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 will need ...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...
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 translation, send ...read more...
This a quick post about the animation classes in the upcoming KDE SC 4.4, showing them running in an embedded device (Nokia N97).
Enjoy:
Some further info: since the animations depend only on QAbstractAnimation, is just trivial to strip it to a ‘raw’ Qt application. A few days ago I had sent a tarball with a standalone application using the Plasma animations to my friend Andre Loureiro and asked him to use it as a base and mimic the kdeexample C++ plasmoid featured in a previous post.
You can grab the code here and give it a try (pay attention that the user code has not being reviewed yet…).
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
The poll to choose the first BugWeek’s target has finished. The results are:
Plasma Desktop
Kopete
Dolphin
Konqueror
I have decided to use these applications (the four of them) as the targets for the next BugWeek sessions. So there won’t be a new poll before the 4th session is completed.
The first session (“zero”) will start the next week, on December 28th. You can already access the session’s main topic on the forums, and get your questions answered in this topic.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219326 is a request to make Okular the default viewer for TIFF files based in that it seems that now the default TIFF viewer in KDE is kolourpaint and it doesn't support multipage tiff files.
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...
In the tradition of random people posting random recipes to the planets, here’s one for slow cooker lasagna. Quick prep, easy cooking, and really good. Enjoy!
Slow Cooker Lasagna
Authors: Ryan Rix
Preparation Time: 00:30
1 package Lasagna Noodles; uncooked
1 lb Ground Beef; cooked
0.5 lb Italian Sausage; cooked
2 cup cottage cheese
2 cup Mozzarella cheese
0.5 cup water
1 jar Spaghetti Sauce
1. line bottom of slow cooker with lasagna noodles.
2. Mix the spaghetti sauce, ground beef and italian sausage
3. spread half of the sauce on top of the noodles
4. spread half of the cottage Cheese on top of the sauce and meat. This has roughly the same consistency in the end as ricotta cheese, and is used instead.
5. Add the water on top
6. Spread one cup of mozzarella cheese on top.
7. Repeat steps 1-6, creating a second layer of lasagna Noodles. Omit the water.
8. Cook on low heat for 4-6 hours. I usually go a little on the long ...read more...
I’m really surprised you’re still reading, since the title really explains it all.. but for you, my beloved reader, I’ll spend some words 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:
the honorable Stephan ‘coolo’ Kulow landed it in cvs Sept 2nd 1997 (yes, that’s 12 years ago)
great people like Waldo Bastian and David Faure worked on it
The second year as part time freelancer has passed.
Looking back the most significant things are:
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.
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?
Firstly I would like to apologise for my previous post, where I have apparently mixed up equinox with solstice. So to all those of you who observe Juli - which is the celebration of solstice - I'm sorry. This will not happen again.
And now it is now the time for all those who celebrate Catholic Christmas to get the wallpaper for it. This time I was finally able to get away from blue, and into green :) which, I think is a color of Christmas (or at least one of the important ones). So, please welcome:
*This time I decided not to rely on plasma and has built my own installer. Basically this is just a self-extracting archive. Download it, make sure it's executable and click on it to run. I hope it works as expected (should on SuSE as that's what I'm on)
It seems I’m one of the recipients of the first annual NQDF award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. It seems the phone will be delivered in a few weeks, but they haven’t yet revealed when the big award ceremony is, or when I will get money, power, fame and influence as a result. I’ll be patient, but until then, thanks for the phone!
The schedule for CampKDE was published last week. I’ll be giving a talk on the challenges the Akonadi team faced in using the Qt Model View framework to implement the posted KDE PIM applications and how it results in reusable components and allows a lot of scope for innovation. I have been blogging on the subject for some time now, but there will be a lot of new content in the presentation that I haven’t covered here yet which is relevant to all users of Qt Model/View – not just Akonadi and not just KDE. Registration is still open if you want to come to attend.
