"The KDE team is getting very close to a final release of KDE 4.4. The second release candidate came out yesterday as a testing platform for users and developers to find and squash bugs before the final release date of February 9th.
Last year a lot of people were attending FOSDEM. This year, 10th anniversary and everything, it seems that very few people are visiting Brussels on Febrary 6th and 7th and attending the largest Open Source conference in Europe.
Anyways, I am attending
NB: Comments on this blog do not work due to a hosting issue
I’ve written an article about KAuth, the new authentication framework in KDE SC 4.4. Earlier today, Linux-Comminity has published it. Go and read it (if you understand German) :)
To date, all of my work has looked at SVN artifacts and the contributors who interact with them: add, delete, modify, move etc. On a couple of occasions I have been asked why I do not look into the artifacts. I never really had a good answer and so now I have got around to it.
The question, I guess, is why would anyone want to look into the artifacts when looking into the health of a community? My previous work has shown how certain contributors can be shown to be responsible for lots of artifacts and lots of commits. But what are they doing to those artifacts with those commits? For all we know (based on the work so far) they are making trivial changes to the same line of code over and over.
As a start I have made use of svn blame to gather data one who “owns” each line of code in KMail. The script I used to achieve this looks like this:
Hi guys, I was preparing this summary of blogs and other coverage of Camp KDE to forward to our sponsors to show the activity occurring at the event. I figured I'd share it with the planet, if you folks are interested. If blogging is a measure of productivity, we certainly set the bar high. :) Dot.kde.org Posts (during and around the event only):
"OpenOffice.org is the popular Linux office suite. But if you're looking for something a bit leaner, faster, and with an efficient modern interface, give KOffice a try.
So if you’ve used kdesvn-build to build some of the modules that are hosted on Gitorious then you are probably familiar with an error that always comes up when doing the initial checkout. This error is so famous that every “how to build using kdesvn-build” guide I’ve seen over the past couple of months have mentioned that the clone step for qt-copy would need to be done manually.
A Konversation developer, argonel, noticed the issue the other day and got in touch with me, so I had him strace the output of the (successful) manual run and the (unsuccessful) kdesvn-build run. It wasn’t initially super helpful although it clarified what was going on (the gitorious.org end of the connect was closed on their end for some reason).
That was the conclusion of that, but then I get an email the next day from argonel saying that he’d done more digging, and that it was a known issue which could be worked around by adding the -v flag to git, which forces progress output to ...read more...
This country continues to surprise me. Take the concept of lite beer, bringing the taste of this beverage to a new low. Or the fastfoodizing of practically every kind of food you can imagine. And at the same time - fruit and vegetable snack trays in the supermarkets which must be scary healthy to some. Amazing.
Van Camp KDE 2010 - Banana Bungalows, THE place to be in San Diego :D
Then the breakfast - I've had sandwiches with peanut butter and jelly every day, certainly something crazy I'm gonna keep around. However, I won't ever even contemplate having a breakfast at a restaurant around here. I tried an American breakfast 2 years ago in San Fran, and since then I know it's not for me. Way overkill, I'd consider the average breakfast here a heavy dinner... I've even skipped several dinners as the 'lunch' I had was just too much.
2009 is over. Yeah, sure, trueg, we know that, it has been over for a while now! Ok, ok, I am a bit late, but still I would like to get this one out – if only for my archive. So here goes.
Virtuoso
Let’s start with the major topic of 2009 (and also the beginning of 2010): The new Nepomuk database backend: Virtuoso. Everybody who used Nepomuk had the same problems: you either used the sesame2 backend which depends on Java and steals all of your memory or you were stuck with Redland which had the worst performance and missed some SPARQL features making important parts of Nepomuk like queries unusable. So more than a year ago I had the idea to use the one GPL’ed database server out there that supported RDF in a professional manner: OpenLink’s Virtuoso. It has all the features we need, has a very good performance, and scales up to dimensions we will probably never reach on ...read more...
The Theodor Heuss Foundation (German site, but the Wikipedia article is probably more informative), named after Germany’s first post-war president, is a foundation established to remember the political achievements of Theodor Heuss as an example for social commitment, moral courage and the dedication to fostering democracy. The foundation seeks “to bring attention to something, which has to be done and shaped in our democracy, without being finished” (Carl Friedrich v. Weizs
WARNING: This is a unstable release, it is actually 0.14 Alpha release, it should work like any release from the 0.12 branch, but do not blame us if it turns your printer into a broom.
Changes against the 0.12 branch: core: * Improvements to Annotation rendering. Bug #23108 * Do not give an error when opening files without pages. Bug #24720 * Try to read streams without Length * Do not crop the transformation matrix at an arbitrary value. Bug #25763 * Make poppler (optionally) relocatable on Windows * Use a small object cache in GfxResources to cache GState objects * Reduce the number of redundant pattern creations in the Cairo outputdev * Use colToDbl() to avoid rounding error in the Cairo output device * Fix problems with mask handling in the Cairo output device. Bug #8474 * Use a better scale down implementation in the Cairo output device * Various optimizations to the Splash output device * Add ...read more...
