So it's official.

An almighty congratulations to [ade], whose defence I could not attend due to work commitments. Instead I am doing the right thing and actually reading his thesis. In his honour I started it last night.

"Practical Automaton Proofs in PVS" is notable for two things (of what I have read so far):

1. The mathematical modelling of requirements is not an easy thing to understand for the unintiated. [ade]'s writing style is fantastic at making it as clear as vodka.
2. This will be the only thesis I ever read to include the words "defrobnicator", "doodad" and "thing-ma-jig"

In my time working with [ade] on the SQO-OSS project I have learned an awful lot from him. Mostly about webcomics. I only hope my final thesis can be as accomplished as his.

I guess all of us have felt this thing at some point. We have tons of projects, we want all them become true, and days are still having 24 hours. Apart from the typical bugfixing where we see bugs and we try to fix them (what also takes time), I am working on several things at the moment:

• KUIServer (what will be hopefully called JobViewServer): I have this interface and implementation finished [thanks to everybody that made suggestions, specially to Kevin for his tips]. The idea is to get this feature into KDE 4.1, have it well tested, and afterwards, write a paper to freedesktop to see if we can make it standard. I really bet for this to become standard because of several reasons, one of the most important: simplicity.
• Goya: I would love to get this into KDE 4.1 also. Right now a branch has been created to go deeper into the strategy that WoC (Widgets on Canvas) uses on QGraphicsView, but applied to MVC. This way we would expose less API, and it would be simpler to use, and what is more important, you would be able to add the widget that you want. It wouldn’t be necessary to code widgets again for Goya explicitly.
• Graphic effects: still several places to adapt (like the small “mark” that is shown on items when hovered in Dolphin for them being [un]selected, and other small stuff), and something more important: work on the style KCM to have this ready for 4.1.

Too much work and efforts are going into KDE 4.1, no less efforts that what went into 4.0 really, but I really see how we are stepping forward, and how we are making this dream a reality. Just wanted to keep you updated, since it has been some time without blogging.

Finally the long wait is over! In The Forbidden Kingdom, for the first time we are going to see the fantastic Jet Li and Jacky Chan together. Not so much about the story has been revealed. The plot might not be that unusual and even it is likely quite predictable (but who knows until we all watch it). From the trailer, it is mostly about a young bloke that travelled back in time. With a girl and two warriors, he was doing some sort of "prophecy fulfilling" adventure.

Few weeks to go.

Today I finally decided to make a formal release of qtnx and nxcl, both version 0.9 as they are not tested enough to be a 1.0 release yet, especially as I made some API changes to nxcl which might have broken Seb’s nxlaunch frontend.

They’ve been tagged in freenx’s subversion at svn://svn.berlios.de/freenx/tags/nxcl-0.9 and svn://svn.berlios.de/freenx/tags/qtnx-0.9. Relevant instructions are in the README files for both directories.

Debian packages should be appearing shortly courtesy of Matthew Johnson.

When you are in an heated debate with a user or a developer, it can end badly. Sometimes you don't get what you want from the developer, or sometimes you do not agree with the thoughts of a user or another developer.

Today we had a little discussion about the location of Akonadi and the 'project' surrounding it. After hours of silence, there was an.... Akonadi Poem. I think it's a great way to have a discussion, use poems. So I want to see no more fights in blogs or bugs, only poems are allowed!

Find the Akonadi Poem here

Since yesterday The border of plasma dialogs like the clock popups have got rounded borders also when the composite is disabled, just like tooltips before,ok not a big deal.
But what is changed is that before tooltips shape was an hardcoded rounded rectangle with a fixed shape and an also hardcoded white border and that kinda sucked...

A second problem connected to that was when compositing was active the windows only faked a non rectangular shape, but they still were stupid rectangles, so for instance you couldn't click on a totally transparent area to make the popup go away.

Now the window shape is computed from the alpha channel of the background svg, it means now the windows have a shape similar to the one you would expect seeing the fancy transparent svg.

