Frederik Gladhorn 

Just in case anyone is following me on kdedevelopers.org, I moved my blog to http://blogs.fsfe.org/gladhorn.

Yesterday I arrived in Oslo just in time for pizza and talking to Will, Darío, Thiago, Olivier, Knut and the students working on mobile broadband connections. We had a great time so far, discussing apis and cleanup of our network manager bits. Working with Will and Darío is fun! We kept planning even on our little bar prowl with Olivier. Darío and I kept giggling about the never ending night. Three in the morning felt like late afternoon... Good thing we came during the summer to visit Oslo. Now it's time to start improving the applet and libs after a great breakfast. Time to get some work done ;) Read More

Björn of the FSFE initially triggered the organization of a joint KDE 4.2 Release Party and FSFE Fellow Meeting in Stuttgart. I'm very happy that our local team grew quickly so everything went very smooth. So Friday it was time to meet and celebrate. At this point we had no idea how many people would show up. Read More

Björn and I sat down (or rather mailed around) to get the FSFE Fellowship Meeting and KDE 4.2 Stuttgart Release Party going. Of course that involved talking to people around here. Ingo of RadioTux was on my list of locals, so I contacted him. What I didn't expect was to be interviewed on RadioTux just a few days later. I had a short interview on RadioTux. So if you are really brave, you can listen to me (in German), stuttering here. After some technical problems they got me on the phone at around 65 minutes. And d'oh, could I think of many things to say when skipping through it afterwards... I guess I still need to work on my promo skills. But it turned out much less embarassing than I had originally feared :D Read More

Ok, it's sort of late... - I wish everyone a happy 2009 :) And since I just found my camera: What a way to start 2009 - Danimo enjoys his swimming pool and Lydia her green dragon. Read More

I'm happy to announce a KDE 4.2 Release Party in Stuttgart. At the same time this will be the first FSFE Fellowship meeting here. Together with the FSFE we will celebrate the release, meet, talk and have fun. Of course everyone interested in Free Software is invited. Read More

I have not investigated the QEdje-Plasma-Applets much, but here's how to get them working, assuming you compile your kde from svn. Some info is on MoRpHeUz’s Blog. Not enough for me though... So here is a step by step walk-through. You probably need libeet-dev or similar, I just got a distro package. Get qzion and qedje: $ git clone http://dev.openbossa.org/qedje/qzion.git $ git clone http://dev.openbossa.org/qedje/qedje.git Build and install the stuff: $ cd qzion $ qmake PREFIX=$KDEDIR $ make $ make install Install qedje the same way. Rebuild Plasma from kdebase. Read More

So M got a flying pig for his birthday. Imagine that! Awesomeness - aren't you jealous? I surely am. It's even pink! There are days (or does it only happen at night, when you can't sleep?) where flying pigs seem to be the secret rulers of KDE. Read More

A few weeks ago I got a smart card to use with gpg for hardware encryption. I'm no security fanatic but I like the idea, so I bought a "lots of different cards all in one" reader. I got a MSI StarReader SMART which should support smart cards and was available locally (strange habit, I like to go to real shops instead of the online competition sometimes). I played around with it, but it seemed to just sit there and do nothing (except read every variant of useless memory card). What made my day is that after only one mail to Ludovic Rousseau with some info about the device and getting a response the same evening, it started working. After adding its usb id it's listed on the ccid driver page :) A big thank you to Ludovic Rousseau! Time to get it to work with gpg and mail now. Read More

I'll be giving a KDE 4 talk at the Hobby and Electronics fair in Stuttgart tomorrow (Nov, 16th). If you were planing to drop by the fair, come on over at 15:30. You probably won't learn a lot about KDE since I intend to prepare for a rather broad non-technical audience. Let me know if you happen to be in Stuttgart and want to have a coffee or just chat :) Read More

While eagerly awaiting KDevelop4 to become stable (it crashes on me too often right now)... I'm back to forgetting vim commands ;) To get a list of files on the left (still need to get comfy with it, but it looks useful) use the Project plugin Read More

Today the Systems Fair in Munich ended. I only spent yesterday and today there helping at the KDE booth. Eckhart and Holger spent all week there and I am deeply impressed that they still were in very good spirits and were lots of fun to manage the booth with :) Read More

