KDE Blogs 

The usual suspects of the KDE crew arrived in Wiesbaden/Germany (near Frankfurt) last night; we did some initial work in setting up the booth and finished up this morning before the crowds arrive. Here is a nice pic of what our booth looks like. Yes this is before any visitors were allowed on the floors; I'm pretty sure it will be more crowded after that ;) Read More

The last couple of months I have worked on the openSUSE Build Service. The goal of the Build Service is to make it dead easy for developers to provide installable packages of their software on a broad variety of distributions. We presented a first preview at FOSDEM. At the Linuxtag 2006, which takes place later this week in Wiesbaden, we will show the current state. On Thursday, May 4th, there is a complete openSUSE track. I will give a talk about the Build Service architecture. You are invited. Don't miss the opportunity to learn about this exciting project. Read More

Last year I completed the Google SoC with an entry about CSS 2.1 in KHTML printing. The project was a great succes despite low visability. (You can see the result by printing documents in Konqueror and notice that headers usually follows their bodies and text is rarely broken so one line is left alone a page). Read More

Some things never change, and the recent discussions about a possible 'new VB' for the Linux Desktop reminded me of this excellent article by Aaron Sloman (my philosphy/AI professor from 1976 to 78 while I was a Philosophy undergraduate at Sussex University). He describes the history of teaching Pop-11, and the reasons for choosing it. When he talks about Algol 68, it could just as easily be C# or C++, and when he talks about Pop-11, you can just substitute Ruby (or Python), and the arguments still make perfect sense. Here are some extracts.. Read More

For those who are not familiar with it: ThreadWeaver is like a multi-threaded make tool for application developers. It provides means to chop operations into jobs and declare the way they depend on each other. When started, the jobs will be executed by a pool of threads, which will automagically try to find the most efficient order of execution. With the lately released version 0.5, it now has job collections, job sequences, and qtestlib based unit tests. Read More

In my last blog I said that I expected my KDE business cards within a couple of days. One day later Adriaan and Sebas got theirs. I live at the other end of the Netherlands, I'm a West Coast guy, and as we all know the Netherlands are a huge country. It's at least 150 km from Adriaan and Sebas to my place. cough How long would that take a postal service? Read More

I've recently been working 'over on the darkside', and have been getting QtRuby working with the GPL'd Qt 4.1.2 and mingw on Windows 2000. Several months ago Ryan Hinton got QtRuby working be generating the code for the Smoke library on Linux, and then hand hacking it to get it to build on Windows. So ever since I've been very keen to get it working - that is until the prospect of devoting an entire weekend or more to Windows programming, and not surprisingly I just kept putting it off. Fortunately, Caleb Tennis's company sponsored nearly two weeks of solid QtRuby development, and I was able to get an awful lot done, including a Windows port. Read More

I've been here in Gran Canaria for nearly six months now, and my spanish hasn't progressed as fast as I hoped it would. Learning another language is really hard! It makes me realise how tough it must be for non-native english speakers to contribute to english based Free Software projects such as KDE. Read More

Aaron took on his asbestos suite and made a case for Python as a VisualBasic replacement for the free desktop. Ok, let's give him some fire and play the "my language is better than yours" game. Read More

... and Aaron blogs about an entry in Murray Cumming's blog, I feel entitled to reply using my own :) Murray fears that from his point of view suboptimal choice will negatively impact the whole free desktop market and while his wording could be intentionally unpleasant about KDE, I guess that he actually believes it. Read More