KDE Blogs 

Tomorrow it starts! The (at least for four of us) long awaited KPhotoAlbum development sprint! Tuomas Suutari, Jan Kundrát, Henner Zeller, and I will all by together at my place in Hjørring, Denmark the coming week to bring the development of KPhotoAlbum forward. Read More

While browsing through kde-look.org I found a cool idea for visualizing a daily agenda. This reminds me of the Akonadi architecture diagram and I even have code (probably not up to date) for drawing this kind of diagrams. So I guess it would be doable without too much effort to implement a daily agenda viewer like this. Would be a fun project. Read More

A while back I blogged about querying dbpedia with sparql. The queries in that blog were pretty simple. Today, I present a more complicated example. SELECT ?a, ?long, ?lat WHERE { http://dbpedia.org/resource/Borne%2C_Overijssel http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#long ?centerlong ; http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#lat ?centerlat . ?a http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#long ?long ; http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#lat ?lat . FILTER ( -(?long - ?centerlong)(?long - ?centerlong) - (?lat - ?centerlat)(?lat - ?centerlat) > -0.01 ) } This query gives you all items in the english Wikipedia near where I live. Read More

My previous post touched on the horrid FPS you can expect from any graphics intensive Qt app on the N810 at the moment. Ariya has pointed out one reason for the bad numbers: Qt decides to convert all 16 bit pixmaps to 32 bit before blitting even if the source QPaintDevice and the destination QPaintDevice are both 16 bit. Read More

This week is hackweek at SUSE and people are frantically hacking on all kind of stuff. Fun. My project is the Social Desktop, which is the buzzwordy title for an implementation of the Open Collaboration Services API (see specification on freedesktop.org). Frank Karlitschek has joined the fun and is at the SUSE offices for hackweek, so server and client implementations go hand in hand. The idea is to bring the community to the desktop and take benefit of the fact that free software projects are not only about software but also about community. This can provide a lot of extra value for our users, especially as the desktop is the place where all the social web data from different sites comes together and the user is in full control of what happens to the data and how it is combined. For some more background have a look at Frank's Akademy keynote. Read More

When thinking about how to implement a client for the Open Collaboration Services API which Frank presented at this year's Akademy keynote I came across the question of how to generally access a REST web service on a client. Read More

Back from FrOSCon. I followed the frog grasshopper. It was great to meet so many nice people again :) The KDE table (booth just doesn't fit) was shared with Kubuntu and Amarok. I think we all fitted together nicely, not really appearing as three projects that much. Thanks to the Kubuntu people for helping a lot in keeping the table/booth running! The blue table cloth we had (kudos Kubuntu) gave us extra appeal. And if it hadn't had a little too much beer in the evening that would have included Sunday... Apart from talking to visitors and other projects and listening to talks, Saturday evening was all about being social. Or it was all about beer, I don't remember clearly. I think we did fairly well on the dance floor also, I enjoyed bouncing around with Sebas, Danimo, Markey, Sven and all the others, though I do hope, no photos of us dancing around professionally are around ;) Thanks a lot to Valerie and Jörg for giving me a ride, that was awesome. And the Grasshopper. Read More

I got a bit bored this weekend (ok, ok, I had to do a lot of cleaning and so and needed an excuse) and had a look at two performance related things in KWin. First was fixing the CPU usage problem caused by using vsync, now that Thiago found out why I couldn't reproduce it (I build Qt without Glib support, it just messes the backtraces up). Interestingly it was code that was supposed to save CPU that by mistake caused the increased CPU usage. Oh well. Second improvement is unredirecting fullscreen windows - that is, if a fullscreen window is not covered by something else, such as a game or a movie, that window is excluded from compositing and allowed to draw normally. This lets it draw at the full speed and should also help with avoiding tearing. The simplest way to see this is to maximize a glxgears window and then compare its reported number of frames to also making it fullscreen using Alt+F3/Advanced/Fullscreen. I could post a video, but it would look quite similarly to the previous performance joke. This one is for real though. The small downside of unredirecting a window is that it no longer has a preview e.g. in Alt+Tab (could be handled with some more code, but not a very high priority now, unless somebody else feels like doing that or I get bored some other weekend). Read More

Akademy finished, it was great. Next week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land, so we are working hard on filling the distros with the necessary features, if not always beastie-free. Read More

Just a small announcement. Development version 1.1 of my little network routing configuration utility is up on my website for your testing pleasure. There is no new functionality. I've just ported it from KDE 3 and C++ to KDE4 and Python, saving it from ravages of bit-rot. It's a neat little utility and it would be a shame to let it get lost on the migration to KDE 4. It is also in Python now which should make the code a lot more accessible for contributors. If you've written a few shell scripts in the past, then your skills a probably high enough to hack on Guidedog and fix any bugs which show up. Read More