Aseigo 

i forgot i had the presentations on my watch (it has 256MB of USB-accessible flash memory =) which, between devices:/ and fish:/, made it really easy to upload. i think they are both the versions i used on the laptops, though i think i may have done some cleanups/typo fixing on each after "backing them up" from the laptop to my watch ;-) anyways. here they are: Read More

somewhere between 15 and 20 people attended the last presentation which wasn't bad given the overly technical nature of the presentation and the fact that it was the last of the day. i was tired and hungry (the food vendors closed down before i could answer all the after-presentation questions people had for me after the second presentation! bastards!) but it went well. i decided to take an informal approach on this one: no slides, just an interactive discussion. i covered the basics of the signal/slot architecture, XMLUI, KConfigXT, what a basic KDE app looks like and the various libraries one can use (kio, kdeui, etc). i then did a quick tour of KDevelop, did some basic form design in Designer and provided an overview the constellation of the many, many KDE devel tools. talked about developer.kde.org and how to get more info on things like the KDE build system. used KDevelop/kapptemplate to generate a C++ and a Python KDE app. people were duly impressed ;-) Read More

during the day i had the opportunity to chat with several interesting people. i talked briefly with a fellow who works on Mono for Ximian, which was interesting and productive. i had drinks with a couple of people from Real Media's Helix project, which was quite productive. i think there is some potential for good things to come out of that project if they manage to work out how to work with the community, which is no small feat. we talked about Open Source Q&A, working with the various Free Software projects, etc. good stuff. the sake helped fuel the conversation well past my exhaustion point ;-) Read More

second presentation went without a hitch. figured it would be lightly attended due to being at noon (lunch!). but the room was full. very good. it was well received and i'm looking for the energy to do my third pressie on kde development. having fun answering question and mixing with the people here. =) Read More

first presentation done, muscled through some technical difficulties with the projector. i hate hardware. the audience was enthusiastic and it was well received. did another round of the (small) booth area. if the people here are any indication, Linux is still in its infancy adoptionwise here but has a great group of enthusiastic and knowledgable people pushing it forward. Read More

after 17 hours on the road i'm finally here. we only got lost once (losing ~40 minutes =/ ), which isn't too bad really. even the border crossing was uneventful. the drive was gorgeous: mountains, trees, beautiful little towns. i love the Pacific Northwest. Read More

so here's the plan... i'm going to go to sleep right now (it 2:30am...) and get up tomorrow, er, today (at 7:00am) and head out to LinuxFest Northwest. if it all works out, i'll have a bunch of fun and inspire some people w/regards to KDE... i'll keep a running diary of the events here whenever i can get 'net access along the way (i'm driving there and back.. ~12 hours on the road each way.. road trips ROCK! =) this way i can keep my friends and interested folk up to date with my KDE weekend adventure, in case anyone cares. well, i know i do. =P Read More

my words have gotten me into trouble (some would say, "again"). apparently some people are truly offended because of the content of my blog. i can't rectify that now, nor can i fix other people's way of approaching the Universe. all the same, i don't want my personal thoughts to cast a pall of negative consequences upon KDE or any other Free Software project; so this will be my last blog entry on kdevelopers.org. i'll leave with some quotes that i found online while looking for some external wisdom on things. some i feel apply to me or to this situation. some are just interesting, or even funny. enjoy. Read More

the bug db is getting out of hand. we have millions of LOC, hundreds of apps, and goddess knows how many users at this point. we need to have a triage team. KDE Quality seems the right place to cherry pick people for it, but i think some education may be in order first. when i get back from my weekend sorte i'll try and write my long-awaited follow up to the WhatsThis HOWTO on Bug triage. but what i'm really wondering is this: would people show up for an online Bug Triaging workship ... say ... on irc, #kde-bugtriage and walk a bunch of people through the process, answering questions, offering reassurance and providing praise (or blame ;) as we go ... hum. Read More

getting back to development is nice. very nice. kicker is in shreds on one of my machines. the non-KDE app button dialog has a nice, spiffy new (standard) look to it. and i'm a few steps closer getting away from the "main" panel being a hard-coded fact-o-life. loading applets via appletproxies will also likely be hitting the bit-bin, after discussion with John Firebaugh and others. its a nice idea, but causes it's own problems while not providing a complete solution anyways (e.g. kicker still crashes due to the bad applets. look at all the BRs on it!). i must also say that smooth zooming icons look so much nicer than icons that jump from small to big (assuming you've got the right icon sizes around in the first place!). Read More

