Scott Wheeler 

So, somewhat miraculously, I've been doing a little KDE hacking again this week for the first time since, oh, 2006 or so (aside from TagLib, which recently moved to GitHub). Read More

I thought this might be interesting for some folks in the KDE world -- for work stuff we needed a fast implementation of Ruby's ActiveResource, so I wrote a Qt / C++ ActiveResource consumer. The performance relative to the default Rails backend is somewhat telling: Read More

Lukáš, who's taken over TagLib maintainership these days, has just released the latest bug fix release for TagLib, also posted in his blog: Changes from 1.6.1 are: Read Vorbis Comments from the first FLAC metadata block, if there are multipe ones. Fixed a memory leak in FileRef's OGA format detection. Fixed compilation with the Sun Studio compiler. Handle WM/TrackNumber attributes with DWORD content in WMA files. More strict check if something is a valid MP4 file. Correctly save MP4 int-pair atoms with flags set to 0. Fixed compilation of the test runner on Windows. Store ASF attributes larger than 64k in the metadata library object. Ignore trailing non-data atoms when parsing MP4 covr atoms. Don't upgrade ID3v2.2 frame TDA to TDRC. As a side-note, some of my buddies from RethinkDB have been looking hard for good C++ folks out in Silicon Valley doing a MySQL backend for solid state devices. If you're a systems-y C++ wonk in search of a job at a hacker-friendly company, they're good folks. If you're interested and we know each other drop me a line and I'll do a little intro show-and-dance. Read More

So, after far too long, TagLib 1.6 is out. I finally asked Lukáš Lalinský, who's been the largest TagLib contributor other than myself and veteran of the MusicBrainz project, to step in and take over maintainership as I've been off doing the whole interwebs startup thing for the last year and change and time is exceedingly scarce of late. Read More

I didn't get to be one of the cool-kids at Akademy this year, but it's still a pretty exciting week for me. I won't drone on about it too much, but since I mentioned here a while back that I'd just founded a new company I thought I'd drop in a link now that we're actually talking about what we're doing. Read More

There are a few scattered updates in the world-o-wheels of late. The biggest of which, as a number KDE folks are already aware is that I'll be leaving Native Instruments, where I've been for the last couple of years and starting my own company with a friend or two rather soon. I'll post a link once we're to the point of launching a public beta. It's not desktop software, and it's not a consulting service, but this will mean that my primary (professional) development platform will be Linux once again. Read More

TagLib 1.5 is out. As always, file any bug reports that you happen to run into in the bug tracker. As there are specifically a couple things that I intend to implement (wav / aiff support as well as support for ID3v2 tags in RIFF chunks) I expect a 1.5.1 (or 1.6) to be much faster in coming around this time. Read More

The TagLib 1.5 RC is up. There have been a huge number of changes since 1.4 (two years ago) and even a number of changes since last week's beta. Read More

So there's a lot of speculation floating around about the recent Nokia acquisition of Trolltech. There will be a lot more information to unfold in the coming months. The first thing I noticed was the price tag. Around €105 million. (I'm going to convert all Norwegian Kroner values to Euro since that's easier for me and most readers to think in.) That seemed low, based on some nebulous not-grounded-in-anything, notion of what I supposed Trolltech was worth, so I did a little digging. Read More

In the world of things completely unrelated to KDE... My life has been rather concentrated on music the last few months (including the various small-ish will-someday-be-released OSS things that I've been hacking on of late). One of the things that came up yesterday in a jam session was that based on the group's name, which contains a reference to Spanish, is that it would be fun to have a collection of samples for use in our set, with various voices in various languages saying: Read More

There's been quite a flurry in the blogosphere in the last couple of days over this and it's clear that a lot of people aren't really looking at this from the right angle. Read More

