KDE Blogs 

I've just posted this as a 'Story', but I think it's more of a blog. So please take down the story, or I launch my assault.. :) I've read recent news that Fidel Castro is getting very old, and has broken his arm, that's sad because he is one of my great heroes. Up there with Hank Williams or Alan Kay.. I went on a 'Marxism Today' study trip to Cuba in 1988 and came away awe inspired by what those revolutionaries had achieved in the 1950's. Although I'm not personally a Marxist, just a 'free thinker', and I had no personal axe to grind on whether the revolutionaries and their cause was right or wrong. But if you study the history of Cuba you will find many parallels with more modern liberation movements such as the Vietcong or the emerging resistance in Iraq. The defining moment of the Cuban revolution was the assault on the Moncada barracks on July 26th 1953. Fidel and a small number of fellow revolutionaries holed up on Siboney Farm outside Santiago de Cuba to plan the assault. Shortly before the operation they gathered about a 100 young people there who didn't really know what they were in for. They just 'wanted to do something'. The actual event was pretty much a failure, just a bunch of students without much military trainging shooting holes in the walls. Afterwards a large number of them were tortured and killed. But their moral position was so strong that the government couldn't execute Fidel, and they put him in jail where he wrote 'History Will Absolve Me' - a brilliant pre-communist revolutionary tract. Read More

I used to be the editor of KDE Traffic. Unfortunately, I'm having almost no free time, and working on it requires a lot of time. Besides it I also work on Ark and KEduca (that taking much of my time), on content for a Brazilian KDE site, and I stay in school for 12 hours a day. Read More

Okay so now I have the octave console done, and now I am working on getting a nice GUI around the plotting stuff.... Well it seems the authors of GNUPlot are better at making graphs than writing code... Read More

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...

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