Irc-Unix.net

Historically, the GGZ approach to consistent multiplayer games on the desktop was to offload all the non-game specific tasks like login, chat and game start into special applications called core clients. After a while, this turned out to be a terrific idea but it contradicted the behaviour of most players. Their usual workflow is to start the game first and then switch to online mode rather than the other way around. For some time now, all the necessary components to allow this alternative path have been available for Gtk+ game integration, but no such widget framework has existed for KDE. (In all fairness, the first game ever with embedded core client support was Widelands which uses SDL.)

This is now changing: With the introduction of the classes GameCoreClient and KGGZCoreLayer, games can easily integrate either an off-the-shelf multiplayer control panel with a list of players and running games, or pieces thereof through the lower-level EmbeddedCoreClient class. Both widgets and standard actions like connect to game as spectator or launch new game are ...read more...

As promised, I’ve written in under 100 lines of JavaScript (QtScript) a service for Amarok that plugs into ZX2C4 Music (ReadMe for ZX2C4 Music, Source for ZX2C4 Music). Obligatory screenshot:

The Amarok scripting API is very slick, especially the scripted services API.

It is not now configurable and is rather inefficient because getlisting.php does not support very complex queries (though I do take advantage of its sorting on lines 54-57), but this will be changed by the time I release an installable version of the script. Currently, it downloads a listing of the entire collection during the first request (lines 27-33), and then just reads from an in-memory database (multidimensional array) to query the different levels (lines 34-95). TMI: too much iteration.

Unfortunately there are some ...read more...

A post on the KDE forum motivated me to write some info about what's new with Kexi 2.0. For sanity I groupped a set of quickies as an 2.0 Alpha 12 changelog. For uninformed, most applications within KOffice will meet the stable 2.0 release (already passed a promising RC1 stage), while Kexi and Kivio neds more time for development. The hope is to synchronize nicely at the 2.1 stage.

"The main highlights behind Alpha 12 is a completely new Report Designer, and Property Editor, both based on new Qt 4's facilities. Report Designer is a creative fork of OpenRPT libraries, and already makes up a rich reporting tool that well integrates with Kexi principles. Property Editor is a component used by any designer in Kexi, i.e. currently Table, Query, Form, Report and Script Designer. The new quality of the Property Editor will hopefully improve user experience.
As a true Free and Open Source Software project, Kexi has enjoyed more new developments such as Oracle and ...read more...

I'm not sure how I arrived at the website of the Times Literary Supplement and found a review of a book based on Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour Du Pin Gouvernet's memoirs, "Journal D'une Femme de Cinquante Ans". But is fascinating reading, these memoirs of a lady who was a maid-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and who lives through revolutions, wars, exile and everything.

And I was so glad when I found the e-text! It was only released on March 15th... I haven't read a lot of French lately, but the nineteeth century French Lucie Dillon writes is really easy to read, probably because the French I was taught at school was already fifty years out of date back in the eighties.

But now for the sad part: it's only part 1! The fun bits, where she lives in America as an exile, making her own butter, and where she returns to Europe to hob-nob with Napoleon are missing! Please, Mireille Harmelin and Eric Vautier, I want to read on!

The RC2 release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is now available . This RC2 version provides some updates on major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26, X.org server 1.6, and kernel 2.6.29. This RC2 version proposes also nearly all of the 2009 Spring design.

People reading planet will have seen Thomas Zander's post about the new ItemViews framework the Trolls^H^H^HQt Software guys have been working on. It's very experimental right now, but I thought I'd have a quick look. I decided that a fun hack to write would be to take a standard listview that displays a list of URLs (boring!) and write a custom view that instead displays the rendered web page. I only spent a couple of hours on it, so the code is a hack (eg. you need to resize it to get the pages to display once they've loaded) but the results look ok. The whole code for this example comes in under 120 lines.





So, that's my hack in response to Thomas's challenge, who's next?

