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For the last few days, I have been busy implementing translation support for the KDE Commit-Digest. Both the website and the actual digest introduction are now able to be translated and displayed in other languages. Translating the digest introduction every week is a much bigger undertaking than a one-off translation of the website, and so only for the hardcore. Read More

So, it is that time of the week again... commit-digest time! Read the latest issue here This week, I have enhanced the commit-digest.org site quite a bit (though I am certainly not finished) - now there are actually links in the sidebar, so it is now a functional random strip of blue, and I have implemented the options page that I always wanted. This means that you can now modify how the digest looks in your browser, for example, if you don't like the italic quotes, change to regular. And if you want the sections to be a bit more defined, turn on "highlight headers". These are all features that have been requested, so hopefully at least Pino will be happy :) Read More

The KDE Commit-Digest, written by Derek Kite for many, many issues is back... only this time, i'm producing it :) So, here is the first issue of my new digest: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2006-04-09/ Read More

I have now extended a certain myscreen feature kde-wide... buzz ratings! Check the charts at http://myscreen.org/buzz As this is the first calculation, naturally the "change" indicator is flat - however, I will probably run the calculation once a day. Read More

So, by writing now I am keeping my last promise that my next entry would be about the project that I have been working on. However, maybe I should have written earlier than exactly 2 months later. Read More

Some of you may now have guessed the project that I hinted at in my last entry. Well, I am not going to talk about that this time (I will in my next entry, I promise!), other than to say that it is running fine after switching servers - sorry for using so much of your traffic allocation, cmk! :) Read More

Finally time to write a first entry. There have been so many things to do lately, which means that I won't get bored - though my head may explode :) Read More

Today I've read a post on planetkde asking the question: "why is one of the jewels of the Free Software promoting non Free Software pdf viewers?" For those who didn't read the post, the author was referring to the NY Times Firefox ad PDF file not being viewable on any free pdf viewer. Read More

I've just read this story about AT&T trying linux. The story tells us that they might deploy linux to 70,000 computers. Of course, this might be the case that AT&T is just trying to get some leverage against Microsoft to get a better deal, but I began imagining 70,000 KDE boxes runing. Read More

I've got a new job (actually I've had this job for about 4-5 months). In telling where I work now, I started to realise why I've been away from KDE development in the past two years. Read More

wow, i'm amazed, i just read http://wlinux.ods.org/GNOME-2.6/ the gnome guys are doing some awesome work! i'm really happy that they are actually catching up with the state we were in 2 years back! Read More

Once in a while, i need to write a formatted text document for printing, for example a letter, a job application or, like to day, a table for checking the boats in my local sailing club. Every time, I optimistically launch KWord, because it is fast and lightweight, and have the features I need -- would it just work... The table I had to write today a little bit complex, it has some rows with 3 columns, some with 2 and some with one. So I created a table with 3 columns and borders, and started to join the columns in the rows where I needed it, and here the problem starts. All the rows with joined columns looses the right border, and there seems to be NO way to get that back, which alone makes the document useless, I can't provide a nice looking document this way. After adding all the rows I wanted, saving screws up the formatting COMPLETELY. Why does kwork reformat the document in the event of saving?? Autosave will cause kword to reformat my document at what feels like random times while working, and I could find no way of turning autosave of, setting the interval to the maximal 60 mins also seemed to do nothing. So, I can change a few things and then save, after that i have to Read More

So Eugenia's proposal for a new "usable" widget style (what is dotNET, anyway, chopped liver?) was wrapped in an envelope today as a "KDE style challenge", whatever that's supposed to mean, by someone I happened to see on IRC. I then explained that, despite the fact that the snake menus she put on her mockup are nifty looking, they are in fact insanely difficult to code, but not impossible. Just ugly and scary. Read More

It's been a long long while since I came up with a blog entry here, mostly since I didn't do anything interesting for the public lately. KDE is still in a freeze, so I have been fixing a few bugs occasionally, nothing more. Read More

i'm having a coding frenzy at home at the moment while waiting for my adsl to be installed. amazing the amount of work you can get done when irc, mail and even sane tv listings are all unavailable. Read More

So, I've been rather quiet on the KDE front lately. I've been busy, though. As much as it might shock and dismay a lot of you, I've been playing around with GNOME. I've even immersed myself in it, seeing exactly how their desktop works and taking notes of things that I like and don't like. The main reason for this is that I was reading through a thread on the Nautilus mailing list entitled "We're going all spatial." Read More

I know, that I should study geography / history these days (and will, too), but instead of doing that I am again working on kmameleon... This week there has been some drastic changes in the (core) of the kmameleon proggy, so basically this is what is new: Read More

So, with revision of 1.25 to kdelibs/khtml/khtml_popupmenu.rc, Stephan Binner removed a function from the context menu in KHTML that I happen to use quite frequently. This commit was the one that took away the 'View document source' action from my right-click menu in Konqueror, and I can't begin to tell you how unhappy that makes me. Read More

