August 20th, 2008 Petr
Kdesvn is heading back to town. And now I’m talking about KDE4 downtown.
Do you remember my last KDE related post? Yep, that one warmly accepted? There was my so called list with negative points of KDE4 from my point of view. Now I’m glad that I can strikeout one more item from this list.
One loud fanfare ended with grandiose coda, please…
It’s few hours ago and now we have Kdesvn compilable with KDE4 libraries.
Woohoo! Cheers to Rajko, the author and Kdesvn maintainer. Due to his fast commits it’s getting better and better every minute. (note: not every minute for sure, but it’s a hyperbole. A hyperbole that we novelists are using every hour)
So. What you can get in this state of code?
- cool Qt4/KDE4 interface with Q3Support/KDE3 legacy modules required
- random crashes included!
- punkrock-like build scripts
- no binary packages in our repositories yet (buildservice etc.)
OK, it’s not finished and it shouldn’t be used for real work yet, but I have to share one of good news - comparing to last dark days of my life.
Posted in oss | 1 Comment »
June 10th, 2008 Petr
I’m brave man sometimes. You know, no coward nor chicken. So you know why I replace KDE4:STABLE with KDE4:UNSTABLE on my desktop machine. And voila — cool KDE4 has been ready after lunch (beans and sausages, realy healthy meal for hardcore workers). There is only one thing to say: “it’s much more better than its 4.0 sibling. Yep, it can be used now. Beer for all developers.” (OK, it’s three things to say to be exact).
Of course you have to set some things to polish it after “vanilla” installation. First - to switch off text under icons because it’s stupid. Second - switch off rubber windows to prevent beans (menioned above) jump out of stomach. And third - set plasma theme for something non-blackish.
I can say I have observed only one popular Plasma crash. It was when I’ve leaved my home desktop unlocked for doggie. He loves to play with mouse. He clicked with it like an wild masturbating monkey.
Finally - I’ve found The First Cool Usage For Plasmoids (TM). There is “Folder View” plasmoid as you can see on screenshot. With combination with The Dashboard (Ctrl+12) it really rules.
Of course there are some issues I’d like to see solved and/or polished:
- Icons in systray.
Icons aren’t sorted in columns. It’s using only one column for it. (latest build fixes it).And these icons are using ugly color fragments in background. There is a bugreport for it somewhere.
- Task Panel. I like it vertical. And I’m talking about panels now! There is no minimal and maximal height of items in task panel. It’s ugly when tehre are only few apps opened and it’s unisable when there are lots of them. The bug is reported too.
- Plasmoids code - I said myself: “you know Qt well, so why won’t you fix it youtself?” So… I’m so sexy for paintEvents obsession. Sorry guys.
- Non functional webcamera. It’s working in KDE3. But when I run only one KDE4 app, it lost its abiliy to capture video. Dunno why.
No MDI window decoration in Oxygen theme. Fixed in latest build.- No kaffeine. OK, dragon player is cool but…You know… But Kaffeine is Kaffeine. They say they’re working on it. Can you do it faster, guys?
- No kdesvn. Ol’ good KDE3 lives still.
- I cannot force Kate to indent C++ code as it does in KDE3 version. And now I’m talking about auto curly-braces after e.g. if etc.
- Amarok2. Well, it’s under developmen. Fine. It’s still playing music. Very well. But it’s growing into something Community2.0beta, if you can understand my feelings. I’d like to listen
music grind core and more deadly sounds but playlist is hidden somewhere in the corner. So I asked for New Music Player Tender 2008. Some good people pointed me for Qmmp and JuK. And the winner is JuK - tadada! OK, it has horrible (read: I dont understand it) controlling, but it takes only bits of CPU (2%, Amarok 5%, Qmmp 10%). And it counts when there are running Oracle and Postgresql databases and some code compilations.
But you rocks, people of KDE. I did not believe KDE4 will be working one day. But the success is near.
Posted in kudos, oss | 33 Comments »
May 6th, 2008 Petr
and dark days are away. The machine where I have all e-mails, photos for friends, and more unimportant stuff crashed with cartoonish kaboom!
