KDE Blogs 

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

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