Cristian Tibirna 

The Linux Foundation organizes this year's OpenPrinting Summit in Montréal. I will be there on Monday and Tuesday, trying to represent KDE.

In order to heal some of my procrastination-induced bruises, I decided to do a little social experiment, that tends to prove to myself (once again) that we, humans, are inherently good, only sometimes misguided (read below for the excitement). Read More

News here and here /me wide-eyed but neutral (still). I don't have a good knowledge of the internals of the CUPS community, but from my ignorant viewpoint, Michael Sweet had the largest hand in that code. It's now mostly up to the community. Which is a great one, for having produced the most dependable printing platform 0$ can buy. Read More

Rutger Claes, KDEPrint's GSoC student for the new UI design, published his report on today's most common forms of printing interfaces. He also offers the fruit of his analysis of how the main dialog should appear in KDE. Read More

Gavin Beatty, GSoC student for the KDEPrint's online OpenPrinting drivers fetching and installation, provided his latest report today. It's refreshing to see enthusiasm and excitement from new young faces joining our community. It's perhaps this kind of effervescence that makes me eager to meet my students in class each autumn. Or to try to put some time in projects like GSoC. We need new energy. We need evolution. Read More

It's quite long since I want to write about this: I used to use the audiocd: ioslave to rip my CDs. But since almost a year, I started to constantly use kAudioCreator. Nifty little tool! Does one thing and does it extremely well. Congrats Benjamin. Hope you keep this one up with KDE4. Read More

Yes, time passes too fast. It's almost time for this year's Summer of Code midterm evaluation. During the week-end I "met" my two students online for a more in depth checkpoint than what we usually have and I'm quite pleased! I looked forward to Rutger and Gavin to pass onto me some of their youthful energy again. KDEPrint needs it. Read More

I've got pointed to http://www.ehomeupgrade.com/entry/4030/first_look_asus Look! KDE as default on a laptop! And a meant-to-be-very-popular one! Big thanks, ASUS.

I'm a juk kind of guy. Yet a few weeks ago, frustrated with my inability to make akode or arts play the 50 mp3s from my collection of 2000-odd pieces (mostly ogg, personal CDs-ripped), I gave Amarok a new try. I still feel (very) awkward with the interface. But I kinda like a) the default classifications available in "Collection"; b) the automatic refresh/update of the collection and c) the statistics tool. Read More

I added three projects related to KDEPrint in the page of ideas for Google SoC 2007: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_UI_redesign http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_CUPS_.3E_1.2 http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDEPrint_--_porting_to_Qt-4.3.2FKDE-4 I hope we have an even better summer this year! Read More

This year's SQIL seems to have attracted less attention from the local Linux community. I was invited to provide a conference on a topic of my choice. I decided on a much more philosophical discussion compared to last year: Qui? Quoi? Pourquoi? Comment? (French for "Who? What? Why? How?"). Read More

In a small poll (or sorta), Albert asks what kind of values are better in the zoom combobox for oKular. IMO, zoom is best represented by either: a slider with major ticks in almost logarithmic scale, going from 10% to (wishful thinking) 10000%, with a spinbox or constrained textedit next to it to show the slider value and allow manual editing a zoom out button and a zoom in button (with the classical icons and obeying bidirectional gui guidelines) with a constrained textedit inbetween. Once again, zoom buttons should increase/decrease zoom value almost logarithmically (1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000% etc.) IN order for these widgets to take lesser space on toolbars, they can be actually hidden and popped up from an unique zoom button ("lens" icon). AmiPro was doing this stuff perfectly 15 years ago. Read More

Ten years ago tomorrow, I was sitting in my office at the university, at 1AM, and, tired of many hours of difficult coding, I decided to take a break and read some of my building up mailing list subscriptions. Read More

Kurt promptly provided me with a nice surprise. There are(!) GUI (even KDE) applications that print labels. But... what's in a name! I know about KBarCode since long (and, being old, don't remember exactly since when). But given all the bar-code centered information in all descriptions I've put my eyes on in relation to it, and given my lack of interest in bar-codes presently (and in the past), it's, IMO, not a surprise that I didn't know it did labels. Read More

