KDE Blogs 

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...

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

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.

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