Daniel Molkentin 

For the first time, FrOSCon will take place this year in St. Augustin near Bonn, the former capital of Germany. Due to its location, it is also in reasonably short distance for most KDE contributors from the BeNeLux countries. Read More

People have been wondering what I have been up to all the time. Now let me tell you: For one uni and a project consume most of my time at the moment. It should get better as the time of exams has passed by (which is on the beginning of april). But even then expect me to have only limited time available until may. Read More

... is love, peace and this little bugger. The iAudio X5 has all I really want: 20 or 30 GB of harddisc, a color display, and plays mp3, wma, ogg vorbis and even flac (and more, e.g. mpeg4 video, but I'm not sure I really can make use of this feature, given the tiny display). It has a high quality microphone build-in and can record to mp3. So that'd be a good alternative to an iPod, which I don't want since it's not capable of playing oggs. It provides USB host support and thus allows for plugging in cameras in order to serve as intermediate storage for camera data. The X5 costs 280 Euro cheapest for the 20 GB version or 330 Euro cheapest for the 30 GB version. Read More

Due to obligations at Uni, I was unable to attend all days of Linux World Expo and Conference in Frankfurt this year. However I spent most parts of Tuesday and all of Thursday at the the KDE booth. Read More

This friday I went to the meeting of SUSE beta testers to the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg. The travel went pretty smooth and so I soon checked in and arrived in a meeting room with all the other testers. We got a nice introduction to the openSUSE project, covering the past, the status quo as well as future plans. Greg from Novell as well as Adrian, Sonja and Andreas from SUSE gave me a good feeling about the project's future. Read More

Ok, finally back at home. Pheeew. Over the last days I played with the Nullsoft scriptable installer system (NSIS) which allows for creating comfortable installation routines based on a description file. It's pretty scriptable and gives nice results. Together with Ralf Habakers recent efforts to port KDE to Win32 with MinGW, the GCC for Windows port, it looks like installing KDE 4 applications with Scons/bksys could be both pretty flexible for us and simple for the user (unlike developing on windows for developers without MSVC, but I will comment on that in a later article). Read More

So Tom's story hit Slashdot. A lot of responses, from simply requests to almost flame-like comments asked KDE4 to simply be fast. I feel urged to comment on that: Qt4 gives us a major speedup in first place. The KDE3 codebase that we ported to Qt4 is already faster than "Kanzler" (this seems to be a general positive thing about Qt4, see also here). As Aaron has indicated quite a few times during aKademy, Plasma will not only bring a nicer look, but also unify applications that have previously been separated, resulting in a faster-loading, tighter integrated Desktop Environment. KDE 4 will have eye candy, but it will still work nice and fluent on computers without modern gfx cards. Also, every decent 2D-gfx card will soon be accelerated by Exa, resulting in improved graphics performance. The granularity of libs will be a lot finer, resulting in applications that only load whatever they need. But with preloading and all the other fancy magic in modern memory management, memory whiners that base their analysis on top & co. should be careful about their results anyway. And finally: There is no hidden agenda or ally with graphics card vendors whatsoever, so we have no interest to make KDE slow, the contrary is, of course, the case. After all, we are also using KDE, and nobody of us likes to wait, either. Conclusion: Yes, KDE 4 will also be about speed, it will hopefully be even speedier than KDE 3, but that's something that future development will show. Read More

amarok podcasting rocks, but it's not only big in .nl, Fab! Deutschlandfunk (Cologne) and Deutschlandradio Kultur (Berlin) are two german nationwide broadcasters that deliver lots of informational content. Both recently introduced podcasting for some of their shows. On their page about podcasts, they introduce podcast reception with iTunes AND amarok. Go for it! Read More

Ok, so we just had a meeting where discussed the redesign of kdelibs and kdebase. Although we have great technology in there, with Qt4 we have a good opportunity and reason to clean up the foundation of our very own DE. Read More

