Zack Rusin 

I decided to move my blog and it's now at http://zrusin.blogspot.com/

V for Vendetta is so good. Aaron and I went to see it yesterday. On the way there we went to a really great (and cheap) vegan Chinese place and stopped by an arcade (remember those?). Coming back we got asked for money under a bridge. The irony of having people ask for money from two trolls under a bridge runs deep. Read More

Oh, sure, normally when you go to visit your friends they take you down to see the city they live in, hang out with their friends and so on. It's no different when I come to see aseigo, but we do all that while protesting. We went on a protest against the seal hunt today. P-man came with us carrying a plush seal toy. I think that image will define "cute" for me from now on (and being a member of the "cute 4" I know cute when I see it). In general it went very well which is just great. This trip has so far been pretty amazing. I found out that I'm coming to Calgary last Friday and had 2 days to prepare. Then I found out that I'm speaking at the local LUG about computer graphics, which by the way was great. I got free Snapples and Kinder Buenos out of it which is really all I want from life. Working laptop, Snapple ice-tea, some candy, skateboard, protest for a good cause from time to time and I'm one content dude. Missing out on the first of those right about now but a man can't have everything. Read More

I'm finishing my leave of absence and going back to work. Yes, doing what I wanted was great, but the pay was miserable. So I'll be going back to Trolltech. It looks like Trolltech will pay me to go to Calgary and work on Plasma with Aaron for a bit, which is just great. Plus apparently the love of my life is in Calgary. I know what you're thinking "Zack, but they have Snapple ice-tea everywhere", yes, but not Kinder Bueno's. You don't know love unless you've tried Snapple's lemon ice-tea with a kinder bueno. Let me just point out that our relationship is purely platonic. Read More

I'm in Santa Clara for the XDevConf. Flying from cold and rainy Philly to sunny Santa Clara is quite a change. I wish I brought my skateboard. I couldn't get WIFI working in the hotel which was a little disappointing and I forgot to bring an ethernet cable. I went down to the reception and noticed that they charge $5 for renting a cable. I decided that I need to get something good to drink to forget that I'm about to pay $5 for renting something that I could buy for about $1. There's a neat juice store across the street so I went there. I started a conversation about the naming scheme they had for the juices (which was just sad) with the girl working behind the counter and I got my juice for free ("berry blitz with immunity boost" was the name). Equipped with that I went back to the hotel where I started talking to the girl behind the counter and got the ethernet cable for free. Can't complain. Next time I'll be aiming for not having to pay for the hotel ;) Read More

Lets talk SWF. A lot of people seem to be mentioning Gnash today. Some seem to think it's a giant step for FSF. I think it's really funny. It's really funny (or sad - it depends how you look at it) how a giant win for FSF is taking a wonderful Public Domain project and basically just releasing it under GNU GPL. Read More

My last blog entry has been caught by a few sites which described me as a "lead KDE developer". I felt the need to clarify this because I don't think it's fair to all other KDE developers. Read More

I finally got most the implementation of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. It's in the kdelibs-js branch in SVN. After George/Maks merge their other changes we'll merge it to HEAD. I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma (hence why I've spent most of the day yesterday on implementing the Canvas element). Read More

I haven't blogged for a while again. To some extend because the things I'm doing at the moment have little to do with KDE. First of all, yes, it's true that I don't work for Trolltech and that I'm back in States. For now I took a leave of absence to work on some other things. Right now those other things are physics; superstring theory to be exact. I'd like to finish my research, write a paper and then we'll see what I'll be doing. Read More

I haven't been blogging for a while. Mainly because I simply haven't felt like it and I've been going through some things lately. But I promised that I'm going to show some movies of things I've been doing. There's really no good way of showing OpenGL effects, vns2swf just doesn't handle it. So those will come later. Read More

