p0z3r

Incoming Wedding

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:27:00 +0000

3 months from today and counting...

Comparing a wedding to an air raid is probably not the best analogy as some could take it the wrong way. There's just so much to do and so little time. As long as "she" is happy with the outcome, I'll be happy too. ;)

Back up and running

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:15:00 +0000

So I've been out of touch for a bit with my recent hard drive failures. Let me just say Knoppix has no problems getting data off of hard drives that contain bad blocks. ;) All my data (i.e. mp3s/digital pics) have been saved and most importantly, my vimrc.

I'm now on a new OpenSuse 10.2 install with 3.5.5 as the default. It's working out pretty well so far. I had to do some installation source magic to get mp3 support for the supplied (read crippled) xine backend. This also means I'll be able to hit the ground running with continuing the KDE4 porting of SK and working on existing bugs for the upcoming 3.5.6 release.

And I'd just like to give kmail some credit. I backed up my .kde/share/apps/kmail/ directory and the kmailrc, and after restoring it on the new install, things just worked. Except for the gui not redrawing between getting emails(all 2772 of them I might add), things are back to normal. Maybe I should unsubscribe from some of those lists someday.

Life marching on

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:53:00 +0000

Disclaimer: Beware non-geek post

Recently I've been in the process of purchasing a house. Things have gone pretty well so far with very few hurdles. We should close by Sept. 15th and be in the house by the end of Sept. I also went on vacation to the beach. Got a little sun burnt. Apparently geeks are not meant to be in the sunlight for long periods of time. ;) The big news though is that while on vacation I proposed to my girlfriend of five years. She said yes after she ripped the ring out of the box and expressed her joy. And here's the shot of the ring in all of its glory:

Web Widgets

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 14:14:00 +0000

So I've been following the widget scene for some time now. Keeping tabs on all the ajaxy type stuff and all the myspace-upgrade-to-flash-9-so-we-can-limit-what-you-embed-in-your-page stuff. This on the other hand is something I've been toying with for a short while. And by this.. I mean Meebo. Today they released a alpha/beta of their embeddable web widget. If you have an account on MeeboMe, they provide you some html code to add to your page.. and then any visitor can talk to you and vice/versa. Interested concept that I'm going to try out for a short while. In fact you can try it out right now from my page!

I've seen it be a little buggy where I could send a message out to the visitor, but not able to receive messages back. For the most part though, pretty neat stuff. Enjoy!

Desktop Summit Day One

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 16:26:00 +0000

Yesterday was fun and enlightening. We manned the booth from 9am to 4:30pm. Most of the day was us answering questions, and we received praise for what we(read KDE project) have been doing and how nice our desktop is. I don't think I heard one complaint about any area of the KDE desktop. I fielded questions about ODF in KOffice, Kexi(which I personally have never used), API documentation for ISV's, Mayan calendar support(as a request from a user) and other areas of Linux in general. I got to talk with Marcel Gagné of "Cooking with Linux" fame, Arne Flones from "The Linux Show" and not to mention the other booths at the show such as Mandriva, REALBasic and even Borders. There was even discussions about Women in Linux from a member of LinuxChix. Jes Hall may be getting a ping from them. ;)

Time for Day Two to start. I'll have pictures posted later for everyone to check out Matt and Wade's awesome booth presence.

Short Notice Savior

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Before my departure to Desktop Linux Summit, I needed to get my laptop updated with something new and snazzy in regards to a distro. My first thought was to go with the usual, opensuse. Little did I know that the 10.1 RC1 was still a bit rough unlike the 10.0 RC1 that I had on it. Yast had a mind of its own most of the time and would decide when it wanted to open the software management dialog so that I could install rpms. Fighting with this repetedly while trying to compile KDE from SVN proved difficult, too dificult in the crunch that I was in.

I decided to "run away" (a la monty python) and find something else that could possible run better and have 3.5.2 on it since my chances at compiling it on my 650mhz laptop in 2 days were close to nil. Enter Kanotix! It is a Debian-Sid based live cd with a quick (and I mean under 20 mins full install on my slower than life laptop) graphical installer. Only problem I really had was that the network card I have worked fine in the live cd boot, but not after the install. I new what modules to load to get it running, but others may have difficulties with that. I'd also like to say a big "THANK YOU" to devil in #kanotix. Their community left a nice impression on me in their desire to help _everyone_ in the channel. Those guys were just non stop with others even while helping me in my dire times. I'd definitely suggest checking it out to anyone reading this.