There's a long thread currently going on on core-devel about scripting within KDE. Here's the executive summary: Having a "blessed" KDE scripting language for writing complete KDE applications is a good thing and allowing applications written in that language in the main modules would be a step in the right direction A tangent to the main thread is adding scriptability to KDE applications For the first sort of scripting, there's something of a concensus that Python or Ruby are the primary candidate languages There hasn't been much language flaming between Ruby and Python; it seems most folks agree that they're both acceptable OO scripting languages, though there have been plugs a bit for one language or the other There's some debate over what appropriate languages are for the latter; KJS (JavaScript) is currently advocated, but there's some debate over the merits of JavaScript To qualify the first comment, even if your language of choice isn't the one taken, there's nothing lost. Currently all scripting languages are second class citizens in the KDE world. Promoting one to first-class status doesn't demote the others significantly. An "everybody wins, use what you want" solution really is just a way of rephrasing the current situation. Read More

Effective as of the upcoming e.V. meeting, after four years of active membership, I've decided to make my membership passive (for those not familiar with the terminology, that's where you're still technically a member, but aren't on the list and don't have voting rights). Read More

I found Celeste's recent post interesting as it took to breaking out the different tasks that are currently lumped under the menu. As I read it, I found myself stepping a bit further back and rephrasing the tasks as questions. Here's they are, in blather-rific format, in hopes that they may serve as a bit of food for thought: Read More

Ok, here's a little tip -- turn off your RSS feed before upgrading your blog software. Really. Please. For the sake of all things good and holy. It just happens to be Anders' feed today, but it seems like about every 2-3 days somebody decideds to upgrade their blog software, thus flooding the planet with everything that they've ever written. Read More

Since I'm on a blogging kick, here we go again: There's a hard balance in the Open Source world in answering "I'm interested in...but where do I start?" mails. I think one thing that invariably people that write them don't realize is that you're doing really good if 10% of those turn into contributors. 10% actually sounds way too high. 2% is probably closer. Actually, thinking about it, I've probably written a few hundred of those and I can only think of maybe 3-4 that translated to patches coming in. Read More

Reposted from the Dot: Didn't knew about that. On the other hand its still the only information that looks relevant. The official kde.org site does not give any hint on the status of neither Kat, nor Tenor; the latest information I found is dated 2005. SVN activity is at a low level (latest update 4 month ago). Read More

I've got some code around that I'm thinking about shuffling a bit and putting out in a library. But I can't find the right license. I basically want to say, "Try to give back any changes that you make in a sufficiently demonstable way." (i.e. patch to the publicly archived project list with a template of information that needs to be there) Read More

One of the hardest things about being a framework developer is getting things right. There are a lot of tough choices you face when you're looking at an open set of applications. Getting things adequate is often fairly easy, but getting them right is a lot more conceptual work. As a framework developer you're often stuck with your choices for a lot longer. Three related examples: Read More

I hate moving. I've lost the grace with which I was able to execute such during my early 20s. Oh, I'm looking forward to being in Berlin, but fear and loathing is sinking in as I look at the mess that is my apartment and realize that it has to be fully packed, moved out of and clean in something like 39 hours. I suppose I can see where my true loves are in the pile of instruments (9 now), hundreds of CDs and records, assorted pro-audio equipment and naturally a pile of computer gear. And books. Lots of books. Read More

OfB: Scott, perhaps summarizing what you've said before, can you give us a roadmap for KDE multimedia? Where is KDE Multimedia heading? Where is the place of KDE Multimedia in the future of KDE? Scott: Well, I suppose roadmap is probably a pretty good analogy -- since there are a lot of ways to get there. Right now those of us in that are more active in KDE multimedia have tried to lay out a set of requirements for multimedia frameworks; they need to support audio and video decoding, routing that to the appropriate places (sound card, sound server, etc.) and probably some basic recording features. Then we've tried to evaluate what's available to us and how we can make use of the things that are available to best support KDE as a desktop. We learned a lot from aRts, so we're trying to make sure that the options that we're considering will be viable long term; but also we don't want to be explicitly tied to a single framework -- at least not yet. So what some of us started on at aKademy was a framework for abstracting away the basic features -- playing stuff, mostly -- of the media frameworks and making that pluggable. We're pretty sure that we'll have a few implementations around and we'll be able to make a decision on what should be the default at a later time. Read More

