My presentation at the SCALE Women in Open Source was very well received and many excellent questions were asked (and answered!). It is my knowledge that the sessions are being recorded and I will post a link to the archive when it is made available.
I also played a little bit with combining native Qt application rendering from within WebKit. One can embed a whole native Qt window inside an html frame and then control the Qt application from javascript (signals, slots and properties of the window and its children are dynamically exposed). Here's a native Qt application (my transform example) rendered inside the advertisment frame on cnn.com (sorry for the depressing image).
After having worked at a small local company for a couple of months, I decided to quit it and find something else. Apart from being a bit too boring the job itself was not bad, but there was very little I could do without having to consult a colleague (or rather, the one who was doing my job earlier). So now, partially with thanks to a very active job agency, I've had a couple of interviews (two
I just noticed that my feed is back on Planet KDE. So I'm crossing my fingers that Blogger won't screw everything up again.
I now have a new job, which is as a Software Architect. And it's a very cool company to work for, and I'm coding in Java, so I'm enjoying it a lot.
One of the first things I got at this job was a new laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron 9400, with 2Gb of RAM, 100Gb of hard drive space, a 1920x1200 17" display and built in Intel wireless and bluetooth. And it has an Intel graphics card too, which is great, because it means I get to use open source drivers.
The downside is that it has Windows XP installed on it, which I have to use at work. Which means I will now be becoming a big advocate of making sure KDE4 will work on Windows. I'd forgotten just how awkward so many Windows programmes are. Things I particularly miss are konversation, kopete, kmail, rsibreak, knotes, knetworkmanager, kio, alt-clicking to move windows, alt-right clicking to resize them... and the list goes on. At least I get to use IntelliJ IDEA to develop in. It might not be FOSS, but it is a fantastic piece of software and well worth paying for, if you're a professional Java developer.
When I'm not at work however, I get to run Linux. I'm not allowed to dual-boot my machine, but fortunately the laptop supports booting off USB devices, so I've connected an external USB drive to the machine and installed openSUSE on that. I had a few problems getting grub to boot properly - as grub renumbers its drives when it boots from USB, and openSUSE's installer doesn't take that into account. And then I had problems getting the 1920x1200 resolution to work, but I managed to sort that out using 915resolution. So now I have an awesome linux box to play with. (I'll post details off how I got everything working properly later).
I ran hdparm and compared my external 4200rpm drive with the internal 5200rpm one, and with the internal 7200rpm drive on my old machine. And the speeds of unbuffered reads were pretty much proportional to the speeds of the drives, while buffered reads were three times faster on the new machine than the old one. So having the drive on a USB connection seems to be having nearly no impact on performance. Which is nice. I just have to be very careful not to disconnect the drive while it's in use.
Since I have a second external drive, I'm thinking of installing another, cut down version of linux on it, specifically for developing KDE4 on. I want to have KDE3 installed in such a way that KDE4 won't see it at all - so no references to any of it in /etc. I don't want any KDE3 apps to show up in the menus of KDE4, and I don't want any clever openSUSE modifications to things - I want it to be pretty much a standard Linux installation. So I have to decide - should I use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo or Debian? Or something else?
As I wrote in my last blog, KOrganizer now has the ability to export the calendar to all different kinds of formats using technology called XSLT transformations. The only thing that I'm missing (because I'm entirely bad at those things) are good designs that I can implement. So I'm looking for nice and visually appealing designs of how calendar exports might look. Possible export formats are e.g.
Just be creative! In principle, one can create anything from the calendar data, from A0 wall poster calendars to A8 pocket sheets, from SVG graphics showing the calendar with a nice holiday picture in the background to professional-looking calendar books.
Of course, with SVG and HTML it would be much easier for me to implement if your design is already in SVG or HTML.
BTW, if anyone wants to try it out, the KOrganizer plugin is currently in the kdepim-3.5.5+ branch for new features to 3.5 (branches/work/kdepim-3.5.5+/korganizer/plugins/xslt/ in SVN). To work with the 3.5 branch, just copy that directory over and it should work. You'll have to enable the plugins in korganizer's config dialog before you can see them in the "File -> Export" menu, though. There are some proof-of-concept style sheets available already (for HTML, SVG, CSV, etc.), but they are mostly dummy styles and do not really produce any useful output (and if they do, the output is plain ugly, so I won't give an example here).
