KDE Blogs 

There's a long thread currently going on on core-devel about scripting within KDE. Here's the executive summary: Having a "blessed" KDE scripting language for writing complete KDE applications is a good thing and allowing applications written in that language in the main modules would be a step in the right direction A tangent to the main thread is adding scriptability to KDE applications For the first sort of scripting, there's something of a concensus that Python or Ruby are the primary candidate languages There hasn't been much language flaming between Ruby and Python; it seems most folks agree that they're both acceptable OO scripting languages, though there have been plugs a bit for one language or the other There's some debate over what appropriate languages are for the latter; KJS (JavaScript) is currently advocated, but there's some debate over the merits of JavaScript To qualify the first comment, even if your language of choice isn't the one taken, there's nothing lost. Currently all scripting languages are second class citizens in the KDE world. Promoting one to first-class status doesn't demote the others significantly. An "everybody wins, use what you want" solution really is just a way of rephrasing the current situation. Read More

So I am back from aKademy in Dublin, and at first I want to say: I'm feeling very honored that I received one of the three aKademy awards: Best non-application contribution: CMake for KDE4. Read More

Someone on the dot asked about Marcus Furlong -- "I didn't know him, where're his code contributions?". Well. Sometimes I think writing code is so much "safer" activity: you can delay your release, you can keep stuff uncommited or not working, and find at least dozens reasons to justify that. Try to do the same with recent Marcus' task! No way. You need to work in real time. People will not wait. Read More

You, the reader of this blog being an internet user: I have a question for you. Have you ever heard about the topic of "Net Neutrality"? If not, you may want to google for it... Read More

I'm just back from Dublin, and this is the first time I actually grabbed a pen and started doing some blogging. Back home I realize that I really need some more sleep; going out drinking several pints of Guinness every day and still getting up quite early got me down. So now I'm hugging a cup of tea in front of the computer slowly getting through the day. Read More

[image:2415 width=600 class=showonplanet align=center] the scenery around dublin is really beautiful. however, after 10 nights in a dark hostel room, I'm really really looking forward to go home, to sleep in my own bed, have a shower in my own bathroom, and eat in restaurants where "vegetarian" is not a foreign word ;-) Read More

It's sunday morning, the sun is agreeably peeping through the cloud deck and I've just booked a room in a hotel in the Elsass region in northern France after having spent two days at home resting from an exhilarating aKademy. Read More

don't know when I'll have net access again :) So I am leaving Dublin and this years aKademy and I am so glad I attended. There were so many things to learn, so many people to meet and so much fun to have. Read More

Yesterday at aKademy I committed Marble to KDE SVN. Marble addresses an issue that exists since long: KDE lacks a generic widget that can be used to display geographical maps. Right now implementation as well as data for maps is duplicated all over SVN. Examples of Use KDE Control Center ( personalisation, timezones ) KDE-EDU ( KGeography, KStars ) KDE-PIM ( KAddressbook, Kopete) KDE-GAMES ( Risk ;-) ) Others: KWorldWatch, KTraceRoute, KDesktop Wallpaper / Screensaver, ... What it's not: Marble neither tries to deliver a 200% academically accurate map that can be used to do science (so don't use it to control nuuukelear power plants) nor does it try to be a Google Earth clone - at least in terms of primary focus. Based on the needs for such a generic widget I imposed the following requirements on the project which should always be kept in mind if you plan to contribute to the project (yes, you are very much welcome to do so): Marble uses a minimal free dataset that can be used offline. Currently the total amount of data that is meant to be shipped is about 5 MB. Marble runs decently without hardware acceleration. It just uses Arthur as a painting backend and does NOT use OpenGL (However it largely benefits from EXA according to some initial testing). Extending it later on to support OpenGL as well shouldn't be hard however I don't consider that the primary focus. Depending on your hardware and the maps being displayed framerate is approximately 5-30 fps. Marble uses vector as well as bitmap data: Currently it uses the very old MWDB II data combined with ETOPO 2, which I will update to current SRTM soon. Marble displays the world map as 3D a sphere, because it's more fun to use and less subject to distortion (So with regard to that it's just like NASA WorldWind, Earth3D and Google Earth) Marble should start up almost instantly. Currently it "cold" starts fully within 2-5 seconds. On each subsequent start it takes about one second. Beyond those requirements Marble already supports "themes" for different topics. In addition to the primary topograpical atlas map there are two other topics: "Earth at Night" and "Satellite View". It's easy to add further topics - I temporarily added a "Moon Theme" on request within 5 minutes of work (it just takes to create two bitmaps and adjust an XML file - try it). Initial support for Google Earth KML files is there already, so it's possible to display placemarks easily. However the whole placemark rendering is still under development so don't complain if within the next two weeks it will fail or be slow. Among the TODO items are: Adding support for downloading data via the internet (that should be a matter of a few hours or days in terms of implementation). This might also offer the chance to display Google Maps data. Making placemarks and polygons accessible, so that they could be referenced to Wikipedia. An "editing mode" which might be used to add placemarks manually or via GPS devices - maybe even working together with efforts like Open Street Map. packaging for different plattforms. As Marble only depends on Qt >=4.1 it's easy to compile it for MS Windows. Daniel Molkentin even created an installable .exe files for it some time ago. If you want to try it these are the steps that lead to instant success: Make sure you've got SVN and at least Qt 4.1 installed svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/base/marble cd marble ./buildqmake qmake (make sure that the parameter refers to Qt4's qmake - on Kubuntu you have to type in buildqmake qmake-qt4 "). make bin/marble For optimal performance it's recommended to add " -O2 -msse " as compile options in marble/src/Makefile once it's generated and recompile. Any suggestions for how to add those options to src.pro directly are appreciated. For each map marble needs some initialization to be done which is a one-time procedure and might take a few seconds on the very first startup (could be circumvented by packaging the resulting data if needed). Have Fun :-)

Something like 9 years ago, when I was a young grad student, I created a web page that was, at the time, the internet's only repository of spaceship images (thanks wayback machine!). I enjoyed putting it together, but inevitably, I eventually let it stagnate. Read More