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During the last years I encountered a number of problems in the Linux platform's architecture that cause problems for GUIs on top of it. When I say 'the Linux platform', I refer to the Linux kernel, glibc and the common GNU and Linux tools, but not X11. I also ignore distribution-specific solutions for the problems. In general the lack of a tool is not a real problem for me, it just is some work that needs to be done. I am talking about the architecture, problems that can not be solved without incompatibilities or at least a lot of work. A 'modern GUI-based OS' is, for me, a OS that does not require a user to know or use a command line tool, even for rare system-administration tasks. That does not mean that it should be impossible to work with the command line and a text editor, but the command line must not be the only way to do an administration task. So here is the (incomplete) list: Read More

Haven't said much in a while -- mostly because things have been really busy for me lately. But today something really got my attention and merited some thought. In the last couple of days Ettore Perazzoli a GNOME / Evolution / Ximian hacker type of guy died; it was one of those moments for me where reading about it all of the desktop flame wars seemed to pass into irrelevance. Read More

So I was talking to my wife last night who does rubber stamping as her hobby. Unlike me who hacks for hours on KDE she toys around with rubber stamps, various inks and things found from garage sales to make art. Read More

The Linux Show went rather well tonight. George was a great co-guest, and I think we handled the questions well in general. We maintained a positive and factual yet enthusiastic air throughout. Even the SUSE/Novell/Ximian and User Linux queries went well. They had a record number of people attending tonight; even the IRC channel had ~80 people in it (they usually only have ~50). So, they were happy with it too. Good fun and a great way to get KDE some positive exposure. I'm feeling rather spent now, though. Time to find some wine and a good book.

no blog since august 29th, so I will continue on this ....

Every time I read a bit of news regarding the Linux desktop, I find myself asking myself: are they reporting on something that has happened or that will happen in the future? I fear that many of our colleagues in the Linux desktop struggle are trying to sell a tomorrow that doesn't exist yet because they feel that they have, so far, lost. This has the potential to blow up in so many horrible ways: people will start expecting tomorrow's abilities today; people will wait until tomorrow rather than act today; competitors will see where we are headed before we get there and be able to act with initiative; those promising may not deliver or even be around in their current form to deliver; what we want to accomplish today may be scrapped in favour of a better idea tomorrow. KDE is very good at avoiding all this. Let's make sure we keep it that way. =)

working on kscd... fixed several bugs over the weekend... only several more to go =P auditing sucks. but it's so necessary. i read over libkcddb tonight and caught several issues, including classes used in a QValueList that didn't have copy ctors or operator=s and a potential buffer underrun. kids, indexing with ints that can be negative isn't cool. anyways. auditing sucks. it's tedious, boring and not much fun. but it's just so easy to miss things in your own code, that having someone else look through it can make quite a difference. Read More

Okay so it was a cold Sunday morning, and I just couldn't seem to make it out of bed. So with my warm Powerbook, I hacked out this little cvs:[kdebindings/kjsembed/docs/examples/invaders/invaders.js|nugget]: [image:260,middle] Read More

Finally after a long time of messing with this, DCOP now works in KJSEmbed. Currently we support any type that can be used inside of a qt:QVariant. KJS functions can also be exported to DCOP interfaces now. This also gives us the ability to have connect dcop signals to local KJS functions. A good example that shows off how this all plays out is below: Read More

It's been a long long while since I came up with a blog entry here, mostly since I didn't do anything interesting for the public lately. KDE is still in a freeze, so I have been fixing a few bugs occasionally, nothing more. Read More