KDE Blogs 

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

As KOffice is supposed to be a lightweight office suite, I figured it would be nice to see how well it would run on maemo based devices. Thanks to Thomas Zander who replaced a lot of the double usage in koffice with qreals it was quite straightforward to get koffice to compile and packaged. Well, for the most part that is, I didn't manage to get kspread to link as apparently the old gcc version I'm using has some problems with inner classes in templated classes and duplicate symbols. After fixing some trivial issues, I could install koffice on maemo and run it: Read More

As many of you will know, I'm not really keen on travelling. This has much to do with the dislike of leaving my zone of comfort, my fear of flying, etc. However, when I do have to travel, I try to inform myself of issues that might arise from travelling to the specific country I'm supposed to go to. For instance, like a lot of Europeans, I do not look forward to the idea of travelling to the US because of the issues with immigration (like privacy). Issues like these (luckily) still generate some press coverage so that most people know vaguely what to expect. Similarly, it's probably pretty well-known that you better don't start waving around Swastika's when you're visiting Germany. Read More

(Warning, rant ahead) There has been a lot of excitement on the web about Google's new browser Chrome. So much excitement that it has been spilling over into the free desktop blog world. Excitement is good in general, but I think many people are missing the point of Chrome and what Google is trying to achieve here. Chrome is not about building a better browser or winning the browser wars. It's about building a better platform for running web applications. It's about winning the internet operating system war. It's about determining what the "operating system" for running internet applications will look like in the future. It's about platforms, APIs and VMs, not web pages. Read More

New versions of KDE Four Live are up to accompany the KDE 4.1.1 release and give an impression of the development in trunk half-way to the first KDE 4.2 Alpha release. These CDs are built with k*-branding-upstream instead of k*-branding-openSUSE packages (see openSUSE branding policy) so their desktop appears less green than usual. :-)

Maybe you already know, maybe you don't: Google created its own browser, called Chrome. The good is that it is based on WebKit, thus contains KDE technology. That's is another recognition for the work of KDE developers. The bad is that they mention Apple's WebKit and nothing about KDE/khtml. Sad. :( See http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html .

Summer is gone. No more pictures or travelling, lack of time for much opensource... that's life. I will also be moving soon, and that will make my spare time even shorter. Lets hope there will still be some spare time during the weekends! Read More