If anyone attending the summit reads this, please feel free to come up to the KDE booth provided by Linspire and say "Hi". We're always interested in chatting it up, or answering any questions you may have, especially SuperKaramba related questions. ;)

SuperKaramba 0.39 posted

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 05:10:00 +0000

With the recent update to KDE being tagged at 3.5.2, I thought it would be a good time to get together a changelog and post an update of SuperKaramba to kdelook.org.
Many bugs were fixed that related to New Stuff. Many new functions and examples of how to use them, such as changing the update interval, passing messages between two different themes, the ability to disable/enable the right click menu on themes, etc.

There was a change to how we put themes in the background when they are opened. We were relying on Qt's lower() method to handle this for us, but that wasn't enough when we had multiple themes opened at once. They'd still be above other windows. We are now using KWin::lowerWindow() to do this, and it works great! Using that is somewhat frowned upon, but I've talked this over with a couple of the kwin developers and it is really the only solution b/c of the speciality of the window type we are trying to achieve with desktop applets. I plan to write up a quick spec in the near future on what I think we'll need for kde4/plasma regarding window types.

I've also got an idea on how to spark some interest into SuperKaramba theme development, but I'm awaiting some things to come through first. Stay tuned.

First SuperKaramba Games

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 23:40:00 +0000

Before I worked on SuperKaramba's codebase, I was a user. One of the things I've been waiting to see developed is a SK theme that is an interactive game. That wait is now over and the results are simply amazing for the, not one, but two that have recently come out.

Matt, the Liquid Weather author, released Su-per-Doku and Jouni, known as Chryseus on IRC, has released 15 pieces as a SK theme (and it even has smooth animations when the blocks move positions =).

I really want to spark some interest in more games coming about and that is one reason for this blog entry. The other reason is to say that real life is keeping me busy and distracted a bit from working on SK bug fixes, including the notorious "always on top" issue that I thought was fixed. Alas my "fix" causes side effects that are very unexpected such as not being able to position themes under dock widgets such as kicker. I've talked with Lubos about the problem and it seems that there isn't a very good way to resolve the problem within the current toolset I have available.

Online Music Purchasing

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 16:16:00 +0000

So, this morning I saw a commercial to try out Rhapsody for 14days free. I dropped by www.51.freerhapsody.com to check it out. In the offer you have to present a credit card in order to get the 14 days. At this point I decided to go visit the main site, www.rhapsody.com, to see if there were any previews of the service. Low and behold, the previews don't work in Konqueror. It states that I need to be using Firefox 1.0.1, which I can't specify as a user agent(1.0 is the only one listed). Safari is also listed, but for version 1.3. So I'm not even going to try out Rhapsody because I don't have a supported browser. In case you're not aware, Rhapsody is Real's online music offering.

I've never bought any music from an online music store before so I wanted to test the waters. Now I had heard some time ago about Bleep. Warp records does all their mp3 purchasing through them, and Warp has one of my favorite artists, Autechre. So I thought why not try out Bleep to see how they perform with Konqueror. Simply Amazing! The preview of tracks worked great, purchasing was easy and they'll even package up an album into on giant zip file for you to download.. all for $9.99 USD.

My favorite part about Bleep, is the EULA for the downloaded content:

You shall be entitled to export, burn or copy Products solely for personal, noncommercial use.

I've not tried any other offerings at this time, but I feel that it is important for Konqueror to support as many as possible as digital content distribution becomes a very well known way of obtaining products/services. Maybe others could share their experiences as well.

Oi veh Xgl

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 07:18:00 +0000

Xgl Xgl Xgl..

Seems like we all just need to really think about how we're going to intelligently use/develop OpenGL in Xorg. I know it is more complicated than that both philosophically and productively, but it's worth mentioning.