After seeing Seele's list of books I decided that I liked the idea. There's something in my personality that likes collecting physical media -- books, CDs, records. It's obvious when I move and I have a tiny amount of furniture, a box of clothes, a few things from the kitchen and then like 10 boxes of books and a pile of pro-audio gear. Read More

Insomnia has to be one of the worst things in the universe. It seems that I've been due for my annual fit of such. Life has been rather stressful lately and while I usually deal well with stress, my body seems to rebel after a certain threshold. I've slept about 3 hours total in the last two nights. Read More

I decided to change the post title when I looked at the Planet and saw that Matthias's post about the Berlin office is right up there at the top. So, my news for the day, is...wait for it...yep, I'm moving to Berlin. And no, not to work for Trolltech -- though Rich joked that I seem to be the only KDE person switching jobs and not going there. I'll be leaving the SAP LinuxLab, after almost four years, at the end of June to work for a pro-audio software company in Berlin. In a meeting today I announced the news to the rest of the LinuxLab (previously only my manager had known) so I can finally mention it publicly, though I made the decision a few months back. Read More

Some amusing advertising has come to my attention this week. The first instance of such was all kinds of bad, and provided by the catering company that's used at my office. Now, bad advertising and ill-conceived food scheme are nothing new for them, but they hit a new low this week -- the "Volksburger". I'm not one of those with a fancy cell phone that has a built in camera, so I've reproduced the sign with a bit of quick gimping for your viewing pleasure. Read More

I still haven't managed to settle into a PPC distro that I like for my iBook. I just tried the latest OpenSUSE RC and YaST segfaulted before the installer really got anywhere. This is not dissimilar from my experiences the last time I tried to install it. (Though this time around at least it authoritatively crashed during the install with no hope of recovery -- unlike a few months back when I tried it and it gave cryptic and conflicting error messages and still wouldn't install.) Read More

So, in typical blog-o-riffic fashion, since I seem to be back in the world of the blogging, here I go with a set of largely unrelated KDE/geek-ish notes: Have a HDD about to die. 200 GB. Mostly media. Doing a bad cluster scan on it took about 18 hours. At then end what did I know? That the files that I already couldn't read are corrupted. Woohoo. I've taken three days off just to relax, watch a few movies, do a bit of coding. First time I've used vacation days for such in a long time. Another thing that I haven't done in a while -- just picked something annoying me and fixed it. I've hated it that every time I go to empty the trash on my desktop that the right mouse menu takes like half a second to come up, so I implemented menu caching and preloading. Seems to work well; we'll see if I can get it into the (frozen) 3.5 branch. The kde-usability list seems to be on the mend. There's been a concerted effort in the last couple of weeks to try to give the list a bit of direction (and less of a comment box / peanut gallery) and it seems to be working a little. Let's hope for the best. I've written up some guidelines and run them by the usability folks, and those will probably go live in the next couple of days. I've moved the whiteboard back into the livingroom. Yes, I own a 90 cm x 120 cm whiteboard. And it's now in my living room again. I've been coding on a few prototype sorts of things that will probably at some point find their way into KDE and sometimes you just need space for sketching and I'm definitely not a UML man. During the time off I watched a few films. Crash was disappointing; it helped to once again invalidate the Oscars in my view. It's a collection of semi-contrived racial memes with a conflict, transposition, redemption, rinse, repeat cycle to it. Afterwards I watched Bulworth again for the first time in years; much better commentary on race and politics in the US and still one of my favorite films. Jackie Brown disappointing too, but mostly because I'd seen all of Tarantino's other films. This concludes the test of the emergency blather system. Had this been an actual emergency, well, you hopefully wouldn't be reading my blog. ;-) Read More

