Krake 

Since so many students have already shown interest in working for KDE during this years Google Summer of Code, with some already having started to send in first drafts of their proposals, I thought I'd a bit of advertising for a specific idea. Well "my" idea :) Read More

Short personal notice: I am currently in Cologne for a business trip lasting two weeks so I am staying over the weekend. If any KDE people around Cologne want to go for a beer until next Thursday, let me know :) Read More

A slight delay of my flight from Düsseldorf to Graz gives me time to recap the awesome time at the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin. Having been part of the programme committee I was looking forward to see at least a small subset of the talks live, though I hope I will have the opportunity to see many more once the videos have been processed and are available online. Read More

Companies often store their customer information in databases managed by customer relation management tools. SugarCRM is one such popular (and open source) system, built on the extremly wide spread AMP stack (Apache HTTP, MySQL, PHP). Therefore its main user interface is web based, i.e. accessible through standard web browsers and thus also relatively platform independent. Read More

I am not talking about His Steveness or this kind of jobs (congratulations to both involved parties!), I am talking about these. Traditionally we have been writing in a very start-to-end fashion, where execution starts at an entry point and ends when the task is done. At first there wasn't any reason not to do this as there was no user interaction during a programs execution point or only at controlled points, e.g. a console program asking for a Y/N descision. Read More

Harald has asked me to organize a KDE release party here in Graz. However, I am too lazy (wait! busy! sorry for my English, busy is the word I was looking for) to do that there won't be a dedicated event to celebrate KDE's newest achievement. Read More

With Akonadi most operations are running behind the scenes, carried out by background helper processes called Akonadi Agents. While we do have respective progress monitoring in KMail2, users will eventually take advantage of fact that they are no longer tied to specific applications. At which point they might want to be able to check on the status of these background processes without launching some front end applications. Read More

After all the blogging about our (as in KDE PIM developers) Akonadi porting, I thought I'll address a couple of things other application developer might consider for the next release cycle. Read More

After my last blog I was asked whether I feel that the migrator is now ready for testing. I think it is. If one wants to repeat the same test scenario (or variations of it), there are a couple of tricks to do that with as less effort as possible. Read More

After blogging about our progress on KMail's data and config migration to Akonadi for a couple of times, I felt that it was time for a screencast showing the migrator in action. Read More

Those who have read my previous blog entry will remember that I have been working on a way to directly operate on a mixed tree storage layout. "Mixed tree" means that the mail folder tree (hence "tree") consists of Maildir and MBox folders nested in each other in any combination, e.g. Maildir inside Maildir, MBox inside Maildir, Maildir inside MBox. Read More

As you most likely have already read on various other blogs we had one of our Akonadi sprints for the past couple of days. Most of the time I've been working on Akonadi support for a KMail mail store, basically a local directory where mails are stored in a combination of nested Maildir directories and MBox files. We already had support for Maildir and MBox in respective resources, but this "mixed mode", interleaved with highly KMail specific index files, made it necessary to either have some way of importing all this data and metadata or to use it directly similar to KMail. Read More

Today was my last day at AviBit Gmbh where I have been working for almost nine years now. Starting with development of internal tools, becoming maintainer of some of the companies main components and finally designing and supervising implementation of a versatile client framework for our surveillance products. What a ride :) Read More

It's that the year again when KDE PIM developers attend the annual meeting in Osnabrück, traditionally hosted by Intevation, one of the companies which continously excels in acquiring funding for KDE related development. Read More

Some of Akonadi's resource agents (usually just called resources) work on local files, some on files containing more than one data object, some on directories containing one data object per file. Read More

In an attempt to follow up on my blog about Akonadi porting xplained I am going to write about Akonadi migration. It is basically the data storage related cousin of porting: Porting is, as we learned, about adapting applications to a new way of handling data. Migration is about adapting data to new ways of being accessed. Read More

For quite some time almost every blog by a KDE PIM developer is about Akonadi in one for or the other, often about "Akonadi porting" or "porting to Akonadi". Akonadi itself can already be difficult to explain, combined with "porting" it probably has only meaning left if you are a developer. Read More

If you have no idea what this means, don't worry, neither do I. What I do know, however, is that a lot of people around KMail and are extremely happy about this :) Read More

Not at the Akonadi sprint. Shame! (You can find Tom's blog about it here and here) Missing out on the API discussions would have been already bad enough, missing the presentation of my GSoC student and not getting to meet Brad Hards sucks. Read More

There has been some confusion about Google data capabilities around the KDE 4.3 release. The 4.3 Feature Plan has an entry for that and it is marked as "Completed". Read More

