Planet KDE

KDE has always been a community that I saw myself very happy with. Open, friendly and cheerful to newcomers. To improve that, and not to diminish the quality of coding while doing so, #kde-devel is better used for coding only, and suggests #kde-cafe for a socialisation channel. I promoted the use of that channel in the past.

I can't anymore though. Blue Numbers is an op at that channel. Everyone knows her... errrm... sorry, She knows everyone. Whenever she sees a newcomer to that channel, rather than being happy about a new person, she feels the need to follow up an interrogation session. Who he/she is, how he/she found the channel, why is he/she not in #kde-devel (we don't welcome gnomees now, no collaboration supported), what are their real names... oh wait, wasn't Blue Numbers herself using her fake name even in the kde mailing lists? only recently she added the real one to the planet even. And yes, if the person doesn't answer, Blue will /op herself and yes... you know the rest.

So yes, the USA will be happy that a new FBI member is doing the customs check works, and soon we'll all need to use biometric IDs to be able to enter #kde-cafe. So great!

I had complained about it... and now each time somebody joins, Blue Numbers will accuse somebody else (me) of being responsible of that interrogation session. Great! So first she'll go paranoid, and then I'll be the one responsbible.

I live in a country (Spain) that used to be a Dictatorship, just barely 30 years ago. We welcomed democracy. I don't want the same for a kde socialization channel.

If there are two things I really hate are 1) dictators 2) lies

So as it was promised, konqueror session management is already done. I’ve just sent an email to kfm-devel with the patch attached and hopefully the patch will enter into trunk before the hard feature freeze (next monday) so that we get it in Konqueror 4.1.

The session management support is pretty similar to the one that Opera has. Let’s say it’s inspired in Opera =). And as everyone likes screenshots, here there is one that shows the new menus for session management:

So you can easily save current session, open one of the saved sessions, or manage current sessions. And only one more item was added to the File Menu, which is the same menu where session management resides in Opera.

The Manage sessions dialog lets you save current session in a new session or in an existing session (overwriting it). It also can rename an existing session, or delete it. Or even open one of those sessions. Quite straightforward if you look at it, actually:

And I have reserved the best part for the end. Proper crash session recovery! Because Konqueror shouldn’t, but it can crash sometimes. And it crashes even more when you use KDE trunk. Until now, the only option you had to recover from a crash was using the crash plugin which is sub-optimal.

What I’ve done is something similar to what Opera, Firefox and many others browsers do: Save session every X seconds (it’s configurable via konquerorrc, 10 seconds by default as in firefox). This is done for all konqueror processes, and it’s saved in ~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/autosaved/. Each process saves its session timely there in a file with a name similar to “:1.114″ which identifies it. When a konqueror instance is closed cleanly, its file is removed.

Thus, every time a new window or konqueror process is launched, Konqueror reads that directory and asks to DBus if there’s any service registered with the name “:1.114″, for example, or whatever name have the autosaved files. This is done very fast, because no text parsing or waiting is needed, so the user doesn’t feel any delay.

If for some reason there’s a file with a name that is not related to a registered dbus service, that means that something wrong happened i.e. a konqueror process crashed or froze. And in that case, you get this nice dialog:

Which allows you to restore session if you want, or not, or even not restoring it now but restoring it later (opening a new konqueror process / window). As David Faure suggested me, it also allows you to check “do not ask again” and always do whatever you choose automatically without asking everytime. Nice isn’t it?

There’ still some related fixes I want to add to SVN before hard feature freeze, like adding a KAction menu to “Hibernate konqueror”, i.e. Save current session and close konqueror, so that next time you open konqueror it can be restored. Also listing the crashed and still not restored sessions (i.e. you clicked in “ask me later”) in the sessions menu.

Oh and adding an option to undo closed tab to right click menu of the konqueror tabbar is a must too, I use that option a lot now in firefox and we need it too ;-).

So this blog title is "KMail and bikeways in Germany". You may wonder what they have in common. You may wonder whether there will be an eloquent Aaron-style nice little story behind that.

But sorry, no, I have to disappoint you. At least from my point of view kmail and bikeways in Germany have absolutely nothing in common, two completely unrelated things, no surprising lovely details they share.

So, to get to the point: what I wanted to say for a long time: congratulations to KMail ! I use it since years and it always just works. And one IMO huge achievement: I have thousands of emails in my mail folders, and it starts really really fast, basically immediately. Sorting or searching the mail folders - instantly. Greak work ! Not all applications manage to do that.