Back from FrOSCon. I followed the frog grasshopper. It was great to meet so many nice people again :) The KDE table (booth just doesn't fit) was shared with Kubuntu and Amarok. I think we all fitted together nicely, not really appearing as three projects that much. Thanks to the Kubuntu people for helping a lot in keeping the table/booth running! The blue table cloth we had (kudos Kubuntu) gave us extra appeal. And if it hadn't had a little too much beer in the evening that would have included Sunday... Apart from talking to visitors and other projects and listening to talks, Saturday evening was all about being social. Or it was all about beer, I don't remember clearly. I think we did fairly well on the dance floor also, I enjoyed bouncing around with Sebas, Danimo, Markey, Sven and all the others, though I do hope, no photos of us dancing around professionally are around ;) Thanks a lot to Valerie and Jörg for giving me a ride, that was awesome. And the Grasshopper. Read More

FrOSCon is coming up tomorrow-like... need to get ready, who stole all my time? Still some notes from Akademy. It was my first (therefor best) Akademy! I can only say it was great meeting so many nice people. Others have blogged about that quite a bit already, so I will save me the effort ;) Read More

Akademy is starting :) We arrived at Katelijne Waver!!! Time to head towards bed...

Akademy is coming closer and I still haven't managed to blog about current stuff happening in Parley. Instead I was wasting my time outside, climbing, and lately again (last weekend at least) some coding. Lately I leaned back and enjoyed other people working on parley a lot. Our two summer of code projects are becoming ready for broader testing and have been merged into trunk. New faces show up improving Parley, Javier Goday got started with two patches to improve the ui :) Daniel Laidig is working on a welcome screen that hopefully will make new users feel more welcome and not scare all long time users away ;) One sad topic that came up is the state of the handbook, which is not as nice as it should be. I cleaned out lots of old stuff from it a week ago, so now it's time to fill it with actual information again. Since huge parts will have to be rewritten, I was wondering if there is a good way to collaborate on the handbook. Any tips are more than welcome. I think we have enough interested people willing to write some piece and improve parts here and there, but the current docbook sources are not very easy to work on with different people that don't necessarily have svn accounts. Read More

I took a sneak peek at Kdevelop. I did so before, but after waiting a month or two and reading Andreas' announcement I was curious to see the progress. I've been impressed at how great the definition-use-chain (that David Nolden is working on) is becoming (it seems to know more about my code than I do ;)). Hovering over a variable highlights all occurrences of it, pretty helpful sometimes. It gives you auto-completion, shows all uses of a function and probably does a whole lot more fancy stuff that I haven't discovered yet. [image:3547] Another thing I that is extremely useful is the quick open (file/class/function) dialog which helps jumping around in the code. This is already available in Kdevelop 3 though I never noticed until it was demonstrated to me. Some easy-to-remember key combo like ctrl-alt-m will take you there, just give it a try. The Kate part is very nice, though it's a bit too color full maybe. I've been taught to choose cmake and simply point to the root folder of my project and let Kdevelop do its magic. Adding a build folder will allow compilation too. With the new version it is possible to have more than one project open at the same time. That rocks. There are lots of things that are not done yet. The class view for example opens the declaration instead of definition of a function by default. But I could already use it productively :) I chose the smallest project I could think of - the soc branch containing only Parley and its lib. I decided to be brave and let the entire project be parsed in the background. That option is off by default and already took quite some time on the few files I have, so that might be a wise default. Usually Kdevelop parses files as they are opened and at reasonable speed too and then goes for the includes. Nice! Keep up the good job Kdevelop guys, I'm really happy to see Kdevelop taking shape! Useless proclaimers are fun and useless, so here it goes: Kdevelop is in alpha state, so unless you have strong nerves and a reflex to save every minute, you'll have to step in and get Kdevelop ready (or wait a little longer). Testing the new Kdevelop I finally got around to fix a bug in the Parley summer of code branch. Since I introduced it, I guess it's only fair that I fixed it ;) Read More

Here's another tip for those not yet on subversion 1.5 (which supposedly comes with the goodness below integrated). svnmerge.py makes merging branches back and forth a little less painful. Most distributions have a package for it, it can be in svn-utils or something like that and sometimes it's simply called svnmerge without the py. Whatever. Say we have this great new project in KDE/kdeedu/foo and now we decided to branch it because the soc-foo project will be worked on during feature freeze... Read More

