MAR
29
2015

PyKDE Future: Seeking a New Maintainer

For anyone who has been paying any attention of PyKDE5 over the last year or so, it is no secret that development and maintenance has been at a standstill. I've been very busy with a family and small children, and that eats time like you wouldn't believe. (Unit number 2 is almost 6 months now, healthy and happy I can report.) But another important factor is that my interests have shifted towards web related technologies over the last few years.

So, it is time to put the call out for a new maintainer or maintainers. I would also like to put in a bit of an apology to anyone who has depended on PyKDE5 and has had to put up this wishy-washy state of limbo for the project. And I would also like the thank people for the occassional drive-by commit which has helped keep the existing functionality mostly working.

Anyone interested should contact me. I'm willing to help and advise anyone who wants to learn the ropes, and to facilitate a transition to new management. If you are interested and curious but don't want to stick your hand up immediately and commit yourself, then still email me and I can forward on some information to you which may help explain how PyKDE5 works and is updated. It should give you an idea of the task at hand.

JAN
25
2015

A new year and a whole lot of stuff (part 1 of 2)

It's been an awful while since I last blogged, we all go though periods where things get rather crazy all at once or boring, mine went though both.

JAN
17
2015

Improving KDE's support for Korean (and other CJK languages)

Hunminjeongeum
The Hunminjeongeum (or 훈민정음). This 1446 document first introduced the modern Korean writing system to the Korean people and is now listed among the UNESCO Memory of the World. (Photo: Jeon Han, CC BY-SA 2.0)

In addition to my usual work on things like Plasma, I've been hacking away on bugs that pose barriers to the use of the Korean language and writing system in KDE/Qt systems lately (I took up studying Korean as a new hobby). As a bonus, many fixes also tend to help out users of other CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, or even generally of languages other than English.

Localization defects come in many shapes and forms and tend to be fun puzzles to solve, with lots of vertical cross-cutting through the stack. Here's a few examples from my plate in the past half year:

Kate: Input method / IME / ibus support doesn't seem to work well in KF5 version and the resulting Qt: ibus plugin badly maps text attributes to QTextCharFormat

On Linux systems using IBus for complex writing system input (which is most of our desktops), Qt 5 would generate QInputMethodEvents with badly-formed formatting directives, causing pre-edit text (such as incomplete Hangul blocks) to turn invisible in some applications. This fixes text entry in Korean and any other language doing complex in-line composition in KWrite/Kate, KDevelop and other applications built on KDE's KTextEditor framework (and likely others).

Amarok: Podcast save location containing Korean characters are garbled

A fun mess where a chain of QString::arg() calls against a template string would go awry by replacing a URL with percent-encoded Korean into the template, causing subsequent calls to trip up on unexpected % placeholders. Your Korean podcasts will now work nicely again in Amarok.

KCodecs and kdelibs: KCharsets does not support CP949 encoding

Code page 949 is a superset of the EUC-KR character encoding. Introduced by Microsoft, it supports additional Korean characters not supported by EUC-KR and remains in use on some Korean websites and IRC networks (unfortunately - please switch to UTF-8!). QTextCodec gained support for CP949 in the Qt 4.x series, but our KCharsets was never sync'ed up to those enhancements, hiding the codec from selection UIs throughout KDE's products. The effective impact of this is reduced somewhat by Qt 5's support for ICU, which is smart enough to handle CP949 transparently in EUC-KR mode, but the situation was still confusing for users nonetheless (and left broken when running non-ICU builds of Qt).

This last one is interesting because patches to address this were actually supplied by the community in 2010 already, but they sat around unloved until recently despite not being very complicated - developers are often reluctant to engage in tickets like this because they feel out of their depth, or simply struggle with the setup necessary to reproduce a problem. I worry this may cause a bad feedback cycle of bugs not being reported by users who don't have the time or energy to educate developers about the problem space.

If you're a user of Korean (or other CJK languages) and KDE, please do report them. I'll be keeping an eye out. If you're a developer and struggling with Korean or CJK support in your application, you should consider getting in touch, too.

JAN
11
2015

New TODO application that blocks distractions while you work

TL;DR: flow is a sticky TODO manager with support for the pomodoro technique and blocks distractions (cat pictures too) while you're focusing on a task: git, AUR, Windows, OSX

"A good task manager application is one that can beat a .txt file."

NOV
30
2014

Comparing text style support in Calligra, Abiword and LibreOffice

This weekend I spent time on preparing for the ODF Plugfest again. The test software ODFAutoTests now has many more tests. Most new tests are for text styles. I've created tests for each of the possible attributes in <style:text-properties/>.

NOV
30
2014

Table View and Report Barcodes junior jobs

Kexi has improved quite a bit since the last time, especially in Reports. We're close to supplementary 2.8.7 release within Calligra, then 2.9 will follow and Qt5/KF5-based 3.0 with a shiny mask.

We're about to reach the point where it's very very hard to find comparable Free Software reporting tool in terms of usability. If you don't know why reporting software may be useful, try to generate 50 or 500 pages PDF out of structured data with just mouse clicks and no programming. Get the report file generated in 2 seconds or less. Or print the report directly without creating intermediate PDF or ODF or HTML files that will pollute your computer... It's data that matters.

NOV
24
2014

ODFAutoTests gearing up towards the 10th ODF Plugfest in London

In two weeks time, users and developers of OpenDocument Format software will meet up for a two day ODF plugfest in London. In preparation of the plugfest, I have spent last weekend, refreshing ODFAutoTests. ODFAutoTests is a tool for creating test documents for ODF software and running these documents through the different implementations.

NOV
22
2014

Blog Moved

I've moved my developer blog to my vanity domain jriddell.org, which has hosted my personal blog since 1999 (before the word existed). Tags used are Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for the developer feeds.

Sorry no DCOP news on jriddell.org.

NOV
3
2014

Do you want Catalonia to be a State? If so, do you want Catalonia to be an independent State?

Today there are only six days left until I vote in the independence referendum. I usually use my personal blog for non technical bits but I thought some readers of my KDE Blog might be interested in this as it does affect the geopolitics of pretty much the whole world.

What's going on?

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