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That's not new but perhaps you'd like to know... ;) How to write a KDE app or a GNOME app. And of course,

After the kdebindings meeting about a month ago in Berlin, I had a 8-ish hour long trip back on the train from Berlin to Nijmegen. Deutsche Bahn's trains are rather civilised and have power on board for all your laptop charging needs (provided you can get close enough to the seats with the tables and the power outlets). Anyway, after getting some preliminary Python coding working inside KDE 4's systemsettings (thanks go to rdale for his help), I had a go at trying to fix up the PyKDE class documentation to more closely match the C++ KDE API docs. About 5 weeks of hack time later I now have something which is ready enough for the public. The formatting is much more in line with the C++ docs and the pages are laid out and cross linked much better than the previous class reference for PyKDE. It is still not perfect (code fragments are not translated to Python), but it should be perfectly usable 98% of the time. Give it a try. Read More

Akademy is coming closer and I still haven't managed to blog about current stuff happening in Parley. Instead I was wasting my time outside, climbing, and lately again (last weekend at least) some coding. Lately I leaned back and enjoyed other people working on parley a lot. Our two summer of code projects are becoming ready for broader testing and have been merged into trunk. New faces show up improving Parley, Javier Goday got started with two patches to improve the ui :) Daniel Laidig is working on a welcome screen that hopefully will make new users feel more welcome and not scare all long time users away ;) One sad topic that came up is the state of the handbook, which is not as nice as it should be. I cleaned out lots of old stuff from it a week ago, so now it's time to fill it with actual information again. Since huge parts will have to be rewritten, I was wondering if there is a good way to collaborate on the handbook. Any tips are more than welcome. I think we have enough interested people willing to write some piece and improve parts here and there, but the current docbook sources are not very easy to work on with different people that don't necessarily have svn accounts. Read More

Such a boring title. And so obvious. But it's August: everyone around packs, get their kids in the cars and rush for miles until they reach to the hot summer beaches.... puagh! not my style. You won't see uga roasting his back under the sun just to look like the Guinness Record of Large Red Tomatoes. Life got other interests to keep my time busy. Different cultured and tourist-free destinations where you can taste the flavor of magestic culinaires not adapted to local aberrations, or you can just walk through, admiring their architecture and nature. Read More

The eGroupWare resource in KDE-PIM hasn't gotten much love and attention in a long time. It compiles, but we have no idea if it really works, nor do we have anyone on the PIM team who uses it. Read More

Akarsh Simha is pursuing a very ambitious project for Google Summer of Code 2008: He's increasing the number of stars displayed by KStars by a factor of 10 (from 130,000 to over 1 million), without having a negative impact on the performance of the program. James Bowlin and I are his co-mentors in this project. James and Akarsh spent the pre-coding SoC period hashing out the code architecture required for this effort, which allowed Akarsh to hit the ground running when he started to code. His progress has been amazing: in the kstars/summer branch, we are already displaying over 2 million stars, and it feels just as responsive as trunk, because the new architecture is extremely efficient in memory usage. Read More

On August 1st, we had a partial solar eclipse in Kuwait, covering about 18% of the solar disk. Part of the event involved showing live view of the eclipse from the Ujari Observatory, which relies on KStars for control. So we got a hand held video cam, an adapter to attach it to a short focal length telescope (which is mounted on the same equatorial fork base of the primary telescope), and a long video cable connecting two 46" LCDs in the ground and first floor levels of the astronomy & space sciences department. Read More

At my new workplace Collabora , I got the chance to play around with Webkit during the last few months. and one of the tasks we looked at was to improve and speedup webkit on QGraphicsView, And then produce useful ways to interact with Web contents, So yesterday, I was checking how responsive it would be to add live reflections of a webpage. Here is the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T44QxXCQZzQ. And it wasn't bad as we expected. This is really easy with QWebView off screen rendering, But since this is a graphics Item, We had to do it differently. The code is on a git repo and you can clone it from : http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/siraj/stefani.git;a=summary. Ok now wondering .. "Stefani?" . It's a playful toy we use to experiment with Web content on QGV. Stefani is built around QGraphicsItem with some super powers to render HTML contents. Basically, this QWebViewItem has the same API as the QWebView, but has some extra functions to produce bling. and one function there, emits a signal on content change, which allows us to render a reflection externally . Read More

I have many ideas and limited time. And many of the ideas I want to work on get interrupted by pressing concerns such as bug fixing and high priority features. Because of this, I tend to have many small improvements lying around in my trunk. Then when the time comes to commit a quick bug fix, I face an 'svn status' output with lots of 'A', 'M' and '?' indicators. In short: a time sink. Read More

While reading ESR's blog I came across a questionnaire to find out what kind of D&D character I'd be. I've only once joined in on a D&D role-playing evening and found it was not for me. This query is interesting though because of the many questions you have to answer and for which you have to make up your mind about which of the given options applies best to you. Read More