Bart Coppens 

Here's this year's crossdesktop group picture of FOSDEM, featuring all your favourite developers that attended FOSDEM (and me)! \o/ (and yes I now also see that I focussed on the building instead of the people, but it's hardly noticeble ;)) Read More

Less than a week to go for FOSDEM 2011 next weekend! Just so that you don't forget: this year we have 2 days of (Cross)Desktop-related talks in their own devroom, but be sure to also look at the entire schedule since there's a lot of interesting stuff in the other tracks as well (including some KDE-related ones). Hope to catch a glimpse of you then :) Especially for the group picture on Saturday afternoon Read More

As always, I took some pictures at FOSDEM 2010. Disappointingly I took less than last year: only 55 instead of 132 (and even that is cheating, because that includes a picture of me taken by xvello). Still, better than nothing, I guess... In any case, as always at FOSDEM, I had lots of fun, and that's what counts! :) Read More

As always, we had the KDE Group Picture taken at FOSDEM. It went pretty smooth this year, apart from not immediately hearing when the autotimer of the camera clicked :) Read More

It's been a while, but I'd just like to bring the following 2 upcoming events in to your attention: FOSDEM. As always, the yearly free/open source software is being organized in Brussels again. I think there's something interesting for most of you, so be sure to have a look at the schedule (even though it is not finalized yet) :) Of course, for all the KDE people among us: don't forget the KDE Group Picture! As for people wanting to know which talks I'll probably attend, I put a tentative list on my website. Vlaamse Programmeerwedstrijd (Flemish Programming Contest). This is a programming contest, open to almost everybody: senior high school students, 'hogeschool'/university students (bachelor, master and PhD), and other people that have graduated from one of those options. This year, it's being organized at Ghent University, which happens to be where I'm working. That means I'm obviously attending it (using Haskell and/or C++). So if you ever wanted to make fun of me or humiliate me (and my teammate, of course) in a kinda-official setting: this is your chance ;)

Wow, so yet another FOSDEM lies behind us. As always, it was quite fantastic; those who decided not to come were clearly mistaken ;) So, other than the obligatory KDE Group Picture, here are some impressions from this year. Let's start with the biggest surprise of all: Boudewijn Rempt was able to make it to FOSDEM! Read More

So, of course there's a lot of interesting things going on at FOSDEM here. Just like last year, we had a nice group picture on the grass field next to the KDE devroom. Thanks to all people who could make it. If you look verrry closely, you can even spot the GNOME person in it ;) Read More

As usual, KDE will have a presence at this year's FOSDEM. If you're coming, be sure to check out our KDE devroom schedule for Saturday, and the CrossDesktop devroom schedule for Sunday. I expect that within a few days the whole schedule will be available, instead of only a few devrooms (importantly, there will be a KDE-related talk in the Debian room). If you're around on Saturday, don't forget to come to the group picture! Read More

For those few of you interested (is there anyone?): I've started a new blog. If this one is any measure, it will be a pretty dead one, but I think it's the thought that counts =) Read More

As many of you will know, I'm not really keen on travelling. This has much to do with the dislike of leaving my zone of comfort, my fear of flying, etc. However, when I do have to travel, I try to inform myself of issues that might arise from travelling to the specific country I'm supposed to go to. For instance, like a lot of Europeans, I do not look forward to the idea of travelling to the US because of the issues with immigration (like privacy). Issues like these (luckily) still generate some press coverage so that most people know vaguely what to expect. Similarly, it's probably pretty well-known that you better don't start waving around Swastika's when you're visiting Germany. Read More

After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards :P Read More

So, 3.5 days of Akademy apparently means a lot of pictures being taken, I'm pretty sure everyone around has noticed this ;) Now I personally took a lot of pictures (again, most of you will have noticed that), which means that I also have a lot of data. Since I'm not really in the mood to upload 2.1G of data (at least, that's the current count), I'm not going to upload all of that somewhere (especially since a lot of those are actually out of focus, moved, generally blurry, bad, etc). If any of you think I made a nice picture of you, though, feel free to contact me and I'll see if I can actually find any such picture to mail you ;) Read More