I am using ra-plugins as a toy to do things I never bothered in other projects.
I am doing unit-testing. And now... some literate programming!
Ok, not much, and not very well, but at least I am playing with Lp4all which is a nice, simple tool to generate nice HTML from slightly wiki-marked sources.
You can see some little things in my code here. My veredict so far? A nice way to keep the code documented in a fashion that ocasinal browsers can follow.
The main thing missing is automatic cross-referencing.
In general, I am finding that this (and unit testing) helps me express explicitly to myself what the heck I am trying to do, and see if the code actually does it. Which is a really good thing.
Boyan Tabakov is my hero. One of them, anyway. Bram Schoenmakers wrote a recent bit on user support -- where it's needed, how to do it. Boyan is one of the people (there's also Anne and Art whom I admire for their patience and dedication) that I see doing user support all over the place on the mailing lists for KDE. He was very active on pim-users for a bit, always helpful on kde-linux (I don't read that list, but I do see the mail headers come by in my subscribed-to-all-lists data collection research project).
So my hat (ok, it's baseball cap I bought in Italy once) is off to you, Boyan. Thank you for making KDE a community and not just a bunch of grumpy and discouraged developers (or gleeful hackers, whatever -- it shows there is more to the project than just code).
Since January 5th there has been a bit of a rush, if not stress to work on standards.
If you may recall, in an earlier blog I posted about Microsofts answer to the OpenDocumentFormat. Which got rubber-stamped as ecma 376 late last year. The ecma seal of approval was not enough for Microsoft. Most probably because it was fighting the ISO approved ODF spec, even if they never said so out loud.
And it makes sense. The number one request any free office suite gets is that it should be able to read MSOffice docs. Or more accurately, it should be able to read the microsoft invented fileformat. So, MS has the advantage that people rely on their suite because the information stored in documents can only be read by their software. This means that even if KOffice is better than MSOffice for a company, they would have problems if their old docs were not properly parsed by it. In other words; lock-in by fileformat.
This concept is not new to most people. Its what MS does. And when ODF started to really take off to counter exactly that advantage, MS had to respond. See that's the disadvantage of being someone people rely on because they have to instead of they want to, no customer loyalty. People walk away in a heartbeat when a competitor can give them what they want on better terms. The response to the open-standard specification of ODF that MS came up with was to create their own. Well, without the open part. But their PR states that its open anyway. First sign is that the first name was "Office Open XML". Hoping nobody would catch on.
So, Microsoft submitted it to fast-track ISO approval on January 5th. This means that ISO has 30 days to object to this process or else it would be (relatively) smooth sailing though the approval process. The deadline for ISO-members to file objections has expired yesterday. I, and quite some ODF proponents have been working hard to make sure this process would not sneak by everyone and get through unnoticed. The result payed off. There were 19 20 official submissions.
Andy Updegrove wrote:
This just warms my heart. I must say. Really good to see that people around the globe want a true open fileformat. And that enough people went through MS detox to put their foot down and say so.
This won't be the end, of course. And its not the only attempt to continue a very profitable monopoly that MS has or will make.
Marbux wrote this on a public mailinglist:
If nothing more, this will buy us time. So I'm back to coding on KOffice. Its what I do best, anyway
update; today I heard that there actually were 20 objections, not 19. Sorry for the mixup.
FYI, I put out a new KDE/Mac snapshot a few days ago. Nothing major other than refreshing with the latest SVN and adding oKular into the build. It looks like something's wrong with plugin-loading, though, oKular can't find any file plugins.
I'll look into getting it fixed soon, and see if we can get oKular actually opening documents. ;)
I stand corrected, I must have run kbuildsycoca on one machine but started it up on another. =)
And to prove it...
