At one day, there was a patch. The patch was small and in early development, and it was posted to the Plasma review board. A couple of minutes later, the patch was rejected. Many reasons were given: The patch didn't have the right intention, it would cause bitrod, and it broke the coding style. Not a big thing, this happens every day in a Free Software Environment. Neither something to get excited about nor something to loose hair over it.

Thats the end of the story? Not quite, in the bible it took 7 days as well, right?. So lets look at it a bit more closely. Day one: The review said that the patch contained a coding style error. Of course the review didn't mention where the coding style error was, or even better, on how to fix that (didn't the review board have this awesome patch annotation feature?). It is a quite obvious way to motivate a possible new contributor by giving him constructive feedback on how to improve his patch. Not a big deal? Not a big deal. However, as it was mentioned as the last point in a long rambling did make it smell a little bit like "Even if you manage to fix all the flaws mentioned before, have fun figuring out how you make me like the arrangement of spaces in your patch!".

There was Day, and there was night. 2nd. Day. Now.. where was I? Ah right, light!.. eh Plasma! So, the patch had its intention to hide the Plasma toolbox from the KDE 4.0.x desktop. The KDE 4.0 desktop was released in January in its first stable release, intended for early adopters. It was expressed quite clear that it is not finished yet ,and the adequate set of features will come with KDE 4.1. So what would be more obvious to highlight the pure beauty and new shininess of KDE 4.1 by introducing a feature-complete plasma toolbox with KDE 4.1? I spend my second day thinking about this.

There was Night, and there was Day. 3rd Day. Lets enjoy some quote from the review: you can, of course, put this patch in your downstream builds. you'll be doing the project a disservice, however. or are we not actually developing software in the open anymore but only delivering a final product and therefore completely avoiding the entire feedback cycle?

A couple of things to notice: The patch wasn't posted by a distribution, it was posted by a KDE developer. It does sound strange that a normal KDE developer is suddenly downstream and only Plasma developers are upstream, but this is how it was communicated. Ah, you're saying that I'm ironic and that I know that in my other live I'm also a distro guy? Fair enough, I should have known that. Obviously I cannot be two persons at the same time. And of course I'm doing a disservice to the project by posting a patch to upstream (!) instead of just patching it downstream. In addition my disservice to the project is trying to polish a stable code branch (nowhere this patch was mentioned to be intended for the KDE 4.1 development tree). I'll spend the rest of the day thinking about if we want to alienate our userbase even more by making them swallow down an unfinished product with rough edges and give them the feeling that whatever code branch, name it stable and released or unreleased and in development, they get the same amount of bleeding. Be free, and bleed freely.

• It allows you to add a plasmoid to the background.
• It has a "break your desktop" button.

While it is arguably true, that the "Add plasmoid" (it is actually called "Add widgets" btw) has some value (the same value the context menu on the background, the panel, the kickoff menu and probably a couple of other places have as well). Note that I also don't want to mention how KDE 3 users have managed to find the hidden context menu in the past to add an applet to their panel, not because it is unimportant, just that I only have one week and I'm already at day 4.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 5th Day. You're expecting me to follow up on the "Break your desktop" ? Okay, well.. its the general reaction you get when you let new people that pop up on a fair where you demo the desktop try it. They go like "uhh.. it turns white.. I broke it!" and jump away from the computer, being frightened that they made a change that they cannot undo. but there is undo, right? Well, only 3 levels of undo, to be honest: if you zoom out more than 3 times, you cannot zoom back in, because you can't actually press the button anymore. The only way to undo that is to delete your plasma configuration or, for the average user, to reinstall your computer. Oh, another thing you learn from being a distro guy: whenever something happens that average users don't expect and they can't undo: they either call support (be it the 24 hour child/mother support hotline or some other) or if they have a little bit more knowledge, reinstall their computer. Or they ask somewhere on the net and get the recommendation to rm -rf ~/.kde. I spent the rest of the day enjoying the other blog about the "break your desktop" button and the followup, which was particularly funny. Unfortunately I cannot link that one anymore because the blog posting was pulled from the net. you can still find it in the Google cache if you try really hard. In essence it said that whenever one has a certain issue with Plasma, one should contact the developer mailing list instead of publically blogging about it. Which I did, btw. Or didn't I? Did I only blog because somebody else blogged about my blog which I'm writing now? Damn, I wish I'd had a day left to think about that.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 6th Day. I think after collecting the pieces, it is time to finish up. Or in my case, understand the big picture. Perhaps today "it also will grow into something that has clearer purpose". But wait, isn't that admitting that the previous days didn't have a clear purpose? The big picture for me is that somewhen we've apparently forgotten what it takes to be a good community: Be friendly, be constructive, allow different opinions to co-exist and clearly distinguish between technical issues and emotionally-overloaded sandbox-thinking. An additional bonus is to provide leadership by actually inspiring others and give them a clear vision, a vision that they can implement, that they can bugfix and polish and that they can understand well enough to share it with others.

