KDE Blogs 

Filed against every single major web browser is the bug of "unicode blindness injection" security vulnerability. In short, Unicode letters can look the same as their ascii-equivalents, but lead to a different URL (thereby permitting man-in-the-middle attacks). My solution consists of verifying that unicode glyphs look different from ascii glyphs (yes, I like the word "glyph"). In my example screenshot, words in parentheses are entirely ascii, those preceding them have a "wrong letter:" Read More

I'm making plans to possibly move to Sydney sometime within the next few months. For those of you in the US, New Zealand is not a part of Australia, and I even need a passport to go there. It's not a huge move since the countries are so similar and I am actually Australian to start with, but moving country at the best of times is a Big Pain. Read More

I start with a little rant, because that's the category I have chosen for today's blog. You see, we have about 30 possible categories on this blog-site and yet I couldn't find one that is appropriate for the title... that was todays rant :-) Read More

If you want to learn something about developing software look at Jamie Zawinskis funny story about Hula. I know I'm not the first one to reference Jamies blog and I'm also not the first one to mention Hula, but I still have the hope that I will get a bunch of flowers and a voucher for three free downloads for being the one millionth. Other than that I'm serious, Jamie's lesson is one of the most focused contributions about software development I have ever read. Read More

Presenting KDE as an exhibitor at LWE is an interesting experience. I've learned a couple tricks that make things more interesting, both for me and for booth visitors: Keep the screens moving. We are using konq's autoscroll feature and Lubos is setting up a dcop script to set the anchor to the top every minute to keep it from scrolling to the bottom. Users think this is very cool and it is :) Don't just take questions to start. The booth visitors don't usually come to us with specific questions... rather, they want to see what is coming in the latest KDE. That is, if they are familiar with KDE (or Linux for that matter) at all. Along those lines, I'm ask booth visitors if they want to play a game of "Did you know KDE can do this?" Examples: Did you know KDE can select and copy text and images from KPDF? Did you know you can subscribe and read your news from with Kontact via our new RSS feed tool, akregator? Did you know Konq can autoscroll, letting you read your news while you drink your coffee? Did you know you can rip your audiocd in real time and across the network with simple drag'n drop from Konq? I think KPDF gets the biggest WOW factor. Several booth visitors have said that they were sold on KDE with just this feature alone. And then they donated, so they were apparently serious :) Generally, users like all of the new features and seem genuinely surprised and excited when presented with cool things they never knew existed had been in their KDE the whole time. Read More

Well, a few people have commented on Hula. I thought I might give it a try before commenting. So I downloaded it from the SVN repo. It uses autoconf and automake (yes there are some dependencies, but autoconf didn't complain so I didn't look that closely). Starts to build OK, but there are a few warnings about implicit declarations and using kernel headers. Eventually it gets to the linking part, and dies. Read More

I thought this was a brilliant blog by JWZ explaining how Netscape fell apart, and why writing 'corporate groupware' driven by specs from faceless managerial types is absolutely not the way to develop anything people would actually want. He was cautioning Nat Friedman about getting too excited about Novell's new Hula groupware. Read More

Last night I saw Nightwish and Tristania in Birmingham. Nightwish was absolutely spectacular and put on a great show! Tristania, the band I actually want to see was actually a disappointment. They seemed to forget how to play some of their older songs. They definitely are better mastered. Read More

Okay, so you are a happy customer with their shiny new Qt application. According to Trolltech now your application is portable. Then reality sets in and you find you are not much better off than before. Now most developers don't mind doing a win32 build and a OSX build, as well as a linux build. After all they are different operating systems... Read More

Finally. Now I can see Tristania. charles@pythagoras noatun $ cvs diff -N 2> /dev/null | wc -l 4763