39C3

Volker mentioned that we need better blog post coverage of events, so hereby I’m doing my part :)

I attended the yearly 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3), together with a number of KDE people and my local hackerspace Spline.

This year I wanted to attend a few more talks live and in person, which worked somewhat well. I’ll include a list of talks in the end, in case you are looking for some ideas for talks to watch on media.ccc.de.

Just like last year, I spend a large amount of time at the KDE assembly. Once again, we were part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. My initial worries about our new location being being in a fairly dark hall instead of the bright and very visible area near the central stairs turned out to be unjustified. We received tons of great feedback and had many nice and motivating conversations with other developers and users.

Victoria started a Konqi hotline service on the Congress phone network, which was in high demand.

The most important activity for me at Congress was meeting some Transitous contributors I had not yet talked to in person. It was great to meet you all.

There were also multiple opportunities to connect with GNOME developers and designers. We identified some low-level components that we might be able to share. We exchanged our ideas for making contributing as easy as possible for new contributors, a topic which GNOME is doing fairly well at as far as I can tell.

Projects

Later on, the KDE assembly turned into a (very small) mini-KDE-Sprint. We shipped much improved maps in KDE Itinerary, based on the MapLibre project. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. This should also fix the pixelated rendering at certain zoom level that sometimes showed with the previously used map. Another advantage is, that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. A big Thanks to Volker, Carl and Tobias who helped with bundling and testing MapLibre for Android.

Afterwards, we looked into options for making a more general KDE maps application, but this will take a bit more work. However, we already have a number of great components, which should make this much easier, such as the code for accessing public transport data known from KDE Itinerary, KPublicTransport, the library for reading opening hours (KOpeningHours) and our library for accessing weather forecasts, KWeatherCore. That leaves this as mostly a matter of tying together all of these components in a nice UI. However, the Qt bindings for MapLibre don’t currently expose enough details for us to do that, so some preparation is required.

I also managed to work on a few long-standing tasks in Transitous. It is now possible to add manual configuration options to public transport feeds in France, which used to be overwritten by a script. Additionally, it is now possible to automatically add all feeds for a country from the Mobility Database, which should make adding new countries a lot easier.

Sessions

• Railway-bubble Meetup Meetup of people interested in a diverse list of railway-adjacent topics. I joined the subgroup interested in crowd-sourcing GPS positions of trains, where I presented the minimal prototype I built for Transitous.
• Transitous Meetup We met with some users of the Transitous API and apps, and exchanged ideas for future improvements. A major topic was support for accessibility features, like considering elevator status in routing. We also discussed possible ways to improve the accuracy and details of data in Germany, where schedules go through a long pipeline that loses details and introduces long delays in the delivery of changes. Thanks to Julius for organizing and moderating this.

Talks

• Zentrum für Politische Schönheit: Ein Jahr Adenauer SRP+ und der Walter Lübcke Memorial Park - A quite fun and hopeful talk, considering the broader topics covered, about the work of a political art collective in Germany.
• All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale Investigation into different kinds of fraud patterns based on Deutschlandtickets.
• Human microservices at the Dutch Railways: modern architecture, ancient hardware? - Insights into the operations of Dutch Railways
• Infrastructure Review - Interesting statistics on the huge scale of infrastructure involved in the Congress

As you can see, I still left a lot to watch online over the following few days.