fidzu : KDE

24 Jul 2008 12:48am GMT

I'll believe it when I'm not in the commit digest. ---Luboš Luňák

We haven't done that bad. If you look at the aggregate of the last 60 days, Seli is at #8. For the last 30 days, #11. He took a vacation last week, so that can't really count. I think the aggregate stats are a little off, though, because he did one or two binges. Usually he seems to be around #10.5. So how do you exactly count? We talked about it, and decided that if he makes the commit digest (which counts the top ten) anytime from now till aKademy, then I lose. So 3 weeks.

Then I'll have to start figuring how to pull off not losing Ossi's bet, which would actually give *me* blue hair...

P. S. He wouldn't tell me if he would actively thwart me, so this should be interesting. Can I get the BugSquaders who are doing SoC to come back if we need you?

23 Jul 2008 9:05pm GMT

The sun has come out again in the Netherlands, which means I'm off to do some sailing and rest my tired mouse hand (by holding a tiller instead).

The past few days have been hectic in a way: we held our n-th annual "toetjesmaal" or "dessert dinner" where 10 or 12 people gang together and make nothing but desserts and call it a well-balanced meal (oddly enough, this works fairly well). Usually we hold it in the winter when the high-calorie approach makes sense; now in midsummer we had more fresh fruit at our disposal but didn't really use it. The line-up:

lemon rice with custard; double-chocolate brownie cake; steamed golden syrup pudding; strawberry-pear crumble; dulche da leche; fruit pavlova; rhubarb crumble; chocolate fountain fondue; mango trifle; rose pudding.

The "dulche da leche" (spelling, whatever) thing is what you get when you bake a tin of sweetened condensed milk. The result is brown and rubbery and sweet. One of the participants has a chocolate fountain thingy which uses an Archimedes screw to move the chocolate up to the top of the fountain; looks nifty, not very practical. The rose pudding was definitely the best-looking hot-pink dessert for the evening, but the last slot is always a tough one: everyone is kind of full already.

On the KDE front I added three more KDE SVN modules to the Solaris lineup - admin, accessibility and artwork - bringing our total to 16 plus KOffice (which doesn't compile today anymore in trunk). I'm going to try to push webdev through tonight as well. It's a testimony to the strength of the KDE libs and the generally high quality of the code that porting these modules is relatively little work. A few gcc-isms (kxsldebug seems to be in love with qDebug + PRETTY_FUNCTION instead of using kDebug) and some math ambiguities, mostly. Only occasionally a file that doesn't end with a newline (I had to double check that the standard does require that, thanks Paul F.).

23 Jul 2008 7:01pm GMT

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the SoK student working on implementing mass tagging in Amarok 2.

So what's new since my last post?

This is a recent screenshot:

The string processing features now all work. These allow the user to easily clean up unwanted stuff from the tags, like trailing spaces and underscores. Title case mode capitalizes the first letter of every word except short words. The words that are already capitalized in some way (proper nouns, roman numerals) are left untouched.

Double-clicking on the token pool now adds the selected token at the end of the layout bar.

Work on the advanced mode is underway for those who still prefer writing text rather than drag&dropping.

23 Jul 2008 5:08pm GMT

Very hard work has been done in these days to improve more and more the Previewer. The first thing i focused on was making a good DBus interface. Helped by Fabrizio Montesi (fmontesi on irc) i made some methods to allow a good integration with JOLIE. So these methods came out:

void openFile(QString filename)

void goToPage(uint page)

QString currentFile()

uint currentPage()

Actually goToPage and currentPage only work when an Okular part is loaded. They allow the client/server communication provided by JOLIE. You can have a look at this screencast made by Fabrizio to show JOLIE+Previewer working together =). http://jolie.sf.net/videos/vision-previewer.ogv

Btw there are also some graphical improvements to talk about =). First of all Nuno Pinheiro made a really nice icon for the Previewer. Currently it looks this way, enjoy:

the Previewer Icon

Now let's have a look to multiple previews handling. Previewer stores recently opened files in the context menu. Now we have a nicer and faster way to retrieve recently previewed files just by clicking on the left side of the dialog, where a list of recent files is shown. Pictures will talk in place of me =)

multiple previews

I made the list as "Plasmy" (awful term) as possible so that it looks not so alien as other widgets do. It reacts well to theme changing:

previewer glassified

Nice huh? =)

