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So after 2 days of frantic hacking we made some good progress on Akonadi - including sorting out the database schemas with professional help for performance, producing benchmarking tools to find areas to improve in other layers, fixing MIME parser bugs, improving KMail in KDE 4.0 and KOrganizer's layouting. Read More

Once again we have friends visiting, here at the KDAB Berlin office. So far Will Stephenson, Bruno Virlet, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause and Kris Koehntopp have arrived for a weekend of Akonadi hacking. Kris (of MySQL) has kindly agreed to have a look at our usage of their system and point out the various errors of our ways. It's already been very productive, we now have a much better idea of what not to do and how to debug what we are currently doing. The rest of the guys are working on benchmarking the other layers, with the goal of proving that Akonadi can actually deliver the kind of performance we need. Bruno has been doing great work on the models for Qt4's model/view framework, on top of Akonadi, as part of his Summer of Code project, and it's great to meet him in person. The picture below shows him in animated discussion with Kris. More exciting things to come as the weekend progresses, I'm sure. Read More

Seems like I'm not the only one taking the KDE 'holiday' vacation days. Usually the last two weeks of August are typically quiet. I did hack up the testapplet locally to connect to the WeatherEngine, so far, it returns a list of available datasources (Ions) in a kDebug() :-). Read More

Justin Karneges recently released the "test1" version of QCA. Read the announcement here. There will be a "test2" release soon, and the final release is scheduled for 4 September 2007. If you have an interest in crypto, or Qt APIs, or (ideally) both, note that we are providing Binary Compatibility and source compatibility from QCA 2.0.0 release for the duration of Qt4. If the API doesn't do what you need, now is the time to tell us. After 2.0.0 we will do additions, but nothing that will break BC. Read More

This blog moved to my private website (feed)!

Today a received a new toy, a shiny greenphone!!! After the last year of extremely bad things it's will help me get back the love of software development. And to help me find it again I decided to reorganise my office which is still on the temporary setup I did when I moved in here over 3 years ago ... finally I won't kill myself by tripping on network or electrical cable anymore ...

This is my first evening I have on my own, so I thought I let the world know: On the 16th of August 2007 our son Felix made world++. It was a busy day - after I complained on the 15th about deadlines it came a bit out of the sudden. Just as we agreed with the midwife that the 17th would be the better date anyway, he protested so heavily that he made it at 16 minutes to midnight (I don't want to bore you with medical details). Meanwhile I figured the 2^4th of the 2^3th month of 2..7 has its charm too - but only to boring people :) Read More

Sometimes KDE makes me want to cry out of frustration (like tonight, because of Qt using select(2) instead of poll(2), breaking my akregator), but sometimes it just fills me with so much joy that I could also cry =) Like just now, when someone came in #koffice to ask if he could somehow print his presentation notes that he put in KPresenter. Unfortunately, I did not know how to do that (quite likely it's just not possible), but it took me just a few minutes tinkering around with DCOP (yes, people still use KDE3.5 technology for work ;)) to make a tiny script that just prints out all your notes! Read More

A few days ago a kind soul reminded me of kandy.kde.org, the ancient home page of Kandy, an application to sync mobile phones I wrote six years ago. [image:2942 size=original hspace=100] I still remember the happy feeling when I had transferred the phonebook of my mobile phone to my computer for the first time. I also still like the cheesy name "Kandy", the triple pun on "Handy", the German word for mobile phone, "Candy", and the KDE naming convention. It once was a sweet application, so please bear with me. Read More

Other distributions certainly like to pick up stuff that Novell/SUSE are developing (and have been using for long). Recent examples include Ubuntu and Mandriva starting to integrate AppArmor or Oracle porting YaST to their Enterprise Linux and RHEL. On a smaller scale, the sysinfo:/ KIO slave has been improved and packaged for several distributions. Read More