KDE Blogs 

I am planning on doing a feature which will list all the Kde developers who are paid by someone. Here is an incomplete list. Waldo Bastian by Suse Zack Rusin by Automatix ( there was someone else too) David Faure by Trolltech Andras Mantia by Eric Laffoon Bo Thorsen by Klaralvdalens Datakonsult AB Read More

This seems to come up fairly frequently with people who talk to me about Kiwi and its goals and the seeming redundancy when compared with JuK. At the risk of possibly offending wheels (which is completely not my intention), I do have a few reasons to continue developing Kiwi, and these reasons are all valid to me. Kiwi is something that I like working on because it doesn't have the same design code-wise as JuK does. I like wheels, and I think he's a damned good coder, but I don't agree with all of his decisions about JuK's design and codebase.Kiwi isn't actually behind JuK when it comes to features. JuK has searching, and tagging. We have global keyboard shortcuts, passive popup notification, and a DCOP interface. (No idea if JuK has any of these features yet, but it didn't last time I checked.) Of course, personally, I think that we have a better infrastructure for future growth, but that might just be my pride talking.We've finally abstracted out our backend API so that adding new Source types (internet radio, portable MP3/Ogg player, audio CD, etc) is going to be a snap. wheels' aim for JuK is to make it a "media playing jukebox" which is a noble and admirable goal. But I want something as easy-to-use as iTunes, with extra care and attention paid to the UI and a clean design with optimizations where they're needed.I want usable, well-designed (API-wise and UI-wise) software that does exactly what I need, and JuK fails this, not because it's a bad program or because wheels is evil, but because JuK isn't my project and wheels isn't me.Now, those are my serious reasons for continuing development on Kiwi. There are, of course, a few silly and not-so-serious reasons for continuing development. We have a half dozen CD burning apps, why not a half a dozen music players?I like having a project of my own where I can't hurt anybody else or step on peoples' toes.Binary metadata caching is for weenies.When was the last time that you wanted cheese-covered french fries covered in bacon? Ok, it doesn't really have anything to do with Kiwi or JuK, but I'm hungry. WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?Lists suck.So, there you have it. Just for the record, wheels and I did discuss the possibility of merging Kiwi and JuK, a Long Time Ago (TM) but I decided against it. I was excited about it at first, and I thought it would make a lot of sense, but after talking with my fellow Kiwi devels, I had to turn the opportunity down. The way I see it, JuK and Kiwi both have plenty of room to grow, and nobody loses, because we both suck less than Noatun. ;) Read More

DCOPWidgets are widgets that are accessble via dcop. You can load a UI file that was built in designer and then access it from any lanuage that can talk via dcop. Read More

So this is my first blog entry. I will try to add something every now and then if it makes sense. Let's see how useful it becomes. I think it has great potentials. Number two on my wishlist would be a wiki on developers.kde.org. Anyone? :) I finally got the program out and everyone seems to be happy about it. To all that are wondering: "reserved" really means "reserved" on the slots that are marked as such They will be filled until the conference starts. I really hope everyone will enjoy the conference. Hope to see you all in nove hrady! Read More

Wow, what a great idea! I can only say thanks for such a site - I definitely hope it will start to be a good resource for any user seeking closer contact to the members of the KDE team. Read More

Well i have hacked the greater part of the day on cleaning up the kblog code. The backend is now completely generic and im now switching the main code over to use that code. Once that is done i can throw that in cvs. Read More

Well , i am back after i spend one week working on some projects in my company. I hope someday maybe somebody will pay me just for doing what i like to do :-) We can dream, always... Anyway, first change: moving contact import to gaducommands.cpp again. Misterious error with contact in one line - i need somebody to test it in ekg and kadu, i know about this problem and this will be done later. But as this should not happend, and never happend to me - i am waiting for help. Zack ? :> Read More

Geiseri definitely made my day with this site, so I wanted to thank him by fixing kspell. I looked over the logs to see which commits broke it. It was broken twice in revision 1.101 (coolo commit) and then in 1.104 in a commit of Don's patch by Laurent. I fixed it but the code I saw there did not make me happy at all. If Laurent won't want to maintain it, I'll start doing it since it simply begs for a maintainer. In other news I'm still playing with JACK. In general I like it a lot and I do think that with GStreamer it's a decent alternative to aRts. Hopefully tomorrow I'll commit the JACK aRts output plugin. I had to write a pure std ring buffer implementation for it, which seems to be working rather nicely (aRts doesn't use Qt in case you didn't know and the current HEAD depends on GLib which makes me wonder why are we hosting it in our CVS). Anyway, if you have a PowerBook remember thart aRts won't work if you'll try to run it in full-duplex mode - disable it from KControl and restart KDE to hear some sound. Read More

KSplash plugin loading scheme changes, and probably will change again before 3.2. Grid spacing on kdesktop needs to be made flexible. No Perl: Python or Ruby? Am I happy that I am the only one hacking on the new ksplash plugins! Probably going through a few more BIC changes and naming scheme changes before we see a final stable API. No time for that to happen before N7y as I am defending my doctoral dissertation on the 12th of next month. I wish I was going to N7y - no money, no time, no job yet. The other thing to do in the short term is to provide configurable grid spacing for kdesktop - quite a few bug reports about it. Unfortunately, the current icon layout algorithm, while nice, does not lend itself greatly to configurability. Let's see what comes of it. Also, based on an informal survey of people in my lab, there is no need for three alignment options on the RMB menu: horizontal, vertical, grid. Everyone prefers something, and uses only their preferred means. This means that we could move the options into the KControl module, and have just one Align item on the RMB menu. Now that I have given up on Perl (impossible to maintain code for any long period of time, see am_edit for an example of well-known mess), the question is: Python or Ruby? Or are there other languages out there that require consideration? Stuff I hope someone else will fix/create: ksmserver - saving multiple sessions kmail - crash on session exit qdockwindow - sane API designed for subclassing kmdi - working IDEAl mode khtml - pluggable modules to add support on demand for MathML, etc. KEmacs :-)

Trying to fix http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60522 isn't a problem in kSirc. It's a generic problem in KStringHandler::tagURLs. URL entries that are of the form http://url/~ or end in any none-word or none-number entry gets poorly highlighted. Read More