KDE Blogs 

While watching a very boring Tour de France remain boring yet another day, I managed to punch a small dent into the gargantuan pile of duplicate, useless, out of date and in parts plain revolting cruft that is KMail's bugzilla area. Now, I remain convinced that bugzilla is a very valuable tool and that there are in fact very important pieces of information buried in there, amidst all the smelly bits, and I also feel that we should be thankfull for each person spending the time and effort to give us feedback, but it's just so much work to keep on top of the buggers and even more work to climb back on on top everytime we've slacked off a bit and let another 100 or so reports accumulate on top of the 400 or so we managed to reduce the pile to last time. Not counting wishes. Be that as it may, we are nearing the 3.3 release, and it'd be great to at least find those bug reports that are genuine KMail issues which are fixable before 3.3 and fix them. It would also be great to give those nice people reporting issues with the betas timely feedback, especially since the same issues tend to get reported multiple times, and often only a friendly "Thanks, we know." is required. If you think you might have an hour or two to spare and would be willing to help with that, stand up and be counted. Like, now. Drop into #kontact or mail me or the kmail-devel list. This is your chance to finally help with the project that was Touched by Zack (TM), $GOD's own Wrapper around GPGME (TM), We put the sin back in sync, Forgotten Attachment Warner with a 50 MB Memory Footprint, the one MUA to rule them all. Yes, that's right, our very own KMail. Don't miss out on this excellent opportunity. Even cartman has recently been spotted contemplating closing a KMail bug. Lypanov has already gone through and solved all ruby related issues. Follow their lead, boys and girls, it will be much appreciated. Read More

I want to tell you a true story which happened about half a year ago but is still in my mind. As you perhaps know I maintain Konstruct. Sometimes it happens that an archive disappears from its specified download location, often the cause is a new version release and the old version being deleted. This breaks Konstruct's installation process. Usually I notice this very quick because I read application announcement sites like kde-apps.org. There is an author who unregularly but then within days releases several new versions of an application which is included within Konstruct. He immediately deletes older versions and doesn't announce a new release. So I mailed him and kindly asked to keep older versions a bit or at least announce new versions on eg freshmeat.net so I have a chance to fix it quickly. He replied with a lengthy mail listing what users asked him during the last 3 years (documentation also in other formats, porting to KDE 3, making it compile with gcc 3 etc.) - and he did all this. A release would keep him busy 5 hours now, he says, to test it against KDE2, KDE3, gcc2, gcc3 and different cases of optional dependencies. He concluded that he doesn't see this effort reflected in the users' reactions and declined either of my both requests. Isn't it strange that he sacrifices 5 hours for a release (not counting the days to enhance the application before!) but then refuses to announce it with some minutes efforts so others can benefit from the new features or bugfixes because "there must be a final stroke for my efforts"? And not deleting the old releases would not even have required him to spend more time... My solution for this problem is simple: Download one copy from his website and upload it to another permanent place for Konstruct users. I'm curious if this has a measuarable impact (by Konstruct users installing meta/everything) on his download statistics but I don't dare to ask as my last mail to him only triggered a response "You are at my PERSONA NON GRATA list." He for sure has a problem with criticism. Read More

I bet everyone running a development version has at least once met Dr. Konqi - but do you know his colleague Dr. Klash? How could I, you ask? He is sleeping right on your hard disk within kdelibs! Dr. Klash checks for accelerator conflicts in menus and widgets. To awake him put following into ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals (or the config file for the application you want to test): Read More

Yesterday was the day the feature freeze for the KDE 3.3 release started and as expected some stuff was rushed into HEAD within the last allowed hours. Now the wait begins that everything compiles again and stabilizes so that KDE 3.3 Beta 2 can be tagged. Also yesterday the message freeze started which is unfortunate to say it polite. It's for sure not the best release schedule for people caring for user interface guidelines, the English proof-reading team, translators who right away started to translate and also don't expect every last-hour feature to be mentioned by the documentation writers in the handbooks. Read More

While Kolab 2 promises an easy installation, I always thought Kolab 1 was a bitch to set up. When I tried to set it up and build it from scratch, it took me more than a day and it was really bad. The fortunate thing is: It's not any longer a pain to get your Kolab running. You can now set up a Kolab Server while watching the evening news. "How does this work out?", you might ask. Well, the fine guys at ZfOS have made Kolab installation much more convinient. They have packages available for all mainstream distributions. Even if your Distribution is not covered, their "obmtool" (OpenPKG poor man's Boot, Build & Management Tool) makes it easy to setup an entire Kolab in three easy steps: Read More

Just in time for the feature freeze, I managed to finish the Kontact wizard. I finally took the time to understand the concepts behind the framework that Cornelius orgininally came up with and I really start to like it. The current version contains some known bugs, but I will address that in the next days. Read More

The KDE conference of last year took place in Nové Hrady, Czech Republic and there were attendees from almost everywhere, apart from Africa perhaps. At this year's conference (expect the conferences schedules to be announced real soon now!) in Ludwigsburg, Germany this may be different: The registration shows a great amount of registrants from Nigeria together with requests for invitation letters. It's great to see KDE being such successful there und being used even in ministries. Or is it just because of Germany? Read More

Some days ago I created an account on kdedevelopers.org out of curiosity or to be able to comment, don't remember anymore. Now that Geiseri has unfrozen the mail notification I'm even able to login and can "create content". But why should I blog? For sure not because my neighbour does. This German story reports that only 7500 active blogs in the German-speaking area exist. In comparison there are 3.5 millions blogs in the US and also the French and Dutchmen are more active. Reading the planetkde.org feed list there seem to be six or seven German KDE developers listed. So maybe I'm still in good company. :-) What could I blog? My weekly KDE involvements are mostly boring. I could tell you about people who still create their own non-KDE looking dialog for a line edit despite the existance of qt:QInputDialog and kde:KLineEditDlg (deprecated, see kde:KInputDialog). Applications which survived somehow from KDE2 or even KDE1 times and e.g. create "titles" in qt:QPopupMenu s by setting them disabled and inserting a separator (kde:KPopupMenu::insertTitle() is nice for this). Or API misusage like giving 'i18n("&Do not ask again")' as dontAskAgainName parameter to one of kde:KMessageBox's methods. And last but not least: The "All Files" file mask is not "." on Unix. A continuous annyoing topic are developers who don't know or don't want to read the KDE User Interface Guidelines (yes, they do exist!) and ignore the availability of technical help (kdesdk/scheck) causing me and countless translators double work fixing wrong capitalization, colon and trailing ellipsis usage. API fashion show, exposing developers' faults, my favorite bugs and wishes or just funny or thoughtfully stories around KDE - everything is possible. Only time will tell... Read More

it's seems that everybody is doing this test :http://hokev.brinkster.net/quiz/default.asp?quiz=Better%2BPersonality&page=1 So why not me too :) here my result: Wackiness: 124/100 Rationality: 100/100 Constructiveness: 128/100 Leadership: 96/100 You are a WRCL--Wacky Rational Constructive Leader. This makes you a golden god. People gravitate to you, and you make them feel good. You are smart, charismatic, and interesting. You may be too sensitive to others reactions, especially criticism. Your self-opinion and mood depends greatly on those around you. Read More

it's been nearly 2 months since the last time I wrote something here ... and I wonder what to say ... so I will say this : hey Mom I'm on the web!!!!! :) Read More