KDE Blogs 

I estimate its some 15 years ago I wrote my first address book. On my Amiga, in C. It had a really nice GUI that was task oriented and I kept all my friends addresses and phone numbers in there. One feature I was pretty proud about was that I encrypted the data before writing it to disk. Some months later I lost the key and I wrote another application to brute force the encryption and retrieve my address book. Lesson learned was that I should not have an 8 bit cypher as all possible keys can be tested for correctness in quite a short time. But instead of creating a new encryption or hashing function, I learned that its better to use an off-the-shelf algorithm as apparently its really really hard to write one that others who have access to the actual code of the algorithm can't hack. You may be wondering where I'm going with this, the answer is that whenever someone invents his or her own hashing or encryption algorithm I cringe, thinking that its such a beginners mistake that I place them in the same category as programmers that write for-loops in games with a specific amount of iterations to delay the program exactly 100msec. Something game writers used to do on old computers. Really funny effect when you bought a new computer that was twice as fast :) Read More

Joining the list of tools being used internally at Novell/SUSE being available as Open Source (like SWAMP or Testopia) now also the source code for the openSUSE Build Service is available under GPL from today on. So if you have some spare computers in your cellar you can set up your own build service farm (to build your own secret or illegal stuff). Read More

Every five years or so, it snows in Tucson. We got our latest taste last Sunday: (click for more photos) I grew up in Illinois, where the winters were long and relatively harsh. So it's pretty funny to watch native Tucsonans freak out after 1 cm of snowfall. Schools were shut down. More than 50 bridges in town were closed to all traffic. Local auto stores sold out of ice scrapers. You know, mass hysteria! </vinkman> Read More

Solutions Linux, a french exhibition happens next week in Paris. As usual, the KDE France team will demonstrate the finest solutions in KDE technologies. To help us in our task, we need you: tell us what is a must see in the latest 3.5 version as well as in the upcoming 4.0 release. With your contribution, we should be able to ensure maximum jaw drop... Read More

So, in line with the articles written by TSDgeos, I'll continue talking about the work done in okular. A reason more to do that is that people ask about the work we are doing in okular, and about the new stuff we've done, so why don't let people know? ;-) Read More

So far, I've only accessed QObjects, slots and UI files, we need to do better to be able to do anything useful as the Qt 4 API has a lot of methods that aren't accessible that way. To do this, we'll use Javascript prototypes. A prototype is basically the object we can consider an instance to be 'cloned' from (philosophy people can think of it as the platonic ideal of the object) - from a purely implementation point of view, it's enough to know that it's the first place the interpreter will look for something that isn't implemented directly by an object. Read More

two days after the release of kbfx silk in which we try to simplify the backends and front ends, we got a nice comment on kde-look. actually this was really unexpected. Read More

The highlight of our Foton company Christmas party was playing with a Wii for the first time. We got one rigged up via a projector onto the wall, so there was a nice large image, and then put the sound through a little stereo so it had a bit of punch. The game we tried first was Wii tennis, and it was amazing to watch people moving around and using the controllers just like bats in a physical real world game. Read More

You think that you know every game that KDE ships? How about KNetWalk? It's a nice little game - not just for system administrators. The chance that you have it already installed is high, it's in the kdegames module! It entered SVN in May 2005, received bug fixes, got ported to KDE 4. But only the upcoming KDE 3.5.6 release will fix the biggest bug: the non-appearance of KNetWalk in the K menu. Have a nice play...

Here we are. Some people told me a blog would have been a nice idea, so let's try this adventure, I'm sure it will be fun :-) I'll talk about my KDE development, about okular, and of course about any other thing that I might want to talk about. It's my blog, isn't it? ;-) Of course, don't expect too much from me, as I'm not a so great talker like many other people around ;-) As a first entry, I'd like to thank the fantastic KDE community and all the people in it: the support you can get is great - thanks!