Once in a while we come across rumors, urban ledgends and myths about all kinds of things. For example you might have read, heard or otherwise encountered wild claims about Akonadi's dependencies, maybe even as ridiculous as "depends on KDE". Read More

The past month had quite some cool things in store. It started with the Akonadi developer sprint in Berlin, Germany, where we got quite some work done, especially regarding mails. Read More

In case you thought that reading about the Akonadi developer sprint on the dot gave you an all encompassing overview of stuff happening around Akonadi, you forgot our brazilian friends. Read More

While working through my backlog of articles on Planet GNOME on my way to Nuremberg (yes, again), I came across a blog entry of Philip Van Hoof. In it he asserts that soon the era of email clients will be over, which I think some people misinterpreted as application for reading and managing email messages becoming obsolete. Read More

When people used to say that blogs are the new usenet, they meant that discussions and flamewars which used to happen on usenet newsgroups, now happen in blogs and their comment sections. Read More

This week I have been working on an Akonadi tutorial targetted at application developers. Compare to the Akonadi Resource Tutorial this was rather difficult. Resources have a well defined task and a tutorial can being with a basic implementation and move on to more complex scenarios later on. Read More

After I received a lot of positive feedback about my Akonadi Resource Tutorial, or probably more accurate outright praises :), I knew I had to write another one. This time I chose a topic that is probably less relevant for the majority of developers, however it should be helpful for people who either work on PIM applications with data types not yet covered by our current code or who want to use Akonadi for non-PIM data. Read More

So I am in my hotel room here in Nürnberg now and a bit tired from the long days over the weekend, however I think a bit of coverage of the KDE PIM meeting is in order. Read More

The following weekend will see this year's instance of the famous KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück, Germany, as usual gratiously hosted by Intevation at their shiny new office. I managed to convince the company I am currently working for that I can attend it and still make it to the final part of our site acceptance test in Nürnberg. Actually, since I am already in Germany, it will require less traveling than going there and back again from Graz. Read More

2008 has been a great year for me Free Software wise. Not only did I get the opportunity to attend three awesome KDE developer meetings/sprints, I also got invited and attended the Linux Collaboration Summit. Read More

The human race has been living and thinking in terms of borders for a long time, since the first people decided to settle down instead of keeping a nomadic life style. Read More

Last week I have been in Nürnberg again, this time almost a whole week. On Tuesday evening I met Will and half a dozen other SUSE people in a really nice pub called Irish Castle. Ah, Guiness, Fish&Chips and more Guiness :) Though, as an afterthought, I should probably have gone with Wings&Chips like Will did, they just looked even more delicious. Read More

When your boss tells you that you have to take over some work from a collegue, work that involves travelling several hours in each direction, work on a project you haven't been involved before and only get a minimum briefing, your most common reaction will likely be "this sucks!". Read More

The next few days I will be in Nurenberg, working on-site at our customer's facilities at the airport. I am arriving Monday afternoon and departe on Thursday morning, so I basically have three evenings to spend on going out for dinner and probably a pub or two :) Read More

Sound like magic you say? I'd say you're right! The White Wizard (also known as Volker Krause) has embedded a powerful spell in the KResource framework which summons a golem (also known as kres-migrator) and commands it to carefully transform your contact and calendar resources into a respective Akonadi setup. Read More

The KDE BugSquash team is holding another testing and bug triaging day tomorrow, Sunday 9th of November, to help maintain and improve the quality of KDE PIM applications. Especially versatile applications like KMail and KOrganizer can potentially be tested numerous times by its developers without finding any issues because it requires a certain workflow or data set to trigger them. Therefore help by as many volunteers as possible is hugely improving the situation, because every person will have different goals, preferences on how to do things (e.g. mouse v.s. keyboard), data sources, amount of data, etc. Read More

As usual the middle day of a developer sprint is the most productive one since all people are here the whole day. We managed a couple of our agenda items in the sense of discussing the current state, roadmap and delegating jobs to those who still have time to do something beside their own important TODOs :) Read More

I'd say we had an extraordinary good last day since nobody had to leave early and the majority didn't have to leave until late afternoon. After plenty of breakfast we started with a bit of blog reading, email checking and warm-up hacking. Read More

Day one of the second Akonadi developer sprint for this year started quite early for me, since I had to get up at 5:00 to pack and catch my plane from Graz to Düsseldorf. Read More

I originally planned to do that in time for the KDE PIM special feature which has been published as part of one of the recent commit digests, but I didn't find enough time to it then and almost forgot about it later. Read More