I use linux since 1994. I pride myself into thinking I know well what kind of tool linux can be. I am accustomed with (and get quite thrilled about) the notion that I will learn something new every day of my life, right until the last one. Read More

Today I started to use smart on all the suse-10.1 systems I use and, in the joy, I installed it on my suse-9.3 systems too. Life is better now. Read More

A good friend of mine recommended to me What Mind–Body Problem?, an excellent read on the age-old puzzle of consciousness. His recommendation came interestingly as a complement to the book of John D. Barrow, Theories of Everything, which ask a strong question about the involvement of conscious observers in the foundation of any universal theory. It's satisfying to read clear and captivating renderings of long lasting personal fuzzy reflections. Read More

Seele found that KDE got caught on thedailywtf. Thanks to this, I learned that there exists something called "kflickr". The other KDE mention there seems to involve kdeprint. Read More

I'm "back" from CLLAP 2006 (quotes around the word back because it was a 15 minutes drive to home) (ed. 2006-05-26: I started to write this on 2006-05-24...) Although the conference was international and addressed to governments, the expo that accompanied it (and in which we had a KDE booth) was very small. Read More

Aaron tries to wake back up the old (and perpetual) discussion about freedom in software. I can't agree more with his perspective. It will make well over 8 years now that I continuously preach, to anybody patient to listen, the social importance of the essential notions of collaboration ingrained in free software. Read More

More and more often, I get the occasion for a violent rant. This means one of two things: either a) I become older and crazier or b) this world becomes too stupid and too crazy for me. Read More

Some time ago, I got a personal invitation to represent KDE with a booth at CLLAP on May 23-24 2006. Altough this event happily intersects with my work and my (already legendary) lack of personal time, I decided to give it a go (read more...) Read More

Seeing a body of the size of Gouvernment of Canada do the right thing can be a reason of pride. Statcan introduced web-based census this year. But they had a limitation as to what browsers can be used. Needless to say, Linux browsers were ruled out by default. I'm pleased to advertize that they timely fixed the false problem. Read More

The KDEPrint team is willing to mentor two projects in the frame of Google's Summer of Code". We would like a student to work on streamlining and improving, usability-wise, the KDEPrint user interfaces. Then there is the very inciting idea of a common, cross-platform, generic description of printer driver and application-side plug-ins to the KDEPrint dialog. Read More

With a 7-days delay, here is what I still remember ;-) of my activity at LWCE Toronto 2006. I went there pushed by George Staikos (who couldn't go this year) and sponsored by the organizers (Plum Communications of Canada). Read More

LWN published a writeup of first two days of the Linux Printing Summit in Atlanta, most excellently written by our own Kurt Pfeiffle. A great collection of information complementary to his previous blog entry. Thanks Kurt! Read More

I finally find some time to write on my being at the Printing Linux Summit in Atlanta from 10 to 12 April. I was kindly invited by Till Kamppeter from linuxprinting.org and kindly financed by OSDL and its partners (this time, Lanier and HP). Read More

In the last months I bought two T43 laptops for my work. Nice machines. We use them for road warring/presentations and even for a bit of FEM development. So, I usually just shrink windows and insinuate geeko onto them. Read More

I will be to the Printing Summit in Atlanta in a few days. Then I will be at the LinuxWorld Conference in Toronto in a few weeks. Read More

I found a sound clip. OGG. I wanted to listen to it. Just listen. So I clicked on it. KDE offered to open it with Kaffeine. I accepted Kaffeine started and promptly gave me an error dialog but no sound. Went back and chose another player from the context menu: amarok. amarok started, asked me 5 (five) almost identical question dialogs (sequentially!) but no sound. Back to the context menu and chose xmms. xmms started, gave an error dialog about sound card not being available but no sound. Back to the context menu, RealPlayer 10 was offered but I already lost interest. Copied the url of the sound bit, went to the konsole, wrote ogg123 and pasted the url then hit enter. Bam! Instant Sound. Trivially complex :-( Read More

