A few weeks ago I got a smart card to use with gpg for hardware encryption. I'm no security fanatic but I like the idea, so I bought a "lots of different cards all in one" reader. I got a MSI StarReader SMART which should support smart cards and was available locally (strange habit, I like to go to real shops instead of the online competition sometimes).
I played around with it, but it seemed to just sit there and do nothing (except read every variant of useless memory card). What made my day is that after only one mail to Ludovic Rousseau with some info about the device and getting a response the same evening, it started working. After adding its usb id it's listed on the ccid driver page
A big thank you to Ludovic Rousseau!
Time to get it to work with gpg and mail now.

> Read More... | Digg This!

KDE 4.2 is in bug fixing mode and so is Marble. Time to have a look at things that got implemented right in time for Marble 0.7: Henry de Valence has been one of the most active Marble core developers during the last few months: He has implemented several exciting Marble features already.

For Marble 0.7 (KDE 4.2) he implemented MarbleRunners. This is a pretty nice feature, which is still a bit hidden, but that is probably going to change soon:

1. Make sure you have internet -- Oh, ok, yes, I just wanted to make sure ...
2. Start Marble (e.g. from KDE 4.2 Beta1 or trunk)
3. Find the "Search" field and type in: Playmobil
4. Wait for the results to arrive!

What happens is that on pressing the Enter key Marble will send the search query to several "service" threads in the background called "MarbleRunners". These threads will return the result as soon as it is available. In this case the OpenStreetMap-Runner has returned four matching results from the OpenStreetMap-Server!

Ok, let's try another one: Imagine, you are somewhere in Finland on holidays ("Tervetuloa!"), it snows and you feel really hungry. In this situation Marble can be a true life-saver ("Hyvää ruokahalua!"):

The source code for the OpenStreetMap-Runner is based on source code by Jens-Michael Hoffmann who also created the OpenStreetMap integration for Marble. Henry de Valence has taken it and created a Marble runner out of it. Additionally Henry has created a Coordinate-Runner:

Enter e.g.

or just:

and press the Enter key. The latter will almost immediately return a result from the GeoCoordinate-Runner and several results from the OpenStreetMap-Runner trailing in a few seconds afterwards:

The best thing is however that Henry has made a HOWTO for creating MarbleRunners. So now you can create your own MarbleRunner yourself! The example shows how easy it is! And the description ensures that you can do this even if you are a beginner.

Just go here to get the HOWTO and just look here to get instructions on how to compile Marble.

The best Runners that you'll come up with will get shipped with the next version of Marble (your chance to enter history)!

I could imagine lots of runners: What e.g. about a Wikipedia-Runner (we don't have that one yet, ...)? What ideas do you have? Please let us know or even better: send us your patch! We are reachable via marble-devel@kde.org. Or join us on IRC ( #kde-edu, Freenode: irc.kde.org )! Of course we also appreciate all kinds of patches that improve the current MarbleRunners as well!

> Read More... | Digg This!

I always thought that some KDE apps looked a bit cluttered. Yesterday I finally tried to do something about it. I started with Gwenview. Two things bothered me: 1. the status bar buttons were too small for their text. Easy to solve by simply not forcing the height of the statusbar. 2. the sidebar had a different color than the status bar. Now this is due to Oxygen using gradients which is cool. It turned out to be rather simple. And this is also the actual reason for this blog.

A tip: whenever using sidebars with scroll areas which are supposed to have the Window color as Base do NOT use something like setBackgroundRole( QPalette::Base ). Better let the scroll area not print any background at all. Simply do that by changing the viewport properties:


sidebar->viewport()->setAutoFillBackground( false );


And if you are using QScrollArea be aware that it changes this property also for the widget set via QScrollArea::setWidget. Thus:


sidebar->setWidget( myWidget );
myWidget->setAutoFillBackground( false );


Enough words. This is what it looks like. Notice the difference in the lower right.

And BTW: Now that apparently the blogging system changed, how do I properly include images? [image:ID] was a really nice system...

> Read More... | Digg This!

It has been a while since I blogged. The reason is simple: the birth of my daughter turned my brain upside down (as in: "as far as I can tell there exists only one thing in the whole world and it is not this blog"). Now, thousands of hours of staring at her later (and also after the very successful last Nepomuk project review) I am finally back to blogging.

And this first blog will not yet mention any amazing new developments in Nepomuk. No, not yet. This is merely a "hello I am back, did you miss me? no? why the hell not? but I thought the world would stop turning without my blog posts." blog post.

So just this one thing: I updated the Nepomuk documentation. It now contains descriptions of all the Nepomuk services and the architecture. So, if you are interested and always wanted to know what all these processes with "nepomuk" in their names are doing, this is the read for you.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I'll be giving a KDE 4 talk at the Hobby and Electronics fair in Stuttgart tomorrow (Nov, 16th). If you were planing to drop by the fair, come on over at 15:30. You probably won't learn a lot about KDE since I intend to prepare for a rather broad non-technical audience. Let me know if you happen to be in Stuttgart and want to have a coffee or just chat

> Read More... | Digg This!

Today the Systems Fair in Munich ended. I only spent yesterday and today there helping at the KDE booth. Eckhart and Holger spent all week there and I am deeply impressed that they still were in very good spirits and were lots of fun to manage the booth with

The Systems is a rather business oriented fair, so knowledge about KDE and open and free software is not as common as at some other fairs. Still we talked to many other great projects and people. It was good to talk to enthusiastic users nonetheless.

Eckhart gave a KDE Education presentation showing
Kalzium, Kig, Step and Marble in depth.



To my surprise many visitors showed up for this presentation, more than for the presentations before or after it - yay! Showing the Windows port on this occasion was interesting, since many people are reluctant to install Linux, though we also gave away quite a few live CDs.
At the booth a few people showed up interested in getting involved more with the KDE project which I think is absolutely great. Not only could we happily point at techbase but also I hope we will see new faces for promotion showing up soon

I also enjoyed talking to the Free Software Foundation Europe people whos booth was not far from ours. This even got me a free (as in gas) ride home. Thanks a bunch Björn. Since we were hitting off with the collaboration and promo things so well, Eckhart and I decided to leave Holger alone for quite some time and even steal his usb stick for a fun project of our own. When we arrived, we noticed some large printers which were in the same hall as our booth. He started the fun contest of finding which would be the most friendly company donating some posters to KDE. In the end we were very happy to bring home more than 10 fresh new posters featuring Wade's great work.



They will find their way into the booth box soonish. We would like to say thank you to Michael Häusler and Thorsten Seyffarth for shiny new KDE posters.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!

I've been watching the development of KDE for a while, submitting bug reports and testing trunk, and last night I made my first patch. I received an svn account and decided to start working on Amarok 2, for which I'm currently fixing this bug. But I also intend to work on other areas of KDE, after I poke around for a while and learn the general layout of the project. Suggestions? To begin, I think I might start investigating this bug. I also work on the Arora Browser.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt's painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpi?ski triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don't think that I've implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I'm running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here's my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I'll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.

> Read More... | Digg This!