We have been working hard since the release of Amarok 2.0, building on the foundation we laid with 2.0. Now it is time to release the first beta version of Amarok 2.1. Please read the release notes and help us find and fix remaining bugs for 2.1.

Breathe., originally uploaded by LunaDiRimmel.

Get your last minute conference submissions in for the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit July 3-11 2009. We are looking for 30 minute KDE and Cross-Desktop talks, Lightning talks, and Technical papers. Abstracts are sent to akademy-talks at kde dot org. See the Call for Participation for more details. Remember, authors of accepted technical papers get a free Coke or beer. Hurry, because the CfP ends Friday (April 10 2009)!

Btw, have I mentioned:

In the '05-'06 Stanley Cup run, I grew a pretty substantial playoff beard, just for the heck of it. (see fig. 1, pictured right)

This time, the Hurricanes are doing a great charity event for the Kids 'N Community Foundation: the Beard-A-Thon!

When the regular season games are over, I'm going to shave, and then grow a playoff beard as hard as I can.

Now, as I mentioned, it's a charity event, and I need you folks to help me out, by pledging at the Beard-A-Thon page. Don't forget to enter "Benjamin Reed" where it says, " There's a specific beard grower I'd like to support."

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The open source KOffice project has announced the availability of the first release candidate of the next generation, version 2.0, which may be the last release before the final 2.0. According to its developers, the goal of the RC1 release is to determine whether the code 'measures up' to the standards for a 2.0 release, but also say the final 2.0 ...

Only the KDE Summer of Code admins still have a huge task before them -- making the final selection for KDE of the summer of code projects.

On April 1st and 2nd a delegation from Amarok visited OpenExpo in Berne , together with our FOSS homies from KDE and Kubuntu.

Software returning to the market with a new version, backed by an Indian firm. In addition, the source article claimed GoBE Software was closing a deal on buying the BeOS operating system from what can only be Access.

You know it’s spring when travels to Berne, Switzerland, hit you again. Regardless of the weather of course. Although this time, it did feel like spring over there and on the day I left for Oslo again, it was really warm, too warm actually for my thick woolen jacket. On the other hand, the jacket was more than needed on my walk from the bus stop to my apartment in Oslo.

Ah well, back to the subject…

After my disastrous train trip South, in Bern itself all went rather smoothly. The hotel was easy to find and I fell into the bed right away. On Wednesday morning, we quickly set up our booth at the OpenExpo and started the day with strong coffee and Gipfeli (a.k.a. Croissants in the rest of the world). There was some confusion with the original hall layout but after some reshuffling, everybody was happy.

...read more...

This Sunday I went to OLPC Pune meet to give a talk on activity development. The students seem be very enthusiastic. The talk lasted for around 2 hours. Photos can be found here.

On the other side, I was looking for a photo catalogue software which can catalogue my photos on DVD or any other removable media, it should  also allow me to search them based on EXIF data and tags and should show thumbnail(s) in the result.
I generally use digikam and gthumb too manage and view the photos. In digikam I never being properly able to catalogue photos on DVD (never tried on the last few updates) and gthumb is too slow in showing the thumbnail or full screen views for the large size photos I take. I prefer gthumb over over digikam to view the photos due to the simpler UI.

Finally decided to write my own app for this, which will *not* have any editing features, Gimp ...read more...

There are still five days left to submit a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2009. The deadline is on Friday, April 10th. Akademy happens as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year. See more details about what we are looking for in the call for presentations. Akademy is the prime occasion for meeting the community, and present and discuss your ideas. Lots of great initiatives were kick-started at Akademy. Don't miss out on this opportunity and submit your proposal now!

Personally I'm particularly interested three kinds of presentations:

• First I would like to see presentations about the beauty of KDE. KDE 4 shines, and I would love to meet the people who make it shine at Akademy, and hear how they did it, and what we can expect in the future. That's not only limited to beautiful graphics. Elegant code, organic user interfaces, beautiful APIs, engines which enable a beautiful desktop, fluffy-bunny themed Chuck Norris, all this falls under this category.
• Second I would like to hear ...read more...