Marty's typepad

Status of social networks integration in Plasma Workspaces (also call for developers)

Last year in the summer I've started a project to truly integrate social networks into our Plasma Workspaces. Truly integrating means having all the data available in our system and allowing any application to take advantage of these data, either just for custom displaying or acting on them somehow.

This solution has several parts - auth mechanism, communication with the service, data storage and data presentation.

The current auth mechanism is custom written for each social network, but fully separated and replacable. They are very simple in terms of UI and provide just that - authentication with the web service to fetch data from it. This will be eventuelly replaced by afiestas' WebAccounts thinggy. So any development effort on the auth mechanism should go there.

Data storage. Since Plasma Workspaces already ships with Akonadi by default, there's no need to reinvent the wheel and create a separate infrastructure just for the social media stuff. Akonadi is generic enough and performs reasonably well for our use case.

With that in mind, we can focus on the social networks integration itself, which is done in form of Akonadi resources/agents, which are very easy to write. 

Currently there are 4 major social networks out there - Facebook, Google+, Identi.ca and Twitter. The resource for Facebook which lived in kde:akonadi-facebook was splitted into the library part, now named LibKFbAPI (it goes in the path of similar Google library, which is called LibKGAPI) and residing in extragear/libs (kde:libkfbapi) and the resource part itself, which was merged into kdepim-runtime recently and so it's going to be installed by default with 4.11 onwards. Using this resource one can download the Facebook stream (currently loads either last 400 posts or posts up to 3 days back). This includes corresponding likes and comments of the posts. It also syncs your friends, their birthdays, home address and whatnot. There is also code for syncing events and notes, however this not really tested (and the events don't really work at the moment). Furthermore your notifications are synced as well, but nothing is being done with them at the moment. I want these to show up as a regular notifications in your systray, this should be quite easy to do. The resource can also posts new posts with your account, but cannot "like" or comment on posts yet. Akonadi does allow for that, we just need the code in the resource.

Then we have the microblog resource for Twitter & Identi.ca (they have the same API), which I've started from scratch. It's using the same architecture as the Facebook resource - a library communicating with the network and the Akonadi resource sitting on top of that. Its code is completely based on the microblog dataengine from Plasma and currently allows for receiving 20 last posts from the stream as well as posting. Any other functionality is currently missing. This is in git at kde:scratch/mklapetek/akonadi-microblog-ng.

And we are left with Google+. There's not much to say really as there's no public API for G+, which means no data access. Dan Vrátil, the author of libkgapi and Google resources for Akonadi, will add this support once the API is available.

A resource can of course be written for any network with available public API. If the proper serialization is used in the resource, it will automatically work with the social feed. Furthermore, one can also write resource for anything, like upcoming calendar events or new mails and whatnot. By default anything serialized as SocialFeedItem will be displayed in the feed.

We have the data storage, we have interfaces to the networks, so what's missing? Data presentation aka the user inteface. Plasma currently ships with a qml microblog plasmoid, which is quite nice. So I decided to use that as the user interface and started porting it to the new infrastructure. That consists of a qml plugin communicating with Akonadi and providing the content to the qml plasmoid itself. The development is going on in two places - the qml plugin is at kde:scratch/mklapetek/socialfeed and the plasmoid is in a branch "mklapetek/akonadi_port" of kde:declarative-plasmoids.

Alright so here's a summary of tasks left to do. I think they are quite easy, just needs a bit of research on how Akonadi works and getting familiar with the code, which is all just basic Qt4. So if you're thinking about helping up, don't be scared that you'll be dealing with super-complex Akonadi code, you won't ;)

Facebook resource

• implement liking posts
• implement commenting on posts
• fix fetching/storing events

Microblog resource

• implement replying
• implement retweeting
• implement favoriting
• implement support for twitter entities

The plasmoid

• make displaying post's comments or replies work/not suck
• fix scrollbar (that's a general problem with non-uniform-item-heights in qml list views)
• display twitter entities (like attached pictures, extend shortened links etc)
• make it possible to hide some networks, eg. show only Twitter

SocialFeed (the qml plugin)

• finish whatever is missing to support any of the above
• merge with some main KDE repo, not sure which one yet

I'd like to see this all in 4.11, but I can't do it all alone. So please step up to any of these single tasks if you have some time to spare, finishing even one task will be awesome and I'll guide you through it. You can either drop an email to kde-pim at kde.org or to me directly to mklapetek at kde.org. Looking forward for your emails.

