Guest Blog for Arnav Dhamija, first year computer science undergraduate at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus.
Hey everyone, I am a first year undergraduate student at the university and I have an idea I want to use for the GSoC with KDE to make Dolphin an even better file manager. My project idea revolves around making file selections from multiple directory trees as easy as possible.
I just published a live Plasma image with Wayland. A great milestone in a multi-year project of the Plasma team led by the awesome Martin G. Nowhere near end-user ready yet but the road forward is now visible to humble mortals who don’t know how to write their own Wayland protocol. It’ll give a smoother and more secure graphics system when it’s done and ensures KDE’s software and Linux on the desktop stays relevant for another 30 years.
I went to the British Canoeing Event Safety Workship last night run by Dave Rosseter and the SCA. Here’s some notes for my own interest and memory.
Events runs by SCA affiliated clubs are covered for liability by the Perkins & Slade Insurance so if someone dies at an event the insurance covers you being sued. Following some incidents the insurance company asked for this workshop to happen so clubs at least have an idea how to check the events they run are safe.
An event is defined as an activity run by the club involving non-club members and outwith the BCU terms of reference. (Or run by an SCA committee.)
When running an event we have a duty of care to look after those involved.
We discussed a chain of responsibility which typically has an event organiser in the middle and club committee and SCA above them and volunteers below them.
We discussed the need to get authorisation of events, at a club that might be by the committee or at an AGM.
We discussed risk assessments which for each risk should include likelihood and seriousness as well as mitigation and whether that mitigation is proportionate.
We look at the 5 stages of an event
Decision to run – why do you want to run it?
Application and Authority – internal (club committee, safety officer) and external (property owners etc)
The acronym CALM was covered which are principles involved in dynamic risk assessment (and are similar to leadership principles of CLAP):
Commuinication
Avoidance
Line of Site
Management
There was a slide on people’s roles and span of control but not much detail on this.
There’s a load of resources that are due to come out to us. Useful stuff is on the HSE website and the gov.uk website such as the guide to organising community events.
It was an interesting enough workshop but I’m not convinced I learnt much, we already do all this in our club and many of the topics weren’t gone into in much detail.
Interesting to see British Canoeing use a photo from the FCC website in their slides, I wonder who authorised that and what their span of control was.
I maintain a membership database for my canoe club and I implemented the database years ago using a PHP library called Phormation which let me make an index page with simple code like:
query = “SELECT * FROM member WHERE year=2015”
show_table(column1, column2)
and an entry editing page with something like this:
query = “SELECT * FROM member WHERE id=$id”
widgets.append([column1, “name”, Textfield])
widgets.append([column2, “joined”, Date])
show_index(widgets)
and voila I had a basic UI to edit the database.
Now I want to move to a new server but it seems PHP has made a backwards incompatible change between 5.0 and 5.5 and Phormation no longer runs and it’s no longer maintained.
So lazyweb, what’s the best way to make a basic web database editor where you can add some basic widgets for different field types and there’s two tables with a 1:many relationship which both need edited?
Muon, the Apt package installer UI is in need of a maintainer. It has been split out from Discover and Updater which are application focused and to some extent work with multiple backends. Muon is package focused and covers the surprisingly important use case of technical users who care about libraries and package versions but don’t want to use a command line. It’ll probably move to unmaintained unless anyone wants to keep an eye on it so speak up now if you want to help out.
FOSDEM is the biggest free software conference and KDE will have a stall and help organise the Desktop devroom for talks. If you have something interesting to talk about the call for talks in the devroom is open now. We should have a stall to promote KDE, the world best free and open source community. I’m organising the KDE party on the Saturday. And there are thousands of talks going on. Sign up on the wiki page now if you’re coming and want to hang around or help with KDE stuff.
I went on a coach’s polo support module training day kindly organised and subsidided by the SCA. It was delivered by Zoe who came up from Wales for the day to 10 people who were mostly experienced polo players but at least 1 was new to the discipline. The idea being to train up coaches in how to coach polo so coaches will go a teach other people. Here’s some notes about what happened for my own memory and anyone else who cares.
