Jason Harris 

This is a big day for me: after 15 years, my last day as an astronomer. After three years of trying, I wasn't able to get a faculty job, so this year I started applying for non-academic positions. Those applications were basically all dead ends, which has been pretty frustrating. Read More

Akarsh Simha is pursuing a very ambitious project for Google Summer of Code 2008: He's increasing the number of stars displayed by KStars by a factor of 10 (from 130,000 to over 1 million), without having a negative impact on the performance of the program. James Bowlin and I are his co-mentors in this project. James and Akarsh spent the pre-coding SoC period hashing out the code architecture required for this effort, which allowed Akarsh to hit the ground running when he started to code. His progress has been amazing: in the kstars/summer branch, we are already displaying over 2 million stars, and it feels just as responsive as trunk, because the new architecture is extremely efficient in memory usage. Read More

I've never been able to successfully run SUSE or openSUSE, on any of my machines. I don't understand why; it just doesn't work. My latest attempt was to download and burn the openSUSE KDE Four Live CD, last night. Read More

I got some good comments on my last post. Let me try to clarify what I was trying to say, because I don't want to be misunderstood as being denigrating toward users: Read More

Have to say, I totally agree with the sentiments expressed by Troy. KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn't really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not. What we need are contributors: that's the life-blood of our community, what keeps KDE growing and evolving. To the extent that users can and do become contributors, I will grant that we need a userbase as a pool of potential future contributors. But I am simply baffled by any argument that we "need" to have a large number of people that never do more than use KDE. Why do we need them? Read More

I'd like to introduce Akarsh Simha, who was awarded a GSoC this year to work on KStars. His project is entitled "Optimising loading and painting of stars in KStars", and when it is successfully completed, KStars will finally have the ability to display millions of stars, without adversely affecting the programs interactive responsiveness. Read More

Say hello to our new baby daughter, Vivian: She was born on Feb 25th. Her middle name is QiHui, which is Mandarin for "bright angel". Haiyin and I are very happy, and not a little tired! Read More

I've tried before, the installer always fails for me. But, I'm getting fed up with Gentoo (finally), so I decided to give it another try. Surely this time would be better... Read More

Attending the KDE4 Release Event has been insanely great. It's so good to finally meet people I've only known via email and IRC. We have an incredible community, and now I feel much closer to it than I did before. Read More

With the release of KDE 4.0, it's time to start maintaining both trunk and branch versions of the code, so that bugfixes can be backported to the branch. If you use the cs/cb/cmakekde scripts to manage your build environment, it's fairly easy to switch the context of these between branch and trunk. Read More

I posted this to k-c-d a couple days ago, but it generated zero response, so I thought I'd post it to the ol' blog in case any non k-c-d types might be interested. Read More

I need help on some things which ought to be trivial. I'm working on the KStars Observing List tool, depicted here: Ain't it pretty? The first trouble arises if the TableView listing the objects loses input focus. Then it looks like this: So it's just about impossible to see what objects are selected, and the only way to restore the active colors without altering the selection or column ordering, is to click on the vertical scrollbar (if there is one!). If these "disabled" colors appeared when the dialog lost focus, that would maybe be acceptable. However, as it is now, if any other widget in the dialog gets focus, I get these "disabled" colors in the TableView. This is obviously a usability nightmare; how do I make the "active" colors persist as long as the dialog has focus (or heck, keep the active colors no matter what...that would be better than the current situation)? Any advice would be most appreciated. The second thing I need help with is resizing the dialog. The button in the upper right is supposed to present a more compact version of the tool, in case the user would like to keep it open without it taking up too much of the screen. This button hides all columns except the first, and shrinks the Action buttons so they only contain one letter each. This all works, but it simply refuses to resize the dialog itself to match the contents: What I want to happen is the following (which I achieved by manually resizing the Dialog): Does anyone know how to make it do this resizing automatically? I've tried resize(), adjustSize(), everything I could think of. Thanks!

