KDE – Kasperian Moving Parts

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Linux, Open Source

Goodbye, for now at least, Linux Desktop

Sunday November 13, 2011

I’ve been an Open Source developer and hacker for a loooooong, long time. It has become far more than a part of what I do. It has become part of who I am. At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason. But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and Read more…

Apples, Desktop, KDE, Linux

Having spent a few days with his MacBook Pro…

Saturday November 14, 2009

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all of the issues at hand. The impetus in this case was: Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Read more…

KDE, KPilot, Music, Open Source

The Palm Is Dead. Long Live The Palm!

Thursday May 28, 2009

I believe I am one of the last few die-hard nutjobs on the face of this earth who still use (and “use” here is a highly subjective word meaning that I have a bunch of Palm devices lying around, am currently the only semi-active (and “semi-active” means that I get probably a good 2 hours of KPilot hacking in per year =:( ) KPilot developer, and occasionally even turn some of them on) Palm PDA devices. I have successfully resisted the siren call of the iPhone for the last 2+(?) years–partly because there is no functional synchronization solution between my Linux desktop and it, partly because it’s pretty bloody expensive, partly because Cingular has atrociously high data plans compared to Read more…

KDE, KPilot

KDE 4.2 Released!!

Tuesday January 27, 2009

Woohoo! KDE 4.2 is released!! I only wish the last few KPilot bug fixes would have made it into the 4.2.0 release, but we were too late. Still, if you think you knew what KDE4 was all about, think again. Check out KDE 4.2.0. =:)

KDE, KPilot

KDE 4.2 KPilot coming! (how to both be excited and have realistic expectations)

Monday January 19, 2009

I just sent this to the KDE PIM mailing lists, but I know not everyone who uses KPilot subscribes, so I’ll re-post it here… Howdy all, I just wanted to get a note out to as wide a distribution list as possible to spread some important news about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release and KPilot’s (exciting!!) part in it. If you don’t care about KDE PIM, data syncing, Palm devices, or KPilot, you may stop reading now and I won’t be offended. =;P For the last 2 years, the talented Bertjan Broeksema and I have spent our Google Summer of Code months doing some major rework and redesign for KPilot. You can see our sync algorithm redesign Use Case here: Read more…

KDE, KPilot

KPilot 4.2 Progress (woot!)

I spent a crapload of time this weekend, going through all the old and crufty KPilot bugs we’ve done a really horrible job of keeping up-to-date on, and triaged the bejeebers out of the list. I think we had ~ 150+ a few months ago. I went through the last 100 of them individually today, and was able to close out 93 of them, woot! A lot of them were problems that had been fixed in KDE 3.5.x, or had been directly addressed more recently in our KDE 4.2 work, or had been indirectly fixed via our KDE 4.2 work. A lot of them were also the low-hanging fruit you’d expect with “it don’t work so good” and not much Read more…

KDE, KPilot

KPilot 4.2 progress

Tuesday January 13, 2009

I discovered a nasty little data corruption bug in KPilot last night and have put some fixes in for it just this morning. The good news is that we didn’t lose any data. We just gave you a lot more data. =:) So, if you’re helping to test KPilot for our KDE 4.2 release looming Any Day Now (TM), please update from svn (branches/KDE/4.2/kdepim/kpilot) and test again. There is still one little nasty behavior that I see that I need to find a fix for tonight, though. With our new core conduit design for KDE 4.2, KPilot keeps its Handheld -> PC mappings in its own XML file–one per conduit. This is a Really Good Thing (also TM). However, it Read more…

Google, KDE, KPilot, Video Games, Work Stuff

Random Musings About a Good Week

Saturday January 10, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged (I blame Twitter), and I had an interesting week, this last, so I figured I’d blog about it. Probably should be a bunch of individual posts, but blef and here goes…. Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet with my team at work and while this may not seem like a big deal, it was to me. Being that I’m currently working remotely, it’s very easy to feel isolated and alone and disconnected most of the time. Until I figure out how to build a virtual presence robot (like Twiki, maybe, except instead of Dr. Theopolis hanging around his neck, it would be Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia == AWESOME!!

Monday December 22, 2008

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving up and committing hari kari, but my little workaround in extending ServerAttempts and ServerTimeout in kdmrc seems to be at least good enough to keep me from committing hari kari myself. And quite honestly, that’s about as much time as I want to spend on debugging it. =:/ But I updated to the KDE 4.2 beta2 packages again today and am absolutely loving OpenSUSE 11.1. Read more…

KDE, Linux

OpenSUSE 11.1 and nVidia?

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff. The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of fun and frolic. First off, I have a laptop (meaning I cant change the video card) with an nVidia chipset (meaning I’d like to change the video card). So while OpenSUSE 11.1 works really nicely with the open source “nv” video driver, it can’t do any compositing, 3d, OpenGL, etc., etc. (meaning no wobbley windows or cube goodness or translucency or… you get the idea…). Read more…