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself. Oscar Wilde Quite some time ago, Pino gave me a great tip (hm, maybe advice is of use occasionally)... Use Modeltest from labs.trolltech.com to validate QAbstractItemModels. It's as simple as including modeltest.cpp in your CMakeLists.txt, add #include "modeltest.h" and when constructing the model, hand over the model pointer to a ModelTest instance. new ModelTest(myQAbstractItemModel, parent); Then you'll have a hard time starting your app for a while, since ModelTest is somewhat picky (but that's what you wanted, right?). Once you manage to get past all the ASSERTS checking for correct parenting and the like your model will have been a bit refined. In the end I think it's quite a good idea to go through this hassle to have a valid model. At least it helps getting rid of some obvious bugs with models. So be sure not to forget beginInsertRows and friends :) Have fun. Read More

Yay, Daniel gave Parley's html export via xsl an overhaul to make it look way better. Two bugs fixed :) one of them would prevent counting answers as wrong in the tests... Pretty nice bug I'd say. Personally I'd have kept it for good. Read More

Yesterday I arrived (too early for my taste) in Karlsruhe, to present KDE at the Open Source Expo. The OpenExpo is a rather new fair, so it was not very full but there was an audience for the talks. I gave a general KDE 4 introduction, with the help of Martin Gräßlin. We started early since the talk before ours did not take place for some reason. That took away a little from my pre talk meditation time :o I started with some slides about KDE 4 based on what Lydia already used a while ago, but very reduced. I soon switched over to live demoing of what will become KDE 4.1 and it was great fun. I could even show how nice the crash handler looks, though that was somewhat unplanned. Having a nice benevolent audience with good humor and me being in a good mood too, I got pretty positive feedback after-wards anyway :) Martin then gave a ten minute KWin tour showing compositing and explaining some of the backgrounds, very nice! He'll be working on the desktop cube KWin effect this summer. Marble with open street map is quite a looker too. Sven later gave a talk about Amarok 2 which also got quite a bit of attention. What surprised me (yeah, call me naive) was people requesting documentation (books on KDE 4) to get started :) And maybe I should start using a localized version of KDE for this kind of presentation, something that I usually don't do. All in all the fair could have benefited from more visitors but was nice. Great catering :) I enjoyed meeting new people again, Stephan and Martin for KDE as well as some nice people from Python, Ubuntu and Open Street Map. Seeing the local crowd (Sput, Sven and Lydia) in Karlsruhe again was great too, I found out Nini is as good a table soccer player as I am. Sven (the one with the good taste in music:) ) provided me with a place to sleep, thanks! Read More

XFig is not young. It's not beautiful either. It is still in use though. Even on Windows, there are people setting up cygwin only to get xfig. And that is because it has one killer feature. Export to Postscript/LaTeX in a way that lets latex replace the text in the drawing. That way the font and text size etc are consistent with the rest of the latex document. And you can add LaTeX text relatively easy and comfortable to your drawing too. Usability wise XFig is a killer... Even though it is possible to work fast with it thanks to keyboard shortcuts and quite advanced functions below the gui. I wish there was something like this available in a modern graphics application like Krita. Looks like I will have to learn getting along with XFig... Read More

Avgoustino Kadis works on a summer of code project for Parley and has ambitious plans: Hi! I'm a fresher in Computing at Imperial College London and I've the luck to participate in GSoC this year with doing something for Parley. I'm going to make it easier & faster for someone to create a vocabulary file for Parley by providing automatic translation and retrieval of unknown words from a text. At the same time I'll get involved in open source development for the first time and if I like it I'll keep on helping on making Parley even more useful, easy and fun! And then!! I'll get deeper and deeper into KDE development, become the leader of all the development team and force all KDE desktops have me as background and no way to change it!! Just kidding! :D Have a nice day ;) Read More

David Capel will work on Parley during the Summer of Code. I'll let him speak for himself: Hello, I'm David Capel, an 18-year-old from Minnesota in the USA. I'm going to be a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this fall and will likely major in computer science of some sort. For my summer of code project I'm rewriting Parley's practice interface so that it uses SVG themes and will be easy to extend in the future, and I will likely create a few new practice modes along the way (if anyone has ideas or requests, feel free to email me). Finally, I'm looking forward to joining the KDE community. :) Read More

This morning Patrick complained that he had no picture of himself while he was at the cebit. So here comes remedy. I stumbled across some other random KDE related pictures also... Read More

Seems like I've been bad. At least bad enough to get kicked from planetkde.org. No clue why actually. edit: I'm back, thanks to Chris Lee for running the planet in the first place :) Read More

Today (for some yesterday I guess) the KDevelop meeting started. After arriving a little late, I came just in time to grab something to eat after listening to the end of Aleix's talk about KDE 4 in general. So far we are still at the "formal" part, discussing general direction of KDevelop in KDE 4. [image:3391] Read More

A week ago I discovered a feature so obvious in that plasma thingy, that I just need to share it. You can put your favorite vocabulary trainer into your favorite panel. You knew it, I bet. Do it 8) Proof: [image:3387] I even poked at it a little so it only takes up a quarter of the panel instead of half of it. Now I already spent more time on this (I just wanted to see how hard it would be to create a plasmoid... but throwing it away seemed like a waste as well...). So if you've been looking for something fun and small like improving Parloids, let me know! Opening files (yes, this includes Parley, KWordQuiz, Kanagram and KHangman ones) should work now. Read More

The time to paint easter eggs has not come yet. It will though, in about half an hour. Also I don't really know why I'll do it. Maybe to reflect on my art skills once more and be happy that other people user their ability to create great artwork for KDE and Parley. Instead I yesterday started something that had been rotating in the back of my head for about a year now. Since I started working on KVocTrain/Parley one problem has been how to deal with synonyms (to a lesser degree antonyms and false friends, which will be done with in the same instant). Trying to check in at four in the morning probably doesn't help me fighting git. But I wanted a branch locally. I won, with only little side effects for the Kalzium plasmoids Carsten made me hack on earlier. Also the first version of the gui was somewhat scary, including three buttons, a lineedit and a listview plus two labels. After getting some sleep, it's down to a label, button and a list that shows the synonyms of the currently selected word. Also having to fix a bug in "The Raven" by Poe, no wait, in the importer for KDE3 vocabulary documents I decided that ember and radiant had to be synonyms for today, as I wasn't in the mood to look for better ones. [image:3345] If you feel your vocation is to suggest me a more clever way of setting up synonyms, make yourself heard. Read More

[image:3318] Ok, so SaroEngels was first... but who has the better view? Opposite of KDE CeBit booth...

Plasmoids have been creeping into different parts of KDE... The E-Team lately spotted two of them. So maybe check out KDE-Edu to get a real hot calculator made by apol. The gui is in need of some love, but it's already very powerful since it uses KAlgebra behind the scenes (yay, scientific calculations on your desktop). [image:3267] The other one I quickly hacked together, using artwork that leeo did for the icon originally. Being reminded by aseigo to seperate engine and applet, I had a glimpse at how engines are created, decided it's easy enough, so the engine is there too now. It can easily be extended to give tons of data, so I'm open to crazy ideas, if you want it to spit out more data, just tell me. Font config works, but some layouting might do good. And feel free to come up with an improved design and especially layout. As I have little time lately and rather want to get Parley in trunk into a working state again, I won't update the plasmoid much. Junior jobbing anyone? Great place to start, I already have a couple of ideas... drop by in #kde-edu on freenode. Read More

Seems like the official launch of KDE4 generates quite some momentum all around. I got two surprise presents today ;) Michael Hofer started a Java app to practice Parley vocabulary files "on the road" - using mobile phones that is. Open xml formats are a good thing. See the project homepage at sourceforge: MobVoc. Lee sent me an update of Parley icons and I'm very very happy this time! The toolbar looks much clearer now (the icons are a bit simpler to make them easier to recognize in small sizes). Read More

At the "Hochschule der Medien" (applied university for media (?)), which is really close to where I live, a Linux day took place yesterday. I only got there when most of the show was over already, but in time to listen to the talks I was interested in, given by the Amarok promo people (Lydia and Sven, the official amarok-beer-manager(titles are important, right?)) and a KDE4 intro by Lydia and Ingo (local KDE enthusiast) which was fun, with a diverse (rather small) audience. Afterwards we sat down in the S-Bar to have a few beers and talk some more, until we finally got the live stream working to watch Aaron talking. So thanks to those who showed up, it was fun. Thanks for the nice organization also! Read More

Torsten, the evil marble-mind tries to take over the world, but that's old news (pun where?). He talked me into getting hot new stuff support into Marble. That was real easy... except of course that marble has all this custom stuff to be a pure qt app. Well it works now. You can get a very nice map of crustal ages of the earth there now. Don't ask me what it actually shows, I guess the legend has to be adjusted a bit ;) Read More

