KDE Blogs 

I'm about 18 months behind the curve here compared to you trend-setters in KDE-land, but I think I now actually "get" git. Meaning that I now have a mental model of git which makes sense and I can use to make sense of the numerous "Git $X seconds" blog posts hanging around on the web (where the number $X is always smaller than the last blogger). I remember sebas having a go at explaining it to me and me not understanding what the big deal was or what it really was about. Read More

Its been a while since I did anything productive in KDE land, so thought I'd try to do something in a morning. Its hard freeze time, so that should be bug fixing. Bug 185532 was something I'd been thinking over for a while. Read More

The best compliment for you, KDE devs, ever: "Daddy you have a new computer!" -- my ~4 years old son Michał, yesterday while sitting with me at a (4 years old) ASUS notebook rebooted from Vista to Linux+KDE 4.2.3...

We finally had a meeting of KDE people in Edinburgh, not quite Akademy but it's a start. Nice tie Paul. A couple weeks later Laura Dragan gave a talk to BCS Glasgow on Nepomuk, nice to see KDE interest going outside the free software crowd. Read More

As some might have noticed among all the praise, some of the features may not come at low cost. One of the biggest memory hogs in KDE4 is (again) something that doesn't have much to do with KDE itself - the OpenGL library shipped with the nvidia driver. It is compiled without -fPIC to gain a couple percent performance increase (if at all, I personally doubt it makes a noticeable difference, but that's just guessing, given it's closed-source). And that means that every single application that links against it wastes about 11MiB RAM (on 32bit system), per process, regardless of whether and how much it actually uses it. And currently there are 5 such processes in just the plain KDE desktop, and count in the X server too. Do the math yourself. Or just have a look at the picture of Exmap showing it: Read More

While most core kdepim folks are knee-deep (neck-deep?) working on Akonadi and Akonadi migration issues, the bug reports and feature requests continue rolling-in at brisk pace for Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook, Akregator, KTimeTracker, KJots and friends. Read More

During the last weeks I introduces Marbles AbstractDataPlugin classes. These make it possible to generate a full featured Marble plugin showing for example photos on the globe with several hundered lines of code. In KDE 4.3 beta 1 is a photo and a wikipedia plugin. On clicking on the little items on the globe, Marble will open a browser showing the corresponding flickr site. The wikipedia plugin may still have some issues, so it probably won't work, but this is already fixed in trunk. Read More

Marble is one of my favorite applications. I especially like it in combination with OpenStreetmap. Free software and free maps, a brilliant combination. But I also love the historical map or the moon view. Read More

In a previous blog entry, I discussed some initial work on GCC plugins. Since then, the GCC gurus (in particular, Rafael Avila de Espindola) have made sure headers get installed correctly. Read More

The past month had quite some cool things in store. It started with the Akonadi developer sprint in Berlin, Germany, where we got quite some work done, especially regarding mails. This was followed by the general ranking period for this year's Google Summer of Code proposals and we were delighted to see that the Akonadi related ones did exceptionally well. Read More