Software

On the second day, I’ve decided to become a volunteer. I thought I know these kind of events, why not give a hand. So I went and registered, got my volunteer T-shirt, and I’ve been assigned a task. My first task was to be video operator in a room. That implies that I have to start/stop the streaming of the talk, make sure the streaming works, move the camera to capture the speaker and/or the slides.

I’ve finished the Docker image for compiling KDevelop 5, first thing, before I even got out of bed. I’ve experimented something with the KDevelop 5 packaging for Kubuntu Xenial, but without much success.

Time to check out of the double room. It’s a dorm room for me and Phillip for the next night. We stored out luggage in the luggage room, and off to the venue we were.

As soon as we got there, we started hacking. I’ve started by fixing my blog’s tags and categories, so I can re-enable the feed for KDE Planet.

Being a huge lover of the KDE community and KDE software, I couldn’t stay away and not participate at Akademy this year as well. This time it’s held in Berlin, and it’s being held together with QtCon. Also participating to QtCon is VideoLAN and FSFE. Amongst the organization was also KDAB.

I’ve booked my trip in advance with a couple of months I think, and I booked a room at a hostel together with Phillip Muskovac (yofel) from Kubuntu. Since the stay was pretty long, it was rather difficult finding a single or double room spanning over so many nights. But we managed to get 5 Kubuntu members under the same roof. Valorie and Scarlett arrived first, then me, the day after, and the next day Phillip and Clive. By the end of the day (1st of September) we were all here.

One of my work colleagues has an Arduino kit, that includes amongst other things a stepper motor driver, an ULN2003APG board,  and I convinced him to lend it to me.

This weekend I had some time, so I played a bit with it. After reading it’s data sheet, and comparing some examples I found online with other motors; finding those motors data sheets and comparing their coils connections with my motor, I got to this schematic:

When the craze with the quadcopter drones started, of course I wanted one, so I bought a few (cheap) parts to learn how they work and played aroud with building one. I’ve never finished the project, because…. I don’t know… I „postponed it”.

Now, in the middle of the craze with 3D printers, naturally, I wanted one as well. I can’t afford one, mostly because I’m not willing to spend that much on something that I’ll not use so often.

This bug has been around for a while, and as far as I can see it keeps coming back.

I’ve found a workaround that fixes the cause that makes Akonadi (and in turn Kmail) throw this error and stop syncing the emails.

I use Gmail and that’s the only thing I’ve tested it with, I have no idea if it works with other providers, actually I don’t know if you (still) have this problem with other providers.

So here it goes: the error is usually thrown when you move messages around folders, what I’ve seen is after I move my sent messages from the Sent folder to the folder with the discussion.

This post came in a bit late, because I was unsure of what to write. I’ve been pretty busy this month with work and some family matters, so my contributions were pretty much non existant. Or so I thought. Then I remembered:

Contribution to Free Software is not just writing code, it’s anything you do for the improvement of a Free Software project.

This includes bug reports, translations, meetings, promotion, etc. And I’ve done plenty of those.

Let’s see now: (in what ever order I remember them)

I’ve helped 2 of the most active KDE Romanian translators gain developer access so that they may commit their translations without bottlenecking through other people. Thank you Viorel Cătălin Răpițeanu and Jobava Bareev for your hard work and dedication.

I’ve had the idea for a while now to write a blog post at the end of each month where to summarize my contributions in Free Software for the previous month, the purpose being to keep track of my contributions. So here’s my first attempt:

This month began with a super KDE Sprint for KDevelop and Kate. I’ve mentioned the things I did and learned in my previous blog post.

During this sprint I’ve had the great opportunity to meet more of the KDE developers and talk with them about many things related or not to KDE. In fact, one of the developers I’ve met there,I’ve interviewed in this month’s Kubuntu Podcast, together with Aaron Honeycutt and Rick Timmis.

At the beginning of this month, KDE held a sprint for KDevelop and Kate, where a bunch of us met and coded like crazy.

I was the first to arrive, in the morning of the 7th of October and around 10, and since I couldn’t get in the apartment till 14 I had some time to kill. So I decided to go for a little sight seeing in the nearby park.

In the evening people started to arrive, and started coding before unpacking. My first impression of them was: „These people really love to code”.