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Amarok collection corruption

Software

Well dang nabbit! I love how Amarok has a nice OSD with album covers, works with my laptop's multimedia keys and how it makes searching and queuing wonderfully easy. But did it really have to corrupt my music collection?

It's not fun to see a Taking Back Sunday album filed under Nekromantix with song titles from The Offspring while it is actually an album by Rise Against. Rescanning my collection didn't solve the problem, so I had to manually delete the file and start with empty scores and statistics all over again. It's times likes these I wish Amarok could import statistics from Last.FM, or that I would write a plugin to keep statistics myself (but for now I will focus on extending Kiki's user profiles and my hopefully successful publish your gig calendar campaign).

Konqueror xmlHttpRequest bug

Software

This really sucks: Konqueror eats characters from user input in xmlHttpRequest POST data, when the input contains UTF-8 characters. I filed a bug report and created a test-case, but as long as this isn't resolved I can't remove my workarounds in Kiki, which upon further investigation turns out to be rather limited.

Microsoft embraces ODF

Software

For the past decade Linux users like me often had to go through all sorts of tricks in order to get Microsoft's proprietary documents working. Import and export filters have improved a lot during the years, but maybe in the future not even those will still be necessary. After all, Microsoft is working on support for the Open Document format:

The initiative covers the Word, Excel and PowerPoint programs from the Office software suite.

The prototype of the first tool to translate between formats will be made available as a free download on 6 July.

Seems like hell just froze over.

(By the way, can anyone explain to me the remaining purpose of KWord now that OpenOffice.org integrates quite nicely with KDE?)

Bluetooth as authentication

Software

Anyone can fake a Bluetooth device ID, so technically my laptop is very insecure at the moment: it locks the screen when I'm away and unlocks it when I'm present, based on the Bluetooth signal of my mobile phone.

May 11 14:58:05 jadzia logger: Phone disappeared, locking KDE.
May 11 15:22:46 jadzia logger: Discovered phone, unlocking KDE.

Not entirely insecure actually: nobody at the office or home is likely to be interested or capable of faking my phone's signal and anyone else would still need keys to gain physical presence (a scenario where an unlocked desktop would be the least of my worries).

Laptop upgrade horror story

Software

Last week I decided to upgrade the software on my laptop. I had been running an old version of KDE for quite a while and ignored the "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" rule by jumping into FreeBSD's ports system. Quick summary of that adventure: I broke it. For some reason kdeinit hang indefinitely because DCOPserver had some problems with ICE. I'm sure I could fix it if I really wanted to, but for some reason I've been dying to get back to Slackware anyway.

So, I'm currently downloading the lastest Slackware torrents while uploading my personal files and configuration settings to a backup drive. Hopefully my system is up and running again before midnight. And hopefully I won't have to spend all Monday making a new build of the development repository we use at work. I probably will though: we use Perl and Perl is a language, not a platform. To do anything useful with it one has to navigate through dependency hell a few times. (Sometimes the mere number of "use this" and "use that" includes are a bigger part of a module than actual code, go figure.)

Wish me luck.

Novell dumps KDE

Software

I hate being right.

When Novell bought both SuSE and Ximian, many critical minds including myself anticipated the worst. Many more, including SuSE VP of R&D and KDE e.V. member and assembly chair member of the 2005 meeting, Chris Schläger, denied it: we all love KDE.

Novell is committed to supporting both GNOME and KDE desktop environments in its Linux desktop.

Yada-yada. And:

I'm sure that we are going to sponsor KDE development in the future. We have (I think) sponsored every major KDE event, like we did with aKademy this year. So why should we stop now?! Novell is very much committed to KDE!

Well, apparently the word commitment has not just been redefined in divorce laws, but also in the world of software development. For it appears to be true after all, Novell practically dumps KDE for GNOME:

Novell is making one large strategic change. The GNOME interface is going to become the default interface on both the SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) and Novell Linux Desktop line.

KDE libraries will be supplied on both, but the bulk of Novell's interface moving forward will be on GNOME.

"The entire KDE graphical interface and product family will continue to be supported and delivered on OpenSuSE," said Mancusi-Ungaro.

Nice words, but they are way too little, too late. Isn't this exactly the kind of support Red Hat offered while they were making a complete mess of their KDE "support", even spawing the third-party kde-redhat project? I should really try that on a girlfriend sometime. No, I'm not dumping you honey, I'm making a strategical change in favour of the brunette on the corner.

Oops.. KMail did it again!

Software

Godmotherfuckingdarnit!! And that's the curse after I censored it. Due to a nasty bug in KMail, I lost all e-mail sent to me since July 25. Mails containing cherished memories, pictures and words of mates and loved ones. Mails containing important login and order information. Mails containing hotel and flight bookings. Mails I still needed to answer. Again.. I lost all e-mail sent to me since July 25.

Apparently when KMail crashes during a DIMAP folder content upload, half the folder goes poof. I should really haved stayed with mutt. I hate it when I lose e-mail.

More Kiki updates

Software

More Kiki software updates? That's correct: Kiki is the name for the PHP software I have written for this web site and I have been doing some work on it. Yesterday's update on access levels has gotten a follow-up: access levels now work for the journal mail digest! And, if your RSS reader has access to your login cookie, for RSS feeds as well.

What else is new in the geek part of my life? Not much. I'm still waiting for KDE 4 to be released so I can take advantage of KSVG2 for Atlantik. I might even resume development on it when that happens.

Software development is not a huge asset on the dating market though, especially not in the rock scene, so ideas to make it look hip and sexy are welcome!

I am still a geek

Software

A fair share of my life revolves around gigs, offensive hoodies and haircuts, travelling and being nice to (and making out with) pretty girls. Developing SMS games for television and being HorrorPops webmaster do not hurt my social status either. But I am also active in the free software community, so there is no point in denying that despite all the hip properties I am still a geek.

On that note, let me announce that I have started to rebuild project pages for my software, starting with Atlantik, the board game application for KDE. I am still a bit cautious about the new technologies I want to use so I am not actively developing it at the moment, but something tells me I most definitely will do so again in the not too distant future!

MDI Window Manager

Software

KDE thought of the week: It's about time MDI becomes part of the window manager spec so tabbing can be implemented in a way that every application can have it, in a standard way.

© Copyright 1995-2008 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)