I have faith that it will come about in some fashion, but seeing how I don't have much experience in the internals personally I'll just provide the links for everyone to peruse.

FreeBSD and SK

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 07:14:00 +0000

So, I finally got an install of FreeBSD going. Albeit in an emulator, it should still suffice for testing. First thing I've noticed is that the ram usage is off. I'm seeing negative values. If any of you *BSD users are also seeing this or have gotten around it, please let me know. This is my attempt at helping support more than just linux with SK. Hopefully some good will come of this.

GMRisk

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Thu, 24 Nov 2005 19:46:00 +0000

Completely off topic of kde stuff..
but how neat is this?!

http://www.ashotoforangejuice.com/gmrisk.html

Looking over the developer documentation of Google Code, I found this gem.
Risk using Google Maps. Remember to set your user agent to Safari if you are using Konqueror, otherwise you won't see anything on that site.

SK 0.37 Release + Cold

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:08:00 +0000

As kde 3.5 development has completed, I felt compelled to make one last independent release of SK for the masses. There are some people out there that won't have 3.5 for some time still, and they too needed the bugs squashed. So, with no further adieu, the 0.37 release is out. Websites have been updated. There are a few things that may make it into 3.5.1 as new features, but I have to spend some time reviewing patches first.

In other news, it's a cold day in Ohio. First major snow was today. It was that sticky wet kind of snow. Just in time for the holiday travel that I have to endure.

RC1 is out

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 21:26:00 +0000

RC1 is out for testing. This being the case, it appears that compiling kdeutils is a bit borked. Reason why is b/c somehow RC1 picked up the first unicode fix we committed, but not the final solution. Regarding anyone that is compiling fresh, I'd just like to apologize now. It is fixed in SVN, so it will be in the next release. Also, the NetBSD patches should be in and a fix for a Solaris compilation bug.

Keep submitting bugs and we'll keep fixing them!

Py_UNICODE_SIZE

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 23:06:00 +0000

Unicode continues to be a learning experience. There was a recent blog post in which a single comment brought to light certain shortcomings in the SK input box. Of those, the big one was unicode output was broken. It was outputting char type instead of unicode type.

To give you some background on what is happening, you can read this mailing list post:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-May/053264.html

Needless to say Alex and I ended up spending some time on this and figured out there is some differences between how some distributions define Py_UNICODE_SIZE. On our systems (gentoo and opensuse), it is defined as 4 bytes. Some other distributions *cough, Mandriva, cough* define it as 2 bytes. I think we finally have it nailed down, but if anyone is running SVN 3.5 branch, please update and report any bugs you may find with it. Btw, if you want to see for yourself what your system has defined, just grep Py_UNICODE_SIZE pyconfig.h on your system.

Not only will this hopefully fix the unicode problems, but it will also allow Kaddressamba to be a reality when 3.5 ships.

Better late than never

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 02:00:00 +0000

Well, here's a couple of the OSDW pics that I promised. First pic is a whiteboard with some kde4 brainstorming. Talk about impromptu! This is one of the reasons I really wanted to go. Face to face idea bouncing. I wish this could happen more often.

Second pic shows some of the kde hackers that were able to attend. The two on the left I don't remember, but I think one of them is Adam (manyoso). In the middle is Ian Geiser. Then right of him is Matt and then Wade. Big thanks again to Wade for transporting some of us around in his pimped convertible rental.

OSDW OMG

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 21:17:00 +0000

Wow what an experience this has been so far. Interesting talks, brainstorming and the obligatory brewery visitation. Matt's flight was overbooked, but he still made it the next morning. Linspire's support and appreciation has been no less than awesome!

I had a discussion with one of the Linspire programmers about a network manager program he wrote in python that manages interfaces on your laptop, switching them based on interaction and events from DBUS. Not only does it handle things nicely, but it also sit in the system tray and apparently has a kcontrol module. I thought this was very interesting considering that it was written in python and with all the recent discussion on the different network monitoring apps recently on the kde-devel list. Why can't we get all these guys together to make one "kick ass" network management application that handles wifi, wep, wpa, etc. I can dream can't I?