Let's bring social integration in Plasma Workspaces ahead of its competitors again!

KTp Presence Plasmoid is now Plasma themeable

Thanks to our Google Code-In student, Peter Amidon, our little presence plasmoid in the-just-released v0.5.2 can now haz proper monochrome icons. The plasmoid is looking for icons in "icons/presence-applet" and names matching the oxygen scheme with "-plasma" suffix, here's the list:

"user-online-plasma"
"user-busy-plasma"
"user-away-plasma"
"user-away-extended-plasma"
"user-invisible-plasma"
"user-offline-plasma"

So, Plasma theme creators, get at it!

Pingz - Super simple network connection internet availability monitor plasmoid thing

I am on a train right now that provides free wi-fi. But you know how these networks work - one second you're chatting with your friend, next second you lose connection. Getting mad enough about not knowing if I have internet or not, I wrote a super simple Plasma applet to monitor the network connection. This is a bit different from the network manager icon, which shows you that you are connected to the wi-fi, but that does not mean the wi-fi router has access to the internet. So this monitors the internet availability directly by sending ping packets to kde.org google.com, one every 5 seconds. If the ping gets back, it shows green icon (user-online icon), if not, it turns into gray (user-offline) icon. Simple as that.

The code is at kde:scratch/mklapetek/pingz, feel free to improve it if you feel like, it's good enough for me for now :)

Update: One thing I didn't realized when running in plasmoidviewer is, that QProcess::execute(..) waits for the ping process to finish. This has the effect of completely hanging plasma every 5 seconds when added to panel or desktop. Fix will follow shortly (if I'll have internet).

Update2: Fixed.

Kubuntu, MacBook EFI and Nvidia

So I was installing the newest release of Kubuntu even before it was officially announced and hit a hard wall with it. Took me about four days to figure it out and fix it properly, so here I'm sharing it, hoping someone will find it useful when in similar troubles.

tl;dr version at the end. Somehow it turned into a full fledged story.. :D

A bit of background first. On my MacBook Pro 7,1 (mid-2011) I first installed Kubuntu 11.04. As was the custom/ritual for the past few years, with every new release of the distro I was using (starting with Fedora 5) I went to the shop, bought a CD and burned the iso. Same for Kubuntu 11.04, nothing special, everything worked. Then they decided to raise the size and not fit on the CDs anymore, so I went just with simple distro upgrade to 11.10, no clean install. Same thing with 12.04. However my root partition became a real mess with lots of devel stuff, lots of deprecated packages and libraries and whatnot. And I was constantly running out of space on that partition. So I decided to just format that partition and install the newest Kubuntu 12.10 as soon as it's out (silly me).

But since the iso no longer fits the CD, I went for installing from USB. After some initial troubles with the installer (which were partially due to bad partitioning, partially because of the installer not handling Mac's EFI properly), I managed to install it, screwing up Mac's bootloader in the process. But I didn't need it anyway, I was happy with grub and my new Linux install.

Kubuntu comes with this nice tool called "jockey", which allows you to install proprietary drivers just by clicking one button. So I went for proprietary Nvidia drivers as I play games from time to time and I use the notebook in uni quite a lot, so I need good battery life. Drivers activated, rebooting and black screen. So I did the usual - check if nouveau is blacklisted, if nvidia kmod is properly loaded, see the logs....and nothing. Everything was perfectly fine. Except the black screen. So I used jockey to switch the Nvidia driver off, rebooted and no X at all. Well since it was clean install and the install was quite fast, I just reinstalled the whole system. And same scenario happened - activated different Nvidia driver, rebooted, black. Reinstall. Tried driver from nvidia.com, no luck. Tried drivers from xorg-edgers ppa, no dice. Downgrading X server, pffft. All the same issue.