We started with introduction bingo, Zoe had written some features in a square such as “has paddled on the sea” or “has paddled internationally” and we introduced ourselves by finding people to put names to for each box.
We looked at warm ups on the land. 2 people standing back to back passing the paddle over the head and down to feet, then passing it round the side in a mock bow rudder movement. We stood in a line one infront of the other and passed the ball over head, through legs then both alternatively. We played paper, scissors & stone with warm up forfeits. Then the two lines faced each other and we passed the ball to the front of the other line then ran to the end of that line. We passed the ball between two people facing each other being mindful to throw with a loose wrist following the ball and catch by slowing the ball down during the catch.
Always warm up slowly especially when passing, it’s very tempting to throw the ball as far as possible which will over-exert the muscles.
On the water we did more passing concentrating on accuracy with finger pointing at end of throw and catching 1 handed taking the speed off the ball.
Tig, in an area, catcher with ball has to hit the opposition’s boat, can be defended with paddles and body, if the player gets hit then they join the catcher team.
Two lines facing each other of paddlers side-by-side then 1 person paddles down middle passing in zig zag to each boat.
Passing on the move paddling side-by-side to hands.
We used the static 2&2 formation with 1 goal keeper, 2 defenders in a ^ shape infront and 2 more infront of that. The attacks against this are “overload” where several players attack all from 1 side, “split” where 2 attackers try to get into the middle and move the defenders apart and “star” where each attacker goes to 1 defender to draw them out and they pass it round in a circle between them.
We did ball control, you can bring the ball towards you by putting the blade on the ball then pushing down on your paddle to roll the ball towards you and up the shaft. You can also pick up the ball with your paddle blade. We did the exercise of moving the ball around the boat, first without going over the deck and then with going over the deck.
We looked at shooting, blocking and tackling. Shooting we all faced the goal with 1 keeper and took turns to shoot. Follow through with hand, aim at a square in the net (not the keeper’s paddle). We tried to shoot in sequence each corner and the centre of the net. We did shooting when receiving the ball from the feeder who was sitting at the side. For blocking we did passes to the side of players who then blocked it with their paddle, as with catching try to slow the ball down so it drops by your side. We also did this with a piggy-in-the-middle style game passing around the middle player who would try to block. We didn’t have time to look at much tackling but there are various ways to keep the opposition off you.
We had a go at making our own training sessions and trying it out.
And we had some slides to show us the basics of the rules and the structure of polo.
There was a lot in this but also a lot missed out. I would have appreciated some training in how to do a flat-3 formation which we don’t often get to do on our narrow pitch on the canal.
KDE has been trying for years to get Plasma working on different form factors with mixed success, so when I first started on this I was pretty intimidated. But we looked around for how to build this and it turns out there is software for it just lying around on the internet ready to be put together. Incredible.
It got very stressful when we couldn’t get anything showing on the screen for a few weeks but the incredible Martin G got Wayland working with it in KWin, so now KDE has not just the first open mobile project but also one of the first systems running with Wayland.
And with Shashlik in the pipeline we are due to be able to run Android applications on it too giving us one of the largest application ecosystems out there.
The question is will there be traction from the community? You can join us in the normal Plasma ways, #plasma on Freenode and plasma-devel mailing list and #kubuntu-devel to chat about making images for other devices. I’m very excited to see what will happen in the next year.
Voy a ir Akademy-ES el jueves para dar una charla se llama “Plugfest Conferencia Protocolos”. Es un revisión de esta conferencia an Marzo y un corto versión de mi charla se llama “interoperabilidad del escritorio Linux”.
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at Protocols Plugfest Europe 2015. It was really good to get out of the bubble of free software desktops where the community love makes it tempting to think we’re the most important thing in the world and experience the wider industry where of course we are only a small player.