So, I've spent the last 3 days porting the Redmond KWin decoration to the new kwin_iii style API in my spare time. In case anyone actually cares, here's how it broke down by the day. Read More

So much to code, so little time... I found an older .plan, and was reading through it. It's from roughly two months ago, and it has notes such as "Find all configuration pages that have a sucky UI, and make them suck less." Heh. Was I really that naive so recently? Read More

Well, I said originally that I wasn't going to release this, but the reactions have just been too funny so far to pass it up. It's not an official release, yet, of course - I still have to implement the rendering code for the sliders and tabbars and probably a few other widgets too. But the sneak preview is out... Read More

Long time no posts from me, I have been buried in exams work - but that is now over! A while ago I found a chatlog posted on the web where a few persons obviously close to the Jabber project (or even Jabber Inc.) were discussing ways of promoting Jabber. One of their thoughts was how about setting up a server for the KDE folks? Read More

I wanted to go to Kastle. I wanted to go really badly. Well, unfortunately it happens during the only week my girlfriend and I could have gone on vacation this year. Now she's busy with her diploma thesis and I could go to N7Y, but registration is closed. ARGH! I hope it will be possible to get some last-minute planning done. Read More

The bot seems to behave, so I welcome any testers. If you want to use it, subscribe to it at kdedevelopers@jabber.org. It will reply with a short welcome message and ask for authorization in turn.Use $help to get a small help text and one command per message. Your passwords are being encrypted, so you don't have to fear that I will collect them. :) Read More

I created a Jabber blog bot today which you can use to post diary entries to this blog via your favorite Jabber client. It's a PHP script and it actually seems to work, this message here has been posted using the bot. I'll try to leave it running overnight and if it behaves, I'll look for a server that will be able to run the script 24/7 so everybody can use it. Read More

Woohoo the site is back! Good time to announce Kopete 0.7 is out of the door, even though that's probably old news for most. Except for a few upgrade issues and an ICQ password problem, the majority of things seems to be stable. However, not a very long time has passed yet and I am putting this in relation to the previous releases. :) Read More

I get to go to n7y! HOORAY! Seriously... this has got to be one of the coolest things to ever happen to me. How many people think that the result of their after-school coding efforts are going to end up getting to go to a conference in the Czech Republic? Read More

What would you think about a Jogger interface for kdedevelopers.org? For those who don't know Jogger, it is a Jabber component that allows you to post diary entries via any Jabber client, such as Kopete for example. To see it in action, you can see one installation at http://jogger.jabber.org. Read More

I spent a few hours today fixing the last release issues for Jabber. Not everything went as expected since I missed the string freeze but at least a few things were ironed out. Looking forward to this Kopete release, I hope it will give us better publicity than the last releases which made us crash mostly crash known for crash crash instability. Read More

I am figuring, that KMameleon needs overhaul... Not only a coding one, but also it would be nice to get a new graphics set of icons. One of the first things is to create a nice icon for the application (think chameleon) Read More

I attended Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco a month ago. Coming from a Linux and KDE background, I was particularly interested in what Apple would say about open source. Read More

OK... So I have managed to install KDE on qt-copy these days... now going back to development... I am figuring, that xmame has some really weird and funky options, like -norotate isn't exactly the same as rotation switch disabled, and -nothrottle isn't the same as throttle switch disabled... Weird... Ok... So I have deactivated the -[no]command switches and now it should work better... Specially in the advanced mode... Read More

Hmm, I'm not sure how twisted this is, but I want to do something other than hack irc for a few days. At work everyone is on ICQ, so I run sim to talk to them. But I've never liked the way IM apps run, what was wrong with IRC?!? Read More

Finally! With a bit of hacking and borrowing from the new libxmpp code, the Kopete Jabber plugin is now able to properly encrypt messages and can thus talk with Psi and other Jabber clients in a secure way. Read More

What fun! What glory! I have a birthday today. So, work is interesting. I get to set up a PII 400 machine, for use as a server. FreeBSD 4.8 is the OS of choice (I just like FreeBSD on my servers, and I don't know why.) Read More

OK... So last night I browse around some CVS posts in the nonbeta, and only after 3 hours of being there and 10 minutes after finding & installing I find myself fixing the new module. Read More

I've been checking out libxmpp lately, the successor of libpsi. Actually I am supposed to be studying for exams, but well, you need to have a few interesting things to do once in a while. :) Read More

Finally fixed ksirc's handling of effects characters. For bold, underline and reverse it used to use ctrl-b, ctrl-u, ctrl-r. This followed the standard text irc clients. It causes problems though, so I changed it to bold underline and #reverse#. Problem though, I can't find anyone else who does reverse video. Does #reverse# make sense? Does it match with anything else out there. Read More

