KDE Blogs 

With IBM selling their Thinkpad division I have to wonder what the best type of laptop to get once my current Thinkpad goes the way of its predecessors (stolen, destroyed by aeroplane cargo men etc). Fortunately Betty bought me this laptop as a birthday present at the weekend for 50p down the market, I'm fairly confident it will last for years. It even beeps which means its a real laptop. Read More

I'm not going to argue the morality of DRM - others have done that, and another opinion won't really change anything. However those arguing against the specific changes made to KPDF by the authors might like to consider that Adobe owns the PDF specification, and claims ownership of the datastructures and operators defined in that spec. The copyright permission is conditional on making "reasonable efforts" to implement the restrictions (see the PDF specification, Version 1.5, section 1.4 for the condition and Table 3.20 for the specific restrictions). Read More

By now there's quite the debate (aseigo, tsdgeos) regarding the implementation of DRM in KPDF. Rather then getting a Blogger account (ahem), I'll post here, where I already have an account. Read More

Found on Planet GNOME: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 123. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you. The result: "To a novelist, there is no such thing as a 'good' sentence.". Can you guess, which book this was?

We're reaching a milestone in KDE development: within the next few days, we'll hit Bug #100000 in bugs.kde.org. So, I have taken the liberty of opening a poll on when the bug will hit the database. What do you think? Read More

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