Latest Postings by Mathias
Introducing libstarred
Inspired by someone's lazyweb call I felt like doing something entirely unrelated to my regular work.
libstarred provides a GTK+ cell renderer and a widget for showing and editing five-star ratings.
Feel free to use it. Merge requests welcome. Ideally someone finds time to polish it for inclusion into GTK+ itself.
Btw, hacked using QtCreator's Autotools Plugin.
Devhelp books in QtCreator
Had a few problems focusing on my work today, so I came up with this little hack: A script converting devhelp books into Qt help collections.
Together with QtCreator's autotools plugin it should help turning QtCreator into a proper GNOME IDE.
Next steps: Let QtCreator index devhelp books automatically. Also on my wishlish: A code ...
On Populism
Funny posting on planet gnome today: A message to liberals. No comments enabled on that blog. Not nice: Post to some closed circle (forum, social network, ...) if you fear feedback.
Anyway.
A quick look at the situation in Greece and UK should be enough to understand where this is going.
In Greece was ruined by some pervert kind of ...
Thank you Steve!
Very sad day. World lost one of its biggest geniuses. Steve, thank you for your awesome ideas! Life would be so much more boring, so much more complicated without your contributions.
Firefox 6 Memory Usage
Firefox 6 landed on my Ubuntu box, so obviously it's time for my mandatory Firefox rant...
top - 14:42:13 up 4:24, 7 users, load average: 6.52, 4.21, 1.83
Tasks: 216 total, 4 running, 211 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.0%us, 8.5%sy, 0.2%ni, 17.3%id, 69.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
...
They call us crazy, but we store Contacts in Tracker
Visa authorities playing bad games with Chandni gave me the chance to talk about the QtContacts tracker plugin, which I and others where working on for that past few months. In case you've missed that early talk, here are the slides.
Interesting to just watch George from KDE to talk about similar things.
Premature bad taste becomes the norm
Seems premature bad taste becomes the norm in GNOME land.
Seems that video was shown at the desktop summit's GNOME: state of the union talk. Despite that the subtitles are entirely off, the German dialog behind is about the final days of ...
Firefox does silent major version update!?
First I was just annoyed by Firefox's "your browser has been updated and must be restarted nagging banner": It slides in with an annoying animation with each tab you open. Even if you closed it. There is no "nag me not" button. GUYS! I'VE GOT WORK TO DO! On an internal website. This site is secure. I promise: "I won't visit that malware ridden Internet before restarting. Really!"
But then searching for a release log - again no link ...
Qt Contributors Summit is over
Really enjoyed the Qt Contributors Summit. Nice, open minded people. Café Moskau turned out as awesome location for technical orientated meetings.
Even held my own little session about my griefs with QObject life-cycle. We found some few chances for improvement, but we also sadly had to conclude that proper two-phase construction and destruction isn't possible in C++, unless you forbid stack allocation and ...
Suspend broken for X200 and X201 Thinkpad in Natty
In case you wonder why suspend is broken for you after upgrading to Natty: Good chances tpm_tis is bugging you. Quite some hits when searching in Launchpad. Seems LP#770272 lists a good workaround. Have to admit I did not try it. Not knowning what benefit a TPM gives me I just blacklisted the kernel module:
echo ...
Qt Contributors' Summit
.
A bit odd for something with my background? Does that mean I am leaving the GNOME universe?
No. It just happens in Berlin, and I've just spent lots of time on letting QtContacts use some awesome GNOME technology (tracker). On the summit I'll try to convince some Qt core guys, that maybe UTF-8 ...
GFX performance pattern
In case you struggle with your GFX performance: Michael just nicely wrote down a receipe to dramatically boost performance in non-trivial canvas based applications. Old story for some, hot stuff for others.
Time for patches
Not happy with GNOME Shell, not happy with Unity, not happy with alternatives. Seems it is time for starting the editor again and cooking patches. Merging the good ideas from GNOME Shell and Unity. Ripping out the crap. Well, making it possible to hide: Some people believe in it - fine.
Still wondering which of the two I'll work with.
Really sucks that people allowed this ...
Web video lies
Those days it's easy to read things like: "Every decent browser supports WebM". So let me share some little wisdom: Things don't become true, just because Google tells so.
For instance Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS does not support WebM, unless you activate some obscure PPAs. Maybe.
Firefox supports WebM only since version 4, which was released just a few days ago.
My smartphone also doesn't ...
Automatic suspend when closing the lid
There is this big discussion about automatic suspend when closing lid as only user visible option going on. Let me share a little tale about the implications of that feature:
A long, long time ago... A young student just bought his first notebook few weeks ago and this was a big thing as even such entry class notebooks were really expensive those days. After long ...