I'm getting to closer to my writer's leave. I've been working on my book project since Christmas but on Monday I will start at a new customer assignment. The new assignment will use Qtopia and embedded Linux so I'm really looking forward to it.
During my leave I've learned a few things:
Linspire have announced that future versions will be based on Ubuntu.In their Canonical partnership FAQ they say that they're sticking with their preferred desktop, KDE, which adds one more to the list of Kubuntu Derived Distros.
KDE World Summit Akademy 2007 put out a call for talks. If you're working on something interesting in KDE or cross desktop then we want to hear from you. Don't think you're not good enough to do a talk, or that your project isn't interesting, it is. Submit your talk online with a brief summary.
Adept had a long standing bug where it couldn't launch the graphical debconf bindings for KDE. The errors it gave us led me to stare long and hard at kdesu's handling of xauthority permissions, but all seemed well until Tonio discovered that there wasn't a problem in adept_batch. Eventually I spotted that while adept_batch ran as normal, Adept proper forks and backgrounds itself. This means kdesu deletes the xauthority permissions file and Adept can't start any new X applications. So we changed Adept from a KUniqueApplication to just a KApplication and now you can install Java packages without the user interface hanging. Yay.
This morning I nearly dropped my coffee mug onto my laptop when I read in the press that Decibel is supposed to be a Pillar of KDE4. Looks like I have to deliver now.
It is a rather nice coincidence (it really is: My mails to Nathan ended up in his spam filter) that I was able to release Decibel 0.2.0 today.
Version 0.2.0 is an important milestone for me as this is the first (almost) feature complete proof of concept implementation of Decibel. It can actually respond to and send IM messages. It is still lacking integration into PIM systems (like Akonadi) and has lots of raw spots that need to be improvement, but it is the first version that actually does something. So give it a try and send feedback. For those that can not resist the temptation to hack on things I made sure that everything has doxygen comments;-)
I do Ruby Rails development as part of my day job, and one of the nice parts of Rails is the ActiveRecord Object-Relational Mapping framework. Today I've been playing with QtRuby using a Qt::AbstractTableModel based on ActiveRecord, and it's really simple to implement and works really well.
Okie, I know we all hate users (especially when they ask the same thing, over and over, without even bothering to google for an answer...) but occasionally quite frequently we forget a few things:
Next FOSDEM will be February 24-25 in Brussels (that's a little over two weeks away). There will be some interesting talks in the general tracks, but I think there's also some very interesting stuff going on in the KDE Devroom. This is a room where KDE people will give some talks, and can meet and so. The schedule is available here. The focus will be on KDE4 related topics, with, amongst others, a talk about the semantic desktop in KDE by Sebastian Trüg.
Even if you don't care for the KDE talks (which I doubt 
), there will be lots of other talks on the complete schedule (I'm not sure how finished it is, but it surely gives a good impression). Do note that on Sunday morning, the GNOME room will host a session with common topics and KDE/GNOME integration. This includes a talk by Jos van den Oever about Strigi. At the same time, the KDE room will be hosting a BoF meeting for people interested in free education software.
Hope to see you there!
Nathan Sanders of OSTG interviewed me for an article last week. The result has just been published on Linux.com in an article entitled, "KDE 4's Sonnet will turbocharge language processing."
Overall, I'm pleased with the coverage, but I do have a few misgivings; although, any minor errors likely are my fault for providing limited explanations in the interview. The scope my concern of is largely limited to grandiose statements I did not intend. For example, "[I]mproved multilingual support is the "most requested change" from KDE 3..." I didn't really mean this; it was a context sensitive statement. I meant something such as, "Excluding technical issues like, 'KSpell doesn't work for me' The most requested features for KSpell that I know of (from end users) involve improving its multilingual support." But, requesting extra qualifiers for my statements is more likely an exercise in vanity than in promoting greater truth.
I will mention, the article doesn't note the work of David Sweet. I'm not familiar with what exactly he did, but my understanding is that he wrote much of the original KSpell and thus much deserves some credit.
Today, I bought tickets for a Pearl Jam concert which will be held 200m (yes,
that's meters!) from
my house this summer. Adriaan
managed to shock me with a "Well, good luck, you'll
be in Scotland then!", but a quick check revealed that
aKademy2007
will only start two days later.