Do you want to help improve KStars, but don't want to do programming or debugging? Do you like pretty pictures? Over at the KStars Community Forums, I have announced the KStars Image Challenge. We need more pictures of celestial objects for our Details window. Right now we have most of the Messier objects and about 40 NGC objects; you can see the current images here: http://www.30doradus.org/kstars/detail_thumbs/ Read More

As blogged by Bart Coppens, there's currently a naked-eye comet gracing northern-hemisphere skies: comet Holmes. It's in KStars, but you should update the ephemerides with Get New Stuff (Ctrl+D), or the position will be way off. Here's a screenie showing its position as of tonight: Read More

Howdy KStars fans, Just a quick note to let you know that we are now in BugKill mode: no more new features for 4.0, just polishing and bugfixes. Here's what KStars looks like these days: Read More

Every five years or so, it snows in Tucson. We got our latest taste last Sunday: (click for more photos) I grew up in Illinois, where the winters were long and relatively harsh. So it's pretty funny to watch native Tucsonans freak out after 1 cm of snowfall. Schools were shut down. More than 50 bridges in town were closed to all traffic. Local auto stores sold out of ice scrapers. You know, mass hysteria! </vinkman> Read More

A recent story on the Dot sparked a conversation about which branch KDE application developers should be developing against (3.5 or 4.0). My usual stance on what developers "should" be doing is that they should do whatever they like. Most of us are hobbyists, so go ahead and scratch that itch. Trying to tell volunteers what they "should" be doing is at best futile and at worst, insulting. Read More

Something like 9 years ago, when I was a young grad student, I created a web page that was, at the time, the internet's only repository of spaceship images (thanks wayback machine!). I enjoyed putting it together, but inevitably, I eventually let it stagnate. Read More

Why is it that whenever a Dot story features one of our female contributors, people feel the need to embarass themselves (and the rest of us) with pathetic and demeaning comments? Greg Meyer called it, it's really creepy, anti-social behavior. Read More

With Qt-4.2, we finally get back the flexbility of adding arbitrary widgets to action containers like toolbars and menus, via the new QWidgetAction class. For QToolbar, there was already a workaround for this in the addWidget() function, but there was no way to add a widget to a menu. Read More

I live in Tucson, Arizona, in the heart of the Sonoran desert, among the Saguaro and Javelina. I love it here; the desert has a unique kind of beauty: vast, sparse, ancient, and enduring. I love the spectacular sunsets, and the spicy smell after a long-needed rain. I love the tough resilience of desert life, which still somehow manages to reveal a fragile beauty now and then. Read More

Ever since Matthias Ettrich joked about it in the early history of the KDE project, focus-follows-mind has been a recurring meme in the KDE lexicon. Well, it looks like it's finally coming! Do you think the kernel will ship "thinking cap" drivers by the time we release KDE-4.0? :) Read More

One of our users suggested that it would be useful to have some mechanism by which members of the KStars user community could meet and interact, either a mailing list or a web forum. I totally agree. I know there are many people using KStars, and there are lots of reasons that they would want a way to talk with each other, share custom content that they've made, rant about their most hated bugs, whatever. Read More

I've spent the last few months on the behind-the-scenes architecture of KStars. Since the port to KDE4 was going to be a major overhaul for us anyway, we decided to simultaneously do a major refactoring of how the data catalogs are represented in KStars. We're now using a hierarchical Composite/Component model, and it's working well. Read More

If I was a nethack monster, I would be: ......| ..%d+.| ......| a little dog: Loyal. Friendly. Housebroken. Nice doggie. Which NetHack Monster Are You?

Sorry for the slight abuse of the blogosphere, but I did post this request (twice) on kde-devel, and got no replies. I'm having trouble getting my custom widgets working in Qt4 designer; read on if you think you might be able to help, or if you want to learn more about how to use custom widgets in the new designer. Read More

Yes, that's right, I am once again at my favorite telescope in northern Chile. Getting a metric assload of data, which should keep me busy for a while. Normally, I would say at this point that it's nice to get away from winter and experience a summery Southern November, but I happen to live in Tucson, AZ, so I am actually missing the best weather of the year! :p Read More

Update from my last post: After failing to install the "easy" distros (Suse 10.0 and Kubuntu), I decided to install Gentoo again. Went flawlessly, and I'm loving emerge. Now, why did I ever want to try another distro? Can't remember :) Read More

I finally decided to replace my sick hard drive, which had been hobbling along for months. I decided to take this as an opportunity to try out the new SUSE 10.0. I've been a happy Gentoo user for a few years, but I've heard good things about SUSE and wanted to try a distro that would "just work". cue foreboding music... Read More

