KDE Blogs 

video preview : http://upload.ruphy.org/raptorgirdview.mpeg Finally after few hours of work. got grid view working, sad thing is i'm not using Plasma gridlayout but when it's ready I'll switch back. but it works and dose the trick for now. I'll be improving the view and the restof the svn components in the coming days. and also start working on the AI engine , maybe the Fuzzy logic plug in can be finessed first,

One should think that reading and writing XML are solved problems. But interestingly there still is heavy development going on in this area. So Trolltech includes their new QXmlStreamReader and QXmlStreamWriter classes since Qt 4.3, which was released less than two months ago. Today I used these classes for the first time and was delighted. This is the first XML API which lives up to the high standard of Qt. Read More

A couple of weeks ago we had the openSUSE hack week and at last it was the newly renamed KDE Team's turn to share our thoughts with the Novell Open Audio team. They're Novell's podcast unit, who travel the empire of the big red N finding what the company and its community are doing, record it then mix it all up with their idiosyncratic wit and what I've come to believe is the Novell rock anthem. So I jumped on the opportunity to tell our team's story, communicate everything that's possible with KDE on openSUSE, and highlight all the good things that KDE 4 will bring to the community distro and Novell's enterprise products. Tune in here. Read More

Every now and then I start kbugbuster and browse the bugs database for KWord. I can then happily close a dozen or so bugs without having to code anything. The reason for this is that basically KWord has undergone a rewrite for 2.0; when we switched to Qt4 and the basic text engine was replaced with Qt4s-scribe and the frames were replaced with Flake it turned out it wasn't useful to refactor the code but more to merge in old code when and where possible. Read More

Dirk pointed me to an awesome application: zzuf. This program can help you make your program more failsafe when dealing with broken data. Zzuf inserts noise in your programs input. You call it as a wrapper about the code you want to test. The amount of noise is tunable and you can exclude files and directories from being 'fuzzed'. What is really elegant, is that Zzuf adds noise on the fly. The data on you disk is not affected. Zzuf just inserts itself between your program and libc and runs 'read' and 'fread' through its own noisy versions of these calls. Read More

After providing last time a screenshot and a screencast (2.4MB, mpeg4) of SuperKaramba in action running the Aero AIO theme, here we go with a more concrete sample that connects SuperKaramba and Plasma together. Read More

SuperKaramba as Plasma Applet running 4 instances of the Aero AIO theme. Screenshot;

(Creating an entry on my old blog until PlanetKDE is updated) I implemented crop support in Gwenview. Here is the blog entry about it.

You may have thought about using the excellent Threadweaver from kdelibs to speed up your application a bit, but got scared of the horror stories of multithreading in C++. One common case where things may go wrong in C++ is deleting of objects. For example when you have an object like a "User". Your painting routines quite likely access that user object, for example to show that QImage of the users face. This means that you can't just delete the user object from another thread, it might still be accessed by the painting routines afterwards. Qt calls the paint event in unpredictable ways, for example when the application is uncovered by another window. Read More

If you ever did anything with multithreading you'd know mutexes. They are basically a building block to do any multithreading work in. In java they are better known as 'synchronized blocks'. Your basic hot zone can be protected by a combination of myMutex.lock(); /* do stuff here*/ myMutex.unlock(); Which is equivalent to the Java manner of synchronized(myMutex) { /* do stuff here */ } Read More