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Saturday, January 31. 2009
As I had blogged a while ago, a number of Amarok teamsters are quite active on Twitter. I've personally been a big fan of Twitter (and still am), but lately a nice FOSS alternative has surfaced, named Identi.ca. Similar to Twitter, Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service, appealing to people like me who just love love to talk a lot.
So anyway, recently there has been a shift in our community to move from Twitter to Identi.ca. I did just the same, and you can now follow my updates here:
http://identi.ca/markey
PS: There are a few things that still bug me about Identi.ca currently. Among them the fact that the default page shows me submissions of random people I don't know (nor want to know), instead of my home page. Another one being that the site insists on cutting off my chin in the avatar picture. Just for the record: I do have a chin, even with a tiny beard attached to it, as other photos can prove 
Tuesday, January 27. 2009
KDE 4.2 has been released and there is neat stuff all over the place.
The thing I think rocks most? Definitely automatic translation and image fetching in Parley. Typing all those vocabulary by hand can be a pain. Thanks to scripting support in Parley you now can let Parley fetch those translations for you. And while we are at it: Why not also get a nice image on top of it? 
 Parley automatic vocabulary fetching So now tell me: Which feature do you think is the best? Got a small feature that risks getting unnoticed? Or a feature that makes your live 10 times easier? Tell us about it in the comments and your blog!
Tuesday, January 27. 2009
KDE 4.2 has been released. One year after the start of the KDE 4 we have achieved amazing things and made great ideas reality. Let’s celebrate and spread the word!
Read the release announcement and the visual guide for a tour to all the goodies KDE 4.2 brings to your desktop.
Sunday, January 25. 2009
Short version: @Ramblurr is my new public Tech/FOSS twitter account, please follow it.
I have been on twitter for quite awhile, for several years at least. My original use case for twitter was something like a web/sms based IRC channel for my good friends from my hometown. Twitter is responsible for keeping us close in the years after we parted ways for different colleges. This use case worked great until my online communities (KDE, tech industry, etc) started jumping aboard the twitter boat.
At first I tried to handle both social spheres?online professional, and raucous college student?with the same account. Needless to say one group did not appreciate the drunken tweets or lengthy star wars quotation contests, and the other group did not appreciate my Java vs C++ discussions. Eventually, I made my account private and left the online technology twitter sphere, but now things are changing.
Twitter has risen to prominence in the online community, and I am missing out on this form of social communication with my fellow technology and open source enthusiasts. So, I’ve renamed my private account, and opened my original for public use.
Please feel free to follow @Ramblurr, my public account, without need to fear a flood of inane, hyper-context-sensitive, ramblings between friends.
Friday, January 23. 2009
Several of us at Camp KDE?myself included?owe a great debt to Till Adam. When he came to the sunny, beautiful beaches of Jamaica, instead of spending his days lounging on the shore or swimming in the warm Caribbean, he chose to pen himself in a stuffy room with a dozen geeks and teach them Qt.
Till works for Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (KDAB), the Qt consultancy firm. Besides working on large-scale, enterprise Qt applications, KDAB provides professional Qt training to such companies as IBM, Boeing, Ericsson, and J.D. Edwards. These training sessions usually run a few thousand Euros per person. With the OK from Nokia and Qt Software, Till provided us with a mini two day training course for free!
While the content and materials Till used during the sessions is copyrighted, the information I learned is not. With his permission I’m going to discuss a few pointers in this post. The topics covered somewhat basic/intermediate Qt skills, so those of you who have been programming with Qt for any length of time might not find anything new or interesting. However, for those, like me, who haven’t quite developed our Qt Fu to the Master level, take away tips from here knowing it was passed from a master.
#1 Most Common Performance Issue in Qt
Converting from a QPixmap to QImage too often.
