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 Congratulations everyone on a great KDE 4.5 release! Those of you who are in the Washington DC Metro area are invited to celebrate on Saturday August 21st at Piratz Tavern in Silver Spring, MD at 7:00PM. Bring your geeky, open source, and K-curious friends (those of the Gnome persuasion are also welcome). Please RSVP to celeste at kde dot org so I can reserve an appropriately large table. 
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| The developers behind the KDE project have officially released version 4.5 of the KDE Software Collection.
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| Eike has been collecting KDE sightings in movies and tv series for quite a while already. It seems he’ll have to add books as well now. One of our attentive users (thank you!) brought this to my attention today: 
Amarok gets mentioned in “The Fuller Memorandum”, the new SiFi book by Charles Stross. Rocking! 
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| As a followup to my post on finding a name for the until then unnamed sports and activity tracking application I have been writing I’d like to thank all commenters on the blog entry for their valuable input, their ideas and suggestions and of course for their kind words. It sure has been uplifting to read so much enthusiastic posts in response to an application that has not even been released yet. Now for the thrilling yet hard part: I had to pick one of the many, many good suggestions for an application name that all of you made. I had a few ideas and requirements what I would like the name to be like — and maybe those ideas are valid for more than just this one application: - The name should be easy to remember. Some imaginative and creative name that no one can remember for longer than five minutes is going to do more harm than good.
- And old-skool name like “KAktivity” (i.e., lots of K’s everywhere) is not, at least in my opinion, ...read more...
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| KOffice Developer Meeting . Akademy time! One Kexi dev was available for hugs^wdiscussion; chatted a bit with the ownCloud hackers about exposing Kexi databases though it, KDevelop guys about injecting Kexi database plugin in a form of KDevelop's "Database view" and mobile guys about possible options for Kexi Mobile.
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| Custom brush was disabled feature for quite a long time in Krita and I resurrected the feature from the dust in week 30. Further testing uncovered a lot of bugs. First bug occurred when you used color mask as grayscale mask. The mip-mapping levels were still grayscale when you returned from grayscale mode to color mode, so the brush looked grayscale even when you wanted to paint in color. Fixed. When you paint in mode “Use color as mask” with some predefined brush, the colorful image is converted into gray scale image first. But for the mip-mapping it is converted to masks, where white means transparent and black means opaque. We had bug in computing grayscale-convert-to-mask. Fixed. Another use-case when we convert color image is when we create custom brushes. You can save colorful brush (with RGBA) and then paint with it as mask if you want with Use color as mask mode or you can select Use color as mask in the custom dialog and the brush will be saved as grayscale. In the later option your brush file ...read more...
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Why do I need KDE Software on Windows? Use Linux instead! That's much better anyway.
Yeah, that's right. But there are situations where that strategy does not work.
I am sitting in the office and are still fascinated by RKWard (as I blogged before). So I kindly asked our IT guys to give me an old notebook to install Linux onto it. And because they are great colleagues they gave me one. (Yes, I come to the point soon.)
So I started to download openSUSE 11.3. But the network connection was so poor that after an hour or more the download was aborted and I had to start from the begin. If I only had a nice torrent client. (Now I come to the point.) ktorrent!
(Yes, there are other programs as well but perhaps I was searching for a reason.)
That was my chance to give KDE on Windows a try.
After downloading the installer (http://windows.kde.org/download.php) I clicked through the wizard until I came to the packages. What packages do I ...read more...
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| First of all, I apologize for my laziness in updating X2 with new code example. I have actually written quite a number of interesting examples, some of which have even been shown back in March, during my talk at Bossa Conference 10, though I did not find the time to clean up and polish them. Although I'd face new challenges in my upcoming adventure, I am quite confident I will reach the designated rate of new X2 example fortnightly. Now let's focus on the newest example: a minor modification to the previous accelerometer code on Nokia N900 [1]. There has been confusion with my statement there: put this function is a separate thread. This is the alternative to a non-blocking D-Bus code. The main goal of course is not to be able to get faster acceleration values per second, it is only to prevent your code from being blocked by the synchronous D-Bus call. Rather than just updating the code with the threaded version, I also added some ...read more...
