KDE on SWiK

Mozilla Qt Port is available for testing

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:23:16 -0700

Great work has been done by the Mozilla and Nokia mobile browser teams. As result we have a working Qt port based on the latest Mozilla trunk 1.9.x. The port is fully compatible with the official Qt 4.4 release.

Interview: MarkMail Indexes KDE Mailinglist Archives

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:16:00 -0700

Several weeks ago MarkMail, a project sponsored and run by Mark Logic, started indexing the KDE mailinglist archives. After about a week of hard work, the KDE archives are now directly searchable from MarkMail. Besides interesting analytics, this brings some powerful search capabilities to the table. Read on for a short interview with Jason Hunter who was responsible for engineering on the project.

Hi Jason! Could you give a little introduction of yourself and Mark Logic?

Hi, KDE! I'm a Silicon Valley hacker. I've been working at Mark Logic for about 5 years now, since the days it was an early startup. We sell MarkLogic Server, a special-purpose database built for content (where "content" is the stuff that's textual, hierarchical, irregular, and not often regularly repeating - like books, articles, and presentations). We use XML as our native data type instead of tables, and pride ourselves on performing very well at high scale.

Until about a year ago I worked with our customers to help them write content apps. I had the idea that we could use the core server to build a public email archive repository, using some of the product features to push the envelope of what people had done before with email archives. That's where MarkMail came from. We started with 4,000,000 emails from the Apache Software Foundation mailing lists.

I've been involved with open source for a long time, leading JDOM and participating as a member of the Apache Software Foundation, so it felt natural to put MarkMail to work initially on the problem of getting more value from open source mailing lists.

Konqueror showing MarkMail's search results

Why did you decide to grab the KDE mailinglists?

Cornelius Schumacher started the ball rolling when he asked if we could load the KDE lists. OK, that's not quite true. We have a long list of communities whose lists we hope to load, and KDE was actually on that list since the very beginning. It's just that one day in April we heard from Cornelius, and the next day received a separate request from Adriaan de Groot. That popped KDE to the top of the priority list.

The KDE mailinglists aren't the largest you have at MarkMail, but they sure aren't small. Did that pose any problems?

Yes, KDE is Big. At current count there's 2.7 million KDE emails. Hosting those emails isn't an issue (we're designed to scale to hundreds of millions) but we had to work hard to gather clean historical archives. We have one person on the MarkMail team dedicated only to this (we like to call him an email archaeologist. I'm not sure he's happy about that nickname).

Why the challenge? Well the most authoritative archives for KDE were the web-based Pipermail archives (I'm using past tense because I'd like to think that today the most authoritative archives are in MarkMail). Pipermail exposes a set of "mbox" files for each archived list. Very handy. The mbox file format is a classic storage format for email and a format from which we can readily load. But as we found out, the mbox files aren't really mbox and there was a lot of post-processing we had to do. Some examples:

Pipermail "scrubs" attachments from its mbox files. Instead of placing the attachment content into the message as normal, it gets placed at an external URL with a marker in the message dictating where you can find it. We had to recognize the scrubbed references, fetch the attachments, and then inline the contents. Sounds simple, doesn't it? It probably would be if the external links were always accurate. Sometimes we could guess and fix things and sometimes we couldn't - bonus points go to anyone who finds an email in MarkMail mentioning an attachment that doesn't really exist. Extra bonus points if you know our search syntax well enough to write a query that directly lists those emails.
Then there's the problem with character encodings in old emails. If you look at an mbox file it seems like ASCII, but in fact it's a binary file. That's because each message may have a different character encoding for its body (or even portion of the body). The Pipermail list archiver didn't always realise this, and fixing that was non-trivial and imperfect.

There are more examples, but I don't need to bore you. I should make clear it's nothing special with KDE or even with Pipermail. Turns out if you load a couple million emails you'll see at least one example of almost every problem that's ever existed. It's the same for every community, just with different challenges.

Graphically drilling down to a specific date

You mentioned pushing the envelope. Can you give an example of that?

