Woha, quite a few days flew by without me blogging about anything. Thankfully the others started to write so I don’t have to repeat it all ;-) Instead I’ll concentrate on stuff I did or learned.

GHNS for Snippets

Well, first I think an excuse is in oder: There is a GHNS button for Kate Snippets in 4.4.0 but it’s broken, neither me nor Joseph had time to acutally use and fix it… But anyways, I fixed it now for 4.4.1. For 4.5 we’ll also have an Upload Dialog.

I also added both now to KDevelop, you can now upload and download snippets from it. I added a few dump examples but will probably improve it steadily.

Kate Performance

On Saturday and Sunday I started to profile Kate highlighting for a large MySQL dump and managed to greatly improve the speed. Actually the funny thing is that I could improve RegExp based highlighting (you still should try to prevent using it, it will always be slower than simple char/string based highlighting). And the knowledge for this optimization I had from ...read more...

• Social aspect: You get to know the other developers involved in the project in real life, which is a great motivation factor. This also happens at KDE's annual conference Akademy, although there are a lot more people.
  
• Productivity: Since you are sitting next to each other discussions about how to do what are very focused. It's amazing how quickly a project can evolve this way. (I haven't seen such focused work in companies, yet. I guess the variance in the knowledge of people involved is higher. And the motivation is usually very different).
  
• Knowledge Transfer: Since participants are experts in different areas, discussions lead to knowledge transfer. This is essential, as sometimes developers have very ...read more...

Hello KDE fans, I have a couple of tasks for you:

Design KDE swag

KDE has a new spreadshirt store with a couple of nice t-shirts by Sebas and some badges including some work by Ingo.

Under construction by Ingo

One of my suggestions - help needed

So, what’s in it for you? Well, you get to say you contributed to KDE and might get to see your creation wandering around Akademy, plus there is talk of giving the ...read more...

• Errors in Plasmoids would only say what the line number was, not what file the error came from. For Plasmoids with multiple files in them, this is less than great. In KDE SC 4.5, the UI will show the filename as well as the line number of the error. In KDE SC 4.4.1 this information will appear on the console. (The difference is due to translation: we can't change strings in the stable branch after release.)


• rect.adjusted was not working; it is now (it was improperly described as as getter in the bindings)


• pixmap.scaled was not working; it is now (and had the same problem as rect.adjusted)

MEPIS has announced SimplyMEPIS 8.4.97, the fifth beta of MEPIS 8.5, now available from MEPIS and public mirrors.

Sorry! I cannot tell you when KDE 4.4 will be uploaded to unstable. I am not working on that. My initial plan was writing about other tasks I am planning to work on and asking for your help. But I realized people would be more interested in knowing about KDE 4.4 packages. Once you know about this, I might trick you into helping in others areas ;)

Debian packages for KDE 4.4 are being worked on, just slowly and of course, keeping on with the quality you are used to. There will be also some changes that have been in some people’s TODO for long time.

The goal is having them in very good shape for Squeeze, that will ship with some point release of 4.4. The doubt is which point release will be: 4.4.2? 4.4.3 ? The schedule for the point releases has not been made yet, so it makes a bit harder trying to predict it. In the same lines, I can not tell you when Squeeze will be released neither, it needs to be frozen first!

Just a quick update for everyone interested. We closed our old mailing lists hosted by Sourceforge and moved to:

• K3b subforum on KDE forums for users
• k3b mailing list on kde.org for contributors

See you there!

The other day, I couldn't resist buying the el-cheapo Athlon 1.6 GHz-powered Acer Aspire 5532 in BestBuy for $330. With its 15.6 inch screen, seems that it is quite a nice bargain. It comes (of course) with Windows 7 Home Premium, but after slapping openSUSE 11.2 DVD I got from the last Camp KDE (must be from Will, thanks dude!) and a bunch of keystrokes, a few hours later the machine happily runs the shiny KDE 4.4. Sound was not a problem, even WiFi was easy to get it working (hard to believe that after all these years, NetworkManager still does not work for me, maybe my bad karma). The included radeonhd driver is good enough for its Radeon HD 3200 (RS780M chipset), but for the sake of testing, I did install ATI fglrx 7.4 10.1 and, voila, I got flawless KWin desktop effects. Even proprietary stuff like Opera, Skype, and Flash plugin faced no serious ...read more...

