This may look like beating a dead horse, but it seems like many people discussing the WebKit issue not only actually don't have much of a relevant technical knowledge, but even fail to simply do a reality check. Because I have tried the WebKit KPart and while I can't say it worked perfectly, it worked. I don't see why I should even myself feed my personal data to Google or what's the point of suddenly needing a webpage for friends, so no GMail of Facebook, but I tried a couple of sites, including YouTube or using two online bank systems to make payments, and I mostly got done what I wanted to get done. Ironically the worst breakages I found were search on kde-apps.org or Martin Graesslin's blog, which possibly may be bugs in WebKit itself. Not that I tried that hard to break it, but after all, you can try out WebKit in Konqueror for yourself (openSUSE users can get the WebKit KPart from the KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop repository together with the rest of KDE4.3RC1) Change the association in 'keditfiletype text/html' or temporarily in Konqueror's View menu.

Now, I'd like to stress the part about it not being perfect now, not even close. It worked, it was usable, but it had some pretty rough edges. Still, I have to wonder more and more why really it takes so long to get the WebKit KPart ready.

Some opinions on the alternative ways of using WebKit in KDE seem to me to be rather confused too. One doesn't even need to actually try Arora or Rekonq (and I haven't, to be honest) to realize that neither of these is a suitable candidate for a KDE browser, at least now. Arora has no KDE integration whatsoever, nor does it plan to have it from what I understood. It may be a fine browser otherwise, but this completely rules it out as the KDE browser. And Rekonq, or any other Arora fork, first needs to do the KDE integration. That may happen, and this browser may even become the web Dolphin, I just don't think it's less work than having the browser already done and only doing the KDE integration for WebKit. Especially given that KDE integration for WebKit in Rekonq or Konqueror should be basically one and the same thing (code reuse, remember? we are known for it).

As for the blog entry I'm referring to in the title, there possibly may be parts in Konqueror that are written with KHTML in mind, if nothing else because until WebKit KPart there was only KHTMLPart, but it is definitely not the design. If we could switch the file browsing KPart in Konqueror to the one from Dolphin, why should it be a big problem to use another HTML rendering KPart? And while I have digged a bit in Konqueror and WebKit KPart sources, I consider myself to be no Konqueror, KHTML or WebKit expert, so let me just point you to what David Faure says about it.

Really, we have written a lot of good code and invested a lot of time into it. We shouldn't just randomly dump it because everybody and their grandmother think it is a good idea. If we do so, it should be because there are technical reasons. This really reminds me a lot of the KWin vs Compiz problem we had before KDE 4.0. Does somebody still think these days that we should have dumped what we had working for the new kid on the block? If you do, I suggest to do a reality check there too.

Oh, and this blog entry would be 100% written using Konqueror+WebKit, if it managed to post it (ok, so this is ironically the worst breakage I found, life is funny like that). I said it wasn't perfect, there is still work needed. I just still haven't found a good reason why this would be a bad decision or even not reasonably doable.

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select a, b, registered, c, d from XXX where date(registered) >= date_sub(date(NOW()),interval 7 day)

explain select a, b, registered, c, d from XXX where date(registered) >= date_sub(date(NOW()),interval 7 day)G

          id: 1
 select_type: SIMPLE
       table: XXX
        type: ALL
possible_keys: NULL
          key: NULL
     key_len: NULL
         ref: NULL
        rows: 72077742
       Extra: Using where
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

explain select a, b, registered, c, d from XXX where registered >= cast(date_sub(date(NOW()),interval 7 day) as datetime)

          id: 1
 select_type: SIMPLE
       table: XXX
        type: range
possible_keys: YYY
          key: YYY
     key_len: 9
         ref: NULL
        rows: 1413504
       Extra: Using where
1 row in set (0.10 sec)

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Took a few days off and went down to the ocean at Atami ...

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I hope to check out three community events in Tokyo in the next week or so:

- 7/10: OpenSolaris User Group: ZFS and OpenSolaris Security
- 7/11: Tokyo Linux User Group: Network Security and ZFS
- 7/13: Tokyo2Point0: Cloud Computing and Lightning Talks

The timing is good, too. Canon called. They fixed my lens.

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The guys in the Venezuela OpenSolaris User Group came up with a pretty cool logo ...


I like the one from the Chile OpenSolaris User Group too ...


And there are many more, of course. See all the OpenSolaris User Groups here. It`s great to see all the personalities coming alive in artwork.

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Heading to the airport shortly to fly to GUADEC/GCDS.

Doing a bit of an airport tour: Perth, Singapore, Paris, Madrid, Las Palmas; then Las Palmas, Madrid, Gatwick; then Heathrow, Paris, Singapore, Perth. It's like the days of yore, when you had to stop all the time to refuel.

When I get home, there's a week left in Perth before our stuff is uplifted for the move to Melbourne. Have spent the morning packing books into boxes. Steph is going to finish most of the packing while I'm away.



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I have moved my blog to kdedevelopers.org. The previous blog was self-hosted (at home) but I simply don't have enough bandwidth to host it (that box will be used to serve uber-lightweight static pages and a koji instance only).

And since I've been mostly blogging about Qt and KDE in the past, I think that this is the best place to host my blog.

See ya!