The life of the traveling KDE developer is not an easy one. We put our lives on hold while we travel far from home to meet with other ardent souls to bring you Free Software par excellance. It's a hard life indeed, as you can see in the picture below. We are sitting in a square in the old town of Malaga with food, beer and the backdrop of a cathedral. Somehow we manage. ;) Read More

Don't you love it when all your hardware goes on strike almost at the same time? On Wednesday, my workstations secondary harddisk went on strike, eating (among other things that I had mostly backed up) a report I was working on for quite some days. All lost, sucks. I suspect bad sectors might be the cause. I will get a new harddisk after aKademy, for now I am living with only one. Read More

It seemed I made a wish of some people from the usability folks come true. Presenting: my first approach of a CollapsibleWidget! The same dialog with two filled and one empty collapsable item on Linux, OS X and Windows: Read More

Wikipedia has just won the most important prices german journalism in two categories -- the Grimme Online Awards. I am proud that we have teamed up with such a cool project. I wish I could contribute more time to Wikipedia. Another price went to BILDblog, one of the most important watchblogs that I know. Congratulations to you all! Read More

I arrived home safely at around 11:30pm with a Thomas, a fellow of my LUG in Bonn and a translator for kdeextragear. He also took our booth parts in his car, which helped us a lot, thanks again man! Read More

After we decided to merge some improvements from KOrganizer/PI yesterday I finished to check-in the new timebar last night. It looks a lot better now than the old one, which basically only showed hour and seconds at the same font size. Those with 12 hour display will see an am/pm indicator instead of "00". In other news: Mosquitos really suck... my blood. It's really painful. Fortunately a drug store was open today, probably because this part of Holland is close to Belgium, where shops are also open on sundays. I could get some treatment for my stiches/bites, which caused me a fairly sleepless night. Read More

Kurt has an interesting point on a common api for basic desktop usage, hidden under some stuff I basically agree with but don't think it's easy to solve: A minimal desktop API for applications that do not use DE libs directly. In fact, Matthias, Scott and me discussed a solution to a similar problem back in Nove Hrady. We were wondering how to enable the use of KDE widgets in Qt applications. Read More

Last Friday (the 13th) was literally a black Friday for me. My car broke in the middle of my ride home and is broken beyond repair. Right on the freeway, involving a police car to protect me, my car and the ongoing traffic - the details would fill up two or three blog entries, but I'll spare you that stuff. So I'll get myself a BahnCard 50 now and try to be mobile by train. cough Read More

As already pointed out by others, we started porting kdelibs to Qt4. Thanks to the restless work of Maksim, DCOP now compiles and works, at least the client part of it. He managed to restore compatibility with the protocol used in KDE3, so we now have some means of posting stuff between toolkit versions. Read More

I took the test and those are my results: Your Linguistic Profile: 50% General American English 25% Yankee 20% Dixie 0% Midwestern 0% Upper Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak? I'm really curious how our british folks can master this, or if they simply feel insulted ;) (Hey folks, I seem to speak 5% non-american english, must be Denglisch... )

Being online for less than 3 days, subversion already shows the rapid pace in which KDE development happens. Starting off with revision #409210 after conversion, Stephan Binner just made commit #410000, by fixing ugly-looking disabled icons (by using setIconSet instead of setPixmap ). Maybe we will soon see a run for milestones like in the german wikipedia? Anyway, way to go KDE! Read More

Our beloved news source Slashdot is reporting that Microsoft is about to help Ford to build cars that don't crash. The linked article on livescience reveals: "Eventually, Gates said, there could be a car that wouldn't let itself crash." Now, the obvious go to joke would be: "Right, this is the consequent development after they shipped the operating system that never crashes. Oh wait...". I would put it differently: "Thank god I don't own a Ford anymore..." Read More

