Tales from the Flight Log

Spring flight season is over, since it’s now over 9000 degrees farenheit in the great deserts of Arizona. We’re making a plan to head out to BALLS this year, but that’s not until September, and I won’t be launching then, so there is plenty of time to rebuild the Arcas and see what else we can put together on the Smoke.

Arcas HV Flight 1

• April 25, 2012
• CTI I170-13, 3 grain Cesaroni Pro38
• Successful Level 1 Certification
• Predicted Apogee: 4300ft
• Actual Apogee: 3000ft (Estimate)

Certification flight, sponsored by Geoffrey Kerbel of SSS. Preparation on site with replacement rail guides and friction fitting of nosecone and body tubes. Launched with Geoffrey’s electronics.

Successful event at a guess of 3000 feet (4300 feet predicted by OpenRocket)

High level winds blew it to the east 0.75 miles for recovery. Recovered successfully with minimal damage:

• Two fins popped loose on landing

Geoffrey deemed it safe to fly again, since the only damage was repairable on-site with 15 minute epoxy, NAR level 1 certification achieved.

Repair 1

Summer rebuild.

• Rebuild lower body tube:
• Removed all four fins

• Sanded and cleaned them up before re-attaching them.

• Began research on electronics install and/or dual deploy design.
• Began research and testing of paint designs.

Nike Smoke Prelaunch Preparation

• Measured and designed in OpenRocket
  • .ork file available here

Began some limited research in to converting the Smoke in to a dual deploy. * Rocket is too stubby for dual deploy to be completely feasible * Limited room for both drogue shoot and motor to justify needing a dual-deploy

Shopped for motors. It’s a 54mm mount, I currently own a 3-grain Cesaroni Pro38. As far as I can tell, as a result, our best choices are:

CTI 3-Grain 38mm Motors

This is our cheapest option. We have a CTI 3-Grain Pro38, so we’d just need a 54-38mm motor mount adapter, which is like 15$ from whatsuphobbies.

• CTI I170
  • Apogee: 779m
• CTI I180 Skidmark
  • Apogee: 662m
• CTI I566 VMax
  • Apogee: 679m

They’re aren’t overtly exciting, about the same apogee as the Arcas achieved on the same motors. They’re about 40$ a pop, and that’s pretty reasonable to get this thing up in the air.

CTI 5-Grain 38mm Motors

This is the border between Level 1 and Level 2 and aren’t much more expensive than the 3-Grain rockets. 5-Grain 38mm contains a lot of really interesting combinations, such as everyone’s favorite the CTI I540-WT and a few Level 2 rockets like the CTI J270-G.

That J270 is probably a good, cheap candidate for a Level 2 certification.

CTI 3-Grain 54mm Motors

This will require me to get an NAR level 2 certification, since all 3-grain 54mm are either a J or K impulse. They’re also a lot more expensive. They also go three times higher than 3-Grain 38mm Motors. It’s also supersonic.

• CIT J1520
  • Apogee: 1212m
  • This would probably be a good 54mm Level 2 certification flight.
• CIT J295
  • Apogee: 1617m
• CTI K360
  • Apogee: 1484m

This post is part of an ongoing series about developments and discussions in Qt.

Some parts of this report are still under discussion, and don’t necessarily reflect the final state of Qt 5. The target audience is people involved in Qt development itself, but without the time to follow everything that happens, and others with a strong interest in Qt, Qt 5, and the community.

This week we cover some more of the QPA API changes and conventions, discussion of implementation of icon themes, packaging concerns, and exception handling. The number of interesting feature commits is still declining, which reflects the focus on bug fixing and stability towards Qt 5.0.

QPA API naming convention changed

The proposal to set a different naming convention for the Qt Platform Abstraction API, as previously discussed has landed in Qt. As the set of QPlatform* classes do not guarantee Binary compatibility, they should not be used in user applications, but only in platform plugins.

The platform abstraction API is in headers which are grouped in a qpa directory, so that it is necessary to use

#include "qpa/qplatformscreen.h"

for example. The user also needs to use QT += -private in qmake code to use the QPA APIs.

