KDE Blogs 

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

I just discovered Planet KDE and immediately got addicted. Planet GNOME was one of my favorite readings on the web the last months, but I think I have to switch now. ;-) Read More

There has always been this inane call to port KDevelop to windows so we can entice windows developers to Qt. Personally I think this call is bullsh*t, and think it makes about as much sense as saying "More people will use Macs if they port Adobe Photoshop to Windows." None the less, I still have to do windows development for some customers... Read More

Perusing the apache logs I noticed some hits coming from kdehispano.org. Pedro Jurado aka melenas has translated some things from the digest. My question is how to assist those who would like to translate? I haven't given it much thought, but would be willing to set things up so others could read the digest. Read More

Yeah, it looks for me like deja vu: one day Sun introduced OpenOffice.org, more recently IBM presented Eclipse (development environment). Why I am talking about this here, you may ask? I am not too big enthusiast of Java and Java-related tools/technologies, even if in ancient times I've tried IBM's Visual Age, for Java and Smalltalk, IIRC. However my work is somewhat related to 1) openoffice.org 2) Kexi (and also more-and-more reusing/sharing bits of KDevelop). So, I've subjective feelings about oo.org and Eclipse: Read More

I did a talk to Edinburgh GNU/Linux Users Group and again to Tayside KGX Users Group this week past. Discussed how to become a KDE Developer, some nice KDE features and software patents (EU elections tomorrow and this weekend, please vote Europeans). I have just put up the quickly put together slides. Read More

In the recent Poll on KDEPims release schedule I wanted to answer, but realized the answer is not that simple; and KDE has been running in the same circle for too long to see that there have been developments out there which change the release stuff completely; in other words, time for my first BLog here :) Read More

Ok, I got tired of the old file-name based background image selection, so I hacked up something to use the (first line of) comment in the JPEG meta data. [image:477] Read More