KDE Blogs 

Hm. So clee tells me the world wants to read my thoughts on KDE development. The thing is, I usually don't bother with thoughts of my own, I mostly just ask Zack, or David. :) Ok, I have one thought: It seems the progress handling infrastructure and dialogs David and I did for KMail are being adopted by some of the other pim apps, namely KOrganizer and KAddressbook, which is nice, because it means we can now show cross application progress info in Kontact, for example. If you are in the mail part and KOrganizer starts downloading calender data, you'll be able to see the progres of that as if it was an operation performed by KMail. Spiffy. Zack is using it in KConfigEditor as well now, apparently, so once 3.3 is out the door I'll likely add a few missing features and make it a bit more generic so it can go into kdelibs. KMail seems in pretty good shape for the release already, stable and all, so hopefully we'll be able to incorporate some of the usability input from the fine folks at OpenUsability.org and fix some of the remaining annoyances before the release as well. clee, is that enough thoughts for now? Read More

Someone a few days ago on IRC asked me about creating kde:KSystemTray apps with KJSEmbed. So I dug into it and found out how cool it really is... It seems there are two parts to building scripts that use the system tray. The first part is the tray itself. This is pretty easy to create you just new it, set the icon, and show it Example: var tray = new KSystemTray( this ); tray.setPixmap( StdIcons.SmallIcon( "news_subscribe" ) ); tray.show(); application.exec(); Read More

So it seemed like a good idea 3 months ago. We needed a utility that would create Palm data files, and embed images in them. We had a java pdb generator already so we figured hey, parse in the data file and images and we are home free. Sounds simple right? WONG! Read More

Since I am somewhat new to C# and .net I decided to follow up on a thread I had read on Joel On Software about the new <a href="http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/">Microsoft Visual Studio Express</a> product line which is targeted at enthusiasts and hobbyists. So I went, and sure enough, Visual C# Express Beta was a free download, and only 50mb. Note that they require that you give them a valid email address, and also, from what I've read, the evaulation expires next year. Read More

JuK Well, there are a number of new recent things in the JuK world. A couple weeks ago I finished a major rewrite of a lot of the internal components that's made a lot of things easier, plus it makes working with the code a lot more sane. I completely refactored some of the older classes, moved more towards some stripped down interfaces for use in internal APIs and other goodness. Read More

Although GUADEC ends tomorrow, I and Waldo are unfortunately leaving tonight. It was a fun time and I'd like thank GNOME's for the last few days. Thank you! Most of all I'd like to sincerely thank Nat Friedman and David Neary. I arrived a day early so my hotel room wasn't ready and Nat basically adopted me ;) for the night and gave me a place to sleep at his room, while Dave took care of my bags. So, yeah, I really appreciate it guys! Read More

Well, after basicly 3 weeks of hounding from chris i got the server upgraded. To my utter shock and surprise drupal radically changed their plug-ins and themes. This blew about 9 hours porting as many of them to the new api as i could. I still don't have the members page working because they hid most of the information in random places in the database... maybe ill get that finished this week here. i was happy to get debain installed though. Now at least I can get software updates for the server again, also it freed up about 2gigs of space. SuSE may be easier to use, but what do those 2.5 gigs of rpms do on the server? Oh well so is life i guess.... N-joy the new server, i'm going to get some sleep :) Read More

A few minutes ago, I was thinking that kjsembed is picking up users less quickly than I would have expected (given how easy it is to use). In the short time between then and now I've found out about two people/projects using it that I wasn't aware of, which has cheered me up. The first is the Kalyxo project which is aiming to improve KDE/Debian integration. It seems they're using it to write a gui for building Debian packages. Apparantly they're missing support for Process which isn't in the 3.2 release, making me very tempted to make an interim release of KJSEmbed available. The version in HEAD has much more power than the previous release, and as far as I'm aware has no particular 3.3 dependencies. The second thing I found was a blog entry on PlanetKDE from Sandro Giessl where he talked about a script he's written in kjsembed that lets you get the pronunciation for words from the webster online dictionary. The script is pretty neat and makes good use of the features of KJSEmbed: loading guis from .ui files, embedding KParts and support for KIO::NetAccess. The fact he found it pretty easy to use is a good sign too. I wonder if we should have some sort of website to which people can upload useful scripts they've written, maybe a section of KDE-apps.org or something? Anyway, it's nice to know that people are finding this code useful, and it encourages me to continue working on it. So, if you're doing something with kjsembed, even if it's just quick hacks etc. please let me know! Read More