At this point I started to become desperate that I can't figure out what's wrong, Google was no help and I was without usable system for two days. Now if you're thinking - "why didn't you just stay with nouveau?" well I did. For one day, when I hit some (known, reported) bug while watching movie, sending my X to /dev/null and locking up kernel. I was starting to think that my graphics card is dieing...

Hours and hours of Googling later I found out that my system was booted using EFI mode. Investigating this deeper I discovered, that Nvidia with Linux in EFI mode are not the best friends. I learned that I needed to make Kubuntu boot in BIOS compatibility mode, basically by switching grub-efi for grub-pc. No easy task getting rid of the linux-efi bootloader though. After no luck with that, I decided to verify my theory and installed Kubuntu 11.04 from CD, which installs grub-pc and it turned out that this was indeed the issue.

So I fired up my OS X install, where the 12.10 iso was, navigated to the file, right clicked on it and it offered "Burn" menu entry. Cool, I thought and searched my entire DVD collection for an empty DVD. Found one, inserted it in, burnt, rebooted, nothing happened, DVD not detected. Desperation was doubled by now. Booted back OS X, opened the DVD and, well, when OS X says "Burn", it means "I will put this file on the disk for you", not "Burn the iso". Partially happy, partially angry, I searched for another DVD. Burnt the iso properly, rebooted, installed, activated Nvidia driver, rebooted, cried with happiness.

tl;dr - Binary Nvidia drivers are not working when you install Linux on Mac (possibly on all (U)EFI systems) from USB stick, which installs grub-efi bootloader. You need to go the old-school-last-century-way and install from CD/DVD, which installs grub-pc and boots Linux in BIOS compatibility mode. And install the bootloader to the root device, not the partition, otherwise it won't be seen by Mac's bootloader. I'm not sure if the grub-pc can be installed from the USB stick too, I really don't have any energy (and interest) left to find this out, so your safest bet is the CD/DVD, but if you have any additional info, please share in comments.

Announcing KDE TeaTime - weekly KDE video podcast

KDE TeaTime (KTT) is a new video podcast ran by a bunch of KDE developers who at some point decided to make their private ramblings and discussions in the open just like the software they develop.

The content of KTT is going to be different each time but always related to KDE. Each time we set a main topic and we'll be discussing live about all things around it, so you can expect rants, personal feelings, ideas not published anywhere and general crapiness :) Please note that our expressed opinions are not always necessarily the opinions of the KDE community and/or KDE e.V.  We're still learning how to do the stuff properly, but in the near future once we get the hang of it, we want to have some kind of live interaction with listeners, inviting guests for interviews, showing cool stuff from our desktop and so on.

Right now we're using Google Hangouts for KTT. We decided for that because Hangouts can be streamed live on YouTube, so everyone can watch it live without needing anything special (besides Flash, but hey, everyone watches YouTube) and right after the Hangout is finished, it is automatically uploaded to the YouTube channel. In other words - we can focus purely on the podcast and not be bothered with setting up our own (streaming) software, saving the stream, uploading to YouTube etc. Hangouts get us all this for free.

We chose the format to be around 25 minutes for one episode and we want to do one episode per week. We'll be announcing the streaming times on our social media plethora - Google+, Facebook page, Twitter, Identi.ca or YouTube. Like us, follow us, give us comments, ideas, constructive criticism and cookies. If there will be big enough desire, we might consider providing the podcast as mp3s as well.

The first episode was already recorded last week, the topic was 3rd party KDE apps and you can watch it on YouTube or down below.

 

Enjoy and spread the word :)

 

Qt Backpropagation Neural Network

When doing some cleanup today I stumbled upon a little university project I wrote sometime ago. It's a basic implementation of backpropagation neural network written in Qt and I thought someone might find this handy, so I decided to share it.

The original design was done by Chesnokov Yuriy in his C++ implementation over at CodeProject.com. The network can contain arbitrary number of layers and each layer can have arbitrary number of neurons. However the implementation uses only feed-forward each-to-each connection between the neurons.