I want to have an iterator with an encapsulated "next" function. These iterators will be returned from a class that knows how to advance over the data structure, but that should be completely hidden from the users of the iterator. Read More

This weekend I've done a bit more playing around with InterTag, a small application I mentioned recently. The goal is to provide something of a demo app for some of the Qt 4 Interview related stuff and as a bonus come up with some classes that can become central to JuK in KDE 4. I've now got alternating background colors, a status bar and a very small file menu ("Open" and "Quit"). Read More

A year and a half ago I first tried out Interview and noted my thoughts on it. In the last few days I've revisited it and have to say that the API is still pretty quirky. Read More

Pretty Things One of my coworkers (Thorsten -- also does some work on KArm) saw my background today and suggested that I should put some of those that I use (which are generally from my own photos) up online. I've since obliged him. The thumbnails from a couple of my favorites are below: Read More

Well, at least the moment Mark has been waiting for. And Ian. TagLib 1.4 is out. Try to refrain from foaming at the mouth. I know there's little more exciting than a meta-data library to really get your blood pumping on a slow Wednesday afternoon. Read More

So, I decided to join in the fun today, after much of the hard work has already been done. In a few minutes I ported KSig over to KDE 4. It's not a real port in the sense of it was just screwing around enough with it to make it compile -- Qt 3-isms still abound, but I thought I'd play with a nice-small-toy-ish app to start off before jumping in full swing. I'll probably continue and clean out all of the Qt 3-ness there for practice. Read More

Tomorrow a small batch of us will congregate in northwest Germany for the second Appeal meeting. There's been quite a buzz around the subproject since the first meeting at Easter this year. Most folks know that it's an intentionally small focus group for usability and visual design and a small number of new technologies in KDE (mostly those that are applicable to usability and visual design) and well, that's the gist of things. For me the most interesting part is having a group where the contributors from those previously mostly divergent efforts are put together and are working as a team. I summed up some of those thoughts (though not directly connected to Appeal) in a previous entry. Read More

Living rooms are overrated. My next apartment is so going to have a studio / computer / theater room instead. My living room gets little use other than having hosted about half a dozen KDE folks for various lengths of time. But my bedroom is getting overcrowded. Read More

Those who have been subject to my rants on this topic before are no doubt familiar with my views, but as they've mostly been on IRC and not particularly structured, and there's been some prompting in the KDE community in the last couple of days, so here goes. The "sexualization" of women in our community really has to stop. I really get sick of seeing every time a female contributor comes around, or everytime there's an article on the Dot that refers to our female contributors that it's just a matter of time before some jackass decides that it's the right forum to ask if they're single or make other comments that are just there because they're female. Contributors are important Contributors are important. We need them. We don't need male contributors or female contributors, we need contributors period. Despite their deficit in numbers, some of the most important members of our community are female. And who cares what gender they are, really? They're important contributors, and we as a community need to insure that we're not treating one segment of our community differently just based on their gender. The KDE social landscape In a normalized social environment -- one that's fairly well mixed between males and females -- this isn't much of an issue. In such an environment flirting and such things are a fairly normal, such is afterall our nature. We are sexual beings. However there are a few ways that KDE diverges from this. First, the majority of people in the KDE community are male. This in and of itself is not a problem. Some of the thought on the social foundations of engineering and sciences being largely male driven in western society is in fact interesting, but out of scope for the moment. However, this is coupled with a significant subset of our community being less than great with their social skills. Specifically, a lot of the members of our community simply haven't really interacted all that much in usual social settings with members of the opposite sex and quite frankly haven't got a clue how to go about such. The result of this tends to be anywhere from overt sexual objectification to accidental inappropriateness. At some point we may see things start to level out -- see, that's the interesting bit. If we aren't asses about this stuff, and we treat contributors more or less equally independant of gender, that will actually help things get closer to a balance with time and then we don't have to actively compensate for our present social dispositions. It's all fun and games until somebody loses a contributor And to be clear, while some of the lighter bits of this may seem amusing to some of folks the first go around -- like, I mean, being told you're cute in the right context isn't the worst thing in the world -- it does get old, mostly because of the baggage that comes with it. The problem is that often along with that comes an objectification that obscures what the person is actually part of the community for. Sure, having people think you're cute might be fun, but not if it's getting in the way of being taken seriously (or too seriously as can sometimes be the case) when trying to actually do something important. And I have known people who have actually left the community over this. Let's be pragmatic For those male members of our community that feel the need to try to pick up women via the Dot, well, I hate to break it to you but statistics are not on your side. Here's a little secret -- there are women all around. Many of them are even single. And if you can come up with something a little more subtle than saying as if they weren't there, "She's cute. Is she single?" they'll actually talk to you. No, really. This happens all the time. I've devised a step-by-step plan that may help some of you and I presume is easier to implement than Theobroma's scheming: Read More

