So I spent a couple of hours tonight hacking on KPilot instead of going to bed like a smart little boy (sorry, honey!!! =:( ), and I fixed a couple of nagging problems that’ve been bugging me for months that I’ve just not been able to find the time to dig in and investigate. I think that’s the problem. At this stage in my life, there simply is no time unless it is forcibly wrenched away from my family or sleep. Blef.
Anyway, I digress…
As this year’s Google Summer of Code winds down to an abrupt end (Pencils down on Monday?? Already??), I am once again very satisfied and impressed with the job that Bertjan has done. He’s continued last year’s outstanding job with our base synchronization conduit and made it even better. He’s finally brought category synchronization into KPilot (how have people not been complaining about this??), thanks to our outstanding base conduit foundation. And he’s ported the ToDo, Contacts, and Calendar conduits to the new Akonadi back end! Woot! I just tried syncing contacts and calendar changes and am very happy to announce that they did sync successfully into Akonadi–even the categories! Woot, again! Job very well done, Bertjan! =:)
Now, is KPilot perfect and ready for release with KDE 4.2? No, not just yet. But it is miles ahead of where it was before the start of this year’s GSOC–and that’s exactly what we were aiming to accomplish. And, even better, I believe that it’s very possible to iron out the rough spots in time for 4.2, thanks to Bertjan’s work, which really excites me.
Please take a moment, if you use KPIlot, to encourage and thank Bertjan on his hard work this year. =:)
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- My darling bride just informed me that I’m pouting because I didn’t get to go to Akademy this year. Darnit, but she’s right. =:( #
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- “Your robotic smart house could strike at any moment.” Love this book so far! #
- Very bummed I’m missing out on Akademy again. =:( I totally need to start the passport process!! #
- Need to buy rope and accessories for a monster between-two-trees swing in the back yard this weekend. But for now, KPilot/SOC hacking… #
- I SO want a Nokia N810!!! #
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- Blef. Fridays are supposed to feel better than this, I thought. #
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- Awesome, rainy day in New England. Lost power once already, briefly, and UPS’s kept me up and working, yay! #
- I really need to spend a weekend and hack an Xbox into being my file/print/ssh server, dangit. Anyone hacked a parallel port onto an Xbox? #
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- Working from Cambridge office today! Lunch with Google and VMware peoples, woot!! #
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- Ugh. Dealing with college tuition and bills is almost as fun as dealing with lawyers, hospitals, and insurance. =:( #
- I cannot brain today. Also, my neck hurts and I have a headache. Blef. #
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Bertjan has already done a very nice job of giving an overview of where we are with this year’s GSOC project and where KPilot is in general. I wanted to add a couple of things to this train of thought too…
First off, this is the second year that I’ve worked with Bertjan on a Google Summer of Code project and I have thoroughly enjoyed both years. Last year, our goal was to create a base conduit framework that could be used to unify KPilot’s conduit code and push down into it all of the synchronization logic that was previously spread across all of the individual conduits. This was a success, and Bertjan also wrote a new Keyring conduit that implemented the new base conduit infrastructure. Unfortunately, these were dark days for KPilot and neither Bertjan nor I nor Adriaan had any more time to give to our little KPilot friend. KPilot was semi-ported to Qt4/KDE4, but none of our KDE PIM conduits worked. And so KPilot languished pretty much untouched and unloved between last year’s GSOC project and this.
This year, Bertjan has built upon last year’s work with our base conduit core code. He’s ported the contacts, addressbook, and todo conduits to use both the new base conduit infrastructure and the new Akonadi back ends that KDE PIM 4.2 will be using. As a satisfying proof of our design work from last year, I don’t believe that we’ve hit any synch algorithm problems, yet. In addition, Bertjan has done the necessary work to finally have 2-way category synchronization working with KPilot and our conduits, YAY!
As Bertjan said, there’s some rough edges still, 2 weeks away from the conclusion of this year’s SOC project, but we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to iron KPilot’s side of these out before 4.2 is released and also hopeful that our KDE PIM apps will be ported to use Akonadi’s back-end so we can again synchronize between our PIM apps and Palm devices.
Now, there’s a few things I’d like to really ask for help with, so if there is still a KDE Palm community as I have seen glimpses of before, now is the time for you to speak up and help us make KPilot a first-class citizen in the KDE4 world. To put it bluntly, we need the KPilot community to help or we won’t make it.
- We need help in testing with devices. Qt4 has changed the way that process threading works and I think I’ve done it right, but have only been able to do very limited testing with a very limited set of devices. I know our configuration/device-detecting wizard is broken and has been for quite some time, so it would be really great if people could help test and send fixes in for this.
- We need help testing our new conduit code. Bertjan has written unit tests (awesome!) and we will be doing ad-hoc testing, but obviously we’ll miss something unless we have the broader KPilot community’s help. If you have time to spare and an old device to test with, please, please help us test the new ToDo, Contacts, and Calendar conduits. The Memofile conduit hasn’t had to change that much, so I’m pretty comfortable with it, but the others are major rewrites.