The kids — now aged five and nearly seven — have some interest in cooking. After all, they see one parent or the other making dinner daily, usually with some narration. Once they’re old enough to hold a paring knife and not cut off their little fingers, I’ve been herding them both into the kitchen for odd jobs like chopping mushrooms, zucchini, bell peppers. Recently I’ve started trying to explain principles to them as well — like what can you do with an egg. Fried or scrambled is familiar to them, and I’ve started explaining why a boiled egg can be soft- or hard-boiled (and playing with the kitchen timer to show them how). Recently we moved a step further with separating an egg and making meringue from the whites and custard from the yolks. Kitchen chemistry at its best.

This weekend the “kid’s science corner” in the paper (with Dr. Zeepaard) had an item on “gummy cheese”, which they made with milk and vinegar — warning that it’s inedible. That prompted me to go looking for edible recipes, which ...read more...

And there we are, the KDE team has released KDE Software Compilation 4.4, formerly known as, well, KDE.

I spent the first week of February in Portland, where I attended Canonical Platform Sprint for Ubuntu Lucid. We got some good work done on the DBusMenu front. You can read about it on Jono and Jorge blog posts.

Last week in Krita -- week 6

Last week was a frustrating week for your correspondent: he didn't manage to get much work done on Krita, also because he had to leave for Ersingen-K

Hola, MeeGo. Not amoeba. Not mi-go (I wonder if they stay at the YMRCIGB-S?). The Register has a little bit on it, and Engadget has it labeled “a doozy?” With Intel and Nokia cooperating on a single Maemo/Moblin platform, re-dubbed MeeGo, we’re seeing a reduction (in the medium term at least) of the number of platforms for smartphones and devices (leaving Windows mobile, iPhone OS, Bada, Android, Symbian still out there as well as plenty of others, I’m sure).

At OSiMWorld last year I fiddled around with Moblin devices and thought they were OK — but unfinished. I haven’t done a whole lot with Maemo, either. But the two of them together, on ARM and x86 platforms? Sounds to me like a strong mix if the license-to-tinker and the dedication to Free Software remains. Since MeeGo is to live under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, I think that’s a given. In addition, there’s a history of working towards good governance there (by all ...read more...

Last week was devoted to add support for abr and vbr brushes. The abr file format comes from Adobe Photoshop, the later comes from Gimp. The motivation for this were the big collections on the web. Sites like deviantart.com are full of the artist’s collection of the abr brushes. The motivation is also interoperability with GIMP and with proprietary Adobe Photoshop. vbr brush support was postponed because it was too much work just to support abr brushes.

First day I started with exploring the abr format, so that we know each other a bit. I started to write simple code to parse it, but I found out that the issue is so complicated. Valek Filippov is working on the python script which parses abr brush, so I started with that one. Important note: We support only brush format v1, v2 and v6.2 (Photoshop CS2). The newest format is not documented at all and there is not open-source implementation around. It would require a lot of reverse engineering and that takes so much time, that ...read more...

Hi there,

About a month ago I’ve introduced myself and the project that me, Schkrab and Diogo are conducting here.  Now I’ll talk a little more about it.

The Dimpress3D is divided into three main parts: the application (KDE application in which the presentation is made up), the exportation module (piece of code which generates the video file) and the player (a trivial player capable of stop and play the video accordingly to predetermined events, in order to show the presentation softly).

The .dim file saved by the application contains a .xml file which holds the content. The content of the presentation is composed by: graphic components (and its properties),  a state machine which describes the presentation flow, animation and rendering options.

