Once again I spent a part of the day on library bindings and reimplementation in other languages for the GGZ Gaming Zone. Our goal would be to release the next version of GGZ with complete libraries for five programming languages, and we’re now very close already with the recent additions to the Java side.

The jggzdmod library implements the GGZ-server-to-game-server control protocol. It is written in 98% pure Java with a bit of JNI magic because Java lacks quite a few of the advanced socket functions which we need for efficient game launching. There’s now a comparison document for the five languages above regarding socket features and workarounds.

The Google Summer of Code task of working on the Common Printing Dialogue is about translating usability and interface engineering concepts, together with some more formal research on dynamic GUI generation, into a top-notch GUI to conclude and validate this effort. Two mentors, Jonathan Riddell and me, will be available, and hence up to two students could work on the topic. Contact either of us if you’re a potential student and want to know more about it beforehand or want to propose your own idea related to that one (see contact data below the idea description). If you’re in for more than just the coding, make sure to sign up to KDE’s kde-research and LF’s printing-summit mailing list as well.

After my two FOSDEM presentations and some chatting after each I think that while the software required to achieve high-quality free multiplayer gaming isn’t there yet, the individual puzzle pieces already let us forebode a scenario of some sort, as a guide of what shall (or will) be possible. We have GSoC 2008 proposals coming up for those who want to help out.

The scenario goes like this: Bob wants to play Chess with Eve. (He used to play with Alice but they broke up, just to introduce some dramatic content here.) He might be logged into his GGZ core client already, possibly lurking at the Chess or Freeciv room, or he might hang around on Jabber. As soon as he finds Eve, he’ll launch a game of Chess and selects his favourite client, e.g. GGZBoard. Eve then joins this game using Tagua since she’s on KDE 4. Hurray for protocol compatibility!

Alice joins as a spectator and is totally jealous of the two players. She decides to found a player club called Toxic Pawns and invites tons of people. She’s a good club leader and also a helpful, above-average player and thus gets granted host status, which gives her privileges such as kicking players and sending private table messages, and of course hosting tournaments. In order to accomodate those players who came up with a new set of rules called Rookymotion Chess, who are believed to prefer playing audio files over playing games but like Chess nevertheless, she requests a new room from the community administrator who easily sets one up based on existing room templates through the community web frontend.

Meanwhile, Bob and Eve continue playing individual games, although Eve’s DSL connection often breaks for no reason. Of course, she can regain her abandoned game seat after a reconnection. One day, the server goes down, yet after a reboot all games are being restored. No data is lost, and no data is being leaked due to encrypted connections. The player’s personal page also features a privacy section which Eve prefers a lot to the ad-driven, privacy-invading other social networking sites she knows. Trust is important in online gaming, since technical efforts to prevent cheating can and will always be defeated at some point. But with karma points, veteran status and other community relationship indicators, Eve can rest assured that Bob’s friends are trustworthy people.

So much for the community-oriented view on all the technology which is currently on the work bench. Except for a few shameless plugs, the presentation should have shown that the software is making great progress and it’s about time to think about community and player-oriented concepts. Gaming is still one of the areas where free software isn’t #1, and changing that requires some vision beside the daily coding. Send comments to any game list I’m subscribed to.

The Chemnitzer Linux-Tage just finished - an enjoyable event like every year, with a certain community spirit not often met at events of that size. The KDE booth was staffed by four people (smajewsky, eckhart, tokoe and me). People were mostly interested in KDE 4.1 alpha to put it bluntly :) but we demonstrated 4.0.2 on most of the screens. Ruphy was kind enough to provide us with new oxygen-ised poster templates before the event so we printed two A0-sized posters. Unfortunately the boothbox didn’t make it so we didn’t get most of the booth decoration.

While working on some plasma data provider at the end of the second day we learned that there’s a secret tool called AutoCMake to help with the creation of cmake files. Now what’s totally missing is AutoCConf so we can come up with some decent AutoCTools! Just kidding. Some more serious issues were about my xrandr-powered Xinerama-like setup which Plasma didn’t handle too well. Also dynamically adding and removing batteries of the laptop isn’t well-supported as of yet in the battery applet. Nevertheless, most visitors were satisfied with 4.0.2 quality over their previous 4.0 impressions which they mostly got from CDs shipped with computer magazines.

The next important event for KDE will be CeBIT. According to tackat’s message on kde-events, volunteers are still needed for CeBIT next week. Don’t miss the opportunity to represent the latest trends in free desktops to an audience which still needs that sort of information.

A good choice in between is Pyntor, which is AFAICT the only fully modular presentation program on this planet. And of course it supports TPP slides, but also gives you the full power of Python for any graphical effects. A number of modules, e.g. for displaying SVG, are already included.

Disclaimer: I’m slightly biased towards Pyntor because I wrote it :) It’s not actively maintained at the moment but I’ll glady accept wishlist items.

My slides for the FOSDEM Lightning talks were just sent in, nothing can go wrong, except that I’m the last speaker on Sunday and could be trapped into drinking Belgian beer while missing my flight back to Berlin. The devroom slides are also mostly finished.

Now I just need to find the magic KDE boothbox, for it needs to be sent to CLT («Innovation thanks to Freedom»).

Finally, on to creating more slides for my lectures. «The internet as a device» will raise enough questions to close the link to the FOSDEM research room, and will hopefully appeal more to my students than other people’s approaches.

Sounds weird, huh? Such content will likely increase on the web if people who think they get semantic relationships (while in reality they don’t) want to create some fortune with little effort. The example in question comes from Zoominfo. However, this is by no means the only site relying on automatic data extraction to build up relationship graphs.
On Pipl, a people search site, the kdelibs relations show some guy named Kio Kio as being our most important contributor. This ‘name’ sounds surreal enough to warrant a combination of those sites with nonsense paper generators to see if the acceptance rate at dubious conferences could be increased.

FOSDEM, Bruxelles, Belgium, February 23-24.

10th CLT, Chemnitz, Saxony, March 1-2.
(Es werden noch Helfer gesucht, bitte via kde-events oder bei mir melden.)

KDE @ fisl 9.0, Porto Alegre, Brasil, April 17-19.
(Voy a viajar en las regiones de Montevideo y Buenos Aires después el evento. Un encuentro con proponentes del software libre sería deseado.)

Everyone else… help sorting out the current events.kde.org/spread.kde.org lull.