For a long time, KStars had a non-functional "Add Catalog" button in its configuration window. Now, it finally works: You can specify what data fields are present in the catalog, and in what order. The pair of listboxes constitute the first use of drag-n-drop in KStars. :) Custom catalogs are easy to add to the program; hopefully we'll see some catalogs on GHNS and kde-files.org. Read More

Finally, something worth blogging in KStars-land: The Object Details window is getting a facelift. Before and after: The layout is much less cluttered, and all of the data fields now use kde:KActiveLabel, so the text can be copy/pasted with the mouse. Best of all, there's now a user-customizable thumbnail image of the object. If you click on the image, the following tool opens: Read More

Whenever there's a KDE release, I like to draw up a "QA list" for KStars that essentially lists all of the program's expected behaviors (it's quite a long list). I then go through and systematically check each one. I typically turn up a good number of lurking insects this way, and the current release is no exception. Read More

Ok, so I got a new PowerBook recently. I was really excited about OS X from the little I'd seen of it looking over people's shoulders. Finally, I would taste humankind's highest achievement in usability and user-friendliness! Read More

The skinny: two people have reported that KStars will not compile for them; both are using Redhat 9 and gcc 3.2.2. The error message is: lx200classic.cpp:29: structure `eqNum' with uninitialized const members Read More

So, does anyone know any good resources for OpenGL programming under KDE? I've started looking at the Qt OpenGL examples, and that seems straightforward enough. However, Someone at the dot told me about the Coin project, which is an implementation of SGI's high-level Open Inventor API for OpenGL. Even better, they have a library called SoQt which is supposed to let you easily make openGL Qt apps. I'd really like to try to use SoQt for KStars, but from what I have read so far, it isn't very flexible. You have to place "SoQt::init(argc,argv)" inside your app's main function, which instantiates a main window for drawing OpenGL stuff. This would seem to preclude making the window a KMainWindow. Is there a way to use SoQt to just make a widget, instead of a toplevel window? Also, it wasn't clearly stated, but I got the impression that it wasn't supported under Qt 3.x yet. Can anyone confirm/refute that? Read More

so after weeks of flakiness with our sourceforge mailing list, I finally requested a kstars-devel@kde.org mailing list, which we have been happily using for a few weeks now. It's great! Unfortunately, we still aren't being archived at lists.kde.org, despite 2 emails to webguy@theaimsgroup.com and one to sysadmin@kde.org (all of which were unanswered). Does anyone know from experience how long it takes to get listed at lists.kde.org, and if the complete archive since the list started will be available? Read More

(EDIT: changed the title. Thanks for the discussion, I am less confused now :) ) How many of you, when confronted with the Qt licensing option (during the 'configure' step of the compile) select the GPL as your Qt/X11 license? I had always done so, but I have come to understand that using KDE precludes this option. If you use KDE, the QPL is your only non-commercial licensing option, because a GPL'd library cannot be linked with non-GPL code. KDE contains lots of this. Here's a partial list, just of the core apps and libs: Read More

I am on the last night of a 4-night observing run at the Magellan 6.5-m telescope, and KStars has been my lovely-and-talented observing assistant for the whole run. It's great to be on a mountain again; prior to this, I hadn't been observing at all in 3 years. The weather's been great, the telescope is incredible, and the winter nights are long down here, so I'm getting lots of good data. Read More

I recently noticed that handling of "Daylight Savings Time" (a.k.a. "Summer Time") did not work for any southern-hemisphere locations in KStars. I fixed it in HEAD and 3_1_BRANCH yesterday, a bit too late for 3.1.3, unfortunately (it will be in version M_PI if there is one ;) ) Read More

We recently had a bit of drama on the kde-edu-devel mailing list. It seems that Debian decided that KStars was not quite Free enough, because some of the images we use are used with permission, and the catalog files are not unambiguously in the public domain. As a result, they were either going to remove KStars altogether, or move it to non-free. Read More

For my first post, I thought I would give a short heads up on recent activity in KStars. Jasem Mutlaq recently added telescope control to KStars, which is just fantastic. Definitely has been one of our most-requested features. Read More

Did you hear that Ralf Nolden is starting work on a new KDE3 development book? Wahoo! It's going to be under the FDL, natch. Following Holger's suggestion that the book be a constantly updated guide to everything KDE, I propose it be titled "The KDEnomicon" :) Read More