QScreen gets refreshRate API

The QScreen class represents a screen in Qt 5. Recently its API was extended to notify about the refresh rate of a screen on particular platforms.

QScreen is part of the application developer facing QPA API. It provides read-only access to properties, and notifies the application developer when those change. The corresponding platform developer API is QPlatformScreen, which has the binary compatibility guarantees set out above (or lack thereof). QPlatformScreen has a virtual refreshRate method in this case which platform developers can reimplement to differ from the default 60 fps.

Homogenising Shared value class copying and moving

A proposal from KDAB engineeer Marc Mutz to make copying and moving of some pimpl’d classes more consistent was submitted. This proposal adds swap() member methods to many classes to the copy-swap idiom easy and effective. Copy constructors can then be implemented in terms of a swap method, which in the case of pimpl’d classes means just swapping a pointer, so it is very fast and does not fail.

This could have performance benefits in Qt, but does not affect 3rd party code.

Icon theme implementation

An interesting thread brought up the issue of icon themes and in particular conformance to a FreeDesktop specification for naming conventions.

Qt 4 had some built-in handling for icon sets in KDE and GNOME environmentsl, but new QPA APIs in Qt 5 will allow giving more control to the platform plugin regarding how icons are loaded from a theme.

Optimizing Qt development on Ubuntu

A report from the Ubuntu Developer Summit brought up some feedback from packagers regarding Qt development. The issues regard seamless integration of the Qt SDK, avoiding conflicts between Qt 4 and Qt 5, and how the appropriate platform plugin should be loaded.

QtDeclarative compatibility module removed

Anyone building the QtDeclarative module may have seen very long command lines with preprocessor defines between QtDeclarative class names and QtQuick class names. This was a temporary measure to raise the available source compatibility of other Qt modules depending on Qt declarative, but QtDeclarative was not a real module.

The module name situation has now settled down regarding declarative. The Qt 4 module ‘QtDeclarative’ is named ‘QtQuick1′ in Qt 5, and should not be used for new code. In Qt 5, the qtdeclarative repository contains two new libraries – QtQml and QtQuick. These two libraries were split from the Qt 4 QtDeclarative code, so they have the same API, but different class names. It seems like a confusing naming situation for people undergoing the transition, but the take-away is that in porting from Qt 4 to Qt 5 you should port from QtDeclarative to QtQml and QtQuick modules.

Exceptions in Qt 5

The use and configuration of exceptions has been cleaned up somewhat in Qt 5. On some platforms, notably WinCE, they have been disabled at configuration time, which causes problems for QtXmlPatterns which itself uses exceptions. Several other Qt modules use exceptions such as QtConcurrent, and the rest should be as immune to exceptions in 3rd party code as possible. Qt does not generally provide strong exception safety guarantees, and does not handle them properly.

The solution is to disable exceptions wherever they are not explicitly needed and enable them only in modules where they are required.

Preparations towards Qt Contributor Summit 2012

The planning around the upcoming Qt Contributor Summit in Berlin is ongoing. The summit is designed to be an unconference, allowing attendees to engage in many ad-hoc discussions, but a partial program has also been added to give some structure to the event, and to ensure that some topics get covered.

See you in Zaragoza tomorrow :-)

And of course, thanks to the sponsors! BlueSystems, Wadobo and Qt/Nokia, you rock!

About two weeks ago I went to Re:Publica, a hipster event (can I say that?) in Berlin. It was an interesting event - related to the stuff I usually visit, yet different. I'll go over the differences, then present what I see as the challenge for Free Software events: get those creative, digital and always-online people closer to us!

AudienceThe main audience of the event could probably be best described as people interested in the 'digital lifestyle'. People who use smartphones, are always on-line. They find their places-to-go on foursquare, talk to their friends on facebook, share their opinions on twitter, Whatsapp with their love - but they don't hang out on IRC or visit forums very often and they probably have a Macbook Air and a high-end android phone. Yes, not that different from us.

