KDE Blogs 

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

I finally decided I needed a laptop. My dream machine would meet the following criteria: Linux friendly. I would like to "vote with my wallet" and buy a machine for which there exist open source drivers for all components. I will be compiling a lot with it, so it should be quite fast at this. This means a fast processor, a decent hard disk and not turning into a bakeoven everytime a binary is linking. Not the size of an aircraft-carrier. But not too small too. If you know the model of my dream machine, please tell me! Read More

As I wrote in my last blog, KOrganizer now has the ability to export the calendar to all different kinds of formats using technology called XSLT transformations. The only thing that I'm missing (because I'm entirely bad at those things) are good designs that I can implement. So I'm looking for nice and visually appealing designs of how calendar exports might look. Possible export formats are e.g. Read More

Linspire have announced that future versions will be based on Ubuntu.In their Canonical partnership FAQ they say that they're sticking with their preferred desktop, KDE, which adds one more to the list of Kubuntu Derived Distros. Read More

I do Ruby Rails development as part of my day job, and one of the nice parts of Rails is the ActiveRecord Object-Relational Mapping framework. Today I've been playing with QtRuby using a Qt::AbstractTableModel based on ActiveRecord, and it's really simple to implement and works really well. Read More

What a stupid idea! How shortsighted, to not consult with their readers beforehand! www.freesoftwaremagazine.com have announced that they will stop offering their publication as a PDF for download. Instead, they will go "online only".... Read More

Next FOSDEM will be February 24-25 in Brussels (that's a little over two weeks away). There will be some interesting talks in the general tracks, but I think there's also some very interesting stuff going on in the KDE Devroom. This is a room where KDE people will give some talks, and can meet and so. The schedule is available here. The focus will be on KDE4 related topics, with, amongst others, a talk about the semantic desktop in KDE by Sebastian Trüg. Read More

XSLT is a W3 specification that allows general transformations from XML into practically any other format (mainly XML, but you can also create any text). In the kdepim 3.5.5+ feature branch I just added a plugin to korganizer, that exports the calendar into XML and then applies an XSLT transformation to it to generate all different kinds of output... For example, one can write an XSLT style sheet for some fancy HTML export, or for CSV export, or to XSL-FO to generate nice PDFs. One might even generate SVGs from the calendar. Read More

Since January 5th there has been a bit of a rush, if not stress to work on standards. If you may recall, in an earlier blog I posted about Microsofts answer to the OpenDocumentFormat. Which got rubber-stamped as ecma 376 late last year. The ecma seal of approval was not enough for Microsoft. Most probably because it was fighting the ISO approved ODF spec, even if they never said so out loud. And it makes sense. The number one request any free office suite gets is that it should be able to read MSOffice docs. Or more accurately, it should be able to read the microsoft invented fileformat. So, MS has the advantage that people rely on their suite because the information stored in documents can only be read by their software. This means that even if KOffice is better than MSOffice for a company, they would have problems if their old docs were not properly parsed by it. In other words; lock-in by fileformat. Read More