the written word remains

Ok, thanks to all Gods people ever beleived in! Ukraine is going to have parliament elections tomorrow. For the fourth time for the last 14 months we are going to elect somebody to govern us. I really hope that will put an end to this endless flow of political advertisement, speeches and other craziness.

Too many politics, too many politicians for poor Ukraine! Ok, we have the fourth elections tomorrow, and I'll vote for nobody the fourth time - just to send my message to those politicians (both from "orange revolution" and "opposition" camps) - you are not good to become presidents, deputies, majors, etc.

Gee, at last I got a permanent internet connection. Looks like the progress has finally made its way to my home :) It's an <2Mbit ADSL connection with 1.5Gb of prepaid traffic for 183 UAH (~30 euro) per month. Quite expensive but at least I won't be counting minutes of damn slow dialup ;)

What's more interesting, is that a device which I am connected through is a DLink 500T ADSL router with MontaVista Linux operating system inside. It's just amazing how can a full-blown Linux system with apache, firewall, etc. live and work fast on a small flash drive :)

Oh, this competition project turned out to be very fruitful! I wish we could do that kind of UI design competition for KDevelop. For now we don't have $1000 but I do appreciate everybody sending me their ideas of IDE design and workflow ;)

Yep, New Year has come to Ukraine for the second time! It was 1918 when Soviet Russia adopted Gregorian calendar. And the difference between Julian and Gregorian calendar was -13 days then. I don't know how that happened but people in ex-Russian Empire, ex-USSR countries still unofficially celebrate the New Year by Julian style calling January 14 the "Old New Year". So, happy "Old" New Year! :)

Yes, one of those rare quizs that worked for me :)

You scored as Mathematics. You should be a Math major! Like Pythagoras, you are analytical, rational, and when are always ready to tackle the problem head-on! Engineering 100% Mathematics 100% Philosophy 92% Linguistics 83% Theater 67% Biology 67% Chemistry 67% English 67% Journalism 58% Sociology 58% Psychology 50% Art 42% Anthropology 33% Dance 17% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

OMG, today I received payment for my Google SOC project. Gee, I've never got that much money for a software project! My thanks to Google and my mentors Carsten, Harald, Roberto. Thanks also to Zack for pointing me to this program. Special thanks to Roberto for being so enthusiastic about Eclipse. I'd never touched that piece of code without you ;) Great :)

Yesterday I attended annual OSDN.UA conference in Kiev, Ukraine. I was talking about KDE4 technology and plans.

I couldn't resist speaking about KDevelop a bit so I revealed some KDevelop4 information ;) Most common questions were "why are you replacing of autotools?" and "what will happen with multimedia?".

After the talk I was communicating with the people and here I'd like to present a short summary.
First, KDE users asked for a simple way for them to participate in writing documentation. What they did ask IMHO was like offline wiki engine for KHelpCenter. They'd like to be able to put some notes and text into the offline documentation. For example, KDevelop/Automake documentation section is unfinished. Users say they could have finished it (or at least write several centences just to share their experience). But currently they'd need to either modify docbook sources or figure out a documentation maintainer and send him an email with a text. What would users love is a way to put some text/comments into the documentation and then click one button and send a patch with their changes to the documentation maintainer automatically.

Also I talked to ReactOS developer. He said they'd like to have Qt/KDE compiled and used as a default desktop on their operating system. They're compiling the system with MinGW32 compiler so I think Qt4 should work and KDE4 should work as well (when ported to win32).

Thanks to Adam and Ariya the topic is hot now so I couldn't resist commenting it :)
From what I can see, they're trying to:
1) get rid of menus
2) get rid of modal dialogs.
I completely support those two goals. Heh, I should have shown those of you who were in Malaga "kdevelop4geeks.ui" file that has been lying on my desktop for more than a month ;) That file is the concept of KDevelop4 user interface I created before I heard about MS Office 12. First version of it didn't contain menus at all and second included a "Menu" button just where the "File" menu is in MSO12. Other concepts I was playing with were different though. Anyway, most of them were efforts to move most of functionality from dialogs to views inside the main window which coincide with the second effort of MS guys.

Thus said, I have to admit that we should probably not copy their interface, at least not in KDevelop. I've only looked at screenshots so I can be wrong here, but it seems their interface is designed for mouse users. Contrary to that, I'd like to see KDevelop interface completely navigatable by keyboard. More, I'd like to make keyboard navigation the prefferred way over mousing. Therefore it's more likely we have to invent a different UI.

Anyway, I'll try to gather my UI ideas and blog more about them soon.