Sure, here's a good example: When you do a search, besides getting the top 10 most relevant emails, you see lots of analytics. You see a histogram chart showing the number of messages matching your query each month across time. With it you can watch trends for lists, people, ideas, or any combination. Every query also shows the top senders, lists, attachment types, and message types for the messages matching the query. You can learn who's an expert on a topic, on what lists something is being discussed, which people are most involved on lists, and so on. By dragging across bars on the graph you can limit the view to just a particular time period. You can also click on any person's name or list name to limit the search. It's convenient to start with a simple query and refine interactively.

We've also strived to make the site easy to navigate. You can hit "n" and "p" to go to the next and previous search results. To move up and down the thread view you hit "j" and "k" (a homage to vim users). If you find an attachment (search for ext:pdf) you can view it inline in your browser.

Oh, and here's a little-known tip. If your screen is sufficiently wide, we give you all three panes (analytics, results, messages) at once. If not, you get the "slide".

Do you have any tips for the KDE community to take advantage of the available capabilities in MarkMail?

The first thing to remember is that you can limit your view to KDE-related mails by going to kde.markmail.org. The use of a subdomain adds an implicit constraint to all your queries.

Another is that you can do negations. For example, KDE has a huge number of automated emails generated by bug reports and code check-ins. You can search without those by adding -type:bugs -type:checkins. For example: http://kde.markmail.org/search/?q=-type%3Abugs+-type%3Acheckins

Lastly, if there's any other lists people want to see, let us know at our feedback page. You can track what we're up to at our blog.

Thank you very much, Jason, both for the work Mark Logic and you've been doing, and of course for granting this interview!

Open Containing Folder in Firefox under Linux (or X Window, period)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:14:38 -0700

Are you running Firefox in X-Window with multiple Desktop Environments? Here is an example of how to get Firefox to open a file with your file manager of choice.

KDE Bug Tracking System

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:02:51 -0700

Kubuntu.org.br

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:02:49 -0700

In the flow

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:18:39 -0700

Sometimes when you think you’re on to something, and you end up in the flow, so bad, that it overshadows everything you’re doing. Ariya and I were working on optimizations in Graphics View and stumbled over an optimization for clipping that made a certain benchmark run 40 - forty - times faster. The patch has no known side effects, comes perfectly for free, and even opens up a couple of more optimizations we can do.

I couldn’t think of anything else on the way home from work. When I came home, I ate dinner, and immediately ran over to my home desktop, installed Git, and tried to find some way to continue where I left off.

It’s a wonderful feeling. If this patch really works this well, it’ll make it into Qt upstream, for everybody’s benefit. Mix that together with a lot of other optimization work that we’ve done, and hopefully things will truly fly.

I, for one, am looking forward to Qt 4.5 :-).

too much Qt going on!

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:18:55 -0700

A great deal of things are happening for Qt right now. Very exciting news:
Qt frontend for Mozilla engine (or, rather, has finally been dusted off and updated) Now we have two of the best browser backends to choose from. (or three if you want to use that ActiveX thing)

and

Nokia gives out free N810 devices to developers in Akademy 2008. Wow, thats a heap of n810’s to throw around.

Too bad Kate forgot to mention the other talks from Nokia:

Harald - Programming for embedded Linux
Andreas - How Graphics View Works
Simon - QtWebKit! (We are part of Nokia now).

and not to forget about former Trolls

Girish - OpenDocument support in KWord 2
and playboy Zack’s talk on Gallium3D - Graphics Done Right

And if course, I cannot really yet mention all the really powerful great stuff being developed at Qt Sofware/Nokia.. but I really want too! Because its just too cool and will blow your minds.

Akademy

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:12:59 -0700

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully booked schedule so I won't be able to actually make it to Mechelen for either days of the conference. Sad because unless we have a conference in Antwerpen some day soon it's probably going the to be the closest FOSS event to home.

