KDE Blogs 

** Sebastian, one of the blind participants of the Accessibility-Meets-Usability weekend, just told me that the development of Gnopernicus, a screen reader and magnifier for Gnome, has been stopped. I hope these are just rumours? It would be a pity. Instead, the development of Orca will be reinforced which is actually good news (thanks henrik for the clarification!). Read More

FIFA World Cup is coming to town. I just walked through the city and saw the first fans arrive. Although I don't like football at all, it's nice to see what's happening here in Gelsenkirchen. We got a new station, many streets have been refurbished, the city is full of people again. It's a very seldom opportunity to meet people from a lot of other countries in your own city :-) Read More

A good friend of mine recommended to me What Mind–Body Problem?, an excellent read on the age-old puzzle of consciousness. His recommendation came interestingly as a complement to the book of John D. Barrow, Theories of Everything, which ask a strong question about the involvement of conscious observers in the foundation of any universal theory. It's satisfying to read clear and captivating renderings of long lasting personal fuzzy reflections.

With Blogs we are all publishers, thats the new world and everyone has his or her soapbox. In the good old days the concept of being published was the most important thing you could get. It meant recognition. Nowadays, its getting linked and copy-pasted (with or without attributeion). Read More

For the last few days, I have been busy implementing translation support for the KDE Commit-Digest. Both the website and the actual digest introduction are now able to be translated and displayed in other languages. Translating the digest introduction every week is a much bigger undertaking than a one-off translation of the website, and so only for the hardcore. Read More

In the times of DCOP disappearing from trunk ... KDE DCOP WMIface (and of course the matching entry at b.k.o that I apparently failed to handle somehow)? What would be the best comment ... shame on me?

Update: Debian packager Adeodato Simo wrote a comment to my previous blog entry, establishing as a fact that the instructions in the README.Debian.gz file in fact where not added by "upstream Debian" (as someone in #kubuntu tried to suggest to me). Isaac Clarencia confirmed to me (also in IRC, in channel #nx), that Debian does not disable the CUPS web interface. He installed a CUPS 1.2.1 from "testing" and found it fully functional. Given these facts, I personally think it very misleading conduct by the Ubuntu packagers (I don't suspect intentional dishonesty), to add 2 paragraphs into the README.Debian.gz file that is signed by Debian packager Jeff Licquia without making obvious who added the modifications. Read More

So I was working on kdelibs over the weekend, trying to clear up a few problems with the D-BUS implementation in KDE. I found that the KMainWindow interface worked almost perfectly out of the box (it would have worked perfectly if I hadn't used a dash [-] in the object path in the first place). Read More

The Apache foundation steadfastly refuses to include support for the OpenDocument filetypes to its distribution despite the mimetypes being registered with IANA. Appearantly the ASF doesn't agree with the OASIS IPR policy seemingly unaware that the OASIS OpenDocument TC has switched to a most liberal IPR policy (Royalty Free with restrictions on possible licensing conditions) earlier this year. Read More

I installed Kubuntu Dapper now from the Live CD to the harddisk. The hardware is very "low end": Intel P IV 1.80 GHz, 256 MByte RAM, 20 GByte HD. But it should be good enough to check the printing capabilities of Dapper, and see how the packagers modified the CUPS setup away from how CUPS.org's defaults. After all, the complaints and calls for help I received must have a reason... Read More