I miss Snapple ice-tea. For some reason they don't seem to have it in Norway. They've got Snapple lemonade which I don't like at all. Right brand, wrong product. And the whole approach to cooking seems to be different here. For example last week we were making pancakes. We got a wrong flour at first (it was too fine). So I and Simon went to the store to find better one. Me being me, I grabbed some girl, dragged her to the right aisle and asked her which flour is for making pancakes. We took the flour she pointed out but noticed that there wasn't a difference between the one we had at home and the one she told us to get. Since the girl I just asked was a little chubby (which is why I asked her in the first place, I figured she knows a lot about pancakes) I decided to ask a skinny girl. She said we should get the same flour the other girl did. So we decided that we must be wrong and bought what they advised. It, of course, turned out to be the wrong flour. I was crushed. Read More

We've put together some ideas for Google's Summer of Code. I think there's quite a few interesting entries there and we tried to make sure that there is a nice set of initial ideas. Personally I'd love to see people coming up with their own ideas (which is why I particularaly like the "framework/application addition" entries). If you never ever coded with KDE, don't worry, we'll assign mentors to you who will help you through out your project. Read More

Being a non-meat-eater in Norway is to say the least interesting. It's been a while since I've heard people say things like "oh, you don't eat meat? we got chicken", or "oh, don't worry, we got fish". I like moving. Change is always fun. I'm slowly learning Norwegian. I was really disappointed though because I missed the Salvador Dali exhibition that was in Philly. If you live somewhere near Philly and have seen it, let me know how was it. Read More

Dave Hyatt asks this question in his blog. First of all let me just say this: KDE developers who worked on KHTML are simply really attached to it because historically it was the "rendering engine done right" and for people who worked on it, well, it's their baby. Read More

You can't even imagine how I hate that question. The truth is "most probably never". I just read the article on /. about Safari supporting the "all crack Acid2" test and people raving how great it is for KHTML. The truth is that KHTML will probably never get those patches. What's most probably going to happen is that one of us will simply reimplement it from scratch (and at the moment the reality is that if it's not going to be Allan or Germain it's not going to happen). Read More

First all let me answer the question as to why I rarely release the code I have and when I do I usually stop maintaining it soon afterwards: when I hack, I do it for fun. There's no deep meaning behind me sitting in front of GNU/Emacs. It's just a challenge of creating something that was seemingly impossible that makes it fun. Once whatever I was hacking on is at the stage where it's working, the challenge is gone and hence it stops being fun. And if it stops being fun I move on. And yes it sucks because a lot of the things I worked on and made publicly available deserves better. Read More

Last week I went to Norway to do the paperwork and see the Trolltech office. I loved Oslo which bodes well for the next few months. I'm back in States but will be moving to Norway in the next few weeks. Read More

So, as some of you may already know in the coming weeks I'll be moving to Norway. I'll be taking a fulltime position at Trolltech. A large part of my responsibilities there will be making sure that X11 is again a state of the art technology. Trolltech is committed to making the Open Source desktop stand out among all other solutions. Read More

So I got bored late in December and decided to just write something that would be fun. So I started hacking on what became Impresario. Impresario started as a very simple window manager. Based on Qt4 it was supposed to be a very lightweight window manager that I could use while porting other parts of KDE to Qt4. Read More

What I find missing quite often is ability to take context specific notes. For example: when I'm reading some spec, html documentation or emails I often want to create a transparent box over something noting "this is important", "this is not true" or something along those lines, taking some personal notes as such when editing code, So "desktop composition" is something that an application author could put on top of any widget which could induce the above described behavior. Read More

I've been looking at some of the bug reports lately and I noticed something weird. People are getting outright hostile when their wishlist items are closed as WONTFIX. I mean, that was always the case, but it's been happening a lot more frequently lately. It's really bothering me that people like Coolo, Aaron, Lubos and many others are getting a lot of heat for closing stupid reports. Maintaining applications like KWin, Kicker or KDesktop is really an ungreatful activity. So if you see a guy who wanted to have a girlfriend simulator in KDE, or something equally silly, insulting one of the developers (who are usually your very good friends) you just want to smack him (the bad kind of smacking - the kind that's not ended by "who's your daddy?" screams) Read More

The one thing I love about any holidays is the spare time. As some of you may know last week I started the kde-graphics-devel list. It's a huge relief for me because I felt bad about not having enough time to answer all the emails I was getting about image effects, new widgets and just a lot of KDE graphics related coding. Read More

