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I forgot to blog about this: I'm not giving up maintainership of Gwenview anymore, in fact it has been decided that Gwenview will move to kdegraphics for KDE4! This is what I call great news! Read More

Yes, pinotree, PDFedit is one of the two applications I discovered a few weeks ago when I searched Google for PDF manipulation tools... :-) (I'm really curious if you'd know about the other one already -- but that's a few days away to blog about. Today is about PDFedit.) Read More

Readers of my blog will know it already: Linux printing is geared to move towards PDF to make it its core spooling and job processing format. (This won't happen over night, and this won't make PostScript printing any harder, so don't worry). That was what the overall consensus was at last year's Linux Desktop Printing Summit in Atlanta, where developers from CUPS, Linuxprinting.org, FreeStandards.org, Freedesktop.org, OpenPrinting.org, OpenUsability.org, Ghostscript, Scribus, KDE, Gnome, Redhat, SUSE, Ricoh, Lanier, HP, Xerox, IBM, Mandriva, Debian, Mozilla and Sun sat together for 3 days, exchanged ideas and discussed how to move forward. Read More

In November, OpenUsability announced six mentored projects for students of usability, user interface design, interaction design, or related. We received applications from all over the world - New Zealand, India, South Africa, Europe, South America, USA and Canada. Most of the applicants were highly skilled, and it was sometimes difficult to take a decision. Finally, the following teams formed up: Read More

Over at the CUPS mailing lists/forums, an ongoing discussion thrashes out some changes that will affect the future of Linux desktop printing. One point is about the "Foomatic" drivers. This driver family is not "native" to CUPS -- Foomatic is a clever trick to plug Ghostscript as an add-on into the CUPS filtering system. So the question was, how could they blend into CUPS in a more harmoneous way? What could be done to not cause so many support calls for Easy Software Products complaining about Foomatic drivers, which they don't develop, and don't offer support for? (ESP is the company of Mike Sweet, the main CUPS author). Read More

<img src="http://www.okular.org/screenies/okular-backend-djvu-1.thumb.png" align="right" width="110" height=86" hspace="10" /> As you might know, okular supports a number of file formats. One of the formats it supports is [w:DjVu|DjVu], as you can see in the screenshot. Read More

I finally find out recordMyDesktop and played a bit with it. Animations are a bit boring as PNG images after all. Too bad the recording seems to take up quite some resources and the videos look a bit jerky because of that (GeForce2 is not that slow :) ). I had to intentionally make some of the things slower and take longer and it still looks worse than in reality. Oh well. Ok, some new things in kwin_composite from Rivo Laks, Philip Falkner and yours truly: Read More

I estimate its some 15 years ago I wrote my first address book. On my Amiga, in C. It had a really nice GUI that was task oriented and I kept all my friends addresses and phone numbers in there. One feature I was pretty proud about was that I encrypted the data before writing it to disk. Some months later I lost the key and I wrote another application to brute force the encryption and retrieve my address book. Lesson learned was that I should not have an 8 bit cypher as all possible keys can be tested for correctness in quite a short time. But instead of creating a new encryption or hashing function, I learned that its better to use an off-the-shelf algorithm as apparently its really really hard to write one that others who have access to the actual code of the algorithm can't hack. You may be wondering where I'm going with this, the answer is that whenever someone invents his or her own hashing or encryption algorithm I cringe, thinking that its such a beginners mistake that I place them in the same category as programmers that write for-loops in games with a specific amount of iterations to delay the program exactly 100msec. Something game writers used to do on old computers. Really funny effect when you bought a new computer that was twice as fast :) Read More

Joining the list of tools being used internally at Novell/SUSE being available as Open Source (like SWAMP or Testopia) now also the source code for the openSUSE Build Service is available under GPL from today on. So if you have some spare computers in your cellar you can set up your own build service farm (to build your own secret or illegal stuff). Read More

Every five years or so, it snows in Tucson. We got our latest taste last Sunday: (click for more photos) I grew up in Illinois, where the winters were long and relatively harsh. So it's pretty funny to watch native Tucsonans freak out after 1 cm of snowfall. Schools were shut down. More than 50 bridges in town were closed to all traffic. Local auto stores sold out of ice scrapers. You know, mass hysteria! </vinkman> Read More