Posts 

It's been an awful while since I last blogged, we all go though periods where things get rather crazy all at once or boring, mine went though both. Jobs It took awhile (try 9 months!), but I started one job but decided to resign half a year later when I felt things didn't connect well. I still wish them all the best, they were nice people. Now, I work at a great Open Source company, Remote Learner, we focus on Moodle and provide upstream patches, new features and addons. I spend my time in the DevOps/Infrastructure side of things with Puppet and random scripts. I have a great team and we do awesome things with git too. Read More

The Hunminjeongeum (or 훈민정음). This 1446 document first introduced the modern Korean writing system to the Korean people and is now listed among the UNESCO Memory of the World. (Photo: Jeon Han, CC BY-SA 2.0) In addition to my usual work on things like Plasma, I've been hacking away on bugs that pose barriers to the use of the Korean language and writing system in KDE/Qt systems lately (I took up studying Korean as a new hobby). As a bonus, many fixes also tend to help out users of other CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages, or even generally of languages other than English. Read More

TL;DR: flow is a sticky TODO manager with support for the pomodoro technique and blocks distractions (cat pictures too) while you're focusing on a task: git, AUR, Windows, OSX "A good task manager application is one that can beat a .txt file." Read More

This weekend I spent time on preparing for the ODF Plugfest again. The test software ODFAutoTests now has many more tests. Most new tests are for text styles. I've created tests for each of the possible attributes in <style:text-properties/>. Read More

Kexi has improved quite a bit since the last time, especially in Reports. We're close to supplementary 2.8.7 release within Calligra, then 2.9 will follow and Qt5/KF5-based 3.0 with a shiny mask. Read More

In two weeks time, users and developers of OpenDocument Format software will meet up for a two day ODF plugfest in London. In preparation of the plugfest, I have spent last weekend, refreshing ODFAutoTests. ODFAutoTests is a tool for creating test documents for ODF software and running these documents through the different implementations. If you want to help out with improving OpenDocument Format, please come to the plugfest, or participate online. Writing tests with ODFAutoTests is a great way to help make the 10th ODF Plugfest a success.

I've moved my developer blog to my vanity domain jriddell.org, which has hosted my personal blog since 1999 (before the word existed). Tags used are Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu for the developer feeds. Read More

[thanks to jens for the lovely logo] Many years ago Ubuntu had a plan for Grumpy Groundhog, a version of Ubuntu which was made from daily packages of free software development versions. This never happened but Kubuntu has long provided Project Neon (and later Project Neon 5) which used launchpad to build all of KDE Software Compilation and make weekly installable images. This is great for developers who want to check their software works in a final distribution or want to develop against the latest libraries without having to compile them, but it didn't help us packagers much because the packaging was monolithic and unrelated to the packages we use in Kubuntu real. Read More

Today there are only six days left until I vote in the independence referendum. I usually use my personal blog for non technical bits but I thought some readers of my KDE Blog might be interested in this as it does affect the geopolitics of pretty much the whole world. Read More

Kubuntu Vivid is the development name for what will be released in April next year as Kubuntu 15.04. The exiting news is that following some discussion and some wavering we will be switching to Plasma 5 by default. It has shown itself as a solid and reliable platform and it's time to show it off to the world. Read More