FrogBlog

KDE 4 is all about clocks. As I did not want to miss them while browsing the Net I sat down and extended Frerich’s Plasmoid Viewer code (a Workspace utility) to not only be a standalone program but also come along as a KPart. It can be embedded into an Konqueror HTML page with a simple element like this one:

<object id="myclock" type="application/x-plasma" classid="plasmoid:clock" height=200 width=300></object>

The patch - which was surprisingly small - can be found here. Below the obligatory screenshot showing some Plasmoids embedded next to an iframed search engine. The applet that locks the desktop locked it so well on testing that I had to kill the process from a console

As people on #khtml and elsewhere keep asking the same type of questions I will summarize some of the answers that I can give and which - to my best knowledge - should match the view of other maintainers. This is to inform contributors, bug reporters, other helpers and users about the current state, avoid unfounded irritation and provide the basis for further discussion.

Feedback is greatly appreciated and will be incorporated into an updated version to be placed on konqueror.kde.org or so.

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My kind employer decided to grant me a brand new ThinkPad R61 - yay! Not only does this new machine allow my to play my beloved World of Warcraft in all its graphical glory, it also made me spend most of this weekend on hacking KDE4.

I decided to use the latest Kubuntu release 7.10 and not only did it come with a nice default setup, getting KDE trunk to build on this thing was quite simple as well - I basically followed the KDE4 build instructions I found online.

My plan was to give some love to my pet project KNewsTicker by porting it to KDE4. After a while of research it turned out though that so many things changed which affect KNewsTicker:

• Qt3 is gone, Qt4 is the new standard. In particular, the way of creating menus (like KNewsTickers context menu) changed a lot.
• Kicker is gone, Plasma is the new standard.
• kdepimlibs features the ’syndication’ library, a further development of librss (which I factored out of KNT a few years ago for akregator to use). So I don’t need my own RSS parsing code at all anymore.

Given that KNewsTicker is quite small, I ended up throwing almost everything away and starting from scratch. By now, I have a KNewsTicker plasmoid which can scroll the headlines of the KDE news along. It’s still pretty rough, for example you cannot extend the list of news feeds at the moment (except by editing the configuration file by hand). In fact, the only things you can configure via the settings dialog are the font size, font color and update interval. It’s a start though!

The obligatory screenshot showing the new KNT in all its glory:

This shows my current KDE4 desktop in a Xephyr window.

A common problem when developing test scripts for Qt application is that some table should be checked for whether it contains the correct data. In particular, the expected data is stored in an external file and the test script should load the file and then compare its contents against the table cells. Here’s one way to do it, in Python:

def checkTableAgainstTestdata( tableName, testDataFileName ):
    table = findObject( tableName )
    dataset = testData.dataset( testDataFileName )  

    columns = table.columnCount
    rows = table.rowCount  

    testDataColumns = len( testData.fieldNames( dataset[ 0 ] ) )
    if columns != testDataColumns:
        test.fail( "Tables does not match test data",
                   "Table " + tableName + " has different number"
                   " of columns than test data in " + testDataFileName )  

    row = 0
    for idx in dataset:
        for col in range( 0, columns ):
            if col >= testDataColumns:
                break
            expectedText = testData.field( idx, col )
            tableText = table.item( row, col ).text()
            test.compare( expectedText, tableText )
        row += 1  

        if row >= rows:
            test.fail( "Tables does not match test data",
                       "Table " + tableName + " has different number"
                       " of rows than test data in " + testDataFileName )
            return  

    if row >= rows:
        test.fail( "Tables does not match test data",
                   "Table " + tableName + " has different number of"
                   " rows than test data in " + testDataFileName )
        return

The function simple takes the name of the table object to check as well as the name of the test data file. The test data file is expected to live in either the test cases “testdata” directory or in the shared testdata directory. A sample invocation might look like:

def main():
    tableName = "{type='QTableWidget' visible='1'}"
    testDataFileName = "expectedvalues.tsv"
    checkTableAgainstTestdata( tableName, testDataFileName )

Note that this doesn’t work for Qt3 QTable objects or with plain QTableView objects. For those, the API for aquiring the contents of a specific table cell is different. However, the algorithm of the function is the same.

Hi!

You can read an interview with one of our Squish for Java users on our web site.

It talkes about their test automation process and why they chose Squish over Mercury’s (now it’s actually HP) Quick Test Pro.