That said, I'm really excited that I'll get to see Pearl Jam again, and that within a five
minutes walk. I wonder how many people can say that one of their favourite rock bands
are visiting their backyard. :-) Browsing pearljam.com, I noticed that
they are selling live recordings from various concerts. +1: No DRM stuff; FLAC and MP3
offered and platform independant download application. They even mention Free Software in
their FAQ. Good to see that things can be done different than the Sonys of this world
want us to believe.
More music-related, tomorrow, our new hifi set will be delivered. We (that's me and Kim)
had chosen it
3 weeks ago, listening to different combinations of amplifiers, cd players and speakers.
The winner is an amplifier and a CD player by Arcam, a british brand and speakers by
Dynaudio (danish apparently). I'm counting the number of nights I've got to sleep until
the new toys arrive for some time already. Childhood rocks. :-)
At the same time all this exciting stuff lightens up my private life, it seems that the
call for dot journalists really has had
some great effect. On The Dot There's a couple of weekly
series running about new stuff in KDE4, among which DannyA's ever so famous
commit-digest. Be sure to
check it out. Join kde-promo
if you want to help out (there's also jobs
for PHP coders, drupal gurus and web-people in general).
I gathered that my blog is now also aggregated on
planet.ubuntu, so hi there!
Now playing: Madrugada, Industrial Silence
Well, a week yes and the next one too, there is some request to add pdf modification options either to kpdf or to okular. This requests are always dismissed with "kpdf/okular is 'just' a viewer, not a swiss-tool".
That said i started to look for pdftk frontends i could suggest to the people and i could not find any good one so i thought i can try to create 'PDF Transformer' (work in progress name) as a "good" frontend for pdftk. The problem is defining "good", so fellow readers i'm asking for some help here, i'd describe what i have in mind and hope to get some comments if it seems good or not. Also if you know of a "good" frontend for pdftk just tellme and i'll be happy to scrap one thing from my todo list.
pdftk can do lots of things that are easy to do in dialogs and a relatively user friendly way, it's just merging of documents, modifying page ordering and removing of pages that i'm not sure how to implement in a way that can be more easy than just typing the whole command at the cli. My current idea is in this this mockup. You open the document[s] you want to use as input and get the list on pages on the left and a preview of the current selected page, you can rotate the currently selected pages, move them up or down or remove them. After you are finished you "create" the output file.
Ideas? Suggestions?
Spot the slightly obscure lyric reference there. I was assaulted on the train on Monday evening. I had the temerity to try and sit down on a seat onto which a chappy was spilling over. After generally mouthing off at me, which I responded to with calm pleading, when I just plonked my bottom on the chair and suggested he move up he swung around and punched me full in the face. Police reports, a trip to Accident & Emergency and a second hospital visit later and I have a fractured orbital bone (the bottom-of-the-eye-socket one), a lovely ripe bruise and a couple of days off work to recover.
It's not the first time my fair features have been tested, I was mugged at knifepoint a few years ago in Reading. Thankfully that just resulted in the loss of birthday presents in my wallet and a huge welt on my chin, though I found it difficult to go out alone at night for a surprisingly long period after it happened. I hope I can face the trains over the next few months since they're rather central to me reaching work!
The best bit was that after the thug, whose mentality I can't begin to understand, left the train everyone was lovely. My friends from work helped me off the train, gave me tissues to stop the bleeding and called the police. I went back to Helen's house and she looked after me, went with me to A&E, sat there the whole time rabitting away to keep me company and then gave up her bed so I could get some sleep. The hospital staff were also really friendly -- god how I love the NHS, how can people stand living in a country without free healthcare, paid through taxation out of solidarity?
Another thing to brighten me up -- the huge volume of press coverage from the recent Vista story we (The Green Party) raised. We even got some quotes in the Saturday edition of The Guardian. This article is quite funny, this one rather interesting. Despite a predictable outcome on Slashdot -- nobody reads the press release, researches the likely hardware upgrades and DRM technologies ("a recent report from the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency found that... 55% of current computers could not even run Vista with Aero tuned off"), but they post anyway slagging off those crazy Greens -- despite that I'm pretty pleased with the coverage.