The example UI is probably confusing and not intuitive at all, but it was done only to demonstrate the network capabilities to the teacher, so take it as that.

How to use

All the network logic is implemented in network.cpp and neuron.cpp, mainwindow.cpp and race-client.cpp then contain examples of usage.

The code contains three example of setting and using the network. First one shows number recognition 5x5 raster, where all the network initialization is done in the code, including the training set (see MainWindow::recognizeNumber() method). Second example features loading the network data from files. The parsing is super-shitty, but...meh, good enough :) The third example was an actual assignment, which was to train a race car, that can follow supplied path. Basically we had to implement a race client that connects to a race server, where bunch of neural-net-trained cars can race against each other. Unfortunately I can't distribute the server nor the access to the public server, so the client implementation will have to do.

Setting the network is as easy as

m_network = new Network(QList<int>() << 25 << 18 << 8 << 4, 0.8f, 0.1f, 0.05f);

which will create a network with 4 layers (25 input neurons, 4 output), alpha = 0.8, learning rate = 0.1 and max allowed network error is 0.05.

Training the network is also easy:

m_network->trainSet(trainSet, outputs);

where trainSet is QList<QList<float> > (each 'inner' list is one training set) and outputs is the expected outputs for the train set, same as the trainSet - QList<QList<float> >. If the network was trained successfully, trainSet(..) returns true, otherwise false. 

Running the network on data is done by

QList<float> *netOutputs = m_network->run(runset);

where runset is one set of data, ie. QList<float>. This returns list with network outputs on the given set.

Gimme the code!

The code is hosted on github under GPLv3, so feel free to clone it, use it, share it, improve it, just keep the copyrights in place and follow the licence. 

https://github.com/mck182/QNeuralNet

Enojy :)

Late GSoC Wrap-up: Social Feed

This year's Google Summer of Code is over and here's the status of the Social Feed project. Let me repeat what the Social Feed is actually all about. It's a project aiming at aggregating your social media content into one single feed of posts, using Akonadi in the backend and Plasma applet on the frontend (but it can be anything that can work on top of Akonadi, even full fledged app or some HTML5 craziness). Here's how the plasmoid currently looks:

It started as a testing plasmoid (and sort-of still is; serves mainly for me learning QML), but as I was unable to port the current Plasma's Microblog plasmoid, I continued improving this. Next week I'll look at the Microblog plasmoid again and will try again, ditching this plasmoid afterwards. Anyways let's have a look on what has been done and is ready.

From the screen you can see that Facebook posts are parsed completely - showing a thumbnail, link title, number of comments and likes. These can't be displayed yet, but they are loaded and stored in Akonadi, so it's just a matter of adding the visuals for it. Twitter provides so-called "Entities", which contains parsed links, image thumbnails, hashtags and whatnot. I had a trouble receiving these (you need to explicitly specify you want to receive them) and took me few days before I finally gave up trying to figure it out. A month later (yesterday) I was refactoring some code and re-reading Twitter docs and I saw what was wrong, so I finally fixed that and soon there will be Twitter posts with thumbs and links and stuff.

Basic posting to social networks now works for Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca. Right now it posts to all networks, but users will be able to select to which network it should be posted.

All code is available in KDE's git, I hope to fine up the akonadi-facebook resource in time for 4.10 release and have it shipped by default. We'll see about the microblog one.

Here are the parts that are needed with their current status:

KOAuth - splitted from Plasma Microblog and slightly refactored, supports Twitter and Identi.ca only right now. The Facebook resource has its own auth mechanism for now, which I might port to KOAuth in time.

Akonadi-Social-Utils - these are special utilities and shared bits among the other components, it's stable and all and I want it to merge into kdepim-libs, all that is missing are unit tests, which I'm no friend with. Yet.

Akonadi-Facebook - the Facebook resource, pretty much all working, requires Akonadi-Social-Utils now

Akonadi-Microblog-NG - new microblog resource, using KOAuth for authentication, getting home timeline and posting works.

