Amantia 

Last weekend I've met with some of our old timer KDEPIM developers and some of the newer ones who are interested in KDEPIM or related technologies in the KDAB offices in Berlin. Being a KDAB employee for a few years already (wow, time is passing quickly), the place was familiar, the people looked familiar. The foosball table was slightly familiar, although some players changed their dresses in order to spread confusion inside the visitor's heads. That is the only reason we've lost against locals with 5-0, 5-0. Suprisingly enough, the table wasn't used that much. Why? Because people were busy either working and talking. What they talked about I don't know too much, as I focused on some issues I planned to fix, but others can testify that Volker did not sit too much in front of his computers, but was dragged from one place to another for various discussions. Most of us started on Friday around noon. I won't tell too much about what others did, that is mostly their problem. Especially if they were on the other side of the room and I didn't saw their screens, I can't tell if they worked at all or not. They looked like they did though. ;) I can share some things about what some sitting nearby did. See later. As recently I became the de-facto maintainer and bugfixer for mail filters, I worked mostly on them. Unfortunately the first attempt to fix a bug failed: a bug that bothers me, although it is not the most reported one. It is about mails not being filtered for a while after a resume from hibernation. It is hard to reproduce, and although I run into it, I couldn't reproduce reliably enough and in a way I can debug it. After fighting with it and realising it won't work, I gave up. See you next time. Meantime we had some excellent food in an Indian restaurant, then when finally everybody arrived (almost everybody to be honest, plus even some more from KDAB who didn't sign up, but show up there), we were ready to start with presenting the kdepim and Akonadi architecture. Old time pimsters Volker Krause, Kevin Krammer and Tobias Koenig helped me with it, and sometimes saved me, as my knowledge in some area proved to be superficial. We ended up with a pretty impressive drawing on the whiteboard: Hopefully for those being on site it was understandable. Read More

This is the story of how bugfixes can happen. For each bug there is a bug reporter. It doesn't really matter if it is another developer or a non-developer user, as in the end it is just a user. Or does it? Let's see. Read More

I regularly see the same misconception and fear popping up on the mailing lists, bug reports and IRC: if the Akonadi database gets corrupted, I will lose my data. To make it clear from the beginning: the Akonadi database is NOT your MAIN data storage. Even if it gets destroyed, removed, your data is still safe. Read More

KMail is one of the most important applications inside KDE, I think hardly can argue anybody about it. Everybody is using email, and even if some think that a webmail solution can be just as good, most of us still do what we did 10-15 years ago: download mail to our computer/phone/tablet and carry that around. And for that we need a mail application. It is not news that KMail got just too big and not flexible enough in the KDE 3.x days. Somehow it was ported to KDE 4, but this was a crude port, without much improvements in its design. A new generic PIM backend was growing up meantime, and with some corporate support from KDAB, a new generation of KMail, KOrganizer and other PIM application started to take shape. From those I can tell about KMail, as I was more involved into it. As we wanted to have a mobile, touchscreen version as well, the work of porting KMail to Akonadi was done together with breaking KMail into smaller pieces, more or less standalone libraries to reuse as much code as possible. Time, manpower and other reasons limited what we could do, so this was a part success. We created and improves some generic usage libraries (KIMAP, KMime), some internal libraries that are nice, some that are not that nice, and in the end we had something that could have been a good foundation for KMail 2 series. I started to use KMail2 at that time, and in the beginning it was a fustrating experience. I can't count how many times I deleted and created again the accounts, the Akonadi database. But after a while I realized that I don't have to do anymore. KMail2 was still not released to the public, but got better and better. Unfortunately only slowly, as even less people worked on it, and only in their free time. It had bugs, some more annoying, some less annoying, but was usable enough to not force me to go back to KMail1. Then the PIM community took a deep breath - just like the KDE community did with KDE 4.0 - and finally released KMail2 officially. Funny or not, around this time I started to have problems with it. A migration of my second computer failed horribly. A cleanup of the Akonadi database and changing from the mixed maildir to maildir format was also painful. I blamed the developers a lot (including myself :) ). Then things started to move on and KMail got a new maintainer, who is very active (hi Laurent!). And we organized a developer sprint to stabilize KMail. The sprint took place last weekend in KDAB's Berlin office and was sponsored by the company. Everybody who knows the KDAB office, knows about the famous foosball table. Do I have to said that in the weekend we played only once? Yes, people were coding intensively, Volker had to raise the priority of the "FOOD" topic often. Issues were listed on the whiteboard. And everybody picked up what he was interested to do. Work was done on the migrator, the mixed maildir agent, the maildir resource, on the akonadi server, performance bottlenecks were identified and a new filtering resource was created, fixing the most hated KDE bug (should be closed as soon as Tobias Koenig is happy with his work). My choice in the sprint was mostly maildir related work, I tried to make it more reliable, more standard compliant and somewhat faster than before. And the biggest win is that I fixed most issues that bothered me with KMail's maildir handling. Yes, I was selfish. The sprint did not end in Berlin, for me it continued on the flight back home (that thanks to the weather and Lufthansa was almost a day longer than expected). And somewhat still continues as of now, although daily work reduces the time I can allocate to KDE. I can say that I'm happy again with KMail and Akonadi starts to gets less and less in the way of me and the users. The biggest success will be when users will not know that there is a nice server helping them, called Akonadi. For those eager to try out the changes, unfortunately most of them are in the master branch only (the upcoming KDE 4.8). We will try to port as much as possible into the KDE 4.7 bugfix releases, but as some changes required library additions, this won't be always possible. Read More