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| Tellico is a collection manager for KDE. It includes default collections for books, bibliographies, comic books, videos, music, video games, coins, stamps, trading cards, and wines, and also allows custom collections.
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| By and large I don't really care about what Microsoft do - I don't use their software, and I actively avoid making my career dependent on them.
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| By and large I don't really care about what Microsoft do - I don't use their software, and I actively avoid making my career dependent on them. But I am a fan of the C# programming language and think the Qyoto/Kimono bindings for the Qt and KDE apis are pretty neat. However, the recent decision to lay off all the IronPython and IronRuby guys is so monumentally stupid, I don't know where to start. I still think C# and Mono are really innovative, and don't agree with all the Free Software trolling against them, even when it is from Richard Stallman himself. So what should we do? Arno is clearly not happy with working on C# bindings even though they are technically pretty amazing. Steve Ballmer why are you are still in charge?
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| Robin Burchell wrote up something on the various string classes which are available in Qt. Unfortunately, the comment function on his blog does not work for me, so I have to respond in a separate blogpost. Basically, Qt has two string classes. By “string”, I mean a chunk of memory which is interpreted as a set of consecutive characters. The most common string class, as Robin noted correctly, is QString, which stores the characters in UTF-16 internally. Robin then goes on to discuss std::string. It is, however, my opinion that std::string is of limited interest for Qt developers, unless they are going to interface with STL-based libraries. This is because std::string has a better equivalent with a more precise name: QByteArray. Both std::string and QByteArray are wrappers around the traditional char* character array. As such, they are best used in scenarios which do not depend on the locale. QString has a diverse set of conversion functions from and to QByteArray (or char*), each of which specifies its own ...read more...
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| Last time I wrote about offline routing in Marble: Calculating routes between two or more places without the need for Internet access. This was realized using gosmore. In the meantime Niko Sams added support for routino, another offline router, to Marble. My last commit adds traveling salesman support, an offline router written in java. All of this will not be available in KDE SC 4.5, but 4.6. Most users will only need zero or one offline routers. With three of them supported by Marble, the question arises which one to choose? Ignoring their underlying algorithms and configuration options for now, I collected some high-level statistics. They show the relative differences of map sizes and response times. The response time was taken as the minimum response time among three or more runs, each measuring the time from sending a route request to the application until the full retrieval of the response in Marble. I chose two routes, a short one and a longer one, and compared the response times ...read more...
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| Last weekend I received a postal package that contained a classroom atlas from Austria: the Neuer Kozenn Atlas. Inside there was a nice shiny CD with the title GEOTHEK Schulatlas, Version 1.1 Digitaler Weltatlas. The publisher of this atlas and its software is Ed. H
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Hi all,
A while ago I asked for comments from readers of the dot. There was a lot of valuable feedback which was noted by the dot editors and I'd like to summarize some of the findings. The dot team has unfortunately been quite busy with Real Life (TM) lately so we haven't had much chance of discussing the results yet but some things are already under way.
Ideas and feedback- Introduce a Like button - status: To be discussed
- Pace of articles - OK, so we keep the speed at 1 article/day
- More technical content like the famous 'Pillars of KDE 4' series by Troy - though one. The dot depends on YOU for content, at least to a large extend. While the promo team writes articles like interviews and reports from meetings, we often lack the technical skills/knowledge to really write about what's upcoming. We might be able to do something like a weekly report on what has been on the planet in terms of upcoming things, but otherwise - we need ...read more...
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DataEngines written in JavaScript can now offer Services. Sounds life changing, right? Ok, maybe not, but really, I swear it is! ;)
DataEngines publish data in a read-only pattern that allows the data to be accessed and shared by multiple consumers (or what we usually refer to as "visualizations"). The "read-only" part is a bit of an annoyance if the data being presented represents a live artifact. For instance, if a DataEngine was reporting on the network link, it might be nice to set the status of that network interface. Of if the DataEngine was publishing information about windows on screen, it might be nice to be able to say, "Hey, minimize that one." Or if the DataEngine shows information from an online service, it might be really useful to say, "By the way, here are my log in credentials for that service."
