Archive for the ‘KDE’ Category

KDE packages for Fedora

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Recently, I compiled a list of apps from kde-apps.org that I thought would be useful in Fedora. In addition, I recently edited the wiki to move the table of requested packages to a page of its own. Ryan Rix is now taking that list and putting it into that table. If anyone sees any applications there that they would like, please add your name to the table and keep it up to date. If you need any help with a package or would like to know how to get started with packaging for Fedora, feel free to join #fedora-kde on irc.freenode.net (webchat link is here).

I’m not sure how long the table will take to propogate and I am only up to page 60 or so of the things on the kde-apps website, so keep an eye out for any applications or libraries you use or would like to maintain.

Posted in Fedora, KDE | No Comments »

Wiki and packaging

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

I did some more packaging work this week. Serna is a mess for a spec file right now and its dependencies aren’t looking all that much better. I’ve reviewed Mailody, Plastik colorscheme, and KMess in Fedora. The daisy plasmoid is under review now as well. Kobby has been pushed to the repositories too.

I also did some wiki work for the KDE SIG. Seeing as my motivation for coding is still low, I figured I’d do some more mundane stuff to help. I’ll get around to cleaning up the other pages in the coming week.

Luckily (and unluckily), the laptop started having performance issues and VNC was utterly unbearable, so now I’m on the desktop where I did all of the work anyways (plus being able to type ‘<’ again is nice), so now there’s one less layer between working and what I’m seeing (keyboard shortcuts are eaten locally if possible before VNC gets them, so the mouse was being used more…which is not really my thing). Now I’m using synergy between the two and it works well, though I’m finding that it’s hard to use both. About the most I can do is fire off a mock or rpmbuild on the laptop and then get back to IRC or whatever.

Posted in Fedora, KDE | No Comments »

Schedules

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

So I just read an essay by Paul Graham which helps to explain why I can’t get the gusto to work on code all that much. I’ve just felt out of steam most of the summer and have written just about nothing. So instead I’ve been reading a lot. Since I got back from college I’ve read a lot. Here’s a list (in no particular order) of those that I’ve finished:

  • Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov
  • Disclosure by Michael Crichton
  • Sphere by Michael Crichton
  • Frankenstein by Marry Shelley
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
  • Mathematical Fallacies and Paradoxes by Bryan Bunch

and those that I am currently reading:

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
  • American Gods by Neil Gaiman

It does feel good to be back reading again. I only got through 4 or 5 of the 60 I took to college last year. So now I’ll be taking less and reading more so instead of 6%, I hope to be closer to 80% of those I take up. I may write stuff about them in the future.

On the coding side, I’ve cleaned up some stuff in Sigen from fixing Sigmodr to behave better with minimum values of some variables showing descriptive text instead of having -1 be -1, it says “No limit” which is how the engine interprets it where applicable.

I’ve also started to work on the Kross fixes I’ve been wanting for a while in KDE’s playground. Not sure how long it will take with the current schedule I keep. I do have time to work on it today, so that’s where I’ll probably be until everyone else gets back.

Posted in Books, KDE, Kross | 1 Comment »

Much-needed update

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

Okay, so I lost the old post half-way through the second paragraph, let’s see how much I can remember.

It’s been over a month since I’ve paid attention to this nook of the Internet. Another year of school ended, got my wisdom teeth removed, gotten into playing some Dungeons & Dragons, hacked a bit on Sigen, building KDE 4.3 beta 1, finally getting VNC working, and some other miscellaneous stuff.

I was able to replace 10,000 lines of code with about 1,500 lines in the tree widget in Sigmodr. It now no longer needs right clicking to add and delete items in a game. It has lost drag’n'drop and copy/paste support for now, but the maintainability of the new code is well worth the loss.

The map editor has had a few bugs squashed as well, though I may have to switch over to a new way of doing it since there’s a test case I hadn’t thought of that the current algorithm is choking on. To visualize the case, imagine a π and then placing that on a platform. There is now an outline and an internal area. The current algorithm screws up the internal outline since it doesn’t know that the other leg (on the same polygon) is the target; it only looks at the other polygon for a target point. So it’s broken and fixing it would take a lot of time. I’ve been trying to think of a data structure scheme which will nicely accomodate the vector idea I was tossing around even while making the current algorithm. A map would work, but I don’t want to have to fiddle with pairs and whatnot.

I’ve also built KDE 4.3 beta 1 for Fedora 11 (i586 and x86_64). I don’t know when they’ll hit the kde-unstable repo at kde-redhat. I have a list of bugs to submit, which I’ll work on submitting in the next few days.

The Kopete runner I was working on is still at the same position it was before, but after talking with Matt Rogers, it looks as though Kopete’s DBus interface needs to be fixed up and redone for it to work. This means that it will have to wait until KDE 4.4 and I’ll be learning myself some DBus goodness. It doesn’t look all that bad.

