Posts 

What does it take to join KDE development? Entertainment? Delicious Food? Wonders of Nature? Or meditation? In case you wonder what these images are, I finally got around to upload my pictures from the KDE PIM developer meeting which took place Achtmaal, the Netherlands, two weeks ago. I put the full gallery here, thanks to the kind Fruit Salad crew for providing me web space without the bandwidth worries of my own ADSL. If you feel left out and also want to enjoy the pleasures of being a KDE developer, why not join the community? Google has a wonderful incentive for students all over the world to join open source development called Google's Summer of Code that is just waiting for you to submit the abstract of your first addition to KDE! So far the promo-talk. However, despite being half-joking, the message is real: if you like KDE (and you do, or you wouldn't bother reading the developer blogs :)), why not help us out and become part of the community? We can always use talented artists, documentation writers, developers, marketeers and testers. Take a look at the KDE Developer's Corner and start contributing! I for one am looking forward to seeing your part of this wonderful desktop in action. And perhaps next time you will be the one spinning the wheel. ;-)

Let us all together ensure that KDE 4.0 will be released at latest before the 10th anniversary of the KDE project (14th October 2006): this will put us into a good position against that legacy OS' major release "late next year". But do not let it us name "KDE X". :-) Read More

the Subject: line is very Zen-like. :-) i can hear the sound of my left hand clapping in the woods. Konsole for 3.4.1 was driving me nuts. it would crash every 3rd time i'd start it, but only on Solaris 10 x86, not on UltraSPARC. not the first time, and not the second time. only the third time, always in the same spot: Read More

I figured that now was as good a time as any to jump on the blogwagon. My timing couldn't be worse though, everything is happening at the same time: New house! Got the keys this week. It's new as in "just been built" and hence is certainly not ready to move into. The whole inside needs to be finished off over the course of the next month (read: painting, light fittings etc and most importantly: deciding network topology and pulling Cat5 through walls :-) ). oh, something also needs to be done with the matching sandpits at the front and back of the house. Bought an Athlon64 3000+ CPU, motherboard and 512Mb RAM for €229, new of course. An impulse buy really. I was kind of planning to buy some hardware after house was ready but just couldn't help myself when I saw this advertised. Mind you I'm now running on an underclocked Athlon 1600 (~1300 stooopid motherboard) which I got off e-bay. Don't really know when I'm going to get a chance to install it in place of the P2. Pushed out version 0.3.0 of PyKDE Extensions. It is software for supporting the creation of KDE programs using Python. Adds things like build and installation system, i18n support, application templates, better Qt-Designer integration and now support for writing KControl modules. (Just added in 0.2.0). Trying to work on Guidance when I can, or at least trying to make sure that Sebas can work on it, since he's got the time right now. The good news is that in July I should have plenty of time for things.

While preparing for my talk on KDE commandline scripting I discovered a couple of new commandline clients. So afterwards I continued to look for possibilities of accessing KDE from the commandline. After a while I thought it would be nice if one could access the KDE addressbook like konsolekalendar allows to access KOrganizer's data. Read More

Rich Burridge talks about how he first started working in the computer industry 30 years ago for ICL computers. Hey! That rings a bell, I started my first programming job in 1978 as a graduate trainee in the Advanced Systems Sector of Dataskil, which was a software house subsiduary of ICL in Reading. Read More

One of interesting proposals published in Technical Report 1, a specification for new functionality being added to C++'s standard library, is the Polymorphic Function Object Wrapper. Having that, QObject can just keep a list of function objects, aka signals connected to a slot. Hmm, perhaps a new C++ feature set will be implemented in all major compilers before Qt5?

There is the myth that using C++ per se makes applications and libraries slow and bloated. Avoiding bloat is of special importance for embedded devices, which usually have limited amounts of CPU power and memory. On www.linuxdevices.com I found a short article on this topic: C vs. C++ on Embedded Devices. Let's get down to the statements being made there: Read More

Finally, DCOP Client/Server implementation for win32 found its way to KDElibs, thanks to great contribution from Andreas Roth (aroth at arsoft-online . com). On the screenshot: 'testdcop' application communicating with dcopserver. Read More

... my first blog entry. Well, beginning, judging by the age of the 'blog' concept it's probably closer to the end of times, but hey, I needed a catchy title :) Now, why do I want to add yet another blog to the growing collection? Do I have anything of value to add? Until now I've never seen a good reason to blog. Two years ago all I did for KDE was doing the grunt library work of Kopete. Important stuff, and a pretty cool way to experience yourself in API design and code cleanup/refactoring, but rather boring for the general public, definitely not blog-worthy. The last year for me was even worse, a job that was stressful and getting more and more on my nerves, so I was too tired at home to get much KDE stuff done, if anything at all. Times seem to have changed. Last month I started my new job, and I have a lot more energy than I've had in a long time. Still, my personal pleasure doesn't warrant a blog, so why the heck is this guy blogging? Well, recently I have become a lot more active within KDE again, with subjects that are a lot more suitable for a blog. For this first blog entry just some one-line teasers of stuff that I expect to be blogging about the coming weeks: Read More