brad hards 

Late last month, I was fortunate to be invited to Microsoft for the Exchange RPC Plugfest as part of the OpenChange team. I decided to arrive into Redmond a few days early to get over the worst of the jetlag, and to spend some pre-plugfest hacking time with Julien Kerihuel and Jelmer Vernooij. Read More

I've been doing some work on <a href="http://www.openchange.org>OpenChange, including parsing RFC2822 format messages into Exchange RPC properties. One of the test tools I have can parse up some kinds of RFC2822 / MIME messages (plain text, HTML, some mime/alternative and text/calendar) and upload the results to a Microsoft Exchange server as a particular user. Read More

Julien and I met up in Redmond last week, just before the Exchange Open Specifications event at Microsoft. It was a productive time, where we did some serious planning and a little coding, and learned quite a lot more about the protocols from some of the main developers of Exchange and Outlook. Read More

The OpenChange team had a short online (IRC) meeting on Friday. The meeting record is at http://tracker.openchange.org/projects/openchange/wiki/Meeting_of_2010-07-30 We're considering holding an "open session" meeting (again on IRC), possibly in a couple of weeks. Read More

OpenChange is an important project, but it does require quite a lot of work to get it all to build. We're working on the process, but in the mean time, we've (ok, Julien Kerihuel with nothing from me except encouragement) has built a Virtual Box image that provides OpenChange all built, configured, set up and ready to try. Read More

I haven't been doing a lot of KDE stuff recently (happy user, although I'd be happier if I could find some extra time for development...). Instead, I've been doing some "real" work, and also going some OpenChange work. Read More

I recently realised that much of the code I find interesting is about interoperability. That is, I'm interested in making sure we can get at data in a range of formats. Read More

Looks like Microsoft has released the PST format specification. I don't normally like to link to MSDN, but I'll do it this once: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff385210.aspx As usual with these documents, I recommend reading the PDF version rather than the HTML. Read More

I'm not at Camp KDE, but instead at LCA 2010 (in Wellington, NZ). Andrew Tridgell, Andrew Bartlett, Jelmer Vernooij and I will be running "birds of a feather" (BoF) sessions during the last part of the conference (Friday 22 January 2010 starting at 1430 in the "Civic 3" room, which is over in the Town Hall building). Read More

The Okular team has never been all that big. Recently we lost Pino as the maintainer. His reasons are his reasons, but I can't say I blame him. I can personally no longer tolerate the level of abuse that we're seeing on bug reports. Read More

In my ongoing distraction from working on the Akonadi Exchange resource, we released OpenChange 0.9 today. Release notes: Improved portability, including a focus on supporting FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and other systems that do not use GNU libraries / shells; and portability fixes for use of the Intel C Compiler and Sun Studio compiler. Read More

I've been working on the next OpenChange release (0.9), and it is getting quite close. So where are we up to: Merge of Ryan Lepinski's Summer of Code project (on converting Exchange calendars to the ICal format) is done. Read More

Not really a KDE related post, but instead one about the OpenChange project. OpenChange is a project to implement the Microsoft Exchange / Outlook protocols, and we're creeping up on the 0. Read More

Once again, its been a long time since I blogged. I have been doing a bit of OpenChange development though. Mostly its been minor bug fixes, cleanups and so on. This weekend I decided to take on something a bit more substantial. Read More

As reported in a previous blog, I've spent some time working with Taras Glek on Dehydra and Treehydra. It is stabilising and getting to be easier to build. However I thought I'd show a simple example of actually using GCC and Dehydra to check for a policy decision, along the lines of the things that EBN does. Read More

Based on a comment from Taras Glek on my feeble attempts to get a GCC plugin going, I did some work on Dehydra / Treehydra. Its an interesting approach, and one that benefits from the GCC plugin API. Read More

Its been a while since I did anything productive in KDE land, so thought I'd try to do something in a morning. Its hard freeze time, so that should be bug fixing. Read More

In a previous blog entry, I discussed some initial work on GCC plugins. Since then, the GCC gurus (in particular, Rafael Avila de Espindola) have made sure headers get installed correctly. Read More