Today, the BIPT (Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunication) released a draft of the implementation of the EU directive regarding data retention in Belgian Law at the request of the minster for Enterprising and Simplification (dunno how else to translate 'minister voor Ondernemen en Vereenvoudigen') (downloadable in Dutch and French). It seems the idea is to introduce some form of public scrutiny (instead of just making the law and be done with it), so that people can comment on it. I'm of course completely pessimistic about real chances of influencing it for the better, but one never knows. Read More

So, after Saturday's FOSDEM KDE Group Picture, perhaps it's now time to give a slightly fuller account of FOSDEM 2008 (with pictures). Since most of my pictures from the main tracks were too blurry anyway, I'll just focus on some of my pictures related to the KDE FOSDEM 2008 presence (leaving out some pics of individual persons and overview shots). Photos have only been resized and cropped where somewhat appropriate. Perhaps to do for next year: buy a lens which captures more light, or a bigger flashlight :P (Shooting at ISO 1600 is rather noisy :() Read More

So, not only is it FOSDEM this weekend, I also organized a group photo for the KDE related people who are here. We went to the small field of grass in front of the KDE devroom. Luckily, the sun just started breaking through the clouds, so there was nice lighting (unfortunately I forgot to switch my ISO back from 1600, so it's a bit noisy nonetheless). Here's a very small version (WiFi is a bit slow here, so no big version yet) Read More

Just so that you won't all forget: next weekend there's FOSDEM in Brussels. You can find the complete schedule in a handy grid layout here. For KDE people, I guess the most interesting non-main track talks could be those in the KDE devroom and the Crossdesktop devroom. Read More

So, given that I'd be on a holiday next week, I thought it would've been a good idea to do an upgrade of my Debian install on my laptop, in the hope that it'd use less power. The good news was that it seemed like it did, with slightly lower temperature (I guess due to tickless timer on AMD64 in the 2.6.24 kernel). The bad news was that I couldn't even try to quantify it at all: all my battery-measuring tools wouldn't work at all anymore. In particular, no KDE Battery Systray icon anymore, leaving me without any indication at all about how much battery I have left. Hoping it'd be just a KDE update fluke, I checked my other favourite power-related tool, powertop. Unfortunately it also failed to show any relevant information about power usage... :( Read More

While idly browsing through Wikipedia, I came across something very cool: the McGurk effect. Just read the Wikipedia page, and try it out with the linked YouTube video. I found the effect rather weird to experience :) (You can watch YouTube without creepy Flash plugins using ffplay/mplayer and the Konqueror YouTube servicemenu. The HTML for the YouTube site apparently got changed recently, so you'll have to manually patch the servicemenu script according to the last comment in that page). Read More

I want to bring to your attention the fact that the deadline for scheduling FOSDEM's devrooms is coming up soon. There are as of yet only very few talks proposed, I'd like to see some more ideas! We'll be sharing the room with the GNOME people on Sunday, where we'll have some talks that will be related to issues that are interesting to both of our audiences. That also means that if we don't have enough KDE talks, they'll easily fill in the gap for us ;) So, hurry up and add a talk proposal on KDE's FOSDEM Wiki Page (or mail me, or query me on IRC). More information about KDE's FOSDEM presence on the dot article. Read More

Once again, there's a wonderful treat for people who want to take a look outside at night. Less than a year ago, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to see comet McNaught with the naked eye. This time, it is comet Holmes giving us a surprise show by suddenly brightening! More details are all over the net, like here. Read More

