KDE Blogs 

Wow, I'm happy today. The story starts some years ago (around 2001, if I'm not wrong), when I bought a trackball (a Trackman Marble FX from Logitech). This model has 4 buttons, the three usual ones on all mice, and a 4th button that (in Windows) was used to emulate a wheel (pressing that button and moving the ball, allows to have a mouse wheel that can pan freely, horizontally and vertically on documents, which, btw, is really cool when working with images). After some time, I grew tired of having that useless button there and added support for it in XFree86 and Qt. I sent patches everywhere, but the XFree86 patch was sent when they were in a freeze and somehow they lost the patch. Anyway it was working for me so I didn't care much and just waited until I found that they added a patch to support wheel emulation done by another person that I never heard of (credits go to Henry T. So.) His patch was definitely his work since it was different from mine, not worse, not better, but different so I didn't have any problem with that (except for thinking about how many other patches were probably lost like mine). The only problem is that that patch didn't work, so I submitted a small fix and finally linux had working support for wheel emulation. Read More

Proof that finding useful stuff on the internet is much harder than it should be. This was found as a side link with a google search for "stroke matching"... |%..... |./U... +.....[ If I were a NetHack monster, I would be an umber hulk. I know where I'm going and will work through anything to get there, even if my methods sometimes appear confusing.Which NetHack Monster Are You? Read More

Today I published an article pointing to a KlamAV tutorial. I'm not sure how useful klamav is since e-mail viruses don't affect gun/linux but I think the claims that we do not get viruses are wrong. The other day I found my machine going sluggish and noticed that today my router had decided to forward incoming connections on port 22 to my laptop (I'd asked it to ages ago and it never worked at the time). I had an account on my laptop with username test and password also test that I had used at some point to check out what a first time user sees of Kubuntu. Some computer had ssh'ed into my laptop, checking for various common usernames and presumably accounts where the password is the same as the username and having succeeded to get into my computer it copied a program rootkit over to try and get root access meanwhile using my computer to portscan various IP ranges for other vulnerable computers running ssh. Self copying code doing malitious things, sounds like a virus to me.

Last week Cornelius blogged about having some D-BUS Fun using the Qt3 D-BUS bindings I had backported from Harald Fernengel's Qt4 bindings. Later that week an email conversation between Cornelius, Will Stephenson and myself resulted in the decision to put the bindings into KDE's SVN repository for shared development. They do now live here and eagerly await your contributions :) Read More

After spending some time with Inkscape I came up with a computerized version of our nice Akonadi architecture diagram. Inkscape is a great tool. It crashed once and I wasn't able to figure out how to put text on an arc path in a way that is also readable when the arc is upside down, but other than that I really enjoyed working with it. The concept of immediately applying all changes you do in dialogs to the document is much more intuitive than having a complex "ok, apply, cancel" mechanism. The context-sensitive hints about the meaning of mouse clicks or keyboard shortcuts in the statusbar also are really helpful. They remind me of a similar feature of XFig which still is my favorite vector drawing application. But I guess Inkscape is catching up. Read More

Hi, just now the first complete compile run of trunk/kdelibs/ finished using cmake as build system. :-)) Only minor things are still missing: khtml (gcc 3.2 is not able to compile it), install rules for headers, some configure checks are still missing. Read More

No I don't want to change it ... it's just that a little before xmas I was planning (and still planning to) to get a OpenDesktop Workstation ( http://www.pegasosppc.com/odw.php ) and I was talking with some of my friend in Quebec City who happens to be like me self employed computer consultants and they all told me that on a business level this purchase was bad and it will use a lot of my office (which is in a second room in my apartment) and that I won't be able to make anymoney with it ... Read More

I've got a bit of an unusual reason to blog today. My mom recently upgraded her machine to SuSE 10, being an avid KDE user, and now the driver for her pesky builtin USB wireless LAN card is not working anymore, which means she can't go online anymore, which sucks. Sound also seems to have broken in the upgrade, and the X-server only wants to start every 4th or so time. Sometimes it just freezes up completely, which I guess means some driver is borked. Unfortunately I'm on the other side of the country and can't log in remotely to fix things, what with the network being broken. So I'm wondering if there's anyone in the Saarbruecken, Germany area who either knows someone local to hire to come and fix it, or maybe even feels like helping out themselves, in exchange for my eternal gratitude and one of my dad's meals (he's an excellent cook, my old man). So, if you think you can help or know someone who could, please drop me an email at adam@kde.org. Thanks a lot. Read More

I found a sound clip. OGG. I wanted to listen to it. Just listen. So I clicked on it. KDE offered to open it with Kaffeine. I accepted Kaffeine started and promptly gave me an error dialog but no sound. Went back and chose another player from the context menu: amarok. amarok started, asked me 5 (five) almost identical question dialogs (sequentially!) but no sound. Back to the context menu and chose xmms. xmms started, gave an error dialog about sound card not being available but no sound. Back to the context menu, RealPlayer 10 was offered but I already lost interest. Copied the url of the sound bit, went to the konsole, wrote ogg123 and pasted the url then hit enter. Bam! Instant Sound. Trivially complex :-( Read More

It's the last day of the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam. Our fantastic organizing and press squad, Fab and Frank, have already spread the word. It has been a productive weekend. Lots of code got written. Armin and Tobias were busy with implementing out-of-process plugins for OpenSync which finally allows to seamlessly sync KDE and which also is needed for applications like the ones from the Mozilla family. I did some polishing on the GUI frontend side and implemented a first version of a D-BUS frontend for OpenSync. Read More