KDE Blogs 

I figured that now was as good a time as any to jump on the blogwagon. My timing couldn't be worse though, everything is happening at the same time: New house! Got the keys this week. It's new as in "just been built" and hence is certainly not ready to move into. The whole inside needs to be finished off over the course of the next month (read: painting, light fittings etc and most importantly: deciding network topology and pulling Cat5 through walls :-) ). oh, something also needs to be done with the matching sandpits at the front and back of the house. Bought an Athlon64 3000+ CPU, motherboard and 512Mb RAM for €229, new of course. An impulse buy really. I was kind of planning to buy some hardware after house was ready but just couldn't help myself when I saw this advertised. Mind you I'm now running on an underclocked Athlon 1600 (~1300 stooopid motherboard) which I got off e-bay. Don't really know when I'm going to get a chance to install it in place of the P2. Pushed out version 0.3.0 of PyKDE Extensions. It is software for supporting the creation of KDE programs using Python. Adds things like build and installation system, i18n support, application templates, better Qt-Designer integration and now support for writing KControl modules. (Just added in 0.2.0). Trying to work on Guidance when I can, or at least trying to make sure that Sebas can work on it, since he's got the time right now. The good news is that in July I should have plenty of time for things.

While preparing for my talk on KDE commandline scripting I discovered a couple of new commandline clients. So afterwards I continued to look for possibilities of accessing KDE from the commandline. After a while I thought it would be nice if one could access the KDE addressbook like konsolekalendar allows to access KOrganizer's data. Read More

Rich Burridge talks about how he first started working in the computer industry 30 years ago for ICL computers. Hey! That rings a bell, I started my first programming job in 1978 as a graduate trainee in the Advanced Systems Sector of Dataskil, which was a software house subsiduary of ICL in Reading. Read More

One of interesting proposals published in Technical Report 1, a specification for new functionality being added to C++'s standard library, is the Polymorphic Function Object Wrapper. Having that, QObject can just keep a list of function objects, aka signals connected to a slot. Hmm, perhaps a new C++ feature set will be implemented in all major compilers before Qt5?

There is the myth that using C++ per se makes applications and libraries slow and bloated. Avoiding bloat is of special importance for embedded devices, which usually have limited amounts of CPU power and memory. On www.linuxdevices.com I found a short article on this topic: C vs. C++ on Embedded Devices. Let's get down to the statements being made there: Read More

Finally, DCOP Client/Server implementation for win32 found its way to KDElibs, thanks to great contribution from Andreas Roth (aroth at arsoft-online . com). On the screenshot: 'testdcop' application communicating with dcopserver. Read More

... my first blog entry. Well, beginning, judging by the age of the 'blog' concept it's probably closer to the end of times, but hey, I needed a catchy title :) Now, why do I want to add yet another blog to the growing collection? Do I have anything of value to add? Until now I've never seen a good reason to blog. Two years ago all I did for KDE was doing the grunt library work of Kopete. Important stuff, and a pretty cool way to experience yourself in API design and code cleanup/refactoring, but rather boring for the general public, definitely not blog-worthy. The last year for me was even worse, a job that was stressful and getting more and more on my nerves, so I was too tired at home to get much KDE stuff done, if anything at all. Times seem to have changed. Last month I started my new job, and I have a lot more energy than I've had in a long time. Still, my personal pleasure doesn't warrant a blog, so why the heck is this guy blogging? Well, recently I have become a lot more active within KDE again, with subjects that are a lot more suitable for a blog. For this first blog entry just some one-line teasers of stuff that I expect to be blogging about the coming weeks: Read More

Today, I managed to get M2, a project I'm working on since november (not every day I also spent my time searching for a new job, a new gf, getting drunk and stuff like that) , at a nice level of usefulness for me. So if I don't get bored while working on it, I might decide to release it in the next few months ... Don't ask what it is, you will see when it's done, if ever it gets "finished" Read More

Here's a blast from the past - I just found this on an old backup disk. It's a prolog interpreter in Objective-C that I wrote in 1993. I was unemployed and bought a NeXSTation with the small amount of redundancy money I got after the company I worked went bust.. as they do ho, hum.. But I subsequently presented it to a company short of a NeXTSTEP programmer, and got a job. So it has great 'sentimental value' I suppose. Welcome to the world of proof trees, WAM interpreters, backtracking, and other strange long forgotten stuff! What about a google summer of coding idea for porting this engine to ruby with a Korundum front end? This code is available under a 'do what the hell you like with it' license :)

Over a week ago we had the pim meeting in Achtmaal, which was a big success. From my perspective it was mostly because of meeting all those new kdepim people in real life for the first time. Read More