As usual the Barcelona KDE crew is organizing a KDE release party, coincidentaly that weekend i will be in Barcelona since it's my mother's birthday (hi mum!) so i'll also be attending. See you there!
This scattered series of posts has been about the RDF support I'm working on for KOffice. The ODF document format lets you store RDF/XML data inside the document file, which in turn lets both a human reader and a computer know about things that comprise an office document. You can refer to a person, place, or time and have the computer know what you are saying without having to resort to heuristics.
Having RDF support in document formats means you can send somebody a single file containing exact information about real world events. The RDF can contain details which can be pulled up in the formatting of the text that you see. For example, for a given contact you might know his phone number, home page, normal business location, email address etc. You might only want to see a small fraction of this information at one place in a document, but perhaps for a header you want to know the postal address too. Stylesheets are what I'm working on right now to let that happen.
"Carla Schroder wrote an editorial piece this week on Linux Today entitled Editor's Note: What is User-friendly, Really?. "In it, Carla claims to be "90% satisfied" with KDE3 and "60% satisfied" with KDE SC 4.3. Why? "KDE 4 sacrifices customizability and efficiency for glitz.
Now everyone is gone, I'm the lone wolf here in San Diego. Still working on a couple of loose ends, including the final article (which is next on my todo, after I've done this blog and done some stuff for Qualcomm as we promised during our meeting).
I knew the esp the first to articles were long and booooring - al talks, little fun. This time I'll do better, I promise.
You can expect an epic tale of hackers risking their lifes to get to the university while the streets were flooded, only to arrive in a place threatened by two dragons and a few too-cute babies. And more flooding. If it wasn't for the good care of Jeff we'd have been without beer, snacks and wifi...
So expect an article tomorrow around this time on the dot.
Of course, Solaris has been a primary target for OpenOffice for ages, so KOffice is a little late to the game on this particular platform. But I guess that’s my fault, since I’m one of the packagers for KDE4 on Solaris, and I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. So this weekend I spent a little under two hours hammering together a specfile (RPM-style) for koffice and getting the whole darn thing to build. Screenshot of KWord in action as proof. I tried KPresenter as well, but that crashed on changing the list style, so I didn’t think that was a ...read more...
I haven’t written a proper tech article since before I (re-)started this blog, so I thought it was high time. Besides, I’ve been wanting to write this post ever since I read some articles on Google’s Chrome OS, around the time right after my old blog vaporized. So there’s a couple of buzzwords to hopefully sucker you into clicking the ‘more’ button and actually reading the article – It’s about Google’s upcoming Chrome OS and it’s implications for the web, the desktop and the browser, as well as why desktop evolution can take an alternative path, exemplified by KDE’s budding Project Silk movement.
I’d really like to link to some of the posts I read on Chrome OS as they were really interesting, but I read them around half a year ago and I sadly couldn’t find them anymore. Anyway I’m going to start by doing a brief exploration of what Google likely wants to achieve with Chrome OS. Most of you probably already have an idea of what Chrome OS will be like:
So if you worked with some version control systems for a bit, you’ve probably heard of a concept called branches. It is quite a simple concept: you can perform several development processes in parallel without them interfering with each other. Most projects use branches for experimental features that could set hell loose and for backporting bugfixes to older releases. Subversion and CVS people usually dislike branches, because they involve lots of uninteresting and painful work that they don’t want to do. That is easily explained by the way branches are implemented there.
As you might know, branches in SVN are implemented in a very interesting fashion. They are not, in fact, implemented at all. SVN branch is just a folder, which is created when a branch is started. If you want to merge it back, you need to remember the revision number, when you created the branch, and use that magical number in a complex “svn merge” command. But still, SVN project history remains a straight line.
What’s wrong with this way of interpreting the branch concept? ...read more...
Well folks, Camp KDE is all wrapped up. Hopefully Jeff finds time to upload some videos real-soon-now (TM) for those of you that could not make it to the talks.
Anyway, just wanted to mention a few things that I thought were great and things that could have been better. It's sort of important for me to pay attention to this, since I kept telling people I'd try to host Camp KDE next year in Toronto.
