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I'm at http://linux.conf.au in Adelaide. Yesterday I went to two tutorials - Keith Packard's talk on cairo ( http://www.cairographics.org ) and Malcolm Treddnick's talk on the Gnome Libraries. Cairo is a really interesting concept - lots of possibilities for 2D graphics rendering. I'll have to blog on that seperately. Read More

I never thought this day would ever come, but finally I got enough together so I could get the banner for linux world ordered. Its only been on hold for 3 weeks now as I've tried to extract useable artwork out of various KDE people. Finally after some sincere and direct prodding tackat was able to produce a pdf file that was able to scale to the size needed for the banner. Read More

more fun in the world of hacking on odds and ends for 3.2 ... just finished up a kfiledialog patch. fun stuff. on the other side of life, just got through listening to the Linux Show this week where ESR and Dennis Powell slag KDE with all sorts of stupidity. i'll be happy to remind those two dolts of their empty headed predictions in a year or two. heck, i'd be happy to school them in public discussion today. they apparently lack good grasp of the facts, but i suppose that's never stopped people (especially those two) from opening their mouths. so be it... time to send a patch for perusal to kde-core-devel.

My favorite Qt feature is the Signal/Slots mechanism. Before working with Qt I only knew the horrors of Java's event handling by implementing interfaces, and libraries that worked only with simple functions but not with class methods. Qt was the first library that allowed to handle an event in a method of a specific object instance - which is what you actually want most of the time. Unfortunately Qt Signal/Slots are not really well integrated into the language. This is mainly due to the preprocessor mechanism that works only on the declarations. Thus the declaration syntax is fine, but the use of signals and slots in the definition has some problems and limitations: Read More

kde.me.uk has some things of mine on it. kde.com's e-mail feed of KDE dot news died along with kde.com so I set up another one for dot news and added debianplanet.org and kdedevelopers.org. email news feeds. KDE dot news are planning on adding their own e-mail feed so that one may dissapear. Read More

This week brought a couple of new exciting things to KDE. Having a closer look at what was announced these days I'm pretty amazed. It started with kde-apps.org on Monday, the followup to the highly popular kde-look.org. On Tuesday we got KDEPIM on Mac. Wednesday brought integration of native KDE widgets in OpenOffice. On Thursday we saw a nice interview about Qt styles for Gtk apps and the announcement of KDE ioslaves for FUSE which basically means that they are now accessible by any non-KDE program, OpenOffice only being one of them. On Friday Zack released his QtGtk library which allows to use all the fancy stuff of KDE like the file dialogs or DCOP in Gtk apps. KDE seems to become the integrative desktop. That's good news. Let's see what will happen on the weekend... Read More

For a long time I have hoped that managed code will beat statically compiled code one day. Managed code can make software more secure, CPU-architecture-independent and makes it easier to generate executable code. The only remaining problem is the performance. Theoretically managed code should be faster than native code that the linker does not understand, because of the better optimization opportunities. But in practice and especially in public perception it always trailed behind. The benchmarks published by OSNews suggest that, at least in the commercial space, managed code is already competitive and can beat unmanaged C code. The nice thing about the OSN article is that it's probably the first time that someone was so (stupid|brave) to violate Microsoft's licensing agreement and publish benchmarks for C# - but even Java did very well against gcc. Read More

So, yup, this is my blog entry, and I have no idea what to write about. Maybe it's because I'm not doing anything, or maybe it's because I'm doing too much, or.... and the list could go on and on. Or maybe, it's because I'd like to try fixing Xinerama support, but I haven't a clue where to start, and I went back down to a single monitor a couple of weeks ago because having that second monitor left no room on my desk. :( Anyways, I've rearranged the desk and so now I may try again after I get home. I'm stuck at work right now, and it really sucks since I don't have a whole lot of time to work on KDE here anymore because we're always so busy. :( Maybe it'll slow down some though and I can get back to hacking. Read More

I was talking to Rich today and he pointed me to a wonderful paper : http://www-sop.inria.fr/odyssee/research/tschumperle-deriche:02d/appliu/index.html . Please look at the image restoration one can achieve with this baby. The "Image Inpainting" examples are breathtaking! The whole thing is on my todo for KDE 3.3. I also got reports from people that some effects from KImageEffect simply don't work, or even worse are crashing. As it seems a lot of them hasn't been tested. Read More

Well it has been a busy two weeks. I have been fixing a few bugs in kjembed here and there and pushing its limites with my two scripts... oh yeah i have a new script [Envelope Maker|EnvelopeMaker]. Read More