KDE Blogs 

I spent a few hours yesterday finally implementing something I've been meaning to do for a long while. Basically since I switched from mutt years ago. You can now assign shortcuts to folders, which means when I hit Alt-I KMail now selects my Inbox. Rather convenient if you have many folders and visit some of them regularly. Of course it also opens subtrees and moves the viewport so the selected folder is visible. After using it for half a day today I really would not want to miss it again, so I imagine a few folks out there will like it as well. :) You can also put the actions on your toolbar, but that is currently not remembered across restarts. I'll fix that and maybe also make a "Favorites" menu which lists them, which I know people have also requested. Feels good to actually scratch your own itch again, for a change, instead of taking care of other people's gripes. On a related note I gave in and actually read many of the /. comments on the eweek KDE/Gnome comparison and was really positively surprised to see that the vast majority of comments was very appreciative of KMail and Kontact. People do seem to like it after all. Nice. Read More

I went to University and found the experience really useful even if most of what I learned was outside the lectures. The first semester was HTML, and out of date HTML at that. But after that we started with Java programming which gave me the theoretical knowledge to be able to pick up a hefty C++ book and learn that quickly enough. University might not teach you the direct skills you want but instead should give you the theory to be able to learn whichever branch of computing you find interesting, as well as the resources (mmm, big libraries and fast internet) to be able to do your own learning. It does mean however that you have to be prepared to work self motivated, most people on my course weren't which is why out of a year of 50 there's only 1 I can think of who is a better programmer than me. (And I'm not a great programmer, out in the real world there are suddenly many much better programmers, I'm always in awe at most of the KDE contributers.) Read More

KDE will be present at Berlinux 2004 in two weeks and I'm busy with several preparations for that. There will be several mostly German talks, including some prominent names likes Georg Greve and Jon 'Maddog' Hall, and I should be a bit prepared for my talk about KDE being qualified as enterprise desktop: Kurt provided me with an account for his NX demo server. I made a small deal with SUSE to be able to show the newest version which includes among other things OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 with KDE file dialog integration. Now I have to bug Zack, who finally got his Mozilla CVS account, to create instructions how to build Mozilla/Qt and the Gecko kpart. :-) Read More

Chris Howells talks about how the computer science tutor on his new course made an unpromising start by asking "Has everybody used a computer before?". Finding someone aged under 25 in the UK who hasn't used a computer before must take some doing. Read More

So they say necessity is the mother of all invention... personally I tend to believe its the affections of a woman ;) Basicly it started last week, my wife is working on her masters in EE, and found out that the lab at work didn't have Matlab installed for his DSP class. So I told her about GNU Octave http://www.octave.org and she was for the most part thrilled. Read More

Chris Howells posted a synopsis of his CS syllabus, and it sounded really dull to me. If someone has been making useful contributions to KDE like Chris, what is it that they need to learn from their teachers? ie what about the teacher who asked the question "who has used a computer before?". Read More

Most KDE users probably know what pressing ALT and F2 does, it's opening the "Run Command" dialog. But did you also know that this little dialog can do magic? Try "2+2 ", try "schumacher@kde.org", try "www.kde.org", try "help", try "logout", "gg:sin 5 ", "leo:warzenschwein" or "ggi:warthog". Read More

I'm not sure what the definition of enterprise is, it sounds a lot like a meaningless buzzword to me, but I suspect that what I saw last Friday comes into the category of enterprise. I was invited to visit the finishing touches being put to the nice new building below and more importantly their new computer system which uses KDE on the desktop. There will be about 250 users moving in this week and so far they love it. There has been only one person complaining, he can't move the icons on the desktop. That would be Kiosk. Read More

Today I was told by a friend that minicli contains a... calculator. Just press Alt+F2 and type e.g. 23-5. Then press enter. Seems like there were alterantives to kcalc that predate the current calcualtor war. Now: anyone willing to implement a solver for differential equations? ;-) Read More

Everything is set up for the expo tomorrow. Matthias Ettrich will be there, which will be groovy. There are piles of leaflets to give away. We will have news of a 250 (going up to 1000) machine deployment of KDE. We have lots of shiny computers on which to demo KDE. I even helped to contrust the dreaded Debian shelves of doom. Read More