KDE Blogs 

hmmm, ok, so much for not working on kopete for awhile. I was going to try to take a break, but I can't! It's like freaking quicksand, I keep getting sucked back in, so I fixed a few bugs, and now I'm better. In other news, I've kinda gotten hooked on Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. It's a cool font for editing code in. Although finding a font size that's just right with this 112 DPI screen is somewhat nerve racking. I think i'll need to play with the DPI a little bit. (ugh)

Wow this week was productive. I added transparent Javascript Array to QStringList handling and transparent Javascript Date to Qt DateTime classes with the help of Harri. Rich added support for setting the application name off of the script, so things like config files, xmlgui, and standard icons work as they do in normal KDE apps. Slowly we are even gaining some users. Even one that is using it for a commercial product. I'm impressed. Read More

I'm a fairly happy puppy with little to rant about at the moment but as I explained earlier, I have a problem coming up with good titles, so I stick with this one. Read More

Here's how I learnt that every programmer should have their own software portfolio from one of my favourite books about professional programmers 'Peopleware' by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. From HIRING A JUGGLER, Chapter 15 of Peopleware: Read More

hmmm, not much to report really (watch, I'll end up writing a huge blog ;-) ). I've lost interest in hacking on anything network related at the moment, so I haven't been working on Kopete much lately, although I did start rewriting some OSCAR code to remove the old Kit api that's been polluting it and generally causing bugs with the contact list handling. :-( I might complete that at the end of this week if I get around to it (and feel like it). I dropped from the top spot in the bugs closed list earlier this week, which is good, because i don't feel like fixing any bugs right now anyways. The bug reporters have been kinda sassy and seem like they think they know it all lately, at least with the Kopete reports. However, I suppose that's what you should expect when you're hacking on an IM application everybody expects to be perfect, and if it's not, you get bitched at like you're a damn moron. I'd like to see them do it. I should start a page for Kopete like Don Sanders did for Kontact. Even better would be finding somebody to sponsor my continued development on Kopete and KDE in general. :-) I'll keep dreaming, but for now, I'll go back to hacking on the secret project.

So, the week or two I've had a little fun hacking up a Icecream Monitor mode that's more like the Teambuilder monitor. [image:438] Teambuilder was always cool conceptually, but in practice never really worked all that well for me. Icecream actually works but I wasn't terribly fond of the monitor a few weeks back. The only two options were the listview mode -- which just listed the jobs as they happened without any nice visual indicators -- and the Gantt View mode, which takes about 50% of my CPU just for painting. So, the above is what I've gradually hacked up. Read More

This last weekend I finally broke down and wrote my second most favorite game in the whole wide world "Daleks" ie "Robots" for those Americans who got the magazine "Creative Computing"... Read More

Just a quick note to say KDE won best linux desktop for KDE 3.2 last night!

We got on well with the GNOMEs at the Linux User Expo in London today. Except for when I filled in their missing poster space with a spare KDE logo, they didn't take that too well. Read More

The cvs-digest rewrite seems to have hit a wall, or I have. I suppose a couple of days away will help. It looks like I'll be hosting the thing on my machine for the time being, until someone with a repository offers a bit of space and bandwidth. I'm short on hd space, got another one coming tomorrow. 120GB seagate. Should do for a week or two. Then do a chroot jail for apache and php, and get the thing running. How come this project, which I started to learn the kde api, ends up teaching me web server admin, php, perl and a host of other interesting but unrelated stuff? The security stuff makes me nervous. If anyone is willing to help with a security audit of the php code, and some suggestions on securing the server, please let me know. Read More