KDE Blogs 

We had an IRC meeting about Portland's DAPI today and while most people seemed to have joined to discuss API related things, it more or less turned into a session to clarify positioning in relation with other projects cleaning up some misconceptions. Read More

Ok, time for another screenshot. It actually shows most of the recent improvements in kwin_composite: [image:2548 size=original] At the bottom-left there's KWrite with the file dialog open. The dialog is transparent because I have MakeTransparentEffect enabled - it makes moved/resized windows transparent and it also makes dialogs transparent (hey, I need to test the stuff somehow). The KWrite main window is de-saturated and has reduced brightness - that's DialogParentEffect and support for saturation/brightness, patches from Rivo Laks. Read More

After a few weeks of hunting for mentors and projects we proudly declare the Season of Usability opened: Season of Usability 2006/2007 - Call for Student Application Season of Usability 2006/2007 is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Read More

Last week I released Kerry Beagle 0.2 in preparation for openSUSE 10.2 (whose release candidate is scheduled for Thursday). I think this version is a nice improvement over version 0.1: new interface, more supported hit types and a more complete configuration module than the original beagle-settings. Thanks must go to Debajyoti Bera for adding more Beagle KDE backends (KAddressbook, KNotes, KDE Bookmarks), and my SUSE colleagues Robert Lihm for the nice icons and Sigi Olschner for being beta tester and giving usability advice. Finally thanks to the KDE translators for providing translations for the first time. Read More

After our previous router died after a lightning strike, we got a new one. Since that new one was active, though, I had the strangest experience: when my KDE session reloaded my Konquerors, it would often claim the hosts did not exist. That's quite a big WTF, I'd say. For some reason, all DNS requests stopped working over UDP for a small while. (Manually dig'ing with +tcp worked.) Which is pretty annoying if your session also starts Akregator, which also wants to look up lots of hostnames. Read More

This year's SQIL seems to have attracted less attention from the local Linux community. I was invited to provide a conference on a topic of my choice. I decided on a much more philosophical discussion compared to last year: Qui? Quoi? Pourquoi? Comment? (French for "Who? What? Why? How?"). Read More

Since the Novell / Microsoft deal a lot of people have told stories on how Novell should not have assumed there are patents, and how the deal is written to sidestep the GPL with regards to patents. And all this time Novell was putting out FAQs, press releases trying to state that its not about patents at all, and how Novell is sure that there are no patents on the GPLed software Novell ships. Read More

Lately on the kde-core-devel there is a [http://lists.kde.org/?t=116336735900002&r=1&w=2|thread] which started innocently by asking the permission to move an application back to kdegraphics, degenerated into a small my app is better than yours type of crap and now it's getting to the a nice discussion on what users want or expect from an application. I will post my comment here since I don't have write access to this mailing list and I also don't want to keep adding to the traffic of the mailing list (and mostly I want to save precious time to the moderators :) ) Read More

In the category of scripting in KSpread 2.0 using Kross2 the KSpread 2.0 Scripting article provides an overview of what's possible with KSpread based on Qt4+KDE4 this days. Seems KOffice isn't that far away from world-domination :)

So, in the last days there have been several things which made me think "This rocks !". Wanna know what ? So here we go, without any special order. Sun releases Java under the GPL ! You know what ? This rocks ! I have never been especially fond of Java. If you want fast code, write it in a language which is compiled to machine code, like, well, C++ or C. Additionally I always had the impression that Java is almost like C++, just that you cannot do everything with it you can do with C++ (templates, operator overloading, multiple inheritance, ...). But OTOH if you don't care that much about execution speed but things like reduced development time and portability (without recompiling), then why stop halfway instead of going the whole way and use a scripting language (preferably one that rocks ;-), to stay on-topic) like, let me think a minute, like Ruby ? You get even shorter development times, you get dont-compile-run-everywhere and you can do things with the introspection features you can't do with any compiled language I know of. Ok, said that, I think releasing Java under the GPL is really great from Sun. You know, there is something called Mono, which is a free implementation of the attempt from Microsoft to push Java out of the market with C# and its CLI. So, if we want a free bytecode-compiled language, Java had the issue that it wasn't really free, only free-as-in-beer. And Mono has to play catchup with the stuff MS develops, and there's the potential that it might carry patent problems. So, now that Java is free, what has changed ? We have a free bytecode-compiled language, maintained by the main development team, i.e. no clone or fork, and since these guys released it theirselves under the GPL they probably won't sue anybody for violating any patents. So, who still needs Mono since November 13th, 2006 ? Read More