Posts 

I've had to travel for work, and during a particularly long flight[1], I managed to get stuck into a Qt4 renderer backend for Poppler[2]. I think I'm about a quarter of the way into it - my Arthur[4] backend can render some pretty complex PDF files[8], but the text/font handling is terminally broken, and I'm having good success with some images, but not with others. There are also some things (like patterned/tiled fill) that none of the backends currently appear to do completely, so I'm not sure how important they are. Certainly the next big step is to get the font selection and character positioning sorted out, so typical PDFs will run. Read More

I like Aaron’s suggestion to label more clearly the adoption status of the various drafts at FreeDesktop.org I also believe that at some point we must be able to say “this is something that is widely adopted and deserves to be a standard

Since today Kieler Woche started, here in Kiel, the largest sailing event in the world, and it's an extremely beautiful day, 20 degrees Celsius, a warm breeze, and clear blue skies, I decided to go outside (yes, outside, meatspace, I am not kidding you) and finally take long promised pictures of the KDE logo with our local tourist attractions as part of Cornelius' brilliant "KDE Everywhere" series. So here goes: [image:1176][image:1177] I've also submitted the UBoot one to kde-look. I wonder whom to send the logo next? Any volunteers? :)

Like many software developers I am a lazy person by nature. There is a theory which states that the primary motivation which drives software developers to work so hard is in fact, laziness. This only seems like a paradox until you think about it for a moment. Probably the single greatest moment in the history of laziness was the invention of the remote control. Such a sublime discovery could not have occurred but for the basic primal human need to be a lazy slob of a couch potato every once in awhile. Read More

The last 5 months I completed a traineeship for which I now need to write a report. Last 2/3 weeks I have been very busy with this report as I am planning to graduate of course :o). So no IRC, no e-mail, nada! Today I tried to read up on some mails. But I suggest that you resend your mail in case you urgently want to speak to me.

The European X Developer Meeting has been kept quite low profile by its organizers. Maybe because it is meant to be primarily for developers. Maybe they are just too busy with organizing things -- after all, it was announced at very short notice. Yet there is a very attractive program of presentations and discussions which should give a glimpse of the future of the modern X Window System extensions to all interested developers: Read More

When I started reading pipitas blog about the fundraiser he's driving, my first thought was, “sure, how can I help, non-financially?". It's easy to donate time and help, and it's very appreciated. But sometimes you have to make the effort to do something more. Read More

(This entry is, of course, in relation to logs by ruurd, ruurd and mpyne) I find it troubling that after so many years, C++ still needs such detailed explanations about fundamental functionality. If this situation would have taken a few short years, we could have suspected slow social evolution from old (functional languages) to new (OOP) paradigms. But persistence, at the scale we see, seem to rather signal problems with the language itself. The current discussion is just a small sand grain falling in the timeglass that measures the evolution of my personal relationship with C++, from 100% love (1993-4) to fifty/fifty love/hate (2003-4). Read More

I call what njaard observed the wolfpack syndrom. The human being is a competitional animal (as any product of natural evolution) but with a twist. We premeditate the way we compete, we're not doing it instinctively. Read More

dataKiosk: It has been a busy week and with the release of dataKiosk 0.7 now completed I'm glad to see it is getting a little publicity on the dot. It is nice to know that others appreciate your work :) The state of the application is pretty good at this point. It still has bugs (if you come across any, please let me know) and quirks, but it is mature enough to handle a former MS Access project with over a million records between a couple dozen tables. Going forward, the focus is on making the data entry task as lighting fast as possible. Then I hope to integrate KJSEmbed for scripting the Virtual Fields and business logic. Read More