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Some days ago I bought an ASUS jeans. We've been searching for a jean that is good for my size (not that easy), and found this one with reduced price (~$10 instead of $22). When I saw the name, I thought it will be fun to buy it. :-) See the pictures: Read More

I find todays hardware less and less reliable. Lately I feel it on my own skin. The story started with some mess I made on my hard disk and an upgrade of SUSE to 10.1 beta9. I reorganized my partitions a little, and after that my old win partition did not want to boot. Well, let's reinstall it, but the installer din not want to start from the CD. After a while it started. Whatever, I thought it's the win installer, as I never tried it since my upgrade to AMD64, so I forgot about it (I don't really use win, I just keep for the case that somebody brings me a software that doesn't run on Linux). After I installed SUSE I had strange crashes, complete system freezes. As I also modified some settings in the BIOS, I still did not suspect anything, but that my BIOS changes made the system unstable or SUSE is still very beta. One of such freezes almost destroyed a reiserfs partition, I could only recover with --rebuild-tree, and I had to run it twice as for the first time it crashed. After that I tried to compile KDE. From time to time it produced some errors, but what it made me really suspect that this is not a software problem was frequent crashes of g++ when compiling KOffice. After a reboot even make did not start, either gave me a bus error or segmentation fault. At this stage I decided to test the memory. In less than a minute I found that it gave me 3000+ errors. I'm a little disappointed with this. It's good that I know the cause, it's also good that the memory is in warranty, but it is sad to see such failures from a well known vendor. This was a 6 month old Corsair Value Select memory, a pair of 512MB modules. Some investigation revealed that one of the modules has problems. So now I am using only 512MB in single channel mode and waiting to confirm the replacement of the module(s). Hopefully the dealer will do it without problem, as it is a friend of mine. And now back to the first sentence: if you go through the blogs on planetkde.org or read some LUG lists, you can see what kind of hardware problems did others have. The most frequent would be hard disk failures. The second might be memory failure. But there are others as well, like badly designed laptops. What's happening in hardware business? Is it really good to try to reduce costs that much and keep releasing new products like crazy? It seems that in this rush the consumer is who will loose the most, but the vendors will do as well, when brands with good reputation start to release bad products (I heard that from ASUS from example, but this Corsair problem is also bad. Plextor also released a problematic DVD-RW.) In the past there were some products that should be avoided (I remember some VXPro-II chipset), but from my experience the problem was not that the hardware failed after some time: either it was a bad design and never worked correctly or it was OK and worked for years. Even in case of cheap, low-end brands. I had an Acorp motherboard with AMD K6 on it, plus some noname S3Savage graphics card and memory, Quantum hard disks, a Creative 16x CDROM from around 1999 (some parts, like the case is from 1995 or so) and it still works for my father! From time to time you need to clean the fans, the CD drive, but it works, and is stable. Same for other PCs I know around. In the library where I work part-time, there are 586 and Pentium I computers in use. And my experience with recent hardware: Read More

During my three years of usability presence in Open Source projects, printing has twice been the stumbling block to extensive and hot-blooded discussions about the whole purpose of usability for Linux. Read More

This and next week will be busier than average. Tonight I met up with pmax (who was in town for biz) with Justin to drink some beers and play some darts at a local bar. Its too bad pmax wont be in town long enough to visit downtown, the cherry blossoms are in full bloom (last night's storm had spared them for yet another week) and its always nice to go site-seeing in the nation's capital. Read More

Lately, I was even more bored than usual. so I decided to check what I had on old backup tapes and I found a lot of applications I wrote for DOS in Clipper (the xbase compiler) and I thought that some of them are worthy of being "modernized" I know some linux based xBase compilers, xharbour ( www.xharbour.org) Clip (http://www.itk.ru/english/index.shtml) but they compile the clipper code to C and use a vm ... I thought it would be fun (I know I have a weird definition of fun) to hook one of them to GCC 4.1 ... Read More

Link to My Home page for More screenshots After seeing cairo clock.. I wanted to simulate the same thing using Qt4 .. just to show how simple it is to do it with new Qt 4.1.1. it's a matter of getting a transparent widget (using few Xlib commands and drawing on it with QPainter paint commands (Clock hands and Clock face) with Time. and I was amazed by the smooth ness and the images quality of the output and also the speed at it was happening.Most of all it's almost Zero length code to achive this effect (less than 400 lines) and the Clock glass is drawn using only Qt4 paint commands. I'm going to place some screenshots and also the source for this simple two classed clock whitch is a nince a eye -kandy, too sad to send it to trash can I shoudl some make it more usable!. I think this also shows that wonder full things to come with KDE 4 UI's and widgets .. and plasma. Read More

I'm suffering from another CUPS+KDE frustration right now. Today I learned that there are two bug reports in our bugzilla which I had missed to see before. They were submitted by Mike Sweet from CUPS. See yourself: #115891 and #124157. The first one was submitted last November, the other one a few days ago. Read More

I'm sorry to disappoint all other parents of the world, but I'm now the proud father of Clara, the cutest baby to have ever appeared on earth :-) In case you do not believe me, here is a proof: Read More

A few weeks ago, Jonathan had asked me on IRC in passing why kprinter and KDEPrint 3.5.1 didn't work with CUPS-1.2. My reply had been like "CUPS-1.2 hasn't even released an alpha or beta tarball -- w.t.h. does Ubuntu Dapper plan to include an SVN version of a piece of core software which has a yet unknown release date??" Of course, this is not Jonathan's personal field of work -- Kubuntu just inherits the CUPS version and setup which the Ubuntu main developers decided for. Read More

It has been a long time since I've posted something here. I've had things that I've wanted to post but pretty much all of my time has gone to working on the Guidance tools for the coming Dapper release of Kubuntu. Thank gawd Dapper has been delayed. I can (am!) really use the extra time for polishing and debugging. It looks like Dapper is going to be an awesome release and will work a lot smoother than the current release (Breezy). Read More