Since, at the time of writing, I have another six hours of train journey before me on my way back from Akademy 2008 I decided to spend my remaining battery power on writing a blog about the event. Read More

So some guy from Nokia named Ari Jaaksi was speaking at some conference and said something along the lines of open source developers needing to be "educated" about consumer restriction technologies like DRM. Read More

...that's what my friends all call me. Actually they don't but since I am a huge fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd and this blog entry is closely related to the previous one I am (ab-)using yet another of their song titles. Read More

Lynyrd Skynyrd rocks, but you already knew that. Will Stephenson rocks as well and you quite likely also already knew that. Free Bird is one the reasons why Lynyrd Skynyrd rocks and one of the reasons why Will Stephenson rocks is that he took over the gargantuan task of moving the Akonadi server to is KDE independent location in kdesupport. Read More

Other mentors have already blogged about their GSoC projects, so I am going to do the same for Akonadi. Basically Akonadi got three slots from KDE and one from OpenChange. Read More

Well, not yet. I am currently at Graz airport, about to begin a journey to Austin, Texas, where I will be attending the Linux Collaboration Summit. Special thanks go to the Linux Foundation for covering my travelling costs and KDE e.V. for the hotel, specifically Ian Monroe who took the burden of doing the hotel reservation. Read More

Based on reactions to my previous blog entry I'd like to add a bit of context regarding the GSoC idea of implementing a GLib/GObject based client library for Akonadi. Read More

Since the Akonadi related applications for GSoC so far have been mostly about interfacing with external PIM data storage systems, e.g. Google's web based apps, I'd like to a bit of advertising for two other things we'd really like to have somebody working on. Read More

Additionally to the migration path for PIM applications there are similar options for the actual data access facilities, i.e. the addressbook and calendar plugins traditionally used to access PIM data in local files, groupware servers and so on. Read More

As promised I am going to try to present the work I have been doing over the last couple of weeks in a less developer centric way. Bascially the idea is to have an intermediate step in moving from the traditional facilities for addressbook and calendar to the future ones based on Akonadi. This intermediate step should allow developers to migrate both applications and data acesss methods (e.g. groupware server access) one by one, so that new applications can already make use of all the possibilities of Akonadi while at the same time allow existing applications to adapt at their own pace. Read More

No, the title is not recycled from my previous blog entry but it is very closely related. Last time I wrote about Akonadi based KResource plugins, this time I am writing about KResource based Akonadi resources. Read More

I just moved the two Akonadi KResource "bridges", i.e. implementations of the KResource plugins for contacts and calendars based on Akonadi (KABC::Resource and KCal::ResourceCalendar respectively), to kdepim/kresources. Read More

I am sitting here in a Cafe on Münster Airport after an exciting weekend at the KDE PIM meeting in Osnabrück. Being a first-timer I was really looking forward to it and I wasn't disappointed. Although my travelling to the event turned out to be quite adventurous because my connection flight from Frankfurt to Münster got cancelled due to strong winds and the airline had to re-booked me on a train ride for the rest of the journey. Read More

Meanwhile I have switched the Cafe to one inside the security area and from Cappuchino to Schneider's Weiße :) One import think about KDE developer meetings is that they are not only about getting work done, but also about getting to know each other better. Read More

Great quote from Danimo's Chaos radio express interview when the topic Akonadi is discussed. Since I am one of the developers invited to this year's KDE PIM developer meeting in Osnabrück, I am currently trying to improve my knowledge of Akonadi. Read More

Sometimes, usually on weekends, I award myself the luxury of checking websites that might have interesting stuff to read. Yesterday one of these sites has been Dell's IdeaStorm portal which probably all of you know because of the Ubuntu/Dell stories. Read More

With all these blogs about how awful people's travelling experience has been from/to aKademy, I'd thought I blog a bit about mine. In short: my journey turned out better than expected. Read More

About two days ago I wrote about changes in the way browser plugins are ging to be handled. At that time, based on the information I gathered from two threads on kfm-devel (linked to from the other blog entry), I assumed that the new Adobe Flash player plugin would just use XEmbed for the visual part but still be an old style in-process plugin with all its difficulties. Read More

Or rather Flash news? One of Adobe's Flash player developers, Tinic Uro, today used his blog to tell us users about upcoming features. Among the list of changes we can read about a change regarding the Linux Flash plugin: The Linux plugin now uses the XEmbed protocol. This is work in progress. The downside is that konqueror and Opera do not support this right now, so the Flash plugin will not work until these vendors update their plugin support. Read More