So, the awesome things: Jeff did a great job, considering he almost singlehandedly put this thing together. Jeff is my hero. The training was the highlight of the week for me, and I'm so happy that he arranged that for us. The group that was there brought a positive attitude to the whole event (should I expect anything less from the KDE community, honestly?), even though the weather sucked. I got to pick a few people's brains and feel a little more comfortable with C++ as a result of the week. Whee!
it’s hard to believe it’s over already… Thursday evening, everyone who was left had a proper dinner together in an actual restaurant. :) It took them a while to make a table long enough for us. Oh, and wade was there – I forgot to mention he made a surprise appearance wednesday evening. :) Friday most people were gone – but me, jos and frank were still around. We discussed kde and the cloud and things over a delicious lunch (there’s a little place called.. Rick’s? Just one block from the hostel) and (eventually) made our way downtown for some shopping. :) i didn’t really mean to buy anything, but I found a few nice things that were on sale. That evening we ate at Rick’s again, and james joined us, and we ran into little william and his family :) jos and frank had fun learning to eat crab legs; I’m sure there are photos somewhere. Back at the hostel the power was back on downstairs, but off again upstairs. We talked to ...read more...
After Nokia purchsed Trolltech last year, doubts arose about how Nokia would handle the dual licensing model of Qt, the advanced cross-platform toolkit which lies at the base of the KDE Free software desktop.
I am pleased to announce my latest mentee, Alberto Villa. Alberto has been a dedicated contributor with the FreeBSD KDE team, and it was finally time to punish him with a ports commit bit.
Martin Wilke will be Alberto’s co-mentor in this little adventure!
In it, Carla claims to be "90% satisfied" with KDE3 and "60% satisfied" with KDE SC 4.3. Why? "KDE 4 sacrifices customizability and efficiency for glitz. [...] There is a trend to dumb Linux down in a fruitless attempt to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. Which is wasted effort, because in doing so computer-savvy users are being ignored and frustrated, and Jane and Joe Sixpack don't care anyway."
What's interesting about this for me is that Gwenview's redesign wasn't to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. It was to take a powerful app with a rather clumsy UI and turn it into a powerful app with a slick UI. Now, I don't know about you, but I like tools that fit my hand when I use them; using tools that fit the tentacles of an octopus might be interesting ...read more...
I'm currently working on a important part of Quanta4, Css Language support. The only thing supported for now is code completion for standalone css files:
But that is the most useful feature a Web IDE can have.
Still on my todo list is:
validation (should be easy with the existing parser)
Outline navigation (should be not that hard either)
Support <style> tags and inline styles in html files
A few notes on how I implemented the plugin:
I reused WebKit's flex lexer
then wrote a parser using kdevelop-pg-qt based on WebKits bison grammar. A major difference is that it successfully parses incomplete Css - as it is during writing in the editor.
The code completion parses the file on invocation and goes through the Ast (resulting from the parser) to find the correct type to show.
Then, using an XML file borrowed from Aptana's code assist, the shown completion items are determined.
Today, a package was delivered to my house containing an item which I’ve been missing for a long time, years in fact. A second battery for my laptop. I’ve been working on various power management solutions in KDE in the past years, and they all had one problem: I couldn’t really test if everything worked with more than one battery plugged in. In that area, I always depended on others to help me debugging and fixing problems, not the ideal workflow, so some bugs have gone uncaught in the past.
Not anymore! Now I’ve got this second battery in the optical drive slot of my dear Thinkpad T60, I can immediately identify problems with displaying the charge rate of more than one battery, and I did. One bug displaying a wrongly formatted translation string in the battery’s popup has already bitten the dust, within one hour of delivery of the second battery, I committed a patch to the 4.4 branch and trunk of KDE SC. As far as I can see, ...read more...
I just commited an update to the Gdb Qt pretty printers, they work now for Qt 4.6. (I didn't test 4.5, but most won't work anymore I guess)
The printers need to poke around in private members, that's why they depend on a specific Qt version.
They are still located in the kdevelop svn, instructions on how to enable them see here. (the svn url changed as kdevelop is now in extragear)
Unfortunately my merge request for Qt that would add them directly to Qt got rejected, so it is a bit difficult to support multiple Qt versions - for now 4.6 only is supported. Perhaps in future more people will discover this feature in Gdb and they will get added... You know where to find them.
Last week I was in Berlin, and besides getting some work done, picking up some espresso beans and meeting old friends, I also received a wonderful German cold bug. From my boss Karsten, presumably. We all know that parents of small children are plague-bearers, but his kids are apparently in a different pathogen group than mine — as a result of which I’ve been pretty much laid-up all week with sniffles, headaches and the like. I can focus for about 2 hours at a time, after which it’s back to bed. I don’t recall colds hanging around this tenaciously or virulently before; the only good thing I can say about it is that 2 hours is enough time to write blog entries on random legal and licensing topics (and also technical KDE things, but that’s coming up).
...read more...
Today, a package was delivered to my house containing an item which I’ve been missing for a long time, years in fact. A second battery for my laptop. I’ve been working on various power management solutions in KDE in the past years, and they all had one problem: I couldn’t really test if everything worked with more than one battery plugged in. In that area, I always depended on others to help me debugging and fixing problems, not the ideal workflow, so some bugs have gone uncaught in the past.
