FrogBlog

For a long time I had problems finding a way to organize arbitrary snippets of information on my computer. I tried several things from simply storing arbitrary text files in the normal directory structure to trying out various note-kepping programs. I even considered writing one of my own.

Several weeks ago I finally found the ideal solution for me — at least from my current experience it seems to be the ideal solution: Viki. This is a vim script that adds wiki functionality to vim.

Now I can keep my notes semi-structured (i.e. cross-referenced) — and my todo list. I even started organizing my web browser bookmarks with Viki (you can invoke an external link in your web browser from within vim with the Viki scripts).

I also use Mercurial to put my notes in a revision control system. This allows me to easily distribute my notes across different computers and keeping them in sync (with the side-effect to get light-weight backups).

I am long-time vim user. For some years I also use a Mac. Last year I discovered the MacVim project. This is a Cocoa based GUI to vim (so far there was only gvim on the Mac, a Carbon based GUI).

The Carbon gvim is not that great so I sticked to the console vim version. But with the new MacVim, I now have a GUI vim that not only looks much better but also has additional features:

• It has a fullscreen mode.
• Vim’s tab feature uses real tabs instead of ASCII-art tabs.
• There is an ODB input manager that adds an “Edit in MacVim” menu entry to all applications (see Edit in SubEthaEdit for the principle).

There are probably other things, but those are the three I really like. With the “Edit in MacVim” feature, I can now easily write my mails from Apple Mail in vim. Unfortunately, the feature does not work for me in Camino.

When I commute to work I typically listen to podcasts. My favorite podcast is Chaosradio Express, a podcast in German about technology (often with social aspects on it as well). In its latest episode Moderne Webentwicklung Tim Pritlove (the host of the podcast) talks with the two developers of Soup.

Soup is a Tumblelog and they explain in the beginning that the concept of a tumblelog is to propagate really short blogs. To cut a story short: the problem I have with writing blogs is that i don’t feel like writing full-fledged articles all the time (I am a somewhat lazy person). But now I realize that it is not needed at all and I plan to write more often blog entries with some short info or tips (they won’t be as short as tumblelogs, though).

So stay tuned. This blog is not dead (although it almost looks like it is from the frequency of articles lately).

A while ago, KDE branched the 4.0.x releases into their own subversion branch directory. This reminded me that I’ve been using a little script for a while which comes in quite handy when you want to commit a patch to multiple branches.

The script is called ‘ilc’ (which originally stood for ‘integrate last change’ but it actually integrates any revision you specify) and can be found at http://ktown.kde.org/~frerich/ilc. It’s a little Bash script which expects you to have separate checkouts for the different branches (so it doesn’t integrate the change “in place”).

For instance, in my directory layout, there’s the KDE trunk checkout in ~/src/kde/trunk and the KDE 4.0.x branch checkout in ~/src/kde/40. I usually work in the trunk branch, but every now and then I want to backport something (usually a bugfix) to the 4.0.x branch. So after hacking away, I eventually do this:


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ svn ci
Sending settingsdialog.cpp
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 765024.
frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$


So SVN gave me the number of the revision I just committed. Using the ilc script, all I need to do to integrate this change into the 4.0.x branch is


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ ilc 765024 ~/src/kde/40


The script will make sure that the affected files in the 4.0.x checkout are up to date, then apply the patch, and finally it’ll let me inspect the patch it did, abort the merge, or commit. When committing, it’ll use the original log message plus a prefix like “automatically merged revision 765024:” so that I can lateron still see that this commit was actually a backport of something else.

Last friday a few fellow KDE-attached colleagues and me made our way to the KDE4 release party which was held at the mighty fine offices of freiheit.com.

Since there wasn’t much time left for Sven to organize the whole thing,  I was (more than) sceptical that there would be an actual party (with lots of people, beer et cetera) taking place. Turned out that I was wrong, very much so. When we arrived at 7:05pm (or something like that – the party was scheduled for 7pm) two nice ladies were waiting downstairs and crossing names out of a list. I didn’t know that we had to sign up for the party! Luckily, it seemed that Harri sent them our names, so one of the two ladies led us via the elevator to the party area. 

Amazingly, the room was already quite full when we arrived there. I would say there were about 30 people at the time we arrived and at the peak of the party there were about 50. I was pleasantly surprised! The freiheit.com people have a nice flat-screen display embedded into the wall of their cafeteria so we were able to view the live feed from Mountain View all the time. However, it was virtually impossible to understand anything which any of the speakers said simply because it was quite noisy in the office. I can’t say I missed the sound of the live stream very much, given that it can be viewed on youtube later (so I’ve been told).

All in an it was a very nice success, showing that one can certainly pull such OSS parties off in the HH area.

When the car* manned with our delegation of KDE developers paved its way through the dark and rainy streets of Hamburg I was expecting at most 10 guests (including us) to show up at the local branch of the worldwide KDE 4 release party. The place was crowded! The live stream from the California event was displayed on a screen – congrats to everyone involved in setting it up. Unfortunately, the speeches themselves drowned in the the noise of everyone chatting and having a drink or sausage in a bread roll and not exactly standing silent in awe. Had a bit of an art happening to see a babbling crowd of people gathered in the stylish freiheit.com rooms decorated by a live picture of a muted man gestucilating towards the viewers for 2 hours or more.

The number of people showing interest to come after the announcement necessitated the installation of an online registration. Quickly the max capacity was filled up. Many – like myself – learnt about this only in the last minute but were still lucky to end up on the list at the receiption. I later learnt that others were less lucky and could not enter anymore. Sorry to hear that! But the room was really jam-packed. Good news is that after last night a local event organizer has shown great interest in hosting bigger events (like Akademy) in the future.

The groups of attendees was a mix of KDE as well as Gnome developers and users. Provided for many interesting talks including a reunion with aRts author Stefan Westerfeld. Hope to receive some pictures to publish soon. Thanks for everyone who came and demonstrated that the Hanseatic City of Hamburg has a lively Free and Open Source Software scene.

Harri.

* Public transport is free here tomorrow. An attempt to repeat the car-free Sundays from 1973. Just (still?) voluntary this time.

Is the Swedish tradition of throwing “used” Christmas trees out of the window on a certain day a real one? That’s what a commercial of the furniture store IKEA wants us to believe at least. I don’t know which day would have been the right one but it was fun either way. Graceful glide from the fourth floor, no pedestrians or cyclists hurt.

To the main topic of this post: The city of Hamburg will join the choir of KDE 4 release parties taking place world-wide later this week. Sven Reumann has organized the local version for Friday, January 18st, 19:00 o’clock at freiheit.com, Straßenbahnring 22. Our new office is nice but the landmarked, refurbished, former streetcar depot occupied by freiheit.com is just impressive. We stick to supporting the culinary aspect.

Everyone with involvement or interest in KDE is heartily invited to join. Use the chance to meet with former, current and future contributors and users of our and other Free Software projects. Knowing the reliability of computer software we also count on being connected live with other places around the world.

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.