Plasma has the concept of a "Service", which does pretty much what it sounds like: it provides an interactive service that you can make calls to. What those calls do, exactly, is completely up ...read more...
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We are in full swing of electronic books, bubbles that are likely to explode into a new phase of the war between the old and new generations of publishers, content providers and consumers. It is likely that sheet music enter the battlefield.
Before proceeding I must warn you about two facts. One: despite the name of the blog, I am a Trekkie. Two: I am not a neutral observer. In my opinion traditional books publishing, as well as media labels, are going to lose. Those not able to adapt to changing times will disappear. Resistance is futile.
The musicians are going to adopt electronic lecterns sooner rather than later. The electronic scores begin to replace the editions printed on dead trees, as is already happening with books. There are some solutions on the market, more or less primitive.
MusicPad: Hardware and software.
How could you describe it? It is like a Kindle with legs. There is a "Master" version with twice the surface. Among its outstanding features: it is completely silent. ...read more...
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This is a quick follow-up on my post from yesterday about adding content to Userbase and Techbase.
The good news is that two people (besides myself) have started adding content to the Plasma Panels page. There's a discussion thread with three people (including me) adding to it. This is great!
I added some links in the introduction section to text that refers to specific widgts, such as the system tray and tasks widget. If you're looking for something even more focused than "Panels in Plasma" to add to, log in to Userbase and click on one (or more :) of those links and start adding content.
I've also added the {{improve|reason why}} template from Techbase, and used it on the Panels page. This in turn gives us the auto-generated Needs Improvement page thanks to the use of categories. Looks like a nice start to getting lists together. I need to discuss with Anne about adding a Category to the {{under_construction}} template so we can start ...read more...
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| GCstar is a free open source application for managing your collections. Detailed information on each item can be automatically retrieved from the internet and you can store additional data, such as the location or who you've lent it to.
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Richard Hillesley wrote an articled title "Copyright assignment - Once bitten, twice shy" that was published today. When boiled down its essence, Richard said two things in the article:
- Forced assignment of copyright raises the barrier to participation and therefore limits the amount of participation.
- When someone else owns rights over your work, they can do nasty things to them.
Both of these statements are true. They are also not without provisos. Richard noted that the FSF provides a promise that it will never close the software up, for instance, which makes point two a matter of diligence: if you assign your copyright to someone without anything in return, such as a guarantee of how those rights will be managed (including termination of said rights should the other party break that guarantee), then you have just made a huge mistake.
It's not all roses for projects that avoid copyright assignment, though: Richard notes the four years that the Squeak community has spent trying to get a license change through. When it comes time to defend ...read more...
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I had the pleasure to meet Aleix Pol and Stu Jarvis at Akademy. They guided me the way to KDE EDU and scientific apps for KDE.
Weeks later I am sitting in my office doing some statistics. The funny thing is, that your brain sometimes is useful and I remembered an app called rkwrd or something.
My friend google told me that it is called RKWard and that it is not a KDE Application. It is an application based on kdelibs (it I see that right).
At home I fired up my kBook and installed the packages for r and RKWard. After a quick look into some of the nice tutorials I could do my first analysis and the linear regression I wanted to do. Brilliant. What a fantastic application. And I had such a hard time during my studies calculating statics by hand.
The other advantage is that I am reminded that I wanted to invest more time for the promotion of KDE EDU (inculding ...read more...
