Monday, April 2, 2012

Support libferris, get at ferris through KIO, and read about OTR messaging

I thought I'd see how well some pledgie tasks would do in the wild. Some of this code is stuff I've been wishing to write for a while but unable to make the time.

If you want to get at some of the funky filesystems offered by libferris from your KDE desktop, you might like to support my "KIO Slave for libferris" pledgie:

Click here to lend your support to: KIO Slave for libferris and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

If you've always wanted to add support for Off-the-Record messaging to your project, or help entice somebody else in that direction, I have a tutorial article on offer here:

Click here to lend your support to: Off The Record Messaging HOWTO article and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

If you want a REST interface for libferris, listing directories and getting at files over HTTP/HTTPS, you can help make that happen here:

Click here to lend your support to: Extend the REST interface of libferris and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

And finally, last for today but not least, if you want to get at jpeg images on your Zoneminder server using nice normal command lines like the following:

$ fcat zoneminder://server/monitor | okular -

Then you might like to throw a little loose change at the zoneminder plugin pledgie:

Click here to lend your support to: libferris mounting Zoneminder and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

13 comments:

Dave said...

You want money to just read about OTR messaging??

monkeyiq said...

@Dave, well the article took many days to write. Anyone determined enough can do the same of course, if you have the time.

Unknown said...

Sure, but $600 for one article? One can get a year's subscription to a library full of such articles...

I just hope that the whole KDE ecosystem won't move to "do you want to see this? pay me".

monkeyiq said...

Well, I'm still testing the waters as to what works, if anything along these lines.

What would you say would be an acceptable amount?

Unknown said...

$6. That's how much I'd pay. Not that I do not value other people's work, but this is well-covered subject with lots of links found by Google (and/or Google Scholar), for any higher price I'd do my own research.

markg85 said...

Sure, you're free to ask how much you want but i'm betting that your numbers are extremely unrealistic! Who needs libferris anyway? I certainly don't and i doubt a lot of people will.

Perhaps you should remove one "0" from all the "prices" which would be reasonable otherwise just don't even begin with it.

Tomaz said...

Look for the other pledger, his was an acceptable amount, 300, not 3000.
I'd pay $10 for a tutorial, not 600. ( being realistic, in brazil 600 US$ is aproximately what a company pays for three workers in minimum wage. )

monkeyiq said...

As I understand it, the amount doesn't have to come from any single source.

I never expected any single person to pay $600 for the article but perhaps a collection of folks to give $5 or $10.

Many of the libferris tasks are not related to KDE (aside from the KIO one, which might help offer other filesystems to KDE).

I'd personally be happy to pledge $10 to anyone offering to write a FUSE filesystem to meet my description of mounting zoneminder. And with the above comment on reduced rates, I'd be giving 20% of the radix shifted goal amount.

Alejandro Nova said...

Unlike Nepomuk, we don't understand how libferris is useful in KDE, how we can benefit from it (apart from mounting virtually everything as a filesystem), and I'm sure no one has it even installed. In fact, libferris doesn't even appear in my Chakra repositories.

Basically, the KIO slave is the thing I was waiting for to showcase all of your progress, but we can't donate if we a) don't know what libferris does and b) don't need that. Unless you create the need for us to use libferris, I won't be optimistic about your fundraiser.

monkeyiq said...

@Alejandro && All: I have rpms of libferris for Fedora, and debs for armv5 debian and the Nokia n9. I did make a push to get it into Fedora mainline, but I suspect that will take a long time.

One of the main issues (for me) is that there is a large degree of overlap between libferris and existing KDE technologies. At it's core one might see libferris as a virtual filesystem with metadata extraction and storage support with many implementations of index and search.

This is iced off with "exposures", letting you see libferris through FUSE, sqlite virtual tables, as a plasma data engine, or through a perl tie. The KIO proposal would be another of these exposures.

I don't want to tread on strigi's feet, so I tend to downplay the index & search and metadata angles of libferris when talking ferris+KDE. Incidentally, libferris can use soprano to store and read metadata, so it plays well with KDE tech.

The KIO pitch would allow some web services to be seen as filesystems by KDE. As libferris can mount statusnet one might then like to microblog using kate. I will put together more information on what filesystems libferris offers to support your point (a). For those who are inquisitive regardless, the plugins/context directory of the libferris source shows the vast chunk of what is on offer.

DanielW said...

OK, the problem is: libferris is not very well known.

And 3000$ seems like quite a lot of money. You have to explain how much work you are planning to put into it

And well, I would like to know if you really need this money or if you have a good paid day job.

If you have enough money for a living, I don't feel like paying upfront for something I don't even know about. I mean most of KDEs developers are working for free on KDE.

I can understand that getting something back from it, may be nice and can be a motivation.

To get any money from the community you should explain why you need the money, how much work it will be (for 3000$) and should maybe with a proof of concept show us that you are able to do it and that we have a real benefit from it.

monkeyiq said...

@DanielW: Defining the exact extent of work is quite hard. There are many, many things that libferris can mount and I would have to focus on some specific ones to test them in their KIO exposure. I was thinking of focusing on web services that ferris can mount to complement the existing KIO filesystems.

I have in the past done this for Plasma, allowing libferris to be seen from the desktop:
http://monkeyiq.blogspot.com.au/2010/05/plasma-libferris-dataengine.html

I'm not sure if the above works as a proof of concept that I can do this or displays enough benefit.

Much of this has been an experiment in itself. The libferris pledgies are all things I have on my TODO list and *want* to do regardless. The pledgies were an idea to greatly help me now and give folks the ability to move some items up from "TODO" at some stage in the future to being available in the next release, really soon.

Unfortunately I am a proletarian and have to meet the imposition of such just as most folks do. As those details are not of great interest to me, I didn't think they would be of interest to readers.

maninalift said...

I would really like to see libferris picked up by the KDE project at large.

"proof of concept" is one thing, but I think the real trick is "proof of coolness", i.e. demonstrating that there is something cool you can do easily which you couldn't do easily without libferris. Something that catches the imagination.