Irc-Unix.net

Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications.

This morning KDE is waking up to a shiny new Planet blog aggregator. I'm not sure what caused this, but there are reports the old host didn't want the CPU load on their server any more, many thanks to them for having put up with it for many years. Fortunately I'd been working on a new Planet started by Chris Lee using rawdog and my own Rawdog RSS plugin. The design comes from the exceedingly cool Oxygen dudes, Nuno and Ruphy.

Interestingly the first comments from a lot of people are about it using Launchpad as a tracker for feed requests. I don't know why people have issues with Launchpad when most KDE developers have used Sourceforge, Google code or for that matter the no-code-published old Planet KDE without moaning. If someone can tell me how to use bugs.kde.org without going through a long wizard asking for which compiler is used I'll happily change but currently Launchpad is the simplest and best tool for the job. You can also just ...read more...

I've been working for Hyves now, and these were pretty intensive weeks. I never realized how much, exactly, I owe to people like Alexander Neundorf for the KDE build system. We have spent time setting up a cmake-based build system on three platforms, an automated update system for our product, unittests, I've spent time evaluating Squish for automated GUI tests -- in short, we're doing all the Right Things at the Right Moment, that is, before we're actually starting coding. I wish my cmake book weren't for 2.2, instead of 2.6.

But as I said, these have been pretty intensive weeks. If you've sent me mail, in particular if it is a long mail that needs a considered answer, and you haven't had an answer yet, well, this is why. I simply haven't had time to write long, considered mails.

And I haven't had time to hack on Krita either. Part of that is because while I've got some spare time on the train, I haven't had the time to setup a KOffice development environment under ...read more...

The last two weeks I haven’t done anything on KDE/Nepomuk/Amarok (Does that statement qualify for posting this on planetkde? ), but for a good reason: It’s getting cold outside.
So time to get back to an old project of me: I wanted to measure the gas usage of my gas heating in real-time and come up with the idea to use a mobile phone with a camera for that. The plan was to have the camera of a mobile phone looking on the burner and recognize if the flame is there or not. That should work under the assumption, that the burning duration is directly related to the used gas volume.

So I picked my old Nokia 6680 (Symbian S60 2nd FP2) (oh I am glad that you can now program it in Python using PyS60) and started work on a proof of concept.

To make it short: After not working on it for about 10 month, I manged to get it to work.

A small Python program calculates the amount of blue ...read more...

The reason i work on global and local shortcuts is because i care about them. I use heavily adapted desktop setups both under linux and windows. And that for years. Global shortcuts are an important part of these setups. Having to use the mouse makes me itchy.

Over this i time developed a global shortcuts setup that works for both on windows and linux. I tend to get angry if one of them doesn't work. Using them for more than five years makes me trying to use them unconsciously even if i know they don't work. Which frustrates me.

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A very bad expression:

23462376427 ^ 2132323

Question is which computer languages can give me the answer without much trouble ? Haskell did.

Linked by Andrew Youll on Sat 29th Oct 2005 16:57 UTC, submitted by Ali Akcaagac Jes Hall, credible supporter of the KDE community has set up this months new SVN report which primarily targets the mature ...

Before reading further... Are you looking for great Linux hosting from a company that cares about GNU/Linux? Pick Dreamhost hosting , get a 10% bonus to the disk space Amarok sure inspires a lot of KDE-envy for ...

This is a big day for me: after 15 years, my last day as an astronomer.

After three years of trying, I wasn't able to get a faculty job, so this year I started applying for non-academic positions. Those applications were basically all dead ends, which has been pretty frustrating.

Then, just a few weeks ago, I got an email that an ex-astronomer now working in biotech was looking for someone with an astronomer's sensibilities for imaging data analysis. So, I emailed him. Two days later, we had a phone interview; two days after that I flew out for an on-site interview; two days after that they offered me the job. It's all happened head-spinningly fast, but my wife and I are very excited about this new chapter in our lives, and especially about getting to live in the SF bay area!

So, here I sit among the boxes of stuff in my house waiting to be loaded onto a truck. Moving is so interesting. I find that my brain is unable to grok the concept that I'm really moving ...read more...

Name: Kattatra Menporul
Author: Richard M. Stallman
Translation by: Sri Ramadoss M
Published by: Aazhi Publishers, Kodambakkam, Chennai - 24. Ph: +91 44 43587585

The book will be released as part of following events:

1) Software Freedom Day Celebrations - 2008
Jaya Engineering College,
Thirunindravur,
Chennai.