The above combination was never a painless experience, still at some point in past it seemed to be better to have a NVidia card on Linux then anything else, so I continued to buy them whenever my system was upgraded. Lately although it started to make me rather bad. I have two computers, one that is a 4 core Intel CPU with 8GB of memory, the other is a Core2Duo with 3GB. The latter is a Lenovo laptop. Both have NVidia, nothing high end (Qudaro NVS something and 9300GE, both used with dual monitor setup), but they should be more than enough for desktop usage. Are they? Well, something goes wrong there. Is that KDE, is that XOrg, is that the driver? I suspect the latter. From time to time (read: often), I ended up with 100% CPU usage for XOrg. Even though I had 3 cores doing nothing the desktop was unusable. Slow scroll, scroll mouse movements, things typed appearing with a delay, things like that. Like I'd have an XT. I tried several driver version, as I didn't always have this issues, but with newer kernel you cannot go back to (too) old drivers. I googled, and found others having similar experience, with no real solution. A suspicion is font rendering for some (non-aliased) fonts, eg. Monospace. Switching fonts sometimes seemed to make a difference, but in the end, the bug returned. Others said GTK apps under Qt cause the problem, and indeed closing Firefox sometimes helped. But it wasn't a solution. Or there was a suggestion to turn the "UseEvents" option on. This really seemed to help, but broke suspend to disk. :( Turning off the second display and turning on again seemed to help...for a while. Turning off the composite manager did not change the situation. Finally I tried the latest driver that appeared not so long ago, 256.44. And although the CPU usage of XOrg is still visible, with pikes going up to 20-40%, I gain back the control over the desktop. Am I happy with it? Well, not.... As this was only my desktop computer. I quickly updated the driver on the laptop as well, and went on the road. Just to see 100% CPU usage there. :( Did all the tricks again, but nothing helped. Until I had the crazy idea to change my widget theme from the default Oxygen to Plastique. And hurray, the problem went away! It is not perfect, with dual monitor enabled sometimes maximizing a konsole window takes seconds, but still in general the desktop is now usable. And of course this should also make me have more uptime on battery. Do I blame Oxygen? No, not directly. Although might make sense to investigate what causes there the NVidia driver going crazy and report to NVidia. Read More

Recently, let's say in the past year, I saw a growing number of email messages on the KDE lists with the following content only: +1 This is getting annoying for me. I get a nice notification from KMail about the messages arrived, and if I saw that it came to some folder that I'm interested in, I look at the message. And many times it contains nothing, but a +1. I can understand the urge to express support for an idea, a person, but please, think about it twice before doing so. These days it is not about abusing my / the worlds bandwidth, as we use more to share "stuff", it is about abusing the time of the readers. Read More

More than a year ago I wrote a post about KDE 4.0, I was quite unsatisfied with how in was and that we are going to release a product that has defects and in the eyes of the users will be a step back. I actually switched to KDE4 as my main desktop sometime during the 4.1 developing cycle. Since then I use KDE trunk on one machine and whatever my distro (openSUSE) provides on another one. There is always a shock when I have to use the distro packages. They did a very good job on integration and in many cases the distro package looks more polished than my self compiled one, still I was always liked the trunk version better. The improvement between 4.1.x and 4.0.x and 4.x.x and 4.1.x is just so big, using the older version is like going back several years. Not talking when I use KDE 3.5 on some other machines. I miss KDE 4.2 a lot in that case. Was it good that we released 4.0 a year ago? I think it was bad from PR point of view, but probably needed to actually have a 4.2 like the one will appear soon in the wild. Yes, there are still issues, yes there are some applications that aren't ported or their port is not up to the expectations (yet). Luckily, unless your distribution did it wrong, it is possible to run the KDE3 applications under KDE4, without much hassle. In the previous blog I complained about performance. My system is almost the same, except the video card is a newer one. And buying a new card at that time caused more trouble, and virtually no visible speedup at that time. Meantime the drivers improved (also due to KDE!), KDE improved (both kwin and plasma), and now I can use my system with effects enabled without thinking about performance. The current performance problems are actually caused by the flash plugin and its wrappers, in many case they start to use 100% CPU power. I'm not sure it can be fixed by us or the wrapper developers, what I know that both Konqueror and Firefox suffer from this problem. I just had to close down Firefox running in a KDE3 session because the X server for that session used completely one core. I'm happy now with KDE4 and trunk already has some improvements compared to 4.2 that I enjoy. :) I'm amazed by the progress of KDE, aren't you amazed as well? Read More

Maybe you already know, maybe you don't: Google created its own browser, called Chrome. The good is that it is based on WebKit, thus contains KDE technology. That's is another recognition for the work of KDE developers. The bad is that they mention Apple's WebKit and nothing about KDE/khtml. Sad. :( See http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html . Read More

Time is passing by. Sometimes I'm also amazed that it was more than 5 years ago when I wrote my first KDE application and soon after I joined the Quanta Plus project. And a few months later Quanta Plus become part of the KDE releases, I think with version 3.1. Probably many of you know that I worked full time on Quanta in the past years, thanks to Eric Laffoon and many other supporters, who made this possible. But things have changed, and I cannot spend all my time anymore on this beloved project. I don't abandon it, just realized that alone it would take just too much time to get a release for KDE 4.x series out in time. Therefore I call for help, I'd like to ask the community, existing developers or users with some C++ knowledge, developers who would like to find a challenging project in the open source world to come, join us. Help to make Quanta4 a reality and make many users happy throughout the world. You don't have to be afraid of the size of the project, one of the goals of Quanta4 is to have a modular code, build up as KDevPlatform (KDevelop) plugins. Read More