One of the new features proposed for GCC 4.5 is the ability to use plugins. I'm a big fan of plugin architectures, especially in open source software. I think that plugins provide a really nice starting point for potential developers. Read More

I was happy to see both KDE and OpenChange (and some lesser projects :-)) were accepted for this year's Summer of Code project. OpenChange is progressing quite well - Julien now has a server running that supports Outlook logging in, and returning the folder list. Read More

My talk from linux.conf.au 2009 is now available for everyone to see on video: http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2009/Friday/72.ogg The slides are also available in PDF and ODF. There are a lot of other interesting videos also available - see Read More

Rodney Gedda of Computerworld Australia has written an article about my talk at linux.conf.au 2009. You can see it at http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/274883/openchange_kde_bring_exchange_compatibility_linux?fp=16&amp;fpid=1 and http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/274883/openchange_kde_bring_exchange_compatibility_linux?pp=2&amp;fp=16&amp;fpid=1 (sorry for the ads, but presumably that is what pays for the site). Read More

One of the many things I learned at linux.conf.au was about ack. Thanks to Paul Fenwick for bringing it to our attention. Spend a few minutes with me on this... Read More

On Friday, I gave my talk at linux.conf.au 2009. I'm sure the slides (and the recordings will be up on the conference web site at some point), but you can get them from my site in ODP and PDF versions. Read More

The hard-working Danny Allen put out a new Commit Digest, and the resulting discussion on the Dot raised a few comments about Microsoft Exchange support in kdepim. The short version is that it isn't going to make it for KDE 4. Read More

Its been a long time (again) between blog entries. The good news is that this time I have something interesting to show: Mailody using Akonadi and OpenChange to get mail from a Microsoft Exchange server, using native protocols. Read More

Spent some time today getting the OpenChange resource for Akonadi up and running again. I haven't really done anything to improve it from where it was a few months ago (OK, September 2007, when I was on holidays), but it lives again. Read More

In my last blog, the screenshot showed a broken image. Thanks to some very fast work by Tobias König (tokoe), it now works. That picture of Konqi was uploaded to the server using Outlook, and downloaded using OpenChange and Akonadi, before being rendered. Read More

Haven't blogged for a while, mainly because I didn't have much worth saying. I still don't have a lot worth saying, but I'll blog anyway. I recently became part of the OpenChange team. Read More

Thiago has set up the KDE Summer of Code 2008 ideas page. Thanks! I've put some ideas on there (far more than I could possibly mentor), and I'd like everyone else to do so too. Read More

For those that missed it, Microsoft recently released some of the specs relating to their office suite (http://www.microsoft.com/interop/docs/OfficeBinaryFormats.mspx). Naturally, they probably aren't everything we'd like to have (various people have suggested that they aren't complete, and I'd be surprised if there wasn't something omitted, more likely because of incomplete records than because of deliberate omission - the PR downside to deliberate omission becoming public would be a disaster). Read More

For those that missed Aaron's Plasma tutorial at linux.conf.au 2008, the good news is you can now view it online. You can have slides, ogg video, or ogg speex: Slides 1 OGG part 1 OGG part 2 SPX part 1 SPX part 2 [Sorry if someone already noted this]

Recent development has left me feeling a bit unhappy with part of my toolset - code coverage. I'm not especially interested in metrics (except as a guide to where to start) - rather in the detail. Read More

I finally got the KCabinet class (in playground/libs/kcabinet) working. To make any sense out of this, you need to know that the Microsoft Cabinet format is based on blocks of data (the CFDATA block) that end up being <= 32768 bytes. Read More

I've just checked in the start of a new class - KCabinet. Its in playground/libs/kcabinet for the morbidly curious. I'm not sure if it is really going to be right for kdelibs - need to get it a bit more mature before needing to make that decision. Read More

You may (or may not) know that Okular can read the Oasis Open Document format (aka OpenOffice.org text format or OpenDocument). It doesn't render the document exactly as oowriter would, but it is quite a bit faster to start up :-) I tried to open an encrypted document with it though, and it failed. Read More

