Filipe Saraiva's blog

Some KDE Brazil people at FISL 13

The 13th International Free Software Forum (FISL 13) – in portuguese, Fórum Internacional de Software Livre - happened almost a month ago, but only now I found the time to report the KDE community participation at the event.

FISL 13 is the biggest event related to free software and free culture in Brazil. Certainly, it is one of the biggest events of its kind in the world. Thousands of participants (7709!), hundreds of lectures (584!), community events, workshops, community booths, speeches, and in the corridors have several developers, designers, hackers, and digital culture activists.

The KDE community was present with an interesting programming. We set up a booth that drew much attention and stood out in the area targeting users/developers groups. I am preparing a special blogpost just on our stand.

We had KDE souvenirs like T-shirts, stickers, and pins at our table, with special emphasis on brooches with Brazilian regional representations of Konqi. A banner commemorating the KDE 15th anniversary identified among the other groups. We also had some notebooks with KDE to people observe and experience our software.

But what really drew attention was the Konqi fantasy commissioned by Tomaz. It is huge, and Konqi was very funny, with a charismatic and good-natured face. Wear it is extreme very hard, two people are required to assist the “pilot” to put the armor. Inside is very hot, almost impossible to see, and the moves are complicated to implement. But it is fun to see a huge green dragon dancing and walking the halls.

I could not resist =D

The main Konqi pilot was Tomaz, but many people took turns on the task of giving life to our mascot, like Wagner, me and another couple of people who out of nothing appeared asking if they could be for some time a big, charismatic, and bighead green dragon. = D

@tatianepires is happy because Konqi is at FISL

When he was not walking and dancing around, Konqi was assembled in our booth, sitting in two chairs. Several people took pictures with him, keeping a reminder of KDE. Our stand also became a focal point of children that were looking admired for our dragon. They came out of there with chocolate and blue and white balloons.

We were on the event schedule with an extensive program of lectures and courses, plus “special guests” especially in activities of free software and education groups.

Some of our highlights this area were the lecture and workshop of Sebastian Kügler, or Sebas for friends We are very happy that he has accepted the invitation to come to Brazil to attend the event, and we hope he has enjoyed their stay here.

Sebas, together with Daker, held a workshop on developing applications to multidevice using Plasma KD technology. Two days later, it was time to present the Plasma Active, KDE for tablets, and talk about the platform, such as KDE is considering the future of free software in the mobile computing scenario, and what the future of KDE on these devices.

Sebas’s course. Image by Olga Produções

We had a relax moment where we organized a pre-KDE 4.9 Release Party in a bar at the city (the Penguin’s Bar = D) where we could drink some and relax a bit.

Izabel cracked our photo with OpenSUSE banner!

One last word about the FISL, a girl who had never used Krita was our stand and simply made wonderful drawings with the software. It seemed that she had complete familiarity with the tool! A KDE guy recorded a screencast of her preparing a “D&D version” of Konqi adult. By the way, where is the video? Well, the final design is below:

Well, I can only say that this FISL 13 was very good for KDE Brazil. We give more visibility to the project, we set up a booth really cool, presents an excellent programming to the event and we rely on the presence of our friend Sebas. Again, I would like to thank Sebastian for having accepted our invitation to visit the Brazilian lands. Also thanks to ASL, Paulo Meirelles, and Rodrigo Troian, who did everything necessary to make possible the coming of Sebas. Thanks guys!

We’re trying to create a new kind of relationship with the FISL, and the goal is to have, in all editions of the event, an international speaker invited to present news about KDE project.

We’re awaiting the FISL 14, and hope to see you all there!

A quick notice: KDE 4.9 is avaiable in Mageia Cauldron since KDE 4.9 release date.

Thanks for all Mageia packagers. If you are a Cauldron user, please test KDE 4.9 software to report bugs and improve the software. =)

LaKademy is over and I will report about the event in several themed posts. This is about I developed during the Latin American meeting of KDE developers. More posts in LaKademy tag.

In this year I submitted a proposal to Google Summer of Code to develop a Python backend for scientific programming in Cantor. In the last year, I developed a Scilab backend. Unfortunately my proposal was not accepted.

But that’s okay, life goes on. This does not discourage me to begin the project.

During the LaKademy, I put as a goal to make communication between Cantor and Python. My first idea was to make a fork of Sage backend, which is also a technology based in Python. But in the evaluation phase of proposal for Google Summer of Code, the Cantor main developer, Alex Rieder, suggested to me take a look in Python/C API.

I began studying this API and other resources on the web (like this one, based on Elmer). I realized that send Python commands from C/C++ code would be easy, however, capture the output of the Python interpreter would be the real challenge. All this communication could be simple if Python would use standard streams by default, which would allow to use kprocess. Scilab didn’t support, but I implemented this support and it allowed the use of kprocess approach. However, in Python I could not do that – or would be harder to do it.

After searches in internet and some studies, I implemented a Python class that redirects messages from the Python interpreter, both conventional outputs and error messages, to a variable that can later be retrieved in a string type by Python/C API. Voilà!

Using this recovered variable, I can say that the core of Python backend for Cantor is working and ready to implement more features. Let see some screenshots:

Computation of a simple counter in Python

Cantor + Python + matplotlib in a external plot

Python error message in Cantor

From this implemented part, the new features that will be added: append plot figure in Cantor workspace, syntax highlighting, auto-complete pre-defined functions, and more. I intend to support in particular for libraries numpy, scipy and matplotlib, which when added to Python make it an interesting tool for scientific programming, like others we have in the free world as GNU Octave, Scilab, Maxima, Sage.

The code is avaiable in python-backend branch of Cantor repository. But remember: it is a experimental version, and the main fatures will be develop yet. Only communication between C++ <-> Python, the core of application, is working for now.

Watch this blog (or follow python-backend tag) for more informations about this project.

In the last mounths, brazilian KDE community worked in the organization of first KDE latin-american meeting, the LAkademy. This meeting will happen from April 27 to May 01, in Porto Alegre – RS/Brazil.

LAkademy aims to KDE community established, so this isn’t a disclosure event. In the scheduling we have hacking sessions between latin-american developers, presentations about hot themes in KDE community (like Plasma Active and Qt5), latin-america promo meetings, and more activities.

I fell good vibrations about LAkademy. The last event like this was Akademy-BR, in 2010. Since, the brazilian community were is several free software promotional meetings, like IV ENSL, Latinoware 2011, FISL, and others, but a specific meeting of KDE community to evaluate it, talk about the KDE future in Latin America, and imagine goals, only now in LAkademy. So this is importance of event.

My TODO list to LAkademy is:

• See some friends!
• Work in improves to Cantor’s Scilab backend;
• See Rocs with Tomaz and Wagner;
• See Plasma Active with Lamarque;
• Work in a new wiki to KDE Brazil with Aracele;
• Discuss about the sustainability of KDE Brazil;
• Discuss about free software events in Brazil in which KDE Brazil will be present;
• Drink some beer and to eat the traditional gaucho barbecue!! =D

I desire (and we will work to) that LAkademy will become routine in Latin America, and enter to the international KDE community calendar, like Camp KDE, conf.kde.in, Akademy, and others.