I know it is not so nice to complain and bash a project when you don't contribute to it. And yes until now, I did not contributed to the KDE4 desktop as I wished. I compiled it regularly and used the libraries, but did not run the KDE4 desktop or KDE4 version of the applications except KDevelop and Quanta. But as 4.0 is approaching, I decided that it is time to test, use, report bugs and even make fixes to it. I use KDE since a long time (~7 years), I think I always compiled from source, and for several years I compiled from CVS/Subversion regularly. I wasn't afraid to use the alpha/beta/whatever version as my daily desktop. But with KDE4 somehow I feel lost. I tried a few days ago to start a KDE4 session. After getting through some issues that the libraries were not found unless LD_LIBRARY_PATH is modified (and knotify even with this setup has problem to find libkaudiodevicelist.so), I finally got it running. Well, it looks nice at first. So what to do there? I can start the KDE4 applications from the Run Command dialogbox. This dialog is a nice improvement over the old version, especially the autocompletion is handy. In my version the menu was still missing, which isn't nice, but I don't care that much. What I care more is the speed, or to be exact, the lack of it. I blamed first the debug version of the libraries and the desktop, so I did a complete fresh build without debug information (a sidenote: my KDE3 is compiled WITH debug info and works fast enough). Sadly, it isn't faster. An example: right click on the desktop, and until the menu is shown, 3-4 seconds can pass. During this time Plasma and XOrg are heavily using the CPU. Moving around a window makes again ~58% CPU load (by kwin). Moving the mouse over the taskbar gives me 60% CPU usage by plasma AND 50% CPU usage by XOrg. This slowness if everywhere on the desktop. I click somewhere and it takes some seconds until it reacts. The "natural" reaction is to click again, which makes things worse. What is the reason of this slowness, I don't know. But I am worried about it, because I have a fairy decent computer here, everything is fast except my video card: AMD Opteron 180 Dual Core (2.4Ghz), 2GB Dual Channel RAM, 7200RPM SATA HDD, Nvidia FX5500 card (with the binary drivers). The card isn't the state of the art one, but should be more than enough for desktop usage. I tried compiz with it, and it works OK. I can see the reaction lag with compiz as well (compared to the KDE3 version of kwin, which is lightning fast), but it is still quite usable. I tried to remove kwin and use another window manager. This made at least the window operations faster, but the desktop was still slow. That's about the speed. Now about the usability side: I have no idea if what I tried is implemented at all or not, if there are plans to do them for the final release or not, but certainly I can say that as it is now, it is close to be unusable. There is the panel on the bottom with the taskbar and the clock. The taskbar let's say works, but I couldn't figure out what really a left/right click on an empty area of the taskbar does. It minimizes/restores the running applications, but I don't see the logic. I also don't know how to move around the taskbar on the panel. I don't know how to move the panel. It is possible to add new applets to the desktop, but I don't know how to move those applets to a panel. Moving them around on the screen is terribly slow. There is also an Unknown Applet on my panel which "could not be created". I have no idea what it is or how it appeared there. I also saw some bugs, like black boxes on top of windows appearing when you move a window over an applet, but this kind of issues are just simple bugs, acceptable at this stage of the development. Unfortunately this experience can have only one outcome: I cannot use KDE4 as my daily desktop. Not even as a testing desktop. So the solution is to test only the libraries and the applications. Luckily it is pretty easy to have a setup where you can run KDE4 applications under KDE3. Well, the first and one of the most important applications is Konqueror. I'm writing this blog from Konqueror4. Altough I feel a slowness here as well (when navigating through the menus, for example), this isn't a big issue, it is usable. I saw some rendering bugs, an ugly infinite loop when loading a certain page, but I saw similar issues with the old Konqui as well. There is a problem with the editor area where I write the blog text (home bring to the beginning of the text, not the beginning of the line, mouse scrolling does not work) and the closing buttons on the tabs do not work, but again, in beta stage these are "normal" bugs. For the applications the solution is to report the bugs or try to fix them. :) I will happily report them. Read More

openSUSE 10.3. I couldn't follow its development as I did with previous releases and tested only after the final version appeared. First I upgraded my desktop from 10.2 and it wasn't a pleasure as it made the system unbootable and I had to fix using a rescue console. But after having it running I was quite satisfied with it. Software management has improved (but still not fast enough in my opinion), the possibility to add the community repositories from YaST is nice, as it is the search page and the one click install (well one click on the webpage, several clicks later). I found some bugs and annoyances and I reported them, in the hope that they will be fixed in an update or in future releases. I also downloaded the 1 CD KDE version and decided to try it on my laptop. This laptop run Kubuntu since the beginning of 2006, when I switched it from SUSE in order to try it and learn it. Kubuntu was OK, but I missed some things, like YaST, I was not happy with all the modifications made to KDE and suspend to disk worked, but strangely (took a long time to come back and had to play with CTRL-ALT-Fx to get back the X screen). But I was happy with the boot speed, I even blogged about it. So I replaced Kubuntu with openSUSE 10.3. All I can say is wow. This time the installation went fine as it was a clean install, not an upgrade. The system feels quite good for this computer (PIII 550Mhz laptop, 192MB RAM, Trident video card with shared memory, 30GB IBM HDD). Compared to my previous tests only the HDD is different, but works at about the same speed (13MB/s). Booting until the KDM screen takes only 45 seconds and until I can use my system is 1:15seconds. Yes, the system is usable at that time when my optimized Kubuntu did not finish loading the login screen. The only optimization I did was to disable services I don't need from the current runlevel and disable arts. Now I don't want to say openSUSE is better, faster than Kubuntu. The new Kubuntu might also be just as fast and good. What I'm saying is that I'm impressed by the speed of the latest version of a Linux distribution. Software tends to be slower in time, while this time it became faster. I also know that booting speed is not enough or really relevant. Right now all I can say is that for general use (not for development) the system feels to be responsive and fast enough. Suspend to disk takes 25 seconds, resume 36. That's quite OK, I didn't meassure yet, but I believe it takes just as much on my desktop system is which is very fast compared to this laptop. I had until now two issues with the laptop: Read More

Even if Coolo says they have the cutest baby on earth, I have to disagree and post a proof of it. :) Our little daughter is with us since a year, we had her birthday yesterday. Read More