Dear lazyweb, I'm doing some research for a weekend KDE project, and you're all invited to help me :-) Is there anything in KDE (or Qt4) that can read the Compound File Binary Format? Read More

linux.conf.au early-bird registrations close soon. Now would be an excellent time to register if you want to come along. I'm booked in... There are a lot of cool looking talks - I'm personally planning to heckle at this talk :-) Read More

As promised, QCA is getting close to final release. Justin has just released "test2", which is the "all but final" version of 2.0.0. We did make some changes from "test1", mostly adding more documentation and a test case or two, but one change identified by Rich Moore made it - a list of all available hashes. Read More

Justin Karneges recently released the "test1" version of QCA. Read the announcement here. There will be a "test2" release soon, and the final release is scheduled for 4 September 2007. Read More

I've been meaning to blog for a while, and finally managed to get there. I'd like to start off by pointing out the awesome work done by Urs Wolfer on Krdc (or KRDC, if you prefer) as his Google Summer of Code project. Read More

I have been working on providing Microsoft Exchange capability for Akonadi on-and-off for a while. It is coming together - I can suck messages off the server into akonadiconsole. More on that later (or as part of the commit-digest, perhaps). Read More

A (another) big thanks to the KDE sysadmin team for getting kdedevelopers.org back in business.

I really would have liked to have been in Dublin this weekend, but unfortunately I am much too heavily committed at work. I definitely plan to be at akademy 2007, and also at http://linux. Read More

Despite being very tired from my day job, I managed to get it together enough to put together a kfile-plugin (metadata support) for the XML Paper Specification format. It pulls out whatever data is available (sometimes not much, but thumbnails are reasonably common). Read More

KDE Remote Desktop Connection now has a roadmap for KDE4 development. We still have a lot of work to do (well, just about everything on the roadmap :-)), but at least we have a plan for what that work is going to be. Read More

After Laurent suggested it might be dead, I decided to try to resurrect the lost soul known as KDE Remote Desktop Connection (KRDC, a.k.a krdc for the command line junkies), which provides Remote Desktop Protocol and Virtual Network Computer (VNC) support for KDE. Read More

I'm in Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) this week for work. I'd hoped to catch up with Hamish Rodda, but he's in Norway. Sounds like the flights (36 hours?) might have been a bit harsh, but there is certainly a lot of interesting stuff coming out of Trysil. Read More

Microsoft have been working on a PDF competitor, call XPS (for [w:XML Paper Specification|XML Paper Specification]). Basically, it gives you a way to represent a printable document (as in a traditional document made up of a number of pages) in XML. Read More

I've been giving some of developer.kde.org a bit of love. In particular, the "Joining Us" page (http://developer.kde.org/joining/) is now hopefully a bit more useful on how to get involved in various aspects of KDE development - not just coding, but all aspects. Read More

If you don't care about Logitech MX610 mouse support, you can safely stop reading now... I released an update to the mx610hack code about two months ago, but forgot to blog about it. Read More

I've just added another section to an example-based tutorial I've been working on. The tutorial aims to describe what you need to know to be able to write unit tests for Qt and KDE, using the QTestLib test framework. Read More

Justin Karneges has released "beta2" of the Qt Cryptographic Architecture. You can get the tarballs from http://delta.affinix.com/download/qca/2.0/beta2/ - grab all three tarballs. You can also grab it from KDE's subversion archive. Read More

The Canberra LUG and the Department of Computer Science at the Australian National University (in particular, Bob and Steve) have done some very nice work with a couple of Power5 boxes that IBM has loaned out. Read More

I've been doing a bit of work on a Linux HID project, for a Point Of Sale scanner. I took a little bit of time out to look at the Logitech MX610 mouse (e. Read More

I need to point out that I am the victim of identity theft (or another clee mistake, take your pick). I didn't work on Qt and glib. I think that may have been a Trolltech employee - perhaps Brad Hughes. Read More

Apparently there was a kangaroo in our back yard this morning. Given that just after that we saw a (probably domestic) rabbit, I wonder it it might have been a Were-Rabbit, rather than a 'roo. Read More