This tip is actually fairly well known, but apparently KDAB consultants run across this mistake very often while in the field. There is a great discussion of this topic over at KDE’s techbase. In summary:
- A QImage is stored in main memory
- A QPixmap is stored in video memory
- Converting from a QPixmap to a QImage is a very expensive operation (see the above article for the explanation)
#1 Most Common Cause of Crashes in Qt
Deleting this from slots
This tip needs some more explanation. Essentially, a mistake many Qt programmers do is include executable code after emitting a signal. Consider this flow of execution:
- The function Produce::blend() emits signal pineapple()
- The slot slotBlender() deletes the instance of Produce
- The signal/slot connection returns to the function Produce::blend(), which has some other executable code such as variable assignments after the emit.
- Crash. Since the slot deleted Produce, any code following the emit statement that modifies memory is now attempting to write to invalid memory.
One good practice to follow is: don’t have any executable code following the last emit statement in your objects’ methods.
However, the real solution is: Use deleteLater() on your QObjects.
This post is getting somewhat lengthy and I potentially still have two topics to cover (Threading and Model/View). Most likely I’ll dedicate a post regarding threading in Qt (I took better notes during that talk) in the next couple days. Many thanks to Till for the sessions, as well as KDAB and Qt Software for allowing them to happen.
Wednesday, January 21. 2009
I'm working on putting together the Camp KDE 2009 videos using the excellent Kdenlive, a non-linear video editor whose name is, well, an acronym for KDE Non LInear Video Editor. More on Kdenlive in a later blog post from me and/or Wade, but trust me -- with the latest versions it's much more stable, and it's getting very good. Anyways, one of the reasons I'm using it is to splice the slides into the videos, because they're just not readable inside the videos for the most part. So I needed a way to turn each slide into some sort of an image. It turns out that OO.o doesn't have this capability natively, but some users on the OO.o Forum came up with a script at the bottom of this page to export each slide into PDF. I modified it to do the following: - Export to JPG instead of PDF (PNG export didn't work)
- Add extra 0s to numbers such that you always have three digits
The code is pasted below. One really fun (not) thing I found out: VBA (or just OO.o's implementation of it) doesn't really do type checking. As a result, if r is a string instead of an integer (which I had forgotten), the following code will always execute as True: If r < 10 ThenAnyways, here is the code, in case it helps anyone at some point: REM ***** BASIC *****
Function MakePropertyValue( Optional cName As String, Optional uValue ) As com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
oPropertyValue = createUnoStruct( "com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue" )
If Not IsMissing( cName ) Then
oPropertyValue.Name = cName
EndIf
If Not IsMissing( uValue ) Then
oPropertyValue.Value = uValue
EndIf
MakePropertyValue() = oPropertyValue
End Function
Sub SplitPDFs
dim oDoc as object
oDoc = ThisComponent
dim url as string
url = oDoc.getURL()
baseURL = Left( url, Len( url ) - 4 )
nNumPages = oDoc.getDrawPages().getCount()
For nPageToSave = 1 To nNumPages
dim r as string
r = Str(nPageToSave)+"-"+Str(nPageToSave)
If CInt(r) < 10 Then
oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"00"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"), _
MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))
Else
oDoc.storeToUrl( baseURL+"0"+nPageToSave+".jpg" ), Array( _
MakePropertyValue( "FilterName", "impress_jpg_Export" ), _
MakePropertyValue( "Overwrite", "True"), _
MakePropertyValue( "FilterData", Array( _
MakePropertyValue( "PageRange", r ))))
End If
Next
End Sub
Continue reading "Oh god: I had to use VBA"
Monday, January 19. 2009
The “conference” ended yesterday as the final presentations were given, however we still have 4 days left here among the sunny beaches. Today Till Adam gave a fantastic lecture-slash-hands-on-workshop of Qt’s Model/View and plugin architecture. Just a couple weeks ago I was slamming my head against the desk trying to wrap my head around Qt’s M/V concepts, the results of which can be seen in Amarok’s new last.fm service browser. Through the creative use of roleplaying (thanks Ade, Jeff, Sebas, and Leo!) and two helpful hands-on exercises I’ve finally gotten a decent grasp of the system. Tomorrow morning we hope to sip QtConcurrent knowledge from the cup that is Till.