Its RAID components to be exact and/or discs.
My favourite root enjoyed cool weekend to restore it again on new hardware.
OK, shit happens. But why it happened to me (and rest of rt.sk gang)? I know about better servers to crash. What about the billing server of my mortgage bank?
But it is not what I want to say. I’m writting it just if you are interested why you cannot deliver any e-mail to me or why I had not respond to you. Sorry folks.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
March 1st, 2008 Petr
Do you know the feeling you don’t want to do anything? And when you touch something it gets screwed? Yes? So you now how I feel last weeks.
So there is quite no progress with my SW. Sad but true. OK, you can read a small article about joys of Scribus documents and enjoy the initial work of QStardict port on Windows.
Heh, it’s quite cool how many Linux/KDE apps I’m missing in the windows session. Hey guys, what about to speed up the KDE_on_Windows work? ;)
BTW did I said that Dan Swanö rules with his Nightingale? The perfect music for this mood.
That’s enough for now. Ten days long holiday is awaiting me… hmmm, sea food, tasty drinks, cycling…
Posted in oss | 4 Comments »
January 30th, 2008 Petr
Ha! It’s done. Tora is build-able natively in the Windows environment. Pretty Cool (TM). And it’s usable perfectly (in the case you like pre-pre-alpha software).
The best thing at all is this one — win master Christoph Kuemmel-Schulte did a perfect job with packaging TOra with all required libraries so it can be used for ODBC, MySQL, and PostgreSQL too. So long Toolkit for Oracle, welcome universal database client.
Perfectly tuned cmd.exe with TOra linking:
TOra is running. Woohoo! It’s running natively (MSVC compiler):
Strange GUI in X11
A ten-point-question for Qt gurus — have you ever seen this ugly behaviour?
Menu is wrongly sized, fonts in lineedits is too small, tool tips are cut… And all others Qt4 apps are correct. Insane.
Posted in oss, tora | 5 Comments »
December 19th, 2007 Petr
The journey for the Best Sqlite tool in the world continues. Yes, I prepared SVN snapshot packages (cheers to buildservice team) for public testing yesterday. Look at homepage or e.g. kde-apps.org. But it is not the main topic today.
When I browsed sf.net to handle tarballs and some binary stuff (ghosh, it’s damn slow) I’ve found some new and strange projects — tons of new sqlite managers.
Woohoo, it looks like people are overfilled enough with writting DownloadLyricsFromFooBarSiteForAmarok 0.1 scripts (do you remember the age of “This is Yet Another Cool Text Editor I Wrote”?). Now they’re writting sqlite managers. OK, no problem — you know, concurrency and diversity is a good thing. Let me say only one sentence: “don’t you think, guys, you’re wasting time?”
I know you’re feeling cool writting OSS but it’s frustrating for me. Oh, sit down, an old man will tell you a story…
My sqlite manager started after weeks of testing all (ok, maybe not all but tons of them) available tools. I’ve selected one and patched it. And believe me I did not care about language or toolkit library. Unfortunately the original author did not accept these patches (he did not answer to be exact) so then I forked it. Do you see the word “then”?
It’s all about cooperation. Of course I cannot ban anybody to write any clone of SupaDupaSw or chose for example Python over C++ or whatever upside down. You can do what you want but we could be much farther together (doh, it sounds gay).
OK, it’s enough. Nevertheless I hope you can feel my despair.
Within this fragile mind
I am alone again
Me, myself and I
Echoes pounds my head
Shapeless forms everywhere
P.S.: Is there anybody experienced in Cmake, MSVC/MinGW and Oracle Client linking on Windows? Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Posted in oss | 24 Comments »
December 13th, 2007 Petr
Big fat warning: the following text is politically incorrect (regarding to Distribution Correctness). It should contains some savage words (if I know some in English). End of Warning.
I’m sitting in the front of opened bugtracker listening some old good rock and roll and The Idea is borning… slowly… but unstoppable… Can you anybody explain to me what are Ubuntu people doing with standard libraries? All known and sane systems (Windows included) usualy behave the same — just Ubuntu varies. Regulary.