Opendocument format

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:16:31 -0700

The Open Document Format (ODF) is an ISO standardized method of storing rich text and other office data. The ODF standard has grown in popularity over the last years quite a bit. Many governments around the world have passed laws stating that any sort of communication between the government and its people has to be done in ODF.
The attraction for ODF is strong, it is the first standard in this field that is completely open and it has a wide enough coverage that you can store your word processor and even most DTP documents in it without loosing data.
I find the part where the standard is open very important, as an individual I have been able to sit on the ODF technical committee and I have been able to co-decide the direction of the standard. Various list-item related stuff has a finger of mine in there, for example.
Equally important is that everyone who wants to can implement ODF support in his or her application. All the information is available to do so, for free, on the web.

So, for end users the biggest advantage of the uptake of ODF is that more and more applications will standardize on this one format and thus applications will be much more interoperable. OpenOffice and KOffice are the early adopters here, I expect that many more applications will start to generate or consume ODF in some form or other. For example to export an abstract dataset to a nicely formatted document ready for printing, or the web.

Currently rich-text is mostly exchanged between different applications as html. Unfortunately html was not designed for this purpose. Sending an email with html markup kind of works. But you should take a look at the html that Qt or Word generate. Loads of extra non-html tags are written out just to put the layout information somewhere when html doesn’t have any equivalent features.
Those made up tags will be lost when the html is opened by another application than the one that created it.
Longer term I expect to see email applications to send ODF as well as html in their emails. Just so they can use the much broader ODF set of features.

Interestingly, a text exchange format gets more useful when more applications support it. This should be obvious
To speed up ODF recognition Qt 4.5 will ship with an ODF writer. Qt’s text module turns into a one stop document generation API where you can use QTextCursor to create your document via a nice API and you can then export the created QTextDocument to ODF ready to be opened by any opendocument implementation. Naturally exporting to plain text and html are still supported, as is printing to PDF.

Support for writing ODF in Qt sets a trend that we believe in the OpenDocument Format and we think its useful to have for our customers, the open source community and all end-users out there.

I always think its important to point out what our current solution does not do, just to avoid disappointment. The QTextDocumentWriter has support for each feature in Qt. So you can expect all features you can access using QTextCursor to be exported. This, however, is a subset of features in ODF. Qt’s ODF-writer does not aim to support each and every feature in ODF. So don’t expect you can write spreadsheets or some obscure ODF-text features that Qt doesn’t have.

There is work going on to make an ODF Reader too for a future release, the aim is to support all the features we write out but also try to map ODF features to Qt’s feature set where it makes sense.
The writer is in the unstable snapshots already, and will be released in 4.5. You can find the documentation online at; doc.trolltech.com/main-snapshot/qtextdocumentwriter.html

openSUSE // KDE 4.1 / Cover Switch

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:08:24 -0700

igorschwarzmann posted a photo:

This is the Cover Switch effect in KDE 4.1 for ALT+TAB. It's actually the only cover anything feature that is actually making sense, but I do suspect that there is the same effect/feature for OS X that I don't know of.

plasma quickies, SoC screencast

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:13:37 -0700

I figured that if I'm doing this whole blogging thing again, I may as well keep you all up to date with what we're doing in Plasma on a regular basis. ;)

Today the initial support for wallpaper plugins went in, which means that now you can us folderview as a full screen containment ... and get a wallpaper. Yes, I can hear you all screaming in joy now. I worked up the basic design, put it to the mailing list for review and Petri Damstén claimed the task and managed to get the first fruits in today.

<spoiler>The QEdje guys and I have plans for wallpaper plugins at Akademy.</spoiler>

Jason Stubbs has poked his head up again and has fixed a bunch of things, including a rather mind-numbing bug in the system tray introduced with Qt 4.4.1. Sometimes I feel that the system tray is the $DEITY's way of laughing at us.

Marco's been plugging away at making buttons and tabbars and what not more pretty and Plasmalike; I believe the goal there is to get the weather applet well under way for 4.2.

Services are starting to pop up as well in places like the tasks DataEngine (used to build taskbars and other windowy things) and the nowplaying DataEngine. Alex Merry has been busy pointing out every bug he can find in Service, and often fixing them too, while I added the ability to associate widgets with Service operations. This allows, for instance, the play button to automagically become disabled when the nowplaying Service notices it can't play anything. Neat stuff.

This is also one of the places that the JOLIE service framework will end up plugged into.

