It felt darned good to hack on KPilot just a wee bit today! Actually, it was less hacking on KPilot directly and more on some utility code that I’ve written that allows me to sync my work Exchange calendar into my personal calendar and subsequently to my Palm. I’ve blogged previously about this, but since my last post, I’ve switched employers (YAY!!!) and I now have to deal with Exchange 2007 OWA, with Forms-Based Authentication (FBA). FBA has managed to break the nifty little Ruby Exchange (RExchange) code that I’d been using, since RExchange doesn’t do FBA. So, I’ve gone back to Graham Cobb’s tremendously useful little OWASync package which has been updated to handle Exchange 2007’s schema and FBA, WOOT!

So, anyway, if you, like me, need to sync your Exchange calendar to your Palm, and you don’t want to have to keep your personal Calendar also in Exchange just for the privilege of being able to sync both work and personal calendars to your Palm, you might find some of this useful. The right answer for this, of course, is to get KDE PIM to be able to speak to Exchange, show it in kontact, allow 2-way manipulation of your Exchange calendar, and then get KPilot to know how to merge multiple calendars into 1 view and 2-way sync them. But that’s a whole lotta work. =:)

I’m actually thinking that it might be a long-term idea to have KPilot be able to sync to multiple calendars on its own. But, again, that’s a whole lotta work.

And what’s more… while it might not be the prettiest solution, what I have now works and does what I need it to:

1. Retrieve my calendar out of Exchange
2. Display my calendar in Kontact (or Sunbird-I just checked and it works fine too!) so I don’t have to deal with OWA for checking my calendar
3. Have my work calendar remind me of appointments via my Linux desktop
4. Sync my Exchange work calendar with my Treo

I remember, not all that long ago, Tom Albers (among others from the release team) launching a licensing initiative; this was partly to push for acceptance of GPLv3 in KDE code (since we have dependencies using GPLv3, we need to update to something compatible and GPLv2-only is not compatible). Today, I started looking at the code in KDE SVN in response to an academic query about the licensing of our software. I looked at headers in kdesupport. Granted, it's not a "core" SVN module, but it does ship all kinds of things that KDE really needs. And headers, well, sometimes headers are just small and trivial and boring. So I was expecting a few issues. There always are. What I wasn't expecting was for over 200 of the 1083 header files to be missing copyright headers that our tools recognize.

It also turns out that our license tool has a bug and rejects the 51 Franklin street address that the FSF currently occupies (well, according to the website it does), so we need to fix that up before starting to fix that up.

The EBN reports on bad copyright headers, so you can get a partial report from there. For instance, Eigen has a bunch of files under GPLv2+; license policy is that libraries must be LGPL (but that's policy as codified in the tools; I'm not really convinced that these should apply to kdesupport as well). Taglib has one missing license warning -- unicode.h is derived from a public domain work but the license text is not recognized. akode is full of unlicensed code.

The whole exercise was thus quite surprising to me; it also means I can't answer all that accurately what the licenses are that we use in kdesupport + libs + pimlibs + base. Most of it will be (L)GPLv2+ or (L)GPLv3, but we need that to be explicit.

You can check your own code as well; the license checker is in KDE SVN. You can get it with svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/quality/krazy2/plugins, it's the license script in there. Krazy plugins are (generally) perl scripts with a strict interface; this means you call the script with --verbose for a long report and a list of files to check. For instance, you can do perl license --verbose `find src/ -name *.h` to check all your header files. Similar check for cc, cpp, etc. if you find a file that is licensed properly but isn't recognised, please drop me and Allen a note (or kde-quality@). Keep in mind:

• Each file itself needs a copyright header. Don't defer to a COPYING file elsewhere.
• Put your name in it if you're the primary author. Put your name in it if you have provided a sizeable contribution that may be copyrightable (i.e. has some creative merit).
• Don't use variations on the licensing language. The EBN / Krazy checker is kind of strict about what's acceptable because the advice we have obtained on licensing issues is that it's best to be (a) recognizably the same as another license (b) complete. So put that whole GPLv3 blurb in there, not just "This file is licensed under the GPL"; the blurb may be cut-and-pasted out of say, kdelibs/kdecore/services/kservicegroup_p.h or use the blurb in the licenses/GPL_V2 (or _V3) file in kdelibs/licenses.