So there was Night, and there was Day. 7th Day. And today, I need a bit of rest from all the blogging. Doesn't it piss you off as well that you can ping as much as you like, be open and constructive for a discussion as you like and still only end up being able to write up your own thoughts up in a post without actually being able to establish any constructive mind-sharing?

So, thats it. Or as downstream puts it: Have a lot of fun.

The Fedora repository contains a set of WebKit packages. Once installed they can give a first impression of WebKit’s abilities.

WebKit is a browser engine which was once forked from KHTML by Apple. Nowadays it is developed by the WebKit project where Apple still has quite some weight, but others are in the boat as well: Trolltech, Nokia, Adobe, some KDE developers, some GNOME developers, etc. Besides, WebKit will be part of the upcoming Qt 4.4, will play an important role in KDE’s Plasma and can also be used as a backend in GNOME’s Epiphany browser.

However, at the moment most of these developments are not here yet. But Fedora’s WebKit packages come along with basic WebKit browsers which can be used to test some websites against WebKit:

The two executables QtLauncher and GtkLauncher are a simple browser based on Qt or Gtk, respectively. Since the path is usually not part of PATH the browsers must be started from the command line with the full path, /usr/libexec/WebKit/QtLauncher for example. After you’ve called that line via ALT+F2 the browser comes up.

But don’t expect too much: these are just basic browsers to show off the capabilities of the WebKit engine - nothing more. They are definitely not ready for production use - or any real use at all. The Qt version does not know how to handle addresses without the http://, usual shortcuts like Ctrl+L are not working, and plugins are not embedded at all. However, the Qt launcher has a nice effect of showing a link address when you hover over a link. The Gtk launcher is in a bit better shape: it does at least understand addresses, but than again it does not fill in the http:// after loading the page.

But nevertheless these two launchers can give you a first impression how this web engine works on a web page - in case you are a web developer this might come in handy. Also, if you are up for tests, you can check the current state of WebKit in regards to the Acid3-Test. Also, the first impression of the engine is rather nice: it seems to be rather quick and layouts web pages just nice. I’m looking forward to see new browsers based on WebKit.

Well, the ACID3 test is out, and it’s time to see the state of the current browsers on ‘the market’

Follows a list of browsers and their results taken from http://web-graphics.com/2008/03/03/the-acid3-test/, with one addition - Konqueror was not tested there.

Edit: Added a couple more tests - thanks for all who contributed

As you can see, amongst stable versions (in bold), Konqueror beats them all. Hip, hip, hooray for Konqueror (KHTML) devs! And one hip and hooray for WebKit!

update: Added a form online and changed the last chapter

A few weeks ago I was in a what-to-code-right-now-mood and inspired by The Gold Bug I decided to write a little easy cypher in PHP (could have been any languageTM of course) without any secret key. You know, just for fun.