Now to the sad part, the german bikeways. No, I won't complain that there are no or too few bikeways in Germany. More the opposite. There are too many, or, too many unusable bikeways in Germany. I mean, bikeways could be a nice thing. Not so here in Germany. The trend here is to put bikeways on the sidewalk together with the pedestrians. Does that make sense ? Does it make sense to have me riding with let's say 25 to 35 km/h through the pedestrians ? I don't think so. I also don't think that would be especially safe, neither for me nor for the pedestrians. But, well, in these cases, one could just ignore the bikeways on the sidewalks.

But now the really annoying effect of that is, that car drivers have come to expect that bikers belong on the sidewalk to the pedestrians: "This is my street, get off !".
I mean, it's not enough for them to honk at you, some of them go so far they lower their window just to scream that at you as biker.
Even if there is no bikeway visible, just sidewalks.
How to put it, I'd suggest to split bikers into two groups: sporty bikers, i.e. faster than 20 km/h and comfy bikers, slower than that. Consider the sporty bikers like motor bikes, and the comfy bikers like pedestrians.
IMO this would make a lot of sense. If I'm going relatively fast, e.g. at 30, I much rather prefer to share the street with the cars at 50, than to mess around between pedestrians moving at 5 km/h. At 30 I also don't want to circle around trees on sidewalks, go up and down the sidewalks at each crossing and also drivers don't expect somebody almost as fast as them selves on the sidewalks on crossings. OTOH if I'm going slow all that is ok.

So my proposal: either split bikers into two groups, or much better build bikeways as part of the street, not as part of the sidewalk, so we get accepted again on streets.
(children biking on sidewalks is ok of course)

Alex

I hadn’t heard or seen anything from the Kopete devs yet, but I did ping Matt earlier this week to help spread the word to the rest of the project. Remember, this is an activity for you the developers, not me. I make myself available to answer questions and facilitate discussion, but the purpose of the user research profiles is to get developers more aware about their users. I will be at UDS next week and will be checking up on the Kopete User Research Profile once I get back.

Finally, after having moved recently and needing much more time to re-assemble all the furnitures I again have a properly setup working place in my new “work room”.

This means I can finally try to get back to actual hacking and even hacking on kde4/win32 in a few weeks! YAY!!

So, yesterday I took a look at messages/month on kde-devel@. A big thanks to all who responded to that, especially Thiago for an interesting comparison of "of" versus "for". Obviously an important distinction to make.

As promised, here is my comparison of kde-devel@ against kde-core-devel@...

OK, some things to note:

• Both lists often peak around the same time (interesting, not suprising)
• Historically kde-core-devel@ handled less traffic. This situation changed about 2 years ago

That's my curiosity about these lists satisfied. Anything you would like me to look into here?

After having ported KPluginSelector to use Goya for showing the widgets it needs to show on the item view, I have worked on removing all unneeded stuff. The code is amazingly more clear now and it now sorts plugins alphabetically. Less code lines, and more features: it can search through the search box on the top. Nowadays this is a must, since it seems plugins are going to appear everywhere KWin, Kopete, Konqueror have a good number of plugins. And more to come…

Since lots of users suggested before that rows were very high, now I made them be less tall. I guess this improves visibility, since you can see more plugins with a fast sight.

So, you can find the patch here. Some screenshots:

This is very probably (almost for sure) going for 4.2 series.

Today we’re proud to announce the winners of the Trolltech Open Source Development Award!

A while ago Espen announced the finalists for the award. The vote is over now and the ballots were counted (electronically).

The third place goes straight to the editor of choice: VIM. Much of Qt’s source code and documentation was loaded, edited, syntax highlighted and saved by Vim, without using the CTRL or X key at all. :wq!

Once platform dependent code is written it may be necessary to implement similar functionality on the remaining platforms. This pattern is typical for Trolltech engineers and therefore the choice of Synergy for the second place comes natural. The lines between different operating systems blur when we use the same keyboard and mouse on Mac OS X, Windows or Linux. That’s very much in the spirit of Qt. As a bonus we have less keyboards and mice to clean from dust and coffee stains.

Once the code is written we submit it and move on to the next task. Unless the unthinkable happens and a bug slipped in. In the hypothetical case of a dangling pointer or memory corruption we might require our winning tool, Valgrind. We don’t need to sprinkle printf() statements into the code anymore, we don’t even need to recompile. We just run the program under Valgrind and it points straight to yoursomeone else’s source code. Hurray!

Here are the reactions from some Trolltech engineers on the results:

They call it a feature, but it’s really just a pain in the ass.