And it causes another problem if not well-managed, because if you use a fancy svg with cool antialiased borders, without composite you will get something awful like that (here zoomed 2x):

See that two black pixels on each edge? and if the radius is bigger the problem gets worse.
This because the semi-transparent pixels will become fully opaque. Fortunately the way Plasma::Theme works comes to rescue, because when compositing is not active it will load a different set of svgs when available (they are all the files in the "opaque" folder in the theme path), so for instance with tooltips when compositing is disabled it will load the following svg (here with an huge zoom):

Here you can see that the outer borders are made of big blocks that will be rendered with a size of exactly one pixel and will make the illusion of a perfectly round line, while the inner border is still round and antialiased.
So if you will make a sexy plasma theme don't forget to provide an "opaque" version of the relevant svgs, that at the moment are widgets/tooltip.svg and dialogs/widget.svg (probably in the future there will be also krunner.svg).
these svgs must not have semi-transparent areas and they must have a pixelated border, There are some nice tutorials around on how to make a convincing pixel-based path, like this one.

What? very 90's or eve 80's you say? Eh, true, this is where the desktop without compositing comes from :D

Ok, so SaroEngels was first... but who has the better view? Opposite of KDE CeBit booth...

So on a few occasions I have looked at the growth rate of Amarok. This post will be the last in the series.

To date, you may have been forgiven for assuming linear growth of the Amarok codebase. The truth is that this rarely ever happens; there's almost always dips and peaks in productivity. So, let's look at redrawing the growth rate but this time we shall do SLOCCOUNT against time and not "revisions".

Hmmmm. Haven't we seen this somewhere before? Of course we have. So when I originally worked this data I looked at SLOCCOUNT for Amarok every 50k revisions in SVN. Since the KDE commit rate hasn't increased all that vastly over the lifetime of Amarok in trunk what we get, when we plot SLOCCOUNT against time, is just a slightly stretched version of the original plot.

This still leaves the mystery of the increased productivity we can see at the third data point. Here's my hypothesis: After time, Amarok's productivity increased due to increased visibility within KDE trunk. Simple as that.

As always, other suggestions are welcome.

Just a few more random thoughts about life, software, and KDE.

* So I finally submitted my application for UPOU two weeks ago and got their “received your application” e-mail the other day. Now comes the agonizing wait for news whether I get accepted or not. They said they’ll probably have the partial list in the website by the end of March or in April, but I still have to wait for an official parcel before I can enroll.

* My writeup about Dispel, the spell remover part of Sorcery, Source Mage’s powerful BASH-based package manager, is up. With fancy charts!

* Last year I had this plan to write about some of my favorite KDE 3 apps, focusing on how to use them and/or special features that make them wonderful. Procrastinator that I am, I let the idea sleep for a while. And now KDE 4 is here with a brand new set of amazing apps. Aaron has started his own series about falling in love all over again with these apps. So I’m kinda indecisive (no surprise there) whether such writeups about KDE 3 apps are still worthwhile.

* I’m currently in the middle of *trying* (and probably failing miserably) implementing a feature request for Konversation, under the watchful guidance of Eike. It’s my first real attempt at creating (not just copying) a feature in a real-world application. This is me, straight from the pampered world of C++ in books (more on that some other time). The process of trying to figure out how things work, (which, in my work process, is an essential part of figuring out where and how to insert a new feature) is exhilarating, adrenaline-pumping, and frustrating all at once. It’s fun *and* annoying. And I like it! Yeah, I’m crazy that way.

* I was able to buy a book on user interface design, “About Face” (first edition) by Alan Cooper. I think it was a pioneer book in the field of UI Design, dating back 1995. I didn’t expect much from the book at first being old and from “the father of Visual Basic”, but it actually turns out to be very nice and not so Windows-glorifying as I thought it would be. I also learned later that he’s one of the big names in the field of usability. I guess what really made me happy about the book (so far) is that it’s probably the first book I’ve seen where someone is advocating User Interface Design as a discipline/field, a subset of Software Design and distinct from Usability. I’m not sure if that ever came about or whether it is really distinct from Usability as a field. And I think Alan Cooper moved from emphasis on “User Interface Design” to “Interaction Design” in the most recent edition of About Face. As a side note, it’s quite amusing to see how some of his suggestions have been or are being implemented in KDE (or almost everywhere) today.