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Today is my last day at Qualcomm. It still feels like yesterday when I set foot in this continent, started some fun with X2, enjoyed Brazil, had this meet-up in Cupertino, did little exploration around San Diego, and then got blessed with a cute boy. Time really flies. Now it's already time to move on, again (though this time without a geeky resignation). I will miss Snapdragon (the pictured HTC EVO is powered by the said platform). Or any other dragons. Those who are annoyed by a certain obsession of mine probably can guess where I'm heading to. In the grand mission of inspiring and pushing developers to write better and more exciting applications, a particular productivity barrier needs to be broken. And I dropped enough (subtle) hints in my previous ...read more...
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| KDE 4.5 will be released in the next days with the most polished Kate/KWrite and KatePart during the KDE 4.x series. A lot of work went into fixing bugs and cleaning up old code for this release. Many important aspects where redone, just to enumerate a few: - encoding detection & handling
- the text buffer
- the undo/redo system (thanks Bernhard)
- search/replace (thanks again Bernhard)
- handling cursors and ranges
- improved spell checking (thanks Michel)
- improved indentation (thanks Milian)
- speed improvements (Milian too)
- better JS scripting (Dominik)
- porting of KDevelop to new interfaces (David Nolden)
It will be the most unit-tested release of KatePart ever I guess, but still a long way to go until we have a good test coverage. (we just scratch the surface) Many thanks to the people contributing to this release (not only to the ones named above or below!), without that much helping hands, never such an amount of cool stuff would have happened  I guess one of the real kickoffs was the great Kate/KDevelop sprint in Berlin, handled by ...read more...
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| I just released version 0.2.1 of Colibri, the passive alternative to KDE4 plasma notifications. Here are the most important changes. On the notifications themselves: - Consecutive notifications are now merged. This is quite handy when someone sends you three consecutive messages on IRC for example: instead of showing three bubbles on after the other, the current notification will grow and integrate the next message. This only happen for notifications from the same application, with the same title.
- The notification bubble follows the Plasma look more closely: it features the same background halo behind text and can take advantage of blurred background when running on KDE 4.5.
The configuration module has been improved as well: - It is now possible to select on which monitor the notifications will appear.
- A "Preview" button has been added.
- It is easier to setup Colibri on your machine: the configuration module will warn you if another notification system is running and let you start Colibri if it is not running.
 ...read more...
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| I frequently find myself wanting to look through the Qt source or look through a couple of commits. I could keep a copy of Qt checked out on all the computers I use, and flick through the repository using git command-line or qgit or even git instaweb, but this is usually less convenient than simply heading over to gitorious. Unfortunately, gitorious is notoriously sluggish and I find their site design a bit hindering as well. So I’ve decided to mirror Qt’s repository on my personal server running cgit, which is much much faster than Gitorious. It’s synced once an hour by cron. And if nobody abuses this, I’ll keep it open for the community. I’m not sure if I’m syncing it in the ideal way, however. I ran git remote add origin git://blabla, and then I run this to sync: #!/bin/sh
cd $(dirname "$0")
git fetch --all --tags --prune &&
rm -f refs/heads/* &&
mv -vf ...read more...
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| Yes, this is basically a job ad. The openSUSE Boosters team is expanding again (when will it ever stop?) and we're looking for another member. If you want to work full time on Linux, enjoy the idea of building a community around the distribution and think you have the right skills why not apply and have the chance to work with me, Lubos Lunak, Stephan Kulow, Klaas Freitag and many other people you know from the KDE and wider Free Software scene?
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Marco's been doing some more amazing work on Plasma Mobile. Given that its running on a device with a 2+ year old Intel mobile CPU, this is pretty cool:
Marco and I have been making progress on the Plasma Shell Design document as well, on step at a time. A lot of the information that is there is being externalized from our minds for the first time ever, and it's really long overdue. Some illustrations of things like the usage of the different quadrants of the scene for different kinds of items would be nice, but are beyond my skill to make look nice and professional. Still, progress... :)
I also did a small proof of concept yesterday, when Aaron P. came up to visit from Washington so we could give him a jumpstart on KDE development, that answered the question: is the current Javascript-based Plasma Shell Scripting powerful enough to use to write a Javascript that could be fed back in through the Plasma Shell Scripting ...read more...
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...read more... 