I just had a problem with Knowledge, which as you might know, is my attempt towards a Wikipdia offline reader: I needed to disable lots of GUI stuff in my QMainWindow-derived class as long as no offline image is loaded. Some of the widgets werent even available as object members. All widgets need to be deactivated and then activated again after the book was loaded. The obvious choice would have been to add a bunch of members, one for every object in question, and then call setEnabled( true ) or setEnabled( false ) for each of them respectively. Result: lotsa code. Lotsa members, sucks. So what was my solution? Obviously, all relevant classes in this case are really QWidgets (except for QActions, I'll get to them later). So what I did is having a private member QList < QWidget* > mStateWidgetList. Every time a widget shows up I would add it to the list. Tackeling a bunch of them is just as easy: Read More

Qt4 is really progressing well. The only problem at this point is that it still changes a lot even after Beta 2 which originally meant to end the phase of rather radical changes, according to the trolls. But that's fine. Let them get their APIs sorted out, let them react to the extensive feedback and let them time to do it right. So what's new in Qt land since Beta 2? First thing to notice is the introduction of "Plastique", which is, as you certainly suspected already, a Qt-only version of the KDE 3.4 default theme "Pastik". The clear advantage is that Qt finally has a decently looking style for Linux, which is available even to statically-linked Qt applications. This is good since I never liked the rather sharp-edged windows style mixed with rather smooth styles like Plastik. The next topic is an improvement (at least I suppose it's new, Maksim wasn't sure either) regarding tool windows handled by QWorkspace (aka MDIs). The window decoration is now completely under control of QStyle, and it might be possible to implement a bridge in KStyle that maps the current KWin decoration on a KDE Style for MDI Widgets. That said, Maksim warned me that it would be hard to do, so I don't take that for granted. Anyway, Plastique provides a nice (hardcoded) Plastik Window decoration, you can get a good impression on how things could look like in the future. Oh yeah, and another one: It will be possible for Qt-only application to make use of at least parts of the KDE icons now. Qt has a standard icon set, which depends on the style. KStyle can map them to KIconLoader, or whatever its equivalent in KDE 4 will be called. Ideally everyone is going to use KDE libs for all platforms once the Qt4 port of the KDE libraries is done and available for all major platforms (Unix, Linux, OS X, Windows) even for Qt-only apps, but we will see if that is going to be accepted amongst Qt developers. Anyway, this will work in any case :). Designer started to get a usable resource editor component. Qt4 resources obsolete the qembed concept of Qt3, making things significantly easier: Simply add files in the editor (i.e. graphics), i.e. /images/mypic.png. Add the resource file to your Qt project and run make. Qt will handle the rest for you. Accessing the resource e.g. from within richtext is as easy as label->setText( QLatin1String( "... ; ..." ) ); The richtext engine itself still has some bugs, but I'm confident they'll get sorted out soon. That's today's little Qt4 tour. We hope you had a pleasant trip!

So i have toyed around with Qt4, which led to a small application called "Knowledge" (Screenshots: 1, 2, 3). Once it's grown up, Knowledge is supposed to become a Wikipedia offline reader. Right now I need to find a good indexer and an easy way to generate HTML from Wiki markup (which is not trivial, since this also requires a TeX parser and a parser for special metadata, i.e. for drawing timelines). I'll probably hack up MediaWiki to work as a preprocessor (which I already started with, but it's a all a big mess right now) The second limitation is QTextBrowser: It's nice for enrichted text, but it's still fairly buggy and even once this is fixed, I really need a proper browser at the end of the day with whistles and bells. Maybe this will motivate me to help porting KHTML once we're getting there. Read More

... if you ever existed. Today, Denmark failed in its attempt to stop Software Patents from being passed through the EU Council. There is IMHO little hope that the second reading of the parliament will make a difference. Other people keep stating that they are ashamed to live in the European Union. I think I have a feeling that is worse: I am scared. Read More

After I tried to discover what's behind Konquerors new shiny Introduction page, I discovered a feature that I want to share: Konqueror now knows the metaphor of WebFolders, similar to Windows, but actually supporting more protocols. (Warning: Flash movie ahead :)) Read More