Google Gadgets are now supported via a ScriptEngine in kdebase thanks to Dong Tiger. Unversal canvas, here we come.

And finally, we've started merging Summer of Code projects already, with two in trunk right now. In fact, I did up a little screencast showing Extenders (by Rob Scheepmaker) and Screen Saver Widgets (by Chani Armitage). Enjoy!

Update! Apparently sound is not working for some with the avi version, so here is the source ogg straight out of qt-recordmydesktop. Hopefully that works better for those experiencing issues with the avi video, though it is a little bit bigger of a file, by ~15% or so.

Now I'm off to the coffee shop for some quiet time to work on Akademy presentations.

Note: all of the above references work that will not appear until KDE 4.2 is released, slated to happen in January of 2009.

KDE Commit-Digest for 6th July 2008

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:09:45 -0700

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for moving of applets in Plasma panels. Various work, such as autocompletion and bookmarks (shared with Konqueror) support in the basic Web Browser Plasmoid. Progress in the "Plasma on new form factors" project. A new "LCD Weather Station" Plasma applet makes an appearance. The Powersave and KWeather utilities are ported to Plasma. More work on the "Cube" KWin-Composite effect, including a configuration dialog and keyboard navigation. Work on the multiple choice mode and internet-based translation in Parley. The new "Message List View" becomes more usable, with work on skinning in KMail. Initial "biased playlist" support, work on the new "mass tagging" feature, and extensions to the Last.fm service in Amarok 2. Experimental work on video capture in Phonon, with a "snapshot" function added to the video widget. KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop4) gets early integration with the Kross scripting engine. Further expansion of the D-Bus interface, and more work on the Plasma applet for KTorrent. More work on guide line manipulation, and a new "Paragraph Tool" for better interaction with larger blocks of text in KOffice. More work on the "Presenter View" in KPresenter. The start of a "Table of Contents" implementation in KWord, with the first steps towards a multi-page table shape in KSpread. Initial support for image display, and full support for UTF-8 text in the Kexi web forms component. A NEPOMUK-based file watch service is moved into kdereview. Read the rest of the Digest here.

a brief history of time beauty in kde 4

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:20:48 -0700

In The Beginning There was a Desktop ...

KDE wasn't always the shiniest tool in the shed. While KDE 1 certainly looked more coherent and generally nicer than most things on UNIX or Linux at the time, it wasn't .. you know .. gorgeous. Things got better over time, certainly, but with KDE 4 some of us decided to try something new and consciously grow the focus of KDE development to include a few key traits we'd been lacking.

At the end of March in 2005 a bunch of people (15, if I recall correctly) gathered for an ad-hoc meeting in Berlin, Germany. There were artists, usability experts, developers, business managers and users. We all had one thing in mind: the future of KDE.

The meeting was by private invite and kept quiet until it was over. This pissed some people off, and rightfully so. KDE's inner culture wasn't as transparent then as it is now, and that showed in this case. But more than anything else, the people organizing it were concerned that it might fail completely ... or succeed in ways we couldn't imagine. It was such a wild experiment that nobody knew how it would turn out.

(Side note .. I do wish they'd carried it out in a more transparent manner from the start and had a bit more confidence in the whole process, but it was a good lesson for everyone. The greater transparency in general in KDE since that era is a nice sign of progress.)

... And Then We Took Berlin

Besides a cute wiki and a beautiful logo, what did we emerge with from that meeting? Well, a few projects that you might have heard of got their start there: Oxygen, Marble and Plasma to name three. Some usability innovations, such as solutions for the select-with-single-click-activation dilemma, also emerged during that meeting.

I summed the results up this way in the wrap-up story for theDot:

"This first APPEAL meeting provided a hot-house for focused, interdisciplinary KDE development. Looking forward, the group aims to grow organically in scope as others with a similar drive for realizing visual beauty, interface clarity and technical creativity in KDE come together. Additional APPEAL meetings are already being planned."

KDE already had a reputation for technical excellence at the framework level, showing prescience with DCOP (later inspiring D-Bus), KParts, KStandardDirs (leading eventually to Kiosk user and group management) and much more. We wanted to add "excellence at the interface level" to that, and to accomplish that we listened to users large and small, usability experts and artists.

