Up until a few weeks ago it had stayed at that level. But a few weeks back Robert Roth appeared out of nowhere and started triaging bugs and submitting new patches and updating old patches. He’s been keeping me busy reviewing and applying patches. With his help the bug count is now at 146. Still high but very good progress. So, thanks Robert!

The big new feature so far this cycle is Control Groups support. Jason Baron from Red Hat has added an option to view the control group information for each process. This is a work in progress. I’ve included an early patch in the 3.3.2.1 release. If you find bugs or just want to follow the progress please visit bug #663644. Also, thanks to Lennart for his input on how best to implement this.

With many bugs squashed and a few new features, the 3.4 release stands to be The best release ever (TM).

Accomodations

Some of the deadlines have passed to get the conference rate at selected hotels. However, some still offer this rate till tomorrow (June 30th). So head over to the accommodation page and book your room. Berlin is very popular in the summer, so get your room booked early… meaning now.

Registration

If you’ve not registered yet, please do. For us, as organizers, it helps a lot if you register as early as possible. For you, though, it’s even more important. Pre-registering will help you get through the conference check-in faster, get you into the parties (beer!), and will be needed for a few other things we’ll be announcing soon.

Workshops and BoFs

The last four days of the conference will be all about getting stuff done. We’ve got lots of space for ad-hoc workshops and BoFs but are offering to let projects and groups who know they want to get together a chance to get there sessions onto the official schedule. The deadline for this is this Sunday (July 3rd). So go propose a session now. Btw, there seem to be a lot more KDE sessions proposed so far than GNOME ones. So, please propose your sessions GNOME folks!

Volunteering

The local organizing team will not be able to make this a great conference without help from the community. We’re looking for volunteers to help us with many aspects of the conference. If you’re able to help in any capacity please head over to our volunteer wiki page and sign up.

Even if you can’t make it to the conference but are familiar with Berlin you can help by going to the wiki and simply creating and filling pages with information about Berlin that’ll help attendees enjoy their stay.

Sponsors

Our sponsor page has gotten a little more colorful recently. Thanks to all our sponsors for making the conference possible.

Keynotes

Last but not least, we’ve announced the keynotes for this year. Check out interviews with Thomas Thwaite (designer and technologist), Claire Rowland (user experience guru), and Dirk Hondel (Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel). In addition, there will be one community keynote from both KDE and GNOME each; details coming soon.

As always more info to come so keep an eye on the news. Hope to see you in Berlin.

The selected design will be made available for purchase to the 1000+ expected attendees. The money raised from the sale will be used to support The Desktop Summit. Please submit your design before 23.55 15th May UTC. See the rules for other submission details.

The Desktop Summit is happening in Berlin from the 6th to 12th August. It is free to attend but you need to register. If you are attending you may want to subscribe to the discussion list to talk to others who are going, we also have the IRC channel on freenode #desktopsummit.

… and you can be too…even if for only one night. That’s right! Tonight is the GNOME 3 Berlin release party.

In case you don’t think you’re invited Lennart added this to the wiki page…

Who’s invited? Everybody! Whether you are a GNOME user, a GNOME developer or a GNOME contributor, you are invited. And, in fact, you are invited if you are into KDE, too. Whether you are young or old, have long hair or short hair, you are invited. If you speak German or English, or French or Spanish or any other language of this world, you are invited. In fact, it’s kinda hard not being invited.

So don’t be shy! Come celebrate with us tonight @ c-base at 19.00.

Related posts:
Berlin GNOME 3 Launch Lounge
Berlin GNOME 3 launch party: Update and reminder

If you have contributed in any way to one of the many Free/Libre Desktops, we encourage you to submit a talk proposal. There are slots available for Lightning Talks (3 min), Normal Presentations (30 min) and Long Presentations (45 min). Don’t be shy or modest. Write up a short proposal and give the selection committee lots of tough decisions to make.

If you need help or have questions you can get in touch via IRC on FreeNode in the #desktopsummit channel or via email at ds-team [at] desktopsummit (d0t) org.