[image:837,right] Today, I finished two the new intro screen that was fairly overdue already. It's meant to look fancy and be useful (to a certain extend at least ;) In other news I finally committed the new exchange wizard with hopefully all relevant strings. I'll be working on it tomorrow to make sure to have something working for the final release. Right now it simply does nothing, so noone is gets hurt, just a bit disappointed maybe. Read More

Ok, this is just in: The town of vienna is migrating to Linux. Contrary to Munich, they are doing a "soft migration", which means they will only migrate 4.800 workplaces to Linux out of 7.500 which will be running OpenOffice.org independant of the OS. This is a lot more cost-efficient for them. They have no migration pressure, as their support contacts with Microsoft are running until 2010, yet they do want to migrate. Read More

As some might know, KBattleship was Niko and my first application in KDE CVS. Today, I saw some commits to it again. It's unbelieveable that people kept working on it, even added new features like the DNS-SD support that was recently checked in. I was looking at the code and felt totally embaressed - ill-named classes, heavy pointer abuse, unused layouts, lack of appropriate data structures, just to name a few of our sins. So I want and fired up vim. Read More

I spent the last days in Berlin, joining the folks at the 21. Chaos Communication Congress (dubbbed "21C3" for that matter). Besides attending some highly interesting talks this was a very welcome way to not only meet the "usual suspects" from the KDE and GNOME camp, but also to make new friends, share new ideas and discuss things. The athmosphere was awesome, albeit unfortunately only as in feeling, not as in breathing (unless you like lung cancer). Read More

Today, a lot of people have voiced their opinion on wether or not it's a good idea to port the KDE plattform to Windows. In other news, I whitnessed another uncessary crash today, that was due to a stale library that had an old interface. On load, it crashed and teared the application down. Read on to learn how to avoid those problems. Read More

This is an attempt to establish awareness of KDE programmers for problems that might arise on large installation sites. I am expiriencing them at Uni from time to time, where several hunderts of clients run a FC1 based KDE installation. So I decided to start a little series that might be an eye-opener for people that usually only code with the computer as a single workstation in mind and as a reminder for those who know about the difficulties that may arise in corporate environments. Feel free to continue this series in your blog or send ideas for more "enterprise development problem" quickies my way. Read More

I got one of the Linksys WRT54G Routers from aKademy, and I must say it really rocks. It can be whatever you want: Easy to use or a real geek toy. Why? Well, it runs linux :) Read on if you are looking for a new router, somthing that runs Linux or just some cool piece of hardware. Read More

You got one of those nice HP nx5000 with SUSE 9.1 preinstalled at aKademy? You were annoyed because the stupid intel chipsets could not handle mixing and the sound device was permanently busy? No more! Read More

Today I was told by a friend that minicli contains a... calculator. Just press Alt+F2 and type e.g. 23-5. Then press enter. Seems like there were alterantives to kcalc that predate the current calcualtor war. Now: anyone willing to implement a solver for differential equations? ;-) Read More

Yesterday, I did some calls with Skype. Amongst others I talked to Fabrice Mous and afterwards we even did a conference call with Stephan Binner. Later on I called my father. This is even more remarkable since my provider (which I luckily will get rid of at the end of this month) blocks UDP ("It's stateless, we can't control it, therefore it's dangerous."). This usually means the end to any VoIP solution which require UDP for low-latency. Still Skype simply works -- remarkable well. Read More

You sure have been wondering why we integrated the google search bar and why we "secretly" developed gecKo. The reason is simple: We are after you. Flee, but mind you: you can run, but you can't hide! insert-evil-and-deep-laughter-here Read on to learn about all the evil details... Ok, and now for the serious part of this entry: Some facts about the evil "Google Plugin": Read More

