As some of you know: When I implemented text-shadow for KHTML back in 2004, I added the ability to draw multiple shadows, because it was just a minor addition in my implementation, but one that meant we followed the entire spec. unlike Safari.

Ever since I've been trying to find a practical use cases for it though, and let's just say: It's not easy. Multiple shadows are just not all that usefull; but I think I've finally found one.

Yay I got my SoC project accepted!

So what is it: avKode - A Phonon backend for FFMPEG

It is basically killing a horrible interface and an error-source called xinelib, and going directly to the source. This also enables more powerfull features in the long run such as capture and encoding.

avKode will be a Qt/C++ implementation of libavformat which uses the universal decoder libavcodec as a backend.

Last year I completed the Google SoC with an entry about CSS 2.1 in KHTML printing. The project was a great succes despite low visability. (You can see the result by printing documents in Konqueror and notice that headers usually follows their bodies and text is rarely broken so one line is left alone a page).

Well, because I such a lazy student, I still havent finished my master thesis, so I am technically still allowed to do a SoC-project this year. So should I SoC?

I haven't had much time this fall to do much actual KDE development. So the number of tasks is starting to accumulate. I might have time to do one or two the next couple of months so I would like to give you the opportunity to give feed-back on what you feel is most important.

Seems Linus has started a new little flamewar :D

Among KDE developers we have always stated that anti-GNOME flamewars are only among users, and while it is technically true. It doesn't prevent users who also developers in other projects to join them. I will just comment here and hopefully not contribute to the fire.

As some bugs.kde.org votes might have noticed I've fixed GMail (standard view) again in Konqueror. Although it is an odd sort of fix, because I really just improved our Mozilla emulation so we change one more bit from our usual KHTML/MSIE behavior to that of Mozilla when spoofing as a Mozilla based browser. This means that GMail only works when you use UserAgent spoofing and set it to Firefox.

As the title says, Acid2 is now passed.

With the help of Hyatt's Safari patches, Ivor Hewitt(*) and I have finally made Konqueror pass Acid2 as only the second browser.

Notice how there isn't a vs in the title? :)

Hyatt and Maciej joined us on IRC yesterday, and we had some really good discussions. I might as well also admit that Maciejs comment was true (but out of context). Please notice that that implies we are discussing solutions and a common future. The idea of a common source tree is pretty much abandoned as we have very different goals and requirements, but we are discussing improved cooperation. With Apple just having released Tiger and us preparing for KDE4 we have a unique opportunity for bringing our source trees closer again.

I just wish to weigh in on debacle to clear up some mistakes. First of all I would like to say I agree with Zack. The annoying part is not that Apple don't cooperate as much as they could. They are actually helpfull in answering questions and _tries_ at least to separate OS X specific features in the code (allthough they fail miserably at it). No, our problem are users who think Apple does more and underestimate the effort it takes for us to implement patches from WebCore. We are doing this for free and for fun, all we really want is appreciation for our effort.

It looks like my thesis will be late (Gee, what a surprise), and since I soon have to buy the apartment I've been renting, I've been looking for a job, and finally found one.

The job is to port a specialized spellchecker for dyslexic to Mac and Linux with Mac being the first priority. It is actually pretty cool software, it is even context aware, which will probably be the hardest part to just plug in.

As part of the job I just received a MiniMac yesterday, and I've been playing with to see what it can do: