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For mirroring my backup drive, central data store for devices, music playing and a webserver for experiments, I'd like to run a small server at home. I want this server to be energy efficient, easy to modify, robust, silent and run customizable free software. It should have at least 500 GB of storage, but 1 or 1.5 TB is better. You can buy very low-energy computers such as the Fit-PC 2 (6 watt) or the Linutop 2 (8 watt). Energy costs for machines that run constantly can be roughly estimated by doubling the power draw in watt, so running a device that uses 8 watt constantly costs about 16 euro a year.

Until recently the computer I used most was a Dell X1 Latitude laptop. That machine is now 4.5 years old. At the time, I chose it because it is a laptop with no fan and hence very silent. It is still better than any atom based netbook. So I would like to use this laptop as a server. UPS and ...read more...

Earlier this year, the KDE team released the highly-anticipated 4th major revision of the KDE desktop.

For a good while, I’ve been wanting to write a KDE app sorta like Photobooth for the Mac. If you’ve never used it, the name says exactly what it is. It uses your webcam to turn your computer into a cool little photobooth, snapping pictures with different effects, backdrops, and even recording video. Cheese from GNOME does the same thing, but it lacks that ‘KDE’ feel.

With the holidays done with, I had some time today to toy around with the Video4Linux API. After a few hours, I had a small console program with Qt that opened up my webcam and…didn’t do much else. I read about the many different formats supported by the API, all of which looked like a pain to write support for. Then I remembered that Kopete has had webcam support in for a very long time. A little more digging later and I found rudimentary support for webcams in phonon/experimental.

Turns out the code in phonon was lifted almost verbatim from kopete, but it hadn’t been touched since 2008. That meant ...read more...

The announcement is up on the dot. The first beta of KMyMoney for the KDE 4 Platform has been released! We started in May, due to an innocent email sent by Laurent Montel, which triggered a series of events that led us to this point.

It took a little while, but I wrapped up the licenses-as-icons with a summary in tabular form. It’s not on this blog, because I don’t know how to pull in fancy CSS and tables into wordpress. Instead, it lives on one of my personal sites for now. It will move to the FSFE pages in due course, once I’ve had some of the other people in the Freedom Task Force look over it. The page is largely auto-generated now by a little python program that understands the labels given to the different licenses. There is plenty of room for improvement: links to the license texts, better explanations of what the badges mean, etc.

One thing I’m quite happy with is the family overview: it shows which licenses are the same when compared using only the qualities reflected in the badges. So it shows MIT and BSD 2-clause as the same — which I’m willing to accept. Unfortunately, due to the granularity of the badges, it also shows some things together (or at least indistinguishable based on ...read more...

Tomorrow Monday is the release of KMyMoney 3.95. This will signal the end of a great and challenging year to me, and of course, as every end, it is the beginning of something else.

Ladies and gentlemen, Sembrowser 0.1 is out for testing!

Have you noticed the version number? It is not that low for nothing: the application (which is a prototype for a faceted side panel) is far from finished and not guaranteed to be stable/scalable/with good performance; anyway, the main feature, that is the faceted panel itself (with basic functionality) is ready for some comments. I want to add that this app is not and will not be a replacement for Dolphin: the idea was and is to create a testing file manager for faceted browsing; Sembrowser has way less features than Dolphin (and I don’t want to copy all of them or port all of them), even if some things are similar (like the places side panel). The new panel itself may be, at some point, taken and ported to Dolphin, but it is too early to talk about this…

So, get the sources and give it a try: you ...read more...

The -440 repository — that is KDE4-OpenSolaris-speak for “the Mercurial repository which holds the specfiles that are being developed for building KDE SC 4.4.0 once it is released” — has been bumped to beta2 now (version 4.3.85). We’re still in the process of rebuilding everything, as there are some new dependencies and the usual fixes and patches to be updated. I count 66 patches still applied; we have started pushing more of them upstream — especially the trivial ones like adding newlines to the last line of a file. Thanks to SadEagle for picking up some of the patches to KHTML again as well — they’re a little odd in that they apply to code that isn’t ever called but that needs to compile anyway.

xz: this is a new dependency, a general purpose compression library. Very straightforward build, no other dependencies — something that we should be trying to foist off on SourceJuicer as quickly as possible so as to make it available to more people.

libattica: Frederik Gladhorn (and whoever else worked on that), I salute you. No ...read more...

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Sometimes answering apparently harmless questions on instant messaging can have unexpected results. In particular, I was telling about Danbooru Client to someone and a question popped up "Why don’t you support pages?". It seemed a nice idea, so I branched off the code (yay for git!) and started working on it.

Well, it took me more than a month to get this thing done… I didn’t spend every day coding, but it was a challenge. Glad it’s over now, which means that Danbooru Client 0.5 is finally available. Grab it at the usual place on kde-apps.org.