I just committed the Qt Mozilla code. To start testing it you need to: checkout mozilla, configure with --enable-default-toolkit=qt, make and that's it. Please do not, I repeat do not send me wishes or bug reports just yet. I'll simply ignore it unless there's a patch attached to it. There are two basic issues which have to be fixed before I'll be taking any requests (1) the toolbar is waaay to tall, 2) updates aren't sometimes propagated correctly). Read More

Lately I didn't have too much spare time, but I've been working a little bit on the Qt Mozilla port yesterday and today. I finally figured out why we've been getting paint event storms but I haven't yet implemented it as it's a fundemental flaw in the way I wrote nsCommonWidget. I'm still waiting for a super-review to get CVS write access on mozilla.org to commit this stuff. Hopefully it's going to happen over the weekend. Also hopefully by then I'll have the paint event storms and offset bug in the toolbar fixed. Read More

Oh, I almost forgot. I sat down yesterday night and played a little bit with Cairo. It does have quite a nice API. A full example is at http://vortex.bd.psu.edu/~mkr137/qcairo.tar.bz2 . It's a pure Qt application. You don't need KDE to compile it. It shows how to use Cairo API natively from a QWidget:: paintEvent (you may need to adjust the library paths in the qcairo.pro file). Read More

I think by now almost everyone knows that together with Lars we started working on the Mozilla code. Essentially the story is that on Sunday night on a winefest in Ludwigsburg we started talking about having Mozilla run natively on KDE. To make the long story short, two days later I and Lars had an example compiling and four days later we had it rendering pages as a QWidget. It was fun. Real fun. This is not some experimental hack. We're looking at the whole thing rendering natively in Qt. This is the full-monty. Since the announcement I'm expecting a lot of very weird comments, questions and flames. I'll try to answer some of the more common questions I've seen already here. So in no particular order: Read More

This is another blog entry from the series of "how to improve my code". I was very happy with the response I got to the "delayed initialization" entry. Today I'll show you how to prove your code is working or at least doing what's expected. I'll talk a little bit about unit testing. If you hate "extreme programming" or "test driven development" bare with me as I'll show you how to very quickly and easily write tests. There's quite a few frameworks that were designed to ease testing. If you're into testing you probably have your favorite one. If you're researching those framework there are two things which you should look at foremost: Read More

Startup of more complex c++ applications is a problem. As an application developer you often don't have the ability to fix a lot of the issues related to this problem but there's one thing that bothers me a lot, that you, as an application developer can fix, so I decided to write about it a little today. I'll talk a bit about "delayed initialization" today. Delayed initialization is one of those "unwritten rules" that you can read about on http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/mistakes.html . In fact this entry should be added there. I don't have enough time but if you do, please try to format it as an entry there. So how does a typical startup routine in a KDE application looks like? Well, first of all we have some KMainWindow derived class. For the purpose of my brainfarts here, let it be : class MainWindow : public KMainWindow Read More

I've been away for a few days with some of my friends. So here's a few pictures of your truly away from computer. I'm actually wearing glasses on those (gray shirt, blue jeans). Good shot of my crotch area : here, black and white photo : here . Read More

Although GUADEC ends tomorrow, I and Waldo are unfortunately leaving tonight. It was a fun time and I'd like thank GNOME's for the last few days. Thank you! Most of all I'd like to sincerely thank Nat Friedman and David Neary. I arrived a day early so my hotel room wasn't ready and Nat basically adopted me ;) for the night and gave me a place to sleep at his room, while Dave took care of my bags. So, yeah, I really appreciate it guys! Read More

