KDE Blogs 

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.

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

Lots of programs in and out of KDE suffer from a condition that I call software arrogance. Consistently, I find such applications completely unusable and thus refuse to use them. Software arrogance is when a program feels it is more important than its user's document. How is it that a program is written such that the user may feel that the importance of the application is greater than of eir document? First of all, the document has what is seemingly a minor role in comparison to its container. This is obviously apparent in MDI (window-in-window) applications like KDevelop in which you can minimise source windows. What? Why would you want to minimize the source code window but still have visible all the tools for editing the source code? It is reasonable to want to show two at a time, and to hide one while looking at another. Then lots of horrible user interface restrictions become apparent as a result of the two documents becoming inseparable from the other. You can't move one of the documents to another virtual desktop, the taskbar becomes meaningless, and, like KDevelop and Microsoft's Visual Studio, your application uses valuable real estate like Starbucks. Now, some of you may say that you like this window-in-a-window thing because logically, when you use KDevelop, you aren't editing just a source file, but you're editing your entire project, and each window of source code you're editing is fundamentally linked in that regards. So, I ask, what really is the document? Is the document the project, or is it the source window? Hopefully, at this point in my rant, you'll agree that both are the document. However, KDevelop (and for that matter, Kate) don't treat the project as the document, they just treat the source code as the document, and then add a few tools to manage the project (almost like an afterthought). Take a look at this screenshot of Kate, and let's look over some of the silly things in it. Read More

I'm currently doing some research focused on marketing and promotion for a KDE related project, and I'd really love it if people reading this could help me out. I'm looking for the opinions of primarily windows and apple users who have switched to using KDE on UNIX-like platforms. There are two main points I'd like to collect data about: Read More

Sad news today, but... Matt, just thanks for all your contributions in Kopete. You dude rock. I hope to see you in Akademy. Good luck in your new projects! We will miss you a lot.

KDE developers: If you ever log off from your current KDE-3.4cvs session, think again! Couldn't you keep it running? For Konqui's sake? Because if you really log off, you'll bring Konqui into big danger. He is about to take a nap on a crescent moon. But the poor guy will be falling off the first moment his sleep will be deep enough! The reason: Konqui has a rest position that is completely unbalanced. He is starting to pass into napping mode high up there with not even the slightest natural equilibrium! Ever since I have this logout pic, I never dared to actually complete a logout – I always was forced to cancel it due to my deep concern for his enduring health. To make Konqui safe (and let me logout and sleep well again), the dangling leg and the dangling tail should hang down on different sides of the crescent, no? So anytime he could start loosing balance towards one side, a small lever-increasing, even sub-conscious movement of the limbs on the opposite side would easily restore equilibrance…. Take a look at any breed of cats of prey: all those who can climb and sleep in trees disollows its juniors to let hang down all dangling limbs on the same side of the bough! ;-P Cheers, Kurt P.S.: Oh, and please dont start explaining to me “Konqui is a Dragon, and dragons can fly!

I was talking Ian Geiser last night on IRC about ways to allow you to dynamically query KParts for their interfaces. This would for example allow you to avoid having to link special interface classes, or to use marker classes to identify your capabilities. Read More

I've been fortunate enough to get my hands on a replacement laptop thanks to someone who has now secured my life-long adoration. My venerable dell latitude csx that has served me for much of the last year has been acting up lately eating up batteries and having the charger malfunction. Not very good and rather frustrating. Read More

We lost the dot/wiki host for the week-end thanks to the software wonder called Zope, so let me tell you for the case you don't know already that KDE 3.4 Release Candidate 1 was released. I updated my small Klax Live-CD and also Konstruct so there will be hopefully someone testing it and reporting showstoppers. And no, not all known bugs will be fixed before the final release. Update: OSDir.com is the first to have screenshots of KDE 3.4 RC 1. Read More