We returned from the first of two Trolltech Developer Day’s events on Friday evening. There surely are many theories on how to best fight the jet lag but I dediced to simply do what my body asked for and gave in on any of the sudden urges to sleep that attacked me over the weekend.

London Heathrow airport was less crowded than during the summer but waiting lines were still long enough to be annoying and shortage of ground crew caused delays on take-off. I find it very much irresponsible of both airlines and airports to schedule more flights via a hub that it can obviously handle. Will try even harder next time to avoid this route.

The Silicon Valley stay itself was very much worth it. Met with several existing customers and prospects on their premises and at the conference. The exhibition area was well positioned with respect to the talks, meals and fresh air enabling an effective still relaxed contact with attendees. Our Qt programming quiz turned out to be more challenging than intended. The winner of the Nintendo DS Lite game console was drawn out of only five partipants that got it right!

Same procedure as every year: we are preparing everything for our appearance at the Trolltech Developer Days in California and Munich, Germany. This year Frerich will join me for the trip to Redwood City and Rainer will go down to Munich with Reggie.

We’ll be conducting a quiz again. The prize will be a gaming device the winner can take home at the end of day two. Last year’s prime number riddle was way too easy so we made things a bit tougher this time. We decided to challenge the participant’s Qt knowledge a little bit. I say “a little bit” because we’ll use an eased version of the original. The first one didn’t pass internal testing with zero correct answers handed in.

As we are already travelling through the Bay Area we’ll use the opportunity to visit some of our customers on site to gather some feedback, demo new features and provide help. It’s nice to be able to get from one customer to another with only a few minutes car ride between. Frerich insisted on renting a Hummer for this purpose but I feared bad press giving the UN climate change convention that is taking place in New York right now.

Please drop by at our “booth”, say hello, take part in the quiz and grab one of those ultra-sweet gummi frogs we’ll have with us.

Now that we have been in our new office for nearly 4 weeks we are finally sattled enough to find some time to write about it. In the last week of July we moved to nice and new offices. Due to our steady growth it got a bit too crowded in our old offices, so in spring we decided to move.

Since we moved into a new building we could get our offices set up exactly the way we wanted regarding room layout and interior. Basically we have 2-people offices for all developers since this turns out to be the most productive setup. The only exception are Harri and myself since we are on the phone a lot and it would be too disturbing sharing an office with somebody.

Since we have plenty of space (which hopefully will be filled soon - we are looking for software engineers!) we now have a nice library with a table football (foosball for the Americans set up. It’s amazing how all of us are improving our “kicker” skills

So all in all, we are really happy in our new office space. Photos will follow soon.

But now the pains: Surprisingly the move itself was rather smooth. But our telecom and internet provide screwed up biiiiiiiiig time. Our connection was supposed to get connected on July 30th. But they actually managed to not find our office building twice! You really must be blind or too stupid to read a map to not find it. Finally, after nearly two weeks we got the internet and phone connection.

The worst part is the incredibly bad customer service and that you just cannot do anything about it and are stuck in the annoying hotline.

So we really had to improvise a lot to get on-line in the first two weeks. I don’t even want to imagine what our customers would have said if we’d be off-line for a day

To get to an end: Now all is set up and working well and we enjoy our new and productive environment

Important: The following information applies for Squish for Qt only.

Squish allows you to do remote testing with the squishrunner running on one host and squishserver (that starts your AUT) on another host. The script interpreter is living in the squishrunner process. So all script commands are executed on the first host and not on the second host that is running your AUT. Only Qt objects (and function you execute on them) are forwarded to the second host and are executed there.

So if you create e.g. a Python file object in your test script, you can only access the file system of the first host. But if you create a QFile object, you can actually access the file system of the second host. But for this to work, the AUT has to be running. And you need some knowledge of the Qt API.

In froglogic we use a dummy application that provides simple shell-like features that are actually executed on the remote host. So if you need such a functionality, read on to find out how to use this in your own test setting.

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This year’s KDE conference was again worthwhile going to. Wish I had been able to stay longer. Talks were good and seeing familiar and new faces proved to be very nice again. I might be in the minority but in my opinion the initial lack of an Internet connection was a good thing. It made people talk to each other or closely listen to a presentation rather than staring at their screen and using IRC to chat with people elsewhere or inside the same room.

Everything would have been perfect if I would not have to add three more people to the list of those that commenced their stay by filing a Property Irregularity Report at Glasgow Airport.

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