Social-Feed - the feed itself, a QML plugin and a model on top of Akonadi, contains the testing plasmoid as well. It fetches all items with the proper mimetype, so if you write a resource, that stores SocialFeedItem items, they will automatically appear in the feed, no matter what they are. More on that in some later post.

Even though the GSoC is now finished, I'm continuing working on this thanks to sponsoring by Blue Systems. And the future feature plan includes: retweeting and liking posts from the interface, adding comments to Facebook posts and replies to microblog posts, sharing pictures would be nice, needs some investigating though (hello kipi-plugins), kickass look'n'feel and that's probably it for the nearest future.

Stay tuned :)

KDE Telepathy 0.5 released

Few days ago the awesome team behind the (still-)new Instant Messaging suite for KDE Workspaces released fifth major version of the communication suite, codenamed "D'oh". Our release cycle was considerably shorter than usual because we wanted to get distributions to include us in their autumn releases, but still we managed to get in lots of good work.

Probably the biggest and most visible change is in the chatting application, which is now able to display images from sent/received image links inline, right in the window. This is done using plugin architecture, which was done as this year's GSoC project by Lasath Fernando. There are more plugins on the way, like embedding a YouTube videos, displaying a LaTeX formulas for all you geeks out there and reading messages out loud for you. We'll also have a plugin which lets you format text like in GTalk, for example if you send message *like this*, it will be seen like this. Thanks to the plugin architecture we can do all kinds of magic with the messages (not that we plan to).

KRunner fans will also be pleased to hear that you can now control your presence via KRunner as well. Simply type "im away" and you're away. Type "im busy Watching movie" and all your contacts know you're watching a movie. Press the KRunner's "?" button to discover more KTp shortcuts (we have quite a few ;).

Several people requested to have even tinier contact list. And so we did as they asked. With 0.5, there's a new list style, called "Minimalistic", which takes your smallest font set in your style (can be changed in System Settings) and uses that as the base for computing the sizes of the rest. We also improved the accessibility of our contact list buttons, which now has more sensible and clearer tooltips. Pressing the Wrench button you'll also discover a "Make a Call...", which allows you to dial an arbitrary number with SIP accounts.

Many many improvements were done in the log viewer, which was taken over by my fellow Czech developer Dan Vratil. He really did take the log viewer into a whole new level and the fixes and improvements are still coming.

The plasmoids didn't receive many new features. But heavy amount of work on the Quick chat plasmoid was done by Aleix Pol. We hit some bumps in Plasma and that slowed the development down a bit. For now, the plasmoids (except the Presence plasmoid) all remain in alpha stage, so please treat it as such (and do report any and all bugs you'll find!).

For users having trouble connecting etc. we now provide a basic Telepathy debugger, which you can run with "ktp-debugger". This gathers all logs from Telepathy components and allows you to easily paste them and send them to us. No more killing stuff and running from console ;)

Lastly, during a discussion at Akademy, we decided to drop IRC support from KDE Telepathy. It's simply because there are lots of high quality KDE/Qt IRC clients and we don't have enough manpower to develop and maintain support for IRC, so we decided to drop it completely. We plan to revise this decision at next Akademy though.

And to end with some good news - I was offered a sponsorship for my work on KDE Telepathy by the great Blue Systems and I gladly accepted it. So now I'll have more time to spend on this great project :)

Sources are available at the usual place - http://download.kde.org/unstable/kde-telepathy/0.5.0/src/. Your distribution may have packages (or will have soon; there are no packages for Kubuntu Precise yet, but will be soon, Fedora should have packages ready for all supported releases, Arch should have it already, no idea about others, sorry).

All help is always welcomed, so if you would like to get involved, just email our mailing list kde-telepathy@kde.org and we'll take care of you. Promise.

How easy is to improve a QML plasmoid?

Easier than ever.

Here's a short story of some random guy (me) who started with QML two months ago (and still can't do anything). 

