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At Fosem when asked about motivation developing OSS, it's learning in my case. I started the XML engine in KMPlayer when in my previous job, between projects, I was reading some docu's about JavaEE, and getting bored reading I started thinking about an implementation. Now there where some bug reports about not supporting certain links, that turned out to be crappy ASX/broken XML files, I started writing a failure proof XML parser, replacing pre parsing hack to make QDom happy. It grew a bit beyond former expectations to also support more XML playlist like XSPF, podcast and SMIL. Now SMIL is big, so that will keep me busy some time, but I just fix/implement real live links. Now SMIL is a bit old fashion and I believe to be super seeded with HTML+CSS+JavaScript or flash. Nevertheless, moving KMPlayer in other directions than the other KDE mm-players, I kept on working on it. Latest edition got the cairo painting implementation. Painting was always crappy till then and I was delaying the real fixing to later, eg Qt4 has this nice graphicsview.. Anyhow, my current colleague Frerich Raabe introduced me with the visitor pattern that, at first looked a bit inefficient, has this nice benefit to separate a particular functionality in a single class. Together with the porting of KMPlayer to the Internet tablet and a thread on the mailing list about cairo compared to other painting engines, this was a nice way to learn about the behaviour of visitors. Two visitor classes are now used, one for painting and one for mouse events. And yes, it really is a cleanup. Read More

So this year I was the first time at FOSDEM in Brussels. Brussels is a very nice city, I didn't expect this. It reminded me on Paris, it has the same french flair and beautiful architecture. But I digress. The exhibition at FOSDEM was smaller than e.g. the german LinuxTag, but there were much more talks. I myself gave two of them: CMake and friends, where I gave a quick overview over CMake (the buildsystem), CTest + Dart (Unit testing and Continuous Integration) and CPack (packaging). It was only a 15 minutes Lightning Talk so I couldn't go to deeply into details. Read More

Today, the code for Strigi moved to a more prominent position in the KDE subversion repository. The code now resides under /trunk/kdesupport/strigi. This is a directory for code on which (parts of) KDE depend(s). The next step will be to make kdelibs use Strigi code for getting at file metadata. A branch in which this work is being done has existed for some weeks at branches/work/kdelibs-strigi/ Read More

This weekend I was at FOSDEM and it was great. Jim Gettys was presenting the One Laptop Per Child progress (video). Strigi saw a lot of limelight. It was prominent in no less then three talks: Read More

Unfortunately FOSDEM is over already, it was a lot of fun. Today started with me getting there at the much too early hour of 08:55, meaning I'm very tired today ;) This morning I mostly was in the Crossdesktop session of the GNOME room. It started off with a pretty impressive demo of Metisse, which apparently is some kind of X hack that looks and works really well. Some impressive features were the customized UI and the 'flipping' away of the screens on top of a lower screen when you select text from it. Next was Jos van den Oever's talk about Strigi internals, which I think will be very neat in KDE4. I tried my best to get a picture of him in action, but unfortunately it was too dark for the small camera I borrowed from Jos Poortvliet; hopefully the GNOME people took a pic, that would be nice. After that was a talk about Wasabi: a proposal for a standard on stuff like desktop search engines and things a user can query. Read More

I went to Fosdem this year, mostly to see people I have not seen for quite some time. And that part certainly was successful! Seen so many familiar faces. People I know from Java (Sun) that I met for the first time, people that I know from free-java that I saw again, and naturally quite a lot of KDE people. One of them was Annma, whom cancelled a meeting years ago and she moved a couple of times since then. So it was good to finally see her in real life :) Read More

... many things happens, uhm... the start of support of PDF forms. But let's start explaining piece by piece. :) Thanks to the work of Bradh Hards and Jiri Klement, the [w:XML_Paper_Specification|XPS] backend of okular has been improved a lot. It can now render pages in a way that starts to match to the expected behaviour, and get some information from the documents. Read More

Ahh, today was a lot of fun at FOSDEM 2007 :) In the morning, I first went to the talk about software patents, then the One Laptop Per Child talk (really nifty stuff) and then the liberating java one. Then I wandered around a while at the KDE booth waiting for the afternoon talks to start. At the KDE booth, I was pleased to see that Jonathan Riddell had actually come, despite his claims to the contrary ;) The Semantic KDE talk by Jos and Stéphane was very interesting and promising, I just hope some of those promises actually get implemented. Would be very cool indeed. After that I went to the AIGLX talk, so I unfortunately had to skip Flavio's Strigi talk :( After that came the GEGL talk, which was very interesting. I thought it would've been nice if it had even more details, but I realize that for a generic hacker audience, this was already detailed enough (it even included creepy C #define-hackery :P). My day ended with Sander's documentation talk, which I thought had some interesting ideas. In between and after the talks, there was a lot of chatting amongst the KDE developers, which was pretty fun as well. Hopefully tomorrow will be at least as fun as today was! :)"

Last year I turned 30 and I know people still wonder when I end up being as old as I look. But on the way to this I pass today the next prime number - and I must say it feels much better than last year. The main reason is that I have a new job. This may suprise one or two, but it shouldn't. Read More

Only a few hours left until FOSDEM starts. I'm about to leave for the airport to fly to Brussels together with the rest of the SUSE crew. There will be an openSUSE developer room and I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon about "Packging made easy". The intention is to present some of the tools we have created with the openSUSE Build Service which make packaging of software much more fun than it was before. Read More