KDE Blogs 

So some money come my way and I finally caved in and bought myself a laptop, after having talked on and off about the idea to Deb for the last couple of years. I bought an Acer Aspire 5612, which is to say 15.4" widescreen, 1Gb ram, 120Gb HDD, Intel Duo Core with the matching set of Intel chips and Intel 945 graphics. All for about 850 euro. The price was right, the specs were right, and best of all is that the drivers for everything are good and FOSS. Being able to buy it off the shelf, literally, in a real shop, is also handy, especially if you are impatient. I've got Kubuntu Edgy running on it plus that other OS that came with it, (for Deb who wants it for her work). Read More

I wanted to use the title "merged kconfiggroup_port branch", but I think I should learn from Aaron, so there we go :) It all started by a bug David fixed in kmail: KConfig *config = giveMeRandomKConfigObject(); config->setGroup("Hallo"); config->readEntry... Read More

Two days ago Miguel de Icaza blogged about the revised Main Menu of the GNOME desktop in the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Desktop Service Pack 1 and how it and the KDE Kickoff start menu inspired each other. In the update section he adds some very familiar sounding anecdotes: during the usability study done in Germany with amongst others Microsoft Vista Beta 2 we also found that most users don't recognize a "Search" input box at the bottom. And that users have problems to find its shutdown button which really turns off their machine (iirc a video with this was shown at Akademy). So same findings and wondering if Microsoft has done their homework with the Vista start menu. Read More

The openSUSE project is interested in knowing how you feel about the openSUSE project and the openSUSE 10.2 distribution. Please take a few minutes to fill out this survey until April 30, 2007. You can enter in a drawing for some hardware gadgets as thank you for taking the survey.

I've recently been having a discussion with Eric Landuyt on the Korundum site help forum about wrapping custom C++ classes in QtRuby. I told Eric that you just needed to create a QObject derived class with the slots and properties you wanted to expose, give it a name via a QObject::setObjectName() call, and create it with qApp as the parent. Then wrap the class in a Ruby extension using an extconf.rb script to generate the makefile to build it. Once your new extension is loaded, you can find the instance of the C++ class by using Qt::Object.findChild() with the object name you gave it. Read More

The Akademy 2007 Call for Sponsors is out there. We've contacted our previous sponsors, but there must be companies and organisations out there who depend on KDE and would be willing to help the most important conference out there in return for their logo on a big banner infront of hundreds of computer professionals. Send us an e-mail if you know of any companies who fit that description. Read More

After I wrote about how to use an ActiveRecord model with a QtRuby Qt::TableView, Silvio Fonseca sent me a nice improvement where he has written a generic Qt::AbstractTableModel that will work with any collection of ActiveRecord instances. Meanwhile, Imo one of the ruby hackers here at Foton where I work, gave a very interesting presentation on Friday, about the new feature in EdgeRails called 'ActiveResource'. He showed how the same table model could be used to create a QtRuby front end to ActiveResource. Read More

I've done a bit more stuff with QtScript in order to keep up with the changes in the Qt snapshots. The API has changed a bit to make things more consistent, and I've updated the demo code I had to work with the new version. The changes to support the new API were pretty simple, and basically amount to using factory methods on QScriptEngine to create your script values. The cast operator qscript_cast has also been renamed and is now qscriptvalue_cast, but it works as before. Read More

Today, Midas Dekkers read the last of 1250 entertaining audio columns on man and nature. Many of his columns are available on the website of Vroege Vogels. You can download either an mp3 of the two hour show of more than 100 mb in size, or you can stream the wma version and skip to the column. That's at least the theory. Under Linux, I was so far unable to conveniently listen to the wma stream. Now I've found VLC and made a small perl script that calls VLC from the URL. Read More

Via slashdot I read this essay by Jonathan Lethem. It is a stunning, jaw dropping piece of work. I don't know what to say to add to it. I love vintage country music and he even mentions the similarity between Kitty Well's “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels