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When your boss tells you that you have to take over some work from a collegue, work that involves travelling several hours in each direction, work on a project you haven't been involved before and only get a minimum briefing, your most common reaction will likely be "this sucks!". Read More

So M got a flying pig for his birthday. Imagine that! Awesomeness - aren't you jealous? I surely am. It's even pink! There are days (or does it only happen at night, when you can't sleep?) where flying pigs seem to be the secret rulers of KDE. Read More

Those of you've been around desktop computers for a while know the calming effect of a simple desktop. One of the things I've missed is the ability to have a basic tiled pattern with user defined colours. So since I wanted to learn a bit more about Plasma wallpapers for another project, I rolled up my sleeves, had a look at the old kdesktop sources, and reimplemented it using the latest technologies. The result is in playground. Everything old is new again: Watch out, panel. You're next.

The next few days I will be in Nurenberg, working on-site at our customer's facilities at the airport. I am arriving Monday afternoon and departe on Thursday morning, so I basically have three evenings to spend on going out for dinner and probably a pub or two :) Read More

I feel a bit stuck in a time warp, having already written blogs with much the same title and subject as this one, back in April. The difference is that it is now possible to use the Plasma Script Engine api and associated packaging mechanism, as opposed to the earlier bindings, which were based on the C++ plugin api. Of course, being able to write engines in C# as well as Ruby is something new. Read More

For the case you, dear reader, are not subscribed to the KDE-accessibility mailinglist (tststs), we received a rather interesting mail just yesterday; Project Announce: AT-SPI D-Bus That project is done by codethink and sponsored by Nokia and Mozilla (and Novell seems to be in there somehow too). Result will be (hopefully) also that each Qt- and KDE-application will be able to access optional the same accessibility-infrastructure like e.g. GNOME is using today. For this Qt4 provides the Qt Accessibility framework and the best; no additional work at the application-level is needed (well, with some exceptions as usual). Read More

Writing good error messages for your programs is art. Your user gets an error message - he cannot ask his computer "how do you mean this?". Error messages are important because they can help you fix a problem. Some error messages are critical because the error prevents you from achieving anything. One example are the error message of startkde. When you have a problem with startkde, you have a real problem. If you cannot solve it, you cannot work (with KDE) at all. Sad enough, some error messages resemble to the infamous OpenOffice help that (while leaving out important context) explains things like File|Open : Opens a file Today I <a href=http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=888689>improved an error message in startkde. The error message was like the following: Cannot start kstartupconfig4. Check your installation. This error message had made me copy kstartupconfig4 everywhere: /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin and I was just about to copy it to /sbin when I started mistrusting this error message. Analyzing the code I found out kstartupconfig4 was found, called and executed, but delivered a return code of 3 (non-zero meaning error). So the error message missed point one for good error messages: be correct Second, its advice how to proceed was too generalized: "Check your installation" is not only what you do when kstartupconfig4 is delivering an error. You also do it if KDE consumes too much system load, when it eats your data or when your computer shows a black screen or starts mooing. So the error message misses point two for good error messages: be concise Read More

Back in April I did some very rough performance measurements of my new notebook vs. my desktop machine: Back then I got the following numbers for a complete build of CMake: Read More

Last week I upgraded my development machine, from a AMD Athlon XP 2000+ to an Intel based one, featuring GMA3100-based onboard graphics. Everything's working smoothly that far, I have only one issue: "Virtual" keyword in the "Screen" section seems to be ignored. This was working since my very first Linux installation in 1996, so I'm really used to having a big virtual screen. This is on Slackware 12.1, using xf86-video-intel 2.2.1. Any ideas ? Read More

I've been pretty inactive in development recently for a few reasons (I got engaged, then I had a nasty fall from my road bike due to a tyre blowout). I was impressed by the great work that David Nolden continues to do for kdevelop, particularly the behind-the-scenes improvements which make using the program bearable. However as we know it's the new features which are the most 'bloggable'... Read More