Date: 20 Sep 08
Time: 9.30 AM

Contact Person: Sivaji - +91 99415 71690
URL: http://jayafossclub.org/

2) Freedom & Software Meeting
Russian Cultural Center
27 Kasturi Ranga Road, (near Cathedral Road)
Chennai-600018

Date: 21 Sep 2008
Time: 4.00 PM

Contact Person: N Balaji - +91 98407 87427
URL: http://www.freedomandsoftware.info/

You are cordially invited to attend the event(s) and pass on this message. Lets make it a memorable one.

PS: You ...read more...

If there was a blogger award for "Most likely to make timely posts", then in no possible world would I even be considered for the award.

The openSUSE KDE team is holding a Bug Squashing event to work through the KDE bug reports in bugzilla.novell.com this weekend. Among the goals are reporting non-openSUSE specific bugs to bugs.kde.org and closing duplicates to reports within bugs.kde.org or bugzilla.novell.com - hope to see you!

Yes, KDE-4.2 will be 32 times faster deleting a large number of files compared to KDE-4.1! I was looking at the highest-voted bugs last Monday , and bug 43356 was about konqueror taking too much time deleting a ...

Rahul Sundaram, long time contributor to Fedora talks about how he started working on Fedora.
Watch it on Youtube or download the ogg.

Yes, KDE-4.2 will be 32 times faster deleting a large number of files compared to KDE-4.1!

I was looking at the highest-voted bugs last Monday (yes, voting _is_ useful in bugzilla, some people weren't sure about that), and bug 43356 (260 votes) was about konqueror taking too much time deleting a large number of files (in kde-3.0, but still true in 4.1).

I first made the KIO job itself 25 times faster for local files, but then it turned out that the KIO job was anyway "only" taking 35 seconds, out of the 8 minutes that konqueror-4.1 took for deleting 5000 times. The other 7 minutes and a half were spent updating the itemview, removing rows one row at a time. Ooops.

After making KDirLister emit a new itemsDeleted() signal with all items, and KDirModel processing this in a more clever way, the view is now told about the 5000 removed rows in one call, and deleting 5000 files with konqueror-trunk (or dolphin, same code) now takes only 15 seconds. That's 32 times faster.

Conclusions: Bugzilla rocks (and users report ...read more...

The KDE team has released KDE 3.5.8 , a maintenance release. New stuff: "Improvements in Konqueror and its web browsing component KHTML.

Once upon a time we had the whole of KDE included in Coverity 's code quality checker, which they kindly offer for free to FOSS projects.

In and Out in 10 minutes

As you may know, for the first time I decided to buy a computer via the internet. That is hard for me since I’m more of a walk into a store and get it right now type of person.

But I do try to change my behavior once in a while and I decided to buy a DELL XPS laptop computer with GNU/Linux pre-installed, my fears of buying something expensive like a laptop via the internet or phone have always been “processing” delays and having to return the product if it is faulty.

And wouldn’t you know it, It took 30 days to ship!!! and when I got my laptop it came with a busted backlight YAY DELL!!!

Cry not, do or do not. There is no Cry

Of course I’m an adult :-P so I see no point in crying over spilled milk. It seemed like a great opportunity to try out their “Customer Support” to get some “real experts” to help me $-P. After 30 minutes in ...read more...

So, I’m trying to think positively about the 3-hour battle I just had with X. I learned 2 new things today, which I didn’t really want to learn but yay nonetheless.

First, Xinerama. I’m going to be doing multiple monitor stuff for work, which should be really interesting if I can keep my self-imposed stress level down. I have never had more than a single monitor to use on any given desktop or laptop until I started working at VMware, and as such I am currently less than clueful with how all of this stuff works in X. (As an aside, if anyone can refer me to some really good documentation or multi-head/multi-screen/multi-monitor/multi-display Linux/X resources, I’d greatly appreciate it!) So today I was looking into a bug report that had to do with a Twinview side-by-side display configuration, and I discovered that “xdpyinfo -ext XINERAMA” will tell you what the screen topology looks like currently. For example, my normal Twinview cloned 1680×1050 setup looks like this:

XINERAMA version 1.1 opcode: 158
head #0: 1680×1050 @ 0,0

… whereas if ...read more...

… your technology-agnostic girlfriend asks you to install GNU/Linux Linux on her laptop. Only Linux ? Yes, ONLY Linux. *Phew*