On January 10th 2006 I was offered the opportunity to speak to the directors of IT services from the Québec gouvernment. Québec is one of the provinces of Canada, with rather important economic and cultural power in North America. Read More

I want to use KPresenter. Really, I do. And of course, this being a presentations software, I want to do with it a presentation. By its very own implicit definition, a presentation has to be attractive yet simple, suggestive yet discrete. But mostly, it has to be aesthetically pleasing. Beautiful. Well, KPresenter's default templates are darn ugly. All of them. The only ones remotely usable are the KDE3 one and, somehow, the KDE2 and KDE1 ones. And... ugly surprise, the KDE2 and KDE1 were made by ... me! Back in 1999 (this is in antiquity, for who doesn't care to do the math). If 2/3 of the acceptable templates of KPresenter are made by an aesthetics-challenged, artistically-incompetent semi-doct developer aeons ago, we're really in bad shape. Read More

Well, SQIL came, has been, and passed. As I was saying, I presented KDE yesterday afternoon at the Laval University chapter of this pan-provincial manifestation. I dare say all went well. The assistance was not numerous, but despite my inept management of presentation time (which made me do the planned 1h presentation take in fact 85 minutes), nobody left (on the contrary) and, above all, I've got 40 minutes of questions afterwards. Read More

I will make a general presentation of KDE for the public that will attend the events of SQIL (Semaine Québécoise de l'informatique libre - Quebec's Week for a free computing). I was very kindly invited for this by LINUQ the LUG of Québec City. Read More

I found on Hans Nowak's "Effectos Speciales" a mention of the map of SoC mentors and students This is the first time I see it. OK, no deep philosophical reflections on this, but let me put out a few observations: Read More

Ricoh USA just delivered to me (as representing KDE) a nice color laser printer (CL4000DN). It looks very impressive and it prints like a fairy tale charm. The hero in this is George Liu, Linux engineer at Ricoh, believes in KDE's technologies and wants Linux to succeed (printing aspects withstanding). He energically advocates Linux at Ricoh. Read More

I got very nice word from Jure Repnic that the books started to get to destination. And Jure says "... I hope we se a similar book for KDE 4 ...". I surely desire so. If only time... Read More

Just saw a Yes/No dialog (in KDE, I specify, to avoid confusion) with tooltips installed on the Yes and No pushbuttons. The tooltips read "Yes" and "No" respectively. I'm flabbergasted! Read More

(Yes, blogs are slowly becoming what mailing lists always were anyways... It's my secret theory that blogs were invented by people a) discontent with their visibilities on dedicated mailing lists and b) not willing to mix their greatness with the commoners ;-) Read More

Wow! I'm glad I'm not in Calgary tonight, or Aaron might have come down to my place and beat me up ;-) ) Anyways I will refrain from wielding back at him my (past century) sarcasm and irony weaponry. Read More

An interesting thing to have: James Anderson's G-SOC sponsored TSync. I didn't look at the code yet, but the principles are clear enough and are definitely attractive when related to synchronizing collections of (KDE) settings, a long time wish/request from our users. Read More

Since the move to SVN, I have a perception problem that was not present with CVS. I physically cringe when I realize I have to fix a commit that I somehow botched (e.g. with a typo). This is so, it seems (from what my brain tells me), because of the global revision number. When I do an error and I need to commit again (thing which would have been avoided with a bit more care in the first place), I increase the global release number by 2. I think the problem spawns from the fact that our SVN already has a huge release number and this accounts for the sheer giantness and complexity of it (the SVN). Maybe I secretely fear a possible failure caused by complexity. Read More

After posting a very short announce about the available KDEPrint junior job 5 days ago, I received no less than 5 offers to help from Andre Gemuend, James McArthur, Arnould Brice, Alfredo Cerutti and Steve Starr. I even received three distinct sets of replacement screenshots. Read More

Since a few days, I feel the lack of a summary mode in KMail. I have many tens of folders and subfolders, on three accounts (local, work, uni) and I have KMail filters putting things al overy this stuffy arborescence. Read More

This message says it all. This is a really easy opportunity to start contributing to your favorite open source project.