i slept on the living room floor last night. it felt good. a large body pillow on hardwood. mmmm. the computer played music to my sleeping head all night and the cats enjoyed not having to jump up onto the bed to harass me. Read More

i think that the Universe has been trying to tell me something. since the beginning of the year one thing after another after another kept coming up to keep me away from KDE development. then yesterday i realized that i didn't really care much for or about KDE anymore. so today i wiped KDE off my main box and installed GNOME from CVS. i'm totally excited about this object model thingy and feel that youthful exuberance in my fingers once again. i can't WAIT to give the underscore key a good workout in the months to come. au revoir, KDE, i've found my true GHOME. i suppose this will be my last blog here. it was fun. luv, aaron. Read More

so.. this is the year that will never end ... in both good and bad ways... i've got my 3 hours of speaking time about KDE staring me in the face in the middle of April @ Bellingham, Washington's Linuxfest Northwest, a HUGE backlog of KDE hacking and a million things going on. i'm watching what's happening @Brainshare with anticipation. my step-Father died, a company of mine is in the final stages of selling it's first "franchise" (licensee, really, but... yeah, those are just legal differences ;) which is something that just cropped up, i'm busy sorting out life with women and other beings, i'm excited about what's happening w/Ian's company re:Kolab (DUDE: we need to talk on the phone again about what's up with the marketing materials!), i'm wrapping up a sideline contract devel job, and i'm trying to figure out how to put together a meaningful action plan for people who watch documentaries like The Corporation and have their eyes openned for the first time to the ills of our culture's metasystems. in all, i'm having a slow month. =P Read More

i wish we designed KDE for 4 year olds. well, today's four year olds growing up in computer-centric societies, anyways. why? because they GET IT. watching my son use KDE, i realized that the Home metaphore for "your files" works very nicely. tonight he said, "i want to go to the home ..." and clicked on the little house icon to pull up the file manager. he loves looking at photos on the computer of people he knows. the whole "My Documents" thing or the claim that "the concept of a Home directory is so foreign and weird" is just a bunch of crotchety old people yammin' their lips. Home makes sense and it works when you don't come into it with preconceived notions, and My Documents requires the internalization of all sorts of preconceptions such as what a document is and that someone actually owns them. we all understand the concept of a "home" and how that thing works (we put our stuff there, sometimes other people's stuff goes there too, it's our base of operations ,etc), so it's a pretty damned good metaphor. Read More

ok... so as the recent thread on kde-core-devel re: kcfg showed, people FEAR usability efforts. that's right, people FEAR it. that word was actually used in relation to the topic. they are afraid some people will screw it up, that KDE can't cope with a drive towards being more usable without becoming pure shit. i really feel like ranting about thickheads, but that would just be adrenaline speaking. as much as that would feel good ;-) , i'm going to try to be constructive instead: what can be done to gain the trust of people in KDE? or is that a pipedream? Read More

ah... finally in my new house and it's feeling good... now to start putting the wraps on various bits of code i have laying around ... committed small things to kjots and kcm_kicker the last two days, and have bigger chunks of kscd, kicker, TOM and systray patches awaiting my attentions. i also have that bookmark code lypie's been patiently waiting for me to commit. =) Read More

ok.. so, i'm sick of waiting several seconds for kwrite to pop up whenever i do a View Source in konqueror. yes, one might be correct in saying kwrite should open faster. but i've got a different idea: why not have a simple viewer window that runs IN the konqi process ala Mozilla? i've had this on my slower box at home for some time now and BOY does it make a nice difference speed-wise. i need to add some basic viewer functionality to it like Search and Print. perhaps just a nice little toolbar with a couple of buttons on it (and an incremental search line? hrm...) anyways... i'm pondering whether it's worth polishing up and attempting to convince the Konqi maintainers that this is a better approach than launching an external editor. here's my benefit/cost summary: Read More

during the last week of moving house (while still working, of course..) i haven't had much contact with my usual "peer group", including the KDE people. let me just say that in their absence from my life i'm beginning to remember how amazing all those guys are. instead, i've been in contact primarily with people who randomly pop up or who come in through the office during the work day. with Linux and KDE taking off, education is definitely lagging behind. ignorance is frustrating, but at least it (unlike stupidity) is curable. some examples of the ignorance i've run into this week: Read More

i was going to be working on NX stuff today, but will do it tomorrow instead. i've been driven to work on kcontrol ideas today. i'm about to go out and get some groceries and a new water gun for my son (he broke his beloved water shoorter today and was rather disapointed by that). i also have some recycling to drop off. i'm about to take a break to do this stuff. but before i go, here's a bit of stream-of-consciousness verse to all those who like to pester me about what a shitty job i'm doing with regards to KDE's usability. Read More

usability is one of the last avenues of software development to have it's methodologies challenged/changed using open source mechanisms. even many practicing/promoting usability in design in Free Software projects usually attempt to do so using draconian and/or closed methods. let's stop the insanity and open source usability. and here's your chance to join the revolution. read on to see how you can change the face of usability studies by doing what so many have jabbered on about but so few (if any) are actually doing. and it'll only take a few minutes of your time. Read More

