KDE Blogs 

Kubuntu 9.10 CDs are now available for pre-order on the Kubuntu Shipit site. Can't wait a month for the CD to be delivered? Download the release candidate now for one last round of testing. Thanks to everyone who helped test the RC releases, see you again next week for the real thing! Read More

Amazing Blog This is the amazing idea that came with Amanda from the new local KDE-MG group. Simple, beatifull and the most interesting way to get conference people to enjoy your booth, put his ideas out of the mind and getting everyone close. At this picture, you see Tomaz ( no tap dance included ), and the board, saying ODEIO ( I Hate ) on left and AMO ( I Love ) and everyone can express their feeling about our beloved project where we can improve it or not, writing a note, whatever you want to write. Our small booth is really more interesting:-) Right now, i'm in the talk table to introduce Anne-Marie in her's bugsquad presentation ! Later will talk more about our second Latinoware experience, getting better and better... Ahh, i forgot to say, there's a nice tipical "Minas Gerais" prize waiting for one of the guys writing the note ! Read More

All hands on deck for the release candidate CD (and DVD and USB and upgrades) testing day. See the ISO tracker for what needs tested (duplicates tests always welcome) and join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate.

You may remember two of my recent blogs. One was about a project to parse powerpoint files and another one was about porting hexdump to the browser. So how about a combination of those two topics: parsing powerpoint files in the browser. It is quite a feasible task. The powerpoint file format is largely described in an xml schema now. From this scheme one would need to generate a parser like there is for c++ and java already. The parsers for java and c++ are both less then 700 lines of code. Read More

A feature that has been floating around in a few places but hasn't been a significant feature in KDE is web slicing. This is the ability to take a piece of a web page (commonly a div) and render it as a standalone object. It's useful for stuff like putting a weather forcast on your desktop, watching new comments on a forum etc. This weekend I made a start on implementing it as tool for Project Silk. Read More

This Sunday, I gave a presentation at UbuCon 2009, the German Ubuntu Developers and Users conference, held at the wonderful historic town of Göttingen, in northern Germany. The conference covers a variety of distribution development topics, with about 250 participants, and a 5-track presentation schedule (!). The talk I submitted was about a topic that fascinates me a lot lately - the convergence of Free Software desktop technologies under the hood, which makes Qt developers get in touch with GTK based technologies more and more, and vice versa, and about our experience at KDAB with developing such technologies. It was called "Qt for GTK Developers", purposefully slightly on the provocative side, with a smirk. After all, I am used to working in areas with unusual risk conditions, so why the heck not? Also, this comes not even close to the stress levels created by parenting. The talk was about how Qt and GTK are both used for developing base desktop services, which toolkit dominates in what areas, and what our guesses are on what the future brings. The central part was an overview of Qt technologies and practises, presented in contrast to GTK. The talk consisted of four sections dubbed "Everything was better in the old days", "Everyone does what he wants", "Qt is not what it used to be", and "This is as good as it gets". There were quite a few good laughs between the audience and me. Read on for more details. Read More

Not at the Akonadi sprint. Shame! (You can find Tom's blog about it here and here) Missing out on the API discussions would have been already bad enough, missing the presentation of my GSoC student and not getting to meet Brad Hards sucks. Read More

Since it seems it will turn up quite often, I would like to answer the question 'Will openSUSE 11.2 include KDE 4.3.2?'. The short answer is no and yes :). The 4.3.2 release of KDE came too late to be included in openSUSE 11.2. As the distribution release gets closer, there is a certain point after which only reviewed changes should be allowed in, in order to reduce the possibility of these changes causing unexpected breakages that might go unnoticed within the relatively short time until the release. This can happen and it wouldn't be very good to fix something small and break something bigger for the release because of some unnoticed mistake. So openSUSE 11.2 will not officially include KDE 4.3.2. Read More

So some already heard the news, but just today i felt that is time to push my own message. After 10 and a half years, i'm leaving Conectiva and of course Mandriva. Among all this years i shared all the up and downs, saw literally hundreds of colleagues leave company in all sort of situations, saw company evolution from a linux box distro to a major world linux developer, survived position changes, office changes, even building changes. As everyone that lived all the past and current histories knows that are all to stay for life. I arrived at Conectiva to do one of amazing hard work, which is convert an migrate the first ATM machines in the world from DOS to Linux in a stupid very short time ( bank is well know as Banrisul and you can see many pictures allover the web ). Guess what, still works, and you can see application running as today, with all post revisions. And i joined later the corporate development team at Conectiva. But was my post assignment that created my real meaning in FLOSS, when i joined the distribution team ( the distro !! ). I will not deny that much of what i learn until now came from the guys there, some of then today found in companies that already are or starting to grow and learn FLOSS. And was there that i get my real love for code, and in special some desktop interface called KDE. Same thing that bring me to know the world, and many friends. From there to now, i've been doing so many things is FLOSS that i really loose track. But this is a not ended history :-) At Conectiva, would be unfare to say thanks for a specific person, since was not a workplace, was a family, as disfunctional with good and bad days family. But survivors. And to Mandriva french friends, i have special thanks for Anne ( extended to her husband Erwan ) that welcome us in a moment that lot of people at .br are having doubts if merge would work and mostly to received me at their home as close friends, even with a surprise invitation to their wedding. And to Blino too, since he was a party buddy and good support at .fr side. ( yes,PLF people, i will not forget you, so no hunting me please :-). And i can say that KDE will be in very good hands at Mandriva starting November... Read More

Nokia has been kind enough for lending me an awesome N900. This will allow me to test KOffice on the phone. Document loading, parsing and scrolling speed could do with improvements. Read More