We defined targets like "visual beauty", "interface clarity", "interdisciplinary development" and "technical creativity" nearly three and a half years ago as goals for KDE 4. We then set about to spread this meme throughout KDE.

We took an arguably slower bottom-up approach to this because we wanted the results to be sustainable and honest, not a splash of paint that gets done once in a hurry and then forgotten about, left to pixel-rot away over the years. We also didn't want to risk creating schisms in the various project teams in the process. This is the principle of "don't break what's working to fix what's broken".

The Results Are (Coming) In

When you look at what is going on today in KDE it's evident that we've been largely successful in getting this meme embedded in the DNA of the KDE team.

From in-application animations and window compositing to SVG theming and canvas centric applications to a much greater sensitivity towards usability issues it's become pervasive and noticeable. That is a success everyone involved with KDE is responsible for equally, not just the few people who trekked to Berlin in '05 and certainly not just the programmers.

(Speaking of programmers, we're still rocking the frameworks side of life with things like Solid, Phonon, ThreadWeaver and Nepomuk, of course.)

We are still working on coordinating all fronts equally well, but the jump in both looks and functionality between KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.1 are pretty compelling. While there are a few features in KDE 3.5 that aren't in 4.1, there are many, many more features that are in 4.1 which aren't in 3.5.

As for visuals, the two releases don't even compare: it's Apples to oranges (excuse the pun ;) with 4.1 being widely hailed as visually more satisfying. It's also more themable, brandable and adjustable than KDE 3 ever was despite the streamlining.

The jump from 4.0 to 4.1 to the bleeding edge development going into 4.2 right now clearly defines the vector we're on: a near vertical climb skywards.

Why this topic now?

I'm talking about this right now because there has been a growing murmur about beauty in Free software of late:

Mark Shuttleworth put out a call to make the user experience of desktop Linux even "prettier" than that of Apple's Mac OS.'

Analyst Stephen O'Grady agrees with Mark, and even notes that he wrote about this exact issue back in March of '06 in a blog entry entitled "Pretty is a Feature".

In one KDE 4.1 review written by Darryl Taft for eWeek, two and two were put together when Darryl wrote: 'Perhaps KDE is working toward that goal.'

And so we finally get to the punchline: Yes, we are working towards that goal.

We started building the necessary momentum and support structure for this push three and a half years ago when we we set for ourselves a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) at the Appeal meeting:

"Put people in front of two machines: one running KDE and the other MacOS. Let them experience both options from log in to shut down, and have them leave wanting KDE."

Are we there yet? I don't have empirical data to point to (though I personally feel "not yet"), but I think we're getting damn close. Most importantly we have the right mindset and the right trajectory to meet that BHAG. That's something very few other software projects can say with similar confidence right now, F/OSS or otherwise.

And this is why KDE is so valuable in the F/OSS ecosystem: we have a culture of anticipating the needs of the near future and working on quality solutions for them before most people even wake up to the issue.

Be Free .. (To Sell KDE)

Now if this sounds like I'm trying to sell the Shuttleworths, O'Gradys and Tafts of the world on our vision and our team, you're right. There it is, I've said it openly. =)

We have something hot going on: something that scales up and down the hardware spectrum, something that is looking sexier practically by the minute, and something that is built for the future ... something that we have oodles more room to explore within and well laid plans for executing on that.

Most importantly, the ability to create that "something" is part of our culture right alongside "make great library frameworks".

That culture is precisely what the F/OSS desktop needs right now, and we should be building our successes on it together.

p.s. Maybe it's time for a second (more open) Appeal meeting.

openSUSE11 // KDE 4.1 / Woobbly Windows Effect

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 09:07:09 -0700

igorschwarzmann posted a photo:

That's an out of the box effect in KDE 4.1. As you see, it works even pretty good with my crappy graphic card (GMA945), but since Intel is providing pretty good open source drivers it works out pretty good (openGL 1.1).

openSUSE11 // KDE 4.1 / Control Panel