Come on people, the stuff that's going on lately is just plain funny: osnews posts the april fool's joke from dot.kde.org while adding "we had some people saying that this is April's fools news, but these claims are false. OSNews does not follow this tradition in general.". That made my day. Brilliant deduction, excellent coverage and top-quality flamewar as a result of a joke. That's funny. Havoc's and Miguel's "open discussion". What better way to solve technical problems than to bring them over to the tech-savvy people at slashdot? Don't get me wrong, it was interesting but the choice of the medium was just plain funny. On the other hand at least every second person posting on slashdot knows someone who knows someone who saw someone coding and that's exactly the type of expertise everyone is missing when making important decisions. Did I miss a memo where blogs were made to be decisions making places? I'll be putting some web-services classes in kdelibs soon. Got a problem with that? Post it in your blog so that we can discuss it. Come on, that's funny. Novell uses Qt. I don't think I've ever seen so many people so close to heart-attack. Things like that make bingo parties on Brooklyn seem innocent. One silly rumor and people went nuts. I mean, next time do what I do, install one of those wheels that you see in cages with hamsters where they run all the time. Oversized one, of course, and whenever you get all worked up, just start running in it. And bam, with two more rumors like that we solve: bad physical shape in the community and energy crisis. Hmm, that's such a brilliant idea that I think I might get a patent on that. With the stuff patent office is doing lately having "developers run in oversized hamster-wheels" a patented idea should be a no-brainer. In other news, Aaron is coming over next week and we're going to have a hackfest at geiseri's place. I'm saying it in my blog because Aaron doesn't know that he's coming yet so I figured I might notify him. Especially that considering the distance he has to take his rollerblades out right now if he wants to get here by next Saturday. Read More

So I'll be talking on GUADEC this year. I found out just yesterday because Michael has sent the notification to a wrong address (thanks Glynn for forwarding it to me). The abstract is available at http://www.automatix.de/~zack/guadec_abstract.pdf. I think it's going to be very interesting. I'll be discussing currently available standards and I'll be talking about ones which we still have to work on. IPC and configuration frameworks will be a big portion of the presentation. Read More

Winter is the time of changes. It is because I made it so. Some of you might have been taught that it's a different season, but for the sake of my argument we'll assume that I'm correct and all the others are wrong. It's like going out naked and people questioning that. Good, I'm glad you're with me on that. I was bored two days ago so I shaved my dreads. Actually I shaved my head, but I figured that it'll sound much cooler if I'll say "dreads" instead of "head". Looking back I might have decided to do pushups or something more productive like fingerpainting, but it happened. I'd post some pictures but because my cleaning lady is sick (I think she's real sick because I haven't even seen her once. They do come with the apartments, right?) I can't find my bluetooth connector to upload some pics from my phone. I took half an hour off today and created a homepage at my automatix.de location. On Tuesday I'm leaving for LinuxWorld Expo. Six of us is going out on Tuesday, which is rather scarry, because I have a new vector quantization algorithm for images, Geiseri his connector and kjsembed, Matthias is the ultimate source on Qt news, Mathieu is Mathieu and that's scarry in itself, Jason can't eat almost anything and Nadeem doesn't eat the stuff that Jason can eat. So we're pretty much covered on the conversation and food front. It's going to be a lot worse on Wednesday when all of us are meeting. Currently George counted 14-20 (for those less fortunate: it's not -6 in total) people. I'd write more but I remembered that I haven't eaten anything today. The friend that used to be feeding me quit that position and I have more important things to do than eating. Read More

I was talking to Rich today and he pointed me to a wonderful paper : http://www-sop.inria.fr/odyssee/research/tschumperle-deriche:02d/appliu/index.html . Please look at the image restoration one can achieve with this baby. The "Image Inpainting" examples are breathtaking! The whole thing is on my todo for KDE 3.3. I also got reports from people that some effects from KImageEffect simply don't work, or even worse are crashing. As it seems a lot of them hasn't been tested. Read More

I'm over at Ian's place at the moment. West Chester, PA, suburbia at its best :) Everytime I come over he makes me do something weird. This time he made me write a bumpmapping algorithm for him. It's mostly used in 3D computer games, since it makes really nice textures. Why did he need it? I'm sure he'll tell you sometime soon in his blog. I'll move the bumpmapping algorithm to kdefx KImageEffect after 3.2. Also if you know any graphics algorithm that you would like to use with QImage's let me know. Either send me the name of the algorithm and the app which implements it, or preferably math behind it. One of my friends pointed me to the following comment by Jamie Zawinski. He says that it's not possible to mix GNOME and KDE widgets. The whole "not possible" thingy never worked too well in Open Source. Hopefully soon I'll release something that proves Jamie wrong. Hold your finger crossed as I'm busy with some other things at the moment. Read More

