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This evening I’ve been playing a bit with Flattr. Flattr gives you the opportunity to do micro-donations to blogs, articles or projects you like. When you do that, in return, you can also receive Flattrs.

Say you want to donate 5 euro each month to projects you care about. Paypal could be used if they have a donate button, but that’s kind of an annoying system to use for this type of donations.

Flattr makes donating easy. When you see a Flattr button next to an article you like, you can press it. It counts as one ‘click’.At the end of the month your 5 euro will be divided by all articles or projects you gave a click to. If you clicked 5 times on such a button, each will get 1 euro. When say 20 different people did that, the author could receive a nice, flattering, amount of money.

You can add a Flattr-button next to the blogs you write, sites you have or projects you run. That way you have a nice and easy ...read more...

Yesterday I finally upgraded my Kdemod setup to 4.5.0. First of all, it rocks! Second, we hit a nasty problem in KMyMoney that might have delayed the whole release tomorrow. KMyMoney took over 2 minutes to start after the upgrade. Normally, it took 2 seconds. Also, it was using 10 times the amount of RAM.

Planet KDE is your insight into the lives and activities of KDE, a community making lovely free software.

Planet KDE is your insight into the lives and activities of KDE, a community making lovely free software.

Occationally I get asked to add feeds to Planet KDE which aren't KDE contributor blogs. News feeds, user blogs and non-English blogs are the usual requests. So today, thanks to the helps of others, I've updated our software and added opt-in support for these different types of feeds. Just click the configure button at the top of the page.

If you have a KDE project news feed (including KDE related distro news), a KDE user blog, or a KDE blog in Spanish or another language do file a bug or add it yourself to the feed (it's in svn) with the new define_feedclass attribute.

I also updated the software to Rawdog 2.12 which should help keep the memory usage on the server down.

Thanks to Ade, Stuart and Kurt for helping with various bits.

There is not much time to work on KSudoku recently. But I think I found the reason why generating some puzzles takes forever. And maybe it will benefit from an idea that might also improve difficulty of the puzzles.

At the moment I'm relocating. I'm moving to my first own apartment together with my girlfriend. Until now I stayed with friends or lived in dorms. So I'm looking forward to how it will be. At the same time there is much work to do at my job as we are approaching the release of our project. And the begin of writing my bachelor thesis is approaching. So not much time left for developing on KDE.

KSudoku is currently hardly of any use. Games are much to easy to solve and some games couldn't be even generated. The reason for freezing during generation of Jigsaw-puzzles is a rather simple one. And very hard to solve at the same time.

KSudoku generates puzzles by solving an empty one. As long as it can't solve with logic it tries to insert values at ...read more...

While I'm in the mood for posting solutions to technical problems, here's another. I have a OBD interface cable for my VW Bora so that I can run a piece of software called VCDS (sometimes known as VAG-COM) and read the error codes from my car's ECU. However, when I plug in the cable (it's the USB version), it is usually assigned to COM7. Unfortunately, the VCDS programme only supports COM1-4.

Weirdly, the solution for me is to plug the cable in and run VCDS settings. If I choose COM3 then it successfully detects a COM port - I think it's used by the built in model. I save the settings, and then bring up the Device Manager and change the port used by the interface cable to COM3. It says the port is already in use, but lets you change it anyway. Then I just use the VCDS software and it works. This seems completely wrong, and to be honest, I'm sure there's probably a better way of doing it than this, but at least it works.

...read more...

Uhhh what?

With Doxygen, we have at hand a solid and widely-known open-source solution for the generation of API documentation. However, it is quite inconvenient when one has to use yet another tool as part of the daily hacking. So today, I looked into how I can integrate the generation of API documentation with my CMake workflow. Because I found no easy how-to on the web, I’m putting up one now.

The base situation is like this: In your source tree is somewhere a Doxyfile, which you previously used to generate documentation by running doxygen in this directory. Rename this file to “Doxyfile.in” and change the line that looks like

INPUT = ../src/

into

INPUT = @CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR@/../src/

(Of course, substitute “../src/” by what’s actually in there.) Now add the following to the CMakeLists.txt of this directory:

# add a target to generate API documentation with Doxygen
find_package(Doxygen)
if(DOXYGEN_FOUND)
configure_file(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/Doxyfile.in ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/Doxyfile @ONLY)
add_custom_target(doc
${DOXYGEN_EXECUTABLE} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/Doxyfile
WORKING_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}
...read more...

@planetkde-readers: this is one of my personal posts, hope you don’t mind

Here’s wishing all Indians a happy Independence day. Let us use your freedom responsibly. We’ve come a long way and there’s a longer way to go. We can start by following traffic rules, obey the law… Just be nice to everyone, your countrymen as they are our family and everyone else, because that’s what our country teaches us: respect towards all and unbiased harmony. Let us not view a religion or a caste, see people and continue strengthing the bond that holds us all in this diverse country of ours.

Let us acknowledge the sacrifices of our martyrs. Acknowledge the things our leaders of today have done and let us commit to the changes that must be.

And again, let us all pledge to use our freedom wisely.

Jai hind

Marble 0.10.0 has been released as a major update last week together with KDE SC 4.5 . As a user you might be interested in our Visual ChangeLog which is also available in spanish over at muylinux.com . But Marble is also a library .

The website is now on a new server, which is a lot faster than the old one and software/hardware is fresh again.
Hope the problems we had in the past few weeks are over now.
No other real downtimes are planned, perhaps some reboots but nothing more than some minutes
Hope I can now finally setup my planned automated unit-tests and build
The DNS transfer seems to be faster than thought, still some people might arrive at the old server, where now only a stupid “Maintainance” page is up. The IP of the new server is 85.214.230.250.

