Mirko 

The first quarter of 2001 was quite a ride. Especially, there was a lot of Free Software stuff going on, not all of it was KDE-related. It included legal matters, Free Software politics, marketing, conference preparation and other activities. In the great tradition of quarterly updates that I am starting today, allow me to entertain you with what happened... Read More

KDE and Gnome together again - the Desktop Summit this year will take place in Berlin, Germany, from August 6 to 12, 2011. It will be one of the biggest and most interesting Free Software conferences in 2011, and Berlin is also always worth a visit. You have seen the announcement, and the web site at http://desktopsummit.org, but you might be asking yourself how you can register, where to submit your talk, and how you can help with the preparations. Read on. Read More

Heated discussions are going on in the KDE community in the aftermath of the announcement of Nokia's platform strategy change. Rationality often goes out of the window when people feel such a change goes against their personal values or beliefs. In the past days, I worked on an analysis of the impact of the changes on KDAB, Qt and the Free Software communities we work with, especially KDE. KDAB is rooted deeply in the KDE community, and many of our developers work with Qt and KDE for years now. We are sharing the same worries and hopes, so the results may be interesting for others as well. This post is about Qt, KDE, Free Software, politics, devices, markets, strategies - it does not get much better than that. Read on. Read More

This Sunday, I gave a presentation at UbuCon 2009, the German Ubuntu Developers and Users conference, held at the wonderful historic town of Göttingen, in northern Germany. The conference covers a variety of distribution development topics, with about 250 participants, and a 5-track presentation schedule (!). The talk I submitted was about a topic that fascinates me a lot lately - the convergence of Free Software desktop technologies under the hood, which makes Qt developers get in touch with GTK based technologies more and more, and vice versa, and about our experience at KDAB with developing such technologies. It was called "Qt for GTK Developers", purposefully slightly on the provocative side, with a smirk. After all, I am used to working in areas with unusual risk conditions, so why the heck not? Also, this comes not even close to the stress levels created by parenting. The talk was about how Qt and GTK are both used for developing base desktop services, which toolkit dominates in what areas, and what our guesses are on what the future brings. The central part was an overview of Qt technologies and practises, presented in contrast to GTK. The talk consisted of four sections dubbed "Everything was better in the old days", "Everyone does what he wants", "Qt is not what it used to be", and "This is as good as it gets". There were quite a few good laughs between the audience and me. Read on for more details. Read More

KDE is moving from X11 only to be a good citizen on Windows and Mac Os X. For those who like to code on Mac Os X, here's a bit of good news for you: icecream in KDE trunk now supports Mac Os X machines as compile servers. This means that compile jobs can be distributed between Mac Os X machines with the same Xcode version. And if somebody goes the extra mile to make a Linux-Mac cross compiler, even between Linux and Mac Os X nodes. Read More

At last year's Akademy, I had the chance to ask Bill Hoffman, one of the key figures behind CMake, a couple of questions about it. One of them was the availability of the full CMake documentation, which seemed to only in print. It turned out that this is not the case: CMake is well-documented and easy to learn. Read on for more. Read More

This weeks c't magazine furnishes an article on ThreadWeaver programming as part of their long-going series on articles on concurrent programming. An interesting feature of the article is that is describes ThreadWeaver as a component of the upcoming KDE 4 platform. Read More

The next step release of ThreadWeaver has been tagged. Say hi to a couple of new features: Queue policies can be used to adapt the queueing behaviour of jobs. Resource restrictions (a kind of queue policy) can be used to limit the number of jobs of a certain group started at the same time. Job queueing priorities are there to control the order of execution. Jobs can now return whether they are successful. The unit tests have been widely extended. The API polished. The interfaces pimpled. MacOs is now a supported platform. That should be enough for a step release, right? Read More

Only recently, thanks to KDAB, I got my hands on one of the brandnew MacBooks running MacOs X on the Intel dual-core CPUs. One of the main reasons to get it was to measure the effect the two cores have on ThreadWeaver's tests and examples. And what do you know - besides a little makefile fix and some adaptions to different dynamic library path setups, all of it runs fine - and amazingly fast. Exact measurements will follow lateron, but so far the results are very promising. Read More

This morning, I went to Tegel Airport by bus. On one hand, this is becoming a routine fast. On the other, it is always enjoyable, because I love the city in the early morning light. The bus (TXL) goes past the Reichstag building and the brand-new Hauptbahnhof (central station). What struck me is the new, open culture when it comes to integrating the government buildings into the city never, a fact that never appeared to me earlier. When I first came to Washington DC, I was amazed at how the Washingtonians played baseball and flew kites right in front of the capitol. I admired the Americans for their openess. Today, there are bars and restaurants at the river Spree located right within sight of the big wigs. How is this for a change in political culture? And yes, you can have a beer outside in the sun and enjoy the view (this is Germany, remember, no brown bags required). Read More

For those who are not familiar with it: ThreadWeaver is like a multi-threaded make tool for application developers. It provides means to chop operations into jobs and declare the way they depend on each other. When started, the jobs will be executed by a pool of threads, which will automagically try to find the most efficient order of execution. With the lately released version 0.5, it now has job collections, job sequences, and qtestlib based unit tests. Read More