Thanksgiving is in two days. I'm a vegetarian so I'm definitely not going to be eating turkey. Anyway, I've spent most of today with Coolo and Dirk talking about khtml, safari and regression testing. Coolo did a great job with regression testing. The rendering tree output is going to be a pain. Baseline output has to be pretty much regenerated after most changes to the rendering. Coolo thinks this will go away as we stabilize. We'll see. Dirk fixed the td p margin problem that was plaguing us. Cool stuff. Read More

I haven't updated my blog in quite a while. The car accident, moving to a new place and a lot of work didn't leave with me a lot of spare time. People have been complaining about the speed of kabc (or rather the lack of it). I wrote a few simple tests. Run them a few times and started looking at the profile data. I was quite happy with what I found. There are still things I see as bottlenecks but we're getting there and I'm quite confident we can make kabc very fast. Aaron asked me to profile libkcal. It's going slowly, because I'm lacking good tests. In kabc, I knew where most of the slow paths at least may be, in libkcal I have no idea. We'll see how it goes. Martijn was also telling me that something has to be done about Kopete's memory footprint. Today I also grew tired of the way we render large jpeg files. Which pretty much means that sometime this week I'll allocate enough time to fix bug 39693 (and a lot of other bugs that are related to the slow/memory consuming jpeg loading). If there's one thing I'm very unhappy about is that I didn't switch KNode's article viewer to khtml before the feature freeze. It still uses KTextBrowser which is simply bad for KNode needs. I also have to fix the in-place suggestions in KMail and KNode composers. I promised coolo to do it like two weeks ago. I've been toying around with the idea of adding Makefile.am checker to kde-emacs. Most of the errors seems to repeat themselves all over the place, which is already a good reason to automatize it. You'd M-x kde-emacs-check-makefile and it'd make sure your makefile follows our standards. Read More

I haven't added any blog entries for a while now. I'm in Germany, eagerly awaiting n7y. The basic functionality of KConfEdit is there. I think it's pretty much ready to move it to kdeadmin. I disabled the saving of configs because I don't want it to be doing that till I'm confident everything is working fine. I got the new ui made by Aaron in KSpell, it still needs some slot connections (most notably the Suggest stuff). In my spare time I'm playing with my pet project: Gadget. It's a services/search oriented application, completely plugin based. If right now you're going: "a what?". You need to look at Sherlock or Watson applications. It havily uses kjsembed. All the plugins are written in javascript. I might add a native interface after I'm happy with the javascript one. Why would you want to use javascript in plugins? Because it's super easy. With kjsembed you can load Designer generated ui files, connect signals to your js slots, load read-only kparts and use dcop - all in a very few lines of code. Cool stuff. Quite possibly I'll add support for Sherlock plugins, but for that XQuery would be required. Rich has got an alpha XPath implementation and Tim expressed interest in such a beast as well, so maybe the three of us can come with something nice up. Read More

Sunday, I woke up, there was nothing on tv, I was bored. I sat down and did something that had to be done and no one was really ready to do. KNode in Kontact. KNode definitely wasn't ready for that kind of use. It took me most of the day. About ~5000 lines of code :( A rather huge patch, which hopefully someone will feel like double checking before I'll commit it. I also went to see Tomb Raider 2 with my brother and a friend of mine and got the ".NET Framework Security" book. In any way, hopefully someone out there will enjoy using KNode from Kontact. Not that the last two relate in any way to KNode or Kontact, but I felt like adding it ;) Read More

I finally committed to CVS the new OSCAR protocol implementation. It uses libfaim from Gaim. Gaim developers have been very responsive so far, they applied some things I've sent them and were patiently answering my questions. I decided to rework buddy handling so things are in a state of flux right now. Also there's no documentation whatsoever, I'll write it once I'm happy with the api. After looking at Cornelius' KPrefs, I started working on KConfEdit again, which is going to become the KDE GUI config editor. I'm abstracting parsing at the moment. I've sat down and tried to come up with things a tool like this would need and now I'll be reworking internals to achieve those goals. So KConfEdit should: Read More