Krita is a very promising application. Its problem is that the potential user currently has to build all of KOffice only to get krita. At aKademy, Ken Wimer told about that at the artists meeting. I first thought it would be the best to get Krita out of the KOffice into kdeextragear or something, but the downside is that it would take a duplication of all the cool koffice libs features, so I had a look into the issue. Read More

Tonight I got my new laptop, which HP offered at a very very low price. My own laptop, finally! That was a dream I actually had since a long time, but I never got to buy one because it was "too expensive". Only wireless doesn't work yet, but there are rumors that there is a driver for that. Read More

So I'll jump into the car in the next minutes. The plan is to arrive at wheels place somewhat before 10. I really hope at least Aaron will open the doors, or else... ;-) We will then arrive in LuBu in the afternoon. Fun, yay! :) Read More

"Wow, Kontact is starting up much faster now" many of you might say after testing a recent CVS snapshot. While we of course are steadily improving speed, this perception of huge speedup is due to the delayed initialization trick: Kontact starts - the mainwindow almost instantly appears, showing the component icons. The splash screen remains, showing a progress bar, until everything is finished. Read More

After Till kept bugging me, I finally asked David Vignoni to submit his final versions of the icons, which I then committed to CVS. As a result, Kontact has now finally decent icons. Interested people should take a look. Have a look: Read More

While Kolab 2 promises an easy installation, I always thought Kolab 1 was a bitch to set up. When I tried to set it up and build it from scratch, it took me more than a day and it was really bad. The fortunate thing is: It's not any longer a pain to get your Kolab running. You can now set up a Kolab Server while watching the evening news. "How does this work out?", you might ask. Well, the fine guys at ZfOS have made Kolab installation much more convinient. They have packages available for all mainstream distributions. Even if your Distribution is not covered, their "obmtool" (OpenPKG poor man's Boot, Build & Management Tool) makes it easy to setup an entire Kolab in three easy steps: Read More

Just in time for the feature freeze, I managed to finish the Kontact wizard. I finally took the time to understand the concepts behind the framework that Cornelius orgininally came up with and I really start to like it. The current version contains some known bugs, but I will address that in the next days. Read More

Hmm, haven't written something in a while, but now that KDE 3.2 is tagged and branched, I think I should give an update. Cornelius has already described everything that comes into my mind these days (and yes, picturing Zack without dreads scares the hell out of me as well...). Read More

Last night I did a lot of bug fixes and janitor work on bugs.kde.org and others were also working hard to get some stuff done before the string freeze that hits us as of today. Still we (#kde-pim) realized that we are not quite there, which is why we will most probably release Kontact as version 0.8 with the following features disabled: Read More

Recently, a discussion about KApplication::random() popped up on kde-cvs. People were asking to move this in a Math tool class. This reminded me of something the KDE-Qt integration group in n7y discussed as a "would-be-nice-to-have" thing. But let me first describe my POV: IMHO KApplication was way to long the place to store everything but the kitchensink. I'd love to get rid of KApplication in KDE 4 if that is possible somehow (or strip it down to a minimal layer that provides no new methods. The motivations: Read More

Finally I found enough topics to annoy you with a new blog entry, so here we go: The last days were definitely too hot. Consequently I enjoyed most of the day in swimming pools or similar and didn't get to do much coding. At least I got some administrativa done, namely publishing the final keylist for the Nove Hrady Keysigning Party and in the evenings when it cooled down I got XMLGUI for KOrganizer RMB menus basically working. It still needs tweaking, but it works, yay! Read More

So this is my first blog entry. I will try to add something every now and then if it makes sense. Let's see how useful it becomes. I think it has great potentials. Number two on my wishlist would be a wiki on developers.kde.org. Anyone? :) I finally got the program out and everyone seems to be happy about it. To all that are wondering: "reserved" really means "reserved" on the slots that are marked as such They will be filled until the conference starts. I really hope everyone will enjoy the conference. Hope to see you all in nove hrady! Read More