So, Akademy 2008 will be in Belgium! Yay \o/ ! Some of you might have known this already if you'd have read the planet closely (troy leaked it already...), but still I'm terribly excited to be able to say it officially :) After all, I've been asking about Akademy (the yearly KDE Developer's Conference+Hacking/BoF sessions+eV General Assembly) coming to Belgium for like 4 years already... The location will be the De Nayer Institute in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, and the pictures I saw of the building we'll be in look pretty awesome. Read More

I don't know about you, but there's this hugely annoying behaviour of QDockWidgets. Since Krita 2 uses them, I tend to run into it a lot. The symptoms are simple: if you have a floating dock widget and Krita loses focus, the dock widget gets hidden. Read More

Sometimes KDE makes me want to cry out of frustration (like tonight, because of Qt using select(2) instead of poll(2), breaking my akregator), but sometimes it just fills me with so much joy that I could also cry =) Like just now, when someone came in #koffice to ask if he could somehow print his presentation notes that he put in KPresenter. Unfortunately, I did not know how to do that (quite likely it's just not possible), but it took me just a few minutes tinkering around with DCOP (yes, people still use KDE3.5 technology for work ;)) to make a tiny script that just prints out all your notes! Read More

Unfortunately FOSDEM is over already, it was a lot of fun. Today started with me getting there at the much too early hour of 08:55, meaning I'm very tired today ;) This morning I mostly was in the Crossdesktop session of the GNOME room. It started off with a pretty impressive demo of Metisse, which apparently is some kind of X hack that looks and works really well. Some impressive features were the customized UI and the 'flipping' away of the screens on top of a lower screen when you select text from it. Next was Jos van den Oever's talk about Strigi internals, which I think will be very neat in KDE4. I tried my best to get a picture of him in action, but unfortunately it was too dark for the small camera I borrowed from Jos Poortvliet; hopefully the GNOME people took a pic, that would be nice. After that was a talk about Wasabi: a proposal for a standard on stuff like desktop search engines and things a user can query. Read More

Ahh, today was a lot of fun at FOSDEM 2007 :) In the morning, I first went to the talk about software patents, then the One Laptop Per Child talk (really nifty stuff) and then the liberating java one. Then I wandered around a while at the KDE booth waiting for the afternoon talks to start. At the KDE booth, I was pleased to see that Jonathan Riddell had actually come, despite his claims to the contrary ;) The Semantic KDE talk by Jos and Stéphane was very interesting and promising, I just hope some of those promises actually get implemented. Would be very cool indeed. After that I went to the AIGLX talk, so I unfortunately had to skip Flavio's Strigi talk :( After that came the GEGL talk, which was very interesting. I thought it would've been nice if it had even more details, but I realize that for a generic hacker audience, this was already detailed enough (it even included creepy C #define-hackery :P). My day ended with Sander's documentation talk, which I thought had some interesting ideas. In between and after the talks, there was a lot of chatting amongst the KDE developers, which was pretty fun as well. Hopefully tomorrow will be at least as fun as today was! :)" Read More

FOSDEM 2007 is approaching very rapidly: this weekend a lot of KDE and other FOSS people will gather in Brussels to meet and talk. There are two small changes to the KDE Devroom schedule that might be interesting. The first one is that we had to change the speaker of one talk: unfortunately Sebastian Trueg is ill, so now the Nepomuk-Semantic KDE talk will be done by Jos van den Oever (of Strigi fame) and Stéphane Laurière (from Nepomuk, EDOS). Should be a very interesting talk! The second change is the addition of a new talk: 'KDE e.V. - The organization behind the project' by Sebastian Kügler (of KDE e.V. Board and MWG fame). Hope to see you Saturday or Sunday! (Here you can find a very incomplete list of KDE related people who will be attending, you can add yourself if you're coming. Dot article for some more info.) Read More

Next FOSDEM will be February 24-25 in Brussels (that's a little over two weeks away). There will be some interesting talks in the general tracks, but I think there's also some very interesting stuff going on in the KDE Devroom. This is a room where KDE people will give some talks, and can meet and so. The schedule is available here. The focus will be on KDE4 related topics, with, amongst others, a talk about the semantic desktop in KDE by Sebastian Trüg. Read More