The sprint is over for some time. You can see summaries of the different sessions and some slides in the wiki. Besides talking about QtWebKit and how to improve it (API, features, speed, make people aware that they can contribute, influence the release schedule, policies.. *hint*) the thing that has impressed me the most is unrelated to coding.
We all hear when someone from our Community is leaving the Qt department, and we always wonder how life will continue, who will fill the gap. In the last year a couple of new people got hired at Oslo and I'm really impressed how they find such capable people that are technically skilled and willing to move to Oslo! kudos!
For the Bookmarks widget for Plasma you can now select which folder to use as base menu: So you can set up a few Bookmarks widgets for your most needed groups of bookmarks. In a row on a panel, or for your different activities, or whatever you want to do.
Also will the tooltip of the Bookmarks widget be set to the name, the icon and the description of the folder. And even better, this data will be automatically updated if you change any of these in the global bookmark editor, like fixing a typo. Even in the settings dialog above the folder data will be updated. Thanks to the nice KBookmark* classes in kdelibs this all was quickly added.
For compile instructions see the link at the begin. Compiles also against KDE 4.3.
BTW: If you live in or around Dresden in Germany and want to have some fun and gather some experience running the ...read more...
I've put a little tutorial in the KDE userbase wiki about MIDI on Linux because Linux users have very little help setting up their systems for MIDI usage.
First, I would like to apologize for a joke, that was not my original idea. I've found it at the renaissance music web site of Alain Naigeon. He says that MP3 is like fast food, WAV is tasting the meal, and MIDI is cooking the recipe. He also says that playing a MIDI file is not reproducing a performance, it's a new performance. I agree, but on the other hand each MIDI file is a recording of a musical performance. Even more than a MP3 or a CD, because it contains no sound, only the musician actions. For instance, the folks at the Minnesota International Piano e-Competition distribute MIDI files of the competitors' performances, recorded in Yamaha Disklavier concert grand pianos, as standard MIDI files. And you can play these files in KMid2. Try this one: ...read more...
It is great to see how many people participated in the first icon test for KMail: 3327 started the test and 2399 finished. This is a drop-out of about 28% across the whole study and fairly good for this kind of study - especially seeing the technical difficulties we had when we started the study.
It is great to see that we got sufficient participants for reliable results in all languages!
As you might know, our test combines multiple indicators and calculates a single value for each icon-term relationship. The maximum value an icon-term-relation can reach is 10,0. Following I split up the results into 3 groups:
1. Icons working really well
All of the following icon-term-relationships show average values above 8 with no individual value below 7 for any language. We can assume all these icons to work well enough in all tested languages.
Hey! Again it’s been a long time since my last blog post. The main reason for this was me being busy with a lot of stuff…
First of all, let’s talk about KGet… There has been a whole bunch of work on it in the last months, including the merge of Matthias’ great work during SoC, a kget-krunner (thanks to Tomas Van Verrewegen), a lot of feature development and even more bugfixing…
Get it, test it and, most importantly: report bugs!
The other project I’m currently busy with is Shaman2. Dario wrote a long blog post about it already, so I won’t say too much. Just one thing: It’s awesome… Expect it to be rockin out quite soon…
I hope I’ll have some more time to keep you updated in the future…
I will give a presentation at Camp KDE as some of you might know. The topic is KDE and cloud computing. The idea is to give an overview over the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing compared with native Qt applications. I plan to give some ideas how we as a free software community could combine the best of both world and see what we have to do to create something which is better than Chrome OS combined with the traditional KDE Desktop and still have control over our own data.
I would like to have some input from you how you see the advantages and disadvantages of web based applications and storages compared with KDE Desktop apps.
So the questions are:
1. Advantages and Disadvantages of web based application for developers
2. Advantages and Disadvantages of web based application for users
3. Advantages and Disadvantages of KDE Desktop application for developers
4. Advantages and Disadvantages of KDE Desktop application for users.
Please post you answers below this blog post or send it to karlitschek@kde.org
"This article will briefly discuss the new features found within Gutsy Gibbon and hopefully give you a better idea of what to expect when the final version of Gutsy Gibbons is released in October.
