KDE Blogs 

Funny little story... I was profiling with valgrind recently and was shocked to discover a huge hiccup in the painting performance of my QImage raster based app. There was this repeated call to QPainter::drawTiledPixmap() that was soaking up CPU cycles. It was a true mystery as I had thought the canvas of my app was completely QImage based. Not so. Read More

Zero as when it does not work. And that's sometimes zero fun. There is a plan to enable compositing by default in openSUSE11.1 when possible (just like e.g. Ubuntu already does), so I've been again pondering the idea of enabling KWin's compositing by default in SVN too, just like it was in pre-4.0 times. The "when possible" part is of course the problem. Even openSUSE11.0 is already ready for compositing, assuming proper driver is correctly installed, but there still may be possibly some problems with some setups, and of course upstream KWin does not have the comfort of knowing the underlying stack is configured properly. Read More

Ubuntu Developer Week happens on IRC next week. I'll be giving my introduction to PyKDE with a WebKit web browser tutorial. There's plenty more interesting talks, see you there.

It's Friday now and hackweek comes to an end for me. It was exceptionally fun and we got some decent work done. The team was fabulous, a combination of SUSE and external community guys. Frank was here for the whole week and worked on the API and the opendesktop.org implementation of it. Sebastian joined us for two days and we had a lot of interesting and useful discussion how to put Nepomuk into the picture, Dirk started to write a Plasmoid for showing the activity log on the desktop, and Zack was here this morning giving us moral support and inspiration. We didn't completely realize the "Social Desktop" yet, but we laid some groundwork. The most visible result currently is this screenshot: Read More

Many of us have the cool Nokia N810 that is an ARM system based on maemo. To compile software for it, you will normally use scratchbox. What a pitty scratchbox only runs on 32bit hardware. As a proud user of a 64bit desktop, I have to use a virtual machine for running scratchbox. Now the question is what is the better virtualization solution: VirtualBox or VMWare? Read More

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