Up to a few days ago we've had a global filter installed which discarded any message that was sent to a kde.org mailing list and was considered to be spam by our spam filtering setup. This was working fine for more than 4 years.
However, there were complains that mails were not arriving to certain mailing lists. I've tried to find out which mails were affected, but failed, because the affected person was unable to forward me the mail in question. Therefore, I've had to bite the bullet and disable the global spam filtering.
Since then, most mailing lists that do not filter by subscribed members have faced massive spamming. Therefore, I've decided to switch them to hold messages of unsubscribed members by default, and installed a script that will monitor these settings and switch it back whenever the list moderator decides to disable that configuration option again.
The number one complaint about this change is that bugzilla email is not automatically sent to the mailing list anymore. The easiest fix is to edit the list settings under Privacy/Spam filters and add a rule with the regexp:
^X-Bugzilla-URL.*http://bugs.kde.org/
and the Action "Accept".
Similarly, mailing lists that absolutely have to be open for all posters should at least add a rule that filters based ^X-Spam-Flag: YES and hold those posts for moderation.
In addition to that I've spent some more hours on tuning the filtering setup to adjust for the recent spam outbreaks, so that things should become normal again soon.
As you already know, we are trying to convert every KDE’s games to SVG, and harmonize them to comply with the Oxygen style. But this is a huge work, there are currently 30 games in the KDE repository, and some new ones are coming.
The migration process is often this one:
- A temporary (ugly) SVG file is made, with the several elements (used to make the game ex: piece, table, …), to allow developpers to SVGize the engine.
- The devs SVGize the engine. See kgoldrunner with the temporary SVG (except the scales)
- The artist can make, test, and commit improved SVG files, maintly elements part for now.
- Then , adjustement, some fix, …
Today, there are 11 games’s engines converted (19 still to do). And there are also kdeedu also to do. Honestly, with my job (the one that pay my food) and my new girlfriend, i don’t think i could do everything, especially all the backgrounds used in games. And i don’t even think about the completion to make them really pretty.
That is why i contacted some of the best “wallpapers makers” i found on kde-look, to ask them if they could help us. Only few hours after, i already had 3 positives answers, from Matthias Endler , Eugene T and Andrew Enyart !!! Click on their name to know what they done on kde-look.
Of course, i’ll help them to start to work with the KDE team.
See some of the others games at our current stages. There are all missing good wallpapers. But now, i feel myself a lot less anxious about it 
ksame:
kreversi:
kpat:
knetwalk:
What a stupid idea! How shortsighted, to not consult with their readers beforehand!
www.freesoftwaremagazine.com have announced that they will stop offering their publication as a PDF for download. Instead, they will go "online only"....
I'm now halfway through reading their 100+ reader feedbacks, and have yet to encounter a single one saying "Yeah, I didn't like that PDF anyway!" Most are arguing fiercly to retain the PDF version, or at least ask politely to get it back.
The PDF version of the magazine was one of its strongest assets to have had. I'm really puzzled by the amount the makers of that product have been out of touch with their own audiences, and how they could announce such a decision without prior consultation with their target group. And it had not even been "easy" to get the PDF either. Yes, the download was free of charge. But there was a need to registration, and there was no direct link from the portal site to get to the nice stuff. And still they had built a rather big and distinct group of fans and followers. Whom they have now alienated all at once... How sad.
For now, you can't even find a link to the first 15 issues of FSM as PDF. Not even when you are a subscriber, not even when you are logged in! And the online versions of their new material even misses to provide a "printable version".... WTF? How much and how fast can a publication degenerate at once, after it previously seemed to have especially cared for readers who do value how gentle paper is on their eyes offline (as compared to the agressive, artificial light that tires them down faster and requires them to be online for reading)?! Not to talk about the big group of interested people living in areas of this globe where it is not a common thing to be "always on"?