I’d write more, but the ocean is calling and I still need to get a Pina Colada. But before I go, check out some photos from the past couple days.
Saturday, January 17. 2009
The internet is on the fritz here in Negril, Jamaica at Camp KDE, but while it is working I’ll post this photo taken from the balcony during lunch.
This is also a field test of the Wordpress Android application.
We have had 3 presentations so far. Right now Sebastian Kügler is giving a great talk concerning optimizing your applications for mobile devices.
More quality updates soon.
Thursday, January 15. 2009
While KDE 4 is shipping with awesome default wallpapers, I still find myself at times facing the problem that they become boring after some weeks. At the same time being developer and all it is difficult to keep up with latest wallpaper trends, also partly due to the fact that I simply can't watch kde-look for hot new stuff. So I said to myself (due to continuing lack of people to drop my ideas at  ) maybe having the wallpaper switch monthly via a remote resource would make sense. Well, that is how I came up with Kubuntu Wallpaper of the Month (kubuntu-wotm). Now, while this would be a nice feature for Plasma itself, due to me being a self-centered distro developer (and not being qualified for Plasma hacking anyway) I decided that doing it via a package makes more sense for the time being (+ it has the advantage that our update-notifier queries the repos anyway). Don't let me bore you though. Bottom line is: we need a team of people with taste for good wallpapers and the time to select a good one every month, to get monthly new wallpapers for Kubuntu. If you are constantly looking for hot new wallpapers anyway, joining the team and helping people like me, who are totally incapable of finding good wallpapers at all, would probably improve your karma quite a bit  Please poke me on IRC, leave a comment, or drop a mail to apachelogger@kubuntu.org ... Since we just talked about this a bit on IRC: I could also imagine that we make a collection of wotm wallpapers available in the official Kubuntu archives (e.g. wallpapers of the last 12 months). That way you can also have a nice collection of wallies for slideshowing, updating everytime you upgrade to a new Kubuntu release
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
Things have been busy around here! First, there was the end-of-semester rush that occurs right before exams, then there was exams themselves. After the 3-day cross country drive home, I’ve spent the last couple weeks playing Settlers of Cataan with old friends, and hitting the ski slopes a couple times a week.
In between all that I haven’t had much time for development. Actually, I told a small lie. I’ve been pretty busy with a secret project ™, but I can’t post anything about that until the 19th.
Amarok wise, things are looking up. I’ve started to completely refactor the last.fm service in Amarok 2. Expect a more explanatory post (plus screenshots!) soon.
Finally, Camp KDE is a few short days away. During the conference Leo Franchi and I plan to knock out some huge improvmeents to Amarok 2’s Context View.
Gah, Gah, Go, that’s all folks!
Wednesday, January 14. 2009
This is going to be my shortest entry yet, mainly to say that this absolutely rocks in so many different ways! Nokia has released Qt under the LGPL - Ryan at ars talks about it some more here
Sunday, January 11. 2009
Amarok 2.0.1.1, codenamed Magellan, has been released. It includes many new goodies as well as a security fix. Rejoice as queueing, “stop after current track”, and filtering and searching in the playlist are back.
Read the release notes and get it while it’s hot
Wednesday, January 7. 2009
I am glad to announce that choqok my most favorite Twitter client (well only for a week or so is now available for Kubuntu Jaunty as well as Intrepid-backports (a.k.a. unsupported updates). I must admit choqoK looks very promising and can probably also become a very awesome non-twitter micro-blogging client. I guess the lead developer could use some help, so if you get a minute or two: check it out and maybe come up with some feedback or even a patch or a piece of translation or a handbook...  Have fun with 0.2 meanwhile.
Monday, January 5. 2009
(image copyright by Wade Olson)
Anyone else noticed the extreme amount of hate & trolling against KDE lately, and especially against KDE 4? I have a special message for you trolls:
You're fucking idiots.
For your consideration:
1) they ignore you
2) they laugh at you
3) they fight you
4) YOU WIN.
(we're at stage 3 now)
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