KDE Blogs 

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

so after attacking the clock applet i convinced myself to fix another long time annoyance of mine: no way for an applet to pop a custom menu in the applet handle menu. well, no more! now i'm going through all the applets in CVS and fixing 'em up to Do The Right Thing(tm). not exactly exciting, though i'm sure all 2 people who notice in the next release will be happy about it. at least they better be. ;-) Read More

Well, my home KDE went mad and started crashing and hanging everywhere, the last and the most disappointing was menu selection hanging the machine tightly. Rebuilt whole system from scratch with much-much lighter CFLAGS (i.e. used -mcpu=athlon-xp -O1 instead of -march=athlon-xp -O3 |:=)) Now it works like a charm and not a bit slower than before. While KDE was out of business my g\f found a home accounting program for win32 and guess what, this is the best home accounting software I've ever seen before. It includes a handy entry tool and useful graphs that display your income/expense as pie charts with separation into categories (screenshot pending). Seems like I have something to port to KDE. My regular job takes all of my time leaving no gaps to play KDE anymore. The rest of the time I spend with my 3-month-old daughter. So I don't expect too much work on KDE side, but seems like I gonna install internet connection in September so I could have some immediate access to docu and collective developers mind from home, this will help me with development alot |:=) On my regular job I'm playing with Ruby, and I love the language more and more every day. This is something I can call a language of my dream. Its elegant as Lua was elegant to me some time before, including easy bindings to C-like languages. Its handy as Perl is handy to script writers - actually, I transferred a bunch of ugly Perl scripts into a single Ruby script in one day and its much-much better and more flexible than it was before |:=). Unfortunately, I was unable to test qtRuby bindings, so mixing Ruby with KDE is left for some time later. Btw, found an awesome alternative library of Ruby software: http://freepan.org/ruby/by-cat/ (alternative wrt RAA) Oh yes, reading a book in Xtreme Programming now and I've got an idea for a decentralized helper tool. Tool that will track the development in a server-less manner within a group of developers. WASTE looks like a good pretendent for a communication framework, since it is group-oriented and supports encrypted communication. Anyone vote for a better toolkit? Read More

wow, feels like forever since i posted a blog. but i'm behind in most of my correspondence: too much is happening. on the KDE side of life i finished up some change to the address picker in libkdepim... it seems to make a lot more sense now and be a lot more polished. Zack made a great start on it, but it needed that last 10%.. maybe it only needs that last 9% now ;-) Read More