Ok, so no next update in the Krita plugin tutorial yet (it'll surely be done before the end of the month ahem). But much more spectacular was the comet I just saw in the dusky sky. I had a very lucky few moments of no clouds in just the right area, which also by pure luck had a relatively clear line of sight to the horizon. Comet McNaught was very noticeable with the naked eye, and even nicer to look at with a pair of binoculars. Too bad the clouds overtook the comit rapidly, so I had no chance to get my camera and take a picture of it. I fear that by tomorrow it'll be too low to spot, but still, I'm very happy to have seen it, even if it was only for a few moments :) Maybe this blog will encourage the people that have a less cloudy weather, have a clearer horizon, and are located more northernly, to take a look outside their windows tomorrow. (More info on how to observe.) For the people on the southern hemisphere: you'll apparently get your chance to observe it as well in a little while :) Read More

I feel it is my happy duty to make all of you code less, by mentioning that the SuperTux people created a new release: 0.3.0. (Note that Berlios seems to have some trouble at the moment, so hopefully it'll still be working when you click the links ;)). They apparently changed most of their rendering engine and physics code, and lots of other stuff changed with it. It looks much better than the already incredible 0.1.3 version that I played a lot. Read More

When Cyrille Berger last wrote a Smudge plugin for Krita, I noted that it was laughably simple. So I started thinking: how much could I strip away from it, so that it would be a nice example of how to write a plugin for Krita 1.6, and still be useful. I ended up with a 'Simple Smudge' tool. It is a simplified version of the one we have in Krita: no extensive tablet support, no configuration widget. But I think it is still cool enough. So how will this be going? I will write it in a couple of parts. In the first installment, I'll just show a raw plugin for a paint operation. Meaning it will show up in Krita as such, but it won't do anything at all. Pretty useful, eh? ;) The next time, I'll explain what to add, in order to get a basic brush tool. Basic meaning it will do exactly the same as the Krita tool, but without the pretty adjustments for tablets. After that, I'll explain how to do the actual smudging. Then, maybe, I'll show how to port this plugin to Krita 2. I hope this structure will keep the portions simple enough, so that it will be somewhat easy to follow and digest, yet still be a bit interesting. Note that this first part will be pretty generic (also talking about the general plugin framework), so it will also be interesting for other plugin types. (In the end I'll probably merge all episodes into a single file for easier reading, so stay tuned for that if you want a single read. Also I'm wondering if I should hide the big part of the tutorial, so that you'll see it after you click on the link, but I'm not sure. I'll put the break tag at the end, but complain if you'd rather see it more in the beginning next time, like at the 'What is a paintop?' part like it auto-inserted.) Read More

Now that Krita 1.6.1 has been out for a little while, I think it's time to bring the Search for Artwork under the attention of the public again. In order to have some nice content for the Krita website, we are looking for people that can create some nice artwork with Krita. So if you made some nice drawing with Krita, there's always the possibility that it can get featured on the Krita site. Read More

After our previous router died after a lightning strike, we got a new one. Since that new one was active, though, I had the strangest experience: when my KDE session reloaded my Konquerors, it would often claim the hosts did not exist. That's quite a big WTF, I'd say. For some reason, all DNS requests stopped working over UDP for a small while. (Manually dig'ing with +tcp worked.) Which is pretty annoying if your session also starts Akregator, which also wants to look up lots of hostnames. Read More

For people like me, who are addicted to Klipper: Klipper has search as you type. Just click on the icon, and start typing away! Only the parts of your paste history that match the typed text will be shown, the irrelevant entries will be hidden. This allows you to set the history size to a huge value, while Klipper still remains completely usable to handle. This is just so handy, I'm almost sad I didn't know about this before :) Thanks to ThomasZ for pointing this out, or I'd have never known. Read More