Doing all that makes it much safer to distribute the code for everyone. Questions and comments on the tools themselves can best go to kde-quality@; things about license policy to kde-licensing@ with a CC to me. And then write more Free Software (under the two-clause BSD license, for instance).

Sure you can draw line with the line tool. But I have never felt confortable with that, I think that's because the resulting line looks too perfect, as you can see on the screenshots below (it's the top right line).

What I want is to have the virtual version of physical tools (rulers, compas, we can even imagine more fancy stuff). That's what a drawing assistant is. It controls the drawing on the image, depending on the mouse/stylus movement. So for the ruler drawing assistant, it will force to draw a line. There is a control over the magnetism of the tools, this control how much freedom the artist has, how much the pen can move aside the ruler line.

The second line (starting from the top right), was done using a mouse. The third and fourth with a tablet stylus. The fourth line is here to show an other interest for the drawing assistant, you can control the pressure all over the line.





In fact, I am more interested in a compas tool, but a ruler was more simpler to test the whole framework.

… literally means “love goes through the stomach”. What better way to announce some of the delights that await the weekend visitors of the KDevelop team meeting? As if free coffee including a free USB coffee warmer wasn’t enough!

This Saturday (April 12), carefully buttered fresh Bavarian Brezn will be served from 9:00 in the morning. This peak of taste bud stimuli will be accompanied by another non-plus-ultra of cuisine - our local specialities shop, which is usually closed on Saturdays, is going make a one-time exception just for us and freshly bake Poğaça - delightful small rolls filled with tasty cheese.

For the ones that prefer sweet things, don’t worry - there will be German Fruchtplunder and Turkish Baklava - after eating those, pure sugar will taste sour.

More information, including a visual guide on how to get there, can be found on the KDevelop wiki.

At times when we have only 512MB Compact flash, we always had to download the pictures off the camera, but with these affordable 4GB cards, it can take a while before we see the need to download. So here is my favorite.

KDE will be present at LugRadio Live USA this weekend at the Metreon in San Francisco, California.

Please come and don't forget to wear flowers in your hair. (No, really, *ahem* ;)

We will be presenting KDE 4.

Oh yeah, and I just updated the hotspot on kde.org to announce it.

Qt 4.4 RC 1 now available in my PPA https://edge.launchpad.net/~jr/+archive for Hardy.

Don't run a dist-upgrade when you add the PPA, you'll get other random packages which are in there.

4.4 fixes python dbus and QtDbus, yay.

There's also an updated package of webkitkde, just for fun.

Since I use OpenSolaris as my primary desktop just right now (the FreeBSD machine is sadly in need of some hardware fixes) I have -- or had -- a pretty strong incentive to get the basic KDE4 desktop working for me. So what does that entail? Well, I have pretty simple needs: a web browser, a console and a text editor. So in theory there's enough in kdebase and kdesdk to keep me satisfied.

So I'm now well satisfied. Thanks to tireless work by Stefan and Lukas on the dependencies (we just nudged poppler into shape, for instance, replacing the existing poppler.so.2 on the system) and some late nights, we now have the following KDE SVN modules compiling on OpenSolaris:

1. kdesupport (3 patch files: -lm -lkrb5 and dealing with class-nested std::map usage in Strigi)
2. kdelibs (9 patch files: library linking, madvise, kjs untangling to work around the GCC hacks, utmpx structure differences)
3. kdepimlibs (2 patch files: gpgme++ still has issues with int and enum, plus std::strcmp)
4. kdebase (4 patch files: kdm mismatch with what's in Solaris nowadays, template magic, ksysguard + ptrace and installation-specific bits in startkde)
5. kdeedu (1 patch file: need to link -lm more often)
6. kdegames (1 patch file: #undef sun and ERR)
7. kdegraphics (1 patch file: gwenview needs to link to soprano)
8. kdesdk (7 patch files: header file handling, libraries, disable umbrello)
9. kdetoys
10. kdeutils (2 patch files: math and disable kmilo)

So it's not a huge diff between KDE SVN and what you need to compile on OpenSolaris. The KDE on Solaris Techbase article is slowly growing and ought to provide all the information needed to do the builds (if it does not, figure it out and fix the page or point it out to the KDE-Solaris team in a friendly manner). It also contains an explanation of how to add a KDE4 session to the standard login manager; this means I now log in to KDE4 directly instead of via CDE.

