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This new version of KDE Four Live shows the changes done during the holiday season until new year. Compared to the final 4.0 release it misses some days of bugfixing and the final Oxygen artwork (new sounds and wallpapers, icon updates). In preparation for the release this CD contains only applications/modules which will be part of the KDE 4.0 release (so eg no KDEPIM, KOffice, Amarok, Quanta and extra plasmoids).

SCNR. Rejoice - it has been done - KDE 4.0.0 has been tagged ! :-) Although I didn't touch any significant number of lines of C++ code of KDE for the 4.0.0 release, the last (almost exactly) 2 years since I brought CMake to KDE4 (together with the help of many other developers, especially Laurent Montel !) have been very busy, impressive, awesome, stressful, interesting, rewarding, exhausting, etc. for me. Read More

So I have been working on a Wiki parser in Qt and so far have most of the basic cases working. I tried two approaches one with a series of regexps and the other using a tokenizing parser. Read More

I finally got the KCabinet class (in playground/libs/kcabinet) working. To make any sense out of this, you need to know that the Microsoft Cabinet format is based on blocks of data (the CFDATA block) that end up being <= 32768 bytes. There are four ways that the data is packaged - uncompressed, MS-ZIP format, Quantum and LZX. I'm mainly interested in MS-ZIP, which is basically the deflate algorithm with a little header (similar to how gzip works). With MS-ZIP, you get around 2K of compressed data in each block, which expands to 32768 bytes in each block - except the last one of course. Read More

Around 2000 (back in KDE2 times) I wrote the so called LAN information server lisa (http://lisa-home.sf.net), which can you show the neighbours in your network. This works by regularly sending ping packets on the network. In order not to flood the network too much, if there are several of these daemons running in one network, they collaborate and reuse their results. Read More

After almost one month, we're finally back in Bavaria. First I picked up my wife in Berlin, where she had a week of vacation. Then visited Rostock for almost 2 weeks and then drove back to Berlin on 26th where my mother married. Then we celebrated new year in the lovely St. Joseph's hospital because Felix got really, really sick and we had to wait over an hour for the blood values and it happened to be the midnight. Read More

Well, the homestretch is near, I've had to dropped some functionality to get this finished for KDE 4.0.0. So, no Icons for this version. But, you can see It should replace most of the functionality kweather did. This applet does not support dropping onto the panel or If it does, it might not render correctly. Read More

I want to wish everyone a great and happy 2008. It's been a while since I last blogged and the reason is I'm pretty busy with the new job, which after nearly 2 months is still fun and challenging and I hope it will stay this way. It's having a nice effect on my, I start to want to program again (well I think I will go take 2 aspirins and wait until this pass) ;)

Before everyone starts to spread his opinion about KDE 4.0 let me spread some reminders: KDE 4.0 is not KDE4 but only the first (4.0.0 even non-bugfix) release in a years-long KDE4 series to come. KDE 4.0 is known to have missing parts or temporary implementations (eg printing, PIM, Plasma). Most changes happened under the surface and cannot be discovered in a "30 minutes usage"-review anyway. User interfaces being unchanged in 4.0 compared to 3.5 may be still changed/improved during KDE4 life time. KDE 4.0 will not be the fastest KDE4 release, like for KDE2 most speed optimizations will happen later during KDE4. Most applications (many are not even fully ported yet) will take advantage of new features which the new Qt/KDE libraries offer only later. Don't measure portability success (eg MS Windows) by current availability of application releases, they will come. KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt [btw said to have only 6 months support for its packages]). KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump 4.0, expect 4.1 later this year. Last, again: KDE 4.0 is not KDE4. :-)

This xmas I was given a watch. It's pretty geeky one LCD Lexon E8, but for me still easier to accept than real binary counters. If we're at watches, Adam Pigg apparently got something like this hardcore LED BCD watch. In terms of usability I prefer Lexon's LCD to (otherwise cool) LED display, because in the latter case you need to use your second hand to press a button to turn the power-hungry diodes on for a few seconds to read the time. Read More