Thoughts 'n Stuff

FOSDEM 2013

I am back from FOSDEM and I am always surprised how quickly it’s all over. Would you believe that I only got to attend two talks again, one of them being my own about Wayland input methods?

Friday Feb 1st

I arrived Friday evening, this time by train. Since I bought my first BahnCard ever in August last year, I am slowly convinced now that flying is just a huge waste of time and should be the last possibility to consider, not the first. Even though I spend much more time on the train than I would on the airplane I still travel more relaxed. Others claim to be super-productive on trains. I am happy enough if I get to braindump my thoughts into my notebook (the dead-tree variant) and then read a book (more dead-tree) to forget about work for once.

Another trick for better conferencing is to arrive (or leave) 1-2 days earlier (later), as this helps catching up with sleep and allows to process thoughts or just do some random stuff not related to conferencing, say, going to a museum or gallery. It allows me to be reckless to myself during the conference without needing one week to recover.

But back to that Friday evening: I was very happy that Quim could make it to our dinner at the Kabash. I knew he had a busy schedule for the next days and that I probably wouldn’t be able to meet him in Berlin. I think he enjoys working for Wikimedia even though he now has to pay for phone calls and 3G. We also had people from Igalia, Digia and Intel OTC joining. We enjoyed great food and nice conversations, then headed off to the beer event. This one has become crazily crowded. It’s nigh impossible to find people you know. Meeting new people is also a challenge. The entire concept of what should be a simple meet&greet is lost these days.

Saturday Feb 2nd

Jens and I arrived around 10am at the campus on Saturday, probably a first for both of us to be so early. It was so empty you could think they’d cancelled FOSDEM but that quickly changed of course. I had zero slides done by then and no motivation to do them either. I went to Dave’s talk and it was nice to see him and Mardy working on a relevant project again. As expected, GOA is dead in the water by now and work will most likely continue with accounts-sso. I realized that I would have to recycle an older talk for some slides, something I loathe to do.

Somewhere in between I had to meet some OpenEmbedded guys to debug Maliit on their custom hardware, but we didn’t get much further than realizing that dlopen() didn’t work properly.

Funniest thing that happened that Saturday was probably rasterman, timj and thiago trashing-talking about the kernel when they could have told each other how much their toolkits suck!

Biggest reveal of the day, however, was that Rob Taylor toured with the Darkness in his crazier years.

Jens was unlucky with his hands-on DLNA talk, but I blame it on the room (Lameere). I remember that my talk there last year was crap, too. None of his prepared demos worked and people started to leave the room. I felt bad for him because I the was one who pushed him into giving the talk. Mark took over the second half and surprisingly, all of his dLeyna demos worked. He got applause (and rightfully so) for each of them.

I only had two hours left by then for my talk (slides). Meeting more people all the time didn’t exactly help with my preparations. I was close to call Luc (organizer of the Xorg DevRoom) and ask him to cancel my talk. I am glad I didn’t because it turned out that worrying about my talk for the whole day was the best way to get back into the topic. You have to understand that Wayland input methods is a yesteryears project for me, all the hard thoughtwork as been done already and I have been mostly working on new projects since August last year. I think the talk was well received by the audience (at least the room was packed). However, I cheated by simplifying and ignoring the actual complexity of input methods a bit.

It was already getting late and by the time we arrived in Brussels center it was about time to head to the Gnome party. Same place at last year, but by around 11pm we had occupied the whole building. I didn’t even know half the guys. Gut feeling tells me this is a side effect of the UX hackfest that happend before, but I would like to believe that the Gnome community is growing again. It was great to see Gnome legends such as Federico or Alp attending, I think both of whom I had last (and first) seen in 2008.

Sunday Feb 3rd

I thought I’d be able to attend a couple of talks on Sunday, but I got stuck talking to people interested in actually working open-source DLNA stacks. I got invited to join the Xorg dinner in the evening, with half of the people being BSD guys. Xorg? BSD? I was fearing for my sanity. Some other embarassment might better be left unmentioned in this blog but the food and wine at least was great! Afterwards we ended up at Delirium again (where else …). At 2am we had to move to the Absinthe bar right next to Delirum. Wiser men than me (such as krh and Rob Clark, who now works for Red Hat!) left before, however. And so we ended up with more beer and several shots of Absinthe until the wee morning hours. Jon made the mistake at that point to ask me about my honest opinion (I actually don’t know why he tagged along with the Xorg hackers for so long), he might regret that by now. Wrong time, wrong place. Happens.

