KDE Blogs 

So about 3 months ago I took a survey of some of the projects I have been using meta-programming techniques with and decided on two basic things: a) Meta-programming can make tedious error prone development faster, easier and more reliable. b) Maintaining meta-programming tools is not fun. I have 2 KDE projects Krafty and makekdewidgets, that both extensively simplify building a component via a processed template. They are awesome tools, and makekdewidets is so flexable it will even work with Qt only widgets. The problem is maintaining these tools is a liability. Maintaining code within code is nightmarishly complex, and involves quite a bit of madness with copying and pasting in and out of test programs. Worse, it seems that over time the code just flat out gets harder to read and organize. The other issue is the matter of input files. Believe it or not XML is not always the best solution, and same goes for flat csv files, or INI files. I also have yet to meet anyone who recreationally programs in lex and yacc so custom parsers are even more painful. Cornelius Schumacher has done some interesting stuff wrt to KConfigXT and meta-programming, as has Rich Moore in using XSLT to generate bindings for KJSEmbed. I quickly grew tired of XSLT though, its constant brain damages, and completely bizzare constructs made the templates as hard to maintain as just embedding code in C++. Also its reliance on using a xml file for input killed its usefulness for things like makekdewidgets or krafty. So with that in mind I have been trying to explore a tool that can solve my big problems: Read More

I've finally started work on the special support for Logitech mice (eg 400cpi/800cpi switching, wireless status reporting). I'm integrating it into the Mouse KCM (kdebase/kcontrol/input), with a conditional build on libusb. Read More

There are some days when one shouldn't touch a computer keyboard. Today must be one of those days. But we'll never learn, and we'll keep doing these stupid things once, and again, and again. It must be Murphy who probably wrote: Read More

Lately I didn't have too much spare time, but I've been working a little bit on the Qt Mozilla port yesterday and today. I finally figured out why we've been getting paint event storms but I haven't yet implemented it as it's a fundemental flaw in the way I wrote nsCommonWidget. I'm still waiting for a super-review to get CVS write access on mozilla.org to commit this stuff. Hopefully it's going to happen over the weekend. Also hopefully by then I'll have the paint event storms and offset bug in the toolbar fixed. Read More

Michael writes more about ruby blocks: What I have yet to do, however, is find a way to get braces to work with if, while, or other flow-control type statements. For example, the program yes implemented in Ruby: Read More

Michael Pyne is learning ruby. Call me stubborn, but I am so used to { and } for forming blocks of code that I don't even want to go back to anything else. Python neatly sidesteps the problem by not having keywords for this sort of thing. Although I'm not fond of using indentation for creating blocks, that at least works with my programming style. Read More

This weekend after wanting to have one for about a year, I finally got a laptop (iBook G4 12"). and my first reaction is WOW what a nice piece of hardware... after playing with macosx for about 45 minutes, the call of Linux was starting to be too strong ... Read More

I'm not one of those guys that promises their girl friends to not touch the computer when on vacation, but sure I promised to do only fun things :) I had two projects I took with my laptop (that I take with me for photographic reasons - in case you wonder): clucene to write kugle and unsermake. As writing kugle without internet and chat is boring, I decided I go for unsermake. Read More

You sure have been wondering why we integrated the google search bar and why we "secretly" developed gecKo. The reason is simple: We are after you. Flee, but mind you: you can run, but you can't hide! insert-evil-and-deep-laughter-here Read on to learn about all the evil details... Ok, and now for the serious part of this entry: Some facts about the evil "Google Plugin": Read More

With the help of other pim developers, I updated the kdepim tasks page. The kdepim tasks page was a very useful tool during the last release cycle, and is already helping the kdepim quality team and eventual newcomers to quickly see what needs to be done. Yes, we have a strong kdepim quality team, I am glad to say it. There are several people working on different areas of the pim applications, including the docs, websites, etc... who work silently, and are not explicitely involved with the quality team. However, at leat two guys, (me and Antonio Salazar), are already jumping in when needed. Antonio worked on Kontact docs during the last release cycle, and is working with KOrganizer whatsthis and hopefully with the docs too, and I wrote KPilot docs and whats this back then, and will do whatever is needed for this cycle (I did not decide yet). Some others started helping out in the last release cycle and submitted smaller contributions, and I hope to hear from them again (Hi Ramon and Jörg, how are you doing?). This effort started with the quality team annoncement six months ago. Unfortunately, it seems that other modules did not have the same results as we did. My email to the quality list about the announcement for this release cycle got no response. I offered help: "If you want to create or update your page to the next release cycle, I can help! Just drop me a line.". Nobody asked (yet). So if you think the tasks pages are a good idea, and you want to participate in the new release tasks annoncement, please drop me a line, or if you don't, I will go with with kdepim only. Read More