Fading Memories

I think I somehow messed up my Breezy install bad enough that upgrading to Dapper just isn’t going to work, so I’m reinstalling, or rather installing Dapper from scratch. I must say, this is a good installer.

For once thing, I’m blogging this logged into my server from the laptop where Kubuntu is being installed as I’m typing this. The life cd found my neighbours’ wifi lan, cracked the key (apparently, or they have chosen to disable encryption today) and got conected.

The artwork is nice, very nice. The startup of the life cd has provision for accessibility. The life desktop is very nice, very clean. The default window theme is small and not gaudy.

Some minus points: the partitioner is completely incomprehensible to me — and I’m an experience partitioner, having repartitioned hard disks for fifteen years. After pressing ok, the screen goes black for just long enough to give me a nasty fright. And my ssh loging through the neighbour’s network sometimes halts and then continues.

Well, time to reboot. Installing is done.

Before the piccy scrolls off the mainpage. The Kubuntu picture of Konqui & KOffice is way cool. And there are no fewer than five Konqui fans in my house...

In other news, the reason I went to kubuntu.org was to find the bugs database, since upgrading to Dapper seems to have removed my gl.h file and there's something funny happening when I resume for suspend-to-ram, one time out of three.

In you don't half realize how soggy the weather is news, our family went for a day trip, today. Yep: I managed to make it possible to get a holiday by working extra-hard for a customer so I could squeeze out from the two or three work projects demanding my attention.

So we went to 's Hertogenbosch, to take the boat trip on the Binnendieze.. Despite the rain, this was rather worth it. Fascinating, in fact. And the way the old city wall is restored in one place reminds me of the intriguing way the castle in has been restored. Graceful, with respect for the original building, but working around it instead of messing it up.

Anyway, now back to my attempts at restoring sanity to this lowly Z60m.

Print magazines have a difficult time, nowadays. Not enough advertisers, not enough speed in their time-to-market. It's no wonder it turned out to be quite difficult to get a copy of the issue of Linux Format slagging KOffice 1.5.

Or maybe it's the quality of Linux Format... I mean, if one reviews the first beta release of an application suite, one should mention that little fact. If one is deficient in the wit department, one should not try to exercise that faculty. Not that KOffice is perfect, but, well, it's not that badi!

KOffice got four Summer of Code projects from the 24 allotted to KDE, which is quite nice. It was going to be five, with Ariya's Excel Export filter project as the fifth. However, since Ariya had also entered a project for Open Office, and since Google when students are chosen for two or more projects, favours the smaller, he was accepted for OpenOffice.

KDE didn't lose the slot, though, we had two backup projects: one for KOffice, one for KDE. But Google placed the other project, so KOffice is down to four. Slightly less excellent for us, but for KDE as a whole not a big deal.

And the projects KOffice has got are real dozies:

• For Krita, Thrain (or Emanuele Tamponi) is going to try to add bezier and scissors tools, under the mentorship of Bart Coppens. After meeting Emanuele yesterday on irc, I'm convinced that he fits right in with the team. Which means that he's officially declared to be as nutty as the rest of us.
• Under the stewardship of David Faure, Alfredo Beaumont Sainz is going to implement full native ODF and MathML support in KFormula. I've every confidence in the success of this project, since Alfredo is KFormula's brand-new maintainer.
• I am going to mentor Fredrik Edemar to implement two things for KWord: basic version control and heading recognition. The latter is quite interesting: Frederik wants to make KWord to assign styles to paragraphs based on text, recognizing when a user types a heading. This is something I like a lot: too often, word processors either allow the user to do all formatting, resulting in documents without structure, or force users to create structure, which they -- rightly! -- don't want to do. What a good word processor should do is recognize the way the user formats the document and create structure. That's the next level, and I'm convinced it's going to be copied a lot.
• Cyrille Berger is going to mentor amazingly erudite Gábor Lehel to turn his Krita-specific layer widget into a cool, Qt4-style compliant, model-view, generic layer/document structure/page preview widget for KOffice 2.0. This widget will go a long way to enabling us to realize the vision presented by the winner of the KOffice 2.0 design competition, Martin Pfeiffer.

This year's Summer of Code looks like it's going to be a runaway success for KOffice!

