KDE Blogs 

Finally, something worth blogging in KStars-land: The Object Details window is getting a facelift. Before and after: The layout is much less cluttered, and all of the data fields now use kde:KActiveLabel, so the text can be copy/pasted with the mouse. Best of all, there's now a user-customizable thumbnail image of the object. If you click on the image, the following tool opens: Read More

Please, raise your hand if you'd like: Color syntax highlighting in KDevelop's code completion? Icons in the entry list corresponding to the entry type ... ctor, dtor, method, member, etc, etc? Some sorting by entry type so all ctor's come first, dtor's next, etc, etc? The ability to specify what parts of the entry are "completeable" eg, if I'm completing a method decl I don't necessarily want to key the return type? If so, then the following changes will need to be made to KTE Completion interfaces: Read More

In France you can get prosecuted for reporting security problems. I think this is a good approach to security. After all, recent studies funded by Microsoft have shown that Microsoft Windows is more secure than Linux because Linux had more security patches applied. It is obvious then that we can improve security on the Linux platform enormously by actively discouraging people to report security issues. This will result in less security patches and thus a more secure computing environment. It will also give us more time to work on fun stuff. Read More

Matt and I are doing a little retouch of KDevelop's code completion. First, on Sunday, Matt made a change which prompts KDevelop to complete much more often than in the past. Before, KDevelop would only complete when it received a textChanged signal from KTextEditor and the current chars were "." or "->" or "::" ... Now, completions are computed for all chars that are not whitespace or empty. Read More

As a follow-up to my last blog, here comes some detail about how to use KNewStuffSecure in your application. Shortly again, the idea behind it is to provide a way to upload and download digitaly signed resources, thus making it possible for the user to check the real source as well as the integrity of the downloaded resources on one side, and on the other side it allows automatization for processing the uploaded resources on the server side. Read More

... if you ever existed. Today, Denmark failed in its attempt to stop Software Patents from being passed through the EU Council. There is IMHO little hope that the second reading of the parliament will make a difference. Other people keep stating that they are ashamed to live in the European Union. I think I have a feeling that is worse: I am scared. Read More

The day that I feared the most is near. The day were my use of linux will be decided by marketing drones but this time they are not force feeding me proven technology but unproven ones and for what? Symply for the sake of interoperability between Gnome and KDE and also probably others Desktop. Well it's a noble goal but why using an unproven technology instead of taking an existing one that works which might only need some fixes and adapt it to satisfy the need of everybody? Read More

Some minutes ago a mail from Ian landed in my Inbox, where he asks if I would blog or write a "short one paragraph snippet" on how KNewStuff is used in Quanta. I don't really get where should I write that paragraph, that I can certainly blog here. :-) Anyway, my PC is doing some video encoding using the nice DVD Rip-O-Matic application written in Kommander, so I have some free time. I have no idea if this will show up on planetkde.org or not though. Now back to the topic. Quanta was already extensible with user defined toolbars, actions, documentation, script, templates and DTEP packages describing languages. It was a natural step to provide an interface from within the application so users can get the latest add-on packages, instead of needing to go to the website and download from there. To be honest, until now only some documentation packages were available for download, but now that the download is integrated we might get rid of some heavy DTEP packages that are shipped with Quanta and offer the rest as an add-on. It was also possible to send such packages in email, but this is also of limited use if you want to contribute back easily to the community. Due to the nature of packages, especially for scripts and toolbars getting new resources can pose a potential security problem, as they contain executable code, and nobody wants to run locally a script that deletes your home directory. Our solution was to use digital signing and md5sum verification. An innovative idea, isn't it? ;-) For this first I locally extended KNewStuff to support verification of the downloaded resources. The user is always warned about who created the resource and can decide to install it or not. If (signature of) the one who created is trusted, only an information dialog is shown. This doesn't rule out the possibility of user error and from this the local data stealing or corruption, the responsibility is completely the user's. The "secured" KNewStuff (KNewStuffSecure) code was contributed back to main KDE libraries and now it is available in 3.4.0, so other applications can use it as well. I tried to make it as easily usable as I could, the only thing that one must understand is how a secured resource looks like: a gziped tarball which has a gziped tarball (the real resource), a signature and an md5sum file. Luckily there is also code to create such secure resources. And this is the second step (and maybe the more important one) regarding KNewStuff usage. I think it's great to provide add-ons, but it's even better if those add-ons come from the users. With the upload feature they can easily share their toolbars, templates and whatever with the rest of the world. And here comes the "todo" part which we want to do on the server side (hopefully for will be ready around 3.4.0 is released, or shortly after), where the newstuff resources are uploaded and are provided for download. We want to set up some scripts on the site so whenever somebody uploads a resource it is handled either automatically (and provided for immediate download) or it's put in a review queue. The decision is again made based on (surprise) the signature of the uploader. If we (the Quanta team) trust him/her and he/she provided good resources it can be a trusted uploader and his work will be offered for download immediately. Resources uploaded by not trusted users are reviewed first and the reviewer can decide if it is accepted or not. So this is the short story. Ian, if you wanted a more technical description (maybe about the KNewStuffSecure), I can write one as well. Read More

Apparently, I am a DYO--Dark Dry Offbeat. This makes me a Neurotic. I believe it. The complete analysis was head-on, in my opinion, but that might just be the result of Confirmation bias (the tendency to see accuracy in astrology, for example). Read More

There are few certainties in life (death/taxes) and less in software, but if I were to nominate two they would be: MDI is here to stay. Some will always hate MDI. Let's face it, it make to much sense in many cases to not have an MDI interface. Look at our users love affair with Konq's tabs for instance. KSirc's IRC tabs, Konsole's session tabs, aKregator's KHTML part tabs, on and on... users would kill if these were done away with. Hell, I recently was checking out Kopete's IRC protocal handler and decided it was a non starter because it didn't offer to manage all of my IRC channels in one window. Read More