SubjectsThe event featured talks on things like the web, new cloud services like on-line music and creativity like music and video tools, open video etcetera. But that was only about 10-20%. Another 20-30% was about the future - social media, social innovation and more. To my surprise, the remaining 50% of the talks was about Freedom - and I use the capital for a reason. The Occupy movement, Digital Restrictions Management, Net Neutrality, Open Data, Digital influence on revolutions, eco-journalism, (internet) governance. Very close to what we, the Free Software community, hold dear (and find interesting!) Yes, not so different from us.



Marketing and artworkYou can imagine - an event organized by hipsters creative people looks good. It does! Team t-shirts were sponsored by spreadshirt and had the title 'actionist'. There was a big wall with the program, using pictures of the speakers, QR codes and more weird stuff. A twitter stream on a screen is old, people. Here, if you tweet a hash-tag you get your face as part of a logo shape or you get a gift if you check in with foursquare. That's more like it. Oh, and they had a 'carry your own chair' program - not unlike we did at the last openSUSE conference at the end of each day, except that it was 'cool', not 'please help us out with moving chairs'!

There were other things, too. Interesting or just plain weird stickers - with just a QR code or a shortened link, or only a slogan. There was stuff like a live steaming camera so you could interact with people on-line (easy to do: a laptop with a webcam connected to a google hangout?!?) and plenty of other good ideas. Surely different from what we usually do!

Challenge for us?I lately have been feeling that Free Software is loosing the battle for the hearts. Privacy and security are not important, internet is just a tool. We've been trying to educate people about Freedom but they don't care.

I was wrong. Collaboration and Freedom DO matter and people know it. We just don't reach the most of those who care about these things. This is where our challenge lies!

After talking with others and thinking about this, I conclude that there are two things we have to do better:

Positivism. We have a tendency to 'lecture' about the dangers of DRM, closed standards, government control and other things. Wake up! Look around you! Online Collaboration has given us Wikipedia. Online Communication has supported revolutions in the Middle East. Social Media gave us the Occupy Movement. And everyone's using Android phones. Yes, there are challenges, but let's celebrate our successes too! Relevance. We often are perfectionists. Build alternatives instead of interfacing with what's out there. But most people don't care that much for a slightly more secure system if it makes getting the latest stuff harder. People don't care about a perfectly free Cloud solution if it's more difficult or doesn't work with what they have. We must realize that a Can do attitude gets us far further than a Can't do way of thinking. And we have to make sure that what people care about is what we care about. Talking to others, sharing data, working with what's out there and checking if what we do has real-world value!

ConcreteAt least at the conference's I'm involved in I'll be trying to broaden the audience a bit and attract people outside of our usual circle. By changes to the program (workshops on Krita, Gimp, Blender, Kdenlive and Inkscape? ownCloud? web stuff? Talks about Wikimedia, the EFF, net neutrality, copyright?) and by advertising/spreading the word in less usual places (maybe an Apple fan magazine or a design paper). Let's see if we can get more people to see what we do, get involved, care!

Awesome images by Renehamburg on flickr

As distributions are slowly adopting our instant messaging suite, we get more and more questions from people everyday. And to give a proper support, we need a proper place to do so. So we decided to meet our users half-way and we created a special KDE Telepathy section at http://forums.kde.org - you can find it here, in the Internet & Network section. We're watching that forum and will try to help you, our users, as best as we can. So if you have any questions or want to discuss something, jump over there and ask away.

Big thanks to einar77 and the rest of our KDE sysadmin team for making this happen, as always - you guys rock!

Just read another "forget desktop Linux" piece by a writer trying to cover Free software on a sight ostensibly doing the same. This is exactly the sort of thing I wrote about in a recent blog entry, and it's sad to see it continue.

First off, "world domination" is not the only metric, nor the most useful one in every case. We have tens of millions of users around the world and I'm sure they'd appreciate it if we didn't forget them. I am one of them, and I know I certainly feel that way. You may be as well.

There's another aspect to that article: it suggests concentrating on mobile. Now .. where have I heard that before? Oh, right: everyone saying the desktop is dead, long live the web, we should focus all our efforts there.

