Planet KDE

Adriaan de Groot (adridg): Upcoming, like a day-old prawn biryani

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:38:47 +0000

Two upcoming events, not directly KDE related but definitely opportunities for get-togethers of KDE folks under the umbrella of some other Free Software event. One close in time, another far away:

BSD Day - December 13th 2008. The NLUUG (formerly the Dutch national UNIX users group) and the NLLGG (Dutch national Linux users group) are organizing a BSD-Linux twofer. Robert Watson, one of the core members of the FreeBSD community, will be there along with the core of the Dutch BSD communities. [[ KDE angle: KDE4 works quite nicely on FreeBSD, except apparently for Kopete ]] The BSD tracks are geared towards the technical. On the Linux side of the fence, a mix of CMS, OpenOffice and other more user-oriented topics will be presented. Same place, same time; one's red, one's black and white. Admission is cheap (as in beer and most likely free).

Spring Conference - May 7th 2009. This one's a long way off, but the call for abstracts is only six weeks away. The NLUUG Spring Conference 2009 has "File Systems and Storage" as a title, which is pretty broad. At StorageExpo I was canvassing the storage companies (think EMC, but also Hitachi and also virtualized off-site backup and replication services) for the Storage part, but for File Systems I'm turning more to the Free Software world. Topics would include VFS type things, interesting specialized File Systems, metadata and search within filesystems, visualizations, metaphors, etc. If needed, I will wield the pink whip of Akademy to make KDE contributors feel right at home. The conference programme is put together by a vendor-neutral independent technical committee, which will construct the strongest tracks it can from the submissions (the first submission is already in, BTW). Acceptance notes will be sent out January 12th and then you've got nearly another five months to get the content of your talk all squared away.

Ariya Hidayat: scrolling through the paragraphs, clicking through the photographs

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 22:11:20 +0000

I heard that seven is a magic number. I am seeing the seventh winter in my life. How magical.

For roughly 300 weeks I stay in Europe already. And I will still be here for some time to come. But after reaching some of my goals, missing many others, I decided I will pay my home country a visit.

Bracing for the impact of reverse culture shock.

Aaron Seigo (aseigo): harvest comes after the seed is planted

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:25:00 +0000

Opening new markets, forging new friendships and strengthening existing relationships is an ongoing challenge. It requires a consistent effort over time and rarely shows imediate results. Done with honesty, openness, fairness and perseverance it does pay off.

In that way, it's not unlike planting a vegetable garden. After fertilizing and tilling the soil (often after last year's harvest to allow it to sit and take and then again before planting), you put seeds and newly sprouted plants in the soil at the start of the growing season. You tend to the land for months watering and weeding and chasing out pests and generally maintaining the plants themselves. Finally the plants start to produce things we can eat and the joy of the harvest continues. Done right, even a reasonably sized plot can provide a family with food not just through the harvest months but through the winter as well ... when you get to start the process over again.

For those living in warmer climes where the growing season is year-round, it's even more practical to just till and till through the year. Making such a "tropical climate" is every organization's goal when it comes to relationship development, though reality is that not everyone gets to live in the tropics. =)

Harvest festivals are common throughout the world because it gives a well needed "Huzzah!" to the end of a long stretch of work that is done for future gain. It reminds the people that their hard work did pay off, that they should continue planting to make food and that they should be grateful for the bounty they receive.

Ok .. where am I going with all this? Well, a couple years ago at Akademy 2006 in Ireland we put together a speaking track and arranged meetings around the topic of KDE and FOSS in Asia. The soil was being tilled and fertilized.

People came from China, Korea, India and beyond representing both community and companies. We met, we talked, we forged relationships, we exchanged business cards and email addresses. Seeds were being planted. It was the first time I'd personally been able to meet with several of them, including people from Red Flag. We talked about how to draw people from cultures rather different in terms of computer usage, social norms and communication patterns closer to the KDE upstream community. Everyone agreed that working together more would benefit us all, and that simple things like having people send patches upstream would be great.

Red Flag people sent a raft of patches directly after Akademy 2006, but as usual with large patch drops some were already done upstream, some no longer applied cleanly, some were incorrect ... a couple made it through though and that was an interesting first step. Seedlings poked their first leaves through the soil.

Over the next two years, people on the Asian continent continued to work on the communities, such as the awesome KDE India community while others continued to work hard even on their own. When Sung-Jae joined KDE e.V. as a member this year and expressed with great heartfelt emotion his efforts and struggles for FOSS in his country of Korea, it was very evident how hard he'd been working on the KDE garden plot at his home. ASUS hosted a couple of Linux developer events and KDE people flew to Taiwan to participate.

Then about a week ago I noticed something: I was seeing patches for KDE 4 posted to mailing lists from Red Flag employees (plural!) using their work email addresses. Besides signaling that they were working on a KDE 4 based release of their operating systems and preparing the move from 3.5 to 4.2, this was new: they were working on sending their patches upstream as they were working on them.

Yesterday, a Red Flag developer got his KDE svn commit account. This told me that finally we were in the harvest time. The seeds planted in 2006 had sprouted, bloomed and were producing fruit.

I hope this is just the first such harvest and that we continue to build strong bonds with those in Asia. This has been a huge challenge for us, being largely Amero-European, due to the differences in culture and language. Both sides have been learning and growing in the process, but I am thankful everyone has stuck with it through the growing season.

I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that those involved take a moment to step back and appreciate the progress we've all made in Asia over the last 2 years with a bit of a harvest celebration, so to speak.

After all, a new growing season is upon us and we'll need to sow new seeds, expand our garden plot a bit further and look forward to our growing harvest in the next year.

Sebastian Trueg: Tip: a little polishing

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:06:14 +0000

I always thought that some KDE apps looked a bit cluttered. Yesterday I finally tried to do something about it. I started with Gwenview. Two things bothered me: 1. the status bar buttons were too small for their text. Easy to solve by simply not forcing the height of the statusbar. 2. the sidebar had a different color than the status bar. Now this is due to Oxygen using gradients which is cool. It turned out to be rather simple. And this is also the actual reason for this blog.