After Jeremy adopted KNS2 as his new project, being pushed by Annma also, the first results start to show. We invaded the so far very low traffic freedesktop.org get hot new stuff mailing list and got some status updates so. Jeremy already implemented returning a list of changed entries to the app using KNS2 two weeks ago, tonight I added getting a list of installed files from these entries. This is good because it enables apps to work with the downloaded data without having to use the install command in their appname.knsrc which was rather limited in possibilities. The other thing is being able to uninstall downloaded stuff. After getting a file, one can now click uninstall again to get rid of it. And install it again. And remove it again... you get the hang of it. Since we are now trying to get it to work properly (without api modifications of course) this is probably the time to ask questions and tell us what's not working with it for you. At least regarding download. I hope upload will work soon as well, I don't know if anyone really tested it yet. Read More

After much back and forth, Parley has an icon! And not only one, Lee also gave in to my wish to create maybe one or two other icons for the menus and such... so now I have 13 new icons, some even in svn already and some more on the way :) (note: the screenshots are not the final versions... some of the icons have already been updated yet again) It's great to see how many people care about this little edu app which really is not that important... but it made four people (that I have contact with) get KDE4 from svn ;) Getting regular user feed back is the best that can happen I guess. Which reminds me: Thanks to you all for making this possible! Keep up the great work! Thanks Lee Olson! Read More

Yesterday I wandered around in my library a little and stumbled upon a book about XSLT. I never intended to get into that stuff because I hate doing html and this looked far too similiar to that. But I picked up the book, read some of it yesterday for half an hour and today I took two hours to see, if our kvtml format was usable with it, since it's just xml. I also picked up a book about css which I never looked at before. Read More

... is what Parley started doing lately. Pretending to have some very basic limited intelligence. Extending that to some more still very limited and basic intelligence will be easy now that the groundwork has been done. And I hope it's getting better at pretending then ;) Read More

Now that was quick! I got interviewed about KVocTrain/Parley today. Read it on blue-gnu.biz.

Ok, it's been a while, but Parley did not lay sleeping. Actually it ate up my spare time pretty well... Parley is sexy? Today I got an improvised page for Parley up. Read More

KVocTrain is dead. Welcome Parley! You might already have noticed when synching kde-edu yesterday or today that the KVocTrain folder has gone and been replaced by Parley. And not only the name has changed. I was able to close quite a few bugs while rewriting the better part of the old KVocTrain. One bug that was very annoying was closed yesterday by simply enhancing the gui a little. It is a feature that Jeremy implemented in our rewrite of the kvtml (Parleys file format) lib. In the old KVocTrain one could have three languages (see screenshots). Let's say German-English-French. Read More

Who am I? Good question, next question please. But seriously, my name is Frederik Gladhorn and this is my first post on the planet, if everything goes well :) I have started taking over KVocTrain some time ago. KVT had some rough edges and still does. "Bug 108568: kvoctrain interface is very confusing, can't figure out a thing" Is by far my favorite. Closing it will almost make me sad... Edu people probably know me by now from bugging them on IRC. I have been working with Jeremy Whiting to get the keduvocdocument lib into shape, letting him do most of the work actually. The result is quite satisfactory, as KAnagram, KHangman, KWordQuiz and KVocTrain now have a XML file format that is actually readable for humans too. After that was done, I used the chainsaw (as Pino) noted to go through the KVT code the last weeks or so. I'm quite satisfied with a much cleaner and easier to use interface. Now KVocTrain really longs for a nice shiny new Oxygen icon. Usability suggestions are welcome as well :) Another thing to quickstart people using the program is a wizard which also got redone last week. The obligatory screenshot of the new language selection dialog: This will probably only make people happy who know the old way of setting up languages in KVT... it makes me happy ;) Frederik Read More

Will it be a GargleBlaster? (the effect of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick) Well maybe not. And in the end WORDINATOR gets killed by terminator. All of these and many more were supposed to be new names for KVocTrain. Some less serious. But the (KVoc)Train will not roll on for ever. This is a call for new name suggestions! Come up with a great new name for the new KVocTrain! Please add your favorite name for a vocabulary training program to the comments section or visit in #kde-edu! Read More

This will be my blog about KVocTrain and my kde hacking in general.