So I was finally forced to switch to KDE4 (again, but this time for real, apparently ;) ) to start porting my Krita 1.6 stuff to Krita 2. Meaning I now have some new and not completely unrelated things to talk about. Read More

Just a small entry to congratulate Boudewijn (and all the other Krita developers, of course!) with his winning (on his birthday) of an award at aKademy with Krita: "Best Application: Krita, Boudewijn Rempt"! Yay! Too bad he was not at aKademy to receive his price first-hand, but I'm guessing the applause was big enough to be heard in the Netherlands ;) Congratulations! Read More

Hey hey hey, it's time for some more Krita blogging! Let's just hope it doesn't get out of the planet too soon because of blogger messups, or because of lots of 'hey I'm on the plane to Dublin' posts :P Good, so I'll write a bit about tablet support in Krita 1.6. Essentially, there are 2 things that are both new and noteworthy in this area. Let's start with the first one: Read More

This is a small blog about layer masks, so that Sander can hopefully use it for the documentation (documentation, yay!). Basically, a layer mask is a mask that you place on your paint layer. This will literally mask areas of the layer, so that the content underneath shows through. You can paint on it with greyscale colors: the more black the color, the less the layer under it will shine through, the more white, the less the layer under it will be shown. So complete white will let nothing through, complete black will let everything through. Basically, it's a bit like selecting a piece of your image, and then cutting it, so that the selected bits go away. So what is the use for a mask here? The big advantage is that it is non-destructive: if you decide that you masked out the wrong part of your layer, you can easily remove the mask and start anew, something a lot harder (not to say near impossible, especially in between sessions) with regular selection-cutting. Read More

Krita participated through KDE with the 2006 Summer of Code by Google. I think the result turned out to be quite impressive and usable. Basically, there were 2 big objectives: create a Bézier tool, and create an 'intelligent scissors' tool, through a common, to-be-created framework. The student that did the programming for this, was Emanuele Tamponi. He completed the project nicely on time, so that the new features can be admired in the upcoming 1.6 release of Krita. First, there was the Bézier tool. This now (finally) allows us to draw an arbitrary and potentially nicely flowing (or is it derivable?) curves on the screen, edit them, and then decide to stroke (draw them with the current brush and color), or convert it to a selection. The basic interface looks like this. Which gives you the ability to move points, control points, add points, etc. In my opinion it's very usable and gives a pretty result (but then, I'm not an artist). There's quite a chance that this tool will get superseded in Krita 2 with the flake bézier tool, which is quite a shame. The far future might look bleak, but at least now we have a working implementation, that will probably get used for the year(s?) to come, until KDE4 and Krita 2 actually get to the users. The other big thing that got done, is the scissors tool. Or, MOS, as we call it now (stands for Magnetic Outline Selection). The tool does a pretty neat thing: you move your mouse around an object (preferably one with well-defined contours), and the tool will try to follow the outline, drawing a curve around it. When you're finished, you can go and modify it a bit, or just convert the outline to a selection. It's a bit like the regular selection tool, but with the very cool effect that you can shake your hands with the mouse, and the tool will actually try to follow the mind, not the hand ;-) In the picture, I moved my mouse around the rose, and the tool automatically added intermediate points. Those points are everything it needs; the lines in between are automatically calculated from the image itself. Pretty cool and useful, I'd say. If you'd like to have a look at the features, you can either wait for the 1.6 version of Krita and KOffice (scheduled for October 10th), the first beta (September 8th), or just check out the svn version from the 1.6 branch (but as with all code, no guarantees it will work). Read More

So, after a long period of nagging by Cyrille and others, I finally got myself a blog. The idea is that I'll occasionally post something about a new Cool Krita Feature, or other stuff I might want to talk about. I think one of the first things I'll write about, once this gets syndicated on Planet KDE, will be the result of our SoC (ooh, suspense!). Read More