Also, with some interest about networked virtual folders and things of that nature that sit on your desktop and are interacted by others across the network in plasma, I started writing a proof of concept SK theme that uses network programming modeling game design ideas(i.e.udp client/server). This proof of concept will emulate Pong, although I'll have to implement the collision code somehow and then I'll release it upon kdelook.

Pictures will be posted on the next entry of some of the happenings that I've been able to attend.

T minus 2 days

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 14:20:00 +0000

2 days until I'm off to San Diego for OSDW. It should be a great time. Although we don't have aKademy here in the USA, this is going to be the next best thing. I can't wait to meet up with other kde hackers and learn some more "tricks of the trade". IRC can only get you so far. Real time communication face-to-face is always more productive.

SK has been getting chopped up a bit lately. In fact most things don't work right now. We're implementing a true xml format for the theme files currently. This should make things a bit easier to work with in the grand scheme of things. Maybe also pave the way for a theme editor utility should someone be so inclined to do so. ;)

I've also been thinking about window decorations again, but have been a bit too busy to get started. I have a few ideas I'd like to expand upon from the Smooth Blend deco I wrote. It requires me learning how to use graphics programs such as inkscape however. This may prove to be my achilles heal. Only time will tell, but be on the lookout.

KDE/GNOME/Pictures/Beer

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 04:40:00 +0000

Ohio LinuxFest has come and gone. Late nights of beer and software discussions over. I was lucky enough to make some new friends that just happen to be involved with the Gnome Foundation and are also located in the Columbus area, Sean Harshbarger and Aaron Bedra. Not to mention getting to know Ryan Quinn of Symphony OS. Although he and I talked a bit, the bar was so loud that I only caught some of the conversation.

I was able to get into a few pictures throughout the day and the evening. The first batch of pictures are mentioned on the Ohio LinuxFest site and are posted here. There are more pictures that were taken of everyone having a good time, but I don't have any way to locate them. Maybe they'll either show up on the planet.kde.org or planet.gnome.org sites? Be on the lookout!
(btw, if you took pictures, please drop me a line or email me)

KDE Voyeurs

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Sat, 24 Sep 2005 23:04:00 +0000

This weekend marks the official inclusion of yours truly into the myscreen club. Myscreen is a cool little project to display what KDE people (developers, artists, documenters, etc.) have on their desktop by displaying a current screenshot. It is updated every 5-15 mins for most people on the site. I have mine set to 30 mins currently, but that may change. Personally when I was just a user, I was always curious of what the developers were using on their desktops such as window decoration, icons, style, etc. Thanks to dannya, you now can! Awesome project dannya, keep it up!

DJ no more + Heavy Metal

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 05:10:00 +0000

Tonight I was able to attend a show that displayed that heavy metal isn't dead yet. The band is a side project of a well known non-mainstream band called Ween. The Moistboyz displayed much of the same sillyness that comes out of Ween via "Deaner". Good time, fun music and tasty beverages.

In other music related news.. I am no longer a DJ. I have changed professions and become a MC. The upcoming title track will be called "Supah Karambah". Not sure if it will be a top ten hit or not, but I will have "the coolest plasma/desktop setup around" Wade. And btw, have my beer ready yet?

Lastly, SK crashes are getting resolved one at a time. Mostly thanks to the help of Vinay, Pedro and Matt. Thanks again guys for all your help!

SK refactoring and OSDW

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 20:39:00 +0000

Yesterday, there was a fairly productive meeting with some people that are interested in helping with integrating SK into Plasma. We came up with a pretty good idea of how to move forward. It mostly involves changing the build structure and begin separating functionality that caused problems in SuperKaramba "classic".

Just prior to the meetup, thanks to Vinay Khaitan and Matt Broadstone, SuperKaramba was ported to Qt4. Although it at least launches the theme dialog, it is by far from functional. It will probably be non-functional for a little while with all the changes taking place. Btw, this isn't happening in the 3.5 branch. It is being refactored, ripped apart and put back together again in /trunk/KDE/kdeutils/superkaramba/. Here's the obligatory screenshot of it running:

The rough draft of the proposed "going forward" plan will be posted on the plasma wiki later today.

