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We probably all know the situation: I finally fixes the last bug in Soprano. Yes, I know, there probably is no such thing as the last bug. But it feels good to lie to myself in this case. The redesigned Nepomuk server is done and it works smoothly. First of all, the Nepomuk Server is no KDED module anymore. So no more 90% CPU load for KDED. It was to heavyweight for KDED anyway. As a recently learned KDED was never intended to be a general purpose service daemon but a manager for small and stable modules. So now the Nepomuk server has its own service management including dependencies handling. Each Nepomuk service runs in its own child process and can be controlled through D-Bus, either through the Nepomuk server's service manager or the processes interface directly (The idea of course is not new: I took the ProcessControl class from Akonadi, thanks guys). This has several advantages: Read More

Since the Akonadi related applications for GSoC so far have been mostly about interfacing with external PIM data storage systems, e.g. Google's web based apps, I'd like to a bit of advertising for two other things we'd really like to have somebody working on. Read More

If you're a student and if you're still searching for a suitable GSoC 2008 idea then Marble might offer a chance to participate in a young, vivid and interesting project. We suggest that you have a look at the Google Summer of Code Ideas page. There are especially three ideas which seem to be exciting and very important: Vector Tiles: We'd like to see a similar concept implemented for all geographical features as the one we are using for Textures: Usage of tiles. Especially for vectors this would be interesting as we could live render e.g. Open Street Map or VMap 0 data. Panoramio/Wikipedia photo support: This would enable Marble to show thumbnails from georeferenced photos such as those from Panoramio, Wikipedia (or whatever image source is suggested by the applicant). Technically this work would extend Marble's KML support (which is currently being ported to a new QXmlStreamReader based framework). OSM Annotations: This project was suggested by Adriaan de Groot and Armijn Hemel and is meant to provide on-screen OSM Annotation support. Of course providing OpenStreetMap support is an important goal for Marble and the suggestions for this idea seem pretty reasonable and realistic for the given timeframe (and dealing with UMPC devices seems to promise lots of fun). Of course we appreciate any other ideas for Marble development as well. Creative ideas get extra bonus points. If you want to find out what Marble Development is about then I recommend that you check out my "Marble's Secrets" blog entries: Part I was a Do-It-Yourself course about creating maps for Marble. We've seen how Marble manages to even display features such as aerial photos or OpenStreetMap. Part II showed how Marble paints the different map layers. We've also seen why Marble only needs very little disk space and memory for its default map - making it an ideal choice for solutions that involve little hardware resources (like the Asus EeePC and the OLPC). Part III looks beyond Marble's offline mode: It describes how Marble fetches its data from the internet. But hurry up: Deadline for GSoC 2008 student applications is on Monday! For help or questions you can join us on IRC ( irc.kde.org, #kde-edu ) or send a mail to our mailing list.

Some people already think we do a damn fine job packaging KDE at openSUSE. But we're just a few guys and we'd do it even better with your help. Tonight at 1900UTC we're having our latest openSUSE-KDE IRC meeting in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode and we'd love to see you there. This is addressed to anyone who uses KDE on openSUSE and values the way KDE works there, whether you just booted a KDE 4 Live CD or if you can remember KDE 1.1 on SuSE 6.4 and have your name on half of kdelibs. In return we value your attention, so we can tell you what's coming up, your feedback, so we do it right, and your time - if you can help us plan features or organise squashing our bugs or tell us about the things we overlook because we are used to them, KDE gets better. Read More

I hope that everybody who celebrated Easter has enjoyed some pleasant days (well and of course everybody else, too ... ;-). Recently I've received a few e-mails from Thomas Hartmann who works in Trolltech's Qt/WinCE team. Thomas has started to port Marble to Windows CE after I had told him about Marble during the KDE 4 satellite launch event in Berlin. After having seen a few screenshots of Marble running on Qtopia this is the fifth plattform apart from Marble on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/Solaris/Unix. The high portability of Marble is due to the fact that Marble doesn't have any dependencies apart from Qt 4 itself (and it doesn't use OpenGL). So you don't even need to have KDE 4 installed to run Marble. However for users the KDE frontend is very much recommended as it has a few extra features that the Qt4-only frontend doesn't offer: like e.g. GetHotNewStuff support. The fact that Qt offers the same API across plattforms (unlike other toolkits) has certainly helped a lot to make the Windows CE port possible. Of course Thomas had to strip down Marble due to the 32 MB memory limit, so the initial vector data isn't as detailed as for the desktop version (we hope that we'll find a GSoC 2008 student who will volunteer to implement vector tiles for Marble): Thomas also created two youtube videos which show Marble on a Dell Axim X51v. The result is pretty impressive given that this PDA is using an XScale/ARM processor (which doesn't provide hardware support for floating point instructions):

With our own beta out the way I got a moment to compile Qt 4.4 beta. It adds QtWebKit packages for those who missed it in my last 4.4 packages. Read More

As some of you may have seen, Kent has released the QtScript binding generator on Troll Tech labs. I've been playing with the code for a bit, and as with KJSEmbed one of the first tests was to make sure you could use it to write a simple web browser. Kent recently added support for QUiLoader to the bindings and as a result, I can use the QWebView designer plugin to make things simple. The result is a basic web browser in less than 10 lines of javascript: Read More

The time to paint easter eggs has not come yet. It will though, in about half an hour. Also I don't really know why I'll do it. Maybe to reflect on my art skills once more and be happy that other people user their ability to create great artwork for KDE and Parley. Instead I yesterday started something that had been rotating in the back of my head for about a year now. Since I started working on KVocTrain/Parley one problem has been how to deal with synonyms (to a lesser degree antonyms and false friends, which will be done with in the same instant). Trying to check in at four in the morning probably doesn't help me fighting git. But I wanted a branch locally. I won, with only little side effects for the Kalzium plasmoids Carsten made me hack on earlier. Also the first version of the gui was somewhat scary, including three buttons, a lineedit and a listview plus two labels. After getting some sleep, it's down to a label, button and a list that shows the synonyms of the currently selected word. Also having to fix a bug in "The Raven" by Poe, no wait, in the importer for KDE3 vocabulary documents I decided that ember and radiant had to be synonyms for today, as I wasn't in the mood to look for better ones. [image:3345] If you feel your vocation is to suggest me a more clever way of setting up synonyms, make yourself heard. Read More

Haven't blogged for a while, mainly because I didn't have much worth saying. I still don't have a lot worth saying, but I'll blog anyway. I recently became part of the OpenChange team. For those not familiar with it, the OpenChange project is developing a client and server implementation of the "MAPI" protocol (which is really Exchange RPC - MAPI is the API you use to access the transport) used by Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange. OpenChange is the key to implementing an Akonadi resource that can work with Microsoft Exchange. Read More

Some words on performance Nepomuk performance has always been a bit of a problem. Last but not least this was due to the D-Bus communication with the Nepomuk server that took place all the time. Don't get me wrong, D-Bus is pretty fast, but you always get the overhead of the marshalling of messages and routing them through the D-Bus daemon. So with the new QLocalServer and QLocalSocket in QT 4.4 which introduce Windows compatibility, I re-enabled the Soprano local socket communication which is a lot faster. Now the Nepomuk server provides two interfaces: the good old and very easy to use D-Bus interface and the fast binary local socket interface. (The latter is barely documented since it is only intended for Soprano itself through Soprano::Client::LocalSocketClient). To use the new interface one could of course create and instance of LocalSocketClient but that is not recommended for two reasons: Read More