The recent KDE Software 4.9 features a new "Now playing.." plasmoid, rewritten in QML. It shows you the current song that's been playing and allows some basic player controls, like pausing and seeking. When you put the plasmoid in a panel, it shows just one line of text, where there are three strings cycling - track title, track artist and track album. These strings were just switched on a timeout, it was a sudden change, which very oftern caught the corner of my eye, thinking there's something happening in the panel. It annoyed me so much, that I actually downloaded the source of the plasmoid and decided to add a fade effect between the string changes. Took me 63 seconds to locate the lines I needed to change. 2 minuts of Googling to find the best approach. 7 lines of QML code and one execution of "plasmoidviewer -f horizontal". In less than 5 minutes I was done. And the plasmoid looks 140% better (in my humble opinion, at least). You can see for yourself in the upcoming 4.9.1 release.

I'm actually so excited from this tiny change that I had to write a blogpost about it (along with spamming half of my contact list). Improving QML plasmoids is really easy. Don't be afraid of it. You don't need any special tools or development environment to get it done. All you need is the source code and Kate/your favorite text editor. And 5 minuts of your time.

(Just keep in mind that all your changes should go through Review board first ;)

GSoC: Social Feed - all out on git!

Here's some good news. The code for the whole Social Feed thing is now clean & stable enough, so I decided to finally put it online, where the development will now continue.

Right now it consists of several parts (which you all need in order to have it working):

1) KOAuth library

This is a library handling the OAuth stuff in Twitter/Identi.ca. It's a modified version of the Microblog dataengine auth mechanism. The code is quite heavy and can be simplified significantly with the help of QtOAuth library, so I plan to refactor it on top of QOAuth class.

The nice thing about this approach is that we don't need to store user's password/credentials. User still has to put them in, but then it will authorize him with the service and return an OAuth token, which is stored in KWallet and that's all that is stored (well the username is stored as well, but that's for convenience only, the password is never saved anywhere).

2) Akonadi Social Utils

This one provides several utilities for both Akonadi resources and the Social Feed itself. It contains an Akonadi serializer for serializing/deserializing the data to/from Akonadi database and an avatar provider, which fetches avatars from the social networks and stores them in cache (KImageCache). The provider is asynchronous and works dynamically with the Social Feed model - whenever the view asks for the avatar, it is first checked if it is in the cache and if not, it starts a KJob to fetch it, once it's fetched, it will immediately show up in the view (and stay cached for the future). I want to start the avatar provider as soon as you start syncing the feed data in Akonadi, so it is all downloaded in one batch and you can view the feed even offline without missing avatars.

By using this serializer and the correct mime-type, you can have arbitrary data included in the feed, be it rss, birthdays, reminders, whatever you need. But someone needs to write such Akonadi resource ;)

This library and the koauth library miss the proper cmake files for finding them, so they're just hardcoded in the linker command for now, so you might have troubles with compilation if you try building this in non-standard prefix.

I plan to include this library in kdepim-libs, so it can all be available "by default" and you don't have to install one more package.

3) Akonadi resources

The microblog and Facebook resources now use both the same serializer (from the Utils lib above), that means they are both stored in the same way inside Akonadi and allows easy and straightforward querying and displaying.  The microblog now supports both Twitter and Identi.ca and you can add it twice, once for each network. The configuration is a bit crap at the moment, but at least works ;) I also don't want to spend too much time on it as we'll soon have a central place to configure all kinds of accounts in KDE and so the configuration should be moved there then.

4) Social Feed

Social Feed is basically an Akonadi model, which is exported as a QML plugin, so it can be used in QML plasmoids. This repo also contains a testing plasmoid, which only tests the model and is not intended for real usage (though it might work ;).

I also became the maintainer of Akonadi Facebook resource and will soon do a release. We're also working together with Pankaj Bhambhani on splitting up the library (libkfacebook) out of the resource and turn it into a standalone library. The microblog resource also has its own library and it's the same architecture, so maybe in the future we'll see a merge of these two into something like "libksocialnet" (no plans yet).

The ultimate goal is to have all these components in such a shape that it can all be shipped with default KDE installation. With the release of KDE Workspaces & Application 4.9.0 just outside the door, the nearest target could be 4.10, so hopefully I'll have it ready by then.