Fading Memories

It's spring in Deventer, the Netherlands, too. So I can show off with pictures of the tulips I got for my birthday in December:

It's not much, but it's mine... Most of the garden has been taken over by the kids to grow vegetables. But I really like the yellow and red tulips:

In Krita 2.0, we will be using OpenGL much more than we already do in Krita 1.5, so I need to learn. When ordering the two basic books, OpenGL Programming Guide and OpenGL Shading Language. But Amazon then gave me Open Source Game Development Qt Games for KDE, PDAs, and Windows as a related choice.

I was a bit surprised: a whole book on coding games for KDE? But, well, it had an introductory chapter on OpenGL, and I thought that might help me ease into the topic.

It turns out this book is a really excellent, well-written concise and clear introduction to coding for KDE. Not just for coding games, but the whole thing. The ideal beginners introduction for people who are interested in coding for KDE. Of course, it doesn't deal with CMake yet, although there is quite decent coverage of Qt4. And the OpenGL chapter is just what I needed, too.

Buy this book, is my advice!

Christ has risen! (all over the world)For those who've been wondering where I was last week, well, I was in Church pretty much solid from Wednesday evening until Sunday morning, 3:30 (CET). And afterwards we had a feast, so I wasn't home until six o'clock this morning.

Holy week is the one week in the year during which I feel most completely alive; when every day seems to be an eternity in itself. During Holy Week I never can believe that there exists a world outside the church services -- everything else is so thin and unreal. That goes for work, but it also goes for KOffice and everything else. Christos anesti!

Which is good, of course. Church is the place where one goes to experience the Eternal and to praise the living God, who his risen from the dead and thereby conquered death itself. And Easter is not commemoration, or re-enactment, but actualisation -- making the eternal truth present for us. Christ is resurrected in reality every time when the priest first sings "Christus is opgestaan!

And this morning, I'm going about the house, singing the Easter troparion in Greek, Dutch and Church Slavonic. Eating chocolate eggs, kissing my wife and hugging the kids. We've got a growing parish full of people (we really don't fit in our Church anymore) I love, and I've given almost all of them the Easter kiss this morning. We had the Gospel in Dutch, Russian, Greek, French, English, Frisian, Macedonian, Georgian and Geez. And I'm blogging incoherently -- but full of joy. Христос Воскресе! Χριστος Aνεστη!

And KSpread runs, too!

And KOffice trunk, of course, compiles with CMake, and I must say, I rather like CMake.

Quite a long time ago I wrote a book on PyQt, the Python bindings to Qt. I still think that even though Phil Thompson may have taken a brute-force approach to binding, it's easily the best and most productive environment I've ever hacked in. Although I use C++ and Java almost exclusively nowadays, I still long for the simplicity and flexibility of Python and Qt.

Good to see, therefore, that Bruce Eckel managed to find a second-hand copy of my out-of-print book.

Thanks to the indefatigable work of Laurent Montel, Adrian Page and Sven Langkamp, Krita 2.0 now starts up. You cannot load an image, create an image or actually do anything but start it, of course. But given the enormity of the task of porting a really big Qt3 application -- and one that depends on almost all of the KOffice libraries and KDE libraries -- this is a very impressive result.

Porting started March 27. That is seventeen days ago. That we needed seventeen days to get a completely stripped down port of Krita done indicates the enormity of the task, and I think we'll need more than a month to get Krita back into a shape where we can start refactoring to make use of Qt4's possibilities, or even adding cool new stuff.

And, of course, we're dependent on KDE, too. Large and important things like the config system, the XMLGui system and so are currently unavailable, which limits the scope for our porting effort.

But, hey! Krita runs again!

KOffice 1.5.0 has been released! We -- that is the KOffice hacker collective -- are tired, maybe even somewhat burned-out, gave our all, have typed our fingers to the bone, our butts have rooted themselves to our chairs and people sadly shake their heads when they pass our neglected and delapidated houses. But now is the time to celebrate! Look at the changelog. The condensed changelog, to be precise. We went from a dozen hackers to about thirty, are still under one million lines of code, have gained yet another application -- and we're tired but happy. But I've already said that, haven't I? Champagne, beer, ginger ale and wine are flowing like water in Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Spain, Italy, the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand and Austria -- and those are just the countries I know we've got hackers. Rejoice!

(And in a month or so, we'll do a 1.5.1 with a couple of bugfixes...)

And still the work continues. Martin Pfeiffer is committing to KOffice 2.0 right now!