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 Since the Live Blue group is getting some popularity, growing in a way that I cannot control it anymore, I’m quitting my old blog and moving to Live Blue one. For those of you that doesn’t know what the hell is the Live Blue group, We are a group of ~30 people, students, professors, users and curious people that use, program, test and do things with opensource. Devoted to ( but not only to) KDE programming, we have 2 projects on GSoc this year, Sandro Andrade’s Code Visualization project, and I’m mentoring Mahfuz on the Mancala game. let it grow        |
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| BBROEKSEMA ARE YOU DEAD?? NO MAN!!! I just have been busy finishing my master. Which, I can say, is progressing nicely. I'm winding up my last two courses and preparing for my move to Berlin, where I'll do my master thesis research at KDAB. However, that's not what I wanted to blog about. I wanted to write an update about the work I'm doing on the english breakfast network, krazy2 and the integration of a C++ parser in the framework. Due to one of the courses I followed I got interested in software maintenance, evolution and quality. Within KDE we have all kind of policies and measures in place to guarantee some kind of quality like coding standards, commit policies, program lifetime policies and what not more. Another framework we also have is the englishbreakfastnetwork which most of you probably know by now. EBN shows the results of several tools that are developed like krazy2 and documentation sanitzers, which are ran against the KDE code base. So, what's the actual use of this? Most of the checks are not that ...read more...
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| European Parliament election in 1 month and 4 days. The last months before elections politicians are listening very carefully to their voters. http://www.freesoftwarepact.eu has some ideas how to bring FS and OSS into politicians minds. Even if there is no campaign in my EU-country (at the moment there is only one in Begum, France and Italy) it reminds me (and hopefully you) that this is a good time to act. NOW!
I will tease every politician I see and ask him or her about their attitude towards
- software patents,
- DRM,
- support for F/OSS in schools and gov. administration,
- ...
And perhaps I'm going to write some emails. So they know there is something like F/OSS and there are many, many voters interested in that topic.
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| I'm exactly three months into my Arabic studies in Cairo, where I've been taking time off university studies and Amarok development.
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So I seem to have been put on the conference circuit recently. This has been pretty interesting, as they've all been slightly different in terms of organizing and what I've learned. :) This one was different because almost all of us were giving talks.
So, this past weekend, Linuxfest Northwest was held in Bellingham, Washington, which is north of Seattle. Josh Berry (CondorDes on irc, kopete, bugsquad) and myself were the first to arrive from San Francisco to the Seattle airport. Once there, the lovely Karsten Wade (fedora, not kde) and company (including a pack of kids all with XOs, sooo cute!) picked us up as they passed through the area. We saw some great signs along the way. Like, "try nitrogen" and "tulip information here". Or the NRA sticker on the bumper of a truck that proudly declared itself to run on biodiesel. We were wiped out by the time we got to the hotel, but went to a place called The Copper Pig and met up with a few other presenters/organizers/Mousey-of-boxer-fame. Chani Armitage (chani, plasma, gsoc) & ...read more...
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My last major communication with the FLOSS universe was almost a month ago, so I figure its time that I tore myself away from school here and wrote something. Its currently the last week of classes, and next week is finals week. Naturally, that means every teacher wants to cram in those last few major projects. And with 19 credit hours this semester, that leaves very little time for me to do much of anything. So in these last three weeks, I’ve been slammed with two rather big projects. The first one is a rewrite of a lot of obfuscated C that tries to implement a parallel fast fourier transform algorithm (theoretically faster than FFTW, but we’ll see…). For an example of the original code, its on the class’ github repository. Its not pretty, especially considering how the math professor behind this project seems reluctant to teach us how his algorithm actually works. We’re really flying blind here. The second project is a rewrite of the guest tracking system we use on campus for student dorms. ...read more...
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For a long time now we had two desktop ontologies trying to solve the same problems: the Xesam ontology and NIE (Nepomuk Information Elements) both define classes and properties to describe desktop metadata ranging from id3 tags (artist, title, and so on) to emails and instant messaging. While the latter was developed as part of the Nepomuk project, the Xesam ontology was a by-product of the Xesam desktop search API project on freedesktop.org mainly designed by Evgeny (Phreedom) Egorochkin. Now although I am obviously biased I cannot say if one was better then the other. What I can say is that NIE was more complete then Xesam. In any case, even during that time both ontologies benefited from each-other. NIE contains ideas from Xesam and the other way around. So both ontologies were already pretty close. All that was left to do was a merger. And that is what happend now. Sort of. With Nokia pushing Tracker and being very interested in semantic desktop technology, with KDE leaning towards ...read more...