A tip: whenever using sidebars with scroll areas which are supposed to have the Window color as Base do NOT use something like setBackgroundRole( QPalette::Base ). Better let the scroll area not print any background at all. Simply do that by changing the viewport properties:

sidebar->viewport()->setAutoFillBackground( false );

And if you are using QScrollArea be aware that it changes this property also for the widget set via QScrollArea::setWidget. Thus:

sidebar->setWidget( myWidget ); myWidget->setAutoFillBackground( false );

Enough words. This is what it looks like. Notice the difference in the lower right.

And BTW: Now that apparently the blogging system changed, how do I properly include images? [image:ID] was a really nice system...

Orville Bennett (illogic-al): To Do (Help Welcomes)

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:07:51 +0000

* Compile a universal mysql package with the embedded library included. This fails in the examples directory on OS X.
* Generate separate ppc and intel packages for mysql and Amarok 2 if since the above doesn't work out. This way we get a working collection for the A2 binary release.

* Add the KDE4 portfiles to the macports repo, along with portfiles for those dependencies available on OS X.

* Finish the horrible excuse for a packaging tutorial currently on techbase.

* Write a script for Amarok that uses the native "Growl" notification system. I'd planned this for a while a had it mostly working with ruby script. I say mostly working because I never did get the artwork to display properly.

* Find out why Nepomuk isn't working on OS X even though it's built and installed.

* Find someone to do the above, post-2.0. I plan on being done after that :-)

* Redesign the mac.kde.org site before KDE 4.2. This one's easy, and, provided I have enough time and someone to do the graphics it'll look awesome. Otherwise it will just look OK. The idea/theme of the new site will be to imitate the plethora of indie mac sites out there while still having a splash of KDE-ness to it.

* Package 4.2!

* Camp KDE!

* Fade to black.

* Pimptacular OSD for Amarok 2.1.

* Solid backend for OS X (I mean, how hard could this be. really)?

* Finally start designing the interface of my bible reading software for OS X.

Any and all of these tasks are up for adoption. Call me!

And somewhere in between that all ... find a new job?

Harald Hvaal (metellius): CLI challence: handle weird filenames without the use of copy-paste

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:48:29 +0000

These days, being in a lab abroad, one situation I commonly face is handling complex filenames in the terminal. For many european languages, one could in these cases just spend a few moments finding the right accent key on the keyboard, and remember it for later how to type this key. But with the filenames I face here it’s often not appearant how I input a certain letter, or even worse, the filename is a victim of mojibake .

So I ask the planet, what can I do about this? I’d rather not have to reach for the copypasta, and in some cases even that does not help (messed up filename triggers tab-completion/shell bugs). Worst case is having to pull up konq/dolphin and actually gui-rename the file.

Here’s an archive with three weird filenames for your enjoyment.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/133095/filenames.tar.gz

Solutions in the comments.

Rob Scheepmaker (pinda): Just in time for the freeze: kuiserver integration in systemtray

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:45:05 +0000

With the feature freeze in about 20 minutes, I’m glad to be able to tell that I was able to merge the kuiserver applet into the systemtray just a couple of hours ago. It still has some smaller problems, and I haven’t had the time to test it very thourouly considering the time pressure to get it in. But we’ve got > 2 months of bugfixing and polishing ahead of us, so I’m not worried. A screen shot of how it looks now:

It’s amazing to see how much new improvements there are in KDE 4.2. Not only in plasma (the size of the changelog is insane), but in all of KDE. The massive overhaul of kmail… The lovely file hover preview tooltips which are back in dolphin… The revised gui of the file open/save dialog… Lot’s of new features, polish, and performance improvements overall. I really can’t imagine going back to 3.5

John Layt: KDE l10n Status Check

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:43:53 +0000

In preparation for setting up the locale files with the right working week values, I thought I'd do a quick check on our l10n status against the official ISO standard list and the UN list of recognised entities. Of the 246 currently on the ISO list, we have locale files for 228 So who are we missing?

AQ Antarctica
BL Saint Barthelemy
BV Bouvet Island
GF French Guiana
GG Guernsey
GS South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
HM Heard Island and MacDonald Islands
IM Isle of Man
IO British Indian Ocean Territory
JE Jersey
MF Saint Martin
MP Northern Mariana Islands
RE Reunion
SJ Svalbard and Jan Mayen
SL Sierra Leone
TF French Southern Territories
UM United States Minor Outlying Islands
YT Mayotte

OK, so there's a fair number of UK, US, and French territories in there, and some very remote uninhabited islands that are clearly to be considered as part of their parent country for locale purposes. Yet they are officially recognised to some extent and many have the various trappings like flags and limited self-governance. Where to draw the line is tricky, but if you're a KDE user from one of these territories and want to make a case for inclusion, then I'm willing to listen. Jersey, Gurnsey and the Isle of Man could make good cases, as could the more autonomous French Collectivities. Anyone claiming to be from Bouvet Island will be ignored as not existing :-)

The notable one here is Sierra Leone which undoubtably should be included. Another difference is we have an old locale code of TP for East Timor, when the official code is now TL and the official name is now Timor-Leste. With the feature and string freeze kicking in tomorrow, it's probably a bit late to fix these now, but we'll have to sort it in 4.3.

Adriaan de Groot (adridg): One Show Wrap Up

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:21:43 +0000

Jos Poortvliet hasn't mentioned it as far as I could see, but his KDE4 talk at LinuxWorld in Utrecht (Netherlands) last week was just packed. Granted, the little Open Source Pavilion theatre had just 20 seats, but folk were spilled out into the aisles and blocking the exits. I'd guess about 40 people watched him demo the pillars of KDE and some nice plasma stuff.

Second most popular talk in the Open Source track was Joep Vesseur's OpenSolaris session, with 25 or so attendees. My own talks in the track were somewhat administrative in nature -- the NLUUG and CodeYard -- and attracted a count-on-one-hand kind of audience.

The show as a whole was packed and I was quite surprised by this. After Linux Expo Live in London which was quiet even for the creatives and commercial offerings, I had not expected IT money to be thrown around like this at all, nor for there to be thousands and thousands of visitors. I "staffed" the NLUUG booth which sat across from the RackSpace / RedHat stand and next to the Proxy, AT Computing, LPI stands. There were another dozen or so stands in the LinuxWorld section -- that part of the show itself wasn't very big, really. It was fun to chat with the regular Open Source business folks; I see them fairly regularly at fairs and exhibitions and conferences.