Jabber seems to be growing again lately. Yet, Kopete seems to have no real userbase in Jabberland. I always wonder why I don't get any real feedback. There are hardly any bug reports, hardly any wishlist entries. Compared to the other plugins like ICQ or MSN at least, although that might be an unfair comparison. Read More

so, i'm back, as people were moaning that i don't keep this up to date, in any case i need to get back in practice now that kdedevelopers.org has appeared, still waiting for my approval though, wonder whats taking them so long... Read More

Well notices now highlight the nick in their randomly picked colours. reved the version to 1.3.8 to allow for the per server prefs. That's it for ksirc today, it's too hot out. Read More

This seems to come up fairly frequently with people who talk to me about Kiwi and its goals and the seeming redundancy when compared with JuK. At the risk of possibly offending wheels (which is completely not my intention), I do have a few reasons to continue developing Kiwi, and these reasons are all valid to me. Kiwi is something that I like working on because it doesn't have the same design code-wise as JuK does. I like wheels, and I think he's a damned good coder, but I don't agree with all of his decisions about JuK's design and codebase.Kiwi isn't actually behind JuK when it comes to features. JuK has searching, and tagging. We have global keyboard shortcuts, passive popup notification, and a DCOP interface. (No idea if JuK has any of these features yet, but it didn't last time I checked.) Of course, personally, I think that we have a better infrastructure for future growth, but that might just be my pride talking.We've finally abstracted out our backend API so that adding new Source types (internet radio, portable MP3/Ogg player, audio CD, etc) is going to be a snap. wheels' aim for JuK is to make it a "media playing jukebox" which is a noble and admirable goal. But I want something as easy-to-use as iTunes, with extra care and attention paid to the UI and a clean design with optimizations where they're needed.I want usable, well-designed (API-wise and UI-wise) software that does exactly what I need, and JuK fails this, not because it's a bad program or because wheels is evil, but because JuK isn't my project and wheels isn't me.Now, those are my serious reasons for continuing development on Kiwi. There are, of course, a few silly and not-so-serious reasons for continuing development. We have a half dozen CD burning apps, why not a half a dozen music players?I like having a project of my own where I can't hurt anybody else or step on peoples' toes.Binary metadata caching is for weenies.When was the last time that you wanted cheese-covered french fries covered in bacon? Ok, it doesn't really have anything to do with Kiwi or JuK, but I'm hungry. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?Lists suck.So, there you have it. Just for the record, wheels and I did discuss the possibility of merging Kiwi and JuK, a Long Time Ago (TM) but I decided against it. I was excited about it at first, and I thought it would make a lot of sense, but after talking with my fellow Kiwi devels, I had to turn the opportunity down. The way I see it, JuK and Kiwi both have plenty of room to grow, and nobody loses, because we both suck less than Noatun. ;) Read More

Wow, what a great idea! I can only say thanks for such a site - I definitely hope it will start to be a good resource for any user seeking closer contact to the members of the KDE team. Read More

KSplash plugin loading scheme changes, and probably will change again before 3.2. Grid spacing on kdesktop needs to be made flexible. No Perl: Python or Ruby? Am I happy that I am the only one hacking on the new ksplash plugins! Probably going through a few more BIC changes and naming scheme changes before we see a final stable API. No time for that to happen before N7y as I am defending my doctoral dissertation on the 12th of next month. I wish I was going to N7y - no money, no time, no job yet. The other thing to do in the short term is to provide configurable grid spacing for kdesktop - quite a few bug reports about it. Unfortunately, the current icon layout algorithm, while nice, does not lend itself greatly to configurability. Let's see what comes of it. Also, based on an informal survey of people in my lab, there is no need for three alignment options on the RMB menu: horizontal, vertical, grid. Everyone prefers something, and uses only their preferred means. This means that we could move the options into the KControl module, and have just one Align item on the RMB menu. Now that I have given up on Perl (impossible to maintain code for any long period of time, see am_edit for an example of well-known mess), the question is: Python or Ruby? Or are there other languages out there that require consideration? Stuff I hope someone else will fix/create: ksmserver - saving multiple sessions kmail - crash on session exit qdockwindow - sane API designed for subclassing kmdi - working IDEAl mode khtml - pluggable modules to add support on demand for MathML, etc. KEmacs :-)

Trying to fix http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60522 isn't a problem in kSirc. It's a generic problem in KStringHandler::tagURLs. URL entries that are of the form http://url/~ or end in any none-word or none-number entry gets poorly highlighted. Read More

So, a quick primer for people who aren't familiar with me. I wrote and maintain the dotNET widget style. A lot of people have given me a bunch of different compliments on it, so I've gotten kind of a big head. dotNET is about to be renamed, although I'm not sure as to what it's going to be renamed to - my own preference at this point is heavily leaning towards calling it 'Bytecode' but we'll see if anybody comes up with something more clever or appropriate. Read More

Nothing. Savanna isn't saying anything right now. She's just marking her space in the cyber arena of the KDE Blogosphere. Maybe her silence will last, or maybe not. Only time will tell. Read More