I was missing from development for about 2 weeks in August, because I had a vacation. With 3 friends of mine, we planned a hiking/climbing journey in the Alps for this summer. I haven't been on a real vacation for a long time, only for small 2-3 days of resting or one day climbing in the mountain. The original plan was pretty ambitious: climb Europe's highest mountain (if we do not count the Caucasus Mountains at the border of Europe and Asia), the Mont Blanc and the second highest peak, Dufour Spitze between Switzerland and Italy for one team, and the Weishorn in Switzerland for the second team. Well, things usually don't follow your plans, and so it happened this time. Those who were at Glasgow probably noticed my problems with my knees. On one of the training trips it started to hurt badly, and at one point I barely could walk. It required serious treatment, both "electrical" and through medicine. The doctors warned me that this might require a surgery in the future, altough they said I can still climb, just more carefully. This problem also stopped me to continue the training, so I wasn't in the mountains for several weeks, nor did I do other serious exercises. Only resting and waiting to recover in the hope I can at still go at least on one of the mountains or part of it. To make the story short, none of the peaks was climbed by me, but this was only partly because of my knees. The weather wasn't too good this year, some climbers died on M. Blanc a few weeks before we went there due to a storm. We were lucky to find 2 days of relatively good weather, but this meant to hurry. Also we had only 3 days to spend on the mountain, because we had to move further to Switzerland to the second peak. Unfortunately I got sick when we arrived at 3200m, and even if I recovered until next morning, I got sick again at 3800m near the Gouter Hut. This is where I abandoned my try to reach the peak. We climb the Gouter face in bad weather conditions (wind, snow, it was a storm, which turned back all the teams who tried to reach the summit that morning), in the night. As the weather forecast for the next day was bad (and wrong...), I didn't spend a night there, but came back the same day to 3200m. Two of my friends did an attempt to climb the summit and succeed, but almost had to spend a night above 4000m in a shelter, because of the fog that came down. As they didn't have sleeping bags, risked and came down to the tent in the fog. Some climbers remained in the shelter and looked really bad the following day. The Dufour Spitze idea was abandoned from the start, instead with my friend we hiked around Zermatt in the hope to make good pictures about the Matterhorn (couldn't because of the weather), and on the day when the weather was forecasted to be excellent, we climbed a 4165m high peak, the Breithorn. So at the end I could still go to a 4000'er, even though on the one which is considered to be the easiest (and yes, it was easy, especially because we had the acclimatization from the previous days). The very same day the two other friends hiked the 4505m high Weisshorn, a hard and demanding mountain, with very narrow ridge where only one of your boots fit on... We did some more hiking on lower areas (below 3000m), and on the descent from Gornergrat my knees finally said it was enough. So on the following days, I did nothing but driving and walking around in villages or where we stopped with the car. The joy was only interrupted on the last day by the Swiss police, who for whatever reason did a complete verification of our luggage and my car at the police station. I hope they were disappointed when after almost 2 hours of searching, asking and investigating find nothing illegal and wrong. Unfortunately this wasn't my first (bad) experience with Swiss police or their border control officers. I'm 99% sure all of them was due to having the wrong country flag on my license plates. There were other annoyances as well (like the backdoor of my Nikon F80 broke and it is very hard to get a replacement, while digital Nikon SLR's are very expensive), but after all it was a good trip, and I could do more than I thought after my knee problems started. And what does it have to do with KDE? Well, I warned all of my KDE T-Shirts during this trip, on purpose. :) Unfortunately I always forgot to take picture with them on the actual summit (or highest part). But did below of them. Read More

Today I discovered an application that is using Qt4. It was a complete surprize, as this is a software that you can download from a photo-shop's web page to create so called "photo-books". Unfortunately it is a Windows only application, but I was happy when I saw that QtCore4.dll & others were installed (inside wine). :) The application is in Romanian, but as I saw it was developed in Germany. It is called CEWE Fotocartea Mea (CEWE My photobook) and can be downloaded from here. Read More

This year is almost over, and it was a very mixed one. It had good and bad sides as well. It started very well as after a few years of trying my wife finally got pregnant. It was also good that I could still continue to live from what I like, with the help of Eric and the others who supported Quanta. And I could improve it, by releasing 5 bugfix releases during the year. I'm not 100% happy with all the releases, but I think the difference between the 3.5.0 releases in 2005 and the 3.5.5 released in October 2006 is huge. Work on Quanta4 continued, especially when Jens visited me. I was happy with the progress we made, altough at some points I was about to give up the new path we chose (using the KDevelop platform and write a new parser) for various reasons. After he left, work on Quanta4 pretty much stagnated, there were only a few commits. I more focused on the 3.5.x series and worked for Eric on other things. I also managed to visit one place where I never been before, namely the Danube Delta. This was nice, as last year we didn't really have a common vacation with my wife. This was only a 4 days trip though and had its bad points (heavy allergic reaction of me at one day, a speeding ticket on the way home), but the memories from the trip are only good. I'd go back once more, especially that I have better experience now where to go and how to go there. Altough I didn't go as much as I wanted to, I managed to visit some mountains with Jens (Csukas/Ciucas and Fogaras/Fagaras), altough the second one was not so successful. But luckily I could repeat it two months later with my friends. I was able to attend this years aKademy as well in Dublin, thanks to the KDE e.V. and the other supporters. Unfortunately the way back was a hell for me, my ears hurt so much on landing (and there were 2 landings), that I think (and the doctor also didn't rule this out) it is the cause of several other health problems that still bother me: regular headaches, returning pain in the ear and a constant high-pitch noise I hear. This caused discomfort and especially the headaches took away almost all my energy to work with a computer. I started to drink coffee almost daily to try to help the headache, which is not so good, as before I drunk only rarely (except at conferences). Lilla came to life between the period Jens left Romania and I went to Dublin. We were very happy for her, and she still makes our life full of smile. She is the one who helped us and still helps us in the hard period of the death of a family member. The death of my father in law was the worst moment in this year and not only. Last year my grandfather died... We also had another case when somebody left us: a dog found us (really, I was searching for our cat who disappeared for a day and a dog came to us for the calling), stayed with us for some months and disappeared. I'm still sad when I think of it, especially that I was angry the last seconds I saw him, as he wanted to run after our car and I shouted at him to go back to the courtyard. Luckily, our beloved cat is still here and I hope he will stay with us for a long time. It was also good that we were able to work a little on our house, namely we changed two entrance doors and put some kind of floor on the attic above the insulation layer. All this to try to keep the house warmer. ;-) We wanted to change the fence around the courtyard last year as well, but couldn't afford it. Finally as a Christmas present, I won a regional contest with my old application, which basicly pushed me into the open source and KDE world: Kallery. The contest itself made also possible to bring the application in the present, a present which will soon become a distant past, once KDE4 is released. ;-) Probably there were a lot of other important moments in 2006, but these are what came to my mind. What about the year that will come? Well, one of the most important things, which also would belong to the review of the old year, is that my country will become part of the European Union as of 1st of January, that is less than 24 hours from now. This is almost unbelievable for me, a moment I was waiting for since the communism fall down. I know there are quite some people from the current EU who are not so enthusiastic about this moment (or not so enthusiastic about the union itself), but I think this is a great chance for all the citizens of the continent to live together in peace, harmony and in the long term hopefully in good wealth as well. I know that in some parts Romania is not prepared and there is a lot of things to do until we can reach the level of the big and richer countries, but I see the progress here. I also know that there will be downsides as well, but I believe that alone this country would stagnate at best, but probably go down both from economical and political point of view. As of my personal benefits of joining the EU, the first one is the free travel (no more running for visas in the capital city, no more different treating at the borders - hopefully no more borders in a few years) and the fact that there won't be import taxes for goods from the EU. Think about not being able to order a book or an electronic device from e.g. Germany without the risk of paying a big tax for it. I payed almost the same amount as the buying price for my standalone DVD player when I came back from Finland in 2001, and that price was not small at all... Joining the EU will probably make Romania also a target for low cost airliners, making travel easier and more affordable in certain cases. I have big hopes that further progress will be made in the next year when it's about the country's infrastructure, especially roads (we had very bad roads and still have in many areas) and motorways, and there were also signs that a regional airport will be built close to my town. Once we have it, I promise to organize a KDE conference here. :-) I somewhat fear the changes as well, because prices AND wages are already going up, and I'm afraid that once it won't be enough to do OSS alone...well, its not enough even now, but luckily with some (partially related) extra work, I may manage it. Anyway, I will probably celebrate the event and the New Years Eve partly at home with my wife and daughter, and partly in the (nearby) city on the street. If you want to join, it's possible, as one of the national Hungarian channels, DUNA TV is broadcasting the event from our city. DUNA TV is visible (Free To Air) on the Hotbird satelite (13East, 12149 Vertical, SR 27500, FEC 3/4) in Europe and is encrypted on some other satelites in America and Australia. Understanding some Hungarian would probably not hurt. ;-) About software: it's really time to push Quanta4 forward. The 3.5.6 release has a priority though, but after that I plan to continue on Quanta4. Unfortunately working alone on it as not that fun, but hopefully we will have some more guys on the boat and maybe Jens will also have some free time for Quanta. I'm not that optimistic about a KDE4 release in mid-2007, but who knows. ;-) We decided with my wife that next year we will go more often to the mountains on weekends. I hope this will be true. I have some old plans what I would like to visit in my country (2 mountain regions and the part where the Danube crosses the Romanian mountains) and abroad as well (Dolomites, Mont Blanc area, Switzerland - again, some cities, like Vienna, Rome, Venice, Prague). If only one from each list will become true, that would be great. But I will not cry if I only can go often to the nearby places. Visiting Eric in the USA is also an old idea, and I'd like it, but (aside of money) fingerprinting and visa issues are keeping me back from this trip. Luckily we have aKademy, where we can still meet once a year for a few days. A long time plan is to make some order on my hard disk, especially pictures and music need to be sorted, tagged and backed up... But my biggest wish of all is to be healthy, happy and to live in peace. Read More