As Adriaan de Groot alluded to in one of his recent blogs, I've been working on a automatic builder for KDE. With much thanks to ade for hosting this, and for assistance in getting it set up, I can now tell you that the builder is up and running on http://www. Read More

One of the things I'd hoped to do at aKademy was to get some discussion going about using QCA in Qt4. Unfortunately I had a cold, and spent much too much time sleeping and feeling unmotivated instead. Read More

I've had to travel for work, and during a particularly long flight[1], I managed to get stuck into a Qt4 renderer backend for Poppler[2]. I think I'm about a quarter of the way into it - my Arthur[4] backend can render some pretty complex PDF files[8], but the text/font handling is terminally broken, and I'm having good success with some images, but not with others. Read More

I've got another suggestion. The best language to write the "./configure" tests in is one that developers are familiar with. I'm thinking C++. We can write the tests in C++, as long as they don't need any special libs, which seems likely. Read More

Building the Qt4 snapshot from today with -platform linux-icc : real 52m9.573s user 46m17.119s sys 4m38.787s Building the same Qt4 snapshot with -platform linux-g++ : real 72m12.090s user 67m30.458s sys 3m58. Read More

Adriaan has posted some ideas for a "UofKDE". I had been thinking along the same lines for developers, only without the first year stuff (which I guess I assumed that people already had by the time they started thinking about becoming a KDE developer). Read More

I'm not going to argue the morality of DRM - others have done that, and another opinion won't really change anything. However those arguing against the specific changes made to KPDF by the authors might like to consider that Adobe owns the PDF specification, and claims ownership of the datastructures and operators defined in that spec. Read More

Well, a few people have commented on Hula. I thought I might give it a try before commenting. So I downloaded it from the SVN repo. It uses autoconf and automake (yes there are some dependencies, but autoconf didn't complain so I didn't look that closely). Read More

And in even worse news, I'm finding it difficult to do real work and any KDE hacking. I've done a bit of QCA work, but there is still a long way to go, and wasted half of Sunday trying to figure out a weird problem in KMail, but that is about all. Read More

Michael Ellerman has made a recent blog post about a coverage tool for valgrind (http://michael.ellerman.id.au/index.cgi/2004/12/19#valgrind). I've been looking for that for a while, hope he gets it released, since that would help with tricky coverage issues like our shared library plugins, such as that used in the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) that I've been working on, albeit a bit on-n-off recently. Read More

I went to another great Canberra Linux Users Group meeting last night. Alex Satrapa did a demonstration of setting up Samba with OpenLDAP, OpenSSL, etc. Of course, doing a Samba demo in front of Andrew Tridgell (who is a fairly regular attendee, and a KDE user) resulted in a few comments, and a short cameo when Tridge explained what is happening with Samba 4. Read More

Michael Pyne proposed a way to dump C++ symbols from a shared library I'd suggest something like nm -C library name. man nm offers lots more.

It has been a while since I blogged - a bit too much real-world work, plus a concerted effort on the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) are to blame. Right now, I have QCA2 running, I have two plugin providers working - one based on OpenSSL, and the other based on GNU libgcrypt, and I have 595 passing unit tests. Read More

I've been meaning to add special Logitech mouse support to the mouse KCM for a long time, and I've finally gotten it done. If you have Wheel Mouse Optical, MouseMan Traveler, MouseMan Dual Optical, MX310 Optical Mouse, MX510 Optical Mouse, MX300 Optical Mouse, MX500 Optical Mouse, iFeel Mouse, Mouse Receiver, Dual Receiver, Cordless Freedom Optical, Cordless Elite Duo, MX700 Optical Mouse, Cordless Optical Trackman, Cordless MX Duo Receiver, MX1000 Laser Mouse or Receiver for Cordless Presenter, you should give it a try. Read More

I've been doing some work on the API doco, while I try to figure out what is going wrong with Linux hotplug support. API doco is pretty easy, but tedious work. Read More

I've been drifting around the various planets, and found a blog by Christian Hammond in the http://planet.freedesktop.org/ aggregation, where he talks about the Desktop Notification Specification he is working on. Read More

