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Merry Christmas

Saturday, 24 December 2005
Simple as should be: Merry Christmas for everyone... No exceptions... :-)

That evil Q lib

Friday, 23 December 2005
What should one do if someone spreads FUD about a part of open source. Lets try the "why?" question. So one bashes qt on #maemo, channel for this GTK based platform used by the N770. Names are mangled if not me. Read More

Guidance & Xorg: Cards

Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Work was having a clean up and I got my hands on a bunch of old videocards: 2x nVidia TNT2 (one with TV out, with is handy), 2x S3 (old school AGP, so I'll have to reassemble my old Pentium 2), 1x Diamond something (AGP 1.5v & 3.3v) and a Rendition chipset based Diamond card (PCI!). This expands the number of chipsets and configurations that I can use to test the displayconfig part of Guidance. I whacked the PCI card into my other computer along side the AGP card that was already in there and it quickly exposed a problem in displayconfig. (Only one card appeared on the hardware tab). Another interesting thing was that the BIOS chose the PCI card to use during boot. While the existing xorg.conf file still worked fine and used the AGP card. Maybe displayconfig also needs a way of choosing between two cards, even for singlehead configurations. Read More

Holidays and KOffice

Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Well, holidays have started, and it is about time since the last months of work were very busy. Now I am taking a small break from ksvg2 hacking to work again on KOffice and Karbon, fixing bugs and small annoying problems. I think I'll wait with large redesigns/ui changes until after the next release though. Read More

Losing faith in technology

Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Here in Holland we have a 'chipknip' (chip-wallet) that is a very cool invention where you basically carry around electronic money and pay using an 'ok' button instead of giving out cash and collecting too many coins. Read More

Something to think about

Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Today I watched a rerun of the Daily show on the comedy channel (Canada) .. and they were talking about the FCC hearings about the cables channels and the profanity they were airing on the "family hours " .... And I was think what is closer to the real christian values than a guy who is fucking a woman or a guy who is killing another one??? I will let you think about this in the holidays time ... merry xmas and happy new year to all Read More

Porting kmplayer to N770

Sunday, 18 December 2005
Being in the N770 developments program and their great SDK/emulator, I really couldn't resist to try some programming for myself. Obvious choice is of course a port of kmplayer. The SDK is great and has both an i386 and arm target. The arm target uses qemu and is not capable of running GUI clients, but does run the console stuff, like configure scripts!!, this way. Having a 220MHz arm + 220MHz dsp dual core CPU and 64Mb of memory makes this device something that was standard about 8 years ago. The dsp chip adds additional video/audio decoding. Nokia added herefor a few closed source gstreamer modules. I haven't been able to pipeline those properly so that they would play video. But I guess that should be possible, also because I've managed to get mp3 playing with it. Given a pda with wifi/bluetooth 800x480 px sreen and 64Mb RAM/128Mb flash plus rs-mmc extention slot, I makes sense to go for a full blown x-server. They've chosen for gnome, though stripped down versions. Actually I don't know what's gnome about this because it mainly gtk/d-bus/gstreamer/gnome-vfs/.. stuff plus a so called hildon application framework (but what do I know on this subject). I don't think there is an alternative given this hardware other then using framebuffer instead of X. Read More

QDS and D-BUS, tieing up loose ends

Sunday, 18 December 2005
Today I reworked the QDS architecture so it doesn't require the application developer to delegate QApplication creation to QDS. The main reason for this requirement has been the desire to use a KDE service implementation, which needs a KApplication instance. Read More

minimac

Saturday, 17 December 2005
Having released a few too many Kubuntu flight CDs without testing the powerpc builds I bought a minimac. I did intially think I would keep MacOS X on it since it's always useful and interesting to be able to play with another operating system. But by the time the Kubuntu powerpc CD had downloaded I'd had enough of it and wiped the whole hard disk. The graphics in macOS X are of course lovely, and the search engine spotlight is just right, but this is also an operating system that is unable to minimise or maximise windows properly and that doesn't even have an applications menu so you can find what programs are installed. Further problems: Read More

Nice Marcel Gagne article on klik

Saturday, 17 December 2005
Marcel Gagne published a very nice, and well written article about klik. This piles onto the stack of recent klik publicity (canllaith has an extended piece in the current TUX magazine, which even made it into the major headline on the frontpage). I found only very few things I could nitpick about. Go read it, if you are not yet familiar with klik. Read More