Posts 

The Canonical AllHands meeting is happening a wee bit outside of Barcelona. It is a requirement of all buildings in Barcelona that they have weird and interesting architecture. This hotel has more floors underground than it has above ground. The translucent showers are a curious feature but my roommate is Aurelien who turns out to be as cool a bloke as you could expect being a KDE developer. Why Canonical, with these Ferrero Rocher you are really spoiling us no? I got to meet Zhengpeng who helped make Kubuntu support CKJ back in the day and now works for the OEM team. Aurélien fixed my Gwenview crasher bug without me having to even report it! I've had a good number of people come up to me to shake my hand and thank me for making the desktop they use happen on Ubuntu, naturally I blush I remind them of the many wonderful people at KDE and Kubuntu who do far more than I ever do. I've also had quite a few say "I've never used KDE. Although I use Kopete all the time. And Amarok is great. And KMail saved me when my other app broke." turns out people use KDE without even thinking about it, which is quite pleasing. Read More

I'm about 18 months behind the curve here compared to you trend-setters in KDE-land, but I think I now actually "get" git. Meaning that I now have a mental model of git which makes sense and I can use to make sense of the numerous "Git $X seconds" blog posts hanging around on the web (where the number $X is always smaller than the last blogger). I remember sebas having a go at explaining it to me and me not understanding what the big deal was or what it really was about. Read More

Its been a while since I did anything productive in KDE land, so thought I'd try to do something in a morning. Its hard freeze time, so that should be bug fixing. Bug 185532 was something I'd been thinking over for a while. Read More

The best compliment for you, KDE devs, ever: "Daddy you have a new computer!" -- my ~4 years old son Michał, yesterday while sitting with me at a (4 years old) ASUS notebook rebooted from Vista to Linux+KDE 4.2.3...

We finally had a meeting of KDE people in Edinburgh, not quite Akademy but it's a start. Nice tie Paul. A couple weeks later Laura Dragan gave a talk to BCS Glasgow on Nepomuk, nice to see KDE interest going outside the free software crowd. Read More

As some might have noticed among all the praise, some of the features may not come at low cost. One of the biggest memory hogs in KDE4 is (again) something that doesn't have much to do with KDE itself - the OpenGL library shipped with the nvidia driver. It is compiled without -fPIC to gain a couple percent performance increase (if at all, I personally doubt it makes a noticeable difference, but that's just guessing, given it's closed-source). And that means that every single application that links against it wastes about 11MiB RAM (on 32bit system), per process, regardless of whether and how much it actually uses it. And currently there are 5 such processes in just the plain KDE desktop, and count in the X server too. Do the math yourself. Or just have a look at the picture of Exmap showing it: Read More

While most core kdepim folks are knee-deep (neck-deep?) working on Akonadi and Akonadi migration issues, the bug reports and feature requests continue rolling-in at brisk pace for Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook, Akregator, KTimeTracker, KJots and friends. Read More

During the last weeks I introduces Marbles AbstractDataPlugin classes. These make it possible to generate a full featured Marble plugin showing for example photos on the globe with several hundered lines of code. In KDE 4.3 beta 1 is a photo and a wikipedia plugin. On clicking on the little items on the globe, Marble will open a browser showing the corresponding flickr site. The wikipedia plugin may still have some issues, so it probably won't work, but this is already fixed in trunk. Read More

Marble is one of my favorite applications. I especially like it in combination with OpenStreetmap. Free software and free maps, a brilliant combination. But I also love the historical map or the moon view. Read More

In a previous blog entry, I discussed some initial work on GCC plugins. Since then, the GCC gurus (in particular, Rafael Avila de Espindola) have made sure headers get installed correctly. Read More