KDE Blogs 

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 :)

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

Finally I found enough topics to annoy you with a new blog entry, so here we go: The last days were definitely too hot. Consequently I enjoyed most of the day in swimming pools or similar and didn't get to do much coding. At least I got some administrativa done, namely publishing the final keylist for the Nove Hrady Keysigning Party and in the evenings when it cooled down I got XMLGUI for KOrganizer RMB menus basically working. It still needs tweaking, but it works, yay! Read More

I just pushed Kopete 0.7.1 out the door. YAY! :) This was definately not the way I had scheduled it, thanks to bug:62210. Kopete 0.7.0 would not have gone out if I had known about that bug. :/ Read More

So my wife wanted to install a kde app a last night that she found on source forge... okay no biggie, i told her to just get the RPM off of the SuSE cd... one problem, the program was not there, soooo i told her to download the source and install it... BIG MISTAKE!* Read More

After looking at the current eyesore in kcontrols style chooser I decided to share some thoughts on how and why to do certain UI things. The old chooser had a listbox to select a style from, while the new one uses a combo box. While someone may have thought this was cool, its a big UI mistake. Here is why: Read More

Well today was a complete waste for anything other than getting linux booting reliably on my powerbook again (dont ask) and messing with my cellphone and cvs:[kdenonbeta/kio_obex|kio_obex]. I have to say so far Im impressed. It autodetected my cellphone via IrDA and listed the contents. I could copy vCard phone numbers strait off of it into my KDE address book, and was even able to make it a directory based resource with some help. Very COOL :) Read More