Wake up call #1: hundreds of millions of laptop and desktop systems are sold each year. It's a market that isn't going away. Nothing is "killing" it. It is being displaced to some extent, but it isn't going away. It's less interesting because it isn't growing, and the corporate drive for ever increasing profits thus stamps it as "mature, boring." This is different from "dead."

Wake up call #2: there is no reason we can't do desktop and mobile and web. Yes, "and", not "or". Free software projects could create very compelling horizontal integration between these sectors as long as we treat them as not being mutually exclusive choices. This is part of the strategy of both Apple and Microsoft (and others), and the market would berate either for saying that they were abandoning some of these tech segments to focus exclusively on one. In KDE, our focus on the desktop has been extended to devices and the web in the last few years, and that's a good thing, something that should be supported. Which brings me to:

Wake up call #3: If people engaged in supporting Free software can't manage to keep long term focus, not freak out and continue to support the efforts that are ongoing ... we're screwed. We are, and will be, our own best friends or our own worst enemies. It starts by not telling others to stop supporting the efforts of thousands of volunteers and companies from around the world. That is, simply put, a betrayal.

A sophisticated view would be an examination of how we can draw together the efforts and successes of mobile for the desktop to give it a boost; to analyze how Free software desktop products and Free software mobile and web products can integrate and work well together.

There are projects and teams out there doing exactly that right now. Several teams in KDE are doing exactly that, and we mean business. It would be nice to not have to keep pulling knives out of our backs from journalists as we continue pushing forward. Long live Free software on the desktop, mobile, web and server!

Having experienced the MakerBot at work, I bought a EMaker Huxley last year. Once you get into the habit of being able to print any mechanical piece that you need (almost), you are forever hooked. Now, I’m looking to build a larger machine and am sourcing material for a building larger RepRap Mendel Prusa V2.

As the price for material is affected by both volume and the transport, I figured that a bit of joint purchasing would be nice. If you are based in western Sweden (i.e. can get to Gothenburg or Alingsås), or is willing to pay for the postage within Sweden, and you wants to join in, add a comment here or drop me a mail (e8johan, gmail). Being able to build bearings, nuts and bolts by the hundreds makes it feasible to source them from far away, e.g. China, or just to get a better price at the local stores.

If you tend to want to keep your music running when you log out, or control your music playing on a desktop machine from a laptop, for example, you may well use the Music Player Daemon (MPD).  If you use Ubuntu’s Unity desktop or KDE’s Plasma desktop, you may well wonder how to get the Ubuntu sound menu or Plasma’s Now Playing widget to talk to it.

Both of these use MPRIS2 to communicate with media players.  MPD, however, does not have an MPRIS2 interface.  Even if it did, it would take a bit of work to be able to use it from another computer.  What you need, then, is a “bridge” of some sort to translate.  One such possibility is mpDris2 (which, I hasten to point out, I haven’t tested).

You would run such a bridge on the computer you want to control MPD from, and point it to your MPD instance.  And voilà!  Every MPRIS2 client application that you run can talk to MPD, without knowing anything about the MPD protocol.

If you just want a headless music player on your local machine, though, you can always use Raven, which talks MPRIS2 natively.

Heya!

It's almost that time: in one week LinuxTag opens its doors! Courtesy of your friends at Fedora and openSUSE, there will be 'Beefy Miracle' hotdogs and 'Old Toad' beer. And together with the numerous other projects we bring you talks about Linux and new Free/Open Source technologies, interesting people to talk to and lots of fun and party!