So what did I write exactly? Well, I wrote two API functions, one for encrypting and the other for decrypting a string, and used all kinds of string manipulations to get it the way it is. A little example for encrypting the first paragraph of The Gold Bug:

Which will print something along the lines of this:

As you can see the cypher hasn’t been optimized for speed at all and can contain all sorts of salts and/or junk, or am I giving away too much fish now? For encrypting we have the function rotsteroids_encrypt( str ) and rotsteroids_decrypt( str ) for the other way round.

So now the fun part, which is up to those nifty smart minds out here to crack my implementation. I’ve written the cypher in pure PHP which might use some other string manipulating functions, or not, but still, it is pure PHP. To make it even more fun I’m just going to make it a contest, and for the first reader who is able to send me a reference implementation that works, I’m going to send a bottle of beer trough mail =).

So how to get started? Well, as I said, it is easy to deal with the code, API-wise there are only to functions one for encrypting and the other for decrypting. To not give away the source-code, and thus the answer to my contest, I’ve created a online form in which you can use the encrypting and decrypting of strings. Earlier today I got a few mails from people that actually decoded the phps file I had uploaded and delivered me the source that way, which is, in fact, cheating.

I’m curious for any responds, let me know!

mail: niels-[AT]-shodan-[DOT]-nl

Cebit is close. In fact this is like "in about an hour". While we still need some volunteers to help us at the booth I think it would be nice when even those who are at the fair for only one day would come over and say hello. I'll be there at the end of the week for some time.

As your favourite KGpg guy I will of course happily sign your keys if you are around. Close to us is as always the heise booth, one of Germanys biggest computer magazines. They will also sign your key for free.

For those in need of SSL certificates CAcert.org is near us and I also can give you some points if you like.

So, don't forget your fingerprint and at least one ID card with photo if you want to get your key signed. If you want to get assured for CAcert you need a second document with photo (like German drivers licence).

I’ve got a fever and the only prescription is Barack Obama.

I am, like a lot of people in Europe, strangely attracted to the US primaries and the Democratic race in particular (as it is actually still a race).

Hearing Barrack Obama talk is pretty inspirational and I’m not even vaguely a US citizen. He seems one of the few politicians who seems to truly believe in what he says and Marc Andreessen’s blog has some really good insights into why the man is capturing the hearts of so many of the young voters in the US. Ron Paul was a pretty inspirational guy also and I know the Internet loved him but sadly this doesn’t seem to have actually translated into a huge amount of votes.

Personally, I hope he wins as it would be nice to have a US President with a less aggressive foreign policy.

I leave you with a quote from Marc’s blog that I think is particularly relevant:

[Obama] said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.

We don't believe improving your OS should be like chasing Tigers or Leopards.

-- gOS, on its free updates for life feature

read more

The former Release Manager here at Trolltech told me that the former former Release Manager had a saying:

The release is not out until you blog about it

So I’m doing a 3-in-1 blog!

A week and a half ago, we released Qt 4.3.4, containing some bug fixes to issues reported to us since 4.3.3 was released. It seems old news now (even though it’s only my last blog entry), but Qt 4.3.4 is also the first Qt 4 release under the GPL version 3. The snapshots were already under that license, but now system integrators and Linux distributions can upgrade their packages to an officially released version.

Then, one week ago, we released the long-awaited first beta for Qt 4.4, containing a lot of new features, like WebKit, Phonon & backends, network access, Qt Concurrent, Widgets on the Canvas, improved printing support, Patternist, Aliens, a new help system and a lot more that Trolltech developers have been blogging about. This release is so big that we could have split it in two or three and we’d still have enough to go around — note how there are 17 links to blogs about different features in the previous sentence alone! (We’re still writing the change log file for the release) It’s also very daring: who could have imagined a full web engine built in the toolkit a year ago? And just like Qt 4.3.4, the 4.4.0 beta 1 Open Source edition is licensed under the GPL versions 2 and 3.

