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Today at Ubuntu Down Under I failed to attend GrumpGroundhog (making packges from latest CVS/SVN for developers to be able to get the latest KDE or whatever), and UniverseSecurity (find some trustworthy people who can join the closed security lists and keep universe secure). I did make it to Edubuntu which is a request for easy remote user administration which sounds like it could benefit greatly from Kiosk. Then me and amu further discussed gcc 4 fun with Doko, it should be just a case of changing Qt (and arts) as a dependency then everything will have to be upgraded. Whether or not KDE actually works when compiled with gcc 4 remains to be seen. ServerInstallation turned into a discussion of server administration and why Cobolt went bad and webmin smells, a promising looking replacement was demonstrated. After lunch we spent as long as we could discussing Kubuntu before my laptop battery ran out. Then it was time to look at language packs which are quite broken in Kubuntu (it ships with all the translations for Gnome). Ubuntu does nifty things with stripping out .po and .pot files, putting them in Rosetta then experting from Rosetta to make language packs. Or something like that. A scheme was worked out to create kubuntu language packs and I think I convinced the Rosetta dudes that the way KDE stores its .po and .pot files is actually quite sane. Finally the artwork session looked at a possible new icon set which looks a lot more glossy (a la MacOSX or clear-e). Could KDE and Gnome share an icon theme? Seems unlikely but certain people may try. Of course it's not like certain KDE developers don't have devious plans for their own new KDE icon theme. Night all. Read More

I'm in Berlin for week, enjoying a city that many friends said is definitely worth visiting. Well, they were right :) The first thing I noticed was the traffic. I took my car to Berlin and the first day (without a good map) I got lost all the time. Totally frustrating since I normally navigate in new cities without any problems. Normally, when I miss a turn, I just take the next one and make sure to go left and right one more to get back to the right road. This strategy completely breaks down in Berlin since almost no road is straight (nor circular, for that matter). Read More

Aaron was interested in what I thought needed doing with KDE/ruby and I mailed him this to do list the other day. Here it is in case anyone else is interested. Read More

Since Licq got integrated with the rest of the KDE desktop using KIMIface (nice work Kevin), it's inspired me to make a couple more changes to improve our integration. Now it's easier to link IM contacts with people in your address book, and you can use your calendar to switch your IM presence. Read More

Today was the first day of the Ubuntu conference in Sydney. It opened with Mark Shuttleworth reviewing the last release and looking forward to the next. I took some notes which are not proof read or spell checked in any way. Next Matt Zimmerman ran an Ubuntu brainstorm asking what would we like to make Ubuntu better. Somehow the hour filled up quickly. After that the day was 8 solid BoF sessions, brainstorming ideas which will shortly be made into a specification. In expanding universe ogra and dholbach talked about how MOTU have pulled in packages from apt-get.org and how they can get more universe (MOTU) developers. There is now a KDE team page on the wiki, my plan is for KDE to quietly take over MOTU. The next session was the Kubuntu Roadmap where me and amu plotted plans for the next Kubuntu. KDE 3.4 was perfectly timed to come out with the Ubuntu schedule, chances are we won't have such luck with KDE 3.5 so we'll have to see what happens. I went to the Rosetta BoF next where Daf and Carlos decided on their 1.0 release in a couple of months. The Ubuntu build daemons are modified to search for any .pot and .po files and import them into Rosetta for easy translation by whoever wishes to help (and unlike some distros the result is then open for anyone to take back). KDE packages don't work with Rosetta yet because Rosetta assumes one directory with the .pot and .po files not the structure of kde-i18n which has a templates/ directory with all the .pot files and a directory for the .po files of each language. Hopefully Rosetta can be modified to take in kde-i18n. In toolchain roadmap we discussed the scary prospect of converting to GCC 4. This is a big change for KDE because of the new C++ ABI. Also KDE seems to be generally untested with GCC 4 and is rumoured to break in unknown ways, so that'll be fun. USplash seems to have been stopped in favour of a simpler system just doing cat foo.jpg > /dev/fb0. The Graphical Installer BoF was talking about possibly making an installer based just on the live CD (which would significantly reduce the cost of shipit, and at over 1 million shipit CDs sent I can see why they don't have the budget to make Kubuntu shipit CDs). Finding Packages discussed a program which would be a cross between gnome-app-install and click-and-run, a program installer focused on applications not packages and with fun features like screenshots and user ratings, would be cool to have something like that in Kubuntu maybe based on Kapture, but the actual package manager needs to be taken care of first. Finally language selector discussed how users could install language packages easily since at the moment you only get the one installed that you chose when installing (k)ubuntu. Adding something to gnome-app-install or its replacement seems to be the way here. Read More

Okay I finally started a blog @ kdedevelopers.org. So I now feel warm and fuzzy as I can write down my ramblings and share this with the rest of you. Isn't that "gezelli" ?

While usability guys normally can never sleep (because there is always something to complain about, if only the dream), they at least can laugh sometimes. As in a plane recently. A wonderful instruction table for emergency thingies. Perhaps this is only funny if "brace" is not in your vocabulary (in German then, you would read it "bratze"). However, what I saw reminded me more of something like audio terror.

KDE, the integrative desktop environment. I can't remember who came up with this but it is so true. By providing interfaces (kdelibs/interfaces) KDE enables choice without negatively affecting KDE interoperability. Read More

Today KDE Everywhere visited Sydney As did some (k)ubuntu hackers. But there's still time to visit the tranquility of the local Quaker meeting

So i have toyed around with Qt4, which led to a small application called "Knowledge" (Screenshots: 1, 2, 3). Once it's grown up, Knowledge is supposed to become a Wikipedia offline reader. Right now I need to find a good indexer and an easy way to generate HTML from Wiki markup (which is not trivial, since this also requires a TeX parser and a parser for special metadata, i.e. for drawing timelines). I'll probably hack up MediaWiki to work as a preprocessor (which I already started with, but it's a all a big mess right now) The second limitation is QTextBrowser: It's nice for enrichted text, but it's still fairly buggy and even once this is fixed, I really need a proper browser at the end of the day with whistles and bells. Maybe this will motivate me to help porting KHTML once we're getting there. Read More