LinuxWorld was co-located with StorageExpo and InfoSecurity and a ToolingEvent so that was why the whole thing drew in so many visitors; most folks were broadly IT-minded, so there was a lot of good cross-visiting.

My badge said "Exhibitor / KDE" and I wandered around the show for most of the day talking to other vendors. My "staffing" the NLUUG booth was mostly being absent, eh. Since everyone reads badges at events like this, I got roughly three kinds of responses: "KDE? What's that?" "Is that KDE as in the KDE?" "Dude!" The KDE related question I got most was "when will it be right for me?" to which I have a pretty standard answer by now, based on my own experiences with KDE4 and tempered by some caution when recommending KDE4 to random strangers:

KDE 4.0 was for application developers to move them to our new platform; KDE 4.1 is for early adopter users who are willing to take the lead in shaping and improving KDE; KDE 4.2 is when things will be ready to use for most folks.

There were lots of specific needs mentioned, from weather applet to multi-monitor support to thin client support. Lots of thin client support, actually. That kind of follows the server and storage virtualization theme of the conference, but it shows a real business need.

Over the next months I'll be contacting some of these businesses to see if we can field-test KDE4 in their environments; that kind of real user runtime testing is invaluable, even if it sometimes points to niche needs. It helps spread KDE everywhere.

Adriaan de Groot (adridg): KDE4 on OSOL mid-november

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:20:55 +0000

Sitting back waiting for a bunch of KDE 4.1.3 packages to compile. After bumping the basics to the latest release of KDE4, I re-did the dependency graph showing what we've ported and what is actually used (warning: it's only 209K, but expands to 6600x2200 pixels, which may be a bit much for some viewers). Blue is the actually interesting stuff, while orange is our ported-but-unused tree. Lots of stuff in there. Some of these are optional dependencies we've forgotted to add to some of the packages -- consider pciutils, for instance. Enabling optional dependencies is like opening a can of worms. Sometimes there's nice tasty earthworms and sometimes a sandworm pops out and devours you.

I may have said so before, but the PCI information part of KInfoCenter is one of those sandworms full of gcc-isms and general ickiness. I still can't think of a good clean way of decoding binary blobs though, but having to re-create a few hundred lines of patch with each minor change to the upstream source is enough to convince me now to push some patches into KDE SVN.

In the mean time, KDEadmin and KDEnetwork have been added as well. This means that besides a fairly straightforward vanilla KDE4 desktop shell you can get some of the useful applications as well. I'm still sorely missing Konversation in our mix, but the rest of the bits I need regularly are there. I could come up with a whole list of other useful KDE4 applications -- RSIbreak, Lancelot -- all of which I can't get to compile yet, so I can't claim we have a complete KDE4 for OpenSolaris, but it's "there enough."

What we haven't really gotten around to is integrating KDE4 functionality with the rest of the system. Things like getting the chance to shutdown the system on logout -- GNOME will allow this, presumably with checks in case you're doing this on a server hosting several hundred users. Edward has started filing bugs in KDE bugzilla for features and functionality and just plain crashes; this is largely a way of reminding ourselves (the KDE4-Solaris community) to look at them at some time.

As for OpenSolaris 2008.11, that will drop any day now, and then we'll roll down downloadable (but not IPS) packages for KDE4 on it. It might not be OpenSUSE; more like FreeBSD in the sense that you get the un-hacked pristine (as far as possible) upstream KDE 4.1.3.

Paul Adams: Getting Papers In: Camp KDE and OSS2009

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:48:46 +0000

A: My wife's gone to the West Indies.
B: Jamaica?
A: No, no. She went of her own free will!

Clearly she is heading to Jamaica! That's where Camp KDE is being held. I've submitted my abstract, have you?

The deadline for submissions is November 21, so get them in quick! I'm particularly keen to see some KDE-related research presented (or at least research that should be of interest to the KDE community). This is part of my personal mission to get some research stuff into every KDE gathering.

So, don't forget, you need to send the following to

campkde-organizers@kde.org

Name
Title
Organization
Presentation Title
Presentation Abstract (2 - 3 sentences should suffice)
Does Camp KDE have permission to record your presentation and post for viewing on a KDE website? Agreeing allows Camp KDE to expand the audience to those not in attendance (and also makes sponsors happy with more visibility).
Will you need your own laptop/portable device for your presentation or will a standard laptop capable of displaying ODF and PDF suffice?
Are you interested in also leading a BoF (Bird-of-a-Feather) meeting on January 19 or 20 on this or another topic?

In totally unrelated news.... Remember I went to OSS2008 in Milan? Well, courtesy of Phil Whitehouse, here is a silly picture of me and Andrew Back of BT/Osmosoft fame, taken at that event.

A sad day for Free Software in Milan

The reason I mention OSS is because the CfP for OSS2009 closed last week and I believe Andrea Capliuppi at the University of Lincoln has managed to construct a submission out of some KDE-related work which I had begun. So, hopefully, we shall have a paper in next year's conference. I won't say what the paper is on until the review is completed.

Roland Wolters (liquidat): Kontact and Citadel - experiences

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:06:04 +0000

While there are many FLOSS Groupware servers out there, hardly any one them is reliable working with any FLOSS client. Recently my company had to bring Citadel and Kontact together, and we used the opportunity to patch while we go.

Background

Recently my company, the credativ GmbH, was faced with the task to sync the usual groupware data (calender, tasks, addresses) between a mobile phone and a PIM client - using FLOSS and via Internet. The natural solution of course is Funambol to get the data of the phone. The next step is to connect that one to a groupware server and access the server via a well known KDE 3 groupware client.

However, having a closer look at the currently available FLOSS groupware solutions was quite disillusioning. While there are many nice servers, there are hardly any solutions where a server works correctly with a client. The best working example is maybe Kolab-Kontact, but Kolab doesn’t work easily together with Funambol. Actually, the current groupware-Funambol connector only supports three groupware servers: Citadel, OpenGroupware and eGroupware. For various reasons we settled on Citadel, and now the task was to check how well this works together with Kontact.