It is quite some time already since I think about getting myself some powerful PDA or a very light laptop. My boss at work wants a lightweight laptop for our research group too. The 4.7kg Dell Inspiron that we bought 4 years ago starts to show its age. Read More

We use all sorts of signs and symbols to communicate. And quite often, communicate we don't. I was brushing quickly through a few useless magazines I inadvertently collected while at LWE-SF last week. One of these was Novell's. Which is actually interesting as it wasn't all Novell publicity but also quite nice Linux publicity. Yet, what caught my eye most thoroughly was a section cover for the part extolling their certification program. It was the photo of the chest of a work-blue-shirt-clad guy who had the word "Trainee" embroidered above his breast pocket. Read More

I was writing about my extra copies of the KDE 2.0 Development book. Three people asked for them. I shipped them today to Jure Repnic, Reuben Sutton and Lex Hider. Read More

I started rather late in my life to work for a gain, at age 23. This was so given the political organization of the place I was then in and thanks to the invaluable care of my parents, who wanted us (me and my sister) to get solid education and be nondisturbed by external difficulties of any kind in the process. Read More

After describing how I traveled to San Francisco and the first and second days at the LinuxWorldExpo, here comes a brief synopsis of the last day on the Linuxprinting.org and KDE booths. Read More

KDE and LinuxPrinting.org at LWE, now in color: Setting up the booths in the .org pavilion Visitors in the first day: Charles Samules (right) and David Johnson at the KDE booth: Read More

LWE-SF 2005 is over. I'm back to the normal schedule now. Here is the fasttrack of getting back home. 5h30 - wake up, shower, check room, check baggages. 6h30 - breakfast, alone. 7h00 - check out and fix the bill. On my way to the airport. 8h30 - checkin to the flight back. 9h30 - I find out from a gentle family of french people that the barril of oil blew up to 66$. Harsh times await us all... 10h30 - takeoff 15h00 (18h00 Mtl. time) - landing. Very nice flight. 19h20 - finally get the baggages, after 1h20 of stupid waiting. 19h30 - find my car in perfect shape in the long-time parking lot. 22h00 - home! Read More

Now I'm back at home, after a very well filled-up days in SF then in Québec. I didn't manage to write down about the happenings in SF while still there and I'm a bit whisked about that. But hey, life is like that. Read More

Yes, I'm in SF now. Since yesterday. Which was day zero. Here is how it went: 4h00 - After 4h of sleep (at the end of a hectic week with only 5h sleep/night), I leave Quebec towards Montreal to get the plane from there. The plane was at 9h10. The ride is a 2h30 one. Usually. Read More

Here is the story of my day 1 at LWE-SF. The morning: Finally, the important part of my trip here is starting. Immediately after the breakfast, we meet all (Till Kamppeter, Kurt Pfeifle, Uli Wehner, Patrick Powell, David Suffield, George Liu, and me) at the booth for the latest preparations. Read More

Today was a nice day. I ran around for a good part of it for the last items I'll have to bring with me to LWE-SF. I spent some quiet time with my family. And in the evening the parents of our god-daughter invited us over for one of their quite regular BBQs. There I met a few old friends and also friends of our friends. People that I met for the first time. A very nice family, him - Francois - francophone quebec-er, her - Deidre - anglophone of distant russian-germans origin (from the old Volga communities of early 1900) and their little energetic daughter, the close friend of our god-daughter. Read More

The third part of Kurt Pfeifle's NX series in Linux Journal just hit the web. It is a very instructive piece of writing. It provides rich information about motivations, history, technology and utilisation of NX/FreeNX. It is very nicely written, reads in a rapid pace and uses a crisp clear and well balanced language. Make sure you look through it. You might even want to put it in your bookmarks collection, as it's a valuable resource. Read More

I gave today the presentation I prepared for the last few weeks for a work-related international conference. I'm pleased with how things went. Tomorrow the conference ends. From then on, I'll go in 6th gear on preparing for the trip to San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo. I will go there thanks to the very generous people at Ricoh. Read More