Changes in this version:

• Massive code refactoring and documentation
• Support for multiple pages: the same query can be repeated multiple pages (shown in a tabbed interface), kind of like browsing the actual Danbooru board;
• Rating information added to the API;
• Support for translations (thanks to Pino "pinotree" Toscano for the help): the tarball now contains a .pot file which can be used for translating Danbooru Client. If you make a ...read more...

Jochen S. asked me to publish the distribution of the age of the participants of the test. I am happy to do so (Thanks to rKward!)…

All participants of the test:

Mean:  27,9 years
Standard deviation: 7,5 years

Frequent users of KMail:

Mean: 29  years
Standard deviation: 7,9 years

Participants not using KMail:

Mean: 27  years
Standard deviation: 7,2 years

Recently, the Maemo team released the preview of their new tool chain named MADDE. It allows building Maemo 5 applications also on Mac and Windows. Unfortunately, it currently only supports Qt 4.5.x, not the shiny new (and unstable) Qt 4.6 for Maemo 5. After a bit of fiddling I managed to to create a patch that allows building Qt 4.6 apps for Maemo 5 on Mac OS X.

Read on if you’re into adventures, otherwise please stop reading here and wait for the official Qt 4.6 MADDE support packages

In a series of articles during the month of July, OfB's Timothy R. Butler explained why he felt that KDE needed to move beyond the Qt toolkit it uses as a foundation.

My friend Armijn pointed me to a thing called Orange Office (no link). I get a Dutch site, which is full of d/t errors (a fundament of Dutch grammar) which tries to sell me .. OpenOffice.org. It comes down to a long spiel about Microsoft Office compatibility and how OOo works exactly the same as Microsoft Office and yet it’s so cheap! Buy now! Word! Powerpoint! Operators are standing by! Yes, they’re charging 15 EUR for an OpenOffice.org download. Going through the terms and conditions is hilarious (well, ok, I should take my medicines now) for disclaiming responsibility, disallowing resale (hello, LGPL!), disclaiming the applicability of refund law which applies to tele-sales. You know the drill. It gets better as the “buy now” page has a “limited quantity offer!” for Calc and Draw as well. The payment processing, somewhat to my surprise, seems to be legitimate — it’s still a heck of a way to rake in 15 bucks for an otherwise gratis download of OpenOffice.org 3.1.

In my ongoing distraction from working on the Akonadi Exchange resource, we released OpenChange 0.9 today.

Release notes:
Improved portability, including a focus on supporting FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and other systems that do not use GNU libraries / shells; and portability fixes for use of the Intel C Compiler and Sun Studio compiler. 64 bit architectures should be better supported in this release.

Preliminary support for Exchange 2003/2007 specific protocols (EcDoConnectEx and EcDoRpcExt2) was added, and redirection support was implemented. This should fix the ecWrongServer (0x478) error that some users encountered while running openchange based software in a clustered Exchange environment. Note that OpenChange is regularly tested with Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007.

Support for encrypted communications between client and server has been added.

Exchange 2010 has been only lightly tested, and there may be some problems. To use a default Exchange 2010 installation (which requires encryption), you must add --encrypt to the mapiprofile command line options at profile creation time.

New libmapi functionality in server operations, properties and in convenience functions. The following Remote Operations were added in this ...read more...

The KDE login Manager

The login manager is the “insert password” dialog that gets in the way when you want to use your computer. Of course you may not be the only user of the machine, so it’s somewhat needed when you share the seat. Some facts:

• Signing the contribution agreement for gdb and glibc with the Free Software Foundation and trying to contribute to both projects. So picking future work will always have to be compatible with this.


• Hacked on OpenBSC. At first just simple stuff like a telnet interface, paging and later doing paid work for On Waves to add SCCP over IP, GSM 08.08 and other things for "toy" integration of OpenBSC into a real network.


• Mid this year I asked Nokia if they have work for me in Asia, later I started focusing on QtWebKit performance. Allowing me to improve QtWebKit and Qt (which will benefit a lot more users), but also to look into various tools like OProfile, memprof, memusagestat and just know netfilter queue's... more on this later.


• I have done my usual things on OpenEmbedded, working on landing patches through the patchwork queue, finally redoing ...read more...

Well.. Come on guys! You can do better than this! You say why? Simply because, apart from a very serious bug related to the download of files .torrent, .meta4 and .metalink (that we have been lucky enough to find out) and a Nepomuk crash (already fixed in trunk), we don't have any report right now reporting any crash or uncorrect behaviour of kget.. You sure about this? So, please, Test it a little bit more, so that the next release will be perfect for you! Ehy! I'm talking also to all people that tried kget some time ago but dropped it saying: "aaaaaaah.. still unstable..". Could you give our baby another chance?

The second KDE 4 developers snapshot is now available. This 3.80.2 release includes source from all the KDE modules.

kdesvn-build 1.11 has been released.

Changelog is basically this:

1. Documentation is improved.
2. The script itself is less craptacular.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, etc. etc. I’ll be on duty tomorrow :-(