KDE Blogs 

Okay, my bags are packed and my papers in order. I jokingly remarked to my wife that all i need to do is a short stint by boat and i will have gone by land air and sea to get to where im going... Read More

I haven't added any blog entries for a while now. I'm in Germany, eagerly awaiting n7y. The basic functionality of KConfEdit is there. I think it's pretty much ready to move it to kdeadmin. I disabled the saving of configs because I don't want it to be doing that till I'm confident everything is working fine. I got the new ui made by Aaron in KSpell, it still needs some slot connections (most notably the Suggest stuff). In my spare time I'm playing with my pet project: Gadget. It's a services/search oriented application, completely plugin based. If right now you're going: "a what?". You need to look at Sherlock or Watson applications. It havily uses kjsembed. All the plugins are written in javascript. I might add a native interface after I'm happy with the javascript one. Why would you want to use javascript in plugins? Because it's super easy. With kjsembed you can load Designer generated ui files, connect signals to your js slots, load read-only kparts and use dcop - all in a very few lines of code. Cool stuff. Quite possibly I'll add support for Sherlock plugins, but for that XQuery would be required. Rich has got an alpha XPath implementation and Tim expressed interest in such a beast as well, so maybe the three of us can come with something nice up. Read More

JuK just got a couple of pretty nifty features in the last week or so. The implementations had a number of related issues to it made sense to solve them in tandem. This first of these is a history playlist which, when turned on, keeps a log of all of the things that you've played and the times that you played them. It's off by default, but you can turn it on via the view menu. The next big thing is that I finally finished up the code for search playlists. Basically this rolls together an advanced search with some vfolder-like functionality. You create a search, in a dialog not unlike KMail's, that creates a new search playlist. This playlist is automagically updated when your collection changes. Here's a screenie with some of the new goods: [image:157] Here you can see a search playlist that finds everything from the Afro Cuban All Stars and Buena Vista Social Club. Since these are actually the same group of folks the union makes sense, but it's one that's difficult to pick out in something like the tree view (though you could select both groups at once to see a dynamic playlist composed of the two). Notice that the search dialog continues to work; here I'm filtering for the year 1997. Also show here is the history playlist item and the new tree view. The other thing that I've hacked out in the last week or so were some pretty hefty optimizations for those with large collections. I created a number of dummy files to boost my collection to up around 12,000 items and KCacheGrind and I fixed up some of the algorithms that should make using JuK with large collections -- say over 10000 files -- much nicer. I was frightened to notice that at the beginning of profiling start up time with 12,000 items was near a minute and a half. I had never tested with this many items so I was rather surprised. I'm now quite happy to say that even with 12,000 items start up time is in the range of 5 seconds. I've also had a number of folks still using the 1.1 release ask what's been going on for the last several months. So, while this is certainly incomplete, here's a rough run down of the major features that have been implemented: Read More

posted the first installment in my new "Non-Programmer's Guide to Participating in KDE" series, title Adding WhatsThis Help To KDE Applications. was posted to theDot, where it got the usual inane comments, but also lots of positive feedback. very happy about it. will be moving it to the KDE support page eventually. next topic will be Bug Triage. Read More

Lots of new features in KJSEmbed over the last few days. I got a new factory method implemented that lets you create read-only parts! This has let me knock together an example that uses KHTMLPart to provide a web browser - total code 22 lines (including blanks and comments). There is also now support for any QVariant type - even those that aren't explicitly suported. Read More

this was the week that wouldn't end. plus 30 degree weather, tons of smoke from forest fires, work work work work ... but, bliss! the weekend is upon me! i did get some KDE stuff done this week, mostly a bunch of kicker applet hacking... but most personally satisfying is how ksnapshot now looks and works. it has the general cleanliness that it had in early KDE2, but with several more features and a more standard and understandable interface. it's been an unusually long road with that app. Read More

Okay so after years of holding out and waiting as my powerpc linux systems get more and more obsolete, ive given up on SuSE. They refuse to maintain anything other than ia32, not that i dont blame them. They are a company and a companies first job is to make money. Because of this im going back to debian. Debian and I have a real love/hate relationship. I love it for simple things like that remote boot weather monitor station in the back yard. It boots from a bootrom and chugs away on a nice 12mb image... But i HATE it for doing desktop work. Im just not a tinkerer, so im not into editing 30 files, reading 6 howtos and still dicking with my settings just to get X to work on a strange monitor, that SuSE's wizard autoprobes... So thats the rub... Debian a pain in the ass to use, but at least you have the opportunity to use it... Yes i know there is gentoo, but again it ignores my annoyancees with debian. Really I hate to dick with my system to configure it. I hate mucking with settings just to get things to work. Yes Debian 3.0 is better at detecting network cards, and sometimes sound... but 2 months later a sound card that worked in SuSE still wont work on my other laptop. Bah, ive got to pack and get ready for n7y... maby Zack and George have better ideas of how to make this laptop usable again... Read More

Yeap, I was in really bad mood today, and I think I even managed to annoy some koffice developers today :-( Sorry Beineri! I hope the comments I added in the lists will help fixing the issues in KPresenter. Read More

Hi, this is my first blog entry and i am using to introduce my self a bit for those who dont now me. My real name is Otto as you can see in the members section and i mainly work on kompare and some other programs if people ask me to look into that. I'm not a superb coder as you can tell from the kompare sources :) (dont forget if the code looks good it is written by John Firebaugh, if not it is my crap :P) but it is fun to do. I currently work for a company called Beaphar (unfortunately it is not related to IT but it is a job and it pays enough for me to buy a new computer (well 2 actually) and for my "vacation" in Nove Hrady). I'll be using this blog to keep you informed about kompare, as the weather is no longer that hot i'll be able to do some hacking again in my spare time. Well see you soon :) Read More

Many of your know I met Wil in July. I had heard last year that he really liked Quanta and mentioned it on his site so I wanted to meet him. Tonight was really a lot of fun! It's amazing how easy it is to just get into your own little world and sit at home when you're self employed. It's also fun to see just how interesting people you can meet are. Wil is really fun not because he's a celebrity but because he's Wil. This time we made the commitment to get there early enough to hear him read. Read More