I think this doesn't require too much words. ;-) PS: She is a girl. ;-) PS2: And the texts are in Hungarian...

I wanted to write down my experience with how good KDevelop 3 is for KDE4 development since a long time, but never had the time for it. I used it since I started to work on KDE4 porting, and I can say that it is usable with some shortcoming and rough edges. First of all you have to use the upcoming KDevelop 3.4, not the latest stable release. This is an improved version of KDevelop 3.3.x, with big changes in debugging - it is supposed to work better with Qt4, but there are some issues left - and autocompletion. It also has better cmake support, which is important for KDE 4 development. The KDevelop 3.4 can be found at /home/kde/branches/kdevelop/3.4 in the KDE subversion repository. Once you have it you have to generate a KDE 4 project file for it. I use as an example an existing project, namely Quanta which is in kdewebdev module. So check out kdewebdev from trunk and run cmake in the source directory by specifying the -G KDevelop3 option, which will generate a KDevelop3 project file. I use the following cmake command: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=path_to_kde4_install_dir -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull path_to_source_dir -G KDevelop3 Read More

Following the call to ask for maintainers for those applications that do not have one, here is a post requesting maintainer for two applications from the KDEWebDev module. The first one is KImageMapEditor, the HTML image map editor application that can be embedded in Quanta Plus or used as a standalone application. It has only a few open bugs, and some automatic porting was done for KDE4, but requires more work. It was basicly not maintained through 3.5.x cycle, aside of keeping it working. The second is KFileReplace that has a wider target audience, and this fact shows up also in the number of open bugs. It is not web developer specific application, but it found a home in our module, mostly because I took over his maintainership after it was abandoned on SourceForge and we found it to be useful. It suffered a rewrite during KDE 3.4 and 3.5 and got several enhancements (thanks Emiliano), but it needs a new maintainer now. The biggest job is to go away from using processEvents which causes nothing but trouble. Using threads or at least timers would be much better. Both applications need an updated homepage as well. Anyone interested in these apps should contact me or us at the Quanta developer list. Read More

This is fun. A real rock band won the Eurovision contest in 2006. Finland sent Lordi, a melodic metal band in horror/sci-fi masks to Athens and they won with a big margin. I heard the first Lordi songs about 2 days ago when I listed to some music I got from a friend and I listen to them only once, but it was OK. Of course I couldn't remember anything from the songs, but the intro and the style (and the voice of Udo from Accept), but it wasn't bad. And I read in an older magazine that they participated in the Finnish Eurovision and it seems that they won there (today I read that some people protested against it even at the president of Finland). Finland is a nice place and they have some very good rock bands there, the best known might be Nightwish, HIM and maybe Stratovarius (but there are much-much more good bands from such a small country). But Eurovision is not known for its rock-friendliness, rather for trendy and light music. But I looked at it today, maybe just to see what are the current trends and to have some fun. Sincerely there were only a few that I could say they were OK, even if the music was not of my style (Germany, Lithuania for example). They were mostly rated down. ;-) Lithuania was the best, we laughed a lot on them with my wife. If you have a chance to see their performance from this shown, do it! Lordi was nothing really special with this song, it was an OK song, but not a big hit IMHO. Today I listened again to their album (its a newer one) and the new album seems better than the winner song. But for whatever reason the countries constantly voted on them and they won with about 50 points and getting a record number of points. This story is bigger than the bird flu in Romania which is now about 20 km from my place. Read More

Some days ago I bought an ASUS jeans. We've been searching for a jean that is good for my size (not that easy), and found this one with reduced price (~$10 instead of $22). When I saw the name, I thought it will be fun to buy it. :-) See the pictures: Read More