Holy f***ing CHRIST people! I haven't read the blogs for a while due to being simultaneously busy beyond belief and rather uninterested in anything further than 3 feet from my own naval, but I decided to take a gander at what's been up here of late and ... it's crazyness! People are spouting off about fd.o when they obviously don't know the first thing about it. Let me cluebat some of you back onto this side of the International Stupid Line (which runs straight through Elbonia and the Far Side universe, IIRC). Read More

so i've gotten a couple hours sleep now and i'm calmer. thanks to work for waking me up; i just love fixing code over the phone. i still haven't finished the stupid "Everything that's new or changed in 3.2" page thanks to my 3.2 install being minorly screwed right now. i'll probably hijak my system at work to finish it off. anyways. i reread my last blog and boy was i in a pissy, albeit mildly humourous, mood. "cluebat you back to this side of the International Stupid Line".. hehe.. i'm such an ass. back to sleep. Read More

more fun in the world of hacking on odds and ends for 3.2 ... just finished up a kfiledialog patch. fun stuff. on the other side of life, just got through listening to the Linux Show this week where ESR and Dennis Powell slag KDE with all sorts of stupidity. i'll be happy to remind those two dolts of their empty headed predictions in a year or two. heck, i'd be happy to school them in public discussion today. they apparently lack good grasp of the facts, but i suppose that's never stopped people (especially those two) from opening their mouths. so be it... time to send a patch for perusal to kde-core-devel. Read More

in prep for 3.2, i've been looking at some of the default settings and fixing up some of the errant ones... like no desktop text shadows, or soft line wrap in kedit... lots of little fiddly stuff.. and working on fixes for editting bookmarks with the context menu (the dialog is a little lackluster) and for ensuring that important servicemenus like the mount options are in the top level and not buried in the Action submenu. Read More

Bruce took his reply to the KDE proposal off his website and replaced it with four short paragraphs that are much more to-the-point and not nearly as dubious as his original piece. The web is vastly impermanent, which can be good but is often unfortunate as we lose our history and context easily. in related news JDub has said written up in his blog (http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/blog/) how dissapointed he is in some of the KDE people for the trail of snipes that occured on the User Linux discuss list in the last few days; i agree with his sentiments but wonder why he felt the need to whine about it in his blog. (hey, how self-referential! look at me, i'm Kevin Smith.) if it wasn't for the fact that we're doing a lot of cool stuff (e.g. code and technical specs) on the kde-debian list, i'd be seriously in the dumps right now. oh well... Read More

Here are the points in the order they were presented in Bruce Peren's reply to the KDE in User Linux proposal, along with my thoughts on them. It's All Emotional Bruce first tries to explain it away by saying, "it's simply unbearable for their personal GUI not to be the one chosen for our project", after making references to emotional investments. He's right in that people do care for and about that which they create. He's wrong in that the "emotional investment" is why many of us had issues with the choice to ban KDE/Qt from his project. Read More

The Linux Show went rather well tonight. George was a great co-guest, and I think we handled the questions well in general. We maintained a positive and factual yet enthusiastic air throughout. Even the SUSE/Novell/Ximian and User Linux queries went well. They had a record number of people attending tonight; even the IRC channel had ~80 people in it (they usually only have ~50). So, they were happy with it too. Good fun and a great way to get KDE some positive exposure. I'm feeling rather spent now, though. Time to find some wine and a good book. Read More