Now, this is not to say that there are no issues left. It compiles . It even runs, but there are many things that fail or do not work right (here I'm just talking about obvious technical failures). Here are the three biggies:

1. Konsole window caption is stuck at ':' because it doesn't know how to retrieve process information. Konsole still doesn't like ^C.
2. Konqueror crashes regularly. On Thiago's announcement of Qt 4.4-rc1 for instance, and lots of other pages. I can toddle around my own home pages but they could have been written in 1997 for all the HTML sophistication they have.
3. The crash dialog can't produce any useful backtraces -- obviously, because there is no gdb here. There's a standard C library function to print backtraces, I just need to figure out how to (safely) get that information into the dialog.

Now that I can use KDE4 on a regular basis, I do notice many things that make me think "I would have done that differently." Some of this is sure to be my unfamiliarity with the KDE4 desktop -- I know stuff has changed, so I'm documenting the discomfort of someone who's switching from KDE3 to KDE4 for the first time.

• In kickoff, the selection of names is the generic description, not the name of the application. So I see in my games list very generic descriptions like "ball bouncing game" and "board game." Gee, I'll play a board game.
• The board game turns out to be SameGame (this is shown when you hover over "board game") which has gone a serious redesign since it was my favorite in KDE 3.1 or so. It now has beachballs instead of the classic stones. Fine. It also has an orange background (?) and orange highlighting (?) and no animation of the selection and no way to configure themes, background or the number of colors. It is nice and fast to play. Much nicer than SameGNOME, but it doesn't re-calculate the highlight after a click -- you need to move the mouse to trigger that. The rounded rectangle of the final score display doesn't match the rounding of corners in the rest of KDE.
• The big red "Leave" button on kickoff doesn't. And all the other "leave" icons are a blue down arrow.
• Focus follows mouse is still gone. Maybe it followed an old mouse offscreen and I need to find the right bit of hardware?
• In systemsettings, not all of the sections seem to work. For instance, under network settings I have "connection preferences", "proxy" and "service discovery." The first two give me a configuration tab of Windows Samba shares, which I can't map to either of their names (nor why they are identical). Not all of the components give the same view with icons down the right; some like the Sound component gives a single tab widget with two tabs. Some traditional WTFs like why the keyboard layout is in Regional and Language and not in Keyboard and Mouse haven't been resolved either.

I suppose it's part of having really high expectations for KDE applications in general -- I mean I can't find things in general that feel wrong, just sharp corners and sticking drawers and oddly placed light switches -- that this little list of mine exists at all. And just like everything else, the sharp corners and burrs will slowly get buffed away. Attacking Konsole is my top priority. Being unable to ^C a running command is just unacceptable (although it improves my typing). I guess every thorn has its rose.

Dear MPAA and international equivalents:

If you want to reduce piracy, stop making it harder to use legitimate copies of movies than pirated ones. For example, with blu-ray:

• Pirated copy: Download. Play.
• Legitimate copy, using free software: Mount disk. Find the disk ID. Google the disk ID to find the key. Find some java program that dumps the decrypted movie to disk, and wait several hours.

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

The digiKam development team is happy to release 0.9.4-beta3. The digiKam tarball can be downloaded from SourceForge as well.



NEW FEATURES (since 0.9.3):
General : Creation of tags simplified everywhere. Multiple Tags hierarchy can be created at the same time. Tags creation dialog re-designed.

read more

From the mailing list:

Please join the Ubuntu Maryland Loco Team at the Frisco Grille and Cantina in Columbia, MD on April 25th at 7pm for a gathering of friends to celebrate the release of the Hardy Heron!

The Frisco Grille and Cantina is a full service restaurant and pub specializing in southwestern-style cuisine. Their website is
http://www.friscogrille.com/ and the Google Maps location is at http://linkpot.net/diagramed/

Be sure to add your name and how many you will be drag^H^H^H^Hinviting to the wiki page at http://linkpot.net/douse/ so we can give our hosts an accurate head count. (If you’re unsure of how to edit this please email with your name and headcount and we’ll get you taken care of)

See you there!

