KDE Blogs 

Uhm, yeah, random notes on my online life as of right now: Matthias Kretz and I had our KDE Multimedia Roadmap talk accepted for LinuxTag. He came over a yesterday and we spent some time today hashing out the outline for our paper and deciding who would write what. I've got 801 Tenor related things that I'm in the middle of, but the basic structures are pretty close to working properly. I really need to get around to doing a TagLib 1.4 release with the standard run of bug fixes beforehand. Michael (Pyne) seems to be back. Coolness. ;-) Like Boudewijn I've been messing around with painting lately. I'm much worse than him. It reminds me of when my college friend Ruth would come over and dye her hair in our bathroom. The whole bathroom was splashed with red crap, but her hair always came out exactly the same color as it was before she started. My painting is like that -- I've got a mess of champs, but my paintings are, well, just saying bad is kind. At any rate, it's fun getting a feel for the brushes, blending colors and whatnot. In other artistic endeavors I've taken to recording some of my improvisations on bass so that I can prove when I'm old that I once was actually good at the thing. I've decided to call them Memes for Bass and have been throwing them here. Seeing usability talked about so much on the Planet lately makes me happy. I'm in serious need of KExtendedDay lately. That will be all for now. Read More

Canllaith seems to start liking to fly gliders. Hey, I can certainly understand that! This experience is sooo just incredible.... feel how the air is able to carry the weight of your wooden (or plastic) bird... hear the wind's always present noises change with the flight state, mixing with the excited beep-beep-beep of the vario, once the pilot has successfully centered his circles in the thermal... get surprised by the centrifugal forces pressing you into your seat in tight curves... Hmmm, and feel your stomach and guts all at once jumping close to your throat, just because the pilot decided to be a little mean to his only passenger and do a sudden nose-dive. Read More

Today was my second glider flight. I try not to mention the first one. The discovery that I was lactose intolerant at 3000ft after drinking an inhabitual hot chocolate on my way to the airfield was fairly traumatic for both myself and the pilot. Read More

First all let me answer the question as to why I rarely release the code I have and when I do I usually stop maintaining it soon afterwards: when I hack, I do it for fun. There's no deep meaning behind me sitting in front of GNU/Emacs. It's just a challenge of creating something that was seemingly impossible that makes it fun. Once whatever I was hacking on is at the stage where it's working, the challenge is gone and hence it stops being fun. And if it stops being fun I move on. And yes it sucks because a lot of the things I worked on and made publicly available deserves better. Read More

Last week I went to Norway to do the paperwork and see the Trolltech office. I loved Oslo which bodes well for the next few months. I'm back in States but will be moving to Norway in the next few weeks. Read More

There's been lot of discussion on the XDG list about a proposal called 'DConf'. Unfortunately, it seems to me to have missed some rather important issues. The most obvious question in any sort of common configuration is system is 'What configuration can be shared?'. Read More

Here's an example of an easy and compact way to simuate the trinary operator in python. It is not short circuit like the one in C, but it is pretty simple: Read More

I'm too lazy to register to post comments, so I'll just go through Derek's post more or less point by point. This isn't tenor, I haven't looked at the code. Search and pattern matching is a fascinating intellectual exercise, and here is the product of my feeble ruminations. Read More

At the last aKademy the openusability website was demonstrated with the idea that usability experts (mostly people that do this for a living) will describe problems in open source projects with suggestions on how to fix them. Sounds great! There was one thing I found less then great; those poor usability experts had to write their report in an XML to make the website understand. Read More

A while ago I blogged my thoughts about future KDE releases. I promised to post the list of some of the things I have in mind for KDE 3.5 and 4.0. So here it comes. It's a long list and if I do it all myself it will keep me busy for years. So if you want to help or pick something up, please contact me, you are very welcome. Read More