KDE Blogs 

My laptop was Ryanaired. A new screen would be 500 quid so result was a new laptop (same trusty IBM Thinkpad r40e). Lessons: always carry your laptop as hand luggage on an aeroplane and always check your luggage before you leave the airport. Read More

Burritos are not Mexican food. ( I was crushed on this revelation ) "Ian" (e-in) is an insult in Spanish. ( J-Pablo taught me everything I know about the language ) The only words J-Pablo knows in English are "you f*cking bastard". ( There was some other grunting and mumbling but I was told this is normal for him ) There are no women in Chile, only llamas. ( I will never go to a porn site in .cl again ) Mexicans do not actually practice canabalism. ( I had to sort this one out for all my inbread friends in Texas ) Crossing the streets in Mexico is their solution to population control. ( It's like lemmings with people and busses man ) Duncan and J-Pablo can not sing along to "Guns and Roses". (I was told this was a form of Latin American torture.) HP has superior technology. ( At least when it comes to picking out their booth babes. ) Mr. Potato is the most popular application in México. ( I have no clue how this happened ) Tequila is better than llama piss (pisco). ( I think there is a connection here between this one and #4, but I will leave that as an exercise for the reader ) J-Pablo need to get more issues of linux journal. ( Either that or we need to stop drinking Nescafe ) Never steal j-Pablo's tacos. ( I have never seen someone get so upset over missing tacos, then again I think he was still drunk at the time ) Basicly this week has been quite a bit of fun. Here at the XpoLinux I had a choice of staying in a hotel, or staying with a host. I wanted to meet new people in Open Source so Duncan and I chose to stay with a host. So they put us up at a Gnome developer's house. Needless to say, we drank way to much, and had a blast. J-Pablo is a great host even if he sings badly. It was nice to see the OSS community in .mx growing. I think it is horribly underestimated by .us and the rest of the world. While they are no silicon valley, they do have a growing tech center in Monterrey. I think we also scored a few more Mexican developers and someone who will do a Latin American localization of KDE (something sorely needed). KDevelop was a wild success, and it made quite a powerful impression for people who think GUI programming is difficult. I blame Microsoft and Sun for this, but that is another story. At any rate there is an opportunity here, and I think KDE is going to be there. For the record there where no Gnomes, Dragons, or Llamas killed in the process of my educational experiance.

...today was a bit saddening; failing all of the hooplah of the last election, which doesn't seem likely at this point, it seems that we're looking at 4 more years of Bush and likely 4 more years of apologizing for my country. Time to get an hour or so of rest and then drag myself into work. Read More

It's a strange day in a strange world. But it's nice to see that the Linux desktop seems to be able to adapt to this strangeness by some means or other.

KDE needs to find ways to expose the many different KIO Slaves and their usefulness to more users' eyes. How about this: separate the protocol part from the host/path in the various addressing fields/location bars. turn the protocol part into an (editable) drop down list of available items. If we want it more fancy, we could just make it a little drop-down to the left of the address/location bar, and depending on the selection, it auto-fills 'http://', 'ftp://' or whatever into the lineedit field. And vice-versa: whatever you type in the line-edit as the protocol-part gets selected in the drop-down. This way users will become quickly aware of many more kio_slave options and start to play with them and also use them... This could be used in Konqui's location bar as well as in File Open dialogs of various applications. Here's a quick'n'dirty mockup: Read More

Since I've been doing fairly well at churning out flame-o-rific blog entries lately, I see no reason to deviate from this fine pattern, so here we go again. I should start with a quote from one of my favorite composers that I think is right on: Read More

My favourite little KDE gem of the week is kio_locate. Its maintainer, Armin has now added support for regular expressions and piping results through grep. This increases usefulness by at least a factor of 10... Ahhh -- you didn't know kio_locate at all up to now? Don't fear: until last Saturday not even distinguished KDE core hackers such as danimo did. After I showed it to him, he was sold. (In return, he promised to burn a CD with legal sound files for me to test the new amaroK with... danimo, I'm waiting.). Read More

We amaroK developers are now also blogging here. The blog is basically both for amaroK/multimedia development and personal stuff, which we figure is too narrow in scope to post on kdevelopers.org. Read More

Some thoughts about "the competition": Nah... I like KDE and I enjoy developing for it. Thank goodness we have choices. Some recent PIM accomplishments: I wrote (not really, I took the To-do plugin and hacked on it for a couple of hours) a Journal plugin for Kontact. You'll find it in the development code. Finally committed all my Incidence sorting methods into libkcal. Yeah! That code has been sitting in my local sandbox for months. I really want to get to back to work on my "Special Dates" summary plugin for Kontact. This thing will display holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, special occassions, in the Kontact summary. I hope it will make the Addressbook summary obsolete. ...and KonsoleKalendar is in a bad way in CVS right now. drat. Until next time....

I swear, if I hear this or "Linux is about choice" or "Open Source / Free Software is about choice" or "My life sized Richard Stallman blowup doll is about choice" one more time, somebody's gonna get an ass kicking. People, let's step back and look at the absurdity of this statement. Read More