Citadel

Citadel is rather unique in the groupware world. It is one of the oldest projects, and started off as something different than it is today. For that reason there are many historically grown things - like the room concept. However, once you get used to that the server is quite usable, and the developer community was very helpful.

Regarding the described setup there were only smaller things to fix, and the Citadel guys did that for us, so thanks to them. Citadel still desperately needs a theme which is pleasing the eyes - the current one looks horrible. But that is a task for a web designer and can come after the code basically works.

Kontact - solved problems

Kontact has quite some problems on many levels. The main reason behind all these problems is the protocol: there is no single open standard for doing groupware stuff, there are many different. There is though Groupdav, an attempt to create such a common standard, but until now Groupdav is still a proposal, and besides some missing main functions (no notifications when the content was changed, for example) it wasn’t accepted by everyone. As a result, the current Groupdav support in Kontact is mixed, and we tried to check what worked, what didn’t, and what was fixable for us.

The first problem was that Kontact of KDE 3 has problems with special characters like German umlauts. That is described in Bug #159795, and the patches necessary to fix that behavior are added to the bug report. This is fixed in KDE 4 anyway, so the patch is only interesting for people who are working with Kontact of KDE 3.x for some more time.

The second problem was that tasks flagged as complete were not synced properly - at least, the complete flag part wasn’t synced. When in Kontact a task was flagged as completed it didn’t show up as such on Citadel and vice versa. The problem seems to be that Kontact looks at the percentage value of the completion while Citadel looks at the parameter ‘COMPLETED’. See Bug #171905 for more details - and a patch.

The base for the third problem lies more in the groupdav protocol than in Kontact: there is no mechanism defined to inform the client that the content on the server has been updated. That is sad - and requires the client to pull for changes. This is not properly implemented in Kontact. Therefore we settled on a hack: whenever a resource in Kontact (addressbook or organizer) is deactivated and again activated, the content is reloaded. We decided to trigger exact that action with a refresh button.
Immediately the question comes up if that should not be triggered by time, but the usual work flow in an office is: “Hey, Joe, it’s me, John, have you seen the new appointment I just added to your calendar?” - a time base pulling would confuse the user, a button to pull would not. The bug to this problem is Bug #175409 - including the patches.

Kontact - problems still valid

While we were able to fix some of the problems (hurray Open Source) there are still some things left: we were not able to properly implement a working Free/Busy system with Kontact and Citadel. This is definitely due to some rather strange bus in Kontact, and will require quite some rewrite of Kontact’s resource plugins. But since Akonadi will be out soon the question is if that should be fixed now or if we should wait until Akonadi is out and then have another look at it.

Final words

Kontact and Citadel do work together somehow. And the bits which are missing can be fixed. However, it is clear that Kontact developed into something which was not planned originally, and that a revolutionary change is needed.
Akonadi will hopefully bring this change, but currently it is not there yet.

But even if Akonadi arrives right in time - and with plugins for all the needs we have - the underlying problem of the broken groupdav protocol remains. It is sad somehow that there are so many fine FLOSS Groupware servers out there but that there is hardly any protocol which is supported by all of them and delivers all the features the users want. No wonder that Outlook/Exchange has such a strong position right now.

Sebastian Trueg: coming back to the world of blog

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 14:04:26 +0000

It has been a while since I blogged. The reason is simple: the birth of my daughter turned my brain upside down (as in: "as far as I can tell there exists only one thing in the whole world and it is not this blog"). Now, thousands of hours of staring at her later (and also after the very successful last Nepomuk project review) I am finally back to blogging.

And this first blog will not yet mention any amazing new developments in Nepomuk. No, not yet. This is merely a "hello I am back, did you miss me? no? why the hell not? but I thought the world would stop turning without my blog posts." blog post.

So just this one thing: I updated the Nepomuk documentation. It now contains descriptions of all the Nepomuk services and the architecture. So, if you are interested and always wanted to know what all these processes with "nepomuk" in their names are doing, this is the read for you.

Shashank Singh (ssingh): on what i am working right now

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:20:24 +0000

Well i have been assigned to work on a visual book shelf . a screen shoot of what i am working on [as screen shoot can't be animated it doesn't actually represent what i am really working on :D ] P.S:i am using clutter [from OpenHand Labs ]and C and glib for this, Clutter is glib based

Shashank Singh (ssingh): Hi,,Once again

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:20:24 +0000

“Will Stephenson” asked about my contribution to Marble so i thought it’s better to write a post :) .. My contribution to Marble (1) Twitter Plugin [1] [2] (2) Panoramio Plugin [1] [2] (3) Better Wikipedia Support [now it supports article to be shown from a region ] i have lot’s of more goodies to commit.. but without a good

Shashank Singh (ssingh): hello world

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:20:24 +0000

Well.. Most probably this would be My first post in planet KDE :D so,, hi everyone at planet KDE .. i am Shashank Singh..the irregular contributor to MARBLE :P and GSOC 2008 student for same :)

Ariya Hidayat: the sky will be my shroud, a monument of cloud

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:52:37 +0000

Things are still exciting as ever. In two weeks, I will be in Bali. Yes, I will be there for the Workshop on Open Source and Open Content (WOSOC) that is held in conjuction with IEEE Conference on Signal-Image Technology and Internet-based Systems.

Check out the full schedule, find the invited talk: Qt for Rapid Mobile Application Development, and enjoy some demos that I will premiere there. Update: the talk is actually one of the keynotes.

So, if you are around and want to have a snack or a chat, just let me know! Mail me at ariya.hidayat@gmail.com.

Aaron Seigo (aseigo): 24

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 06:08:00 +0000

The last twenty-four hours have been packed.

The P-man and I went over to a friend's last night where he, three others and I sat on a covered and semi-enclosed deck with a propane heater that hums not unlike a brass instrument in a symphony during the pre-show warm up when you light it. We talked about our week and what we'd each done and played music on guitars while others sang along. Winner of the harrowing tale of the night category went to E who had to change his number after a girl he picked up at a wedding went psychotic on him and started endlessly stalking him and telling him untruths like "I'm pregnant.." holy restraining-order-in-the-making. E also took some great pics, which I hope to have soon as well.

