Tstaerk 

As you may have followed, I compiled my KDE in a virtual machine, described an example how it goes and even compared compile times in a mini-benchmark. I stopped using a virtual machine later because VirtualBox only gives you one virtual CPU, QEmu as well, and VMware Server only two. The good thing is I found KVM virtualization and learned how to set it up. It is a bit tedious and you will have to create a network bridge after every reboot, but the result is astonishing - I could compile Qt 4.6 in 20 minutes instead of 80. Read More

This weekend we, the KDE PIM developers, met again in Osnabrück to develop and discuss the future of kmail, korganizer, kjots, akonadi and other software for Personal Information Management. There you can find all meeting minutes, time tables and results, here I want to outline what was most important to me. Read More

At work, I stumbled across a problem that I want to declare as universal. I got a mail with a title like christmas party invitation I deleted this mail without reading because I knew I would not go there. Fine so far. But later I found out this mail contained one sentence that actually was of interest to me: Read More

I recently had a crash that was hard to fix. Well, it IS hard to fix because I am still on it. It is again one of these "from the middle of nowhere" bugs KDE is so good in producing. Read More

Some weeks ago, someone posted a question on the KDE PIM mailing list "Which IDE do you use" or so. This reminded me of the ideals of my youth when I believed that the better your IDE - the more efficient your programming work - the more you get done in a given time for your software development. Read More

It is often said that many open-source-software is not enterprise-ready. But in order to be enterprise-ready, software must first be user-ready. I want to give you a feeling what I mean. Read More

Today I <a href=https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84510>fixed a bug that has been open for more than 4 years. This feels good. However, there is a reason why it took so long: kdialog contains a member winId() as you can see <a href=http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/KDE/kdepim/ktimetracker/idletimedetector.cpp?r1=900568&r2=900567&pathrev=900568>here, but this is not documented in our api documentation. KDE's api documentation has a list "This is the complete list of members for KDialog, including all inherited members." where winId() is missing although it is inherited from QT! I suspect the problem is that winId() is inherited from QT and not from KDE, however, this is something for you to be aware of: The API documentation might be incomplete. Read More

Writing good error messages for your programs is art. Your user gets an error message - he cannot ask his computer "how do you mean this?". Error messages are important because they can help you fix a problem. Some error messages are critical because the error prevents you from achieving anything. One example are the error message of startkde. When you have a problem with startkde, you have a real problem. If you cannot solve it, you cannot work (with KDE) at all. Sad enough, some error messages resemble to the infamous OpenOffice help that (while leaving out important context) explains things like File|Open : Opens a file Today I <a href=http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=888689>improved an error message in startkde. The error message was like the following: Cannot start kstartupconfig4. Check your installation. This error message had made me copy kstartupconfig4 everywhere: /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin and I was just about to copy it to /sbin when I started mistrusting this error message. Analyzing the code I found out kstartupconfig4 was found, called and executed, but delivered a return code of 3 (non-zero meaning error). So the error message missed point one for good error messages: be correct Second, its advice how to proceed was too generalized: "Check your installation" is not only what you do when kstartupconfig4 is delivering an error. You also do it if KDE consumes too much system load, when it eats your data or when your computer shows a black screen or starts mooing. So the error message misses point two for good error messages: be concise Read More

As I pointed out recently, I only develop KDE in a virtual machine. It does not only enable me to rollback changes that screwed up something, it also allows me to go back to a verbatim snapshot where I can e.g. be sure that there are no mysterious plugins installed to directories that I have not thought of. I also pointed out that compiling in a virtual machine is slower, because you cannot use more than 2 processor cores per virtual machine. No problem! Use coolo's icecream and build up a compile cluster as described on http://en.opensuse.org/Icecream. I have done it and at the moment my fans are roaring and compiling the KDE for my virtual machine. Read More

When I heard that Nokia was giving away N810 devices on aKademy, I wondered how long it would take till I saw the first code changes. So, code changes to support the ARM architecture or the use of KDE on a PDA. Today I saw three (and wrote two of them): Read More

Many of us know this: You are on KDE version "from yesterday" and suddenly, everything breaks. Maybe someone broke the kompile or it is just a bunch of bad code that went in before your checkout and prevents the window manager from starting. Read More

Since some years, I have searched for an elegant solution to generate call graphs out of C++ source code. Today I found it. It is doxygen. I have evaluated doxygen years ago, but I threw it away. The reason is that you have to know two things about doxygen: Read More

I got kdesupport build in a maemo (scratchbox) environment and I documented every step in my beloved wiki. It is the first list item here.

Many of us have the cool Nokia N810 that is an ARM system based on maemo. To compile software for it, you will normally use scratchbox. What a pitty scratchbox only runs on 32bit hardware. As a proud user of a 64bit desktop, I have to use a virtual machine for running scratchbox. Now the question is what is the better virtualization solution: VirtualBox or VMWare? Read More

Since some years I have the pleasure to maintain KArm, the friendly KDE timetracker. KArm allows users to find out how much time they spend on which task since longer than 10 years. For KDE 4, it was time for a big renovation. Read More

I have had so much struggle finding a decent html editor that I finally wrote one on my own: mozilla composer cannot handle the fish://-protocol openoffice dito quanta crashes when it sees me I finally started using kword, which cost me several months of fighting and finally even contributing code, but there are too many problems for using it where I work. OK, so I started khtmledit - the wysiwyg html editor that has everything you need (if it does not have anything - you don't need that ;) First, here is how it looks: Read More

Here's the first blog in my life. KDE PIM meetings are for hackers like a bottle of water in a desert. Finally time to hack, hack, hack and only sporadic meetings. And those meetings about development topics. This meeting took place from friday 2008-02-01 till 2008-02-03. This time I remembered to take vacation for the friday. At 10:00 am, I departed from Alzey and arrived shortly after 14:00 in Osnabrück at Intevation who hosted this meeting (thanks!). Some guys were already there. I finally got to know Thomas who had shown me <a href=http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Getting_Started/Set_up_KDE_4_for_development#KDevelop >how to use kdevelop for KDE 4. I used this day to get KDE compile on my notebook. We left the office at 1 am. krep On Saturday, I gave a presentation about my pet project, simplified debugging. I showed how you can increase your productivity by using a combination of add_trace and krep. My pain points are: Read More