One more thing. I'm getting emails about DBus because my name appears in the AUTHORS file, so : KDE is not switching to DBus I hardly did anything for DBus Yes, I do have Qt bindings for DBus pretty much finished. I still have some things that have to be worked on in them but since they're not too high on my todo list right now I can't bring myself to commit that code Yes, a bridge between DCOP and DBus would be technically possible, but I don't think we will ever go for it. It'd be just another layer Creating a DBus library that is source compatible with libDCOP would be possible with one assumption - that assumption is that the application/library using libDCOP doesn't access libICE directly. I've never seen anyone doing that so I think we're pretty much safe on that KDE is not switching to DBus. DCOP is great I think that's it. Now back to coding and repeat after me : neural networks don't work, nice concept but nothing more, well maybe... but that's not KDE related :)

I needed a short break from coding on the two projects that I've been working on for the last few days on so today I added support for both PPC AltiVec and AMD 3DNow instructions to the KCPUInfo class. Basically for completeness. Now take a deep breath and read the part that says "for completeness" again. I think it's a little funny how for most people just mentioning 3DNow, MMX, SSE or AltiVec is enough to recompile whole kdelibs and spend two days looking for speed differences. KDE is not at a point where assembly level optimizations would matter a lot. geiseri is working on a rather neat DCOP cli optimization. I've been playing with udev a little bit. In case you didn't notice - once you plug a device to your machine (be it usb, bluetooth or any hotpluggable device) KDE has no knowledge of it whatsover. If you ever connected a scanner or a usb digital camera you know what I'm talking about. With udev we could get that working. Pretty much all udev does is intercept the /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug calls and creates nodes. The plan is to make udev emit a signal saying that a device XYZ has been connected after creating the nodes. It's pretty trivial. The hard part is to do it in a desktop agnostic way. DBus, DCOP and on embedded devices simple scripts - they all have to be supported and to have a more complete device database available. I'm so happy kernel is getting there to finally do things like that. Oh, and finally to kill some time I finally started my "Transparency in KDE made easy". I was sick of all the questions about it and decided to write a whitepaper on it. I'm not yet sure where or when I want to publish it. Read More

I didn't think that I'm going to write a blog describing OLS, but I wanted to point out a few things: Nat's dashboad presentation - horrible. The man curses more than I, or anyone else I've ever seen does. I don't know if that's the way he is or whether he was doing that only for the talk but that still doesn't explain why "fuck dude, shit doesn't work" or "shut the fuck up dude, let me finish" were the leading ideas of his presentation. Other Gnome developers/users present on the talk served the purpose of cheerleaders for Nat. The whole thing was just stupid. The basic idea is good, unfortunately it's pretty much taken from the Microsoft Longhorn. Like Aaron once noted in his blog, the gui for this thing is unacceptable. It's way too intrusive. Also the quering mechanism that Nat & co. are using is pretty much based on broadcasts of clue packets all over the place which simply will have to change at some point or it will become incredibly slow. My favorite quote from the presentation though is : "Dude, we have like 1000000 threads running at a time, we create a thread for string duplication!", which, I think, was a good thing in Nat's eyes. Heh, good luck... Havoc's freedesktop.org bof - the discussion in itself was limited, but only because the crowd has been mostly composed of kernel hackers who simply don't know that much about the freedesktop.org initiative. After the presentation Havoc, George and I went to a bar to talk a little. I had a horrible headache that day but conclusion I have is : "Havoc is a great guy". You can quote me on that ;) Hopefully we'll see him on n7y Keith's/Carl's Caito tutorial - in one word "impressive". I do like the idea and implementation. The design is clean and api very friendly. I'll be playing with it today, pretty much because I want to play with it on OS X. Porting Xc to OS X will be fun ;) In other news I coded a lot during the whole thing. Some of the things I'll commit today or tomorrow include : AltiVec instruction detection in KCPUInfo, an icon in the KMail email fetching statusbar notifying users whether the connection is ssl/tls encrypted (that one is for George ;) ), some accelerator fixes in KMail that we found, new OSCAR protocol implementation, based on Gaim's libfaim so that Kopete's and Gaim's team can share some code. Anyway, back to coding...