Uhm, yeah, random notes on my online life as of right now: Matthias Kretz and I had our KDE Multimedia Roadmap talk accepted for LinuxTag. He came over a yesterday and we spent some time today hashing out the outline for our paper and deciding who would write what. I've got 801 Tenor related things that I'm in the middle of, but the basic structures are pretty close to working properly. I really need to get around to doing a TagLib 1.4 release with the standard run of bug fixes beforehand. Michael (Pyne) seems to be back. Coolness. ;-) Like Boudewijn I've been messing around with painting lately. I'm much worse than him. It reminds me of when my college friend Ruth would come over and dye her hair in our bathroom. The whole bathroom was splashed with red crap, but her hair always came out exactly the same color as it was before she started. My painting is like that -- I've got a mess of champs, but my paintings are, well, just saying bad is kind. At any rate, it's fun getting a feel for the brushes, blending colors and whatnot. In other artistic endeavors I've taken to recording some of my improvisations on bass so that I can prove when I'm old that I once was actually good at the thing. I've decided to call them Memes for Bass and have been throwing them here. Seeing usability talked about so much on the Planet lately makes me happy. I'm in serious need of KExtendedDay lately. That will be all for now. Read More

I'm too lazy to register to post comments, so I'll just go through Derek's post more or less point by point. This isn't tenor, I haven't looked at the code. Search and pattern matching is a fascinating intellectual exercise, and here is the product of my feeble ruminations. Read More

Today KDE's culture is one of our most important assets. It's also one of our worst enemies. KDE's culture has been ideal to bring us to where we are today. More or less, our goal for years has been to produce a desktop -- something that can actually be called a modern desktop. Read More

Yes, that's right folks, it's the Ministry of Silly Hats. A privileged few of you have been subjected to my gests on the acquiring of an appropriate sombrero de Tejas and well, guess what Santa Claus, err, mom, brought me this year? Read More

It seems that German bus drivers don't celebrate American Thanksgiving. Funny. Somedays I love a nice, well funded public transportation system. Somedays, like say, today, it makes me want to break things. Read More

Let it die. Please. Every time you post another link to that on Planet KDE god kills a kitten.

So, with some of the new stuff for displaying cover art, I was inspired to hack out a "now playing" bar. I suppose a picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes: Read More

"Howdy" isn't a question. This point seems to have confused a number of my European friends. Sure, it sounds like -- and is probably derived from -- "How do you do?" but it's a simple greeting and is used like the variations on "good day" in various languages / dialects (g'day, bonjour, buenos dias, dobry den, moin, guten Tag, etc.) If you respond with "fine" this will cause nothing but confusion. Instead you can reply with the same or another greeting. Read More

...today was a bit saddening; failing all of the hooplah of the last election, which doesn't seem likely at this point, it seems that we're looking at 4 more years of Bush and likely 4 more years of apologizing for my country. Time to get an hour or so of rest and then drag myself into work. Read More

Since I've been doing fairly well at churning out flame-o-rific blog entries lately, I see no reason to deviate from this fine pattern, so here we go again. I should start with a quote from one of my favorite composers that I think is right on: Read More