Now the FSM production as PDF *may* have been expensive, and they may even have lost money on it, lots of money. That I don't know. But that is also not a reason they give us for the turnaround. Tony Mobily's editorials says: "Paper—as well as PDF—is now a thing of the past..." If this indeed is their conviction and the true reason for the twist, it is a very stup^Will-informed judgement. If it is just an excuse to cover up another real reason (like "financial difficulties" may be), the argument will not gain more traction either.
The response of their readers to them seems to be very resounding.
One reader's response is typical: "What? No PDF? No read nor digg then." Another one: "By dropping PDF and quality composition, you lose your Ace, your trump card. With them, you will be like most other web-sites discussing free-software. I may or may not want to visit your site. Without the PDF hook, I now will be just as likely to visit other sites."
Tony gives a lot of reasons that are indeed valid points going against PDF, and in favor of HTML publishing. But he throws out the baby with the bath water, and completely forgets the advantages that go with PDF for many potential readers and use cases.
And he seems to look at it in a very rigid "EITHER -- OR" way. It didn't seem to occur to him that they could have expanded from PDF to HTML, while retaining their PDF version as well.
And last: of course, a so called "$freesoftware" $magazine should have explored the option to use Free Software for the job. And it *is* possible to create HTML and PDF output from a single source automatically! And neither is or was there is any rule that you need to use Quark Express or Pagemaker payware in order to create high quality PDFs. Ever heard about Scribus, Tony?!? And if you are not so much interested in DTP quality layout any more -- what about Mike Sweet's (of CUPS fame) htmldoc then? You can test an online HTML-->PDF converter here...
Heck, and if they have no "techies" in their ranks, they could even use OpenOffice for HTML and PDF generation. Just create a simple style that works well for both formats.... Ts, tss, tsss...
Of course, they are free in their decision. I just fear that they did not consider they may have to basically start anew and from scratch in building again a devoted audience (because their old one will be rapidly dissolving).
Ok, the SPF implementation situation is kinda pathetic.
There seems to be exactly one maintained C implementation. And it's windows-only.
libspf's website seems to have disappeared
libspf2's not RFC-compliant (verified for 1.2.5) and their issue reporting system bounces.
So, I have taken the most compliant one I found whose code I can actually follow (that would be the python one) and am reimplementing it in C (using bstrlib and libdjbdns).
It will probably not come to a good end, but hey, it may work ;-)
XSLT is a W3 specification that allows general transformations from XML into practically any other format (mainly XML, but you can also create any text).
In the kdepim 3.5.5+ feature branch I just added a plugin to korganizer, that exports the calendar into XML and then applies an XSLT transformation to it to generate all different kinds of output... For example, one can write an XSLT style sheet for some fancy HTML export, or for CSV export, or to XSL-FO to generate nice PDFs. One might even generate SVGs from the calendar.
And the best of all: All these export styles are not hard-coded in C++, but they are pure xml files that can be edited by anyone (okay, not really anyone, you need to know XSLT). Due to KDE's nice standard dirs approach, there are some system-wide style sheets, but each user can also add her/his own style sheets in one's home directory.
Unfortunatly, I'm not much of a graphics or web designer, so the output of the transforms is currently really ugly (and not completely implemented in XSLT, either). But at least the technology is there, now only the style sheets have to be implemented and polished.
I wake up, it's a bad dream
No one on my side
I was fighting
But I just feel too tired
To be fighting
Guess I'm not the fighting kind
The Qyoto project has made some good progress over the past few weeks. We've now switched to the .NET 2.0 gmcs mono compiler, with support for generic types amongst other neat features. Q_PROPERTYs are mapped onto C# propertys, which makes the code look a lot nicer. Arno Rehn has implemented a C# version of the Qt Designer uic tool called 'uics', and the code it generates uses the new properties. And another important change has been switching to cmake, and so we have a nearly sane build system.
KOpenBabel (KDE3) and QOpenBabel have been released in version 0.2:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=176925
Kalzium is now also a frontend to OpenBabel and of course most code is shared between KOpenBabel, QOpenBabel and Kalzium.
So go and check out KOpenBabel!