I find todays hardware less and less reliable. Lately I feel it on my own skin. The story started with some mess I made on my hard disk and an upgrade of SUSE to 10.1 beta9. I reorganized my partitions a little, and after that my old win partition did not want to boot. Well, let's reinstall it, but the installer din not want to start from the CD. After a while it started. Whatever, I thought it's the win installer, as I never tried it since my upgrade to AMD64, so I forgot about it (I don't really use win, I just keep for the case that somebody brings me a software that doesn't run on Linux). After I installed SUSE I had strange crashes, complete system freezes. As I also modified some settings in the BIOS, I still did not suspect anything, but that my BIOS changes made the system unstable or SUSE is still very beta. One of such freezes almost destroyed a reiserfs partition, I could only recover with --rebuild-tree, and I had to run it twice as for the first time it crashed. After that I tried to compile KDE. From time to time it produced some errors, but what it made me really suspect that this is not a software problem was frequent crashes of g++ when compiling KOffice. After a reboot even make did not start, either gave me a bus error or segmentation fault. At this stage I decided to test the memory. In less than a minute I found that it gave me 3000+ errors. I'm a little disappointed with this. It's good that I know the cause, it's also good that the memory is in warranty, but it is sad to see such failures from a well known vendor. This was a 6 month old Corsair Value Select memory, a pair of 512MB modules. Some investigation revealed that one of the modules has problems. So now I am using only 512MB in single channel mode and waiting to confirm the replacement of the module(s). Hopefully the dealer will do it without problem, as it is a friend of mine. And now back to the first sentence: if you go through the blogs on planetkde.org or read some LUG lists, you can see what kind of hardware problems did others have. The most frequent would be hard disk failures. The second might be memory failure. But there are others as well, like badly designed laptops. What's happening in hardware business? Is it really good to try to reduce costs that much and keep releasing new products like crazy? It seems that in this rush the consumer is who will loose the most, but the vendors will do as well, when brands with good reputation start to release bad products (I heard that from ASUS from example, but this Corsair problem is also bad. Plextor also released a problematic DVD-RW.) In the past there were some products that should be avoided (I remember some VXPro-II chipset), but from my experience the problem was not that the hardware failed after some time: either it was a bad design and never worked correctly or it was OK and worked for years. Even in case of cheap, low-end brands. I had an Acorp motherboard with AMD K6 on it, plus some noname S3Savage graphics card and memory, Quantum hard disks, a Creative 16x CDROM from around 1999 (some parts, like the case is from 1995 or so) and it still works for my father! From time to time you need to clean the fans, the CD drive, but it works, and is stable. Same for other PCs I know around. In the library where I work part-time, there are 586 and Pentium I computers in use. And my experience with recent hardware: Read More

So aKademy 2006 was announced. The date is interesting, as it starts on my birthday. ;-) I wanted to go there, but didn't start any preparation before the final announcement. Now I looked at what do I need to go there. First a plane ticket: it is 220EUR+airport taxes. This is not that bad, and the fact that I don't have to go to the capital city, but I can use another one (where my mother in law lives) is a bonus. So traveling can be arranged. But I need a visa as well! Unfortunately Ireland is not part of the Schengen treaty and altough I don't need a visa to enter the Schengen states, I need one to enter Ireland (and UK for that matter). I couldn't find the local site of the Irish embassy, but I found some informations on a travel agency site and I was shocked. The amount of documents they ask is enormous and I'd say aberrant. Starting from proof that you work here the listed documents are: registration of the company (not clear if you need it also if you are an employee?), birth certificates of all your relatives (parents, sisters, brothers, spouse, children), official declaration that you don't want to work there, copy of all pages of your current and past passports where there are visas or stamps, bank account statement, reservation at an Irish hotel and whatever. All officially translated to English and everything in two examples. The waiting period for the visa is 4-6 weeks. Amazing. Not even the US or the UK has these kind of requirements. Of course it is well known that getting a visa for the US is a simple lottery, but for the UK on their site it is said that 93% gets the visa and they try to issue the visa for everybody in one day. Also for the US they decide on the same day you have the interview. I hate paperwork and usual treatment at embassies (most of them). I would also need to go to the capital city twice (800km in total), pay a lot for the travel, for the visa and for the translations (it's not cheap to do official translations) and after that you might still not get it. I found an email address (which does not bounce) and asked there again about the requirements to get the visa. If they don't answer, I will call them. But if the requirements are the same I read on the tourist agency site, I may not go. It would take far too much energy and money from my side and it may not worth. So happy aKademy for all the others. Read More

Today I took some time to configure an nx server on a system for which I am the administrator. It is a server in a library behind a firewall server. Actually I have to access both a linux server behind that firewall and a windows server as the application they are using is windows based (and even if it runs just fine through wine, it is not enough in every case). So first I had to solve the direct access from myself to the linux server. With some iptables rules I did it (first time in my life!). It is not perfect as I am using a dial-up connection, so my IP address is not fixed and I had to enable ssh access from a wider range, but it works. ssh to the server behind the firewall worked on a non-standard port. Time to try nx. I had some problems running nxclient. For me, on SuSE 10, it showed an empty xmessage window with an OK button. :-0 I checked, I have everything installed, still nothing happens. As a last resort I downloaded the client RPM package from NoMachine. And the wonder happened: it works. Now I could enable the encryption for all traffic, meaning that theoretically I must be able to access the nxserver with only the custom ssh port open in the firewall. And for my surprise, it worked: I could log in to the KDE desktop from the library. The speed is quite amazing, I would say. I may tweak this even more for the future, but even now with a 800x600 screen it is fast enough. I run krdc to connect to the Windows server: works and fast again. So basicly I have now my KDE desktop, inside that another KDE desktop and inside that the Windows desktop. Amazing, I would say. The latency is a little bit high, but this is because of my modem connection (it is a 3G wireless modem, ~128kbps upload, ~300kbps download). Read More

I did some performace tuning today on my laptop, so i can make Kubuntu start up faster. It was mostly about disabling startup services I don't need and optimizing KDE startup performace according to the performace tips from wiki.kde.org. I did not tried to use the patched fontconfig or do something like that. I just have the standard kubuntu debs installed. The system was prelinked, but it was before I even started to optimize it, so it is not really relevant. I will not go into the details, but here are some figures. The laptop is a PIII-500Mhz (actually this is written on the box, but every application, including the POST screen says it's a 550Mhz one), 192MB SDRAM 100Mhz (261MB/s), 6GB disk, Trident video adapter, 15" monitor, working in 16bit colors. hdparm -t /dev/hda shows 13.22 MB/s. Not too much... Read More

I have to admit that I'm a big SuSE fun and used SuSE exclusively for the last 6 years or so. For me SuSE had and has several advantages over the other distributions and these are: Read More

I haven't blogged since quite some time and when I did it was because of a sad story. But now it is different. Christams is close and I already got some gifts from my friend from over the ocean and from myself. ;-) Read the rest only if you have enough free time to spend on blog-reading. After almost 4 years of usage I partially retired my old desktop computer, which served me so well. During this time I did spent some on improving it, but those were mostly because of hardware failures. Let's see a history of my recent computers: Read More

