KDE Blogs 

It's been a while (3 years!) since my last post regarding "changing the stars" of Open Source developers. I faded out from the KDE developer scene to concentrate on the corporate job I was offered then (though not because of that post :-P). Now that my duties at work have stabilized, I've "followed my feet" back to Open Source and KDE. Read More

Great news for all people who like the Marble Desktop Globe: Google Summer of Code '07 has started and our vivid KDE community managed to get 40 students accepted - three of them will work on Marble! I've got to admit that I was pretty overwhelmed by the interest people showed in Marble: lots of students have submitted applications that dealt with Marble. Most of the submissions were great so it was pretty hard for sure to choose among them. I hope that in the future we'll be able to get also those people involved whose ideas weren't accepted this time (especially the geocaching idea and the Marble Almanac). Right now I'm happy that now that Inge Wallin of KOffice fame has joined forces we'll have at least five people working on this tiny little project. For GSoC '07 topics will cover KML and GPS support as well as flat 2D projection. In other news there have been lots of Marble packages for Linux -- thanks to Steffen "Whitey" Joeris, Beineri, Chitlesh Goorah and lots of others. However I'd like to point out that Christian Ehrlicher managed to create a Marble install package for Windows which is ready for download (keep in mind that Marble is still in early beta stage, so bugs certainly do exist). Now even if you are forced to use Windows there is no excuse anymore not to try Marble ;-) I hope people don't mind if I post a screenshot:

Some of you may already know it, but I thought I should announce it here: next Thursday I'll be going to Albany/New York for around 6 months. There I'll have a job for this time at Kitware, you know, the guys who are (among others) writing the best buildsystem in the world ! ;-) Read More

Registration for Akademy 2007 is now open. This year it's being run by KDE GB. You need to register by the end of the month if you want accommodation with the KDE booking. Please pay promptly for the accommodation, it'll save us all a lot of hassle, payment is through paypal. Akademy 2007 is going to be great! Do come along. Read More

I'm sure I will be using KDE 3.5.6 for most of my personal Linux time over the next few months. And I'm evenly sure I want to follow the KDE4 developments (esp. regarding KDEPrint). But I'm also curious to have another look at Beryl and Compiz. (I'll certainly not be using it for any length of time -- last time I had a look, about a year ago, my head was dizzy from all the wobbly-ness of the windows moving, and the bottle-genie-ness of windows minimizing+maximizing; however, I'm looking for some cool 'demo-ware' to impress and make envy my collegues if I happen to give a scheduled presentation to them coming June...) Read More

BTW, new Qt4.3's QWizards's field system (see QWizard::field()) looks really useful. It is a clean version of approach to the one we discussed last year -- where we refer to pages/data widgets by name (or ID) and not by pointer. Read More

( For english speakers, translation will follow soon portuguese entry ) Bom, acredito que a maioria dos interessados nessa arena de programação do FISL devem já ter recebido o recente comunicado sobre premiações e desafios que pretendem colocar. Eu fui pessoalmente convidado, com outros colegas brasileiros do projeto KDE para ajudarmos na mesma, sendo que somente eu poderei estar presente esse ano. Para tanto, tive que fazer algumas considerações sobre o planejamento original da arena como nos foi requisitado. Foi aventado a possibilidade de colocar no contest uma certa quantidade de bugs do KDE ( também Gnome e Debian ) como os ítens de resolução. Poderia ser até uma boa idéia, porém estamos falando de um torneio de tempo curto e seria muito difícil que os participantes, salvo excessões, tivessem conhecimento básico de tecnologia KDE e Gnome, e ainda mais sobre específica distribuição como Debian ( assumindo que todos os participantes usem no seu dia a dia a distribuição ). Foi de comum acordo entre o grupo que não seria viável simplesmente escolher bugs do KDE e separá-los por dificuldade, ainda mais se decidiríamos por kde 3 o kde 4. Isso é irreal no espaço de tempo curto envolvido. Eu me ofereci prontamente para ajudar no último dia se necessário, porém meu planejamento pessoal envolve, com muito gosto, ser o "tech news man" para o br-linux, o qual o Augusto já tinha me convidado a tempos, portanto, meu tempo está reduzido em relação as atividades extras e as pessoais. Mas de novo, me coloquei a disposição de poder ajudar, mesmo quem sabe ajudando a avaliar problemas reais e factíveis da arena, para que realmente possamos encontrar bons programadores, porque quem vive nesse ramo aqui, sabe como isso é escasso e raro... Read More

I've recently been working on a little Rails app that manages foreign exchange handling, and prints reports. I'm converting an existing Excel based app that does the same thing, and I needed to get data from a spreadsheet to use as test data. So I fired up OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet, it loaded it fine, and even had KDE file dialogs which is nice. I looked for an option the export to CSV (comma separated values), but there were only options for PDF and xhtml. Read More

My Cool Discovery of Today: A few days ago a few little known Chinese friends of KDE must have translated the "Getting Started/Build/KDE4"-page on the TechBase wiki into Chinese ("zh_CN"; AFAIK, this is the "Simplified Chinese" as used on mainland China). My Uncool (but Confirmed) Apprehension of Today: On one system (not mine) where I tried it, Konqueror can't print nor print-preview the page correctly; while Firefox on the same system *can* (should I say: "...of course"?!) do it... So don't tell me "You don't have the Chinese fonts on that system -- they need to be installed". See also.... Read More

So I now have a semi-working notebook for private Linux/KDE purposes again. May be able to build my own version (and follow the development of KDE(4)) again.... Paid 150.- EUR. Got it with a 120 GByte harddisk. It's a HP nx5000 model (same thing as 30 participants of aKademy 2005 [Ludwigsburg] may be familiar with). But it came with a specific, known kaputt-ness: Read More