Irc-Unix.net

Interviews

I did some 30 second video interviews at Akademy in Helsinki. You can download them to get a feel for the people and place of Akademy. Unfortunately I've been unable, in the limited time I've devoted to it, to convert them to Oggs, ffmpeg doesn't want to do it. I've also been unable to find a simple HTML5 video gallery script that would make a simple HTML page with the videos embedded. Do let me know if you have the answers to those. I recommend Frank's interview for an insight into what our board spends its week doing.

Eben Moglen Talk

Before Akademy I went to see Eben Moglen give a talk at the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Eben is a much overlooked rock star of free software, having written the GPL licences and made many other significant contributions.

His talk was about the dangers of embedded software, taking the example of the software in cars because it is a topical issue but also in other life critical areas such as aeroplanes and ...read more...

Jos has been getting very philosophical lately. One post that got me thinking about how odd KDE is (in a good way) was his one about working together.

KDE is quite unlike anywhere else I have worked, for fun or profit. Probably the closest analog is my involvement at university with the student newspaper, the Warwick Boar where I started off writing general features and ended up as Science Editor.

The Boar had a few similarities to KDE. It was staffed by volunteers, was successful (we won awards and stuff), diverse and quite large (I don’t know exactly, but well over a hundred contributors). However, unlike KDE, it was hierarchical. At the top was the Editor, who had ultimate power and responsibility. He or she made the call when someone threatened to sue for libel, or when one of the big national newspapers wanted access to one of our sources (it happened). Below the editor, each section had its own head, responsible for organising their team and making sure that their pages got done.

LuxRender — это бесплатная кроссплатформенная система рендеринга трёхмерных сцен с открытым исходным кодом.

Особенности:

• Использует математические модели освещения, основанные на физических явлениях,
  благодаря чему изображения получаются реалистичными, но их рассчёт занимает много времени.
• Идеально подходит для архитектурной и интерьерной визуализации.
• Имеет интерфейс с интерактивным управлением, командную строку.
• Гибкий и полный C/C++ API.
• Плагины экспорта доступны для Blender, XSI, Cinema 4D и Maya.

В данное время разработчиками ведётся активная работа по внедрению поддержки OpenCL.
Поддерживаются OC GNU/Linux, MS Windows и MacOS X.

Скриншоты.
Изменения в этой версии.

For KDE developers, web-based forums are often uncommon workflows. Indeed, for communication among developers mailing lists are much better tools, especially since you can handle everything inside a client (most of the time), compared to forums where you have to use a web browser. The ways of reading, replying and interacting with posters are dramatically different. And that is why some developers find themselves uncomfortable with the KDE Community Forums.

A dedicated application would be usually much better than a browser, because you can work around the intrinsic limitations of the browser itself. The problem is that you can’t really access a forum with anything else than a browser. That is, it used to be like this, but now things are changing.

In the past months fellow administrator bcooksley has been working quite hard implementing the Open Collaboration Services (OCS) specification in the KDE Community Forums. For the uninformed, it’s the same API that powers OpenDesktop.org and related web pages. This means that you could ...read more...

Дорогие коллеги! Мы приглашаем вас принять участие в пятом ежегодном слёте российских пользователей Gentoo Linux - Gentoo Summer Camp Russia! В этом году Gentoo Summer Camp будет проходить 7-8 августа близ города Бологое (широта: 57°57'22.20", долгота: 34°02'45.31").

Где это? В 10 километрах от г. Бологое. Карта прилагается (см. ниже)

Зачем? Встретиться, пообщаться на природе, отдохнуть, пожарить шашлыков :)

Кто участвует? Пользователи Gentoo Linux, сочувствующие и члены их семей.