Cool stuff in the booth area, BEER AND HOTDOGS!This year, openSUSE & Fedora gang up to both support you, the visitors, and LinuxTag, our gracious hosts. We'll hand out 'Old Toad' beer and 'Beefy Miracle' hotdogs for a small donation (€1 per item) to the LinuxTag e.V.! So there you have it:
Come, buy and eat hotdogs and drink beer in support of LinuxTag!
(the openSUSE beer is actually free as the catering didn't like us asking for donations to LinuxTag. However, we strongly suggest to give a donation anyway)


Sessions at openSUSE boothAt the openSUSE booth we'll also have short hands-on tech sessions every day. The schedule:

• Wednesday-Saturday
  13:00 your ownCloud by yours truly
• Thursday
  15:00 Colour Management by Kai-Uwe Behrman
• Friday and Saturday
  15:00 AppArmor Crashkurs by Christian Boltz

Work work! Looking for a job?I've also heard that two HR people from SUSE will be at or around the booth during most of Friday and Saturday. We're 20 years old, still going strong and have plenty of opportunities so if you're interested in an exciting job at the greenest company in the FOSS world, ask for Johanna Grau or Nadine Pieper!


I'm greatly looking forward to seeing all the friends from various Free Software projects again, like GNOME, KDE, LibreOffice, Fedora, TuxRadio, FreeBSD and many others. And you of course, dear reader!

(yes, the posters are all mine. Didn't know I had it in me. Honestly, they're all rip-offs of real art of course, the first two based on the official LinuxTag poster and the 'we believe' is something which fuzzily came to me this morning after a way-to-short night. The art is inspired by suse.com/careers - I really like that. It is, of course, all in github (I really DO believe) and merge requests or suggestions are very welcome. But before tomorrow, it has to be printed for LinuxTag!)

In KDE3 times the “scheck” style from kdesdk/scheck could be used by developers and testers to “highlight accel and style guide conflicts”, like this (from the README):

• Orange shows accel conflicts.
• Green proposed accels.
• Dotted red lines show nested groupboxes (not prohibited, but not favored ).
• Potential style guide violations are marked with yellow, likely ones with red.
• Missing colons are drawn with two small red squares.
• Errors in window titles are marked with “foo|b|ar”.
• Violet background show untranslated string.

Just, the scheck style has never been completely ported to Qt4/KDE4! Since the begin of the KDE4 era it has stayed in kdesdk but excluded from any build. And now in the preparation of the migration of kdesdk module to git-based repositories any unported submodules will be moved to tags/unmaintained/4, already next sunday, May 20th.

So take a look at the current sources and consider giving it some Qt4/KDE4 love

If you are interested, please subscribe to the new mailinglist for kdesdk.

I spent some free time today getting caught up on the large backlog of phonon-gstreamer bugs. Towards the end, I started to have delusions of grandeur: Imagine a phonon-gstreamer codebase that doesn’t require supporting a zillion different audio frameworks, and instead belays that task to something that I don’t have to maintain.

My question here, is how many people would throw a fit if phonon-gstreamer dropped support for ALSA and OSS, and forced everyone to use pulseaudio by way of GStreamer’s excellent pulseaudio support?

Hold on, lower your pitchforks for a minute. Let us consider the audio framework landscape in the modern world:

• Pulseaudio is the One True Way for audio playback in Gnome
• For 90% of the support questions we handle in #kde-multimedia, the solution is “use pulseaudio”.
• Pulseaudio can handle using OSS, ALSA, Bluetooth, or whatever your audio output is, through one consistent entry point
• It is a total headache to figure out any bugs in your audio when music goes from Amarok->Phonon->Phonon-GStreamer->(ALSA, OSS, Pulseaudio, god knows what)->Speakers->Earholes

Additionally, I really don’t feel like testing phonon-gstreamer on all those different kernel-level interfaces with exotic setups every time I fix a bug and am afraid I’d introduce another twelve. The PulseAudio folks seem to do a fantastic job at that already. Phonon isn’t meant for real-time playback or production studio quality audio. Thats what Jack is meant for.

I can’t think of a good reason why we shouldn’t stand on the shoulders of giants by making PulseAudio handle all the hard stuff on Unix involving massaging PCM formats, equalizers, matching playback category with output device, enumerating outputs both real and virtual, volume control, etc.

If you can, leave a comment on this post. I’m not making an official statement saying that I’m definitely removing ALSA and OSS support from phonon-gstreamer, I’m merely asking for feedback to see what can be done to fix things at all levels in the audio stack.