The exportation module is intended to read the .dim file and render a video. For now, we are using a python script running in Blender 2.49 to do so. We will build the application upon a plugin structure that will allow new exporters as well as other features to be dinamically linked.

Now, you can watch the ...read more...

I have fixed Exmap, my still favourite tool to measure system memory usage, to compile with latest kernels, and also to work on x86_64 (the latter was a bit of guess-work, but I think I got it right). KSysGuard seems to be getting close, and with Exmap unmaintained by its author I don't feel like doing this forever, but for now, it's still possible to get exmap from my home:llunak:kernel repository. And as I don't feel like trying to do cross-distro kernel packages in the buildservice, those not using openSUSE are left with either trying to package it for their other distro, or pick out the patches from the .src.rpm .

While I was at it, I had just a little look at memory usage. Since I had done quite some comparisons of KDE3's memory usage with other desktops in the past, the first thing that came to my mind was doing that quickly again. As these days LXDE appears to be the new lightweight kid on the block, I ...read more...

So I would like to take a few minutes to talk about audio routing in PulseAudio. This is a oft misunderstood topic and it does sometimes seem like black magic and/or broken but, as always, it's pretty simple when you look at it properly. That's not to say it's sensible (I have a several reservations about the current way of working), but the first step to improving something is understanding it, so I'll try to explain here and then say what I think is needed to improve it. This is a rather complex and in depth post, so if this kind of stuff doesn't float your boat, it's a good candidate to skip :p

So how does PulseAudio route your audio and what the hell do you mean by "audio routing" anyway? Well, PA handles multiple audio devices ("sinks" for output, "sources" for capture). When an application wants to play sound it says "Hey PulseAudio, play this!!", and PA tries it's best to comply. The application will typically not care about which device to actually output too - they ...read more...

Since KDE Software Compilation 4.4 we have an updated, improved and easier to use Hot New Stuff framework.
So far only a few test candidates were ported to it, namely the wallpaper dialog, Parley, Plasma comic strips and Amarok when compiled with 4.4.
Now it’s time to change this.
In cooperation with our forums staff, I will start a small course to let someone else do the work for me
Should you participate? This is a great chance to learn about some of KDE’s infrastructure and how to get the source, build it and write some small patches.
You should know some C++ already, since that’s too much to learn in the one or two weeks of the course. Other than that you should have a distro that provides kdelibs 4.4.0 development packages (if there is a kdelibs 4.4 available to you, chances are you’re good to go).
Oh, and you should be interested in hacking on KDE software obviously
For more details ...read more...

Video: Amarok 2.3 First Look

Warning: no videos included, though they would help a lot. Also note that I'm using an Intel chipset in both my laptops (the big one also has an ATI chipset, but that doesn't work.)

Lukas recently discovered that Krita was taking about 100% of one of his CPU's cores. When moving the mouse over the canvas. Since X11 took about 60% of that CPU we immediately thought of painting issues, so I started testing with KWin's Paint desktop effect enabled. That effect overlays every rect that is redrawn with a color.

It quickly became clear that for some reason, updating the mouse position lable in the statusbar would update all of Krita's window: menu, toolbars, canvas, toolbox, dockers and statusbar. Curiously enough, Karbon only updates the statusbar. When I disabled the mouse position label in Krita, the CPU usage was gone.

Then I started playing some more, also on my other laptop and now in Ersingen for the KPresenter sprintlet, we tried the same on Thorsten's laptop. And I'm puzzled by the results:

On my X61t, the areas covered by ...read more...

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 by Matt Hartley at 1:13pm No Responses If you goto Applications, Ubuntu Software Center, you will find that there are a few different sticky note type options available.

Today being the day it is I should start with wishing all my fellow chinks out there a very happy and prosperous Chinese New Year. And then to the rest of the world, Happy Valentines Day! While I’m at it let me also congratulate KDE on a stellar 4.4 software compilation release, thank the openSUSE folks for a pretty darn good upgrade-experience, and of course, last but certainly not least, congratulate Plasmate, the lovable Plasma add-on creation tool, on our recent first ever alpha release!

