my first post on Planet KDE! I didn’t know that we could have ourselves aggregated on Planet KDE with an svn commit until I “accidentally” stumbled upon the “Add your blog” link while adding Planet KDE to the RSSNOW plasmoid. I wish to introduce myself to Planet KDE through this post.

Yes, I hadn’t been in touch with the KDE world for long and only lurked in #kdeedu or posted on kstars-devel@kde.org, until I made it to the last 2 days of aKademy 2008 (thank you Bart, Kenny, Wendy, Pradeepto!), which I thoroughly enjoyed!

So who am I? Not getting philosophical, I’m called Akarsh Simha in the real world, kstar on IRC, and asimha on the SVN, and am a student pursuing the BTech programme in Engineering Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (“IITM”), India. I have currently finished two out of four years of my course and am running on the third. I plan to pursue a career in Theoretical Physics. Programming / Software Development is one of my “primary” hobbies, the other being Amateur Astronomy.

I develop for KStars and was a Google Summer of Code (2008) student under KDE, mentored by Jason Harris. I’m a not-so-active member of the KDE India community.

Memories of aKademy 2008

I was browsing through Flickr photostreams tagged by aKademy2008. Finally, I found, what is currently (till Anurag uploads all the photos he shot) the sole photo of mine from aKademy.

Here’s a photo by Mr. Park (Korean KDE Developer, from his photostream) at Brussels Centraal Station, where we parted. Left to Right are Me, Pradeepto, Anurag and Mr. Park.

[ (c) 2008 Mr. Park "segfault" Joon-Kyu. ]

And this is possibly the only “proper” photo I have on the internet. . Thanks Park!

An idea for easy KDE development within IIT Madras.

I think the most painful part of developing KDE is to build the dependencies etc from the SVN checkouts, i.e. setting up the development environment. Now, let’s say I’m developing kdenetwork. I will need to have qt-devel, checkout and build kdesupport, kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kderuntime and then kdenetwork. Now, a newbie who does know C++ need not be very comfortable with the build process or with debugging the builds, but could be capable of coding for KDE.

Why not set up a KDE development server within IIT Madras, to which you can SSH with X forwarding and just start developing?

For starters, let’s say I do this on my machine. What I would do is to create a new user account for “public” KDE development, and then learn to use kdesvn-build to automatically maintain fresh copies of KDE. Then I could request anyone who is interested to create an SSH key and mail me their public keys, so that I could put it in the authorized_keys of this account. This way, there will be no password sharing hassles.

Whenever someone wants to kontribute, all he need to do is to login through SSH, make his changes and build. Of course, once a developer has created a patch of his work, he could do an svn revert, so that it keeps the work clean.

The major trouble of making a public server of this type would be the bandwidth limitations that would cause SSH with X forwarding to be unmanageably slow. Any suggestions / ideas?

KDE.IN Monsoon hacKathon – Photos

http://members.bas.org.in/kstar/kde.in-monsoon-hacKathon-2008-pics/

2.5 million stars in trunk!

Yay! All the machinery for loading 1e6 stars has been moved to trunk and the 2.5-million-star Tycho-2 catalog has moved to the ‘Download Data’ (Get Hot New Stuff) feature. I plan to put up a screencast on how to use this and the conjunction tool from KStars sometime, along with a whole lot of other features.

To get the Tycho-2 deep catalog, just click on File->Download Data and click ‘Install’ next to ‘Tycho-2 Star Catalog’.

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!

KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon – Day 1

Day 1 was almost entirely spent by me in the following activities:

• Install Debian on one of the systems Atul had so kindly provided us with. (They have a local Debian mirror, so it rocks!!)
• Copy the KDE sources from Sharan’s harddisk
• Play around SSHing into my system
• Build KDE
• Discuss about FOSS.IN 2008 and KDE’s place
• Frantically realise that you’ve done nothing at the end of the day and try to commit something that builds, whether it adds some value or not

I had a nice time being with all the KDE kontributors around. We also had a few talks by Pradeepto, explaining David Faure’s method of setting up the KDE source tree and svnmerge.py.

Other folks did useful things – Pradeepto made a release (of what, I don’t know. Definitely will have to do with KDEPIM or KMail). Tejas commited his Bonjour plugin for Kopete.

I learnt something about Bonjour from Tejas. Nice thing it is. Sharan has agreed to help me use EMacs more like an IDE than like “Notepad”.

Dinner @ Nandini, RMV Extension. Dinner back @ home as well, because I had promised the folks at home.

Although we could only get the stuff building today, the inspiration from the KDE Hackathon got me working all night till now (despite the fact that I need to get to Day 2 tomorrow) fixing some stuff. Finally, it looks like I have “achieved” all my GSoC goals. Anyway, that apart, the proper motion code is tested and found to be proper – that’s a good thing. I finally learnt how KStars draws lines on screen (many thanks to Jason. I’d have been lazy to find out myself ). I also commited the data files that had the duplicate entries, because they seemed to work without any trouble.

Finally, I thought I must blog about ‘Day 1′. Atul was insisting that we all blog, so here it is . We are also actively microblogging on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kdehackathon

Looking forward to Day 2. I hope to:

• Ensure that binfiletester also verifies sanity of data. That way, I’ll have the ultimate testing tool to receive that catalogs to come. That way, I’ll also get a hint on why KStars is spewing out trixel jump message of late. (Wasn’t doing that before I remodelled the trixel2number and number2trixel code).
• Random bugfixes for KStars

Thankfully, I have access to my phpmyadmin from there

BTW, Photos by Kushal are here.