Those two words pretty much describe my experience of Malaga beach :) The sun was mostly under the clouds but still it was really hot ;) The Mediterranean Sea was great (warm and calm) but too salty to my taste. People, you should come to the Crimea (Ukraine) to the Black Sea cost. The water there is as warm but much cleaner (because there's no sand, only pebble) and also it contains twice less salt ;). Anyway, I enjoyed much swimming in the sea :)

This year KDE conference was harder to attend to but we got a series of nice talks. I particularly enjoyed Richard's talk about bindings and Mirko's walk on the dark side (but that's probably because I've been walking on that dark side for more than a month now). The build system BoF was surprisingly fruitful, there were no disagreements and build systems wars at all.

Today I was once again a tourist and woke up early for a city tour. The tour was pretty interesting but too short for my taste so I decided to continue being a tourist and visited Picasso museum. The museum was pretty impressive, lots of original Picasso's paintings are there. Cool! Also did I mentioned that all his paintings contain naked women? ;) Yes, they do, even on those paintings that at the first look contain only lines and triangles, naked women are drawn :)

Ok, enough blogging, shall get back to hacking because I haven't finished yet qmake support for eclipse. Really, I spend too much time talking, eating, drinking, whatever... The "drinking" part is so huge so I managed to got drunk the day before yesterday and forgot my hat and my bag with a bottle of beer (has anyone seen them?). Oh, shame... how much drunk was I to forget a bottle of beer? ;)

While writing our applications we do care about how we accomplish our programming tasks. We want to efficiently write code, easily debug, sync with the repository, etc. But does it really matter what kind of representation on disk our projects have? Let's just imagine a tool that allows you to write code, has code refactoring and completion, builds your projects and api documentation easily, whatever else you could imagine. And if we had this tool, would it be important that the tool stores its data on disk to files? I don't think it would be important. At least I wouldn't care.

The problem is only that we don't have such tool. Editors let you do all that stuff by hand. IDEs try to do that but usualy suck in several cases. And they don't suck because of plain file representation of the code. IDEs usually have several representations of code and project in memory in format that you mentioned (yep, smth like semantic networks, trees, whatever) and they can (and do) store that into disk in binary formats. So the problem is not having the representation but implementing things you're asking about. It just takes enormous amount of time and believe me, implementing source parsers is not the only task that takes that time.

Today I finally got back home. This time I was able to commit all my stuff to the SVN and prepare a little website for those who are curious about what is KDE-Eclipse. Visit http://kde-eclipse.pwsp.net and enjoy!

I've been working on my Google SOC KDE-Eclipse project for several weeks now and what I can tell you is that hacking on Eclipse is a cool experience :) I like that and I don't think I'll drop KDE-Eclipse after 1st of September.
Before I started I knew Eclipse is huge. In reality this doesn't hurt you IMHO just because it has good architecture and it is written in good language (yes, java is ok for me;)). The documentation doesn't help you much though. First, it is not sufficient and second (and importrant) you do not learn much from the documentation.

Thankfully, you have the source code and I really appreciate the source code of Eclipse is open. That's because only from source you can learn as much as necessary. And this fact leads me to think more and more that open source is not about "reusing software" (commercial companies do that as well) but about "reusing experience" which is hidden inside the source.
I have the strong belief that people who write the software are more important than the software itself and by looking to the source code you can gain at least part of experience of people who wrote it. That's the power of open source, that's "reusing experience" concept at work!

Speaking back about Eclipse, I noticed that it's not uncommon when you spend several hours digging into source and docs trying to figure out how things work, how things you have in mind should work and then you spend 15-30 minutes coding your stuff ;) In that respect KDevelop is much easier to hack on. Basically, if you have an idea how usual KDE comonent application works, you can hack on lot of things in KDevelop.

PS: in several days I will commit the stuff I wrote last week so everybody could at last try it in use (yes, it's usable enough now ;)).

Finally it looks like I'm good to go to aKademy. After 3 visits to Spanish embassy (which is 600 km away from my home), 4 days of making phone calls to the embassy trying just to arrange an interview and 2 days of calling to know the result, I was told that I have my visa. Whew :) Now I just need to go to the embassy and take my documents back.
Also thanks to Trolltech (thank you Harald! :)) and KDE-eV (thanks Mirko and other guys :)) my travel expenses will be reimbursed.
That's going to be cool :) I will be able to spend 5 days (till 1st September) hacking on KDE-Eclipse (I'm starting to like that job;) but that's another blog) and other 4 days hacking on KDevelop4.

Today and yesterday I was doing like a real tourist. I visited lots of places in the city, walked tons of kilometers. At the end I got tired but very pleased. Ottawa is a really beautiful city and it doesn't look as other cities I visited :) Cool!

