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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

The past month had quite some cool things in store. It started with the Akonadi developer sprint in Berlin, Germany, where we got quite some work done, especially regarding mails. This was followed by the general ranking period for this year's Google Summer of Code proposals and we were delighted to see that the Akonadi related ones did exceptionally well. Read More

The first episode of 'programming in SVG' led to some nice bling improvements in KDE. Aaron showed how to put an SVG program in a plasmoid and Ariya taught us the incantation to make the desktop shine through such a plasmoid. And last but not least Remco Bloemen mailed me with a working demo that hows how to include arbitrary data in an SVG application with data URIs. Read More

Recently I received positive feedback on my program CubeTest. The program is being used in primary schools to help children to achieve better spatial insight. There is a teachers manual on-line. CubeTest was originally written in Qt3 and ported to Qt4 later. Because some cube decorations are SVG images, the Qt4 version needed to use Q3Picture, a class for backwards compatibility with Qt3. The renewed interest prompted me to suggest to add CubeTest to KDE-Edu and clean up the code. Now I was faced with a chose: keep Q3Picture or move the cubes to a QGraphicsView. Read More

One of the new features proposed for GCC 4.5 is the ability to use plugins. I'm a big fan of plugin architectures, especially in open source software. I think that plugins provide a really nice starting point for potential developers. So you can start with something simple and well defined, and grow into the rest of the system. Personally, the idea of understanding all of GCC is just overwhelming. But perhaps I could do a really basic plugin that can do an additional static check. Read More

I'd like to say hello to everybody reading this blog. This is my first blog entry. I'm starting my blog because I got accepted to this year's Google Summer of Code to work on Marble. Read More