This conferences, and its namesakes in the US, are sponsored by Microsoft among others and there’s obviously a decent amount of money in it, the venue is a professional conference venue and there’s a team of people making sure small but important details are taken care of like printed signposts to the venue.
What’s it all About?
In 2008 Microsoft lost an EU antitrust case because they had abused their monopoly position in operating systems. This required them to document their file formats such as MS Office and protocols such as SMB. This conference is part of that EU requirement meaning they have to work with anyone who wants to use their formats and protocols. They have a website where you can file a request for information on any of their documents and protocols and everyone said they were very responsive in assigning engineers getting answers.
Since 2008 Microsoft have lost a lot of ground in new areas in the industry such as mobile and cloud. Because they’re not the dominant player here they realise they have to use formats and protocols others can use too otherwise they lock themselves out.
The Talks
I spoke about Interoperability on the Linux Desktop which seemed well received, the reason Linux desktop hasn’t taken off is there are many other systems we need to interoperate with and many of them don’t want to interoperate with us. (Of course there are financial reasons too.) It was well received with many people thanking me for a good talk.
I went to talks by people working on Samba, LibreOffice and Kolab which all gave pleasing insight into how these project work and what they have to do to workaround complex proprietary protocols and formats. LibreOffice explained how they work with OpenDocument, they add feature and for any feature added they submit a request for it to be added to the standard. It’s a realistic best practice alternative.
I went to a bunch of Microsoft talks too about changes in their file formats, protocols and use of their cloud service Azure.
The inter-talks
It was great meeting some people from the free software and MS worlds at the conference. I spoke to Christopher about how he had been hired to document SMB for MS, to Dan about taking over the world, to Miklos about LibreOffice and many others. On the MS side I spoke to Tom about file formats, Darryl about working with Linux, to Jingyu about developing in MS.
I hope I won’t offend anyone to say that there’s a notable culture difference between the open source and the MS sides. Open Source people really do dress scruffy and act socially awkward. MS people reminded me of the bosses in Walter Mitty, strong handshakes, strong smiles and neat dress.
culture difference
One part of the culture that depressingly wasn’t difference was the gender ratio, there was only half a dozen women there and half of those were organising staff.
The Microsoft people seemed pretty pleased at how they were open and documented their protocols and formats, but it never occurred to them to use existing standards. When I asked why they invented OOXML instread of using OpenDocument I was told it was “MS Office’s standard”. When I asked if Skype protocols were open they seemed not to know. It probably doesn’t come under the EU court requirements so it doesn’t interest them, but then all their talk of openness is for nothing. When I suggested Skype should talk XMPP so we can use it with Telepathy I was given largely blank faces in return.
Talking to Samba people and OpenChange people about my opinion that their products should be stop gaps until a better open protocol can be used was met with the reasonable argument that in many cases there are no better open protocols. Which is a shame.
I went into the MS testing lab to test some basic file sharing with Samba and reminded myself about the problems in Kubuntu and discovered some problems in Windows. They had to turn off firewalls and twiddle permissions just to be able to share files, which was something I always thought Windows was very good at. Even then it only worked with IP address and not browsing. They had no idea why but the Samba dudes knew straight away that name browsing had been disabled a while ago and a DNS server was needed for that. Interesting the MS interoperability staff aren’t great at their own protocols.
Zaragoza
I had a great time in Zaragoza, only spoiled by travellers flu on the last day meaning I couldn’t go to the closing drinks. It’s on the site of a 2008 world fair expo which feels like one of those legacy projects that get left to rot, 2008 wasn’t a great year to be trying to initiate legacy I think. But the tapas was special and the vermut sweet. The conference timetable was genius, first day starts at 9:00 next at 10:00 and final at 11:00. The Zentyal staff who organised it was very friendly and they are doing incredible stuff reimplementing exchange. It’s lovely to see MS want to talk to all of us but they’ve a way to go yet before they learn that interoperability should be about an even playing field not only on their terms.