Hello world planet!
First of all thanks Clee for adding me so fast! For those who don't know me (well, the mayority of you i suppose) i am sometimes a programmer of some kde-related things.
At the moment i am doing some work with Plasma (yes, i'm the one of the infamous click, drag... eject:P)

Other thing i've done for kde are the Polye ster kde3/kde4 widget style and Tastymenu, a kmenu replacement for kde3.

I don't blog very often and my english is very "all your base are belong to us" but well, sometimes i will be here :D

Implemented a tag cloud to this website (and so phpwet) it were years i didn't touch that crappy cms, but i can confirm my idea that i hate it but it's the one i hate less :P

It may work earlier for other couples, but it didn't work out earlier for us. So yesterday was officially the first evening mom was out alone - that is without being called home at 7pm because coolo ran out of ideas how to calm the baby.

Breastfeeding is really a great way to feed babies (and taking that Felix almost tripled his birth weight in just 6 months proves my point), but it also has one downside: My wife was irreplaceable when it came to food for quite some time and she both loved and hated it. Now she's out of direct duty as he's getting random vegetables for lunch and millet gruel for dinner, she thought we retry the experiment.

So I had an interesting evening, of course this ultraclever boy figured pretty quickly that something is different this evening. So he protested pretty clearly when I tried to feed him and did not want to sleep at all. I guess many parents know that: too tired to eat, too hungry to sleep.

So I put on our beloved "Ergo Baby Carrier" and went up and down till he finally was more tired than hungry and slept. Then I read the backlog of the openSUSE project IRC meeting and turned on the TV to watch some soccer. But as sleeping hungry wasn't the long term plan of my son, I only watched the first half. Then the bottle? carrying? diper? fun? bottle? sleep? carrying? bottle? fun? - cycle started, which almost frustrated me as much as calling my wife. Then we entered the living room and he spotted the soccer - and was calm out of the sudden. Something of it fascinates him, so he forgets every other problem he's having. This only works with soccer - and for a short time if our birds are having a fight.

So I was very pleased the fabulous Neuer kept the race open till well after 10pm. During that time, Felix was nipping from the bottle and it was enough so he felt back to sleep early enough so I could only guess the result of the penalty shootout while singing him to sleep in the sleeping room. But I did not expect anything else from the Neuer we saw last night (and even though the guy basically destroys the dream of my brother-in-law to ever become goal keeper auf Schalke).

Needless to say Maren was very happy to see us alive as she came home. And I'm very happy she does not want to go out tonight, so if time permits I may join the yast team tonight.

I seem to remember making some kind of promise about multiple desktop-containments, and getting stuff done this week. whoops.
my brain is fried. I haven’t been sleeping well. I feel like I can’t code my way out of a paper bag right now. I don’t trust my own judgement in general.
so, no shiny desktop improvements from me, at least not this week. sorry. I need to recharge.

My apologies to Huey Lewis and the News. And warning: this is a wandering, brain-dumping, meandering post which may very well be of no interest to you.

There’s nothing like spending the weekend in a hospital to give you a little perspective.

I blogged previously about feeling dizzy and nauseous, and I attributed it to the in-ear, sound-isolating headphones that I bought. Well, I don’t think that said headphones were the cause as much as a possible contributing factor. Things got so bad on Friday (I couldn’t even sit still without the room spinning on me and me feeling like I had to throw up) that I went to the local Emergency Room, which led to my being admitted into the hospital (kind of like a sick graduation of sorts), where I spent a very uncomfortable and frustrating weekend. They ran all sorts of tests on me. I guess the good news is that the doctors couldn’t find any of the big, bad signs of problems that might lead to my symptoms. But then again, that’s also the bad news-they don’t know what caused it, which scares me because that means that it will most probably happen again. My brother in law called a couple of nights ago to cheer me up by telling me that he has chronic Vertigo, which sounds very similar in symptom, and that there’s not much doctors can do to treat it. Greaaaat.

