KDE Blogs 

... many things happens, uhm... the start of support of PDF forms. But let's start explaining piece by piece. :) Thanks to the work of Bradh Hards and Jiri Klement, the [w:XML_Paper_Specification|XPS] backend of okular has been improved a lot. It can now render pages in a way that starts to match to the expected behaviour, and get some information from the documents. Read More

Ahh, today was a lot of fun at FOSDEM 2007 :) In the morning, I first went to the talk about software patents, then the One Laptop Per Child talk (really nifty stuff) and then the liberating java one. Then I wandered around a while at the KDE booth waiting for the afternoon talks to start. At the KDE booth, I was pleased to see that Jonathan Riddell had actually come, despite his claims to the contrary ;) The Semantic KDE talk by Jos and Stéphane was very interesting and promising, I just hope some of those promises actually get implemented. Would be very cool indeed. After that I went to the AIGLX talk, so I unfortunately had to skip Flavio's Strigi talk :( After that came the GEGL talk, which was very interesting. I thought it would've been nice if it had even more details, but I realize that for a generic hacker audience, this was already detailed enough (it even included creepy C #define-hackery :P). My day ended with Sander's documentation talk, which I thought had some interesting ideas. In between and after the talks, there was a lot of chatting amongst the KDE developers, which was pretty fun as well. Hopefully tomorrow will be at least as fun as today was! :)"

Last year I turned 30 and I know people still wonder when I end up being as old as I look. But on the way to this I pass today the next prime number - and I must say it feels much better than last year. The main reason is that I have a new job. This may suprise one or two, but it shouldn't. Read More

Only a few hours left until FOSDEM starts. I'm about to leave for the airport to fly to Brussels together with the rest of the SUSE crew. There will be an openSUSE developer room and I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon about "Packging made easy". The intention is to present some of the tools we have created with the openSUSE Build Service which make packaging of software much more fun than it was before. Read More

FOSDEM 2007 is approaching very rapidly: this weekend a lot of KDE and other FOSS people will gather in Brussels to meet and talk. There are two small changes to the KDE Devroom schedule that might be interesting. The first one is that we had to change the speaker of one talk: unfortunately Sebastian Trueg is ill, so now the Nepomuk-Semantic KDE talk will be done by Jos van den Oever (of Strigi fame) and Stéphane Laurière (from Nepomuk, EDOS). Should be a very interesting talk! The second change is the addition of a new talk: 'KDE e.V. - The organization behind the project' by Sebastian Kügler (of KDE e.V. Board and MWG fame). Hope to see you Saturday or Sunday! (Here you can find a very incomplete list of KDE related people who will be attending, you can add yourself if you're coming. Dot article for some more info.)

Two days ago the first incarnation of sidux was released, code-named "Chaos". sidux is a desktop-oriented distribution. It comes as a Live CD based on the "unstable" branch of Debian, but is easily able to install onto harddisk from the running Live CD using a completely new graphical installer frontend. Read More

Since my last blog I've been working on various different projects in KOffice. Most are not really screen-shot interresting so I declined to blog about them. After all, who wants to se that if I type text in a text-frame the frame will grow automatically when the text would not fit anymore. That's soo boring :) Read More

Just the other week I was talking to someone that is a big supporter of the Open Document Format. He was arguing that we need to find a way to get KOffice and OpenOffice to open all the documents made in MSOffice without any loss and any change in layout. He argued, if that's impossible, then what is the advantage of ODF? Read More

I read this recent article about Mono on the Mac and thought why don't I try building Qyoto on Mac OS X and see if it works. The article talks about GTK# using X11, although a native port of it, along with System.Windows.Forms being done. Cocoa# seems a bit incomplete. I personally like Objective-C, having been an Objective-C programmer for 10 years, and I don't think the Cocoa libs translate too well into C#. The api looked a bit ugly to me, with weirdness like every C# method being annotated with the objc type signature so you get to write everything twice. Using Attributes to annotate methods and classes is fine in the bindings classes themselves, and the Qyoto code does exactly the same thing with the C++ type signatures, and classnames of the methods being wrapped. But I'm not sure if you want to do that in application code. For example, here is a snippet of code from the ViewSample.cs example: [Register ("SimpleView")] public class SimpleView : View { public SimpleView (IntPtr raw) : base(raw) { } [Export ("initWithFrame:")] public SimpleView (Rect aRect) : base (aRect) {} [Export ("drawRect:")] public void Draw (Rect aRect) { BezierPath.FillRect (this.Bounds); Graphics g = Graphics.FromHwnd (this.NativeObject); Font f = new Font ("Times New Roman", (int)(this.Bounds.Size.Height/15)); Brush b = new SolidBrush (System.Drawing.Color.White); g.DrawString ("This is System.Drawing Text\non a NSBezierPath background!\nTry Resizing the Window!", f, b, 10, 10); } } Read More

I just uploaded support in Adept for Apport, the Ubuntu crash handler. Ubuntu uses a modified kernel which calls a user space application when an application crashes and that writes a report with information including the core. Adept Notifier now watches for these reports appearing and runs the Apport frontend when they do, which uploads all the data to the bug tracker if the user so wishes. Read More