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 Since using twitter, I've noticed a lot of people use services such as tiny.url or tr.im in order to shorten URLs. There's a problem with this though: I now have no idea what website I'm about to visit. If someone I trust has posted the link I'm reasonably likely to click on it, but for other people I tend to avoid these shortened links because I have no idea in advance what they are.
What is really needed is for the shortener service to show you what site you're about to visit first, so you can make a more informed decision about whether to visit the site or not. Hmm, maybe I should be sending this as a feature request to those sites instead of randomly blogging about it...
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I recently purchased a small pasta machine. I don't really know what the proper term for it is. I hesitate to call it a "pasta maker" because you still have to the bulk of the work yourself: making the dough, turning the handle, moving the handle between the different rolling and cutting mechanisms, feeding the dough through, etc. It uses no electricity and attaches to the counter or table top with a little vice. This really appeals to my "no school like the old school" side.
It's amazing how a little bit of flour, an egg and a bit of water can, in 5-10 minutes time, produce enough pasta (and then some!) for four people. Add some sauce, toppings and settle in beside a main course or a salad and voila .. great meal. The taste and texture of the pasta is unachievable with dry pasta or even the "fresh" pasta I can get from the grocery stores here. So instead of pulling out some dry pasta from a box (which takes about 10 seconds), I'm spending a whole ...read more...
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| Well I went and ported kfile_torrent to be a Strigi analyzer so that the .torrent info metadata is available in KDE 4 now. Unfortunately although KFileMetaInfo has apparently been ported to use Strigi no metadata shows up for me in Dolphin. Maybe it will when I enable Nepomuk perhaps, kind of unfortunate that a feature more or less from KDE 2 is still unavailable though :-/ In other news I’ve been trying to find a good reason to play the PS3 that our family got last fall. Most of the games I’ve tried so far have not warranted the annoying aspects of a super-whamodyne system. For instance, the last game I tried was Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which was very well reviewed. But, I didn’t find it very entertaining. Once the game came in the mail (from GameFly, since I refuse to end up with another $60 stinker), I tried it out. It told me it had a required update to install (for the PS3 itself). Awesome. So about 10-15 minutes later, I end ...read more...
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| Google's annual Summer of Code program, which pays small grants to students who make substantial contributions to open source software projects during their Summer break from school, has officially launched.
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I was wondering how hard would it be to create a web-browser that is, like Google’s Chrome, separated in different processes for different tabs. You know, the whole “security problems and crashing are restrained to single tab” thing. As it turned out, it is not all that difficult. Create the main window, start the WebKit (QWebView) in another program, then X-Embed the later in the former, and communicate via D-Bus. (I got the idea to do this from Embed Window plasmoid  ) If the child crashes, only one tab is gone. If the main application crashes, tabs become independent windows. I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to work on this, but if I find the time, you could see a Rekonq-based (http://rekonq.sourceforge.net/) browser that is similar to Chrome someday.  ...read more...
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 Yesterday, Marcel has moved digiKam 0.11 source code from a development branch to trunk in KDE subversion repository. 0.11 include now the famous Batch Queue Manager, and will be ready to test in production soon... read more
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I'm not a designer, but I tried my best to reflect my idea of how a Music Player for KDE could look like. Of course it isn't suppose to look so primitive, but, then again, I'm not a designer.
This is the initial mockup (I hope to publish one article with all windows and sections soon). Hope you like it:
Thanks for your attention :-)
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| 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). During a 3 month collaboration, students work together with an experienced usability mentor and key developers of the project to improve the user experience of a FLOSS application. The next Season of Usability student projects will start in May 2009. FLOSS Projects who would like to benefit from a usability student are encouraged to fill in our Call for Projects: » Season of Usability 2009 - Call for Projects (available until April 15th) For more information see the 2009 Season of Usability Call for Projects
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| Yesterday Sebas blogged about his desire for a small plasmoid that would allow him to suspend his computer when the screen is locked. Since I already wanted an excuse to play around with a Python plasmoid, I decided this would be a cool little applet to code. Turns out that there is a (pending) freedesktop.org interface to power management and PowerDevil implements the important parts of this. 
