ChEeTaH's - KDE

Where have you been?

ChEeTaH — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 11:57:35 +0000

It's been a long time again, very long. A lot has changed too, so here goes...

First of all: I got a job in February. It's not the greatest thing, but getting something really nice is hard right now. At least it relieves us a bit from the huge financial burden we'd otherwise have. Another small job at my university, where I worked for only 4 hours each week, is ending this month. I'll have my last paycheck from there soon, unfortunately.

I've also prepared the tContact Drupal module for release. The code has been slightly improved, which is always good. There's also another mini-module for Drupal which allows you to add CSS classes to menu links. This makes it easier for a theme to turn a menu into a series of buttons, similar to the menu at the top of this site (Home/About/Contact). Right now this site uses the menu item's ID number, which is somewhat random. With this module such menus are just a little harder to break :) I hope both modules will land on Drupal.org soon.

What else? KidDraw of course. A few months ago already, I've cleaned up a lot of code, made it a little bit themeable (which resulted in removing a whole lot of code). I've also changed the file loading/saving structures around so that the files KidDraw produces are nice straightforward XML files. They're compressed to save some disk space, but it means that compatibility with future and past versions is much easier. Still, a release is not in sight right now, and I'll stop predicting/hoping anything right now. First I've got some other stuff to finish and wrap up, before I can focus on KidDraw a little more again.

I'm also working on some supersecret projects with Rosana, which has taken some time off of other projects. It has inspired me to write the menu CSS classes module mentioned above though.

Another technical bit I worked on this past weekend is merging all the (5) Drupal installations on this webserver to a single centralized installation. Before, a new version of Drupal would mean updating each site separately: putting the site in maintenance mode, uploading files, updating the database and turning the site back online. Times 5. Right now: Put all sites in maintenance mode, upload files, update all databases, put them all back online. I've set up bookmark folders in Firefox so I can put all sites into maintenance mode with just a few clicks. Same goes for updating and bringing them back online. A similar amount of effort is saved for updates of common modules among various sites. All in all: maintaining the sites is less painful - especially as the amount of Drupal sites we're running will soon grow.

That does mean that if you spot any errors (missing/broken images, links, etc): please contact me! I think I've most of them covered though.

And then there's University of course. It's taking a lot of my time right now, with this year's last set of exams just around the corner. Together with some more deadlines, it's a busy time right now.

The Sims 3 is also out, I've been playing it for a bit. Not much yet - too little time. The (Collector's Edition) box is shiny though.

Spore Galactic Adventures, the first real expansion for Spore, is due next week, and Thursday (18th) me and Rosana will be checking it out at EA Netherlands. A bit late for a preview, but it may just be early enough to get me excited about the game once again. I don't know all too much about it right now, so Wednesday evening I'll have to do some reading to catch up on it.

Finally: I'll be getting a new laptop this summer. After saving up for a long time, the €1000 offer from university (for a HP Elitebook 8530w) is in. I've filled in the form saying I want it, I'll have to pay up soon. I should be getting it around August. My current laptop (6 years old) just doesn't cut it anymore...

That's it for this rough summary of the past couple of months (project/work wise anyway). Until next time!

Happy New Year

ChEeTaH — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:49:14 +0000

Boy, it's been a while. Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Better late than never :P I've been really busy, and I'm wrapping up a too busy semester with finals now. Time for some plans.

I'll follow up my last post with some sad news: KidDraw didn't make it to KDE 4.2. The reason: time. As I said: busy semester, but also plenty of other things to work on which left KDE a bit too much on the side.

However things are more stable in KDE land now: KDevelop4 is coming along great making it actually usable for me. I also don't have Akregator (my feed reader) crashing on me all the time anymore. Now KDE 4.2 is just around the corner and I've decided to stick to that branch now, rather than running trunk all the time as I've done the past year.

Running such an unstable version of my favorite desktop is nice: you constantly get all the new features that everybody implements. However, it occasionally led to a broken desktop with crashes all over the place. I'm opting for better stability and more productivity this new year. I now run a KDE version from trunk, just before RC1, and will switch to KDE 4.2 once it's out.

I will be getting new computer parts too, and with 4Gb of memory I think it's also the time to switch to a 64bit OS (I still run Gentoo 32 bit now). That means a complete reinstall of everything I have, which is exactly what I'll be doing soon. With KDE 4.2.

