KDE Blogs 

This friday I went to the meeting of SUSE beta testers to the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg. The travel went pretty smooth and so I soon checked in and arrived in a meeting room with all the other testers. We got a nice introduction to the openSUSE project, covering the past, the status quo as well as future plans. Greg from Novell as well as Adrian, Sonja and Andreas from SUSE gave me a good feeling about the project's future. Read More

I've recently been making some rubbish attempts at fixing a bug in the QtJava bindings. The problem is here in bug #112409, it meant that an event handler method in QtJava could only be a direct subclass of a QtJava widget, like QWidget or whatever and not a sub class of a sub class of QWidget and so on. To fix it involved using java reflection to look for any overriden event methods in the java superclasses by writing a loop to go up the class heirarchy. Please laugh at my comments as I continually screw up on the commit :). Read More

Ok, finally back at home. Pheeew. Over the last days I played with the Nullsoft scriptable installer system (NSIS) which allows for creating comfortable installation routines based on a description file. It's pretty scriptable and gives nice results. Together with Ralf Habakers recent efforts to port KDE to Win32 with MinGW, the GCC for Windows port, it looks like installing KDE 4 applications with Scons/bksys could be both pretty flexible for us and simple for the user (unlike developing on windows for developers without MSVC, but I will comment on that in a later article). Read More

At aKademy, Frank performed a live usability test with Thomas Nagy's kdissert, a powerful mindmapping tool for building texts. I extended the usability test a bit and used kdissert myself to summarise the results. This is an extract of the mindmap: Read More

The Kubuntu Release Candidate won't be available tonight (unless you know the right IP address) due to problems with syncing with the mirrors. Well done to ArkLinux for getting theirs out though. Mañana as we say in Malaga.

Dave Thomas, the Pragmatic Programmer, made a recent announcement on ruby-talk about a new book by Caleb Tennis called 'Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby'. It is about 90 pages long and costs only $8.50 for a personalised pdf version. The idea of the 'Friday' small book series is something to try out on Friday afternoons. Congratulations to Caleb for getting the book out! Why not try out some QtRuby programming one Friday? The book will help you get going, and anything that helps lower the barrier to entry for Qt/KDE programming is great news. Read More

I hope someone could be interested in implementing semantic browser widget for KDE4 while playing with Qt4 drawing features... For example, similar to news.com's News Plasma. Quite suitable complement for KDE4's search engines. Read More

Last weekend, in a pub with some friends,we started to talk about aliens abductions and we weren't able to understand why an advanced race able of travelling between the stars will come here to do anal probes ... Read More

Last week I had the privilage of meeting Ariya at ScotLUG. I introduced him to Irn-Bru and we discussed Speedcrunch, KSpread, Kubuntu and his top secret project (he didn't let on what it was). Read More

The sun eclipse was also visible from Romania, altough it was not that spectacular. In 1999 was a full eclipse that I was supposed to see from the mountains, but minutes before the eclipse started, the sky was filled by clouds and some minutes after it ended, it cleared up. Go figure. ;-) Now it was cloudy, but cleared up before the eclipse started. I made some digital and non-digital photos. They are not so spectacular as the sone shined quite bright (you couldn't notice the eclipse from the amount of light if you did not know about), and I don't want to become blind, so I used a filtering material to make the photos. This way only the sun and the moon is visible. A picture can be seen here.