I started out with the great Python+Plasma tutorial and the second one on using the Plasma::Widgets that we know and love from C++. Couple that with the python bindings for dbus, and you’ve got yourself a little applet that suspends your computer at the press of a button. You can find the applet on kde-look, and it should be present in GHNS as well. (working on this point… for some reason it’s not showing up for me).
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| Yes, we are apparently eligible for Google Summer of Code! I looked it up. Just posting this in case it helps anyone else who like me was unsure about their eligibility.
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I've been thinking about Google's Summer of Code program a bit, and since it's having its fifth birthday this year. I thought it would be about time to congratulate the people at the Open Source Programs Office in Mountain View, especially Leslie, Cat, Tiff, Erica and all the others who I had the pleasure to meet at various occasions. Good works, gals! From a KDE point of view, it's nice to see after 5 years that this Summer of Code works. "Works" means that it does get us a lot of attraction from new talent. There are actually quite some people active within KDE on a regular basis that have found their way into KDE through the Summer of Code programme.
It's good to see how this is managed by the Google staff as well, they're not just throwing money at us, they're actually putting a lot of effort into SoC, and it provides real, tangible and sustainable benefit for Free Software projects. That's money spent well. The user wins as well, over the ...read more...
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| Do you like HowtoForge? Please consider to support us by becoming a subscriber .
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| Well, it seems to be the season when Plasma developers are blogging again about their progress =)…so..here I go =) The weeks befora Bossa Conference Sebas started helping me with Pastebin applet as we discussed during Tokamak: it was not as sexy as a plasmoid needs to be. So he just started (re)doing the UI bits and I tried to help him a little bit. We cleaned the code, changed the UI completely and now it’s much better!  Default view (left), Mouse Hovering (right) Now you can also put it on your panel and have something that looks nice (instead of just a sentence telling you to drop stuff in that region)..We also added tooltips showing the status of the applet.  How it looks at the panel Today the only thing that was not working was fixed and ...read more...
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EN: Next friday there will be a open talk about kde development shedule, kde technologies and qt on the Federal University of Bahia ( UFBA ) with me ( Tomaz Canabrava , undergraduated bachelor in computer science student) and Sandro Andrade ( soon-to-be-PHD ). It’s good to see the number of open-conferences growing in Brazil. ( the pt_br text is not a translation of this one, since they need more information if they want to go ;D ) PT_BR: Pr
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| Following the good habit of release early, release often: here we have yet another qt solutions release: the QtAnimationFramework 2.2 (and since 2.1 it’s LGPL too o/) It’s mainly a refinement of the previous version, after a round of API review and incorporating all the feedback we got internally and externally. One main modification was to rename QtAnimation to QtVariantAnimation (this was to scare most users away from using QtVariantAnimation directly, as this is an abstract class). Apart from that, we did some minor API modifications in QtVariantAnimation, QtAnimationGroup and QtSequentialAnimationGroup and several bugfixes. This solution also includes the code to the AnimatedTiles example that was previously posted here, by Andreas. We are also providing an example class CustomPropertyAnimation, in the sub-attaq demo, which shows how to animate QGraphicsItem (you can also use it to animate your own classes). You just need to provide your specific getter and setter functions. Another nice feature of the sub-attaq demo is that it’s now using the statemachine API for coding the game logic (that’s really ...read more...
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| Drkonqi is nice and friendly, but some apps (e.g. kded or krunner) have a crash handler so that they restart instead of annoying the user with crash dialogs. As developers, we want to see backtraces of crashes in all cases; and to be in gdb in order to be able to print variables etc. Solution: asking for core dumps. That part is easy:
export KDE_DEBUG=1
ulimit -c unlimited
You should put that somewhere that is read during KDE startup, for instance ~/.kde4/env/debug.sh But then after a while you find core dumps everywhere in your source and build dirs, and you need some "find all core dumps and delete them" scripts when your disk is full. Not convenient. Instead, I like to set it up like Mac OSX does: with a directory dedicated to core dumps. Fortunately, the linux kernel can be set up like that too. As root, do the following:
mkdir /cores
chown 777 /cores
and at the bottom of /etc/rc.local or any other script run by root during the boot sequence: ...read more...