- We have an awesome little Keyring conduit that we simply don’t have the time to fully test, polish, and support for KDE 4.2, which makes us very sad. It does seem to work, mostly, and Bertjan has even written an almost completely functional Keyring viewer/editor in our KPilot code! But we just don’t have the time and manpower to make it as bullet-proof as we’d like before KDE 4.2 is released. But this is good news! If you use Keyring and would like to help us get this finished, polished, tested, and ready for prime time, we’d LOVE your help! Please let me know!! Unfortunately, if we don’t get the help we need with this, we’ll be forced to disable the Keyring conduit and nobody will know it’s even there. =:(
In addition, let me just add that while Palm devices were once the coolest geek device on the planet (after the Newton went buh-bye, of course), and lots of people were interested in using them and subsequently a higher number of people were interested in coding for and helping out with them, this is definitely not a true statement today. Everybody and their dog is all excited about the iPhone, and I cannot say that I blame them. Palm seems to have totally lost its coolness, geek appeal, good business sense, and anything else that would keep it otherwise relevant in the current technology climate. I won’t digress too much here, but if you’ve ever tried to endure through Opera’s constant crashing of your Treo or Blazer’s general suckiness for a couple of hours while everyone else around you is experiencing pain-free Safari-surfing on their iPhones, you might be able to appreciate the frustration and rage that accompanies said experience.
But back to subject at hand…. The affect that this all has, though, on those of us who are trying to maintain software for the Palm platform (KPilot, here), is that it’s pretty de-motivating when nobody seems to care about the software you’re writing anymore. Synchronization and PIM software is about as un-sexy as you’d want to get, quite honestly, and KPilot seems to be the ugly poster child for it.
So, reiterating my cries for help, if you use and care about KPilot now and in the future, please please please let those of us know who still try to care for the little guy. And if you truly care and have even small amounts of time (and maybe a spare couple of devices to test with), please let us know that too. I’m not asking for people to send me or Bertjan or Adriaan devices. We have some already. What we don’t have is the time and breadth of use cases to adequately test KPilot and make sure that it’s not going to eat your data for lunch, and that’s something we’d really like to not see happen after KPilot is released with KDE 4.2
Thanks for making it through this lengthy post and as a reward, here’s one of Google’s image search results for KPilot (????) =:)
I don’t know how many people are aware of this bold move VMware made recently, but I think it’s pretty amazing. Just last week, VMware made its hypervisor free!!
VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free
With Customers Deriving Value from More Than 20 Products in the VMware Portfolio, Company Makes #1 Hypervisor Free
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 28, 2008 – VMware, Inc., (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced its stand-alone ESXi hypervisor will be available at no cost to help companies of all sizes experience the benefits of virtualization. Since 2001, VMware has provided the industry’s most popular and reliable hypervisor, which is now used by more than 120,000 customers. In December 2007, VMware announced significant improvements with ESXi – its third-generation stand-alone hypervisor. With the industry’s smallest footprint and OS-independence, ESXi sets a new bar for security and reliability. ESXi 3.5 update 2, available today, meets the criteria for mass distribution: (1) ease of use and (2) maturity and stability now having been ‘battle tested’ for six months with customers. The leading server manufacturers have all embedded VMware ESXi, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, and NEC. ESXi can be downloaded now from www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
Now, speaking personally, I’ve always used VMware’s desktop virtualization products, namely Player and Workstation. In fact, looking back at my serial number history, I see that I first convinced my boss to splurge on me with a license for VMware Workstation 3.0 (for Linux systems of course) on 2/7/2002. And that’s just the first license I bought. =;) I’m really excited about the next release of VMware’s hosted products and the really cool features in them. The irony of it is that now that I have an awesome job that doesn’t require me to use Windows apps, I won’t actually need some of the cool features that are coming out and definitely won’t appreciate them as much as I would have working in my Corporate USA jobs of yesterday.
But being a geek and all, I have quite a few times wished that I could afford VMware’s enterprise hypervisor (ESX) so that I could use it at home and run several virtual machines on the physical box that I have downstairs right now, being horribly under-utilized. And now that cost is no longer an inhibiting factor, I’m already planning an upcoming geek weekend to do just that. Cool!! Oh, and before you tell me that I should just use Xen or KVM, I’ll pre-emptively answer that I’d really like to use something rock-solid, enterprise-class, and world-proven, thank you very much. Given the choice of yesterday between a costly enterprise-class VMware hypervisor and the young and comparitively unproven Xen or KVM solutions, I might have eventually given in and tried one of the free solutions. But now that VMware ESX is free, it’s pretty much a no-brainer for me to choose it over the other free solutions.
Sweet mama! Go virtualize your toaster or something!! =:D
Disclaimer: I work for VMware and have never been shy about how much I’m loving it. =;P