Thus far, we on the planning committee have been pretty quiet on the Intertubes. There has been Lennart’s post about the call for papers (which you really should hurry and submit a proposal for), but that’s about it. However, we’re now getting to the stage where you’ll hear more and more from us on the local team.

At the end of May or beginning of June we’ll be having a 1-2 day meeting with representatives from the GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V to make sure all parties are happy with progress and identify potential areas that need more love. From that point, the amount and pace of work to be done are bound to increase significantly. Fun for us.

Although things are going well, there has been some controversy regarding the registration process on the website. When one goes to register for the Desktop Summit, you’re asked to sign in with, or register, a KDE identity. While this is not ideal (at least from a GNOME perspective), we decided on this due mainly to lack of man-power and time. The people who stepped forward to get the website up and running were from the KDE side. Thus, it was most expedient to have them use the KDE infrastructure with which they were familiar. Thanks to them for donating their free-time to get this done on such a tight schedule. While things are actually working, we hope to make some small changes soon that should make the process a little clearer.

To close, I’d like to recognize Claudia Rauch, Business Manager of KDE e.V. and Mirko Boehm (also from KDE) for bringing the Desktop Summit to Berlin. They were the ones who submitted the proposal and have taken on the brunt of the planning work. They’re also both a pleasure to work with. Thanks guys!

You can find current info on the event’s GNOME Live page or on Facebook.

We’ve scheduled a couple talks and some entertainment for the evening. (Expect updates!)

Talks:

• Exploring GNOME 3: This talk will discuss the new features in GNOME 3 with a focus on the GNOME Shell.
• Making GNOME the OS: Lennart Poettering, of PulseAudio, systemd, Avahi fame, will discuss turning GNOME into an OS.

Entertainment:

• Daniel Holbach, of Ubuntu Community and hugging fame, will be performing a DJ set.

As a service to the community, Lennart will be available to fix anything you think he may have broken on your system.

The GNOME Foundation has supplied us with a limited number event goodies to distribute, so get there early to claim yours.

We hope to see you there!

Contributions

The post that got dumped onto p.g.o when my feed got activated yesterday gives some idea of why I’ve been added to p.g.o. Other than that I’ve also (hopefully) finished up the port of Vino to GNOME 3 that Ryan Lortie had started. I’ve also done other odds and ends which you can find on my Ohloh profile.

On the community side, I’m a member of the local planning team for the Desktop Summit, and organizing the GNOME 3 Berlin Release party, which I’ll have more details about in a coming post.

Personal

I’ve got 2 kids. My daughter, Vada, is 2 and my son, Rigby, is 5 months old which means I hack when I really should be sleeping. I’m an American expat living with my wife, Annika, who’s German. I adopted the German looking name from her… just to confuse people.

I was also one of the lucky ones selected for a trainee position at Openismus. Thanks Murray!

Closing remarks

As for my hackergotchi… it’s outdated. But Andreas seemed keen on having one with a moustache for some reason.

I’ve followed p.g.o for many years, so it’s kinda cool to actually have my floating head join the mix. I’ll try not to bore you.

Cluttermm

Cluttermm wraps the Clutter Toolkit, “a software library for creating fast, compelling, portable, and dynamic graphical user interfaces”. Clutter has become an integral part of the GNOME project through its use in the GNOME Shell featured in GNOME 3. As such, I think it’d be a shame to not have high-quality C++ bindings.

Cluttermm had not really had much activity since early last year. With the rate of Clutter development, Cluttermm feel behind quickly. I’m trying to catch up now and as Murray mentioned, I’ve been able to wrap more API and fix a few bugs. So far I’ve got the 1.2 API almost fully wrapped. There are certainly bugs, some of which I’m finding now that I’m actually writing some examples. As I’m very much new to this wrapping business, I want to write a number of examples using the newly wrapped API. Once I’m comfortable that things are in good order, I’ll move onto the 1.4 and then 1.6 APIs.

GNOME System Monitor

GNOME System Monitor (g-s-m) is the default process viewer and system monitor in GNOME. I got involved by responding to the call to port g-s-m to Gtk3. Thanks goes to Openismus for allowing me to spend work time doing the porting (which I’ll blog about in the next couple days). During this process one always finds areas for improvement which spurred my interest in becoming the maintainer.