Sirko brought up the idea to organise a hackfest together with developers of applications for Linux desktops and experts interested in colour management. The idea behind that event was to bring interested developers together, support them in implementing color management in their software and move forward that topic across desktops and distributions.

During the recent LGM we found a chance to involve Richard Hughes and planed together about what we like to do during the hackfest. We spotted three main areas of interest: desktop applications including window managers, web browsers and printing. These topics are already worked on, but in a scattered way.

As example, Gwenview is a really great application for managing pictures. But it has no color management implemented yet. Color management in KWin is worked on during the GSoC this year, but in the opposite color management in the compositing manager mutter on the GNOME side is far away as can be read here. Not many web browsers support color management and if they who do, it is often incomplete. The SVG v2 standard will for example introduce additional color management features compared to SVG v1. So it is now the right time to get these implemented in order to be well prepared. For the KDE printing stack there is also a GSoC project this year, but also the Linux Foundation has a working group for this topic.

So, by meeting in person in one place, we want to get something done and build a good understanding of the role of each participating group for a working end to end colour management.

The hackfest will very likely happen in Brno in the Czech Republic at the Red Hat offices. A good time appears later this year 16th till 19th November. Now we like to collect more ideas, speak to people and sort financial issues.

Continuing with my previous post about the Zeitgeist team’s improvements with regards to speed, there’s a nifty tool in the sources I wrote yesterday that uses a genetic algorithm to find the slowest queries you can throw at the engine.

If you’re not familiar with genetic algorithms, here’s a brief review of how they work:

• Start off with an array of numbers, with each index corresponding to a particular attribute of the problem.
• Evaluate the fitness of that genome
• Simulate evolution of the successful genomes by crossing, mutations, etc, just as you would with real DNA chromosomes

In the case of this Zeitgeist tool, the chromosome refers to a query, and each allele (index of the array) refers to an attribute of the query. Here’s a relevant comment from the sources:

# Chromosome to data mapping: # 0, 1 - Timerange begin and end. If both are zero, we use timerange.always() # 2 - The search type. Anything over 30 is a dead individual. # 3-5 - Specify template properties. Anything besides 0 and 1 is dead. # 3 - Specify a subject interpretation # 4 - Specify a subject manifestation # 5 - Specify an event actor

Using the super cool pyevolve library, implementing a genetic algorithm is super easy:

def eval_func(chromosome): query = buildQuery(chromosome) if query is None: return 0 start = time.time() results = engine.find_events(*query) overall = (time.time() - start) return (results["find_events"]*2+results["find_event_ids"]*4+results["get_events"])*1000 genome = G1DList.G1DList(6) genome.evaluator.set(eval_func) ga = GSimpleGA.GSimpleGA(genome) ga.evolve(freq_stats = 1) query = buildQuery(ga.bestIndividual()) assert query is not None print query, len(engine.find_events(*query))

Let it run for a long while on a big database, and you end up with a query that takes forever. Due to how evolution works, it isn’t the longest running query, but it is certainly one that takes a long time.

Hey everyone, I am riding 100 miles (161 km) for Chicago’s 2012 Tour de Cure. My goal this year is to raise $1,500, because last year I was blown out of the water by the generosity of the people at my mom’s work, the KDE community, the cycling community, and a few friends. So, if 300 of you donated the minimum $5, I would make my goal Last year I had a blast doing this ride and completed it in 6.5 hours. My other goal this year is to finish it in under 6 hours.

To donate, you can click on the Support image above, or go to my Tour de Cure page. Scroll down, and on the right hand side you will see “CLICK HERE TO SPONSOR ME”, click it. I appreciate any and all help!

Donate To My Tour de Cure 2012 Ride is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

We are pleased to announce the new  open-slx Weekly News 18 in the Formats PDF and EPUB.

You can find in this week (abstract):

• open-slx Screencast: Updating Plasma Active
• Vivaldi Tablet with 8GB
• Tizen runs Android Apps too
• Installing Java 7
• and more...

The open-slx Weekly News 18 are downloadable there [881,31 kB] (PDF) and there [11,94 kB] (EPUB).