We got home and I was in bed by 1 or 2 or so, and I proceeded to sleep in until noon. I love sleeping through the morning. I've been able to sleep in at least a bit pretty much all week as P hasn't had school this week. He's back tomorrow though, so my sleep hours diminish back to the usual.

When I got up P was playing a video game and I suggested we make pancakes. I got out a recipe and all the ingredients and P made the batter while I washed the last night's dishes. I cooked them in a frying pan to a nice golden hue and we ate them with maple syrup.

I cleaned up the house a bit, had a shower and then hit the email. About an hour later I came across the request by the PolicyKit-kde developers to sneak their code in without going through kdereview. The release team reps were against breaking the norms, Kevin was against anything related to a framework going in so late and Lubos wasn't impressed because about a month ago it wasn't working at all. PolicyKit-kde is two small apps that give the user a GUI to interact with PolicyKit, which is used to do things that require special user priveleges in a way that allows a great amount of sys admin control. Think of it as a sudo for GUIs that uses D-Bus.

The fellow who designed and wrote a lot of it is a GNOME developer, but he designed it to be desktop agnostic. I take my hat of to David Zeuthen for that, but we in KDE haven't really taken advantage of that feature. So anytime you want to use PolicyKit and it requires user interaction via a GUI ... you need more than just KDE around. For desktop basics like this, there's really no excuse, especially since PackageKit-kde is only about 1400 lines of code. Due to this, and that it apparently works decently now, I'm hoping it will go into 4.2. This will also allow KDE app developers to more comfortable start working on PolicyKit integration where it makes sense (e.g. in System Settings).

If it doesn't make it into 4.2 it will be in 4.3, but please make sure that your distro packages it with their KDE build before then! I went over the code a bit myself today and wrote up a lengthy summary email about the matter to kde-core-devel. It's in the hands of the release team now.

After that I made dinner and the P-man and I tucked into a simple pasta and salad affair. Hunger once again addressed, I folded a load of laundry and put P into a bath so he'd be clean and fresh for school in the morning. As he soaked and played, I worked on adding per-virtual-desktop-views for Plasma.

I committed the feature to svn just a while ago and it does work. There are some quirks and some issues it highlights, but nothing bigger than what we've worked through before so I'm not overly worried. It will be an experimental feature in 4.2, which means no GUI. If you want to try it out, put perVirtualDesktopViews=true in your plasmarc in the [General] section. I'm not overly interested in bug reports at this time on it, however. I have other issues to fry.

For instance, I rearranged how screen addition, removal and changes are managed inside the Plasma desktop shell. We now have Kephal for that which should address many of the issues we were having by relying only on QDesktopWidget and how xrandr 1.2 loves to be useless for a desktop application. Kephal provides a rather decent API for managing screens and promises to bring sanity to it all. Both KWin and Plasma will be using it in 4.2.

I also want to attack some zooming issues in the next two months to make it more streamlined and easier to use. There are also some quirks with the new drag-and-place-where-you-want-it cashew.

So, lots to do. =)

But tonight I'm done. It's half past 11 and I just finished folding the second, and thankfully last, load of laundry for the night. The alarm is set for 06:45, so I should be heading to bed within the next hour or two. First, however, I thought I'd blog .. and then I'm going to call a good friend and talk for a while. =)

Ivan Cukic (ivan): Vim and Qt Creator’s Quick Browse

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:42:51 +0000

Although this is not much related to KDE, or at all in fact, I decided to post it on my KDE development blog simply because there are so many KDE (and other) developers using Vim as their main (and only) IDE.

As I said earlier, I am a Vim fan, and I can not see that it will change in the foreseeable future. But, I have to say that, although I don’t find it a complete replacement of Vim’s Project plugin, that Quick Browser of Qt Creator is a very nifty feature.

So, I decided to start writing a Vim script which will emulate the Quick Browser behaviour. And so it started. The first version was a proof of concept one and it was designed so that the quick browser showed its results in a side panel (just as the Project plugin does).

And it worked quite fast.

The problem was that the Project, Code Navigator and my Quick Browser couldn’t work together very well - each one wanted it’s own window/buffer. So, I decided to start writing a simple Python (yes, Vim now supports Python scripting) framework that allows multiple plugins (called runners - took the name from Plasma/KRunner and I’m not ashamed) which are based on that framework to work together in harmony.

The project waits approval at SourceForge under the name Vide (obviously short for Vim - IDE). Currently only Quick Browser runner exists, but I’ll add more later.

Project management

And, that’s not all. There will be project meta-data which will allow you to define different build tools (cmake and qmake come to mind), …, and everything else I come up with… Since I’m bored and have to take my dog for a walk, this is all for now. So stay tuned.

Stephan Binner (Beineri): openSUSE 11.1: Introduction to KDE4

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:06:53 +0000

Another small idea we realized for openSUSE 11.1 is a link in the first-login greeter to a "Introduction to KDE4" page.

Originally written for the greeter (hence the current layout and shortness) the text ended in the wiki because we were past openSUSE translation freeze. The wiki solution also allows extension anytime (feedback and translations welcome). Its purpose is to give new KDE users and KDE3 switchers some (openSUSE-specific) explanations and hints for a good KDE4 start.

For further generic introductions and tutorials we happily refer to the nicely growing KDE UserBase.

Charles huet (Packadal): KGLEngine

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 16:13:00 +0000

Hi
I haven't blogged in a long time, nor have i developped, and i'm feeling sorry about this, but at the moment i've got a lot of work going on, and i'm even working on week-ends to finish my school projects...
But on the bright side, we just had a meeting on IRC with DrIDK and smarter, our new collaborator.
That's right, we are now 3 persons working on KGLEngine, and smarter is working on a space invaders game.
(The funny thing is that smarter is also French, can we deduce anything from that ?)
We have defined goals for KGLEngine, which are :
1°) find a solution for the collision detection problem ; which will be using step (and before that adding it the few functionnalities it misses) or implementing something more robust thant what we have right now
2°) Get ourselves a web site, and finish/polish the techbase tutorials in order to attract game developpers
3°) Develop/finnish/polish our games in the works (kglpong, kglspace, ktank, and katerpillar)

here comes a screenshot of the kglspace game (still WIP, of course)

On a side note, I'm looking for an internship (preferably in the U.S.), so if anyone reading this blog works in a company that would be interested in a hard-working student in computer science working towards a M.S. (with concentration on software engineering) please let me know the email address i should send my C.V. and cover letter to :)

Andreas Aardal Hanssen (bibr): Font and Palette propagation in Qt

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:16:08 +0000

Last Friday, we submitted a change into Qt 4.5 that fixes an old problem we’ve had with font and palette propagation in Qt. The patch appears in current snapshots and in the upcoming beta. Since this change affects code that’s essentially been the same since Qt 4.0, and Qt 4.5 is quite late for a change like this, I thought it would be worth writing a blog about it to draw some attention to it and gather some feedback.