The Qt Crytographic Architecture (QCA) was originally written by Justin Karneges as part of the PSI instant messanger. After a little bit of discussion, and an agreement on how it will work out, he's agreed to move it into the kdesupport module (KDE already has two copies - one in kdenetwork, and another in kdenonbeta). Read More

I've finally started work on the special support for Logitech mice (eg 400cpi/800cpi switching, wireless status reporting). I'm integrating it into the Mouse KCM (kdebase/kcontrol/input), with a conditional build on libusb. Read More

I'm writing this on the flight from Tokyo to Sydney, with intent to publish later. Earlier today I flew the Frankfurt to Tokyo legs, so anything in this blog needs to be understood in the context of some potential jet-lag :-( Read More

OK, I'm at aKademy, and am enjoying it a lot. I particular enjoyed the talk by Tom Chance on KDE Quality Teams, and Matthais Ettrich's talk on Qt API design. It would be good to see the rest of Matthais' talk - perhaps it could be re-run during the coding marathon. Read More

It seemed like a lot cooler idea when I submitted it. In the end, my talk was an ugly mix of the wrong material for the audience and some bad presentation skills. Read More

I've been working on my presentation for aKademy, and it looked a lot easier before someone posted a link to a guide about lightning talks to the linux.conf.au 2005 organisers list. Read More

I'm putting off writing my presentation for aKademy, and working on a really old KOffice wishlist item - bug:24399, which hopes for encryption. The move to the new OASIS format (aka the OpenOffice format) provides the requirements. Read More

I've been slack, busy and confused. Hence the lack of blog. The one thing that I have done, based on a likely need to refer to it to write up my talk for aKademy is to mostly complete the KFile meta-data tutorial. Read More

After a bit of a delay, I've finally finished off the KFile plugin tutorial. Please review and patch! The tutorial is up on http://developer.kde.org, as http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kfile-plugin/t1.html. I've had part of it up for a while, but not linked or built from the SGML source into HTML. Read More

Been busy at work, hasn't led to much hacking at night - too tired. I did manage to finish off the Sony Memory Stick projector converter. Just a command line mockup at this stage - integration into KPresenter is the next stage. Read More

A friend of mine got access to a Sony projector. One of the things that was interesting is that it has a memory stick slot on it, and it can project directly from the memory stick. Read More

I've committed Qt bindings for libusb - see http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb/ This includes API docs and unit tests. This isn't released yet, so you'll need to suck down the CVS version. I'm a bit worried that the bindings aren't really Qt-ish enough, because I'm not very experienced with class design. Read More

I've been thinking about some of the stuff that Frans English has brought up about KDE Control Centre. While I don't agree with some of the things he's written, there is certainly a case for cleanup in some of the hardware settings. Read More

I recently read a Mac magazine (borrowed from the local library - I wouldn't have bought it :)) that had an interesting idea about extending iCal into an associative tool. Read More

freedesktop.org is a website. Really! It contains code and documentation. We could use some of that for KDE, if it suits us. But KDE is a volunteer effort, and we don't have to read any particular website, nor use any particular code, nor implement any particular specifications. Read More

I'm at http://linux.conf.au in Adelaide. Yesterday I went to two tutorials - Keith Packard's talk on cairo ( http://www.cairographics.org ) and Malcolm Treddnick's talk on the Gnome Libraries. Cairo is a really interesting concept - lots of possibilities for 2D graphics rendering. Read More

I've finally completed the C++ bindings for libusb - what a fun way to spend New Years Eve. This implementation is layered on top of the C routines - no changes to any of the existing code, so it should be portable to any platform supported by libusb. Read More

I've been thinking about what KDE is. Or what it means to be a "desktop environment" at all. KDE has many faces (and we're not just talking about kde:KJanusWidget :). The windowing manager (and associated KDE Panel) is the public face, but the infrastructure in kdelibs that makes the key applications (KMail, Konqueror, konsole, kdevelop, and lots more) not just possible, but consistent and reliable. Read More

I've been working on C++ bindings for libusb, which is a cross platform library for accessing USB devices. Currently I have a really hierachial class structure, where each Endpoint is in a Qt:QPtrList - the Interface. Read More