Fresh off the intarwebs: Tanguy Krotoff from the VLC project announced availability of working VLC and MPlayer backends for Phonon. The VLC backend uses libvlc from the latest dev version of VLC, 0.9. Sweet.

The folks over at Qt Centre, a site devoted to the Qt programming community, have announced the start of the Second Annual Qt Programming Contest. What's really cool is that one of the categories is ... Plasmoid! Yes, they'll be naming a winner in the category of best Plasma add-on. Coool...

I'll be the guest judge for this category, so I'm looking forward to the submissions.

I suppose this means I really, really need to get those tutorials on techbase, huh? ;)

Dear GMail,

Unless I have subconsciously absorbed fluency in various Eastern European languages from watching Russian porn or sleeping on the couch with late night TV on, I really don’t get many emails that I want composed entirely of the Cyrillic alphabet. A rigorous examination of every email I’ve ever received as done by the prestigious accounting agency Dewey, Cheetum & Howe very clearly tabulates exactly zero emails saved by me that are composed from these letters.

Ditto for Arabic. And Hebrew. Or Chinese shorthand. If you don’t want me to continue ad absurdum, please consult this list for many other alphabets that I don’t use. There are many; I’m a stupid American. If n=[total number of alphabets] you can start with [n-1] and we’ll go from there.

No matter how many times I mark such emails as spam, you don’t seem to get the hint. Please start getting the hint. I’m hinting. Take it. Take the hint. Or maybe a sign. Like a wink. How about next time I get an email entirely in Arabic save for the string “v1@gr@” I’ll wink. Ok, I just winked. You didn’t notice. That email where the only Latin alphabet letters were “Free Rolex”…no not that one. Yeah, that one. I winked. Are you even paying attention GMail?

When I communicate with others from another country, I use the Language of Love ™. Not Hangeul. If you see Hangeul, go ahead and put it in the trash folder. If Language of Love ™, keep it.

Wade

so I was kinda without interwebs for a while there. last week pete and his friends unexpectedly got a house that was available immediately - they were planning to move for may. since pete’s landlord was being bitchy, I helped him move last week. the good: we have a 4-bedroom house all to ourselves until his friends get around to moving in. the bad: there’s no unsecured wireless in the area.

I was thinking of asking the neighbours if they’d be willing to share, but never got around to it - and today was the day the cable guy came, so now I have interwebs again, yay. :) life’s been quite busy, so in a way it was kinda nice to not have the internet distracting me. it was incredibly inconvenient at times, though - couldn’t look up bus schedules, couldn’t research things, etc… there are so many little things we take for granted.

so, yeah, busyness. mostly of the small-but-necessary variety. buying things, moving things, fixing things, making a vague attempt at househunting without craigslist access. I’ll be staying here for april, then actually getting a place of my own in may - or at least that’s the plan. between lack of interwebs and being about to head off to italy, there hasn’t been much time to look for a place, so… we’ll see how it goes.

apparently I forgot to mention this on my blog: I’m going to italy for a few days for a plasma sprint. lots of hacking, very little tourism. it’ll be awesome. :) while we’re on the subject, I’ll also be at akademy in august.

now I need to go panic about all the stuff I need to get done online. soc research to do (I haven’t even blogged about my application!!), email to catch up on, plasma stuff I never did…

plasma was a little frustrating last week, actually. I had just started on a ui for multiple desktop containments when I had to put aside that work to write a soc application… then I’d almost cleared everything away, and just had a bit of other code to do before returning to it… then I just had a few RL chores to get out of the way… somehow every morning there was another day’s worth of things in my way, and then I was offline and just as busy. since I spent most of today busywaiting for the cable guy (I’ve read most of the last harry potter book), I doubt I’ll get to it tonight… in fact, it may have to wait until I arrive in italy. there’s just so much to do!

well, at least I’m busy doing stuff I actually want to do. :) being back in canada continues to be awesome. hopefully after I get back from italy I’ll have time to go track down the friends that haven’t dragged me out or run into me at parties. and make some new friends. and… argh, there’s so much to do!! :)

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-irc/2008-April/000425.html

I’m ashamed of myself, I really am

Now what is that supposed to mean? The "real" Nepomuk? Well, you did not actually think that I would introduce an RDF store into KDE just to save some tags and ratings? No, the "real" motivation goes way beyond that and it is time to hint at it.
Today I committed the PIMOShell to the Nepomuk playground (To the right you see the PIMOShell main window showing all xesam:Music resources).

