Posts 

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

Warning: Lazy copycat from openSUSE News ahead! :-) The KDE team today released KDE 4.1. The KDE developers, including the openSUSE KDE Team, have been working on it for the last six months. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. See the release announcement for more information and screenshots. Read More

After visiting a really nice collection of exhibit gardens, I decided to make an application to see how different plants are related by making a phylogentic tree generating webpage. For many groups of species, the familiar relationships have been examined very well, but for the combination of arbitrary species, you have to rely on taxonomic data for now. A convenient resource for getting at this data is NCBI taxonomy (ftp). This data unfortunately has no timeline distance between the branch points, but it's nice enough for starters. Read More

Its been a long time (again) between blog entries. The good news is that this time I have something interesting to show: Mailody using Akonadi and OpenChange to get mail from a Microsoft Exchange server, using native protocols. Read More

The new Strigi service a blogged about before is in svn trunk now. With it Strigi is now enabled by default. But that is no need to be alarmed. I think it behaves quite nicely. After 1 hour and 42 minutes of initial indexing (I did not feel any slowdown of the system in that time) I got this: Read More

Do you know about DBpedia? It's a project that lets you perform complex queries on the content of wikipedia. I've been playing with it a bit and want to share some examples. Try to come up with cool queries! Read More

Sebastian is apologizing to me for writing code. This is a bit strange and I need to reply to his post. The discussion below is really more suited for a mailing list, but since I did not start it I have no choice in the matter. Read More