That brings us to OSDW. There was a mention on the panel-devel list about buying drinks for people attending plasma meetings, being able to prove it and show up in San Diego. So, Wade Olson, I'll be seeing you in October with a smile on my face! That being said, I would now like to ask for someone to help make Matt Broadstone's dream a reality. Mr Broadstone is an avid KDE hacker working on the Plasma team with myself and many others. His finances are a bit shy and would appreciate any help in getting his butt to San Diego. Donations are appreciated, but please direct them to his page or maybe through the KDE donations page. If you do the latter be sure to name him in your contribution.

Vacation

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:37:00 +0000

I recently got back from vacation. We ended up going to Florida to see the sites and be tourists.
We visited Disney and the Kennedy Space Center. We cooled off at a water park and the hotel pool. Somehow we missed Hurricane Katrina by a couple hundred miles, and made it back in time to go see Phantom of the Opera!

Too bad I'm missing akademy right now, but we did get a rough game plan ready on Sunday for what SK work needs to be done in the short term. Direction is always a Good Thing(tm).

openSUSE vs. Kubutu

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Sat, 20 Aug 2005 00:24:00 +0000

I recently had a need to update my laptop so I figured I'd try a few distros out that I had been hearing a bit of buzz.

Being a Suse user for the last year or so, my first thought was to try out the 10.0 beta1 of openSUSE. The install was pretty nice and clean. Even hitting ESC to see the details during boot had a nice touch of a boot splash background. To my dismay, there was invariable problems getting my wireless card or any wireless card working. There's a list of "most annoying bugs" page that I skipped over at first. After asking some questions in #opensuse, I was directed to that page to find out hotplug support and pcmcia devices were having no luck. Needless to say, that just doesn't cut it for a laptop, and it being a beta I should expect a things such as this.

Moving on to Kubuntu. Nice install as well. One thing I really liked is that there was only 1 cd to work with. openSUSE had 4 cds to do the install. There was a problem I ran into though that had me puzzled. After the initial install, it tells you to reboot to update packages. So following the directions I did just that. It started to boot, and then partway through the boot, the lcd screen starts cycling like a television with bad reception. This made it _very_ difficult to read the terminal. After giving up the installation, I was going to attempt to do an FTP install of Suse 9.3 whereby I removed my wireless card and relied on my wired pcmcia network card. Well, not paying attention during the boot, I missed the timeout before booting from the hard drive. Good thing I missed it too! My Kubuntu install amazingly just worked?! I think there was a problem with either the wireless card during boot, or it relied on a wired connection to do package updates on that first boot. Either way, I now have Kubuntu on my laptop and its currently checking out and compiling the KDE 3.5 branch as we speak.

Now both distros have their high points. Suse with years of experience, not too mention Yast. Kubunutu with its debian base set of tools such as apt-get and the same common codebase as Ubuntu. I'm sticking with Kubuntu for now because I can't deal with pcmcia voodoo while trying to get a KDE 3.5 demo box up and running.

Btw, Ubuntu just released a new version the day after I burned Hoary, and the openSUSE 10.0 beta2 came out two days after my attempt to install it.
So for all I know, these issues have all been fixed.

0.37 RC2 is out!

noreply@blogger.com (p0z3r) — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 16:38:00 +0000

After a couple very late nights, SuperKaramba is now at Release Candidate 2. You can grab it from kdelook or from our project site. If everything goes well, this will turn into the 0.37 final release.

Last night marks the inclusion of SuperKaramba into KDE 3.5. *applause* Just in time for the Alpha release on Friday. That being said, we've not decided if we want to try and do one more release before the 3.5 feature freeze on Aug 25th. We really need to shift our gears and start crackin' on Plasma.

Another change in SVN happened last night as well. Smooth Blend has also become part of the KDE 3.5 release. An updated package will be posted to kdelook when I get to it after the weekend.

Pending any errors for either inclusion, I'll be crossing my fingers. Everything built fine for me after a few changes, so hopefully everyone will have access to these on Friday. Not too bad for going from an end user to a KDE developer in just 6 months. ;)

In other news...
I'm going out of town to a wedding for the weekend. If something breaks and you post in our project forum, you'll probably get a response on Monday evening.