So, I hope I can do more this semester so KidDraw will make it to KDE 4.3 in about 6 months. I've also got a few Drupal modules planned, one of which I wrote last night and mostly needs cleaning up before I'll throw it up here: a multilingual site-wide contact form. I'll also apply to get it on Drupal.org soon.

There you have it. A few of my plans for 2009. I hope I'll be able to get it all done.

KidDraw Progress

ChEeTaH — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:20:45 +0000

For the past couple of days I've spent a bit of time getting KidDraw into shape. It's not there yet, not at all, but with the foundations in place I should be able to get a nice version in KDE 4.2 (January). Screens inside!

First let's take a look at the old Windows version, made in Delphi:

Now what you see is a fully working version. You can pick a color and line width (no need to click for those), load up to 5 images you made before, clear the current canvas and stop the program. Oh, and you can draw, of course.

Enter the new KDE/Qt version: It's largely the same. Except that it's cross platform. And that it supports multiple color palettes. And that it isn't finished yet. But: progress is there!

Painting was already possible somewhere around last year, well before I got it into KDE. This week or so I've done some housecleaning, made saving and reloading of drawings possible - in a straightforward self-made binary format, to keep the files of reasonable size. I might still change to XML though, probably compressed, so extending the format is more flexible.

Another thing I'm happy with is the palette support. I'm planning options to download and install new palettes, but I'm not that far yet. The most important stuff already exists though. The next screenshots all show the same image, but with different palettes. You can cycle through them and you'll see the image change colors.

The amount of colors in the palette doesn't matter. KidDraw keeps the original information so when you go back to the original palette, all colors will still be there.

As for the big gray area on top: that's where you'll be able to open/save images to in the future... but that's for another update.

All this currently lives on the SVN server of KDE, in Playground/edu. If you want to try it out, you'll most likely need to build it yourself.

Desktop Pimpin'

ChEeTaH — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:56:24 +0000

Google has introduced its gadgets to Linux. After the Windows and Mac releases of Google Desktop giving you clocks, calendars and more straight to your desktop, the framework is now available for Linux as well. Under the Apache license (2.0), with both Qt and GTK hosts. But they're not the first.

Gadgets are far from new. Even on Linux, KDE 3.x had Superkaramba to pimp your desktop. Now with KDE 4 there's Plasma, with Plasmoids in your panel and on your desktop. I'm sure there are other similar gadget/widget/plasmoid/dashboard systems out there. While some developers like having many analog clocks, I stick to the digital ones. Behold: my desktop, as I currently see it:

That is still without any Google gadgets on there. You can see my beautiful girlfriend and son, as well as a calculator I hardly ever use, two comics, a calendar, a picture frame showing some of my favorite pictures, KDETwitter, a fifteen-puzzle (with a lovely picture, again), and some clocks. The blank space at the right bottom of the panel shows the current moon phase. It's well, blank right now. This is all with the new default KDE 4.1 Plasma theme, by the way. I should blog about that soon, now Beta 1 is long out and Beta 2 is coming up soon.

Now come the Google Gadgets. Following the instructions - there are no Gentoo ebuilds yet, and as it was only announced today I don't think there are any packages just yet - there was one small problem. It couldn't load a library. Running 'ldconfig' as root did the trick, so I started ggl-qt.

It quietly hides in the system tray, where plenty of other icons are dumped. Google could've picked a slightly different icon I guess, this one reminds me of a certain OS logo from Redmond.

After I figured out the program went there, I double clicked it. Nothing. Single click perhaps? Nope. Right click it is. Add gadgets, there we go.

Plenty to choose from, I guess. The choice seems somewhat limited though, no Spore countdown for example, no Twitter or Plurk gadgets either. The Spore countdown does exist for Mac Dashboard, and Plasma should be able to load it, but for some reason it seems unsuccessful (I never see it, though it is installed). I should try to find out what's going on there.

Anyway, time to add some gadgets. More clocks! Four pages of search results for "clock", that should suffice...

Those clocks are just from the first page, a few of them giving errors and not installing. The gadget interface seemed to get a little slow, so I stopped adding more.