The sun eclipse was also visible from Romania, altough it was not that spectacular. In 1999 was a full eclipse that I was supposed to see from the mountains, but minutes before the eclipse started, the sky was filled by clouds and some minutes after it ended, it cleared up. Go figure. ;-) Now it was cloudy, but cleared up before the eclipse started. I made some digital and non-digital photos. They are not so spectacular as the sone shined quite bright (you couldn't notice the eclipse from the amount of light if you did not know about), and I don't want to become blind, so I used a filtering material to make the photos. This way only the sun and the moon is visible. A picture can be seen here. Read More

I don't blog too often, but several things happened during the last month and they are partly related to KDE as well. And as there is a short dot story now available, I would like to share something about the background of the story. The KDE part starts with the old idea of merging Quanta and KDevelop. The idea is not revolutionary: both are IDE's, both are using some kind of MDI (KMDI), both offer similar functions, only the target audience and the supported languages are different, altough both have PHP support. The first idea was to make Quanta use KDevelop's plugins. It turned out that in order to do so, we would need to rewrite KDevelop. So Jens came with the idea of making KDevelop plugins from Quanta's functionality. Good idea. We first talked about it last year at aKademy. After that almost nothing happened, everybody was busy with his own task. But we (and mostly Jens) did not forgot about this idea and some months ago he started to port the Project Views functionality to a KDevelop plugin. Slowly I joined the porting and we had some plugins working inside KDevelop. But things were slow, so he invited me to go there to Cambodia to work together. 6 weeks for me there would be just too long and even with support from the e.V. it would be expensive. Again, he came up with another idea: he has time to come here and work on Quanta. This was a great idea and we did as he said. We've been preparing with my wife to host Jens in our small house, which was partly without furniture. But with the help of our parents we managed to bring it in a shape that we can host somebody for a longer period. Oh, not only one, but two: we got a cat meantime. ;-) We started here first to identify the plugins we would like to create, try to find the limitations of the current KDevelop framework and finally to code the plugins one by one. We had lots of ideas and did not know how much we can implement in this timeframe. Now looking back I had mixed feelings: we did a lot of work, much more than we could do if we were not here together, but of course I feel that progress could have been even better if things evolve differently here. But about this later. 6 week continuous coding is hard. At least it is not for me. So aside of coding we wanted to visit the country as well, especially the mountains. Again, I find that we could have been better, but again, this was mostly out of our control. On the first weekend we wanted to climb a nice, but hard mountain. Well, it rained, so we went to visit the county, mostly the numerous mineral water springs (there are a lot - for free) and a volcanic lake that's nearby. After all, this was nice. After the first full week coding my wife went on vacation, so we decided to go to a nice mountain area in the west of Romania. We've been there once and I wanted to go back again. The mountain is not that high, but has several caves, interesting forms and things that you cannot really see in other places (of Romania), like a disappearing river in the ground. It flows down into the earth at several places, just like the water in a bathtube. On our way to the mountain we visited my grandfather as well, who was very sick. Well, the mountain is still beautiful, even if the weather was rainy the days while we've been approaching it, it became nice on the first day when we slept there. Everything looked perfect, but I got sick. So I couldn't really enjoy the trip. And my wife and Jens go sick as well after. I think we had some kind of food poisoning or other stomach infection. :-( So I have to go back again there to enjoy it... It was also not that nice that I broke my digital camera there what I got from Eric at aKademy. On our way back we visited again my grandfather, whom health situation was worse and worse every day. After some days of working, we were preparing to go to the KDevelop conference in Ukraine. I already had the visa and the ticket, but mainly due to the problems with my grandfather, I did not go there. Jens went alone there. I was amazed that he does it, as he had to take a bus to a city from where the train stop, find the train station there, go to another country where people don't really speak English and even the letters are different... But it was OK. Reports about the conference were already posted here. Regarding our work, he discussed some problems we have identified and moved the project views functionality into KDevelop's existing File List plugin, so everybody can enjoy in the next KDevelop release. Just before the conference was over, my grandfather died. I had the time to take Jens from the city (this time he did not have to take the bus as my car was repaired) and next day I went to the funeral. This was a weekend, and he stood at our house taking care of the cat. So things were busy until this time and I was not so happy. I just waited for the phone call when my father announces the death of my grandfather and this was stressing. I also had a lot of things to do at the city library as I am working part time there as a network administrator. I even installed some months ago an LTSP network for free internet access. Of course, the terminals run KDE. It was amazing that people can work on it without real training and some even configured Kopete for chatting by themselves. But this time the job was boring: install and configure several Windows machines... After the funeral of my grandfather coding progress was very good. Well, the truth is that we started in the morning (9-10AM) and sometimes went to bed at 2-3AM during the night... I could say that Jens could stay up for a longer period. ;-) My wife was the first who gave up, and sometimes I simply couldn't wait until we both stop to work, but went to bed. During this time we ported many functionality of Quanta into the newly created plugins. So now the code is somewhat usable. You should not search for everything that was in Quanta, some areas are still unfinished, but it can be used. And hopefully it does not crash. Some functionalities are even improved compared to the one that is in Quanta 3.x. In our TODO file there is a list of missing items, the most important would be VPL. We want to have a clear VPL implementation which does not need hacks everywhere in other parts. One way could be to use KDOM as a storage for our internal node tree. We wanted to work on this as well, but did not have the time. So the current parser still creates our own node tree, but the code is more separated than before, and slowly we reach the point where we can try to use KDOM. The fact that we did not really work on parser is one of the reasons I said that we could do more. Maybe not in 6 weeks (from which 1 week was the KDevelop conference) though. Other missing item is the debugger, but as Linus works heavily on support for XDebug for Quanta 3.5, we did not want to start porting the current implementation. I don't want to spend too many words explaining the details of the new Quanta. They are more or less explained in our DESIGN file and anybody having questions can find us on the quanta-devel list. As I said we wanted to visit some places here as well. But the weather was playing tricks with us. It rained a lot, we had only a few days with sunshine and usually not on weekends. It rained so much here that the country experienced flooding like never before. It started during spring in the west (the water is still there), but now the problems were mostly on the east. Most of the roads between Transylvania and Moldova are damaged. That road as well that I used to get Jens from the train station to our home... One weekend we tried our luck and climbed a mountain. We got some small rain, but it was OK. Only that the boots of Jens did not survive the trip. The lower part started to separate from the rest already on the first trip, but I took to a repair service and they glued back. Well, it was good for half of the next trip. This incident and the fact that we had only one more weekend left lowered the chance to visit the higher mountains. And yes, next weekend the weather was again cloudy. So we visited a castle (the "Dracula" castle, altough it's connection with the Romanian prince called Vlad Tepes - known as Dracula, altough he was not a vampire... - is only vague. The castle was under his father's (? I'm not exactly sure about this) control for 35 years or so. But the Dracula myth is good for tourism: the village is full with tourists from Romania and abroad. As the weather started to became better, we went to the base of another mountain (the first one we wanted to climb weeks ago) and walked a little there in the forrest. As we prepared to live, the clouds disappeared and it was visible that the next day will be beautiful. So was it, since that day it is sunshine and high temperatures (30C and above, compared to the other days when sometimes it was only 15C). While we've been going to Bucharest to the airport, my heart was crying as I saw the clear and sunny mountains. So we went to Bucharest, experienced some traffic jam, hot air and crowed and after that Jens flew away. He should be at home at this time, ~22 hours after he left Romania. Here we are today, I still did some work on kdevquanta (or Kuanta, however you like it), but I should focus on Quanta 3.5 now. And I should go to the mountains on this weekend as the weather reports say that we will have sunshine during the next days. The target is a 2-3 days trip in the highest (2544m) and longest (70km) mountain in Romania. Of course, we will visit only a small part of it. Read More