The patch ensures that palette and font properties set on a widget by the user propagate all the way from the source to every single descendent widget, overriding application font and palette settings to the same font or palette property, and that all settings propagate correctly when changed. In short, if you want a specific font family for a form, and you assign a font defining only the family to that form, then this family will propagate through the entire form while keeping any existing font size settings intact, which is how it was always meant to work. It also ensures that new widgets are initialized with the right settings from their new ancestor widgets. The only thing that stops propagation is if the same property has been explicitly assigned to a child widget (or the child is a window that doesn’t enable WA_WindowPropagation). In this case, the child widget’s settings will take over and continue propagating.

The former behavior was to resolve fonts and palettes against the parent’s update mask only. Explicit settings applied by the parent’s ancestors, however, were lost when resolving against application font and palette settings. So if you set the font size of a form on Windows XP or Vista, this would not sometimes not apply to QComboBox or QTableView, but it would always apply to QPushButton and QLineEdit, because on Windows, QAbstractItemView has an application font family and size set by the system. The “sometimes” is the funny part, because if the above widgets’ immediate parent widget had font settings applied to them, then these settings would sometimes propagate. But put a widget between, and they would not (other funny behavior also applied).

Some background info might be useful. QFont and QPalette have many things in common. They represent two pilars in Qt’s style mechanism: the fonts, and the colors/gradients/pixmaps used by the style to render the appearance of its standard controls. Most widgets use both text and colors, and both the font and palette are subject to system settings (e.g., theme, locale, desktop settings for fonts and colors), style settings (most styles polish the palette somehow), and of course user settings. Each of the two has so many settings that it’s impractical to force the user to set them all. So instead, only the settings you change are applied, and the rest are derived from context sensitive defaults.

Now you don’t usually want to change the palette or font if you want your application to match the native look and feel. In some environments, however, changes can make a lot of sense. Changing the default font family or size may be important for accessibility (…OK, OK, or for fun). Changing the default window background color can give your form a special touch that separates it from the rest of your application (e.g., using a white background for configuration forms, regardless of the system theme, is quite common). However, you should be careful when making specific font or palette changes, because this may cause undesired effects when your changes are combined with system settings.

Now for the settings. Both QFont and QPalette represent lots of settings, or “roles”. They also both record which of these settings have been explicitly set, and which settings are left untouched. When Qt knows that only the QPalette::Window role of a certain widget has been set, this allows the rest of the palette to be derived from the widget’s ancestors, and from the application palette set (QApplication::palette allows the user to set default palette settings per widget class). If all you want is for your widget to use a larger font, then you should assign a QFont to that widget that only sets the point size (i.e., it leaves the family, bold and italic settings, etc, unset). This size should then automatically apply to the widget’s children without touching the other settings the children might have.

// Give w and its descendents a bold font, let all other
// font settings propagate from the defaults.
QFont f;
f.setBold(true);
w->setFont(f);

// If you want to keep existing settings that have been
// explicitly assigned to this widget, you may want to copy
// the current font out and make your modifications.
QFont f = w->font();
f.setBold(true);
w->setFont(f);

// Constructing a QFont completely from scratch is usually
// wrong.
QFont f;
f.setFamily(…);
f.setPointSize(12);
f.setBold(false);
f.set…
f.set…
w->setFont(f); // do I have to set this font on all other widgets as well?
// answer: no, if you want to change font or palette settings “globally”, start
// with QApplication::font or ::palette, and only set the entries that you’d
// like to change.

Note: QFont and QPalette both represent requests. Qt finds the effective/final font by comparing your settings against the font database to find the best match; see QFontInfo for details.

Assigning specific fonts or palettes to widgets is a privilege to the application author, and the application author’s settings should propagate. Qt’s kernel never uses direct assignment, but rather QApplication::font or ::palette, which provide “soft” default settings that the user can override. It’s unfortunately not uncommon that styles assign directly to widgets. This is unfortunate, because as soon as you assign specific font or palette settings to a widget, this stops propagation, which is often to the application author’s surprise. (For debugging purposes, you can check Qt::WA_SetPalette or Qt::WA_SetFont to see if the style is preventing your settings from propagating to a widget.) Styles are out of the application author’s control. Now if the app author wants a form and all widgets inside to use Qt::white for QPalette::Window, but the style explicitly assigns a gradient brush for that role to all QFrames, then the user’s settings are lost, which is bad (most should agree!). So why do styles do this? After all, the style can choose to render the widget just as it likes, regardless of the palette. Why should the style assign palettes to individual widgets at all? Usually, it’s to work around a specific limitation in Qt’s palette, font or style functionality, such as Qt’s lack of more context sensitivity for font or palette settings (e.g., if the QRadioButton font should be italic only if it’s an immediate child of a QGroupBox; Qt doesn’t support that out of the box. Also, widgets’ backgrounds are initialized using the widget’s background role, which is out of control for the style). The problem when doing so is that propagation stops for that role. But no finger-pointing; Qt’s own styles are guilty of this sin ;-). If your style assigns palettes to widgets (QStyle::polish(QWidget*)), you should take a second look and see if it’s really necessary. Your call :-).

Solution 1: Since the style isn’t forced to follow the palette, the alternate colors should be applied when the widget is rendered, leaving the widget font and palette intact. Theme-based styles (which require 3rd party APIs) in particular.

Solution 2: Report the limitation to us, and we might implement the missing functionality!