Of course there are already a number of good media players available, such as Amarok, Banshee, or Dragon, currently KDE's default media player.

Hi all!

Tomorrow will be held in Teresina (Piauí, Brazil) Release Party of KDE SC 4.5! The date and place were changed because of the postponement of the launch of this new version. Now the party will be held tomorrow (14) in a town near Teresina, Timon, in Maranhão state. This is KDE-PI across borders! The date and place were changed, but the activities remain the same:

• Presentation of version 4.5
• Compiling version 4.5
• Beer!
• Cajuína :D (A typical drink of Piauí)
• Mangueira ;) (A typical alcoholic drink of Piauí)
• Four Cheese Pasta Sauce!

We expect a good tasting foods and beverages and too of KDE SC 4.5!

We are still waiting for 67 people to convert their account from password to ssh. As we can not shut down passwd based svn access until they are all done, we will probably not make our next deadline. Today for example we made no progress at all.

Those 67 are the contributors that have used their password based account this year, so we will not move forward without them. Please do not complain that we won’t make our deadlines!

As I promised more than a week ago, today I’ll show you the progress done with the authentication framework, starting with signing a plasmoid with PlasMate, uploading that plasmoid and its signature to opendesktop.org within PlasMate, and retrieve it with the Widget Explorer  “Download widget dialog”. Originally, I planned to show a more detailed screencast [...]

In the last weeks, the homepage was sometimes down, as the server it is on is slowly dying. I just negotiate the transfer to a new one. That one will allow additional stuff to be run, guess we than even have nightly unit test runs (at least I hope so)

Therefor it may be, that the site is not reachable, as DNS transfer might always take some days.

Do not think that because I’m not blogging too much those days, I quit KDE or something, actually each day that passes I’m more and more involved within kde ( and I have Helio Castro asking me to not be the superman that I’m trying to, just to prove =p ).

I just moved again, from Florianopolis to São Paulo, and so I’m not yet fully setup here, so my internet connection *really* suck a lot, but that doesn’t keep me from working. talking about Work, I moved from a really cool company that does Asterisk Boards here in Brazil, Khomp to a really cool company that dows Qt around the world, KDAB. I’m now co-worker of Nuno Pinheiro, Guilliermo Amaral and David Faure, oh my… *-*

A new era is born in KDE now, for the first time ever there is an Intern working for 4 hours per day in kde-related projects with k’approval ( Thanks Cornelius o/ ), his name is Alex Raymond, I’m mentoring him in Plasma for 2 weeks ...read more...

Like told in previous posts here and there, KDE 4.6 won’t have a KatePart that supports the SmartInterface but instead KatePart moves on to the new and shiny (and much simpler) MovingInterface for the handling of automatic moving cursors and ranges.

Now the big cut is done: KatePart in /trunk no longer implements the SmartInterface. KDevelop already adopted the new interface in a development branch, lets see how that all evolves.

• "Friends invited me to do something for free software."
• "I feel accepted. / The members of the KDE community were open."
• "It was not hard to ...read more...

It's time to head off to that wonderful land of KDE where the desktop only gets better and better with each release.

Let me introduce a small project I’ve been working on with a friend of mine, Giuseppe Capizzi. The project is called jump and

News for all your Linux folks - KDE 4.5 has been released, and it contains a 1,723 new features, along with 16,022 bug fixes.

Today I finally decided that the way I use objdump could be improved. Every time I wanted to take a look at the code that GCC had produced (which I do about 10 times per day on average these days) I would execute "objdump -dwC |less" and possibly have a vim with the sources open in a different Konsole tab. For some more intensive debugging/optimization sessions I'd redirect the objdump output to a file and open that file and the source file inside one vim process (:vsplit is my friend).

But then I asked myself why vim doesn't understand all by itself that I want to look at the output of objdump whenever I open an executable... So I looked how the gzip filter was implemented and then did my own little hack. I also found a little nicer syntax file on the web as well so I combined that all to:

KDE today celebrates its semi-annual release event , releasing new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Development Platform and a large number of applications available in their 4.5.0 versions.

On Saturday we had a series of talks about KDE 4.5. It took place in FM La Tribu, an alternative radio station, always willing to help Free Culture movements.

About 10-15 people gathered there to listen to Juanma, Mariano, and others talk about the features offered by KDE. Myself, I talked about the applications in KDE Finance, and also about how to develop within KDE. I hope we see some new contributors coming in.

Now I work for Sencha, the company behind the leading JavaScript frameworks such as Sencha Touch, Ext JS, Ext GWT, Ext Designer, jQTouch, Rapha

Ryan Melton announced on the kde-bindings mailing list that he had set up a project on github called 'qtbindings' with the aim of doing cross-platform gems for QtRuby.

My last blog was long ago. I know, this is bad, i should blog every week, but well i didn’t really had interesting news.

I was doing very much small changes, tweaks, bug fixes, layouting code and much more. The last bigger addition was the minimal shade selector, I will talk about it in a few lines.

But first here is a small summary, of what i was doing since the last blog post: I’ve connect the colour selectors to the resource manager, made the settings save to kritarc, added a tab in krita preferences (thanks Boud for the new registry, that was needed for that), added a colour history, moved the settings button to a more space efficient place, implemented drag and drop for colours, shortcuts for quick access and an api for setting a colour. The last point was actually much more difficult, than it sounds, because of the way, the selectors work with colour spaces. The selector has to search for the colour, that generates the user visible colour by using the colour spaces. ...read more...