Now, as you (ok, some of you =) ) noticed, there are two more icons near the close button. We got a trash:

the trash icon

As suggested by friedrich| on irc, some of you would need to delete some recently opened files from the history. So here comes that trash: click on it to remove the currently opened file both from the Previewer and from its history. Simple! =)

The second added icon is the resize one =). Since scrolling the wheel to resize the previewer was getting hateful for me i decided to make something different (more like is done for your applets on the desktop).

resize icon

So, as the tooltip suggests, just drag that icon to resize your dialog. =)

Oh! Forgetting.. Some of you asked for an integration with Dolphin/Konqueror. Currently Previewer provides a service menu:

previewer and service menu

"Preview this file" sends the file to Previewer and shows it.. This isn't a real Dolphin integration. Btw I'm keeping in touch with Peter Penz to integrate this behavior in Dolphin natively. It doesn't seem so easy to implement but i'm sure that Peter will do a great job for this!! =)

That's it guys. Of course comments are always welcome!

Cheers

Alessandro.

23 Jul 2008 4:17pm GMT

Ever since I first played with FractInt, it must have been at least 15 years ago, I've been intrigued by fractals. At first, they seemed like magic to me, but as I learned more maths, I can understand the why, but not always the how.


A couple of years ago I set out to write a fractal exploration application called Frakter. To be honest, it sucked pretty much, but it was an attempt. The nice things about it where:

• Fractals where kept in external scripts, so that the application could be extended.
• Colouring was done using special colour maps that could be loaded and saved.
• It used a background thread to render the fractals.
• It had a zooming history that one could type right into to find interesting ranges in the complex numbers realm.

Now and then I visit Paul Bourke's great collection of fractals (and loads of other stuff too). Each time, I feel an urge to write something that can handle everything that he shows.

I want to be able to fit all different types of fractals into a class tree that I can write a GUI around. The data carried from the fractals to the UI would be enough to do basic 2D rendering, 3D rendering, psychedelic colouring, and so on.


I've had a couple of half hearted attempts this far, but now I started from the other direction, i.e. starting with the fractal types I never get to otherwise.


Right now I've implemented IFS and L-systems. The implementation is not even an attempt at being efficient and uses loads and loads and loads of memory, but it works. The next step is to create a colouring class that one can inherit to do the funky stuff. Last value, current value and current iteration, fractal specific category are the "input values" I plan to use. Right now, fractal specific category, is "last used transformation set" when dealing with IFS, for L-systems, it is zero.

23 Jul 2008 3:41pm GMT

It took me one and a half day and Jos will not be happy about it. That is because I have to start this blog entry with apologizing to him:

"Jos, I am sorry, you will probably not like what I am about to present here. But this makes it so much easier for me and all the KDE people. And strigidaemon simply does not provide the needed features, which I can understand since you are doing this in your spare time. But I cannot wait any longer and in the end really want to reuse all the nice KDE features instead of reimplementing it all just to keep away from QT/KDE dependencies. I hope you understand."

Now that the tension is built up. What did this guy do? Well, essentially I reimplemented strigidaemon as a KDE Nepomuk service. Why would I do that? Why would I reimplement an existing working application? Simple. For the following reasons:

• The parts that I copied from strigidaemon are rather small since all the work is done in the streamanalyser library. So "reimplementing" is maybe a bit overstating it.
• Managing strigidaemon is not that easy as there is no proper method to suspend/resume indexing. You will see below why that is important.
• strigidaemon does not inform about what it is doing. Thus, having an information GUI is impossible.
• The new service is of course a Nepomuk service and as such, can make use of all our nice Qt/KDE features:
  • It uses KDirWatch to watch all indexed directories for change. In comparision the inotify/fam support in strigi was never completed and also meant to maintain 2 dirwatch implementation: one in KDE and one in Strigi.
  • It uses Solid to get notified about power state changes - indexing is suspended when your laptop is running on batteries.
  • It regularly checks the available space on the home partition and suspends indexing if the space runs low (also very simple via KDiskFreeSpace. Using Qt/KDE is so damn great! You really can focus on the important stuff!)
  • It shows info messages about its status via KPassivePopup. Very KDEish and smoothly integrated with the desktop.
  • It shows a GUI to inform the user that the initial indexing can take a while and gives the possibility to configure/disable/suspend/resume strigi (see below for a screenshot of the widget for which I'd like your input.)