I finally visited America :) Look's like it's a cool place but anyway it's a lot different from Europe. Especially the wet climate makes me feel that the weather in Ukraine is not so bad ;)

I had two talks - one at the DesktopCon and one at LinuxSymposium today. Looks like the one at DesktopCon took more attention. At LinuxSymposium I had two hours for the tutorial. At the first hour I was talking about KDevelop Platform mostly and I had some people interested in the platform stuff we have. Looks like we have to promote it more and try to get more applications written for the platform just to make a really good showcase. The second hour was scheduled after the lunch break and I spent it mostly discussing technical issues with the Eclipse guy (who was KDE developer some time ago btw :)). Other people were not interested in the talk.

Commenting Mathieu's blog, I have to disagree on some things with him. The organization of the conference is ok. I had my two tutorials accepted and we could have more KDE talks accepted if we sent our proposals. But I also have to agree with Mathieu that people who attend this conference are not really interested in KDE technologies. I don't know why - that's probably beyond my understanding. Anyway, there were some cool talks about Eclipse, Kernel (today) and even some X-related talks were ok ;) (we had lots, lots of X talks).

Today my trip to Ottawa is starting. I will give two tutorials - one at DesktopCon (19th) and another at LinuxSymposium (20th). Guys from Xandros were so kind to make this possible by sponsoring me :)

PS: Another thing everybody is wondering about is where is KDevelop Conference dot story. Well, once KDevelop4 is commited to svn, the story will be there ;)

The conference is over now. I'm sitting at home and writing this blog atm. Hope others got to their destinations without problems. I spent great time in Kiev, too bad we had only one week.
The next step will be writing a dot story covering our achievements during the week, I'll do it a bit later after I recover ;)

Despite the conference day started very early we still couldn't start the event in time. Approximately at 10:00 we started. We was torturing our visitors till 18:00 and finished almost in time. Before we finished Ian got his luggage therefore we were able to finish the rest of day drinking Tequila. I think Ian has some really embarrassing pictures of me and Roberto taken during this process :)

Next day we went to the hacking session place, downloaded qt4 and kdelibs4 and started porting kdevelop. This process in ended in the night with KDevelop4 running without any plugins on KDE4. This was quite an achievement so we decided not to continue hacking and spent the rest of the night drinking vodka.

Getting up in the morning was really hard on the third day but we managed to do that and continue porting. This day KDevelop had several plugins ported, Roberto continued working on his parser generator (which is a really cool thing btw ;)). I got kyzis running in KDevelop4. Richard had fun with Ruby grammar and Jens finally made us discuss Quanta/KDevelop integration issues.

Next day I was serving as a city guide :) We walked over almost all cool places in Kiev, visited lots of places and finally about 20:00 we ended up hacking on KDevelop again :) The day was really productive. Roberto wrote ast generator and refactoring engine for his parser generator. Ian started to provide support for qmake from Qt4 in KDevelop3. I updated the documentation plugin to support Qt4 documentation and joined Ian in his effort to improve qmake support.

The fifth day was taxing. I and Jens went to the train station to buy tickets for us. We spent more than an hour waiting in two queues but finally we got our tickets. This day we spent on porting more parts of KDevelop and Roberto and Harald started to improve our projectmanager and other plugins using model/view architecture. At the late night Ian got his improved qmake manager running and said we should have more such meetings. I couldn't disagree with him ;)

When I came to Kiev I didn't realise how much stuff I have to do. The conference preparations took all my time which was spent on arranging meetings with people, printing booklets, announcements and badges. That was really interesting experience for me but now I wouldn't reccommend anybody to undertake such things like conference (especially when you're the only person responsible for that ;) ).

Now I can imagine how much stuff is being done by people working on organizing Kastle/aKademy meetings :) Those guys should really be busy preparing such cool events.
So, talking about the "day-2". I didn't notice it ended because I fall asleep probably just after going back from the city to the place I'm living ;).

Next day in the morning I had an interview at the Canadian embassy. I was applying for visa because I was accepted as a speaker on DesktopCon and LinuxSymposium (17-24 July). Of course, I will be speaking about KDevelop - what else can be expected from me? :)

Canadian embassy impressed me much - I got a visa just in one day. That never happened to me before :). I mean other embassies used to process my application one-two weeks and I was forced to come two-three times.

After I got my visa, I started arranging other conference-related things. That took too much time and therefore I was late to the airport to meet Harald Fernengel and Roberto Raggi. Thankfully, the arrivals queue was really large in the airport and Harald and Roberto managed to get through it only after 1.5 hours waiting. Ian Geiser had more interesting experience of arriving with the wrong flight without his luggage. I must admit he was ok even without the luggage. The only thing he missed was the bottle of Tequilla that was somewhere in his luggage :) Only Richard Dale arrived without problems.

Despite everybody was tired, it was decided to replace Tequilla with a Vodka and that helped a lot to overcome the "tired" state :) The only side-effect Vodka had was that we had 3 hours to sleep before the conference. Of course we could sleep two hours more but nobody had even started their presentations that time ;) So we woke up at 6:00, prepared our presentations and went to the conference place but... that's another story...