The beta 1 also marks the first new platform for Qt in many years: Qt/Embedded for Windows CE. It’s now the fifth platform that Qt supports, after X11, Windows, Mac and Embedded Linux (QWS). It’s the result of a year and a half of work done mostly by the Trolltech Berlin office, trying to adapt our existing Windows code to a deceptively similar platform. If you have tried to develop for WinCE, you’ll have noticed that the APIs that are available in the Microsoft products are full of subtle differences and not-so-subtle omissions. Well, Qt brings you a unified, cross-platform API, across the board.

Talking about new platforms and deceptively similar platforms brings me to the Mac. Apple has not been afraid of changing their platform under you. The 10.5 (Leopard) release of MacOS X is full of those changes, including some that may break existing Qt applications. Qt 4.3.3 introduced initial support for Leopard and that was improved with 4.3.4, with a fix for OpenGL because Apple changed the typedef of a type.

And today we announced the first alpha of the Qt/Mac Cocoa port (hmm… can I call it the sixth platform?). It comes to emphasise our commitment to the desktop PCs, to our customers and providing them with an upgrade path to newer systems. (For those of you not following the Mac news, Apple decided to halt development of the 64-bit version of the base libraries that Qt depends on, called Carbon; so we had to rewrite a good portion of our code using the Cocoa libraries) As any other alpha, this release is expected to be full of bugs and missing functionality. Trenton has posted a list of what’s known to work and what isn’t in his blog. As soon as possible, we’ll make snapshots of the Mac Cocoa tree public so users can follow what’s going on. More news on snapshots at a later date.

So, that’s it: in the space of a week and a half, we have released three Qt versions, in three different minor series: 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5. And that’s not it: we’re scheduling a 4.3.5 and possibly a 4.3.6 release some time in the future, for those clients who cannot or will not upgrade to 4.4.0 when it’s out. And since no more betas for 4.4 are planned, the next release will be the first Release Candidate sometime in the next 3-5 weeks. (In fact, I wrote a rough initial timeline for a year and a half worth of releases. And no, I cannot share that document, since it’s pure speculation at this point)

I’d like to thank everyone involved in making those releases possible: the development team (the Windows CE and Mac Cocoa teams in particular), the support engineers, the Product Management team and all of our users and clients. Yeah, without the input and feedback from you, we wouldn’t have come up with the releases.

I couldn’t finish this blog without mentioning Nokia: while the planning of the integration is proceeding in several fronts, we continue to work. And quite hard. I hope three releases in a week in a half shows how committed we are to what we do. And we will continue to do what we do best: provide you with the best toolkit you can find. For all platforms: “Code once, deploy everywhere” (I think I have to pitch this slogan to Marketing…)

He did it (even after his slight disappointment with Saul Williams’ release statistics). Trent has released a 36-track instrumental album, Ghosts, under a Creative Commons license (CC by-nc-sa). MP3s are available through torrents and FLAC files (and other formats) are available for only $5 and various collector editions of hard media and artwork for a bit more.

Support free culture and the artists who produce it. I did. (Although I suggest downloading the MP3s now via bittorrent and waiting a few days to purchase the FLAC files, their servers are in pain).

Akademy 2007 organiser Kenny went to Belgium a few days before FOSDEM to scout out the Akademy 2008 location.

I started a poll to see what current thinking is on best application programming language. Surprisingly high Java support.

it’s that time of year again, when young developers’ minds turn towards… well… more coding. :) Summer of Code is revving up for another year. ideas are coming together. sure, it’s not summer yet (it’s bloody cold in shanghai, actually, and I’m hivering as I write this) but preparations are made earlier every year, and anyone who’s serious about SoC knows that the early bird gets the t-shirt. ;)

to the students at the beijing conference who weren’t sure how to get involved (if any of you are reading this): now’s your chance. SoC is all about helping students break into the free software community.