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| Want to see how to crash almost every KDE application? In your favorite KDE application, open any modal dialog, e.g. the configuration dialog.
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| Howdy do all you out there in interland. This one is mostly for A. L. to get her to stop pouting.
Today, boys and girls, I'll be speaking about macports. Macports is a ports-like package management thing for OS X. For all my arch linux peeps, it's like the AUR for PKGBUILDs, but you need privileges to check in. It's both easy to use and easy to break. Er, easy to contribute to I meant. These contributions are known as Portfiles; text files defining various things necessary to compile your software of interest. It's so easy to use I can show you how to make your own Portfile in five easy steps. Step 1: Create a Portfile!
This is easier with a template and as it happens I have one lying around. Here, have this and rename it to Portfile.
# $Id$
PortSystem 1.0
name
version
categories
maintainers nomaintainer
description
long_description ${description}
platforms darwin
homepage
master_sites
use_bzip2 yes
checksums md5
Step 2: ...read more...
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| The latest beta of KDE 's 3.2, beta 2, was released a few days ago. I installed the provided Fedora RPMs and had a look in this early pre-release version of the popular X11 desktop environment.
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| Want to see how to crash almost every KDE application? - In your favorite KDE application, open any modal dialog, e.g. the configuration dialog.
- Quit the application using D-BUS, like this:
qdbus org.kde.kontact /MainApplication quit
Chances are high that your application just bit the dust and you're greeted by Dr. Konqui. Why does it happen? Well, let's have a look at how modal dialogs are usually created. Most often applications have some "main widget" with slots reacting to user actions, creating a modal dialog on the stack, like this: void ParentWidget::slotDoSomething() {
SomeDialog dlg( this ); //the dlg-on-stack-variant
if ( dlg.exec() == QDialog::Accepted ) {
const QString str = dlg.someUserInput();
//do something with with str
}
}
What could possibly go wrong here? Nothing, you might say. Looks safe, right? This code is so trivial and the pattern is used in so many Qt and KDE applications. Wrong! This code is bound to cause a crash in a couple of situations, where a D-BUS call to quit() is ...read more...
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| This is the period of the year when Plasma developers exits from under their rocks it seems, so there i am too, i wanted to blog about that since quite some time, but i am really too lazy lazy lazy to blog :p As Aaron said, last months i've been quite busy with the implementation of the new systemtray specification. At Tokamak we gathered around a whiteboard and discussed what sucked about the current X systemtray, so... what if we could design it from scratch? well, let's do it! this thinghie interested me so much that i jumped over it in a coding frenzy with i hope a sane amount of pauses to think about it and keep the design sane, scrapping stuff when the design direction seemed to take an ugly direction, process that is still ongoing, so all i will talk about here is still subject to changes, rennnames, replacements etc, nothing "production" still :p Soooo, why we were really unhappy about the system tray we have now so much at the ...read more...
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It seems like conferences in the first week of the month are popular. I'm missing one in june, but we have the following stuff coming up:
May 7th: NLUUG Spring conference on filesystems and storage. Ted Ts'o will be doing the keynote and also an ext4 talk (presumably on what's improved since FOSDEM). Jos van den Oever is providing the KDE angle with search -- it makes no sense to store if you cannot retrieve, after all.
June 7th: Alas, empty (help me out here).
July 3rd-11th: Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the cross-desktop conference. Comprising both Akademy and GUADEC, this is the second time the two big Free Software desktops have put their conferences on one and the same island (but previously, the island was bigger -- this time we're working together). Paul is running that, content-wise from the KDE side, and you can submit technical papers now.
