Posts 

This is a small blog about layer masks, so that Sander can hopefully use it for the documentation (documentation, yay!). Basically, a layer mask is a mask that you place on your paint layer. This will literally mask areas of the layer, so that the content underneath shows through. You can paint on it with greyscale colors: the more black the color, the less the layer under it will shine through, the more white, the less the layer under it will be shown. So complete white will let nothing through, complete black will let everything through. Basically, it's a bit like selecting a piece of your image, and then cutting it, so that the selected bits go away. So what is the use for a mask here? The big advantage is that it is non-destructive: if you decide that you masked out the wrong part of your layer, you can easily remove the mask and start anew, something a lot harder (not to say near impossible, especially in between sessions) with regular selection-cutting. Read More

Today something more lightweight than usually. New database form widget has arrived: slider has been developed for Kexi, as a tutorial for the polish edition of Software Developer's Journal. The widget is usable when data is restricted to a given interval, and in the tutoral it is provided witin a custom widget factory (i.e. an extension, plugin) to show how to implement such thing and let Kexi find it. Read More

We've been waiting for this step. Read on to discover how clever it is. Short version: MS now encourages you to make all your data ODF-compatible. Period. Long version, after the /. article: Read More

So today I tried to optimize some code using std::string from the Standard Template Library and found something interesting. Let's say you have strings to assign which sometimes get longer and then again shorter. To avoid unnecessary memory allocations you can use std::string::resize(size_t n); so you create the string and then resize it so that it is big enough for the longest string: Read More

One of my pet hates in GUI widgets is the 'spinbox', and I especially dislike the idea of a floating point spinbox. I think for technical reasons I had trouble wrapping the KDE3 floating point spinbox in korundum, and couldn't get particularly worked up about fixing it. But I was a bit depressed to find out that Qt4 has a floating point spinbox widget (although I didn't obstruct its inclusion in Qt4 QtRuby). Read More

I put up some packages of the KDE 4 first tech preview for Edgy. i386 only at the moment but they're sitting in Edgy's NEW queue and will be compiled for everything when they pass through that. They install to /usr/lib/kde4 so it's quite safe to install them alongside your existing KDE 3. I compiled Umbrello and was very happy to see that it compiled and worked without major problems. Thanks to Oliver and Kleag for getting that to happen. Having text under buttons is going to be an interesting challenge for a lot of programmes. Read More

Summarising the comments on the previous blog entry and my own consideration: Top-to-Bottom – Users do not want to think about the proper sequence of options. The layout should therefore support the workflow. Top-to-bottom is mostly perceived to fulfill this requirement. Read More

Despite being very tired from my day job, I managed to get it together enough to put together a kfile-plugin (metadata support) for the XML Paper Specification format. It pulls out whatever data is available (sometimes not much, but thumbnails are reasonably common). It is committed into trunk (in kdegraphics/kfile-plugins/xps) Read More

There was a lawyer and he was just waking up from anesthesia after surgery, and his wife was sitting by his side. His eyes fluttered open and he said, “You're beautiful!

Charles Nutter writes in his blog The two core JRuby developers, myself and Thomas Enebo, will become employees at Sun Microsystems this month. Our charge? You guessed it...we're being hired to work on JRuby full-time. Read More