The gadgets sure look nice, though there's no coherent theme like my Plasma desktop. That's not much of a problem though, there are a few bigger issues. The first is a visible one: square shadows, if that's what you can call them, show up around each gadget. Also I had some trouble moving the gadgets to the right position, which was quickly solved by holding Alt while dragging the gadget. Unfortunately it's not possible to drag gadgets from the Add Gadgets interface straight to the desktop. You have to click "Add" followed by moving the gadgets around. Still, nothing major, it could just be a little friendlier in that aspect.

What is really bad: every gadget is its own window. Having a couple of gadgets around means Alt+Tab takes so much longer to find the right app now, as you'll also have to go through each single gadget now. The only solution right now is right clicking the gadgets icon again, and then hiding all the gadgets. But well, that really defeats the purpose of having gadgets on your desktop, right?

There are some other issues with the window-for-each-gadget thing. Because they are windows, they are dimmed when inactive, due to my KWin settings (love compositing). They also cover my existing plasmoids, so stacking a plasmoid over a gadget would not be possible. One advantage is that you can put a gadget always on top, so it is always visible. That's something I can't do with the plasmoids, but then again I'm not sure if I'd ever use it.

So after this quick run, that's my major gripe with Google Gadgets. Nevertheless, it's a good thing Google got these for Linux now too. Besides the actual UI there are libraries that come with the package, which can load the gadgets. All released as open source!

As long as license issues do no arise between the Apache and GPL license, I guess that the plasma folks will go ahead and integrate Google gadget support in a future version - possibly 4.2 - of Plasma. Not sure, of course, but it would be a nice addition to the dashboard gadgets that are supported (though not completely, obviously) right now.

I also quickly tested the GTK+ host. It looks pretty much the same, though gadgets get an addition expanded view (which seemed to be no more than loading the gadget in another separate window, which also looks more like a window). I could not find the sidebar Google says it has. perhaps it's only available under Gnome.

All in all: Google Gadgets is definitely nice, but because each gadget is its own window, there are some (major) usability issues. It's still a first version and I'm sure Google - and others - will improve Gadgets in the future. It doesn't integrate well at the moment, but support for these gadgets from within Plasma would solve that problem for me. Releasing the gadgets libraries under an open license is a great thing, so kudos to Google for that!

But, for now, I'll stick to the clocks I already have.

Wanna try for yourself? Check the Google Gadgets for Linux project on Google Code, the build and install instructions are easy enough.

Joining KDE

ChEeTaH — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:50:04 +0000

Although I originally applied for the Google Summer of Code this year, unfortunately I was not accepted. There obviously are many great entries this year, and although I'll never know how great the people of KDE found mine, it can't be half bad, really. After all, I was asked to do what I had planned anyway, just outside the Summer of Code.

So what was it all about? Well, it currently is not online here as I'm waiting for some Drupal Modules to be ported to Drupal 6.x (specifically Project*). That means I do not have all the facilities to properly promote my projects here just yet. But those who do know this site from before, may also know that I had a program called KidDraw here once.

Last year I started rewriting KidDraw in C++ using the Qt toolkit. I got quite far, but it still needs lots of work too. Part of what I want to do is change it into a KDE app. Not all too much work, and eventually it should become part of KDE Edu.

Due to college and all I haven't been able to do a whole lot yet, but I have officially joined KDE as a developer now. KidDraw sits in Playground/edu now where it will remain until it's ready for review and then hopefully inclusion in the real KDE Edu module. It won't be in time for KDE 4.1, which is due out this July, but with a bit of luck I can have KidDraw join KDE in 4.2, out in December/January.

So now I've gotta find a summer job to get some much-needed money. Wish me luck!

KBlogging

ChEeTaH — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:37:14 +0000

New site, new ways to blog. Yep, you're looking at the brand new version of Simply Life, all made possible by the dearest of dearest, Rosana!

A lot has happened since my last post, so here goes:

Went to LA for the last proper E3, with Rosana
Checked out Hollywood and Disneyland while there
Fell in love
Got together
Junior was... erm... born. July 11th 2006.
More love
Rosana got pregnant
Moved to Breda to the same flat as where Rosana (and two other students, still) lived
Did a whole lot of searching for a new home for the three, soon to be four, of us
Found an apartment
Moved
Seth was born (October 23rd 2007, 14:58 CET)
Rosana made this sparkly brand new superduper design
I'm blogging, using KBlogger on KDE 4

That's the short version. Most of all, this isn't really all too much more than a test post, but so far I love it!