For me these are more than enough reasons to commit the new service in the next days. It will solve the Strigi situation for many of our users that always disable/kill strigi because they don't get any information about it from KDE.

As I said above I wanted your input for the GUI. The idea was to make it non-intrusive but have it staying in a corner of the desktop until indexing is done or the user closes it. Here it is in all its uglyness:

Please help me to make this widget useful.

Jos, I hope you can understand why I did it. It was rather simple and gives us all the features we need. Without reimplementing all the nice things KDE has to offer.

23 Jul 2008 10:40am GMT

On Monday, I drove to Guelph to hang out with some friends and then take the VIA Train to Ottawa. We arrived around 5pm today.

About the only thing done that was productive today was order a Pizza and sync rawhide and pray wireless will work tomorrow morning.

I wish Other KDE people where here

[ Insert I'm Going to OLS! banner here ]

Pictures to come ...

23 Jul 2008 4:19am GMT

1.5% population of Finland saw Iron Maiden last weekend (in Helsinki & Tampere) . Finnish people rock!!!

23 Jul 2008 12:54am GMT

(c) 2008 Barbie barbie.missbarbell.co.uk

So, this weekend just gone was the weekend of LugRadio Live. Here's how it went for me. Friday morning, I got up, finished packing my stuff into my suitcase and headed off to the airport to go and pick up Myrtti. After missing a couple of buses, eventually got there, just in time to meet her as she was coming out of Arrivals.

We then headed off to Wolverhampton, with Myrtti being amazed by English houses (don't ask me - I don't know either) arriving in Wolverhampton 20 minutes before we could check into the hotel. So we went for food. Well, actually, I went for food, and Myrtti came with me. Moon Under Water has nice food, as do most Wetherspoons.

Anyway, from there on, Myrtti and I went and checked into the hotel, and then had a bit of a chat (and checked on the CaveyCam) while waiting for the evening events to kick off.

The evening events… god. well… I don't remember a lot of it. I remember coming in, sitting down, and sitting down with Daviey, ompaul, and a couple of other people (I can't remember who!) and well - the night went on from there.

Left the Evening Events @ around midnight, and walked back with ompaul and Myrtti to the hotel. Couldn't sleep, as there was a dry-riser next to my room, so at 4am, I gave up, and registered on flickr, uploading the photos from the night that I'd taken.

Then, at 6am, I went hunting for breakfast, had a little walk round Wolverhampton, and found that Spar had food, so bought a couple of sausage sandwiches from there (and a couple of cans of Relentless). Went back to the hotel room, answered the wake up call, and headed to the venue just before 7.

I was the second person there after Chris (Proctor) - am proud of that, and spent the morning setting up all those lovely banners that you people saw (and chasing after some that had gone missing).

Did anyone notice that the can of relentless I'd thrown in the bin had been used to help stick up the Main Stage schedule poster? No? Good… twas amusing though.

Thanks to Mrs Ron for providing the Bacon Sarnies though

Anyways, sat down and started to film the intro, then moved onto the first talk in the Atrium (I signed up for the morning sessions on crew - why oh why?). I had to try and keep myself from falling asleep due to no sleep in the first one, but towards the end, the caffeine kicked in, and I started to wake up.

Next up was Bruuuuunnoooooo's talk… it was "tres amusant" … I enjoyed watching it, and am glad that the audio isn't coming from the camera, or all you'd have heard was my laughing.

After that, It was lunch. Woo. Headed off to the Moon Under Water for what was meant to be an SBLUG gathering, but, couldn't find them in the packed pub, so ended up sitting with Barbie and JJ and chatting to them while we had food.

Came back and scoped out the Exhibitors for a bit (and yes, played some TF2) before going to watch the gong-a-thong… mrben… raccoon pants… I won't say anymore, or my mind will explode. Though I must say, I did love Matthew Garrett's talk on how he hates the community.

