Richard Stallman is giving a keynote talk about Free Software at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit and I am very much looking forward to hearing what he has to say. However, I just read this short post Why free software shouldn't depend on Mono or C#, and to me what it is saying seems incoherent.

On the one hand he says that:

This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. Free C# implementations permit users to run their C# programs on free platforms, which is good.

When you develop a language binding you never know what sort of thing people will develop with them, and it's really fun when people turn up with something. Yesterday I was chatting with Tobias Kappe on irc and he mentioned his Selene project that allows you to create dialogs in C# that are toolkit independent.

Tobias said that he was learning the Qt api, and the project uses the GTK as an alternative toolkit. Here is an example of how you can combine both in a single source file:

I've read various stories about how people are having problems with the KDE4 compositing effects. So for a change, I thought I should describe how I'm a very happy KDE4 user, after I got KWin and Plasma effects to run pretty satisfactorily on the low end VIA7 cpu/gpu combination in my HP 2133 mini laptop.

Yesterday I was getting the smoke bindings lib to build with Qt 4.5 with krege on irc, and one of the errors we were getting was with a private class called 'QMetaObjectExtras' that was failing to compile. I fixed it by making the generator skip that class, but I wondered what was in it. This morning I had a look and it turns out that the new moc has a very interesting and useful new feature; you can now have constructors in your QMetaObjects.

To get a constructor added to the QMetaObject, you just prefix it with Q_INVOKABLE like this:

I've been hacking on deriving QMetaObjects for GObject-Introspection data as I described in a recent blog and am making good progress. I've now built a complete heirarchy of QMetaObjects from the gobject-introspection Clutter module which I've been using for testing.

With the next Akademy and GUADEC being co-located in Gran Canaria, I thought it would be nice to do a bit of 'cross-desktopping'. My Gnome friend, Alberto Ruiz, is organizing the Gtk+ 3.0 Theming API Hackfest with some GTK hackers along with Jens Bache-Wiig from Qt Software. That is really good news as it means they'll be thinking about making the toolkits apis compatible at the look and feel level right from the start.

The implementation of the Ruby runtime in the new 1.9.1 release is a complete rewrite based on a virtual machine, YARV, instead of interpreting the AST directly and slowly like the previous version. So I was expecting that there would be a lot of changes required for QtRuby as it has a fair amount of C interface code. However, it turned out to be not so bad at all, and I'm pleased to announce that the QtRuby, Korundum and Wt::Ruby projects will all now build against Ruby 1.9.1 as well as the older 1.8.x versions.

Have you ever been a bit irritated by a wart on an API, that gives you a slightly uncomfortable feeling when you think about it, and an itch to try an fix it? Once such wart was in the way standard Plasma plasmoid packages worked; you could call the main script any name you like as long as it was 'main'. That meant that if you looked at your Ruby, Python or JavaScript applet code in Kate it didn't have any syntax highlighting as the editor depends on a '.rb', '.py' or '.js' suffix.

Before going to last years Akademy I had planned to use the week to try and start helping out with Ruby support for KDevelop4. In the end I got sidetracked by two things; playing with the Nokia N810 and finding out about a web application development library called 'Wt'. Koen Deforche gave a talk about Wt and I was impressed the way he described how web development usually sucked, and why a widget based desktop style api was better than the usual web page with embedded code approach.

It seems at the moment everyone is looking out for netbooks, Richard Johnson writes about them on his blog today, and I was interested to read the comments. While I was back in the UK for the Christmas break I spent a day in London shopping, and wondered up and down Tottenham Court Rd looking for a netbook to buy. I ended up with an HP 2133 Mini-Note with SuSE 10 preinstalled on it.