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One of the many things I learned at linux.conf.au was about ack. Thanks to Paul Fenwick for bringing it to our attention. Spend a few minutes with me on this... If you are a fan of grep (especially with -drecurse), but hate seeing the .svn directories and contents of the object files, you need ack. Read More

More than a year ago I wrote a post about KDE 4.0, I was quite unsatisfied with how in was and that we are going to release a product that has defects and in the eyes of the users will be a step back. I actually switched to KDE4 as my main desktop sometime during the 4.1 developing cycle. Since then I use KDE trunk on one machine and whatever my distro (openSUSE) provides on another one. There is always a shock when I have to use the distro packages. They did a very good job on integration and in many cases the distro package looks more polished than my self compiled one, still I was always liked the trunk version better. The improvement between 4.1.x and 4.0.x and 4.x.x and 4.1.x is just so big, using the older version is like going back several years. Not talking when I use KDE 3.5 on some other machines. I miss KDE 4.2 a lot in that case. Was it good that we released 4.0 a year ago? I think it was bad from PR point of view, but probably needed to actually have a 4.2 like the one will appear soon in the wild. Yes, there are still issues, yes there are some applications that aren't ported or their port is not up to the expectations (yet). Luckily, unless your distribution did it wrong, it is possible to run the KDE3 applications under KDE4, without much hassle. In the previous blog I complained about performance. My system is almost the same, except the video card is a newer one. And buying a new card at that time caused more trouble, and virtually no visible speedup at that time. Meantime the drivers improved (also due to KDE!), KDE improved (both kwin and plasma), and now I can use my system with effects enabled without thinking about performance. The current performance problems are actually caused by the flash plugin and its wrappers, in many case they start to use 100% CPU power. I'm not sure it can be fixed by us or the wrapper developers, what I know that both Konqueror and Firefox suffer from this problem. I just had to close down Firefox running in a KDE3 session because the X server for that session used completely one core. I'm happy now with KDE4 and trunk already has some improvements compared to 4.2 that I enjoy. :) I'm amazed by the progress of KDE, aren't you amazed as well? Read More

On Friday, I gave my talk at linux.conf.au 2009. I'm sure the slides (and the recordings will be up on the conference web site at some point), but you can get them from my site in ODP and PDF versions. Read More

LZMA is a relatively new compression algorithm. It is used in more and more places: 7-zip, the Linux kernel and deb and RPM packages. So adding LZMA to Strigi was a desirable step. The code for LZMA can be downloaded from the 7-zip website. It is in the public domain. Read More

After I received a lot of positive feedback about my Akonadi Resource Tutorial, or probably more accurate outright praises :), I knew I had to write another one. This time I chose a topic that is probably less relevant for the majority of developers, however it should be helpful for people who either work on PIM applications with data types not yet covered by our current code or who want to use Akonadi for non-PIM data. Read More

I recently noticed that although I have already talked about using KDE4's KWin in KDE3 or any other window manager in KDE instead of KWin, there is one thing missing in the mix: Using KWin without the KDE desktop. Read More

Have you ever been a bit irritated by a wart on an API, that gives you a slightly uncomfortable feeling when you think about it, and an itch to try an fix it? Once such wart was in the way standard Plasma plasmoid packages worked; you could call the main script any name you like as long as it was 'main'. That meant that if you looked at your Ruby, Python or JavaScript applet code in Kate it didn't have any syntax highlighting as the editor depends on a '.rb', '.py' or '.js' suffix. Read More

Amazing how long it always takes for me to write a log entry. So many times in the last months I told myself I had to write the next entry... well, new year's resolution (a little late I know): more blogging about what I am up to (regarding KDE of course). Read More

In a great demonstration that not only do great minds think alike, they can also subconsciously syncronise to attack the same problem, Luca Beltrame and I started work on our own tutorials about writing Plasma applets using Python at exactly the same time and day this weekend. We've coordinated ourselves and now there are 3 new tutorials about programming Plasma applets with Python up on techbase. The first tutorial by myself is an introduction to the whole work cycle of creating an applet. Luca continues in the second tutorial with how to use Plasma widgets in an applet. And today I've written another tutorial about how to use DataEngines in an applet. Read More

Björn and I sat down (or rather mailed around) to get the FSFE Fellowship Meeting and KDE 4.2 Stuttgart Release Party going. Of course that involved talking to people around here. Ingo of RadioTux was on my list of locals, so I contacted him. What I didn't expect was to be interviewed on RadioTux just a few days later. I had a short interview on RadioTux. So if you are really brave, you can listen to me (in German), stuttering here. After some technical problems they got me on the phone at around 65 minutes. And d'oh, could I think of many things to say when skipping through it afterwards... I guess I still need to work on my promo skills. But it turned out much less embarassing than I had originally feared :D Read More