The PIMOShell is a metadata maintenance and debugging tool which I will now use to give a glimpse of the "big picture".

But first a few words on PIMO: PIMO, the Personal Information Model Ontology, forms the basis for all custom, user-created classes (types) and properties. It defines basic stuff like an Agent or a Location and is intended to be extended by the user in any way he or she likes (more information on PIMO).

Let us dive into an example:

By using the context menu in the upper left class list PIMOShell allows us to create new classes with a nice little dialog. Basic information like a label and an optional icon and description can be added directly. We create a new class "Friend" which is a special kind of Person: a close friend.

Once the class is created it shows up as a new subclass of pimo:Person which in turn is a subclass of pimo:Agent. It can now be used like any other class in the system. That essentially means that we can create instances:

Again we can set basic properties like the label and the image. We create an instance of Tudor, my friend from DERI, Galway. Once we did so, PIMOShell lists Tudor as a new instance of Friend:

Now Tudor has been created as a new RDF resource in the Nepomuk storage. And that means we can query him using the simple Nepomuk query client:

When searching for all resources of type "Friend" we find Tudor. Nice.

But simply creating new classes is not fun enough. To categorize friends we might be interested in what relates us to them. Like a mutual interest. Thus, we create a new property:

As you can see the new property will be for our new class "Friend". And once it is created we can change its value in the lower pane:

The mutual interest that I share with Tudor is complaining about bad food (just for the sake of the example of course).

Again the new information allows us to find Tudor:

I personally think this is quite cool. Of course the PIMOShell is not intended for the end user. But it gives an idea pf the possibilities. A PIM application might categorize according to user created classes with additional fields, saved text documents might be typed, we can organize arbitrary data in a powerful way. All we need is a deeper application integration. And this is where you come in. I hope.

One of the better parts of being a member of the QtCentre administration team is that you get the opportunity to run the annual programming contest. In the first stage, we discussed how to pitch it this year. Last year we tried to divide the entries between developer apps, end user apps, libs, etc. This year we 're trying something different. The categories this year are: collaboration, education, project management, automation, demo, plasmoid and newcomer. If you are curious about the details, look no futher than here. I will discuss our thoughts when choosing these categories later on.

In the previous days we reached the next stage of the preparations. I got to talk to lots of interesting sponsors and partners. The nice thing to notice the all the positive feedback that we got. This year, the sponsors making the contest possible are: Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, Integrated Computer Solutions Inc., Trolltech ASA, BitRock, Thorsen Consulting, Apress and basysKom. (Yes Apress are donating some copies of my book, the Foundations of Qt Development).

Now, I'm eager for one of the best stages of helping out with the contest - seeing the contestants and trying them out.

It was just a matter of time, but now I am proud to discover that the first Amarok fanfic has surfaced on the web. Here's an excerpt:


Runeclaw paused in front of the larger-than-life portal and curled back her lip. "Easy there, Amarok," she said softly while reaching down to pat the bristling fur on her wolf's neck. "I don't like the smell of this place either, but Kitahl wanted to meet here. Always one for the dramatic, he is," she continued. The sound of her own voice and the steady deep breathing of her mount helped to calm her nerves.

"Maybe we should go back and lure that dragon we saw down here as a surprise gift." Amarok flatted his ears back and chuffed stubbornly as she tried to turn him back towards The Blasted Lands. "Sissy," she chuckled affectionately.



Original can be found here. Have fun reading

I’m happy to announce (no April joke this time) that every attendee to the KDevelop developer meeting in Munich will get a free USB hub (4 port) with integrated coffee cup lukewarmer! No more cold coffee, this wonderful device will make sure that your perfect brew will stay hot warm slightly above room temperature at all time:

There are still some free seats, please check the KDevelop wiki for registration info and instructions on how to get there.

Disclaimer: Cup not included in offer. However, coffee and tea are free during the meeting