Our family prays every night -- a very, very, very short and abbreviated version of vespers -- and we like to light a karbounakia, or small bit of charcoal, and add a grain of incense. There are all kinds of good, theological and pious reasons to do so, but it's fun, too, and it helps if the living room smells like Church, when you want to pray.

Our stock, bought last year in Greece, is now sadly depleted, so I was rather interested when a bit of outre research(1) led me to the Hermitage of the Holy Cross. Here they sell incense... But it's almost as if they're selling pipe tobacco!(Note: I do not recommend smoking, not even a pipe, although it is surely something every wise wife should allow her husband, the old English proverb says "allow your man his pipe and his hobby and you've got him chained for good", but smoking etc. A hobby like KDE, though, cannot be but good for ones health.)i

In any case, Casper Boemann has just fixed the rotating-big-images bug in Krita. Hurray!

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¹Roey Katz on #koffice reminded me (without knowing himself) that I should check Ship of Fools, from whence I went to Monachos, where a discussion on head scarves attended me to the question of long hair and beards for men, where I learned that angels are trespassing on the 96th canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

I bet I earned that penny for my thoughts now!

That's what I feel. The weather is nice and I haven't done a thing about Krita for quite a bit of time. Of course, that's partly because I have a hard time getting into the Qt4 porting; porting Qt3 to Qt4 makes me feel like I'm learning to ride a bicycle with training wheels again. Which, given that I'm as Dutch as Dutchmen come (being from mixed German and Swiss stock), you may well imagine is hard on me. Anyway, if I cannot bike, I'm going to ramble...

Read more ...

Looks like getting a new lease of life. After consultation with the publisher and Phil Thompson, I've sent the sgml sources to Phil, who's acquired a small band of volunteers to update the text for PyQt4 and, what's even nicer, bundle it with PyQt.

The only real restriction on the license of the book is that nobody but OpenDocs is allowed to publish it as a paper book. Maybe that makes it not free enough for Debian, but, well, having the book available in the PyQt package makes PyQt so much more attractive. Even if I say so myself, it is a very full and clear introduction to coding a complete application in PyQt. The University of New South Wales chose it for its introductory class in OO programming, after all. Pity they used the electronic, not the paper version.

Oh, and a Turkish translation appears to be in the works.

Update: "hgg" writes to tell me that my book is still available at http://www.commandprompt.com/community/pyqt, which I didn't know. Which means that my offer of sending out a pdf file isn't necessary anymore.

Seems I was five years too early for once in my life. Python as Visual Basic for the Free Software world was exactly my pitch when looking for a publisher for my book on application coding with Python and PyQt. The book is hard to get nowadays: the publisher has let the online copy disappear and paper copies are exceedingly rare. I periodically try to interest the publisher in a scheme where someone else can update the text, but that has never gone anywhere. In any case, I can send interested people the pdf file, I guess. More than 600 pages...

Personally, I've never cared for Ruby, and while I admire Korundum, I've never seen the problems with PyQt and PyKDE. Actively maintained, stable, easy to use (every method can be a slot!), integrate well with KDE, maintainer is a great guy, nice mailing list. In the early days the biggest problem were that there were no distributions carrying the binding; nowadays it's one of those technologies that may not be completely up-to-date in the buzz department, but that just work. PyQt and PyKDE work fine. You can depend on them.

A newer development is Kross, in KOffice. Basically Kross is a bridge between a set of classes you define to be the scripting API of your application and a language interpreter. All languages use the same API: Kross has pluggable interpreters. Currently Python and Ruby, but people seem interested in adding a Javascript interpreter. Now I've just had the pleasure of hacking on a Javascript application a little, but that's a whole other rant. There are mature Kross bindings for Krita and Kexi and an experimental one for KSpread. Personally, I'm interested in doing one for KWord. Sebastian Sauer is now working on a macro system, too.

Kross is a little underdocumented -- like everything -- but Cyrille Berger has been writing a tutorial for people who want to use Kross in their application. It's not finished, but it has enabled Isaac Clerencia to do the KSpread plugin.

As a side-node: a current problem with application scripting seems to be that we don't have a good idea of what a KOffice document tree should look like from a scripting point of view. Something I need to think over.