This is episode 666
destination chaos
Each and all an actor blind
Ghosh, it’s boring. I’m running Ubuntu in the Virtualbox. Yep and the same code is working correctly on Opensuse with exactly the same version of Qt4 (but who knows how They patch it). Hours of time wasted.
So. Let’s compile vanilla Qt4 on Ubuntu and prepare Yet Another Minimal Example of Crippled Behaviour. #!$#%%! And weekend is still far ahead.
Update
I rewrote affected functionality. It was older Q3Supported code. Now it behaves correctly. In the pure Qt4 MVC architecture. The project milestone deadline does not allow me to examine it more. Anyway — thanks for your hints about Qt patches. I’ll use it in future for sure.
Posted in beat the bastards | 4 Comments »
December 6th, 2007 Petr
in dark frozen days…
It’s hard to promise anything but it looks like long awaited software projects (at least awaited by me) are getting closer next brave releases.
KDE 4
Weeks ago I installed some SVN snapshots of KDE4 into my office laptop. “What a disgusting crap?” I said to myself. There were things broken (and I mean all things).
You cannot imagine how I was suprised after one yast-update run. My fictional testing user can do common tasks in fully functional KDE4 session. And I can say KDE4 should kick ass — when it gets some time to stabilize all new features…
Things I’d like to have (TM):
- An option to remove text from toolbar buttons. It’s ugly and it breaks layout with large texts. Period.
- Bordered menu in Oxygen theme. I saw some bugreport for it.
- Apps (I use regulary) with feature list filled at least 80% of its KDE3 older siblings.
- Is there any “go up one level” button i Dolphin? No? It should be there. Definitely.
And last — the best thing in KDE4 is that all Qt apps I’m working on are starting pretty fast. And all of them are pretty integrated without any kdelibs inside etc. stuff.
The longest awaited image ot all:
Scribus
The Qt4 porting continues. And the application is getting more and more usable. Andreas is doing great work. It must be great work because I don’t understand any line of his code. We should hire a bodyguard for him.
One insistent thought was born last week in my mind — we can do it. I had to listen more Tiamat songs to return myself to the right negative state of mind again.
TOra
Mad soldier Mike break it all. But it’s still compilable ;). And I’m using Qt4 ported (with Qt3support) version from last week for regular Oracle administration tasks with only small amount (but ugly) crashes.
Sqliteman
Let’s be the 1.1 version feature-freezed now. Various new goodies has been done — data populator, data importers, editors, sql scripting support etc. Now it’s time for pack of releases for public testing and bugfixing.
There are some serious issues hard to fix. Some are in the Qt4 library itself (QSql bugs submitted) — some are my fault of course…
I wish one or more developers for this SW to make things move faster.
So good night pals. I’m facing the first x-mass party this year — the tomorrow’s hangover awaits me. To cleaning brain is mandatory.
Posted in oss | 5 Comments »
November 13th, 2007 Petr
Reboots are boring. Full OS virtualization is space consuming on my laptop. But creating snapshots of the SVN with fresh features is really good for feedback. I think so.
Well, from today I can serve my Qt apps from Wine/Linux environment. It was easy. Qt4 installer, MinGW installer, Cmake installer — all installed fine and everything is working without any issue. wineconsole --backend=user cmd is helpfull too.
So from today there is no need for rebooting, multiple SVN working directories. And the best point at all — today’s exe binaries for Windows are used by real XP/Vista people. With no reboot! (Did I said it before?)
Posted in kudos, oss | No Comments »
November 8th, 2007 Petr
It’s quite interesting how are Qt apps really multiplatform. I’ve tested some night-builds of Sqliteman in Vista and XP. And the only thing I can say is that rebooting is boring (I know, I know — virtualization. But there are some serious reasons I cannot use it extensively on my office laptop).
OK, back to the topic.
I said myself: “what could happen when I run it in Wine?”
It runs, it works and it doesn’t crash. It counts.
Disclaimer: running my apps under wine is not required. You can use its native-built equivalents. You know, portable writting is easy. Sometimes.
Posted in oss, sqliteman | No Comments »