Last Wednesday I had the idea to install SUSE 9.1 on my machine. Though not SUSE's fault, it sure was the most unpleasant experience since a long time (wrt computers, that is). Apparently, because of the Novell takeover, the SUSE distribution (the physical shipping of stuff) is a bit of a mess. As such I'm waiting for over 4 weeks or so to receive the package on my work, but being eager to see what's in this new distribution I decided to use some copies of the CD's from my uncle and went ahead installing. That is, after I made some tarballs of important stuff and put them on my second HD. During the initial booting of the CD's I noticed the CD worked somewhat slow, the drive was spinning up and down and only slowly the menu appeared. When it was booted however, it worked like a charm. I wiped my first HD, spent some time doing the package selection and started installing. But when the copying of packages started I noticed how slow the CD really was. The drive was spinning and ticking like a mad man and when the first estemated time was shown it said 4 and a half hours remaining. That kinda sucked, especially as it was 1am... So, I decided to abort the install (my drive was reformatted already) and to just install SUSE 9.0 again the next morning. So said and done and the next day I was running on SUSE 9.0 again. Not using the carefully built KDE from CVS anymore, but KDE 3.1, man that was slow! At those moments you realize how many optimizations KDE has had since then. I put back the tarball of my home directory and tried to unpack my /share directory from tarball as well, then tar gave a segfault. Kinda confused I retried the command after which my konsole froze. I opened Konqueror and browsed to the /share directory (which is on a seperate partition) and Konqueror froze. Trying to reboot my entire system froze. Ok, not good. So, I didn't touch the system that much the next two days, living on webmail only, after which I gave the system another shot using my uncle's original CD's. We arrive at Sunday now where I have successfully installed 9.1 on my machine and everything appears to work nicely, until I try to start recompiling KDE. I start with the qt-copy directory from CVS and after a few minutes of compiling I notice a syntax error. Nothing for qt-copy, you'd say. So I opened up the file that bailed out and indeed, there's a syntax error there. However it doesn't look like a human mistake, more like some kind of corruption, like some characters had fallen off. So I removed the file, checked it out from CVS again and now it compiles. This type of corruption then happens two more times. I decide I will do a memcheck during the night and will continue compiling kdelibs now. Surprisingly, a similar thing happens in kdelibs, but when I try to open the file using vi, vi crashes. I go to another terminal to terminate vi, but after entering my username at the other terminal, the terminal doesn't respond anymore either. After switching back and forth between the terminals a few times to see if one comes to live again, the entire system freezes. I decide I better go to bed and leave the machine doing a memcheck. This morning I turned on my monitor and the memcheck was still running, no errors. So I booted the Rescue System from the SUSE CD's and start doing a fsck on my partitions. I check my root partition, no problems. I check my root partition again, no problems. I check my root partition once again, fsck freezes. However as the system is now booted from CD-ROM the rest of the system keeps working and I can login to another terminal. Any attempt of killing the fsck process silently failes. I turn off my machine and replace the first HD with another one I had precautiously picked up from my work this midday. I once again do a reinstall of SUSE 9.1 on the second HD which is now running. And here I am, currently untarring my tarballs once more. Hopefully it keeps working this time. Then I can rush myself to get the KFind patches in and make type-ahead find really powerful. But first I need to get KDE CVS back on my machine again. Read More

I'm experimenting with KBlog. I have no idea if this will work, post embarrassing texts or delete all my data. But it's worth a try. It at least looks like it could once become a useful tool. Read More