KDE Blogs 

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

Startup of more complex c++ applications is a problem. As an application developer you often don't have the ability to fix a lot of the issues related to this problem but there's one thing that bothers me a lot, that you, as an application developer can fix, so I decided to write about it a little today. I'll talk a bit about "delayed initialization" today. Delayed initialization is one of those "unwritten rules" that you can read about on http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/mistakes.html . In fact this entry should be added there. I don't have enough time but if you do, please try to format it as an entry there. So how does a typical startup routine in a KDE application looks like? Well, first of all we have some KMainWindow derived class. For the purpose of my brainfarts here, let it be : class MainWindow : public KMainWindow Read More

Yesterday at work we found some problem with backtrace on linux ia32 when it was being called from a signal handler. So i said lets see if this works on Itanium or if it is a more genereic Linux problem. Guess what, on Linux IA64 there is no signal generated on a divide by zero, the result is 0 and the program terminates normally... WTF ??? Read More

Last night I downloaded the Qt 4 preview and had a play with it, so far I'm very happy. The new painter code seems great and the GL painting demo suggests a lot fun ideas. Read More

I've been away for a few days with some of my friends. So here's a few pictures of your truly away from computer. I'm actually wearing glasses on those (gray shirt, blue jeans). Good shot of my crotch area : here, black and white photo : here . Read More

No Debian CVS packages, my usual way of staying up to date, have turned up for KDE 3.3 so I turned to Konstruct for compiling beta 1 and it's very nice. It's even nicer after adding an extra 512Megs of memory. Read More

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