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Coming back to Oslo (from LinuxTag in Berlin), apparently the heat wave which hits Europe was its peak, at least here in Oslo. To add insult to the injury, it does not really help if the ventilation system acts strangely, which it usually does right when you need it. We sort of enjoy the rare moment when Oslo is warmer than most other places.

In any case, Berlin was fantastic. There were already few blog posts (e.g. from Lydia, Chani, Sebas, Frederik) about LinuxTag so I won't write too much about it. I was very content with my talk since the room was quite filled when I was doing my presentation. The Qt booth was fun as well, I managed to have short chats here and there with the fellow Berlin trolls, KDAB guys, KDE people, and some other new contacts.

As it was nicely planned long time ago (except a little glitch with some kind of a desktop suite program :-), we did manage a cuisine-exchange program (and it was not about pizza). Hmm, I still need to find those pictures...

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A summary of my more interesting recent twittering.

• The President of Brazil holding an OpenSolaris T-shirt [link]
  (via Kelly Nishimura)

• A Paper Craft Castle On the Ocean [link]
  (via @lbkwrm)

• Favorite Scrubs Episode (#100) [part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

• Kid swaps his iPod touch with Sony Walkman [link]
  "It took me 3 days to figure out the tape had a 2nd side"
  (via Alex Muffett)

• Miss Ellie - world's most ugly pedigree dog [link]
  I'm so glad we have a cute looking mutt.

• Dunking Devils (Basketball trick shots) [link]

• Getting my iPod working with my Ubuntu desktop.
  1st, fix the read-only problem [link]
  2nd, use Amorok to easily transfer music to the iPod [link]

• Humor: Owls on drugs [link]

  (via @lbkwrm)

• An alarm clock for really heavy sleepers [link]
  Would hate to wake up in that with a hangover.
  (via HackADay)

[Technorati Tag: Links]

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Just like last year, this fall we will have another Qt Developer Days. Europeans might want to visit Munich, Americans are better served with San Francisco.

Will I go there? Well, unless there is something wrong, yes I will. Note that a little information about the sessions is already available. I leave it as an exercise to the reader, which talks in the Innovate track I will hold :)

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Since three brings the luck and it is the first Mersenne prime, I am glad to list three QWebView tricks for your pleasure:

Night-mode

Snap scrolling:

Transparency, something you have also seen before:

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Just in case anyone is following me on kdedevelopers.org, I moved my blog to http://blogs.fsfe.org/gladhorn.

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I finally decided to move my blog. kdedevelopers.org has served me well, but now I want some more features. Blogger provides some killer features, such as using my own domain, blogging by email, or the powerful comment system. So from now on you'll find my blog at blog.cornelius-schumacher.de. See you there.

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Today is the first day of my employment at a wonderful company called KO GmbH. KO GmbH provides services around software dealing with office documents, notably KOffice. I'm excited to have found such an inspiring job working in Free Software.

At the KOffice 2009 Sprint in Berlin last June, I got to meet many of the KOffice developers and was impressed by the productive atmosphere. In my job at KO, I'd like to help KOffice become enterprise-ready, by which I mean, that I want help the KOffice team make a reliable and flexible office suite.

My role in the company is software architect. The business cards Tobias Hintze, our CEO, sent me just say 'architect'. That inspired me to spend some time on this first workday to pose for a picture that goes well with a dEUS song about Buckminster Fuller, the architect after whom the buckyball was named.

Listen to 'The Architect'.

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Disclaimer: I have no desire to re-ignite KHTML vs WebKit arguments. Rather, the purpose of this blog post is to hopefully enlighten a technical question.

Over the last few months I've heard many KDE developers in various forums bemoan the lack of a working and stable WebKit KPart. The motivation behind this complaint seems to be that KDE folk want a WebKit browser option for KDE. Thus the naive solution is to just get the WebKit KDE KPart in shape. Given this motivation... the solution is wrong IMO.

I can speak from some experience here. I've been working on QtWebKit for quite awhile and have also worked - in the past - on the WebKit KPart plus Konqueror integration that Simon started. For a time, it was building and running just fine. You could install it and change a configuration file and Konqueror would render using QtWebKit. However, the integration was *far* from complete. Plumbing the sources of Konqueror I learned a nasty secret: Konqueror is highly KHTML API specific. Konqueror has deep integration with KHTML that goes far above and beyond the KPart API. Creating a QtWebKit KPart is woefully insufficient for the purpose of providing anything more than a basic HTML viewer.

A simple HTML viewer is no where close to a fully modern desktop browser.

This all makes sense if you stop to think about the history of Konqueror. Konqueror is a generic desktop shell. It is designed to allow basic viewing of various documents in various formats. Of course, it has become much, much, more than that. And the key to this growth of features is Konqueror's steady adoption of API's above and beyond the generic KPart API.

Which brings me to my point: if parts of the KDE community truly want a modern browser based on QtWebKit they'd best be looking at solutions beyond Konqueror. Otherwise you are left with two hacky solutions: make a QtWebKit KPart that is API compatible with KHTMLPart OR migrate Konqueror source to make it less dependent on KHTMLPart. The former is not going to be fun as the KHTMLPart API is not refined or polished and highly KHTML specific. The latter can only be accomplished with a lot of work set aside for refactoring or through nasty '#ifdef KHTML callThisWay() #else callThatWay();'

Both of these solutions are sub-optimal in my opinion.

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