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A few days ago I wrote that I got my copy of The System of the World, the latest book by Neal Stephenson. Yesterday I searched for the "The System of the World" on Google and learned to my surprise that the link to my blog entry was the 3rd top hit. Interesting. The first hit was Slashdot, the second one Amazon, then me and then lots of book sellers. The original "A Treatise of the System of the World" by Isaac Newton was something like number 33. Read More

I've been drifting around the various planets, and found a blog by Christian Hammond in the http://planet.freedesktop.org/ aggregation, where he talks about the Desktop Notification Specification he is working on. I think that the approach of the Desktop notification spec is wrong. We should be specifying the DBUS message in detail, and the intended usage. When it gets to the level of < b > tags and icons, we are going in the wrong direction. Read More

One of the largest problems we have in KDevelop is that people use our templates. The problem with templates is they are obsolete the second you install them on your project. You don't get bug fixes from new KDevelop releases, you don't get updates when autotools or something changes. So they do over time become a serious liability. Read More

On today's ruby-talk there was a post by Michal 'hramrach' Suchanek entitled "ruboids (on mac os) - singleton instance() returns nil?". I thought he was refering to the rubyists as 'ruboids', which seemed slightly rude to me. Read More

Today I received The System of the World which makes my Neal Stephenson collection complete again and me a happy guy. I just have finished Quicksilver and am about to start to read The Confusion. It feels good to know that two and a half kilograms of words are still ahead.

Did you always want to know what patches the distributions apply against vanilla KDE source? Did you ever receive weird bug reports with 'impossible' behavior or stacktraces for your application? Or wanted to forward port this feature you saw in screenshots, read about in reviews or used on a machine with that other distribution? But you had not the time to search for the sources or the bandwidth to download the complete source package just to get the patches? Read More

It was a pleasure to work with Alex on QtRuby/Korundum. But I haven't heard much about what he was doing since aKademy. There he talked about how he'd made a start with speeding up the ruby runtime with JIT techniques. I just loved this announcement he made about his latest project on ruby-talk. What a stylish entrance! Go Lypanov, Go!

Meta-Programming is becoming an increasingly important part of my life as a software developer. It's a fascinating way to take programming to a new and higher level. Ian has blogged some thoughts about Meta-Programming. I would like to respond to them: Read More

The Qt Crytographic Architecture (QCA) was originally written by Justin Karneges as part of the PSI instant messanger. After a little bit of discussion, and an agreement on how it will work out, he's agreed to move it into the kdesupport module (KDE already has two copies - one in kdenetwork, and another in kdenonbeta). Read More

So I am fed up with autotools. Its possibly the worst possible build system I have ever had the displeasure of being abused by. Its probably because I never got into m4 macros, or testing the size of an int of my machine every time I try to build a project. So finally with the arrival of Package Config and QMake I can rid myself of this horrible mess. Anyone looking at the QMake documentation might discount it immediately as a serious build system. Since its VERY simple. SOURCE += main.cpp CONFIG += application debug thread Is a very simple case. Even the "CONFIG" portion is optional though because it will use the current Qt configuration if none is specified. "So okay I can build Qt apps, what about KDE apps?" you might ask. Well this is where a neat application kde-config comes into play. This application will tell us all sorts of things about kde as long as the binary is in our path. kde-config --expandvars --install lib will return location of the KDE libraries live. To get a full list of all the path elements kde-config returns just issue a kde-config --types. Now with this handy program we can use the system( ) directive in QMake to populate things like our include paths. QMAKE_LIBDIR+=$$system(kde-config --expandvars --install lib) LIBS += -lkdecore -lkdeui Read More