Irc-Unix.net

"In years past, an ISSCC presentation on a new processor would consist of detailed discussion of the chip's microarchitecture , along with at least one shot of a floorplan that marked out the location of major functional blocks .

Just a reminder that the KDE 4.4 release party is tomorrow, February 12 2010 at Fudruckers in Columbia Maryland. Jonathan Riddell will also be giving his CALUG/MD Loco talk that was canceled on Wednesday due to snow. More information…

Tonight I could not attend band rehearsal so I used the time to play with the new QML language. There is a nice tutorial online and a good screencast.

QML allows one to write flashy applications with little code. My first QML program is a metronome. The N900 has a metronome program but it is rather boring. It does not look and feel like a real metronome. So I set out to write one in QML and managed to do so in 56 lines of QML. The interaction is simple: tap it to toggle between on and off and slide up and down to move the cross-bar on the metronome which will adjust the tempo in the range 40 to 208 beats per minute.

Without further ado here is the code. You can run it in qmlviewer. Two things are lacking at the moment: a nice SVG image of a metronome and of course the ticking sound. I am keen to find out how to make the metronome produce sound to make it useful.

So 4.4 is out, and I’ve done my first plasma screencast! :)
It’s just a little guide to the ways you can navigate activities in 4.4 without using the ZUI.

hrm. apparently embedded (non-youtube) video is a paid feature on wordpress…
but notmart has kindly uploaded it here.
there’s a link to the original ogg there, too. :)

"At the Black Hat DC Conference 2010 security researcher Christopher Tarnovsky of FlyLogic Engineering has demonstrated a way to defeat the Trusted Platform Module chips widely used to secure data in computers , identity cards, gaming systems like the Xbox 360, cable set-top boxes, and other electronics.

The Linux Mint team announced the final release of Linux Mint 8 "Helena" KDE Community Edition.

Have you ever wondered how a window system actually works ? I have. When I was preparing my Widgets In-Depth talk for Qt Developer Days last year, I decided I should implement a simple little window system as bonus material.
This blog post will be a rough description of the window system I built using Qt, and a port of Qt to the new system.

Windows And Systems

As you probably know, the window system is the process that manages the windows on your screen.
A window, also known as a window surface, can be described as an area of memory that will be drawn to the screen. Window surfaces are typically arranged in a scene-graph to keep track of them. Finally, window systems typically run as a server process. When other processes that want to show something on screen, they have to talk to it through some form of inter-process communication.

The toy window system up and running.

Window Surface

We need something that represents the memory area used to paint the window contents. ...read more...

Rodney Gedda 09 April, 2009 11:06 KOffice 2 will include Krita, an image manipulation tool like PhotoShop or the Gimp 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 ...

As you maybe know I have a new job since last December and I’m working on
Samba4 now. Samba4 is a monster so I’ve asked for some simple tasks to get
started. The task was to migrate some code to a new Samba library called
tsocket. The problem was I didn’t know what to do and how. Some functions
of the API were documented but not all. So I had to guess from the names
what the function is doing and read the code to understand it. Then I’ve
started to work with the interface and I had to look again the the code to
find out possible return values. In the end I spent a lot of time jumping
through the source code to find out the return values for the functions.

If the API would be completely documented I could get my work done a lot of
faster so I simply started to document it cause I had to understand it anyway.
I’ve decided to write the documentation ...read more...

• The Ubuntu Artwork wallpaper flickr group
• Submit a theme for the Community Themes package in Lucid
• Help us with identifying, testing and fixing Papercuts 

Hand-held devices could soon have pressure-sensitive touch-screens and keys , thanks to a UK firm's material that exploits a quantum physics trick.

Go check it out

One more thing...

In 0.4 release I asked to the distributions to update they packages, some of them did and some of then not, but the best of all is that I got a lot of feedback from the packagers, and here comes the payment for that feedback

With the last release I added a crash when receiving files, I gare say it was not my fault, the KBluetooth code is a mess and I can’t fix it without rewrite it from scratch (thing that I’ll explain hopefully in 2 days).

Small roadmap for 0.4 version:

• Fix file transfer jobs (speed calculation and notifications)
• Check (and re-check again) input

I’ll try to get the above points covered in a couple of days too.

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Clement Lefebvre has announced the release of Linux Mint 8 ''KDE'' edition: ''The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 8 'Helena' KDE Community edition.

KDE SC 4.4 is just out of the door (by the way, what an achievement, woha :D) and as our tradition we are already cramming features on trunk, that will be KDE SC 4.5.

In plasma land you will probably see more things in the tone of polishment and refinement of stuff already there rather than completely new stuff. But since the fourth Tokamak is approaching, expect something really really tasty coming out of it :D

But now there's a little appetizer: in 4.4 in the Search and Launch interface of the netbook shell is possible to add favourites and remove them by clicking on the little "-" icon

While that's good and will still be available, now is possible to add favourites where you want with drag and drop from the results view and move them by just dragging around.

The drag operation will start with a pretty low sensibility, making possible to still scrolling the view by dragging.

For instance since the results view scrolls vertically, if you drag vertically the view will just move, but if you ...read more...