I'm not the emotional type. But... In a very distant past, I was co-author to the "KDE 2.0 Development" book. One colateral outcome of this happening was that I got 5 copies of the book. My own annotated book is on my shelf, of course. The other 4 copies rested o a out-of-the-way shelf for the last 5 years. Now, my rational brain told me this is nonesense. Thus, I donated one copy to the library of my university. I was resolute into putting the other 3 in the recycling bin. But I couldn't, even if (I still maintain) I'm not the emotional type... Read More

Isn't it nice? FreeNX hurries up! There are things for which I care more than for most, simply because I feel that they are bent to drive the world as we know it to become a much better place. One other such thing is FreeNX Read More

A few days ago, Kurt Pfeifle very kindly offered me the opportunity to test NX. I'm an old guy and I thoroughly dislike buzzwords, but sometimes it's simply no way around particular ones. The expression I'm itching to use here is disruptive technology. Read More

(This entry is, of course, in relation to logs by ruurd, ruurd and mpyne) I find it troubling that after so many years, C++ still needs such detailed explanations about fundamental functionality. If this situation would have taken a few short years, we could have suspected slow social evolution from old (functional languages) to new (OOP) paradigms. But persistence, at the scale we see, seem to rather signal problems with the language itself. The current discussion is just a small sand grain falling in the timeglass that measures the evolution of my personal relationship with C++, from 100% love (1993-4) to fifty/fifty love/hate (2003-4). Read More

I call what njaard observed the wolfpack syndrom. The human being is a competitional animal (as any product of natural evolution) but with a twist. We premeditate the way we compete, we're not doing it instinctively. Read More

It's "official" now, I'm back to more than lurking in the KDE virtual world. I reactivated today, after almost a year of interruption, the mail flood from cvs and kwin. I also set myself a cap of minimum 1h and a max of 2h per day for coding and manual reading. Read More

After 7 years with my own (almost famous ;-)) build scripts and almost a year with kde-build, I switched today to kdesvn-build (many thanks, mpyne). It's definitely worth it, be it only for the colored output and for the progression notification. And ah!, I also switched to unsermake. Read More

Yes, it's already bad to be forced to own and run 16 different linux distros just so as to have one's application available for "linux". But it's even worse when there isn't an application at all. Read More

Among my other numerous and intricate tasks at work, I also play the temporary role of informatics djin in our research group. I herd machines, mold users (yeah :-| ), tend for software (both sickly commercial licenced stuff and marvelous free gems), test compilers etc. I thus come regularly in contact with absolute new unix users (in the occasion of creating their accounts and guiding them around), that come from 3-4 years of windows history and are cruelly plunged, headfront, into a boiling sea of C++ & g++ & python & Finite Elements & Mathematics & Unix & KDE & XEmacs. People that see a command line for the first time in their life. I have to handhold them during the first days and explain to them why machines don't crash (thus no need to hit the pesky reboot button) and so on. Read More

It's a sad thing to read intelligent people uttering frivolous and unsubstantiated affirmations, harpooning around with caustic near-to-arrogance addressings and pulling a Demostene from the "height" of their perceived more inner understanding of the "grand scheme". Read More

My general mood is down. I'd like a "Personal Rant" category here... I am now compiling for the last time the KDE CVS HEAD source. No, I don't intend to kill myself. It's just that I'll switch to svn as everybody else. Read More

You know that a framework is great when adding a new feature (like, say, searching in a listview) takes under 5 minutes. I got annoyed of never being able to easily find offending keybindings in the kkeydialog's listview so I decided to use Scott Wheeler's ListViewSearchLine widget to fix the problem. It just took me 5 minutes (including the update and compilation of a fresh kdeui from the head cvs) and I got a perfectly useful new functionality. All is so intuitive... Read More

I was reading the PyCon presentation at LJ (very interesting stuff) and got idly browsing the very cool SubEthaEdit notes (I will probably comment at some other time on my fascination with Python and about the enticing principles behind SubEthaEdit). Read More