Monday Feb 4th

I had to checkout at 11am and get my train at 2:30pm. How I managed to get up by 11:15am I still don’t know. But luckily I was able to meet with Kat, Dave, Martin & Tobias for some waffle & chocolate breakfast. This was a much better FOSDEM ending than last year.

Tobias chose the same ICE train as me. Poor him, he had no idea what was coming for him: He had to endure my satirical reality talk from Brussels to Cologne. Both of us had to change trains then, with him heading off to Hamburg and me returning to Berlin. I wish I could have made it back a couple hours earlier now because I missed Quim’s presentation in the Wikimedia office.

Exhausted but happy, I finally arrived at home on Monday night.

FOSDEM 2012

FOSDEM in 2012 was an exciting (and naturally, exhaustive) conference again. It's great to have so many relevant people who are all active in the free software world together in one place. It's also a great opportunity to discuss radical new ideas, ideally while experimenting with Belgium beer. Which is what we usually did when we weren't at the conference site.

It was nice to see Jarno and Esko at the conference, too. We even stayed in the same hotel. I hope they enjoyed the Ethiopian lunch as much as I did. And perhaps they're not too angry any more that we lead them to drink Absinthe ;-)

Jon and I gave two talks. Jon's talk (slides) was about Maliit as a project, explaining what Maliit is (and what it is not), combined with a short history lesson about the project. I tried to outline the difficulties of mobile text input in general (slides), picking some use-cases that are known from the desktop world and showing why simply copying the use-cases and their known interaction models does not work very well. I honestly liked Jon's talk more though.

Neither of us two actually managed to visit other talks, even though we wanted to. We had to ask Jarno, Esko and others about what great talks we missed. Apparently there were quite a few :-(

Our Maliit T-Shirts were well received, though we usually only handed them out when someone listened to our Maliit ramblings long enough.

We were asked about accessibility several times, which is currently not within the scope of Maliit but perhaps something to think about in the future.

We also got to talk with the people working on (text) input in Redhat and Intel, mostly in the context of Wayland. There are some interesting opportunities to get things (more) right this time around.

Thanks to our employer, Openismus, for sending us there!

How we enable others to write 3rd party plugins with Maliit

We finally published a video about Maliit - an input method framework including a virtual keyboard - and 3rd party plugins. Kudos goes to Jon for making time for that.

This video highlights one of Maliit's key features: pluggable input methods which come with their very own user interfaces. The Chinese input methods show how Maliit offers support for composed characters. The video is proof that 3rd party development for Maliit (open-source and proprietary) is not only possible but also happening.

maliit.org states that "it should be easy to customize existing input methods or develop powerful new input methods, whether for profit, research or fun", we actually mean it.

The harder question is of course how to motivate others to actually get started on input method development with Maliit. For that, we have a multipronged strategy:

1. Provide sufficiently polished reference plugins that can show off Maliit capabilities but also serve as inspiration for new plugins (hence the BSD license for reference plugins). Our reference plugins are currently using Qt/C++ (Maliit Keyboard) and QML (Nemo Keyboard). We also have PySide support, but no one contributed a reference plugin yet. This gives choice to interested input method developers, and we think that's important. The reference plugins serve another role when it comes to designing new API: They become our testbed, allowing us to verify our API proposals.

2. Ship Maliit with a bunch of example plugins and example applications. None of them try to be complete. They are all self-contained though and usually show one feature at a time. This can be tedious to maintain, but we believe that examples need to stay small and focused, otherwise developers won't look at them.

3. Documentation that is easy to consume. Our documentation is not as concise and clear as we'd like it to be, but it's slowly improving. We also experiment with videos that can serve as an introduction to more in-depth (text) documentation.

4. Packages for most common Linux distributions. This one seems obvious, but sadly, it's quite a lot of work for us to keep up with it (and we already use automated services such as Launchpad and OpenSuse Build Service). In the hope to attract dedicated packagers we wrote down some packaging guidelines

5. An architecture that had 3rd party plugins and multiple toolkit support in mind from the start. The plugin developer facing API needs to be easy to use and clearly documented. This will be the focus of the upcoming 0.9x series.

We will demo Maliit @ FOSDEM 2012, hope to see you there!