Программа? Общение, купание, рыбная ловля, сбор грибов, компиляция футболок, ваши варианты :). Программа будет расширяться и дорабатываться в соответствии с вашими пожеланиями. Идеи принимаются к сведению. Инициативы приветствуются и всячески поддерживаются :)

Что брать с собой? Палатку, спальник, туристский коврик (в народе "пенка"), продукты на себя, одежду - по погоде, аптечку, запас оптимизма и хорошего настроения. Алкоголь по-минимуму, без экстримизма :) Ноутбуки. Посуда: кружка-ложка-миска-нож, кто потащит котелки для корма - обсудим в форуме :)

As I mentioned in my article about Akademy, I discovered a fun Finnish game named M

My summer of code had hit a bit of a dead end between some Nepomuk woes (your week is up Vishesh ) and some general issues with plasma integration in all of the plasma-related SoC projects… Half of that is hopefully solved with a bit of a nice solution, imo, which Aaron came up with at Akademy

At Akademy, Aaron talked a lot about Elegance; in our interface, our applications, our API. Make things fun to work with, easy, organic. It’s something we should strive for, and something that I have strove for in my code; sexy code is a hell of a lot more fullfilling than ugly hacks.

Since the beginning of SoC I have had the interesting task of making sure that applications have some sort of way to talk to the KPart I have been working on (which is now feature complete enough for me to start cleaning up the code for kdereview and eventually kdebase-runtime, w00t), which is incredibly difficult because KParts simply aren’t designed ...read more...

Yakuake is a drop-down terminal emulator based on KDE Konsole. It features smoothly rolling down from the top of your screen, a tabbed interface, configurable dimensions and animation speed, a skinnable GUI, and a sophisticated D-Bus interface.

It’s been about a month since my last blog entry, so let me remind you what I’m doing as part of my Google’s Summer of Code (which down here is Autumn/Winter!):

1. A hatching and halftones brush for Krita.
2. Implementing impasto in Krita.

Part 1 is virtually complete, there’s no halftones brush yet, but it’s trivial to create one from the hatching brush which is now beta!. That’s right!, all GUI is linked and you can start toying with it and have fun, change the settings to anything you like without touching the source code! =D here’s a little picture reminding you of what it looked like:

Halftone Brush Beta!

Documentation!

How to install Krita trunk and start playing!

Remember there is no way to download only Krita, you have to download all of KOffice’s source code and then you can specify the applications you want to build. If you wonder why this is so, ...read more...

Компания Motorola начала использовать защиту eFUSE-чипов. Эта аппаратная технология запрещает загрузку модифицированных прошивок. Данный способ тивоизации планируется использовать на платформе DroidX и Droid2. Motorola и раньше использовала тивоизацию. Например на Motorola Z6 использовалась подпись RSA, которую хакеры смогли обойти. Также использовалась технология на основе SELinux. Но в отличии от десктопа/сервера, где данная технология используется для защиты пользователя, в данном случае идёт речь о защите телефона от пользователя.

Новость взята с opennet.ru

Had been holding off posting on this until I have something reasonably pretty to show for it, but damn, said pretty thing sure took its time. Anyway, GSoC mid-term evaluations just ended, and I finally managed to hack up something that looks somewhat presentable. Here’s a short screencast of it.

Some key ideas of the current implementation:

• The tray lives in it’s own containment separate from the main activities/launchers.
• There is a passive “shrunken” form and an active “enlarged” form.
• The passive form is not interactive and click/tapping it simply switches it to the active form (with a simple QML animation thrown in). It shows a number of defined “always-show” applets and a limited number of the other applets, prioritized by recent activity.
• The active form shows all available applets in large, finger-friendly sizes, and is scrollable in case it doesn’t fit the screen (hello Plasma::ScrollWidget!). It behaves more or less like one would expect a systray to behave.

Not a lot to show for one month plus worth of development I admit ...read more...

This article shows you how to create the GUI of a tiny text editor without being a C++ guru.

Last year we already discovered that Kate is truly the only holy text editor* (again thanks to rms for making us aware of it)! (and btw, xkcd is totally wrong). And now we even have yet another proof: The holy Kate maintainer and the naked woman! Enjoy

(*) this is an insider from the joint KDE and Gnome conference (gcds) in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, 2009.