Every time I read a bit of news regarding the Linux desktop, I find myself asking myself: are they reporting on something that has happened or that will happen in the future? I fear that many of our colleagues in the Linux desktop struggle are trying to sell a tomorrow that doesn't exist yet because they feel that they have, so far, lost. This has the potential to blow up in so many horrible ways: people will start expecting tomorrow's abilities today; people will wait until tomorrow rather than act today; competitors will see where we are headed before we get there and be able to act with initiative; those promising may not deliver or even be around in their current form to deliver; what we want to accomplish today may be scrapped in favour of a better idea tomorrow. KDE is very good at avoiding all this. Let's make sure we keep it that way. =) Read More

working on kscd... fixed several bugs over the weekend... only several more to go =P auditing sucks. but it's so necessary. i read over libkcddb tonight and caught several issues, including classes used in a QValueList that didn't have copy ctors or operator=s and a potential buffer underrun. kids, indexing with ints that can be negative isn't cool. anyways. auditing sucks. it's tedious, boring and not much fun. but it's just so easy to miss things in your own code, that having someone else look through it can make quite a difference. Read More

It has been said that some Free / Open Source software projects lack direction and vision, that it's all just a random herky-jerk towards an unknown or poorly defined goal. While this may be true of some projects (though hopefully not too many), KDE is not one of those projects. Right from the beginning, KDE had a vision. Matthias stated that he wanted to build a consistent desktop to counteract the menagerie of toolkits and methods common to X11 environments at the time and a full set of user-oriented applications on top of that environment. This vision has not changed significantly. Read More

so Ingo, in all his wilyness, got me into a debate on kde-core-devel over the new-ish address picker in KMail. turns out his REAL problem is that it is buggy. and he's right: there are several issues with it. some of it can be blamed on classes that were suposed to make it into the libs from kaddressbook that haven't, but there is some work that needs to be done, no doubt about it. getting me into a debate isn't all that hard (sigh) but the truly wily part about it: i've committed to spending some time on that dialog (which i didn't even write; hi Zack!) this week. huzzah! i suppose that's one way to get 3.2 into shape: debate people into fixing bugs ;) Read More

i've got several outstanding bugs to squash in kscd that represent regressions over 3.1. things keep coming up, or i keep getting prematuraly tired in the evenings: i have a lot on my plate at the moment, both for work and personal life. but i have to get the kscd stuff done this week. i think i'll take a couple hours out of work to do so. the problems don't seem very difficult, aside from the Linux ide-through-scsi emulation bug. that one's going to be annoying because it's likely due to work done on libwm by another hacker, so i'm not intimately familiar with every LOC in there and this just breaths of one of those annoying OS-specific quirks. such is life. Read More

Crazy things happening around Mahlah's computer this week. First she complains to me that her KDE (3.1 on SUSE 8.2) is acting up: it's slower than usual and rather flaky. It started up after she rebooted two weeks ago. I went downstairs to check it out and sure enough, it's much slower than it should be. She's only got 8 konqi windows open, kmail, a konsole with three tabs (one of which was ssh'd into a machine to irc from a screen session) and some text document open. That shouldn't slow the system down. The CPU isn't showing much usage but there's a distinct slowness and disk churning when switching from the desktop with all the browser windows on it to the one with kmail on it. So I take a look at the output of free assuming something must have gone run-away on the mem usage. To my astonishment I see that, for whatever reason, the system thinks there's only 32MB of RAM! There's many times that amount actually installed, but on the last reboot the system took a left turn somewhere and figured it would only use 32MB. It was only 8MB into swap, despite running sshd, cups, apache and the afformentioned KDE session. No wonder it was "slower than usual"! I'm just amazed that it was usable at all. Read More

What if, instead of basing our platforms, software and development paradigms upon chasing what we perceive the competition has today, we based our decisions upon user demand. So when a group of people actualy need something, someone (probably people invovled that group having the need) make it. If nobody needs feature/library/component/technology X, nobody makes it and the platform isn't weighed down by it. If this sounds a lot like how things work in open source, it is. Read More

I was out having a pint with a fellow when he mentioned he uses (and quite likes) Evolution as his email client. He had a few gripes about it, but then don't we all when it comes to the software we use day-in and day-out? He then mentioned how he was surprised at just how huge a program it was. i asked if he knew how many lines of code went into Evolution, and he guess about right. I then asked him if he could guess how much had gone into Kontact; he though a little less than Evolution, but probably a similar amount. This is, however, far from the truth. Kontact is dramatically smaller that Evolution in terms of code count, even when taking into consideration all the various apps that are associated with it (KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook, libkabc, the various kioslaves). Then he asked a very interesting question: if I wanted to make a KDE mail app that was an alternative to KMail, would I be able to, would the KDE project encourage such an effort, and how much work would it be? Read More