After that, I went back and gamed for a bit, before heading to the Live and Unleashed recording. Found Myrtti again there, and gave her a bit of a shoulder rub while watching it (and laughing my ass off too!)

So. There brought an end to Day 1… except, it wasn't over. By this time, I was feeling pretty crap… no sleep. So went and packed up, then headed back to the hotel, slept for a bit, then headed to Karaoke.

I didn't stay long, and was on the soft drinks all night, but managed to fit in a rendition of "Summer Nights" - I do a mean Olivia Newton John. I'm kind of dissapointed that the guy I was singing it with (my Ex Boss) didn't know the words, but I've had a promise from froodie that next year she'll do the John Travolta, and I can do the Olivia Newton John. Speaking of froodie - great rendition of "Sweet Child O' Mine" - I was singing along in the back of the venue (and drawing funny looks by air-drumming/air-guitaring)

Sunday morning. I was still tired, but due to exhaustion - I'd actually managed to sleep. Though - I think the fact that the following comment was made in IRC means that I didn't look as fresh-faced as I'd have like to believe I was.

<+ompaul> Mez, on sunday you looked like someone had eaten enough of your brain not to kill you but to stop you from understanding there was sunday

So yeah. Once again, set up at a ridiculously early time (this time 8am though) - I managed to be one of the people on the Coffee Run to Starbucks, so that worked well for me. I didn't have to do much.

Started off the morning upstairs in the Lightning talk room, watching Barbies talk (and getting told off for raising my hand to answer his questions). Was still a good talk the second time round. And some of the stuff I forgot the first time, I've now seen again. I must apologise to Barbie for laughing to myself towards the end of the talk though. When you have a crew radio on, and you can hear Jono telling everyone he's in the toilet with a speaker, you can't help but laugh (I so wish that the LCD display in the atrium was something we could send messages to - I would have sent "FlashHug Jono now - he's in the loo!")

Next was Agostino Russo's talk about Wubi - which was quite interesting. I've not actually used wubi myself, but to see it working in situ, and to hear about the geekyness behind it was actually quite cool.

Lunchtime again, where I spent outside eating sandwhiches and munch provided by MrsRon again, before I came back in, scoped the exhibitors again, and generally mingled talking with people until it was time for Chris Jones' (Ng) talk about terminator.

Next was the goodbyes… Sad to see them go - but - they WILL be back next year! (YAY!). Sad to see the podcast end, but it was a good ending to a good weekend.

Then we packed up, and found out that the bar we'd arranged to goto afterwards… was closed…. FAIL. Got it sorted out in the end, and after food, ended up at the Novotel bar, where there were quite a few people. Twas good talking to people there, a nice friendly relaxed atmosphere, and a nicely stocked bar. I must say though - I don't think I've laughed so much in a long time than I did with standing outside smoking with Xalior, Daviey and a few others (failhat!). Xalior is an extremely funny guy.

Anyways, from there, it was time to head home, after another night in the hotel, and taking Myrtti on a whirlwind tour of Birmingham's Music Stores

To me, it'll be a weekend to remember. There were a lot of firsts for me, and a lot of fun.

I must say though, thumbs up to Tony Whitmore and Ron Wellsted for doing an amazing job at organising everything this year. And to all the rest of the crew who made everything run so smoothly (and Tig for the trousers! and barely leaving the sound desk!)

22 Jul 2008 11:34pm GMT

I'll blog some more about the extender progress tomorrow, but in the meantime, here's a screenshot showing some of the progress. For your viewing pleasure:

Kuiserver screenshot

Credit to pinheiro for his great extender dragger design.

22 Jul 2008 11:32pm GMT

There has been a lot of development work this past week with Kobby. After posting about some design issues I was attempting to clear up before diving into code, Armin Burgmeier (Creator of infinote) pointed out that the term 'session' in infinote is used to describe the editing 'session' of a single document, unlike in Kate where it is used to describe a set of documents. Instead of deciding whether confuse either users or developers, I came up with a new naming scheme for the control dialogs which might actually better represent the actions being performed.