I'm trying to make a habit out of those entries. I've spent a little time today working on and closing 12384, which by now had 423 votes. Felt good to close it. Also worked on 4202 a little more. I want to have the html capable editor in libkdepim after OLS. Hopefully everyone is going to like it as the editor itself is a kpart plugin. In the beginning kedit, krichtextpart and ktexteditor based will be there. Hopefully before 3.2 I also get a KoText editor part there so that you can edit emails with it. But that's after I'll port KMail and KNode to it, especially that I need to work on html export in KWord a little more. George emailed me today saying that he wants to work on KConfEdit, which is great because I was planning on doing that for a while now. KConfEdit was an app I wrote right after KDE 3.0 came out. I never had enough time or energy to move it out of kdenonbeta but with Waldo's proposed KConfig changes for 3.2 (comments and types in entries) I started thinking about it again. During OLS we'll, most probably, have a few nice hacking sessions during which we'll bring that app up and running. I also took over KSpell and am the maintainer of it as of today. Few minutes after announcing that I got a few emails pointing me to Dom Lachowich's email on the freedesktop list about Enchant which seems like a good idea. I'll decide what to do about it when Dom's going to answer some of my questions about it. One of the usability people sent a mock-up screenshot of the new, proposed KSpell dialog layout. It looks really good and I like it a lot. If some other people won't object then that's how it's going to look for 3.2. I also started working on bluetooth integration in KDE. As Ian can assure you I'm addicted to my phone (Nokia 3650). I just think it's neat. More on that later. Oh, and I started looking into integrating KDE api docs in Qt Assistant. More on that also later. I don't know. I'm rather productive and I think I'll start limiting those entries to some bare minimum to not scare people of with their size. It all comes down to a simple fact: I'm well, coding, closing bugs and a lot of cool things is coming your way - just trust me on that. Read More

I don't like the fact that I have to be coming up with topics for those entries. I think I'll just start putting dates for them. People who want to know what I'm doing will find them anyway. I haven't done anything too interesting today. Worked on KSpell a little more. Cleaned it up a little and closed two bugs, from which the more interesting is that you can now check HTML/SGML/XML and Tex/LaTeX documents with KSpell and it will automatically skip the tags/commands and it will spell check only the actual contents. It should make spellchecking in such applications as Quanta and KTextMaker/Kile a lot more friendly. I'm trying to come up with a new layout for the spell checking dialog. If you're missing something in our current implementation let me know. Oh, and you can safely skip the fact that you want to be able to select a language right from the dialog. I have two reports about that and that fact alone is one of the reasons I'm planning to redesign it. Maybe our usability team will make itself useful ;) I put an image of me in my hacking corner here or simply check my photo gallery. For some reason people who have never seen me imagine me differently. Not sure if that's good :) Also not really KDE, more my-life, related, still a great picture. I wasn't really supposed to be posting it on the net, but I liked it too much. Read More

Geiseri definitely made my day with this site, so I wanted to thank him by fixing kspell. I looked over the logs to see which commits broke it. It was broken twice in revision 1.101 (coolo commit) and then in 1.104 in a commit of Don's patch by Laurent. I fixed it but the code I saw there did not make me happy at all. If Laurent won't want to maintain it, I'll start doing it since it simply begs for a maintainer. In other news I'm still playing with JACK. In general I like it a lot and I do think that with GStreamer it's a decent alternative to aRts. Hopefully tomorrow I'll commit the JACK aRts output plugin. I had to write a pure std ring buffer implementation for it, which seems to be working rather nicely (aRts doesn't use Qt in case you didn't know and the current HEAD depends on GLib which makes me wonder why are we hosting it in our CVS). Anyway, if you have a PowerBook remember thart aRts won't work if you'll try to run it in full-duplex mode - disable it from KControl and restart KDE to hear some sound. Read More