I'm going to try something different. (insert knowing laughter here) it seems the topic of "Why KDE" is coming up more and more often in my day-to-day life both on- and off-line. sometimes the actual topic is "Why open source" but i usually manage to steer it into "Why KDE" because KDE is something i'm rather interested in and it provides a great case study. through these conversations i've come across some interesting thoughts, and i'm going to record them here over the next little while, one per blog entry. here's #1. Read More

i've been doing waaaay too much screwing around in kicker lately. there's a few more things that need doing, like alphabetizing the Add/Remove menus and possible splitting up the Applets menu now that we ship with a couple dozen applets, but it's generally in not too bad of shape at this point. i even snuck in a change to the default look of kicker. one less icon. one more background. the custom colour option for butons also looks pretty snazzy IMHO and should be friendly to low-resource machines that still want a panel that isn't completely boring. Read More

people wash in on the shores of KDE as others are washing back out... if i close my eyes i can almost hear the waves of people lapping against the sides of KDE's CVS. Read More

posted the first installment in my new "Non-Programmer's Guide to Participating in KDE" series, title Adding WhatsThis Help To KDE Applications. was posted to theDot, where it got the usual inane comments, but also lots of positive feedback. very happy about it. will be moving it to the KDE support page eventually. next topic will be Bug Triage. Read More

this was the week that wouldn't end. plus 30 degree weather, tons of smoke from forest fires, work work work work ... but, bliss! the weekend is upon me! i did get some KDE stuff done this week, mostly a bunch of kicker applet hacking... but most personally satisfying is how ksnapshot now looks and works. it has the general cleanliness that it had in early KDE2, but with several more features and a more standard and understandable interface. it's been an unusually long road with that app. Read More

so after attacking the clock applet i convinced myself to fix another long time annoyance of mine: no way for an applet to pop a custom menu in the applet handle menu. well, no more! now i'm going through all the applets in CVS and fixing 'em up to Do The Right Thing(tm). not exactly exciting, though i'm sure all 2 people who notice in the next release will be happy about it. at least they better be. ;-) Read More

wow, feels like forever since i posted a blog. but i'm behind in most of my correspondence: too much is happening. on the KDE side of life i finished up some change to the address picker in libkdepim... it seems to make a lot more sense now and be a lot more polished. Zack made a great start on it, but it needed that last 10%.. maybe it only needs that last 9% now ;-) Read More

I discovered KDE had the option to rename files by clicking on the icon name (vs selecting them and then pressing F2). I'd like to have this turned on by default, rather than off, as it would address the #1 complaint I've received regarding single click mode. I suggested such on kfm-devel and kde-usability, and will be doing further testing w/RLUs (real live users) shortly... Read More

Worked a bit more on KJots last night. I'm nearly finished with everything I'm going to do with it for 3.2, then I can move on to finishing up work on KsCD, then I can move on to TOM and KMail headers, attachments and folder properties. Insert regular bug fixing obsession sprees and the unpredictable random distractions in there and that's probably my KDE life from here to 3.2. Read More

this isn't a rant. it's just off-topic. so there. =) if you're not into music, esp of the folk fest variety, save yourself the boredom and don't click the Read More link. Read More

coming up with titles for blog entries isn't fun/easy, but having to pick node terms is really bloody annoying. especially since it's this long listbox that pushes the body waaaay down the page. couldn't it at least be after the body where i could ignore it? and have "KDE General" (or what-have-you) selected by default? Read More

folk festing all weekend at the Calgary Folk Fest... hope to meet Ani at the after party tonight... no KDE'ing till the weekend's over... =)

so the other night i got sucked into joining #hci on openprojects.net. it was all good and fun for a while with some rather interesting discussion going on. and then someone brought up the many issues surrounding the delivery of binary packages on Free Software OSes and all went to hell in a hand basket. Read More

gah! too busy these last two weeks... i need to lead a life of luxury so i can nurse my many non-paying but oh-so-enjoyable interests, like KDE. perhaps i'll ask Santa for one this year ;-) Read More

Alright, this time less philosophy and more "what I'm doing and thinking about doing, as if you care" ... I am nearly ready to start working on some major KControl issues, but am stalled on a couple of fronts. Hoping inspiration (and some bits of code i'm waiting on) will arrive soon. Read More

What does every dedicated KDE hacker dream of? Well, besides unlimited amounts of beer, fullfilling relationships with people of the sex of their choice and world peace... working on KDE fulltime, of course! Read More

Bug hunting ... people usually appreciate it when their bugs have been solved and are closed on bugs.kde.org, but they really get excited over new features. New features often require a good amount of work, especially to get them right. But the effort to "wow factor" ratio is far higher on new features than bug hunting. Read More