QWidget tracks whether widgets have explicitly assigned QPalette and QFont settings through the attributes Qt::WA_SetPalette and Qt::WA_SetFont. Toggling this attribute from the outside is almost always wrong. Have you ever seen a snippet like this?

widget->setFont(font);
widget->setAttribute(Qt::WA_SetFont, false);

What does this code try to do? The WA_SetFont attribute does not affect propagation. Also, sometimes if propagation doesn’t seem to work, you see snippets like this show up:

bool Widget::event(QEvent *event)
{
switch (event-&gr;type()) {
…
case QEvent::FontChange:
child->setFont(font());
break;
…

This is also wrong; if child is a regular widget, propagation should work just fine. If it’s a window, you might want to enable Qt::WA_WindowPropagation for that child.

So now for a bottom line. I personally think Qt’s propagation mechanisms are very cool and well-designed. And I think we should continue developing them! This change takes a step into the realm of “let’s at least make sure it works consistently all over the place”. And then, we should look into how we can remove all explicit font and widget fiddling in our styles. One step at a time.

Sascha Peilicke (saschpe): KGo status updates

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:09:31 +0000

Having had no status update of KGo since quite some time, I’m going to fix that now. So what actually is KGo? As the name implies it is an implementation of the traditional Go (or Weiqi) game widely played in Japan an China. We are in luck that we already have a good free Go engine, GnuGo. And even better is the fact that there exists some sort of de-facto standard on how to communicate with Go engines, the GTP protocol. Having all the necessary building blocks at hand I decided to start getting something done and here it is:

This screen shows the setup phase of an recorded masters game where you can setup to start at a certain move and wether you want to replay it versus a go engine or versus another human. Ahh… the version currently in SVN trunk has playing versus an engine disabled (but it is implemented and works) because im refactoring the responsable code at the moment. Loading from and saving to SGF files works nice and I have plans to add support for playing online either via GGZ or the more traditional Go servers but this definitely won’t happen too soon…

Here we have one of the configuration screens and what can be seen is that it is themable (like all the other kdegames) and that you can choose your preferred Go engine backend and get instand feedback if that engine is supported or not (that little green light):

As you can see, the current theme is rather functional and I do have to admit that I used and modified some artwork from KReversi. This shot shows some recommended moves generated by the Go engine backend. In fact nearly all game calculations are done in the backend but this is not as clean as it may sound. The GTP protocol is in state of transition since … years .. and it is missing a lot of necessary things.

So i ended up writing a complete GTP protocol wrapper which implements all the needed tidbits like player management, nice status querying and game board manipulation.

Altough one can use it to play Go at the moment there are still a lot of areas which need improvement. So if you want to help out feel free to grab it from SVN and start testing:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/games/kigo kigo

Stay tuned …

Update: I just decided rename it to Kigo, took quite a bit of time but it was just commit back into SVN.

Posted in KDE, OpenSource Tagged: Game, Go, GTP, KDE, kdegames, Linux

Ariya Hidayat: everything is better when you hear that shout

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:06:15 +0000

In Oslo? Don't miss Mithas The Sweethouse (Grønland 2A Oslo)!

Photo by this girl.

Nuno Pinheiro (pinheiro): KDE 4.2 Rocks! I told you so.

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:03:00 +0000

Well the last few weeks I have been able to build trunk in my machines, and I have to say that KDE is looking great.
I'm not afraid to show my kde 4.2 next to a Leopard or a Vista. Of course its not as polished as a leopard, but it has its how strong selling points, or not as ... don't know how to compare it with Vista (I personally find Vista, humm... bad)
The funny thing is that, it is exactly how I thought this was going to go. And I had this clear notion more than 2 years ago, wen we were fighting to get 4.0 out.
At the time I thought that 4.0, I would not be able to use, (I wasn't well cause my distro did not made a version of it, and I was not brave enough to build it myself :) ), 4.1 would be usable and already better in some way than my beloved 3.5, (and it is, I use it all the time and cant get back to 3.5), and 4.2 would be on pair with the competition better in some ways, worst in others, And from my test so far its exactly so, its an amazing desktop very polished, pretty, coherent, modern, and extremely flexible. Clearly shows that its a fresh vibrant project with strong pillars that define the desktop of tomorrow, today. And better its doing that in its own its KDE Pillars its not windows or macos.

Now, 2 years ago, I thought what about 4.3 ??? I thought at the time, "well if all goes well 4.3 will be the start of the revolution were we finally say the time as come", the open source desktop is here and is here to prosper.

I must say that Im very proud of being a part of the enormous effort kde is, kudos to every one, 4.2 is amazing and belive it or not, its not done yet.

Sebastian Sauer (dipesh): law@germany: rm -rf /wikipedia

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 06:30:28 +0000

While a new law was accomplished that allows police to break into every house, install a trojan horse on our computer-systems and video-cams in our rooms to secret monitor us, others are on there way to ban internet-games they don't like or to just shut down wikipedia cause they can;

Politician Forces German Wikipedia Off the Net

A rather unknown guy was able to do so with the permission of a court+law and without allowing wikipedia.de to provide a statement / alternate view before. That is the real scandal since it demonstrates the new direction of our neoliberal development and it shows that the last kind of protection we had, the law, is finally gone and/or fails to do it's work.

No news for those who where able to enjoy the new terror-laws at the G8 Summit 2007 or who did fall into the terror-trap like some families. But that this is valid now for even such cases does set new levels. Huston, we have a huge problem.

Michael Pyne (mpyne): Happy Halloween

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:45:42 +0000

I’m not back yet but I figured I’d leave a message to be posted while I was gone. Don’t forget that feature freeze is almost up! (At least according to the release schedule as of this time). If you have stuff to get in do so, just try and make sure it’s well-baked by now.

It’ll be interesting to see if we end up adopting the branch seasons idea being thrown around (i.e. winter, autumn, summer, spring). It could serve to change our release mechanism such that we could add new features whenever and they would only make it into a release once they have the kinks worked out.

Also Thanksgiving is coming up for the American contingent. Wish I could be there but someone has to stand the watch, right now it’s my turn. So Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it, be sure to save me some pumpkin pie!

This is an autogenerated message. I am currently away

Jos Poortvliet: Hero of today

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:13:49 +0000

I'm sorry for Aaron & the plasma team today. I just read Aaron's blog about the glowing panel. Yeah, it's cool. Really.