So, I’m back home now (got to return on Sunday), taking a nice little handful of drugs to help with the dizziness (some of which, oddly, have the side effect of possibly causing dizziness-explain that to me?), and am today hooked up to a Holter Monitor. I have never felt more old and decrepit in my life. =:(

Spending the weekend in the hospital is a very different, and altogether disagreeable experience-one which I sincerely hope to not repeat anytime soon. There’s nothing quite like being completely alone with your fears, worries, unanswered questions, doubts, and the like with naught to take your mind off of them. And now that I’ve been out sick from work for 3 days, while the nausea has gotten very much better, the dizziness and not-quite-with-it feelings are still there. And, the growing feeling that there’s just something that’s not quite right-aside from the physical ickiness, I mean.

I think the biggest thing that I’m finding is that I lack balance in my life. I simply do not know how to relax, it seems.

Prior to my current job, relaxing to me meant programming on something cool and interesting-something that is challenging, that gives me a sense of accomplishment, and that lets me learn stuff I’ve never learned before. And Open Source has filled that need quite nicely. The ironic thing is that now that I am being challenged and am able to learn and grow and work on something really cool and interesting for my job, I’m finding it very hard to get motivated to spend off-work hours diligently laboring away on my FOSS side projects (KPilot currently). Actually, there are another few factors at work here…. Now that I’m working from home for the majority of the time, my reliance on my trusty little Palm handheld devices is mostly non-existent. Certainly, I have no need for the little guy when I’m working from my desk at home and have my laptop in front of me at all hours. And therefore, I have just about zero desire to hack on things related to it like I used to be when I was absolutely dependent on it for daily survival.

In addition, one of the most exciting things about KPilot development was the camaraderie that I had with my fellow KPilot hackers. And that’s not been there in a long, long time. I’m not faulting anyone for it, and I’m as much to blame as anyone else, but there’s just nobody working on KPilot anymore, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon, being that Palm devices are nowhere near as sexy and modern as the other neato gadgetry we have these days (iPhones, PSPs, etc., etc.).

And, I still have not figured out how to find a healthy work/home balance. It’s a very easy thing to do when you’re working in an office building. The work day starts when you enter the building and it ends when you leave. Plus, you get a nice little buffer before and after that allow you to transition between work and home frame of mind, etc. Now that I don’t have that physical separation anymore, it just seems like the days blur together into a gigantic boulder that keeps picking up momentum. The vicious circle keeps getting more and more out of whack as I get up later, get started working later, and stay up working later as a result. By the time the weekend hits, I’m shot. The time zone difference is somewhat to blame too, I think, but I think that that’s not all of it.

I absolutely must get back onto a regular routine and schedule again, like I had when I drove to work every day. I think that this has played a very big piece in my getting so sick recently. And I really need to find something that is cool and interesting that I can start hacking on in my off-work hours.

So, a short list of todos:

• Get on a regular sleep/wake/work/relax routine again. I’m thinking I might even do something silly every day at the same time to give myself the “driving to work” and “driving home” buffer, like driving to the local Dunkin Donuts and getting a coffee or something.
• Drink much more water. This makes perfect sense. I’ve never been a big water drinker, but I think that because I’ve not been drinking enough water, my body was so worn down that it just nose-dived. I need to go out and buy a big honking cup that looks cool.
• Sleep at least 7 hours every night. I have a horrible time with this one. I’m a night owl, and gravitate towards staying up until the wee hours of the morning, especially when I feel like I have to accomplish something to feel good about the day.
• Find something interesting and cool to do outside of work again. My sense of obligation and “should do” points me to getting KPilot working in trunk so we can have something useful for KDE 4.1, but it sure is not all that interesting to be perfectly honest at this point. I think I need to poke around a bit and find something that interests me again-if for nothing other than a break. This ties into the regular routine thing again, but I’ve been living such crazy and out of balance hours lately that I simply do not have any time to relax. And I think I’ve realized how important it is to have a healthy balance and to be able to have some time every day to feel some peace and relaxation.

Harumph.

I warned you this post wasn’t interesting.