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Beware: only little to no KDE content… Finally after about 5 and a half year since I last bought new PC hardware I got myself some “more power”. That last one was my first laptop ever and those who where with me last year in munich know how old it felt (slow, only 1 hour battery life….). In fact ever since I’ve been using computers this is my first completely-self-paid PC, all other were either the old machine(s) of my dad or uncle that they spend or I did partial upgrades… I actually didn’t spend too much attention to the actual specs, partly because I don’t care too much - anything in the mid-range is just fine - and partly because nowadays I have little clue about what is the latest coolest . The little attention I paid to the details already got back at me, first I needed 30 minutes to figure out how to get network running under linux (Realtek r8168 chipset onboard, the r8169 driver was loaded but it doesn’t support this one, solution was ...read more...
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| If you've ever used a PIM you know how important they can be for both business and personal organization.
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| Seems that the trick to make a transparent QWebView or QWebPage is not very well known. So here is the magic incantation:
view = new QWebView(this);
QPalette palette = view->palette();
palette.setBrush(QPalette::Base, Qt::transparent);
view->page()->setPalette(palette);
view->setAttribute(Qt::WA_OpaquePaintEvent, false);
Or grab it at http://gist.github.com/103126. Here is the result (click to zoom). I put the famous TuxKiller wallpaper as the background for the main window. The central widget is set to a QWebView instance, using the transparent trick. As everyone loves Cube these days, that is the URL I am loading:  Note 1: of course this does not work if the web page explicitly sets the background color. For example, google.com (see its HTML source) forces a white background. Note 2: with Qt 4.4's QtWebKit, you have to use the background brush instead of the base brush. This is changed in Qt 4.5 for consistency with the rest of Qt (it is mentioned in Qt 4.5.0 changes file). |
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Hi everyone,
today, we are launching our openDesktop.org sponsoring project.
Aim of this project is to help openDesktop.org, KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org and the other sites to keep it as you know it today and to help us to investigate into further new features, improvements, hosting and projects for our community.
So what exactly is the openDesktop.org sponsoring you may ask. Well, the openDesktop.org sponsoring is a platform for companies and enterprises which want to prominent present their products, services and job offers on the openDesktop.org sites to a large audience of Open source and IT experts. Advantages as a sponsor are free premium job offers, ad banners, mentionings in blogs, news and many more.
At the moment we have over 90 million page views and 2.6 unique visitors per month.
So If you know a company who wants to support the open source community via our sponsoring project or if you have suggestions for us we're happy to hear from you.
You can also contact us to get the whole feature list and price list. Providing us a ...read more...
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| I’m probably one of the last GSoC student to blog after the announcement, but I’m just knee high in school work right now  The good news is: Yes! My proposal was accepted and I’ll be working this summer with implementing basic support for tables in KOffice’s text shape. Of course I’m very excited about this and I just wish school was over so I can start hacking. I’ve been aggregated on the planet for a while now, so maybe some of you have an idea of who I am, though my very infrequent posting surely hasn’t helped. My name is Elvis Stansvik and I’m a 25 year old student from Sweden. A little more about me in my original proposal. I’ve followed the KOffice project with great interest for the past 4 years or so, and when time has allowed I’ve done some bug fixing et.c. I’m looking forward to finally be able to put my heart into the project this summer. Since support for tables is quite ...read more...
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| Recently I received positive feedback on my program CubeTest . The program is being used in primary schools to help children to achieve better spatial insight.
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this weekend me and pete rode down to bellingham for LFNW. :) it was a lot of fun. I was kinda nervous about riding my bicycle to the conference, but it turned out well… we took the bus to white rock, and getting to the border from there probably only took half an hour. once we were through, it was mostly country roads, with more birds than cars. :) there was a bit of confusion in ferndale because google maps was out of date - but we asked directions from some locals and got back on track quickly. it took nearly 3 hours to get from the border to the hotel, and it was dark by then, so we were quite ready for bed. saturday morning I was sore from friday’s ride, but still managed to cycle the two miles to the conference. bellingham is lovely and flat - it was a nice easy ride. :) at the conference we found our table easily, and there were two monitors on it… but nothing else. jeff, blauzahl and the ...read more...
