KDE Blogs 

So... the world is made to know already what Ubuntu 8.04 will be named: it's 'Hardy Heron'. This choice has a good and a bad side to it. First the good one: it made me dicionary-lookup the 'heron' word (and stealthily confirm the 'hardy' one, since I wasn't completely sure about its meaning any more). Read More

I was missing from development for about 2 weeks in August, because I had a vacation. With 3 friends of mine, we planned a hiking/climbing journey in the Alps for this summer. I haven't been on a real vacation for a long time, only for small 2-3 days of resting or one day climbing in the mountain. The original plan was pretty ambitious: climb Europe's highest mountain (if we do not count the Caucasus Mountains at the border of Europe and Asia), the Mont Blanc and the second highest peak, Dufour Spitze between Switzerland and Italy for one team, and the Weishorn in Switzerland for the second team. Well, things usually don't follow your plans, and so it happened this time. Those who were at Glasgow probably noticed my problems with my knees. On one of the training trips it started to hurt badly, and at one point I barely could walk. It required serious treatment, both "electrical" and through medicine. The doctors warned me that this might require a surgery in the future, altough they said I can still climb, just more carefully. This problem also stopped me to continue the training, so I wasn't in the mountains for several weeks, nor did I do other serious exercises. Only resting and waiting to recover in the hope I can at still go at least on one of the mountains or part of it. To make the story short, none of the peaks was climbed by me, but this was only partly because of my knees. The weather wasn't too good this year, some climbers died on M. Blanc a few weeks before we went there due to a storm. We were lucky to find 2 days of relatively good weather, but this meant to hurry. Also we had only 3 days to spend on the mountain, because we had to move further to Switzerland to the second peak. Unfortunately I got sick when we arrived at 3200m, and even if I recovered until next morning, I got sick again at 3800m near the Gouter Hut. This is where I abandoned my try to reach the peak. We climb the Gouter face in bad weather conditions (wind, snow, it was a storm, which turned back all the teams who tried to reach the summit that morning), in the night. As the weather forecast for the next day was bad (and wrong...), I didn't spend a night there, but came back the same day to 3200m. Two of my friends did an attempt to climb the summit and succeed, but almost had to spend a night above 4000m in a shelter, because of the fog that came down. As they didn't have sleeping bags, risked and came down to the tent in the fog. Some climbers remained in the shelter and looked really bad the following day. The Dufour Spitze idea was abandoned from the start, instead with my friend we hiked around Zermatt in the hope to make good pictures about the Matterhorn (couldn't because of the weather), and on the day when the weather was forecasted to be excellent, we climbed a 4165m high peak, the Breithorn. So at the end I could still go to a 4000'er, even though on the one which is considered to be the easiest (and yes, it was easy, especially because we had the acclimatization from the previous days). The very same day the two other friends hiked the 4505m high Weisshorn, a hard and demanding mountain, with very narrow ridge where only one of your boots fit on... We did some more hiking on lower areas (below 3000m), and on the descent from Gornergrat my knees finally said it was enough. So on the following days, I did nothing but driving and walking around in villages or where we stopped with the car. The joy was only interrupted on the last day by the Swiss police, who for whatever reason did a complete verification of our luggage and my car at the police station. I hope they were disappointed when after almost 2 hours of searching, asking and investigating find nothing illegal and wrong. Unfortunately this wasn't my first (bad) experience with Swiss police or their border control officers. I'm 99% sure all of them was due to having the wrong country flag on my license plates. There were other annoyances as well (like the backdoor of my Nikon F80 broke and it is very hard to get a replacement, while digital Nikon SLR's are very expensive), but after all it was a good trip, and I could do more than I thought after my knee problems started. And what does it have to do with KDE? Well, I warned all of my KDE T-Shirts during this trip, on purpose. :) Unfortunately I always forgot to take picture with them on the actual summit (or highest part). But did below of them. Read More

My Application of the Day: Kochizz for Apache2 Configuration My application discovery of the day (well of the yesterday, to be more precise), is Kochizz. Kochizz is a Qt4-based GUI tool to get to grips with the Apache2 configuration. Read More

Y'all are aware of the current frenzied push by Microsoft to whip their OOXML file format (used for MS Office 2007, described on some 8.000 printed A4 pages) through the ISO 'fast track' standardization process to make it a 'standard'. Read More

As promised, QCA is getting close to final release. Justin has just released "test2", which is the "all but final" version of 2.0.0. We did make some changes from "test1", mostly adding more documentation and a test case or two, but one change identified by Rich Moore made it - a list of all available hashes. The basis for that is so you can possibly show them to the user who makes a selection. That logic also applies to the list of cipher algorithms and MAC algorithms, so we also provide a static method to get the lists of those too. Read More

I love the practical way the neo-liberal UK government make things happen to create a more 'business friendly' environment. The latest idea is to simplify science exams to allow more people to pass GCSE physics - what could be wrong with that? More scientific people and we'll surely have a more scientific country. Read More

So, i had a productive IRC chat this morning with Tackat, who introduced me to Marble. Marble is part of kde-edu, and can be built either as a KDE4 application, or just as a standalone QT application. It runs very nicely on Solaris with QT 4.3.0: Read More

There's enough of meat committed to SVN so it's time to show you something those involved in Kexi have been waiting for: tabbed and context-sensitive style of application workspace. It honours Fitts' Law-friendly-KDE 4's-large-toolbar mode, while still is aimed at tools accessible for power user and development environments like Kexi. Read More

So after 2 days of frantic hacking we made some good progress on Akonadi - including sorting out the database schemas with professional help for performance, producing benchmarking tools to find areas to improve in other layers, fixing MIME parser bugs, improving KMail in KDE 4.0 and KOrganizer's layouting. Read More

Once again we have friends visiting, here at the KDAB Berlin office. So far Will Stephenson, Bruno Virlet, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause and Kris Koehntopp have arrived for a weekend of Akonadi hacking. Kris (of MySQL) has kindly agreed to have a look at our usage of their system and point out the various errors of our ways. It's already been very productive, we now have a much better idea of what not to do and how to debug what we are currently doing. The rest of the guys are working on benchmarking the other layers, with the goal of proving that Akonadi can actually deliver the kind of performance we need. Bruno has been doing great work on the models for Qt4's model/view framework, on top of Akonadi, as part of his Summer of Code project, and it's great to meet him in person. The picture below shows him in animated discussion with Kris. More exciting things to come as the weekend progresses, I'm sure. Read More