I would also like to announce that I have my server up with a public address now.It has HTTP and git services. The important URLs are:

Most of the git repos are there to keep old code in VCS if I ever hack on them again. The older stuff is scary, not really for the faint-at-heart.

Posted in Fedora, KDE, Sigen | No Comments »

Running into trees

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

So this weekend I started hacking on the new tree for Sigmodr. It’s so far going okay, though there are some issues with juggling the indexes around, which is the most annoying part about Qt’s MVC (at least with trees, I haven’t touched the table models for a while). This new tree will be much more compact and easier to maintain. Instead of being strewn across a couple dozen classes, 2 files per class, it will be 3 or 4 classes with less than half the code since I can condense it all. The old tree is full of hacks and nastiness I didn’t like when I first wrote it, but I didn’t know any better then. Now that I’ve had more exposure to writing some models, they make more sense, but juggling indexes is still a pain.

I also got a KDE SVN account and committed the beginnings of a runner for Kopete to set the status of accounts and to be able to start chats. I’m currently stuck since in order to access Kopete’s accounts with libkopete, I need to fake having Kopete’s configuration file as the runner’s config. I may be able to use DBUS, but I’ll have to look at Kopete’s interface a bit more to see what I can use from that. The runner is currently in playground.

Posted in KDE, Sigen | No Comments »

Kross fixins

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

So this turned out kind of dry and boring, but it’s basically a laundry list for fixing up Kross and its language bridges.

Sigen uses Kross to allow for many scripting languages to be used to script up things in games that use the engine. Tonight I perused the source for the bindings (the KJS and QtScript bindings are very simple) and looked to see what could be improved or fixed. One thing that the bindings need are ways to use disconnect. Neither Python nor the Ruby bridge offers a disconnect that does anything. This should be just as simple as a state machine just like the one used for connect. Python ships a (most likely, I have to run diff over it yet) patched version of PyCXX which I’d like to get working on a system version in Fedora (still needs to be packaged) so that it’s not duplicate and other applications can use it. Ruby doesn’t implement a way for connecting an object to non-Ruby methods (such as back into the C++ objects). Falcon mostly works, but connect and disconnect are both non-functional due to some issues with what objects have the methods. I finally got the Java bridge to compile tonight and I haven’t gotten around to testing it yet. Unfortunately the state of the CMake file which searches for the libraries that it uses from Java is not very portable. It assumes the library directory and compiler imclude directory to find AWT stuff. Although my GSoC project to do this as well as add Kross support to an existing application wasn’t accepted, I’d like to at least fix up some of the language bridges and then polish up Kross so that it’s easier to use on the application side. Adding forwarding headers as well as allowing ActionCollections to host objects would be a start.

Looking at the code, making other language bridges shouldn’t be that tough. Lua offers a C API and has a Kross bridge at some level of completion in KDE’s playground. I can’t find documentation for PHP’s C API, so I don’t know how well this would work. Some variant of LISP is under way as I understand. With all these ways to script the engine, making new ways of doing things should be a snap.

Posted in KDE, Kross, Sigen | No Comments »

Catch up

Monday, March 16th, 2009

I missed posting all last week mainly because of an inability to focus while I was at home for spring break. I’ve made a huge to-do list that I’d like to tackle, but I’m not sure how it’ll work out. I also have some restructuring to do with daily schedules and some loose ends I’d like to tie up for plans and whatnot. Sigen grew a long list of things that need to be done and decided on during the bus ride home, which I’ll give a post of its own later this week since I’d like to get to bed at a reasonable (college student) time here.

While at home, I usually end up doing things I never do here it seems. Watching TV, eating much worse, not getting any work done, etc. I did find out that apparently the folks at Redmond think that “Life without walls” is a clever slogan for themselves. As, I’m sure, others have pointed out that windows don’t really exist without walls and that it feels as though hitting walls is a daily routine in Windows land, it makes me feel as though that as a whole they are completely oblivious with their lack of so many things that I take for granted in KDE land that it’s almost laughable.

Commercials still annoy me. Always will I guess. Advertising is a hard problem that seems to be getting better. Radio ads seem to be among the worst still. I listen to my second-favorite radio station at home because the first has such bad commercials it’s not worth it. TV ads can be muted and still have cues when they’re over. The Internet is such a worse place when I use browsers without ad-blocking capabilities. It’s a basic necessity these days. I know that keeping sites up is hard to do for free, but there has to be a better way than intrusive ads that distract from the content of the site. If they showed up every X links or so, it would be better for me, but worse for many.

I did finish Broca’s Brain and started Island. I feel a little lost about the beginning of it, but it may be a result of my lack of focus during the last week.

Anyways, bed is beckoning and I’ll see what happens with the first day of classes after the break in a couple of hours.

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