As a follow-up to my last blog, here comes some detail about how to use KNewStuffSecure in your application. Shortly again, the idea behind it is to provide a way to upload and download digitaly signed resources, thus making it possible for the user to check the real source as well as the integrity of the downloaded resources on one side, and on the other side it allows automatization for processing the uploaded resources on the server side. Read More

Some minutes ago a mail from Ian landed in my Inbox, where he asks if I would blog or write a "short one paragraph snippet" on how KNewStuff is used in Quanta. I don't really get where should I write that paragraph, that I can certainly blog here. :-) Anyway, my PC is doing some video encoding using the nice DVD Rip-O-Matic application written in Kommander, so I have some free time. I have no idea if this will show up on planetkde.org or not though. Now back to the topic. Quanta was already extensible with user defined toolbars, actions, documentation, script, templates and DTEP packages describing languages. It was a natural step to provide an interface from within the application so users can get the latest add-on packages, instead of needing to go to the website and download from there. To be honest, until now only some documentation packages were available for download, but now that the download is integrated we might get rid of some heavy DTEP packages that are shipped with Quanta and offer the rest as an add-on. It was also possible to send such packages in email, but this is also of limited use if you want to contribute back easily to the community. Due to the nature of packages, especially for scripts and toolbars getting new resources can pose a potential security problem, as they contain executable code, and nobody wants to run locally a script that deletes your home directory. Our solution was to use digital signing and md5sum verification. An innovative idea, isn't it? ;-) For this first I locally extended KNewStuff to support verification of the downloaded resources. The user is always warned about who created the resource and can decide to install it or not. If (signature of) the one who created is trusted, only an information dialog is shown. This doesn't rule out the possibility of user error and from this the local data stealing or corruption, the responsibility is completely the user's. The "secured" KNewStuff (KNewStuffSecure) code was contributed back to main KDE libraries and now it is available in 3.4.0, so other applications can use it as well. I tried to make it as easily usable as I could, the only thing that one must understand is how a secured resource looks like: a gziped tarball which has a gziped tarball (the real resource), a signature and an md5sum file. Luckily there is also code to create such secure resources. And this is the second step (and maybe the more important one) regarding KNewStuff usage. I think it's great to provide add-ons, but it's even better if those add-ons come from the users. With the upload feature they can easily share their toolbars, templates and whatever with the rest of the world. And here comes the "todo" part which we want to do on the server side (hopefully for will be ready around 3.4.0 is released, or shortly after), where the newstuff resources are uploaded and are provided for download. We want to set up some scripts on the site so whenever somebody uploads a resource it is handled either automatically (and provided for immediate download) or it's put in a review queue. The decision is again made based on (surprise) the signature of the uploader. If we (the Quanta team) trust him/her and he/she provided good resources it can be a trusted uploader and his work will be offered for download immediately. Resources uploaded by not trusted users are reviewed first and the reviewer can decide if it is accepted or not. So this is the short story. Ian, if you wanted a more technical description (maybe about the KNewStuffSecure), I can write one as well. Read More

We've reached an important point: branching the CVS for 3.2. After complaining a little that things didn't went as smooth as they could I've started to work again. Now that HEAD is open and we have a 3.2 branch, it was time to get rid of development branches. So let's merge them into HEAD. I've tried to do is carefully. Made a copy of my local HEAD checkout, merged (using CVS merge) the development branch into that. So far, so good. Compiled, committed that one. Great, it worked perfectly, I only had to fix minor issues. Committed also those ones. According to the kde-cvs mails they went to HEAD. Some minutes later I've changed the formatting of a file and, surprise, the mail to the kde-cvs indicated that it went to the 3.2 branch. I've become suspicious and verified my local copy. It looked that some files have the KDE_3_2_BRANCH tag and some other don't have. This also means that I committed some files to HEAD and some to branch. Great. Not that I break every freeze rule, but for sure it won't even compile. I've tried to figure out what has happened, and the only thing I can imagine is that the connection went down (by itself, or I canceled) while a cvs command was not completely finished, and this messed up the local copy. This may happen, as I usually connect->commit/update->disconnect. Many times I also download my mails during this time and sometimes I disconnect after the mails are downloaded (especially if there are lot of mails) and forget to check that the commit/update was finished. Or the merge itself caused the problem, I don't know... Or the cvs server had problems. After struggling a while and trying to figure out what can be done, I've decided to repair thing manually. Namely update my local branch copy (which wasn't easy either, as the updates were often interrupted (signal 9?), although the connection was up and running and I haven't killed cvs) to the place where cvs was branched and commit this code again to the branch. This wasn't so simple, but I could do: locally. I couldn't commit, now due to some locking problems. This was the point when I gave up. It was around 2 AM. Now it's morning: I couldn't even update from CVS. I get cvs [update aborted]: connect to cvs.kde.org(195.135.221.67):2401 failed: Connection refused Read More