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Finally it seems that i've some time to spend even blogging.. it's a great progress from the previous months :) First of all.. yes, i left my job finally. Basically because i'm still a student.. it's quite impossible to finish university having a full time job.. and since it also wasn't exactly a nice job, i must admit, now i feel really better :) I started hacking again on kmobiletools. I had enough money to buy a new phone, a Samsung SGH Z140V. The really cool part is that a lot of features are currently unsupported, which makes a lot more interesting coding. It's a PDU able phone, so i was finally able to code a decent implementation of pdu encoding. Also, having 2 mobile phones (yes, i'm still feeling too attached to my old Moto C350, which has made kmobiletools born :P) gave me a nice idea: since i had both ttyACM0 and ttyACM1 busy, i had to find a way to avoid having them exchanged.. So now kmobiletools before loading a device checks for each possible target, looks for the mobile IMEI (if any), and then says "Here it is! Let's connect!". With this system i could also code a nice wizard, that seems very useful also for unexperienced users. Now i should start working on real life.. i'm still too late with studies.. and above all, i'm still single :\

Overview As we know it's been some time since we released a stable version of kbfx. Lot of work has been going on behind the stage..I think users who came to kbfx.org know a lot about the upcoming kbfx version and it's state. but there are lot more who has no idea about kbfx 0.4.9 which we will release in 10 to 15 days from now. Read More

I want to have an iterator with an encapsulated "next" function. These iterators will be returned from a class that knows how to advance over the data structure, but that should be completely hidden from the users of the iterator. Read More

A common solution I hear in OSS projects to learn about relevant features is to track the users' interactions with the software: The menu items they click, the settings they check, the applications they use. Implementing a tool that is able to track such data seems to be a widespread idea among Open Source developers. The rationale is usually to provide usability experts (like me) with data that describes the actions and behaviours of users. Read More

For those running Gentoo, I've created an ebuild for the cmake required to compile KDE4. Although, the current kdelibs4_snapshot doesn't seem to compile with cmake. :-( http://kurt.hindenburg.name/ http://kurt.hindenburg.name/downloads/cmake-2.3.4-20060317.tar.gz

The vector graphics package Xara Xtreme so far was only available for Windows. Back in October, the Xara company announced the porting of its flagship product to Linux and Mac OS X. Not only that -- the complete source code should become available, and subject to the GPL license. But at the time they consoled hopes for an immediate release to a later date. Read More

So aKademy 2006 was announced. The date is interesting, as it starts on my birthday. ;-) I wanted to go there, but didn't start any preparation before the final announcement. Now I looked at what do I need to go there. First a plane ticket: it is 220EUR+airport taxes. This is not that bad, and the fact that I don't have to go to the capital city, but I can use another one (where my mother in law lives) is a bonus. So traveling can be arranged. But I need a visa as well! Unfortunately Ireland is not part of the Schengen treaty and altough I don't need a visa to enter the Schengen states, I need one to enter Ireland (and UK for that matter). I couldn't find the local site of the Irish embassy, but I found some informations on a travel agency site and I was shocked. The amount of documents they ask is enormous and I'd say aberrant. Starting from proof that you work here the listed documents are: registration of the company (not clear if you need it also if you are an employee?), birth certificates of all your relatives (parents, sisters, brothers, spouse, children), official declaration that you don't want to work there, copy of all pages of your current and past passports where there are visas or stamps, bank account statement, reservation at an Irish hotel and whatever. All officially translated to English and everything in two examples. The waiting period for the visa is 4-6 weeks. Amazing. Not even the US or the UK has these kind of requirements. Of course it is well known that getting a visa for the US is a simple lottery, but for the UK on their site it is said that 93% gets the visa and they try to issue the visa for everybody in one day. Also for the US they decide on the same day you have the interview. I hate paperwork and usual treatment at embassies (most of them). I would also need to go to the capital city twice (800km in total), pay a lot for the travel, for the visa and for the translations (it's not cheap to do official translations) and after that you might still not get it. I found an email address (which does not bounce) and asked there again about the requirements to get the visa. If they don't answer, I will call them. But if the requirements are the same I read on the tourist agency site, I may not go. It would take far too much energy and money from my side and it may not worth. So happy aKademy for all the others. Read More

D3tails... See 4lso: P0w3r C0mb1n3d ;)

Reading the GNOME 2.14 feature guide you are told that "several important components of the GNOME desktop are now measurably faster" - which is nice. As example the GNOME Terminal is mentioned which a graph says is three times faster than the previous version and now being four times faster than xterm. If I remember an early draft of this document correctly it was measured with "time cat /usr/share/dict/words" so what do you think was measured? How long it took to print all the characters in that file? Likely by no means. Read More

Once upon a time there were some dwarfs who wandered around the earth and told everyone who liked to hear that they would produce a desktop including the distribution of their handcraft every sixth months. And some people believed them and the dwarfs' business grew a bit. But the dwarfs wanted to grow further and so they continued to praise themselves as the high lords of fixed release schedules - and it worked some times somehow. People who had an own project or business to place on the desktop started to trust the dwarfs' telling. The dwarfs were happy and built bigger and bigger furniture... Read More