KDE Blogs 

I added system-config-printer-kde into kdeadmin. This is a Kubuntu application that saw a very early version in Hardy and is now usable to do various printer settings. It's always nice to add new applications and fill in gaps in our offering. Plenty more to do should there exist somewhere out there a free software developer interested in printing :)

Until now I've always been using my own built Qt packages when building KDE packages for maemo. Initially because the Qt packages in extras-devel where missing some vital parts for KDE (mainly SSL support I think) but after that because I just had them installed, and it worked. But now I wanted to change this, and use the extras-devel provided Qt, as in theory that shouldn't matter, after all they are build from the same sources, with nearly identical configuration. As it turned out, this was actually quite a bit harder than I thought it would be. Read More

Many of us know this: You are on KDE version "from yesterday" and suddenly, everything breaks. Maybe someone broke the kompile or it is just a bunch of bad code that went in before your checkout and prevents the window manager from starting. Read More

Zonker has posted on openSUSE News and his own blog our decision that openSUSE 11.1 will be the last release to include the KDE 3.5 desktop. This is a compromise how to handle the KDE4 transition after long discussions with many users. Read More

I only discovered today that the n810 doesn't have any swap file turned on by default. It has only 128Mb of memory, which is quite easy to fill up. And when you fill up the memory you don't get a 'consumer friendly dialog' telling you that your machine is full. No instead of anything helpful, the machine will behave slowly, erratically and then ultimately crash. And after is has crashed you will often find that it won't boot anymore and you need to restore your root partition from a backup. Read More

After blogging about clocks a few times, let me post some code for a clock. Click on the image below to see it. Your browser must support SVG. This clock was inspired by an entry on kde-apps which was blogged about by Cornelius Schumacher. A lot ofthe HTML, SVG and javascript was helped by the SVG+javascript clock page by Kam-Hung Soh. Read More

Playing with SVG is a lot of fun. I expanded the spiral clock I made yesterday with animated transitions between different panels. The SVG above can be viewed with Firefox 3.0 or Opera 9. It is only 232 lines of SVG and Javascript. Read More

Yesterday, Adriaan blogged about the Antikythera mechanism. This is a fascinating piece of early machinery. Read all about it on the wikipedia page. Ade called for a plasmoid to be created of it and I think this is a good idea. So I looked around on the web if there is some software simulating the mechanism. I found a webpage where you can download an OpenGL implementation that is compiled for windows. You can run it with Wine on a i386 Linux machine. The source code is not available on the site. I was struck by backside of the mechanism. The inward spiraling lines look very much like the Akonadi clock Cornelius blogged about some time ago. Read More

Since some years, I have searched for an elegant solution to generate call graphs out of C++ source code. Today I found it. It is doxygen. I have evaluated doxygen years ago, but I threw it away. The reason is that you have to know two things about doxygen: Read More

In my last blog I found out that Qt is being evil when using QPainter::eraseRect() with a QImage based textured brush. How evil? Well, calling QPainter::fillRect() with the same brush results in something like a 30-50% speedup while achieving the exact same results. Not only that, but the QPainter::eraseRect() codepath makes QImage not thread safe for painting outside the main thread because it is silently using QPixmap behind the scenes. However, this isn't the whole story. I was surprised that even with all this fixed the algorithm is still not optimal. Read More