KDE Blogs 

In my ongoing distraction from working on the Akonadi Exchange resource, we released OpenChange 0.9 today. Release notes: Improved portability, including a focus on supporting FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and other systems that do not use GNU libraries / shells; and portability fixes for use of the Intel C Compiler and Sun Studio compiler. 64 bit architectures should be better supported in this release. Read More

Well.. Come on guys! You can do better than this! You say why? Simply because, apart from a very serious bug related to the download of files .torrent, .meta4 and .metalink (that we have been lucky enough to find out) and a Nepomuk crash (already fixed in trunk), we don't have any report right now reporting any crash or uncorrect behaviour of kget.. You sure about this? So, please, Test it a little bit more, so that the next release will be perfect for you! Ehy! I'm talking also to all people that tried kget some time ago but dropped it saying: "aaaaaaah.. still unstable..". Could you give our baby another chance? ;) Read More

At work, I stumbled across a problem that I want to declare as universal. I got a mail with a title like christmas party invitation I deleted this mail without reading because I knew I would not go there. Fine so far. But later I found out this mail contained one sentence that actually was of interest to me: Read More

I've been working on the next OpenChange release (0.9), and it is getting quite close. So where are we up to: Merge of Ryan Lepinski's Summer of Code project (on converting Exchange calendars to the ICal format) is done. Did some more testing with Exchange 2010. Julien Kerihuel added support for encrypted connections, which are required in a default install of Exchange 2010. The server provisioning works again. (Note: Server is pre-alpha. This is a developer preview only, not intended for any kind of other use.) More documentation tweaks. I'm pretty happy with where we're going on this release. It has been a bit slower than we'd expected, but there are also some useful fixes that are about to go in, especially one related to how recipients are handled, which is a nasty problem for many users. Read More

I have self-backed policy of not mentioning competition if not really necessary, let it be G or M. So as a minimal effort I just quote these carefully selected bits (bias included!) instead of commenting the recent story: Read More

Winter is here, the snow is falling, the frost is crisp each morning and it get progressively harder to break the ice for the day's canoe. Fortunately Kubuntu has just the thing to keep you snug in these cold months. From the davmor2 knitware shop comes the Kubuntu jumper range. Available in a selection of colours including beige with blue, beige with ligher blue and beige with cyan, it has been carefully crafted by designer extraordinaire Sue Morley over many months of hard work. Order one now, it's the perfect fashion item to impress that special someone in your life for Christmas (possible 6 months waiting time from ordering). Read More

In an attempt to follow up on my blog about Akonadi porting xplained I am going to write about Akonadi migration. It is basically the data storage related cousin of porting: Porting is, as we learned, about adapting applications to a new way of handling data. Migration is about adapting data to new ways of being accessed. Read More

The Smoke based QtScript bindings are progressing well, and are now called 'JSmoke' in the style of 'JQuery' the JavaScript library or 'JScript' the .NET JavaScript implementation. In KDE promo-like words, I hope this will 'raise the brand recognition' of the state of the art KDE Smoke dynamic language bindings technology. Read More

Today we enjoy 11th anniversary of disclosure of Microsoft's best business and development practices: The concept has been reportedly in development since early 90-ies: The practical and consistent extension of that achievement is introduction of the MSOOXML format: It is not compatible with ISO standard Office Open XML But those that use MS Office exclusively and upgrade frequently do not really care; moreover it is not a problem even for them to hear the mistyped OpenOffice XML name from time to time Office Open XML unlike MSOOXML has no implementation so far It is not clear whether Office Open XML is even implementable because of contradicting parts There is no something like MSOOXML specifications, instead there is something like "report from the current state of implementation", which has already been updated at least once and will be again for MS Office 2010 MSOOXML is advertised as a dump of the binary DOC/XLS/PPT formats into the XML layer, and thus is a great advantage according to the creators The advantage is so big that as authors suggest, breaking XML principles is not a big problem (there is no known attempt to address the issues) Since MSOOXML, unlike ODF, was created behind closed doors, there was no planned or possible harmonization between the two; now since it is too late (there are implementations of ODF and MSOOXML) "interoperability" term is the new modern buzzword, but at least in Poland noone knows what this word really means (and yes, this is an apparent advantage) For making the binary->XML dump extensive documentation of the former was needed; so since finally Microsoft created docs, and the binary formats got declared as obsolete anyway, publishing is a double PR win ("we are so open", and "we're now OK in court cases") The binary DOC/XLS/PPT formats are now somewhat documented in the public but this is not the end of the story. I've been mentioning this before and I'll trow this chair again: there are still MS Access file formats, as closed as in 1992, except for the huge work of never finished reverse-engineering. The current attitude is as follows: Read More

For quite some time almost every blog by a KDE PIM developer is about Akonadi in one for or the other, often about "Akonadi porting" or "porting to Akonadi". Akonadi itself can already be difficult to explain, combined with "porting" it probably has only meaning left if you are a developer. Read More