People like clowns, they are funny! A clown figure is the image of a very clumsy person, sometimes even stupid. They wear oversized clothes, huge shoes and have ridiculous makeup. They do things way too stupid for normal people to even consider, their jobs is to be whereever there is a need to from someone to laugh about. Read More

Danimo and frinring already blogged about Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2007 and I can't resist doing it as well. I have been quite lucky at picking which talks to go to, especially the choice to attend Meike Reichle's talk about how to promote Free Software. She is an awesome speaker, totally in control of her audience's attention. Read More

After almost a year of I am working on the Qt3 D-Bus bindings again. The past week I have been fiercely working on getting them in shape for the requirement of the D-Bus based DAPI implementation on KDE3. Read More

As I predicted, the offer of game porting specialist Runesoft to do a Linux port of "Ankh" if at least 200 pre-orders could be achieved, has been met with sufficient demand on the side of Linux gamers. Read More

I'm sure every reader of this blog has at least once encountered the myth that Linux users, or more generally users of free software platforms, would not consider spending money on software. Read More

We had an IRC meeting about Portland's DAPI today and while most people seemed to have joined to discuss API related things, it more or less turned into a session to clarify positioning in relation with other projects cleaning up some misconceptions. Read More

Application which do not "belong" to any of the free desktop projects, i.e. which do not use their respective development platform, are usually lacking integration features. However, most of have options to configure helper applications for certain tasks, e.g. handling HTTP URLs, opening files of certain MIME types, etc. Read More

Bugs are bad, I think we all agree on this. One of the most evil kind of bugs are those that appear only during installation or installation related procedures. I wrote in an earlier blog that I have been helping the Debian-KDE packagers fix a bug. Unfortunately, due to a side effect (I hate side effects), a newly installed KDE would no longer find the KControl modules! The bugs does not appear when upgrading the packages since the old, wrong, directory is still there. So it took someone with a fresh installation to even discover the problem :( Read More

I have been quite sucessfull with my secondary development projects this week. The problem of the KDE packages in Debian has been fixed, thanks to the swift response of Fathi Boudra. Read More

Most development I do lately is not directly visible in KDE's source repository, but rather development for other projects connected to or interface with KDE. Since I am a Debian user, a very happy one :), I am following the debian-qt-kde mailinglist, to know about issues our Debian packagers might encounter. Sometimes this requires just adding some information to a bug report, sometimes it requires doing some research in bug tracking systems and code respositories and sometimes it requires coding. Read More

don't know when I'll have net access again :) So I am leaving Dublin and this years aKademy and I am so glad I attended. There were so many things to learn, so many people to meet and so much fun to have. Read More

There is an article over at linux.com which predicts that the Portland initiative will fail to reach its goal of "unifying the Linux desktop". Unfortunately the author somehow missed that "unifying the Linux desktop" is not the goal of Portland. Read More

While I have been a KDE developer for ages, this will be my first KDE conference and I am even one of the few lucky ones that had their talk proposal excepted :) Read More

If the title doesn't tell you anything, you'll be a lot wiser after reading this :) So I bought this new Vaio laptop.After checking that the really nice Vaio recovery tool does indeed leave any main operating system intact when restoring the pre-installed entertainment system, I was about to install the usual Debian/SID onto it. Read More

Yesterday I got my new laptop. I got it in the meanest possible way I could have imagined: two minutes before I had to leave for work sigh I barely had time to check the contents of the box and it didn't matter what kind of things I got to work on at the office, most of my thoughts were occupied with my precious. Read More

Once upon a time, I believed in fairy tales. Later, during my software engineering education, I came across a fairy tale called "capabilties detection". The tale's main content was that it would be possible for a software to query for available capabilities in some kind of backend. It told about a mythical protocol called X11, which would allow an even more mythical software called an X11 client, to query an almost unbelievably mythical thing called an X11 server for the availability of what the tale called extensions. Read More

... and Aaron blogs about an entry in Murray Cumming's blog, I feel entitled to reply using my own :) Murray fears that from his point of view suboptimal choice will negatively impact the whole free desktop market and while his wording could be intentionally unpleasant about KDE, I guess that he actually believes it. Read More

Beside being a developer I consider myself part of the KDE support team. I have been doing developer and end user support for a couple of years now, for the last two years almost exlusively (read no development). Read More

Lubos woke the dormant Portland project by creating a first implementation of a possible desktop adapter API. Having some experience due to my work on QDS I volunteered to put some work into it as well, especially KDE related backend code. Read More

...here. Yet. "Yet" because I don't have anything to commit as all involved code is littered with commented codeblocks of failed attemps. I am talking about a QObject adapter for the Qt3 D-BUS bindings, i.e. a wrapper class that makes slots of a given QObject instance callable through D-BUS. Generating D-BUS introspection data from the slot signature is next. Read More

