KDE Blogs 

In the CLucene backend of Strigi, I was being conservative about allowing concurrent reads and writes to the index, hence making indexing slower if you were looking at the status. So if you were monitoring the indexing speed, it would be slower. Read More

Flavio Castelli added a nice feature to Strigi: the ability to include or exclude files from the index based on their file name. This feature has been in Strigi since the last two releases. And while Flavio has been busy writing a report about it, I have smoothed out the feature a bit and made it more universal so that it now also works on names of files that are embedded in other files. Here is a screenshot that shows the dialog for configuring these filters. (input from the usability teams is welcome ;-) Read More

Last sunday I released version 1.4.1 of Gwenview. This version contains quite a few bug fixes. Most important for me is that the rotating bug is now fixed. This one has been bothering me for a while. Read More

At aKademy, David Faure presented a script for calling make from emacs when you write code in a different directory from the one you build in. Since I use vim and bash, I had to adapt it to work for me. One important aspect for vim users is that if you call ':make' from vim, it calls the first 'make' it finds in the path. This call is associated with niceness like jumping to the right error lines after calling ':make'. The script I paste here should occur in your path before the real make (usually /usr/bin/make) and it should be called 'make'. When called, it will move up in the directory hierarchy until it finds a directory called 'build'. It enters there and calls the real 'make' with the arguments you passed. Read More

For the next generation of KDE's file manager, we want a better handling of removable drives such as USB sticks, USB and firewire drives, CDs and DVDs, ZIP (does anybody still use this??) and flash memory. We set up a short survey to answer the questions that bother us most: How many removable drives are usually connected to a computer and what are they used for? Read More

An interesting read: Joel Spolsky argues that too many choices lead to user unhappiness and looks at the Windows Vista "OFF" feature as an example. In a response on his own blog, former Microsoft programmer (now Google employee) Moishe Lettvin who worked on exactly that part of Vista for a year describes how the development process inside Microsoft worked for his group. Read More

I was feeling a bit poorly today so I decided to spend the day doing something fairly easy but productive and beneficial for openSUSE: re-familiarising myself with the Build Service by packaging some software. Read More

In less than two weeks openSUSE 10.2 will be released with really edgy components. And you can download and try its release candidate today and help to find the last bugs! You will experience a complete system management suite and the best-engineered and most improved KDE and Gnome desktops available - with desktop search, 3D effects and interface usability improvements in both desktops. Read More

The elections that took place in the Netherlands last Tuesday were about more than the government. In the province of Noord-Brabant, there was an additional question. This question was about a unique aspect of the province: the absence of an anthem. The Queen's Commisioner decided this should change. Three songs were proposed, all less than a hundred years old. One of them, from the same composer of the emotional song 'kadeng kadeng', is a disgrace to good taste. The other two are nice to sing along in the pub. Read More

Ubuntu Open Week happens next week and has a plethora of intersting looking IRC sessions on how to develop for Ubuntu. Among talks specific to one of the Ubuntu teams is the Kubuntu talks being done by Brandon, which should be really interesting. Read More