I swear, if I hear this or "Linux is about choice" or "Open Source / Free Software is about choice" or "My life sized Richard Stallman blowup doll is about choice" one more time, somebody's gonna get an ass kicking. People, let's step back and look at the absurdity of this statement. Read More

Since I seem to have sparked a bit of a debate on Planet KDE, let's see if I can bring a little clarity to things. Let's play a little game. Let's call it "the abstraction game". In this game we'll have words and thoughts and these words and thoughts need not be representative of what actually exists in the real world. Read More

So, as I'm sure a handful of folks have noticed I'm back from Chile now. Vacation was good; a little too good honestly -- I'm having trouble readjusting to normal life. While I was there I met up with Duncan (of Kopete fame) several times who it looks like we'll have joining us in the veritable land-o-KDE (err, Germany) in the next relatively short while. Between Spanish classes, drinking Pisco and general ignoring of technology when possible I did end up doing a talk similar to my talk from aKademy at one of the universities there. Things were good -- I didn't even look at code for three weeks, which was the longest stint of such in a few years. My Spanish is back to being almost at a usable level again; and unfortunately I seem to be mixing it into my German at the moment, which doesn't really work at all. Also had a lot of fun just socializing with non-geeks for a while. I've always kind of been a softie for the social sciences, so this was a good chance to dust off a few of my rants. Oh, and sorry Roberto -- I really planned on making it to Buenos Aires, but didn't get much further than Mendoza . At some point I shall return though. When I had finished budgeting all of my time I realized that going to Buenos Aires for just three days would be a little silly, so it's been postponed for my next trip to that part of the world. Strangely just as I'm starting to get back into things from Chile I'm already having to organize things to go to Linux Bangalore, which I submitted my talk for yesterday. I actually really need to head to the US embassy (in Frankfurt) to get my passport extended (I'm out of visa pages -- 14 countries so far this year) and get my visa organized in the next few days. As it turns out one of my old college roommates is now studying in Bangalore, so it'll be fun meeting up with him there. Blah, this is rather scatterbrained with few real details on anything, but at any rate -- aside from bumming around and yacking about KDE I'm also back to doing a few things: Read More

Ok, so as has been mentioned a handful of times, I'm headed to Chile for a while. I'm looking forward to it and my talk there (summary is slightly out of date, the talk won't be identical to my aKademy talk). See everyone in October! Read More

So, I suppose I should chime in with an aKademy post too. I did two presentations there -- the latter with Christian from GStreamer / Fluendo. Search / Metadata talk Read More

Ok, so Qt 4's listview / table / iconview / listbox replacement is called "Interview" collectively. I started playing around with it last weekend and well, there's some good and some bad. The good is that at least from an initial take on things the performance seems much better. This could just be the double buffering tricking me and making it look smooth since I haven't actually done any really intensive tests on it, but it certainly feels more responsive. Read More

Ok, as usual it's been a while, but I've had a reasonably productive last couple of weeks -- I've been hacking on quite a few things and generally doing a good job of overextending myself as usual. ;-) Here's a run down of the last couple of weeks: Read More

JuK Well, there are a number of new recent things in the JuK world. A couple weeks ago I finished a major rewrite of a lot of the internal components that's made a lot of things easier, plus it makes working with the code a lot more sane. I completely refactored some of the older classes, moved more towards some stripped down interfaces for use in internal APIs and other goodness. Read More

Ok, I got tired of the old file-name based background image selection, so I hacked up something to use the (first line of) comment in the JPEG meta data. [image:477] Read More

So the JuK GUI hasn't exactly been stunning historically. There have been a few times that there have been plans to make it nicer, but they've never amounted to much. Well, I finally decided to try my own hand at it and had a little fun with Sodipodi. I think it's a pretty big improvement and if all goes well I'll have it checked in soon. [image:454] Read More