The last few days saw a couple of threads on the dbus mailinglist about topics we KDE users got used to love in DCOP. For example how to start browsing for interfaces on applications connected to the bus, in D-BUS terminology called introspection, how to know which session busses are currently active for a user and how to work with users session busses from the system bus. Read More

Last week Cornelius blogged about having some D-BUS Fun using the Qt3 D-BUS bindings I had backported from Harald Fernengel's Qt4 bindings. Later that week an email conversation between Cornelius, Will Stephenson and myself resulted in the decision to put the bindings into KDE's SVN repository for shared development. They do now live here and eagerly await your contributions :) Read More

Today I reworked the QDS architecture so it doesn't require the application developer to delegate QApplication creation to QDS. The main reason for this requirement has been the desire to use a KDE service implementation, which needs a KApplication instance. Read More

Just reached a releaseable state in my efforts to backport the Qt4 D-DBUS bindings to Qt3. Basic usage works as expected, but I don't know yet if the marshalling code is sufficient for real world use as Qt4's QVariant is a lot better than one from Qt3, e.g. allowing user defined types. Read More

After spending some time on implementing a DBUS proxy object, i.e the service object's peer on the client side, I finally found the 100% CPU usage problem I mentioned in my last blog Read More

I started to have a deeper look into D-BUS as I will require an IPC facility if I want to provide a Qt4 API of QDS and still access KDE services. Read More

I've got myself a new toy: a Soekris net4801 Here is a nice gallery of images for it. In the more distant future it is supposed to take over the position of the firewall on my home network, but right now it is fair game for doing geek stuff ;) Read More

Since it is currently en vogue to ponder about the use of the KDE name, I have no other joice to join the fun ;) While the focus has been on the topic of applications, it also applies to developers: when can a developer call himself a KDE developer? Read More

Barry Hawkins blogs about his reasons why he thinks working on free Java implementations is a good thing. Being a long time JavaLobby subscriber I have read several pieces of pro and contra and enjoyed several flamewars in the articles' trackbacks or forums :) Read More

Ok, that was a lie, no cowbells ;) Getting tired of the primitive example application I had for QDS I deciced to create a better one, including a GUI one can take screenshots of :) Read More

Free software development is all about feedback. Feedback from other developers, non-coder contributors to the project, your packagers and your users. Sometimes you get very few feedback, which could either mean you are not reaching anyone or everyone is so satisfied with the projects current state. Read More

Over on Planet Classpath the people blog about the ongoing efforts and success with their Qt based AWT peers. Nice to see that the high quality of Qt's code on all its platforms get more widespread acknowledgement outside the KDE area. Read More

Well, not all of them. Those that create tons of structs for datatypes and even more functions to work with them. I hate them because they almost look like sane OOP APIs but are awfully to use compared to what real OOP languages would offer Read More

I have blogged about QDS, my Qt desktop integration library, almost exactly a year ago. Unfortunately I didn't have much time back then due to serving at the Red Cross (instead of serving in the military; Zivildienst for the German speakers). Read More

While preparing for my talk on KDE commandline scripting I discovered a couple of new commandline clients. So afterwards I continued to look for possibilities of accessing KDE from the commandline. After a while I thought it would be nice if one could access the KDE addressbook like konsolekalendar allows to access KOrganizer's data. Read More

Last week we had our local Linux event of the year called Grazer LinuxTage which is part of an Austrian wide series of events called Linuxwochen. This year I decided to do a talk about KDE and not about Qt programming as the years before. Read More

KDE, the integrative desktop environment. I can't remember who came up with this but it is so true. By providing interfaces (kdelibs/interfaces) KDE enables choice without negatively affecting KDE interoperability. Read More

Caution, rant ahead! I started working on an extension library for Qt applications which should enable them to use service or features offered by desktop APIs without creating link time dependencies on the respective desktop libs. http://www.sbox.tugraz.at/home/v/voyager/qds/index.html Read More

Collection of ideas on how to encourage more developers to develop with KDE. I have been doing developer support on mailinglists, newsgroups and web forums for about three years now. Support means helping developers solving development problems, especially for developers who are new to Linux, Qt or KDE. Read More

Letting Qt applications user aRts as their sound backend. Short introduction: currently most of my KDE related time is used to help newbie Qt and KDE developers. When one of the user of www.mrunix.de, a German Unix/Linux developer board, had a problem with Qt sound (didn't have have NAS installed), I decided to try implementing an aRts backend for Qt. Read More