James Ots - Computery Things

Making a VCDS inferface work

2010-08-15T08:20:00.002Z

While I'm in the mood for posting solutions to technical problems, here's another. I have a OBD interface cable for my VW Bora so that I can run a piece of software called VCDS (sometimes known as VAG-COM) and read the error codes from my car's ECU. However, when I plug in the cable (it's the USB version), it is usually assigned to COM7. Unfortunately, the VCDS programme only supports COM1-4.

Weirdly, the solution for me is to plug the cable in and run VCDS settings. If I choose COM3 then it successfully detects a COM port - I think it's used by the built in model. I save the settings, and then bring up the Device Manager and change the port used by the interface cable to COM3. It says the port is already in use, but lets you change it anyway. Then I just use the VCDS software and it works. This seems completely wrong, and to be honest, I'm sure there's probably a better way of doing it than this, but at least it works.

Disabling the buzz

2010-08-15T08:16:00.002Z

I just installed openSUSE 11.3 on my desktop computer, and I have to say it's pretty much awesome. Almost everything has worked straight out of the box, including my Wacom graphics tablet and my wireless card. One thing that's been annoying me is that whenever I make a mistake (such as trying to delete some text that isn't there), my computer makes the most almighty buzz. Or maybe it could be described as a belch. It's pretty horrible, however you describe it, and makes me jump out of my skin every time. I think it's supposed to be the System Bell.

I spent some time trying to work out how to stop this, and eventually managed to stop it by doing this: I opened up KMix, clicked on the 'Mixer' button to bring up the full mixer. The selected tab was HDA Intel, and I clicked on Settings > Configure Channels, and then dragged the item called 'Beep' from 'Available channels' to 'Visible channels' and clicked OK. Then I muted the Beep channel.

I just thought I'd post that in case anyone else has a similar problem and is searching for a solution some time in the future.

Activating Virgin Media Broadband on Linux

2010-02-18T11:12:00.002Z

Yesterday I installed Virgin Media broadband at my new house. Virgin Media? Am I insane? Well, unfortunately my new house is 4.5km away from the exchange and the fastest ADSL connection is less than 2 Mbits, so Virgin was my only option. Anyway, I digress. The reason for the post is to help out any other Linux users who want to use Virgin Media.

When I plugged in the router and went to view a website on my computer, I was redirected to an activation page, where I had to enter my name and postcode and stuff like that. Except that the first page you go to checks to make sure you're running Windows or using a Mac. Thankfully, Konqueror and Opera both let me change my browser identification string so that Virgin's servers think I am using Windows. So far, so good. The next problem comes a few steps later when the 'Next' button doesn't respond. A quick view of the page's source shows that Virgin is trying to set the browser's homepage using some bad JavaScript. It also shows that after trying to do that, it was just going to redirect to another page anyway, so I was able to copy that URL into the address bar and carry on. I don't remember what the URL was, but if you look for the function called 'next()' in the source, you'll see it there. A few pages later it prompts you to download and install their special tools. There's no option to skip this, but if you click on 'Next', it starts the download and then goes onto the next page anyway. You can just ignore the download.

After all that, your connection should be activated. Mine was, anyway. Now I get about a 4 Mbit connection instead of the slow 2 Mbit ADSL connection. Which is still slow, considering Virgin Media advertise it as a 20 Mbit connection, but I wasn't expecting anything that good from Virgin Media. After all, they are just NTL with a new name.

An Update

2009-06-17T15:36:00.002Z

So I have a baby. Joscelyn Eleanore was born two weeks ago, and is completely wonderful. And on Saturday Naomi, Joscelyn and myself are flying off to Canada so that the inlaws get to see their first grandchild. I'm really looking forward to it. Well, mostly. It'll probably be quite tiring - we're hiring a car and will be doing a huge amount of driving (around 3000 miles) so that we can see everyone Naomi wants to see. But it'll be fun.

My other baby (my seven year old laptop, Lazarus) is losing its memory. One of the memory slots decided to give up the ghost, so it now only has half a gig of RAM. One gig was already on the low side of comfortable, so now it's extremely frustrating to use. At least I'm running Linux on it and not Windows, since I generally find Windows likes to have around double the amount of RAM that Linux likes. It'd be a good excuse to put Lazarus in the grave one final time and get a nice, fast, new computer. But I can't afford a new computer and a new baby. Well, I could, but I just got a new 10-22mm lens for my camera and I want a new Line 6 box for my guitar, so I might just have to struggle on. Oh well, I'm in Canada for the next five weeks, so I don't have to worry about it at the moment.

KNetWalk

2009-04-14T19:36:00.002Z

I'm trying to write an Android game, but I've been rather addicted to playing KNetWalk, which is slowing me down somewhat. I'm getting fast at KNetWalk though - I just did the Very Hard level in 59 seconds without any penalties. I think I might give up now, although I reckon I could probably do it in 50 seconds if I was very lucky.

tinyurl No Longer Breaks My Security Model

2009-04-14T08:08:00.002Z

At least, not on my Android phone. I've just released Check Redirect on the Android Market (for free, of course), which intercepts view intentions on links, and if the link is a tiny url of some sort (the list of intercepted hosts is configurable) it pops up a dialog letting you know where the link redirects to, and asks if you wish to follow the link.