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| Recently I received positive feedback on my program CubeTest. The program is being used in primary schools to help children to achieve better spatial insight. There is a teachers manual on-line. CubeTest was originally written in Qt3 and ported to Qt4 later. Because some cube decorations are SVG images, the Qt4 version needed to use Q3Picture, a class for backwards compatibility with Qt3. The renewed interest prompted me to suggest to add CubeTest to KDE-Edu and clean up the code. Now I was faced with a chose: keep Q3Picture or move the cubes to a QGraphicsView. I chose neither. Instead, I started an experiment with SVG. SVG is, in theory, well suited for this type of application. Since SVG was recommended by W3 in 2001, adoption was slow. Currently however, Firefox, WebKit and Opera support SVG rather well (as I found out and you will see). So I started porting CubeTest to an SVG application. That's right, an SVG application. SVG, like HTML, supports embedding of javascript and for CubeTest purposes this more than ...read more...
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Last time I did not include any screenshots, but I know that only from screenshots derived a magical force called “buzz”, so here comes a screenshot of what I did this evening: 
First, note that the rectangle (which is in fact a cuboid block) appears in green, and the line at the right (a simple wall) seems to glow in a similar color. These are new interactors which I added to the editor interface. When you hover an object, a translucent overlay appears (like on the wall here). And when you click on this shape, the overlay will become more opaque, can be dragged to move the object, and more handles appear to manipulate the object’s geometry. Second, please also note that the rectangle is rotated a bit. I was astonished how less changes were required in the Kolf codebase to make this happen. Another usability improvement (though not visible here) is that objects cannot be shrunk below a certain size anymore. This prevents you from making objects ...read more...
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| Qt is a comprehensive, object-oriented development framework that enables development of high-performance, cross-platform rich-client and server-side applications.
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If you're tracking KDE 4.3 development and using packages from the last week or two, you may be experiencing Plasma crashing where the backtrace contains "Solid::Predicate::~Predicate()".
The cause of this is a small bug in some string parsing code in Solid that was tripped up by hotplug action .desktop files installed with some packages of Kaffeine. The kaffeine_play_videocd.desktop file, found in `kde4-config --prefix`/share/apps/solid/actions/, apparently ended up getting shipped with mismatched []s in it. (I'm not sure how that happened exactly as the files look proper in Kaffeine's svn? Oh well ..)
I fixed the crash in Solid the other day but a lot of people seem to be running into it while the fix percolates out. The solution is to get a version of kdelibs (or even just Solid) from this week and/or fix the incorrect .desktop files (e.g. by adding the missing [s).
It's cool that so many people are using and testing the latest and greatest 4.3, though. Figured I'd blog the answer so people can find it more easily.
Enjoy. |
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| Recently I began using QtCreator to try and do some development on Amarok. During my day job as a Java developer I get to work with tools like Intellij, which is a great IDE when you can put aside the problems of Java GUI apps on Linux. For a long time I’ve been using vim for my KDE development which has been more than sufficient, but lately I’m craving some of that productivity win that a fully fledged IDE can give. Today I’ll show you how you can set up your KDE application in Qt Creator and use it’s interactive debugging to enhance your development speed. I’ll assume that you have an existing KDE project and you’re using Qt Creator 1.1, and I’m not going to do any whining about bugs and that rubbish. Firstly, you’ll need to open a project. It’s as easy as File > Open and then find your CMakeLists.txt file. Your project should be parsed and opened. While we’re at it, let’s make sure that our compilation is optimised to ...read more...
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FINALLY committed the stuff to SVN under /22x22/actions/ and also the source svgz's. The intire set is named kmix-***** maybe the naming need to be reworked into mixing-****. any way the kmix developer can now point to the new icons.
Lately I have been thinking on selling stuff KDE/theming oriented, like for example themed folders icons in star trek style, plasma themes that are in a Dune like atmosfere etc... Do you think its a good idea and if so would you like to read about it on my blog post's.