So, the week or two I've had a little fun hacking up a Icecream Monitor mode that's more like the Teambuilder monitor. [image:438] Teambuilder was always cool conceptually, but in practice never really worked all that well for me. Icecream actually works but I wasn't terribly fond of the monitor a few weeks back. The only two options were the listview mode -- which just listed the jobs as they happened without any nice visual indicators -- and the Gantt View mode, which takes about 50% of my CPU just for painting. So, the above is what I've gradually hacked up. Read More

...Hotel Wheeler style [image:435] Ok, so that's not a birthday candle and that's not a birthday cake, but jalepeño / onion pizza is much geekier anyway. So here's happy 32. :-) Read More

Apparently including the number of bugfixes. :-) Matt and I -- being the two resident (and fairly active) Texans in the KDE project had a bit of fun going back and forth on the top spot for bug fixes this last weekend. He's currently ahead by two, but more of mine were from actual commits, so I think those should count double. Read More

Ok, it's been a really long time, so this is just a list of random junk (both OSS, CS and less geeky stuff): TagLib - I'll probably be doing a new release soon. There have been a couple of new features, so I'm debating between the version number 1.1 and 1.0.1. I've been generally very happy with the reception that TagLib has gotten -- I get quite a few mails from developers thanking them for freeing them from id3lib. Read More

Haven't said much in a while -- mostly because things have been really busy for me lately. But today something really got my attention and merited some thought. In the last couple of days Ettore Perazzoli a GNOME / Evolution / Ximian hacker type of guy died; it was one of those moments for me where reading about it all of the desktop flame wars seemed to pass into irrelevance. Read More

...and Debian for shipping it. Just dealt with another user having problems -- folks friends don't let friends use unstable Debian compilers. Why does it seem that every distro seems to have to take their shot at shipping an unstable compiler? (At least SuSE's has worked reasonably well for me.) Read More

JuK just got a couple of pretty nifty features in the last week or so. The implementations had a number of related issues to it made sense to solve them in tandem. This first of these is a history playlist which, when turned on, keeps a log of all of the things that you've played and the times that you played them. It's off by default, but you can turn it on via the view menu. The next big thing is that I finally finished up the code for search playlists. Basically this rolls together an advanced search with some vfolder-like functionality. You create a search, in a dialog not unlike KMail's, that creates a new search playlist. This playlist is automagically updated when your collection changes. Here's a screenie with some of the new goods: [image:157] Here you can see a search playlist that finds everything from the Afro Cuban All Stars and Buena Vista Social Club. Since these are actually the same group of folks the union makes sense, but it's one that's difficult to pick out in something like the tree view (though you could select both groups at once to see a dynamic playlist composed of the two). Notice that the search dialog continues to work; here I'm filtering for the year 1997. Also show here is the history playlist item and the new tree view. The other thing that I've hacked out in the last week or so were some pretty hefty optimizations for those with large collections. I created a number of dummy files to boost my collection to up around 12,000 items and KCacheGrind and I fixed up some of the algorithms that should make using JuK with large collections -- say over 10000 files -- much nicer. I was frightened to notice that at the beginning of profiling start up time with 12,000 items was near a minute and a half. I had never tested with this many items so I was rather surprised. I'm now quite happy to say that even with 12,000 items start up time is in the range of 5 seconds. I've also had a number of folks still using the 1.1 release ask what's been going on for the last several months. So, while this is certainly incomplete, here's a rough run down of the major features that have been implemented: Read More

So I'm excited; JuK is down to zero open bug reports. I think this is the first time that this has been true since about 2 days after it went into CVS. Read More

Ugh, another bugfix rejected. This one affects at least KAlarm, JuK, KGPG, KGet and Kopete. Bug was acknowledged; patch acknowledged; won't fix before 3.3 (probably more than a year and no help for KDE 3.2). Read More

Well, I'm looking for the "stuff that nobody cares about" category and not finding it, so "development" shall be the lucky winner in this contest. So, stuff that I'm up to lately: Read More