But it doesn't cut it right now. Because I just had a good look at KMail and the work done by Szymon Stefanek during his Google summer of code project. He just catapulted KMail into this century ;-)

That stuff ain't cool or wow, as some say.

It's way beyond cool. That piece of work is just so complete, polished - I love it. Yeah, it's so simple, it seems so small to the casual observer - but I think it's wicked ;-)

Everybody on Jeremy's blog is asking for screenshots, so I sat down and made a small walk-through. The tour limited to what I've found in the listview area in like 5 minutes, so there is bound to be more. But you can see that for yourself when 4.2 is out, so here we go.

Let's have a look at KMail and the message pane when you start it up.

Not too ordinary. The look of the header imho doesn't rock, and the layout is rather busy. Notice however how KMail is still grouping the pretty large number of threads from my GMail account. Completely in the background, the interface is incredibly responsive.

So where's the cool stuff? To the right of the search box.

Let's go through the buttons. The first one quickly filters on message status:

Nice, you can quickly find what you're looking for. Not incredibly special, tough. So on to the next one:

Yeah, search. This one is very good. Notice how you can save search folders, and it is also bloody fast (this search felt instant). Now moving on:

That's one heck of a sort choice. Oh my. It might be useful to put some stuff in sub-menu's, but at the very least, you're guaranteed to be able to sort any way you want. Moving on:

So you can choose how the threading works. For example, here's topic starters.

When you change threading, it takes hours to change the view. Of course - I have thousands of emails which have to be re-threaded, right? Nope. It's instantaneously. Sometimes KMail it starts regrouping threads but that's background stuff (16.000 threads takes almost 30 seconds here, and as far as I can tell it does the visible stuff first). And I might be mistaken, but it seems it's even multi-threaded. Yeah, you're reading that one right: KMail properly uses multicores. Oh boy!

Furthermore, it's configurable (notice the nice description!):

Not exactly lacking in fine-tune abilities either:

And as the menu already indicated, this is configurable per folder. So you can have your mailinglist threaded as - well, mailinglists obviously... And conversations as conversations. Lovely.

But you haven't seen the best yet. Oh no... Let's look at the next menu. (I added the last 2 options myself)

Theme? What'd ya mean, theme? Let's see what fancy does:

How's that for cool, huh? Looks much better, imho. And shows more info- efficient. But we're not there yet, of course. A real geek would wonder what configure does:

But the real goodies are in the advanced dialog:

What's so good about it? Each and every one of these items can be configured by drag'n'drop and right mouse clicks! Quick impression (it's hard to describe it or show in screenshots anyway):

So after some playing around, this is what I've made for myself. Good usage of space & lots of info.

It's bloody easy. It's superfast - showing tens of thousands of emails, and changing the view in miliseconds! And I have yet to seen a single crash! There MUST be some Plasma guys thinking now: "What the heck was Szymon thinking, out-witting us with this amazing piece of code?"

Conclusion

For me, Plasma's thunder for today was stolen in almost complete silence, a little over a week ago. KMail is back, and it's steaming hot!

To everybody on the web who complained that KDE was taking the Gnome way, removing features for the sake of usability: take this!
Being able to optimize applications to your personal workflow holds the promise of big efficiency gains, and KDE is offering you those!

My hero of today: Szymon Stefanek!

Of course, the same goes to the whole KDE PIM team, and to Szymon's projectmentor Thomas McGuire. Heroes. Respect guys!

And remember children, this kind'a thing actually happens all over the KDE base - we just don't notice these niceties every day, which is why I dedicate this blog to all the cool but unseen stuff going on in KDE SVN!

Edit:
I'd like to respond to some of the issues ppl brought up below.

About a coolness scale: Plasma rocks. Period. It's just that this morning, after reading the planet, I started KMail, and decided to play with the new look. I didn't like the defaults. After a while I got so excited I just HAD to write about it... Of course there just IS no coolness factor, most of KDE stuff ranks so high it's hard to compare to anything anyway. OK?

Secondly about the mention in Gnome: I'm not gonna remove it because this is simply what is said to me/asked of me by users again and again when I talk about KDE on tradeshows, seminars and online.

Frederik Gladhorn: Hobby und Elektronik

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:13:35 +0000

I'll be giving a KDE 4 talk at the Hobby and Electronics fair in Stuttgart tomorrow (Nov, 16th). If you were planing to drop by the fair, come on over at 15:30. You probably won't learn a lot about KDE since I intend to prepare for a rather broad non-technical audience. Let me know if you happen to be in Stuttgart and want to have a coffee or just chat

John Layt: Weekends Around The World: Calling all i18n Maintainers.

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:08:28 +0000

Here's a quote for you from Wikipedia:

"In Muslim-majority countries the legal work week in the Middle East is typically either Saturday through Wednesday (as in Algeria and Saudi Arabia), Saturday through Thursday (as in Iran) or Sunday through Thursday (as in Egypt, Syria, United Arab Emirates). For most Israelis, the work week begins on Sunday and ends on Thursday or Friday at noon to accommodate the Jewish Sabbath which begins Friday night."

This is something KDE hasn't handled up to now, resulting in calendar widgets that often didn't draw the weekend properly for the users locale. Another issue was the day of religious worship was tied to the calendar system, which caused issues for users in countries that use the Gregorian calendar but whose day of worship is not Sunday (e.g. Turkey, Israel, etc).

So I've added three new settings to KLocale in 4.2 to address this:

WorkingWeekStartDay - Defults to Monday
WorkingWeekEndDay - Defaults to Friday
WeekDayOfPray - Defaults to Sunday

Those locales that don't use the defaults can now set these values up correctly, and individuals can choose to override the settings for their locale in the Region/Date KCM. The kdelibs KDateTable widget now obeys these settings when drawing the weekend header and red-letters the day of worship, and I'm working on the kdepim widget too.

I haven't updated any of the actual i18n settings files yet, so this is a call-out to the i18n and l10n people who are better placed than I to know which locales need updating to either commit the updates themselves, or e-mail me with the required details and a definitive reference for me to confirm the details against. I will try work through the list myself at some stage, but any help is appreciated.

Something we're thinking about for 4.3 is also showing the locales public holidays in the kdelibs calendar widget like the kdepim widget does, but there's a few things to address before that happens. Part of this will be proper support for astronomically based calendar systems.