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| One of the new features proposed for GCC 4.5 is the ability to use plugins. I'm a big fan of plugin architectures, especially in open source software. I think that plugins provide a really nice starting point for potential developers. So you can start with something simple and well defined, and grow into the rest of the system. Personally, the idea of understanding all of GCC is just overwhelming. But perhaps I could do a really basic plugin that can do an additional static check. The idea is based on mygcc which allows extensible checkers to be written for gcc. As an example, consider a (C) API that looks something like
foo_init();
foo_use1();
foo_use2();
foo_cleanup();
where you have to init() before using any of the use() functions, and then cleanup() when you're done. Its an error / bug if you forget to init(), or cleanup(), or if there is any path that results in the sequence being broken. Its an error if you cleanup() twice. An example of this is something like malloc/free or ...read more...
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Once I got frustrated with the “zypper dup” trying to downgrade kde4 packages due to my weird mix of package installs from various repos, I decided to go for running KDE from svn trunk. KDE from svn really flies on my laptop and I don’t find the need to login to vista of late. However KDE svn had a strange problem. Unlock dialog wouldn’t let me unlock complaining of authentication failure. This confused me as I was using appropriate password. With some investigation, I noticed kscreenlocker to be the process behind locking and killing that in another terminal would unlock me The beauty of open source helped me continue to futher investigate the issue and I discovered “kcheckpass” being used by kscreenlocker. While /opt/kde3/bin/kscreenlocker would authenticate me, the kde4 version failed!! Solution: The README file in kcheckpass source folder gave me a hint regarding ownership and setuid persmissions for kcheckpass to be set. kcheckpass requires owner to be root and needs the setuid bit to be set. Finally after invoking “sudo chown root ...read more...
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| Am I the only one to wish that there existed another aggregation of kde-related blogs, like planetKDE, but with much stricter rules on what is OK to post? Like, only allowing to write on software one has been coding, presenting achievements and plans, and trying to attract more contributors? Looking back on how I have first been reading planetkde as a KDE enthusiast, and then been using planetkde for Eigen, this is what I've always been looking for.
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| Last week in between running usability testing on Amarok and preparing for the Season of Usability I wrote some notes down about the KPackageKit updater. Very informal, but I figured if I posted them, maybe the right people would see them and find something useful. Expert Review of KPackageKit Updater (PDF 922KB), April 20 2009 (Now that the SoU student applications have been opened, I can get back to the Amarok usability test report :)
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| Are you a student of design, usability, human factors, or other HCI-related field? Are you interested in working on an open source project? For 10-15 hours a week between June 1 and August 31, you could work with an experiences usability mentor on a fun and interesting design project! An added bonus is the $1000 USD internship stipend at the end of the project. The OpenUsability Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code™, OpenUsability offers sponsored student projects. Other than the Google projects that address developers, they aim at students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design. Students experience the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects while getting into OSS development. This year we are happy to support student opportunities from these open source projects: - Amarok
- Drupal
- Gallery
- GeneMANIA
- GNOME
- Kadu
- KOrganizer
- OLM
- SemNotes
- Ubuntu
See the Projects page for more information ...read more...
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| Finally moving lekhonee to PyKDE4. Main reason is to add spellcheck support, which looks very easy in KDE land than Qt.
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| Konqueror and KHTML continue to be a bit of a contentious issue. My last post received quite a treatment. There was a lot of good feedback and I appreciate the thoughtful comments people made. There were some really good thoughts and there are a few things I want to cover that I previously didn't. So first things first: Goals Having clear goals and values is important, especially for a project as large as KDE. They provide guidelines for appropriate functionality and development and having good goals is an important part of good software. I build on a couple of values which lead to my thinking and reasoning in this. This all starts with a simple question: How does KDE improve a person's life? And to extend that a bit further: Why should someone choose KDE over something else? KDE is valuable because it's being built to be comfortable. Ease of use, customization and other features as well seem to be focused on this (somewhat amorphous) goal. I think that konqueror needs to fit into this picture as ...read more...
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| The Akademy program is almost done. Speaker notification deadline was yesterday, but we are still busy sorting out some last details and haven't sent notifications yet. Please bear with us and have a bit more patience. We have a lot of great proposals, more than we can fit into the schedule. So it's not easy to decide what we can take, and the co-hosting with GUADEC adds another dimension of complexity to this task. But we are on a good track, and we will have a fantastic program. Stay tuned...
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| UserBase , the KDE user wiki, is really growing nicely but certain areas are still lacking quality content.
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