Because Textwriters are needing Coffe just  donate anything.

Original Post: http://community.open-slx.com/news-42-open-slx-weekly-news-18-published.html

Technorati Tags:Technology, News, Mobile App, Tablet, Tablets

Download: PDF-Format [881,31 kB] EPUB-Format [11,94 kB]

Dieser Wochenrückblick wurde unter der Creative Commons by Share Alike veröffentlicht.

Wir freuen uns, den neuen open-slx Wochenrückblick 18 in den beiden beliebten Formaten PDF und EPUB zu veröffentlichen.

Unter anderem in dieser Woche:

• open-slx Screencast: Plasma Active updaten
• Vivaldi Tablet mit 8GB
• Tizen fährt auch Android Apps
• Java 7 installieren
• und mehr...

Der open-slx Wochenrückblick 18 kann hier [833,53 kB] (PDF) und hier [19,10 kB] (EPUB) heruntergeladen werden.

Da Textschreiber immer wieder einen Koffeinschub brauchen, kannst du hier einen Kaffe spenden.

Original Post: http://community.open-slx.com/news-41-open-slx-wochenrueckblick-18-veroeffentlicht.html

Ältere Ausgaben können hier eingesehen werden.

Technorati Tags:Technology, News, Mobile App, Tablet, Tablets

Download: PDF-Format [833,53 kB] EPUB-Format [19,10 kB]

Dieser Wochenrückblick wurde unter der Creative Commons by Share Alike veröffentlicht.

Europes biggest event arround Linux and Open Source – LinuxTag, is’nt far away anymore and Oyranos will participate on it. LinuxTag take its place in Berlin from 23.-26. May on the exhibition area arround the Funkturm. On saturday the 26th of May I will present together with Sirko an talk about colour management – “Bring Color To The Game“. The talk will not introduce Oyranos as CMS, it will more explain what color management is and about the actual status on free desktops. We want as well to talk about what a user needs to get colour management running. During LinuxTag I will be reachable on the openSUSE booth for questions and introduction into profiling and bring some colorimeters.

As mentioned in my previous post, you can now link your documents, files and folders to your activities. That, by itself, isn’t much. The first thing that you could do with that is show the linked documents on your desktop by using the Contour layout, which is quite nice even outside of Plasma Active, but although usable on the desktop as well, it has some problems.

So, how to make this available to the normal users, you ask? Easy – make it available to the normal file managers via KIO – just type activities:/ in Dolphin, Konqueror or the Folder View applet, and you’ll get a list of all activities, and files that belong to them.

You can see what it looks like in the screenshots. At the moment, it is a bit buggy, but it will work as expected for SC 4.9.

Hi all,

I am sri13 @ IRC. Last year, I completed GSOC under KDE and did some work in Krita. Now, I am not doing any thing in krita and I am feeling very bored as there are no challenging tasks. .

Any new challegenes to do in KDE or Krita . . ?

Please tell me . . ,I wanna try different . .

A picture of Oz Fox from Stryper I took ages ago. We’re rock stars.

So, after working on the cool “Large image displaying library” in KHTML I decided to look into other parts of KHTML, and work on getting my lolcat page working in KJS/KHTML. It turned out quite easy, KHTML is very friendly, both the code base and the community around it.

So, after fixing a couple of other small issues, I decided to take on Twitter which has stopped rendering properly in KHTML/KJS. Thanks to the excellent debugging support in the khtml kpart, it only took a couple of minutes to track the error down. The issue turned out to be that the maximum stack size in the KJS interpreter was too small, Twitter is serious about its Javascript. The issue is then if we should bump up the maximum amount of stack frames, since if we eat up all the available stack space we can get nasty crashes without Dr. Konqi (the crash reporting tool) showing up. But for now KHTML in git should render Twitter just fine.

Lastly, a tip if you want to debug production sites with long lines in KJS; turn on the “Reindent Sources” option if it is slow, the katepart embedded in the javascript debugger isn’t a fan of the long lines most websites put together.

And as usual, thanks to the KHTML developers for help with everything.