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Not an April Fool's day article. Appeared yesterday. In the British Guardian:   "No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch" "I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are." Read More

In KWord we always had a very simple way to structure pages. We just stored the height of a page and when there is a frame at position 10000 you can calculate its at, say, page 12. Naturally, this only gets you so far and we had requests for things like differently sized pages and pagespreads. So, in October 2005 ago I wrote a Page class and a PageManager class. Which was released in KOffice 1.5. This already gave features like being able to have a document start from page 10, instead of always from page 1. But unfortunately there never appeared a GUI for it, and thus users could not use it. Read More

Bild-Leser-Reporter Stephan K. found that while trying to grab some icecream for his pregnant wife:

I've been a bit quiet lately. Sorry for that, I was more focussing on getting nice things done which was needed for me to make sure my open source efforts stay enjoyable :) Read More

Hum, long time no blog... I finally bought a laptop: it's a Lenovo 3000 N100. I am happy to report almost everything worked out of the box when I installed Ubuntu Edgy, including Wifi. Only tricky thing was figuring out how to get the correct video resolution. It turned out the only necessary action was to apt-get install 915resolution. Read More

How to get more developers on our board? No doubt, it's easier to get them as we support more languages. Kross helps to utilize this strategy, especially for Python, Ruby, Javascript and (soon/less or more) Java developers. Read More

Finally, the dialog section in the HIG has made some progress. Thank to Olaf who knows Qt Designer much better than I do, we found a way to create a clean dialog layout for KDE4. The trick is to use the same ratio of spacers on bottom of each group box. Read more in the guidelines! Read More

A short story about using the right tools: Factory is the development distribution of the openSUSE project, currently at version 10.3 Alpha 2+. The SUSE-powered Dashboard tells you what is compiling - or not. If it's a good day the KDE 4 packages in the openSUSE Build Service can be updated. And finally KIWI allows you to create operating system images, eg. Live-DVDs. Read More

I just added a proposal for an interesting project to KDE's Summer of Code Ideas page. It's about kxml_compiler, a tool to automatically generate C++ code for parsing XML data from XML schemas. There is some existing code, but it only barely works. Improving this code to become useful for a wide range of schemas and applications would be a great project. The proposed XML based KOrganier holiday description format provides a nice benchmark for this. The code is used in KDE, but it's pretty much self-contained, so working on it will mainly require solid C++ knowledge. kxml_compiler is part of the Kode suite. Read More

Andy Koehler has created some nice animated Kickoff buttons in case you don't like the one that your distribution ships. :-) They look best at their native size but can be used with any: when you change the panel size the animation is not resized initially but a "dcop kicker Panel restart" will fix that.