KDE Blogs 

While reading Joel On Software, I found a link to a website with a draft of a book called "Emergent Design" by the same authors who wrote "Design Patterns Explained". Some chapters are still to be added, but the existing material there is very interesting reading, especially chapter 3, which covers "Coding Principles". If you were to apply this to the internal architecture of something like, say, umbrello, you can see why it would be very difficult to write any unit tests for the code. The classes in that application are very much linked together. For example, lower level classes send signals to indicate state changes to upper level classes. In other words, the coupling is too tight. It makes it very hard to test a class or group of classes in isolation. Read More

It was about a year ago that I got my CVS account after posting a patch to the kopete-devel fixing some issue in the Yahoo plugin. I don't even remember what it was. I sent the patch and Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett was like, "You should get a CVS account.". A few days later and I had one. Needless to say, I was quite pleased with myself. So anyways, it's been a year now, and I'd say I've been pretty active, although not as active as some people. For those who like lots of stats, here's some numbers since I got my CVS account on 05/13/2003 Read More

Well Alexander promised me that he would give me a QVariant editor widget tomorrow, so I am psyched. I grew annoyed with Qts qt:QSQLPropertyMap and decided to deviate some with my own take on the bugger. Not that its TTs fault here because I am departing from the realm of SQL. I ended up with a more complex property map, but this also gave me some added bonuses. Read More

Yesterday I started my new job at xandros and so far it's fun ....

Ok, so I got a new PowerBook recently. I was really excited about OS X from the little I'd seen of it looking over people's shoulders. Finally, I would taste humankind's highest achievement in usability and user-friendliness! Read More

Well I have been busy this week bothering Zack and fellow employees here. For the last 5 months I have been fighting with the concept of Java's Storable interface, and MFC's CDocument object. Both seem to fall very short of my goals... Read More

Collection of ideas on how to encourage more developers to develop with KDE. I have been doing developer support on mailinglists, newsgroups and web forums for about three years now. Support means helping developers solving development problems, especially for developers who are new to Linux, Qt or KDE. Read More

As the things that I am working on are not KDE-related anymore (and Blogger.com now allows comments :), I have moved my english blog to tjansen.de.

After a bit of a delay, I've finally finished off the KFile plugin tutorial. Please review and patch! The tutorial is up on http://developer.kde.org, as http://developer.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/kfile-plugin/t1.html. I've had part of it up for a while, but not linked or built from the SGML source into HTML. Read More

As an exersize I have been exploring the feasibility of migrating from KJSEmbed scripts to C++... Anyone who has worked in industry for any length of time is completely aware of how those temporary solutions become not so temporary. Usually these over time get less and less maintainable, and more of a liability. I have seen this a few times with one off perl scripts that keep a system up and running, or a simple VB app that is used to order supplies from the mail room. In both of these instances they where a one-off temporary solution that lived on for years and years... the VB app was VB3 on windows 3.11 and the Win95 migration played hell on it... the original author was gone, and no-one knew how to get it to work with our other applications (written in Delphi, not much better). Read More