You cannot imagine how excited I am about this

Unfortunately I don’t have much to add to the other posts who have already previously announced the news, so I decided to do a brief showcase screencast instead. It’s a simple one where I demonstrate creating a simple Python plasmoid from scratch in Plasmate, which would hopefully hint at the workflow we are aiming to create as well as demonstrate the salient features that made ...read more...

So, first day of the Kate/KDevelop hacksprint.

We just talked and hacked at the rented flat,got to know each other and had a fun time. Everybody made it more or less in time, even last minute attendee Adymo from Ukraine, nice! Hacking-wise the productivity wasn’t that high, esp. for me, but a few patches got committed here and there.

Right now I’m working on a little speedup for Kate, esp. for big MySQL files - lets see how it turns out. Cullmann showed me a few things I could do so maybe it works out, lets see.

Over the next week I plan to push in user configurable include paths for the PHP plugin and do some more Snippets & Scripting work in Kate, lets see how it turns out. I’ll go home now, kinda sucks that I don’t stay with the others here at the flat but have to take a 1h ride into the city… Berlin is definitely too big :D

Prerequisites:

• Php
• XDebug extension
• xdebug configured to accept remote connections
  
  
  • xdebug.remote_enable = 1
  • xdebug.remote_host = localhost (yourhost if on remote server)
• KDevplatform, KDevelop
• The following KDevelop Plugins:
  
  • executescript
  • executebrowser
  • xdebug
  (download here)
  

Debugging a CLI Script

1. Create Launch Configuration

• Run » Configure Launches...
• add Launch Configuration (+)
• choose Type "Script Application"
• enter interpreter "php"
• enter script path
• activate the new Launch Configuration in Run » Current Launch Config

2. Start Debugger

• Set a breakpoint (Run » Toggle Breakpoint, or rightclick on icon ...read more...

I’m pleased to announce (as first as it seems) that KDevelop4 released its 8th Beta. This is mostly a bugfix release as we are slowly (but steadily) moving towards a final release. There’s going to be another Beta soon with (hopefully) some more features as the KDevelop/Kate Sprint just started.

Additionally to kdevelop+kdevplatform you’ll find Beta’s of various php-related plugins on the KDE mirros. These plugins enable language support (code-completion and navigation), php-documentation view and debugging of php code (both standalone and inside a browser via xdebug). These are provided by Milian Wolf and Niko Sams, so join #kdevelop and give them a hug for providing such outstanding php support

For those eager to try out (and when the distro hasn’t built packages yet), you can find the files on the KDE mirrors

Current Statistics

It’s a while since I wrote about UserBase, but there’s been plenty of activity.  Let’s look at some statistics, first.  We now have 1,212 content pages and 1,236 uploaded images.  There have been 10,889 page edits since UserBase began – and that will already be out of date by the time you read this.  We have 1,459 registered users, of which 20 have contributed this week.  A year ago that statistic was a mere handful.  The total number of views is now 2,764,290!  Kontact is the most-viewed page – well ahead of the Welcome page – and Akonadi has passed GPU-Performance!  A sign of the times, perhaps.

Top 10 contributors this week

Once again the top three places in the Contributions table go to translators.  New contributors since last I wrote are Jzmer, writing about Kimpanel, Afiestas who has undertaken to get the Kbluetooth page sorted out, Aseigo who is writing about Plasmate and Algotruneman – ...read more...

"Welcome to part four of our look at the KDE 4.3 System Settings panel. In this section we'll tackle the Advanced User Settings under the Advanced tab.

We all knowing, that on 14. February this Year we celebrating the Valentine’s Day. This is an goog Day to share you Love for Free Software with your Friends, This Campain is started by Free Software Foundation Europe. All Details of this Campain you can see under: http://www.fsfe.org/campaigns/valentine-2010/ Have alot of Fun