really, all comp sci students should be applying for SoC :) it’s frigging awesome. you get to spend the whole summer hacking, on your own schedule, get paid for it, *and* you get shiny google gear. oh yeah, and something cool to put on your resume. and you get to make friends in whichever corner of the community you contribute to, become a part of that community, and next year have other new developers looking up to you and asking you questions :)

remember, community and communication are incredibly important things. good communication before your application gives you a much better chance of being accepted, because developers who don’t communicate aren’t very useful - especially in larger projects. we’re all in this together; developers help each other out, discuss ideas together, and try to avoid stepping on each others’ toes. a happy, friendly community makes working on the code much more enjoyable. :)

as for myself… I’ve been too busy to think much about SoC yet. haven’t put up any of my ideas for plasma or anything. I’m not even sure whether I should participate as a student, or as a mentor, or just skip this year. I’d like to do another project, and the money would be useful, but I’m not sure if any of my ideas are really project-size, and I have so many, many ideas that I’m not sure I’d like sticking to just one. I also kinda feel like I’d be taking a spot away from potential new students who need the mentoring more than me. it kinda seems like plasma could use another mentor, but I’m not sure I’d be any good at that, and it’d take away from *my* hacking time.

ah well. I still have a couple of weeks to decide.

I just commited the finalized KRatingPainter to svn trunk which allows to paint a rating value using any QPainter. I think it is quite nice since it allows to specify the alignment, a spacing, a custom icon, the maximum rating, a hover rating, and so forth. And I think it would be great if this class (and its easy-usage widget companion KRatingWidget) would be used throughout KDE whenever we want to display a rating value. Although it is part of the Nepomuk lib at the moment, it has no real dependancy here: the rating is a simple integer value.

A little test application shows the rating widget in action:

It is often mentioned that many games are not available on Linux. While several big titles are indeed missing such Linux ports, the Open Source community itself produced some impressive titles. Here is a short list together with some promo videos.

Most of the Linux Distributions out there are shipped with the set of games included in GNOME or KDE. These games are nice for short breaks, but not comparable with big, hour consuming games sold by the big publishers. However, the Open Source community stepped up there to deliver its own products, and many of them are not only interesting, but simply impressive. Also, there is a game for almost every taste available.

First of all the games where I also found a promo video:
The first person shooter Nexuiz speaks for itself:

The same is true for the first person shooter Tremulous:

In case you loved the UFO-XCOM series, you will find yourself at home at UFO: Alien Invasion:

Glest, a real time strategy game with wizards, trolls and the like:

In case you love classical Jump’n'Run games, Secret Maryo Chronicles is the way to go:

Next a set of games which might be a bit calmer (and don’t have a promo video), but are nevertheless exciting:

• Freeciv is the game of choice for everyone who loves to crush and rebuild entire civilizations.
• Wormux is - as the name suggests - a Worms clone.
• FlightGear gives you a fuzzy feeling if you love to fly from one airport to another with different types of machines.

All of these entries above have three things in common: they are all actively developed by a healthy community, they are all very appealing and have high quality graphics, and they are all comparable to the proprietary competitors of the corresponding game type. Some of them are better, some of them are as good as, some of them fall a bit behind - but not much. And they definitely meet the requirements of the occasional player and are a way to spend hours and hours.

Of course I’m well aware that there are many more Free Software games - but I’ve kept my focus on the games which at least released one full working (feature complete, playable) version and are in active development. And of course I only listed games I know of. Although I think I covered all the shooting stars of the Free Software games genre I am open to any other suggestion!

But while these games are great, the Open Source community sometimes fails to advertise them. For example, many of these games are included in the distributions - but did you ever see a Linux distribution review featuring the included games? It should be included in the release notes and reviews that a Linux distribution most often is not only a nice set of Office software but also comes along with a rich set of high quality games.

Fedora for example has a dedicated project for games, the Fedora Special Interest Group Games which helped to bring many games to Fedora. Except Secret Maryo Chronicles all games above are available on Fedora and just a click away. It takes more than 1 GB to install all these games - but that is definitely worth the space. And if you like them: promote them!

There is btw. only one genre which I personally miss badly: MMORPG. Of course there are projects dealing with it, but none of them has released a full, stable version yet. But that might be not too bad for my person because I still have to finish and hand in my final thesis these days, and a free MMORPG would give me quite some time problems.