August 7th-9th: UKUUG Summer Conference ...read more...
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| So Google Maps Street View is causing all the same trouble after its launch in the UK as it did after its launch in the US. Personally, I find it a really interesting piece of technology - largely because a lot of interesting research effort must have been put in to make many of its aspects work. One aspect that interests me most is their use of facial recognition technology to blur out people's faces when detected. At least this is what I assume is the approach.... I say "assume", I mean "assumed". As I was browsing around some of my favourite streets of London, my attention was immediately drawn to this....  Now, perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect that the Marquess of Anglesey (as depicted inside a pub sign) will probably not be offended by his face being incorporated into Google Maps Street View. I don't feel the sign's privacy is in any danger here. So, do you think you might have an approach to detecting when a ...read more...
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| Unit tests are in my eyes a very important part of programming. KDE uses them, KDevelop does - the PHP plugin I help writing does as well. cmake comes with a ctest program which does quite well to give you a quick glance on which test suite you just broke with your new fance feature :) But I am very dissatisfied with it. Right now I usually do the following # lets assume I'm in the source directory cb && ctest # look for failed test suites cd $failed_test_suite_path ./$failed_test_suite.shell | less # search for FAIL cs cd $to_whereever_I_was_before
That’s pretty much for just running a test. Especially all that cding and lessing became very tedious. Tedious is good, because I eventually fix it: introducing kdetest I wrote a bash function (with autocompletion!!!) called kdetest. Calling it without any parameter will run all test suites and gives a nice report of failed functions at the end. Here’s an example (run via cs ...read more...
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| It is that time of year again where many people from around the world participate in what is known as Earth Hour. Earth Hour is one hour where people from around the world have the opportunity to switch off their lights for 1 hour. This year though, you will get the chance to vote for either Earth or Global Warming. Flipping your light switch off for 1 hour is a vote for Earth, and leaving it on is a vote for Global Warming. When does this occur? It happens between 8:30 PM and 9:30PM your time for 1 hour. In may part I plan on not only shutting off my lights, but also my computers, websites, and all electrical equipment in the house. I figure for 1 hour I will chill around a candle and maybe read a book. Thanks to Brian Clark from GNOME, he has brought to my attention as well as to the attention of Planet GNOME readers, that there is an Earth Hour plugin ...read more...
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Last week I’ve spent some time on adding grouping support to extenders, and laid the foundation for grouping jobs in the plasma systemtray. The grouping support for extenders is accomplished through the new ExtenderGroup class. ExtenderGroup is a subclass of ExtenderItem that adds an expand/collapse button to show or hide all ExtenderItems that belong to this group. You can add ExtenderItems to a group by calling setGroup on the items. The grouping support for jobs currently uses this feature to show the total progress of all jobs. By expanding the group you can view all individual jobs. See this screenshot to see what this currently looks like: 
The green arrow (we’ll need a better icon for that) hides the 2 jobs, keeping only the “2 running jobs” part. The nice thing about this is that by default you’ll only see this total progress when copying stuff, which doesn’t take up as much space as the detailed individual jobs. You can also notice the ...read more...
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The problem with not blogging regularly is that I forget about things I want to share with all of you, and then I start upright in the middle of a paragraph in the book I'm reading ("The Billionaire's Vinegar") or whatever I'm doing and feel compelled to wander towards the computer.
What was it this time? Two little non-world-shattering things:
First, it always fascinates me how facile the mind is at the most unexpected times. For instance, while sleeping. When I first got my current cell phone (I went for years without one, actually) I never noticed when it was ringing: my mind just wasn't used to a phone that wasn't on my desk ringing having anything to do with me what-so-ever. Now, however, it wakes me from my sleep.
Yesterday I was sleeping soundly and someone called around 6:45. The phone was in the living room, but my mind nudged me (just barely) awake and I stumbled out to get it. I'll sleep through all sorts of noise and mayhem .. but things my mind decides ...read more...
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