Although KDE SC 4.4.0 isn’t officially released yet (or there’s no announcement on the dot yet), I’ve bumped the specfiles in the KDE4-OpenSolaris repository to 4.4.0 and kicked off a rebuild. That means that we should have new packages at about the same time that the major GNU/Linux distributions have them. The release candidate was pretty stable on OpenSolaris as long as you didn’t (re)build any parts of it while logged in, but we’ll probably be hearing enough bug reports in the next few months for OSOL. You can report problems to KDE’s bugzilla with the OS set to Solaris, or use the OpenSolaris bug tracker and choose one of the KDE components there.

Of course, the whole future of OSOL is a little .. fuzzy. The Oracle / Sun takeover has caused a fair amount of shake-up in many of Sun’s projects, but OSOL has not, as far as I know, been either committed-to or deprecated. We’ll see.

In the wake (er, .. the bow shock wave, since I’m getting ahead of myself) ...read more...

The organization “Bits of Freedom is a Dutch NGO Privacy watchdog. It has been re-vivified in the past years. It hands out semi-regular Big Brother Awards (say, isn’t the estate of George Orwell going to wake up at some point?) for the worst offenses against privacy in the Netherlands. Worth reading if your Dutch comprehension is ok. BoF has garnered some mainstream media attention as well, which offers hope that privacy isn’t completely a lost cause in this country. [Current schemes of nationwide chipcard travel and road-pricing deny that hope] There’s also a “Winston Prize” for someone fighting for privacy, which went to the Euro-MP Sophie in’t Veld. It took me a minute to figure out the “Winston” name, but since I’d read 1984 (it says so right there in my book list) the light dawned eventually.

Anyway, cheers to BoF, and keep watching over your own privacy.

The second week of our action plan for optimizing Krita was devoted to optimizing painting in Krita. Although there are many great paintops in Krita, digital painters tend to use most of the time the simple default brush engine which we call Pixel Brush. Painters can use GIMP brushes here, the text brush, but the most used brush tip is called Autobrush. You can setup the brush attributes like shape (circle, rectangle) and you can change the ratio to get an ellipse. Then you can change softness by vertical and horizontal fading. If you play with spikes and ratio, you get stars and other funny shapes. The brush has many dynamic attributes thanks Cyrille Berger’s work on concept called sensors. E.g. tablet can control the size by pressure, by tilt or anything you want (e.g. interesting is drawing angle) and it can be tuned by curve.

The algorithm, which computes the brush mask, stamped on the canvas regular as you stroke, is computed by the KisCircleMask::valueAt(). It is a computationally expensive function according valgrind ...read more...

For all those in Buenos Aires or its surroundings, we'll be having a meeting to celebrate the release of KDE SC 4.4.

This next Saturday 13th, at 19:00 we'll meet at Dr Mason, a bar known to be friendly to FLOSS people of all nature (it has been home to a couple of Ubuntu release parties). It is located in Araoz 1199, Buenos Aires. Cost is about AR$ 30 for some beer and snacks.

We'll gather to talk about the features of the new releases, upcoming events, and of course, have a beer and socialize. Here you can find more information about it: http://kde.org.ar/node/54

Just in time with the KDE SC 4.4 release, I was able to get out another release of Skulpture, my favorite widget style. The list of fixes is quite long again, partly because Qt 4.6 required some adaptions. The most annoying bug, the Tab key handling in Konversation, has finally been fixed. Two other bugs could cause crashes, so you are advised to update.

Source code and packages for all major distributions are available for download from the kde-look.org site. Note that these packages are not official; you should switch to distribution packages once they are available.

So, in The Beginning, when I was just a young padawan on the Internet, I had been let into a glorious secret: Emulation (not of IBM System/360 machines, but of more important things like the Super NES). Some branching from there led me to zophar.net, a popular emulation site, and their message boards, and also left me with a fascination with emulation.

The attributes of some of the older systems like the NES and Super NES made it fairly easy to capture their music-producing software, since those systems used separate co-processors to handle music effects. NES music would be stored in the NSF format, and SNES music was handled with the SPC format (named after the audio chip used, the Sony SPC700). There were (and still are) specialized plugins on many systems to play these formats (they emulated only the music chip, not the rest of the system).

I’ve been involved on the periphery of some of these things for the past couple of years. (For instance I had written a KFileMetaInfo plugin for KDE 3, ...read more...

With 2010 we've started to employ identica as an channel for our live changelog at the {power}user level.

You don’t have to use KDE 4. (And I can’t believe I’m actually having to make that part clear) Really people should use whatever makes them most comfortable, productive, fits with their needs better, etc. Just use what you want.

With that said, saying that you do not like desktop effects is not a good reason to avoid KDE 4. I happen to like desktop effects but I’m not using them, even though I’m in a KDE 4 desktop (due to a stupid problem somewhere in the driver toolchain). In fact I know for a fact, given that I recently tested it, that KDE 4 works just fine even in a Composite-less X11. So I forget what propaganda technique it is (straw man argument?) but in short that reason has absolutely nothing to do with KDE 4.

Really your whole rant could have been more concisely expressed without a single reason (as after all, you should be able to use whatever desktop environment you want) and you wouldn’t have people nitpicking your exact reasons that way. ;)