KDE – Kasperian Moving Parts

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

Korganizer, Exchange, OWASync, Google Calendar, KPilot

Friday November 21, 2008

I use KOrganizer to view and manage my personal calendar. My employer uses Microsoft Exchange *spit* for its calendaring solution, so I also have a calendar on the Exchange server that holds all of my work meetings and reminders. I would really like to keep everything on my Google Calendar too, so I can share it with my family. And I sync everything with my Palm so I can carry my schedule with me and get alarms when a meeting is coming up. As an aside, I’d really like to use my Nokia N810 for this instead of my Palm, but alas this is just not there yet, mCalendar notwithstanding. So my current “solution” involves using OWASync to pull down Read more…

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Open Source

KDE 4.2 is flat out going to rock

Tuesday November 11, 2008

That’s my prediction. Of course, the truth of the matter is that KDE 4.2 (trunk) flat out rocks today. Seriously. I have never been more excited about the Linux desktop than I am right now. And this, 2+ months out from our actual KDE 4.2 release. I’ve been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of months now, and thanks to the awesome nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk packages, I’m thoroughly enjoying pretty-darned-bleeding-edge 4.2/trunk packages, but with half the carbs, and I am loving what I’m seeing! Recent KMail improvements are awesome. Plasma is getting more and more bullet-proof and gorgeous by the week. Kwin just keeps getting more and more stable and purty. Kdevelop4 and Kate are getting some SERIOUSLY cool enhancements Read more…

Desktop, Google, KDE, Life in General

KDE/Qt California People Sightings!!

Thursday October 30, 2008

I’m out in California this week (belated warning) again, WOOT! I got to spend another awesome weekend at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year, Leo and I were the official KDE representatives, but Thiago, Simon, Ariya, and Olivier got to join in on the fun too. And then today and tomorrow are the Qt DevDays, where I finally got to meet blauzahl, greeneg, and hays, as well as catch up again with the Qt dudes and njaard. It’s a really, hectic, crazy week, trying to cram everything into it, and I’m tired as hell, but it’s been an awesome week thus far. Hopefully my body will hold off on the usual travelling sickness until I get home. Read more…

Desktop, KDE

nVidia 177.80 Released!

Wednesday October 8, 2008

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!! YAY progress!!! [[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed was IPP=2 from IPP=1. HTH!

KDE, Linux

KDE 4.2 (trunk) Now Rocking On My Thinkpad T61!!!

Friday October 3, 2008

My work laptop and main computing device is a Thinkpad T61 with an nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1) card. It’s been a frustrating last year in trying to run a KDE4 desktop as my main work and development environment because of the problems with the proprietary nVidia drivers that show up in KDE4. However, this little post is definitely more of a Huzzah!!! than a disgruntled grousing session. Lord knows we’ve had plenty of those. =:) Thanks to the folks at nVidia who are diligently working on improving the problems in their drivers!! Anyway, I’ve followed everything I could find on Lemma’s techbase pages and in the nVidia forums, but nothing has worked. Until now! I’m running the Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Multi-Monitor Setup On A Single Physical Head (Now Better!)

That’s a big title, eh? I blogged previously about setting up a multi-head X environment for development and testing, even though I’m working on a laptop with only one card. My previous attempt used Xdmx and multiple Xephyr displays, and there were some problems with it. Thankfully, Lubos commented about his nifty little fakexinerama library that achieves the same result only MUCH easier (easierly?) and without any of the problems that I’d seen using Xdmx/Xephyr(1..n). Here, then, is a description of what I’ve done and the results…. This is a screenshot from within the Xephyr session, showing the 1600×1200 Xephyr display. The cool thing is that using ksnapshot from within the Xephyr session will actually capture the entire display, not Read more…

KDE, KPilot, Movies, Music

Getting Excited about KDE4 All Over Again

Tuesday April 15, 2008

It started to hit me yesterday as I spent 3.5 hours in this year’s KDE Google Summer of Code mentor’s meeting (thanks again sebr!!). KDE4 just plain rocks, and it feels good to start getting excited about it again. And I don’t just mean KDE 4.0. Don’t get me wrong, KDE4.0 is a nice little release. It’s not perfect and there are some things that are irritating about it and keep me from using it as my main DE. But like Aaron has been saying over and over and over again, KDE4.0 is not KDE4. KDE4.0 is more of a preview of things to come, and what I see coming just plain kicks butt. I am finally getting excited about Read more…