It's 2:30 AM, and instead of being arriving at rosario for the 1ra Jornada Linux, I am here in my office polishing the slides.

I am ei­ther too re­spon­si­ble, or the ex­act op­po­site :-)

Any­way, mak­ing the slides made me see a whole bunch of things that are al­ready very cool in KDE 2.

For ex­am­ple, snap­shot har­vest­ing is just too easy. split kon­qy, and drag the im­ages in­to the fold­er :-)

KP­re­sen­ter is pret­ty sol­id (ex­cept for em­bed­ding :-P)

In fac­t, I am now de­cid­ed that kon­queror is my new de­fault brows­er.

It's sta­ble enough for re­al use, it can be made to have sep­a­rate pro­cess­es for dif­fer­ent win­dows, and... it does ja­va and plug­ins bet­ter than net­scape it­self! So, I'll keep it ;-)

Now, I will fin­ish this, and go find a bus, so I will be in Rosario around 8AM.... just in time to go with­out sleep­ing in­to the ac­tiv­i­ties. Oh, the fun ;-)

Well, KDE Beta 3 is working quite nicely, and I'm now finally confident that I can actually code for it.

So, it's time to go crazy, get a com­put­er, and re­do KRN.

This time, us­ing li­br­m­m, my mail stor­age thing, and the KDE I/O stuff, plus XML­GUI, and per­haps an ex­port­ed DCOP in­ter­face.

It's gonna be fun :-)

The new dock-based, MT KRN is advancing well, although the amount of things broken in it is a bit scary. Of course the code to do all the things 0.6.11 did is still there (and anyway, that's what CVS exists for ;-) but it is totally divorced from the UI.

On oth­er is­sues, I got over slash­dot to­day, af­ter a long while. Af­ter I thought the site had reached the bot­tom, they get a shov­el and dig deep­er :-P

No, I don't mean /. it­self, but the peo­ple com­ment­ing in it. What *is* the point for them? What do they get? I am a firm be­liev­er in quid pro quo[1].

Are they so eas­i­ly amused as to be re­ward­ed by the imag­ined re­ac­tion of peo­ple read­ing about grits and pet­ri­fied teenag­er star­let­s?

I doubt any of them will read this, but... well, let me tell you: there is prob­a­bly no re­ac­tion at al­l. I know I just look at that waste of elec­trons with sort of a blank ex­pres­sion, and then click "nex­t". I ex­pect ev­ery­one to do the same (ex­cept for the grit­ter him­self, who prob­a­bly looks at his oeu­vre and gig­gles in­sane­ly for around 13 min­utes).

But to­day, it had reached new depth­s. One guy made a poor taste com­ment about GNOME, pos­ing as a KDE ad­vo­cate (I se­ri­ous­ly doubt he was, I'm more in­clined to be­lieve he was just a a trol­l).

But the an­swer left me as­ton­ished. It in­clud­ed a graph­ic de­scrip­tion of how all KDE ad­vo­cates are worm­s, who look for­ward to be put in a hook. Pret­ty dis­gust­ing. Again: I don't be­lieve that an­swer was writ­ten by a GNOME ad­vo­cate, but just by a pre­pubescent mo­ron.

How­ev­er, when the time comes that peo­ple need to im­per­son­ate oth­ers to fight in the name of those oth­er­s' be­lief­s, such peo­ple have deep trou­bles. So, sor­ry, /., you are now of­fi­cial­ly a loony bin. It used to be fun to hang around there. Close it, and start an­oth­er site. Or rather: don't close it, and start a new one, hope­ful­ly the stupid and in­sane will stay in /., trolling and in­sult­ing each oth­er.

If that day comes, email me, I will be on an­oth­er site. Which one? Sor­ry, I won't say. It's a nice lit­tle site, with short dis­cus­sion­s, usu­al­ly in a po­lite tone.

I al­so saw a dis­turb­ing trend here, with the trust met­ric ar­ti­cle, and the Jab­ber peo­ple ar­gu­ing about whether they de­served to be "mas­ter" or what­ev­er... light­en up­[3]. If you are a mas­ter, you are a mas­ter re­gard­less of what col­or your name ap­pears on ad­voga­to, and be­ing marked as mas­ter here if you are not is just food for the ego, and junk food, for that mat­ter.

And it must be true be­cause I say so, and I am a mas­ter... oop­s, Jour­ney­er, what­ev­er that means :-)

This must be the long­est di­ary en­try I ev­er wrote, and I'd bet not many have writ­ten longer ones, hope­ful­ly you, hy­po­thet­i­cal read­er, will for­give me.

[1] Yes, I be­lieve we don't do free soft­ware out of the good­ness of our heart­s[2], and that we all have ul­te­ri­or mo­tives, even if we are not ful­ly aware of them. I should write about it some­day.

[2] I al­so be­lieve the end re­sult is pret­ty much in­dis­tin­guish­able from what would hap­pen if we were do­ing it out of the good­ness in our hearts (or rather your heart­s, mine is dark and eeeevil, just ask around)

[3] Of course ask­ing oth­ers to light­en up about things that are of no big im­por­tance to me is easy. That's why I do it. I sup­pose that if ad­voga­to rat­ed projects and KDE was some­how marked as lame, I would care. I hope peo­ple will tell me to light­en up when that hap­pen­s.

KRN is now multithreaded! Ok, not really, in at least two ways.

One way in which KRN is not mul­ti­thread­ed, is in that it is done us­ing GNU Pth, which is not "re­al" mul­ti­thread­ing, but co­op­er­a­tive userspace mul­ti­thread­ing. Of course that if I had to make KRN reen­trant and thread­safe, it would not be mul­ti­thread­ed in any way.

The oth­er way in which KRN is not mul­ti­thread­ed is that it is not fine enough in its gran­u­lar­i­ty. There are chunks of things which don't spawn thread­s, and lock the UI thread, thus lock­ing KRN. But those are easy to fix: wait un­til some­one com­plains it block­s, then make it spawn and look as a re­spon­sive de­vel­op­er ;-)

Al­so, I port­ed kdestu­dio's dock­wid­get back to KDE 1, and am adopt­ing it to do use­ful MDI-­like things (ie: dock­ing, not re­al MDI).

Fi­nal­ly: the re­port pro­gress­ing frame­work is there. All that's need­ed now is make it do pro­gress­bars in­stead of print­ing on the ter­mi­nal, and make it work on all long ac­tion­s...

Well, this is the first entry. I have wanted to keep a diary on a semi-public place for a while, I guess this is as good a moment to start as ny other.

I am a KDE de­vel­op­er, my most wide­ly known pro­gram be­ing KRN. Af­ter a long hia­tus I restart­ed de­vel­op­ment a cou­ple of months ago, af­ter I de­cid­ed the cur­rent state was a bit em­bar­ras­ing.

Don't get me wrong, I am not em­bar­rased by the pro­gram as a whole. Af­ter over a year of ze­ro de­vel­op­men­t, it is still one of the more ful­l-fea­tured GUI news­read­ers you can find, and I ba­si­cal­ly learnt C++ while writ­ing it (and it shows ;-)

So, now, af­ter re­turn­ing (a mere 5 hours ago) from my va­ca­tions (nice, beach, sun, etc.) I will try to hack 0.6.9 out as soon as pos­si­ble.

There are a lot of nice things al­ready done (how about "s­e­lect from Ar­ti­cle where Sender like "%@my-de­ja.­com%" and Date > (TO­DAY()-3)" ? And no, you don't need to in­stall MySQL for this to work!