KDE Blogs 

I spent the past 10 days working on image warping. It wasn't easy, but I think most of the work is done ! Since I had absolutely no idea concerning the algorithm, and wasn't even sure what I wanted to do - I only knew I wanted to add an "image deformation" functionality to the tool -, I began searching randomly on the web. I eventually came across a nice paper entitled Image Deformation Using Moving Least Square. Apart from the snappy pictures at the top of the front page, what I liked was that it gave implementation details and put the emphasis on the speed of this method. Basically, it describes 3 different math functions (affine, similitude, and moving least squares) which distort an image according to the modifications made on a set of points. Read More

Fast - tell me how do you implement a thumbnail loader - well the loading and storing of the thumbnails that is? Classically you would likely say something that included individual JPG files for each thumbnails, and perhaps also something that included multithreading. Read More

The OpenChange team had a short online (IRC) meeting on Friday. The meeting record is at http://tracker.openchange.org/projects/openchange/wiki/Meeting_of_2010-07-30 We're considering holding an "open session" meeting (again on IRC), possibly in a couple of weeks. If you'd be interested in attending, please leave a comment on the best days and times (relative to UTC) so we can accommodate as many people as possible.

It's official the combined KDE Akademy and Gnome GAUDEC conferences will be held in Berlin in 2011, next year and this is great news! I played a small part in organising the joint conference in Gran Canaria in 2009, and really enjoyed working with the Gnome guys most of whom I hadn't meet before, as well as the familiar KDE people. It was great fun to see how it turned out. I don't think anyone really knew in advance - we didn't know if too much collaboration would spoil the 'community bonding' aspects of the conference and their individual identities. Or maybe too little collaboration would increase the distance between the two communities. In the end I thought the collaboration aspects could have been better, indeed like the WiFi could have been better - there is always something you can improve at these conferences, but what the heck, by and large it was mostly pretty good. Read More

After many months kubuntu.org got a new look, complete with new logo. Many thanks to Ofir for his patience in seeing this through. During the Platform sprint in Prague I took Aurelien Gateau, doko and a couple of nice chaps from SuSE Prague canoeing on the awesome whitewater course near the city centre. Read More

During the Akademy kde-on-mobile discussion, Kévin Ottens suggested that mimetypes be splitted out from the main sycoca database, in order to reduce the overall time kbuildsycoca takes every time it runs, and to make things more modular. Last monday I had a look and decided to go one step further and not use ksycoca at all for mimetypes. This makes the KMimeType subsystem really independent (usable without having run kbuildsycoca4 before, so no dependency on kdeinit+kded etc). Took me the whole week, but there we are. Read More

OpenChange is an important project, but it does require quite a lot of work to get it all to build. We're working on the process, but in the mean time, we've (ok, Julien Kerihuel with nothing from me except encouragement) has built a Virtual Box image that provides OpenChange all built, configured, set up and ready to try. Read More

I have a bit of a depressive sort of personality, usually seeing the cup as 'half empty' rather than 'half full'. And lately I've been a bit depressed about the state of the KDE project despite an awesome Akademy in Tampere. Amongst things that bug me about KDE, are the very slow migration to git, and that Windows 95 look and feel that we can't seem to escape despite having brilliant graphics programmers, usability experts and artists. I just loathe those complicated menus, toolbars and Microsoft's complete lack of aesthic sense that we have copied perfectly. Then I came across an article about Bangarang and how it uses Nepomuk. I'm very interested in anything Nepomuk, and even if I don't actually have much use for a new media player I installed Bangarang and tried it out Read More

KMag used to zoom into part of the screen got just today an additional mode: Follow Focus Mode. That means that kmag can now follow either the mouse pointer or the keyboard cursor. Read More

It's been two weeks since my last blog entry, so I thought it was time I gave an update about my work. The next step was to add perspective transformation to the tool, and the least I can say is it wasn't easy. First thing is it took me some time to find the formulas and good values to create a good perspective effect, and then to obtain the same one with Qt. There are different reasons why I had to know the formulas and couldn't just rely on Qt, one of them is that the perspective transformation is not invertible, unless you know the equation of the plane in which were all the points before the perspective projection. Read More