After getting the control dialogs worked out I went to connect the infinote functionality for an XmppConnection and ran into some issues with sigc++ and Qt. Luckilly this was a quick (albeit somewhat dirty) fix. It wasnt much longer before I got the connection functionality working, and ran into the next issue: Needing to use the Glib event system from my Qt app. Luckilly, libinfinity was designed to allow for the plugging in of any event system by implementing the Io interface the library provides to register sockets to be monitored and the handling callback functions (very cool). The only issue now is that as far as I can tell, the way this is implemented doesnt doesnt fit well with Glibmm's design, meaning I may have to create the C GObject subclass for proxying the C++ wrapper by hand.

22 Jul 2008 10:48pm GMT

One of the goals of my GSoC is to let Akonadi do the storage handling for KPilot. At least for the PIM conduits. In my previous blog I already mentioned that Akonadi entered KPilot. However yesterday and today I had to dive into the code of Akonadi itself.

Akonadi stores a revision number of for each item that is stored with it. KPilot however, does not have a notion of revisions. What it does store is the last time that the handheld was synced. So to see if a record on the pc side is changed it looks if the modification time of that record is after the last time that there occurred a sync. The dirty and quick solution (read work around) would be to store the modification time in a custom attribute of Item.

Well, Akonadi had *some* code already there for modification time but not yet on the client side and also not completely on the server side. Behold! =:) That has changed. (Thanks to a lot of patient of vkrause). Patches are send to the kde-pim list for review and will probably be committed soon. Unfortunately I did not have the time to implement more sophisticated features like: give me all items modified after <date>.

That's all for now folks. I need to get back to KPilot hacking to keep Mr. vanRijn happy =:).

22 Jul 2008 7:18pm GMT

22 Jul 2008 7:16pm GMT

Someone asked how to setup Eclipse for KDE development in my last copy/paste bug rant. Here's how I did, in short.

1. Setup a working KDE development system according to Techbase, with cmakekde and all the good stuff.
2. Download Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede, preferably the C++ one from eclipse.org, but any set containing CDT will do.
3. Create /home/kde-devel/cmakekdeeclipse similarly to cmakekde (see the end for the content), make it executable (chmod +x)
4. In Eclipse, File => New => Other => SVN => Checkout Projects from SVN. Checkout the KDE module you want to have in Eclipse. Use the C++ wizard when creating the project, set it to a Makefile project. You'll adjust that later (or use the Advanced Settings button directly).
5. After the checkout, open the projects properties and choose the C++ Builder tab. Change the builder from make to /home/kde-devel/cmakekdeeclipse ${workspace_loc:/playground_plasma} and choose an existing, empty directory for the build directory.
   Change playground_plasma to the name of your project.
6. Press Ok. If all went well, you can just hit the "Build" button now and it will just work ™.
7. Realize it took more than five minutes

Things to enjoy: Error and warning parser that will annotate faulty lines, a great indexer and content assistant, spell checking (that's actually useful), gdb integration, doxygen assistant, Bugzilla integration (sadly not working with KDE Bugzilla), IRC integration (needs communication framework), Subversion support (needs subclipse/subversive), code formatting and a whole lot more.

Last not least some random tweaks:

• Set the environment option LC_ALL to C in the preferences if the error/warning parser shows warnings as errors
• Disable klippers setting "Prevent empty clipboard" if copy/paste in Eclipse behaves weird
• Activate doxygen support in Window => Preferences => C/C++ => Editor
• Disable automatic builds
• Activate the (gnu) elf parser for gdb integration in Project Settings => C/C++ Build => Settings => Binary Parsers

And finally the cmakekdeeclipse script I use to invoke building:

#!/bin/bash
set -e

srcFolder="${1}"
test -d "${srcFolder}"
source ~/.bashrc
cmake $srcFolder -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull
nice make -j3 VERBOSE=1
make install

No pic, no care?

22 Jul 2008 6:59pm GMT

Amarok 2 alpha 2, codenamed Aulanerk, has been released. See the release announcement for more details.

Thanks everyone who helped with bug reports and patches. Keep them coming

And of course a screenshot for you to enjoy:

22 Jul 2008 6:08pm GMT