From what I can tell g-s-m hasn’t been actively developed in well over a year. You can imagine that bugzilla has a lot of suggestions for future tasks. My first order of business will be dealing with neglected patches and responding to bug reports.

So it appears as if I’ve filled all my free time for the foreseeable future. We’ll see how much I can get done between changing diapers and playing with the kids.

Oh, and lastly… patches welcome.

A Tutorial for Tutorials?
So here we are, we’ve got some nice, simple code examples, some even with tutorial-style documentation. But if you look through the examples you’ll find that the documentation style varies dramatically. Before we go and write too many of these tutorials maybe we need to standardize how we write these. Some issues that arise when writing the tutorials are:

• how do we structure the tutorial? Daniel’s Magic Mirror example incrementally builds up the program while others, including mine, explain the finished program.
• how does one reference the code? Do we use line numbers, show full functions/classes? Do we include unexplained code in the code snippets?
• how do you show a full listing? Do we append a full code listing at the bottom of the tutorial or provide links to files?
• how much should we comment the code? If the code is going to be explained, do we need to repeat the same thing in the code comments?
• and so on…

Some of these have answers. For example, we decided that we should build up the programs incrementally and that referencing line numbers is probably going to be more trouble than it’s worth.

When I was writing my photo-wall tutorial I knew that I was writing it not in isolation but as a larger collection. Thus, I wanted my tutorial to fit in with the other tutorials in the collection. As there was no guide to go by, I poked around the repository to see how others were doing it. I found one I liked and went with it.

The point is that because there is no canonical tutorial or document to go by, we are adding a possible barrier to those wishing to create such tutorials. During the hackfest it was mentioned that we can not motivate people to contribute, we can only demotivate them. Let’s not do that.

For completeness these are my opinions about the above-listed issues.

• structuring the tutorial: Incremental build up is nice for GNOME beginners and that seems to be the target group so let’s go with that.
• referencing the code: No line number referencing. Break the code up into small logical blocks and describe. Blocks need to be small so that one can read the description and see the code without having to scroll up and down repeatedly.
• showing a full listing: Do like the Qt examples do; list all files at the beginning of the tutorial. This gives quick access to folks who don’t need the description.
• commenting the code: Heavily comment the code so that is descriptive outside the context of the tutorial and probably remove the comments when placing segments in the tutorial in order to save space.

Dealing with undocumented code examples

Right now I don’t know that we have a plan for dealing with this so here are my thoughts.

In a perfect world we are going to have a tutorial written for each example in each of the core programming languages. As perfection is rather boring, lets think about the alternatives.

I think in this case we should simply look at the Qt examples. They either have a tutorial-like description or they don’t. The one’s that do have an asterisks, those without don’t.

Regardless of whether the coder is willing or able to write an accompanying tutorial, we should promote getting as many code examples in as many core languages. In fact some example may be too large to expect a tutorial. Take a look at the Qt Network torrent example for one instance of this being the case. Looking at that example you’ll see that even though there is no tutorial, a file listing and description is available. If we were to standardize on having a file listing and functional description of the example at the top of each tutorial we could just copy the description and list the files for each newly added example port. Of course, hopefully someone would eventually get around to writing a tutorial as well.

Relating reference documentation with examples

One of the nice things about the Qt reference documentation is that it often references examples in the See also section. With one click your sent to an example that’s probably more complete than the small snippets you usually find in the API reference. Looking at the QTcpSocket class you’ll find 6 referenced examples. Some have documentation while some are just commented code. Maybe Shaun has something up his sleeve for something like this using Mallard.

Closing words
Basically, I would like to see a consistent, wide-ranging, integrated and ever growing set of examples and tutorials to help developers get started with developing with GNOME technologies. I think the Hackfest was a great start to getting us there. The documentation team has done a great job laying the foundations and providing infrastructure for getting us where we want to be with GNOME 3 regarding developer docs. We just need to finish ironing out a few things before we are quite there.