The Nepomuk Sprint

I’m writing this on the plane back from Freiburg, and the Nepomuk Coding sprint. It’s a beautiful town (except late at night during the weekend, but anyway…) and well worth visiting again (hopefully there’ll be a Nepomuk Sprint 2010).

Now to the important details. As I often seem to at these kind of events, I find myself leaving with less code written than I arrived with. However, when put in context, this is no bad thing. Nepomuk is a new technology, and is not entirely straight forward for a newcomer to understand. I arrived with intentions of integrating Telepathy with Nepomuk, but with little clue how to actually do this. And the results: I know understand enough about how Nepomuk works to make a plan, and start coding on integrating with Telepathy (unfortunately most of the code I wrote in the few days beforehand with this aim turns out to be so wrong it’s best just to throw it away and start again).

There are two ways in which Telepathy will be integrated with Nepomuk. One is the fairly obvious case of storing metadata about your IM buddies. Some examples of this might be: the last time they were seen online or the geolocation at which they were last online using the Location interface of Telepathy). I’d love to hear any more suggestions of metadata that it might be good to store on your instant messaging and VoIP contacts (please use the comments section at the end).

The second integration point is a little different. It concerns the idea of metacontacts. Users of IM clients such as Kopete are probably familiar with the idea that you can group two buddies on different protocols, who are the same person in real-life, together as one metacontact. I intend to implement this for Telepathy applications’ contact lists using Nepomuk to store the relation between the different buddies. The advantage of doing this is that not just your IM client, but any Nepomuk enabled application can see this relationship.

So, that’s my rather superficial hand-wavy summary of the plans that came out of the Nepomuk sprint for Telepathy. I hope to write again soon to provide a mercilessly technical explanation of how all this will/is being implemented.

Finally, I’d just like to say thank you very much to Sebastian Trueg who did such a great job of organising this sprint.

Telepathy-KDE update

I haven’t written anything for a couple of months now for the same reason that I haven’t committed any code. Exams. Now they’re over it’s back to hacking. But just because I haven’t been working on Telepathy/KDE for a while doesn’t mean that nothing has been done (obviously).

The underlying TelepathyQt4 library on which all our work is based has progressed a lot, gaining support for requesting channels from the Channel Dispatcher, gaining the Client interfaces and going through what will almost certainly be the last major API redesign before it goes stable. These two advances mean that it is now possible to work on Telepathy client applications in Qt/KDE without having to play an endless game of API catch-up.

There are also two summer of code projects progressing nicely:
- George Kiagiadakis (gkiagia)’s work on KCall is really exciting… I can’t wait to take part in my first video conference using KDE software!
- Kaushik Saurabh (roide) is also making great progress on his Conversation Logging Framework for KDE (while not entirely a Telepathy project, it goes without saying that the two will be integrated).

And now to the future… to Friday. I’ll be at the Nepomuk Sprint in Freiburg working on integrating instant messaging buddies with the address book and the semantic desktop. I’m not yet exactly sure how this will be done, but I’ll be spending the next 2 days up until the sprint getting that nailed down, and then coding madly once I get there. I really hope there can be something photogenic as a result, since libraries provide very limited picture-potential for this blog.