KDE Blogs 

I love interesting articles about the implications of global collaboration via the Internet, and what effect it will have on working patterns. So when I saw this article The Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper I thought it would be just up my street. But no! It's just a pile of utterly pretentious rubbish. I loved this destruction job on Slashdot. Read More

I've been meaning to add special Logitech mouse support to the mouse KCM for a long time, and I've finally gotten it done. If you have Wheel Mouse Optical, MouseMan Traveler, MouseMan Dual Optical, MX310 Optical Mouse, MX510 Optical Mouse, MX300 Optical Mouse, MX500 Optical Mouse, iFeel Mouse, Mouse Receiver, Dual Receiver, Cordless Freedom Optical, Cordless Elite Duo, MX700 Optical Mouse, Cordless Optical Trackman, Cordless MX Duo Receiver, MX1000 Laser Mouse or Receiver for Cordless Presenter, you should give it a try. It can give you the battery status and RF channel on cordless devices, and resolution switching on other devices. Read More

Today I chanced upon another feature where KDE leads, HTML access keys. a tags can (and should) have accesskey="x" elements. I used them in this website I made last year. Unfortunatly they are almost completely useless because you don't know they're there, that website has to mark them out with span tags and a stylesheet to underline them. Then you get the problem in Mozilla that if you make say 'f' as an access key you find your File menu becomes quite inaccessible. In Konqueror just press Control and the access keys available pop up as wee tooltips. Then press the key you want. Clever. Read More

I've no problem with multiple toolkits on Linux, but I really don't think there is any point in innovating on File Dialogs, or Button Orders. I don't care about whether the Gnome dialogs are better than the KDE ones. That stuff was done 20+ years ago, and anyone who thinks that designing a better File Dialog in 2004 is 'innovative' has lost the plot. So what gets up my nose somewhat is when a Gnome blogger just completely fails to acknowledge that KDE exists. Read More

I've been doing some work on the API doco, while I try to figure out what is going wrong with Linux hotplug support. API doco is pretty easy, but tedious work. Mostly I've just been doing cleanups, with a few new widget images. Unfortunately it takes a while for http://api.kde.org to catch up. Read More

Someone (I forgot who, sorry) asked on the kdepim mailing list for the To-do printout to optionally write the percentage completed. So I implemented that. While working on that new feature we discovered that there were two "ghosted" options on the To-do print dialog that were never implemented, namely the option to print only unfinished To-dos and the other to print To-dos within a range of due dates. So I implemented those as well. But then I thought why not give the user the ability to print the To-dos in different sort orders? Like by percentage complete or by due date? Plus, this gives me a kick to finally test and commit my Incidence sorting methods I discussed a few blogs back. So that's my current project. Which brings me to libkcal. And reminds me to nag the web admins to automagically post the KDEPIM Reference ('make apidox') on pim.kde.org. I discussed this in my previous blog. New Toy Alert! I just got a 160GB external USB hard drive. Now I can store lots of music (from my personal collection, of course) and pictures from my digital camera! That's all for now... Read More

Last night I watched a video of a talk from the Swiss Unix Users Conference on the Linux Standards Base. Their aim is to create a standard which binary programmes will just run on. Instead of creating a dozen packages for each distribution and each version of those distributions you can create one package (a subset of RPM so it can be converted with alien to .deb) which will run on any LSB 1.3 certified distribution. The way they are doing this is by specifying the filesystem hierarchy and the libraries. This is a middle ground between the API only standard that is POSIX and the One True Operating System standard which Bruce Perens first tried to make LSB into (SuSE and Red Hat didn't want to be told to just use Debian, he's still trying with UserLinux) and which there was a faltering attempt made by the proprietary Unix vendors called OSF1. Read More

Do you know KDEMail.net? It provides free email aliases in the form "firstname.lastname@kdemail.net" for KDE contributors and developers of KDE software, not necessarily in the main distribution, who are interested in a stable contact address to put as contact point into their work. Read More

I just committed the Qt Mozilla code. To start testing it you need to: checkout mozilla, configure with --enable-default-toolkit=qt, make and that's it. Please do not, I repeat do not send me wishes or bug reports just yet. I'll simply ignore it unless there's a patch attached to it. There are two basic issues which have to be fixed before I'll be taking any requests (1) the toolbar is waaay to tall, 2) updates aren't sometimes propagated correctly). Read More

Learned yesterday on IRC that people still think that the KDE Credits page is access restricted. That's wrong, everyone with a CVS account can update it (cvs co www/people/credits/). If you don't have an account read the paragraph at its bottom. Read More