And when I'm using Linux instead of my phone, I found an extension for firefox which does a similar thing. I can't remember what it was called though.

tiny.url Breaks My Security Model

2009-03-30T13:54:00.002Z

Since using twitter, I've noticed a lot of people use services such as tiny.url or tr.im in order to shorten URLs. There's a problem with this though: I now have no idea what website I'm about to visit. If someone I trust has posted the link I'm reasonably likely to click on it, but for other people I tend to avoid these shortened links because I have no idea in advance what they are.

What is really needed is for the shortener service to show you what site you're about to visit first, so you can make a more informed decision about whether to visit the site or not. Hmm, maybe I should be sending this as a feature request to those sites instead of randomly blogging about it...

Android Reloaded

2009-03-04T18:13:00.002Z

On Monday night I got home from the pub, and my phone announced that there was an update available, and would I be so kind as to allow it to update itself. I said, 'Yes, that would be lovely', and my G1 proceeded to show me a nice updating screen while it changed all its software around.

There's not much to see for it. The Android Market now tells you when anything you've installed has an update available, which is nice. Google Maps is now version 3, but I can't tell the difference. The biggest changes though, have to be memory usage and power consumption. Previously, after using my phone on and off during the day at work, the battery level would generally be down around 40% when I came home. However, the last two days have seen it around 60% instead, which is a great improvement. The other change is that before the update, my /data partition had around 10Mb free on it, while after the update it has around 30Mb free. I don't know how they've done that. Perhaps shifted some space from the /cache partition? I never bothered noting the free space on anything other than /data before.

G1 Power Usage

2009-02-28T23:12:00.002Z

After posting my last entry, I thought I'd elaborate on the G1's power usage. There's a useful little tool available on the Android Market called Watts, which logs the battery level and shows a graph of it. The image below is two screenshots from Watts.

The one on the left is the device's power usage last night, when I wasn't using the phone at all since I was asleep, but the phone was still checking my email and twitter regularly.

The one on the right was this afternoon, when I was watching the rugby at my parents', but also using my G1 a far amount for twittering, checking emails, texting, and looking up things like the words of 'God Save the Queen' and what a drop goal is.

As you can see, the standby life is pretty good, and you can probably get a good eight hours of reasonably intensive use out of the battery. Which is pretty poor, but I can live with it, since I don't usually use the phone that intensively.

Should I Buy A G1?

2009-02-28T14:32:00.003Z

Since I've got myself a T-Mobile G1, I've had several people ask me if they too should get one. And the answer, as it often is, is: It depends.

If you want a phone with good battery life, this is definitely not the phone for you. If you have GPS and Wifi and 3G and all the bells and whistles turned on and you're using the phone constantly, you'll probably only get four or five hours of use out of it. I turn GPS and Wifi off and turn the screen brightness down (because even when it's turned right down it's pretty bright), and don't use it non-stop, just a fair bit of twittering and the odd bit of internet browsing and some texts and phone calls. And usually it's down to around 40% battery by the end of the day. Of course, it depends completely on how you use it. I usually plug the phone in at night so that it's fully charged in the morning. Last night I forgot to switch the charger on, and when I checked in the morning it had used less than 5% of the battery, so it's standby use is pretty good.

If you want a phone which was take videos, this isn't (yet) the phone for you. There are rumours of software upgrades on the way which will add this capability, but it isn't there yet.

If you want a phone with an on-screen keyboard, this also isn't (yet) the phone for you. It's apparently on the way though. An I don't understand why anyone would rather use an on-screen keyboard when you can use the G1's fantastic real keyboard. I didn't think I'd like using the keyboard much, but it works brilliantly, at least for my hands. The 'chin' on the phone gets only very slightly in the way. And my phone is a black one - I've heard the letters are hard to see on the white and bronze versions.

If you want a phone which doesn't force you to have a Google account, this isn't the phone for you. The first thing you have to do when you set up your phone is either enter your Google account details, or sign up for a new account. The phone is very tied into the Google way of doing things. This isn't that much of a problem for me - I'm not Googlephobic. Nor am I a Googlephile. Most of my email still goes through my own server, and there is software for the G1 which lets me read that email just fine. And I was starting to use Google calendar just before I got the G1, so it's quite nice that it is now synched up with the phone. Some people will find the Googleness of the phone to be a hindrance, but I find it works really smoothly, and is around three million times better than my previous Nokia when it comes to synchronization.

If you want something which is thin and stylish, this probably isn't the phone for you. It isn't huge, but it's certainly no iphone. It's not ugly either - personally I think it's really well designed and good looking. Again, it's up to the beholder and their eye.

If you want a phone with an incredibly flexible operating system, this is the phone for you. The Android OS is very well designed, and the way it operates is mostly very intuitive. And unlike Nokia phones, where it seems that once you have the phone, you won't get any new features until you buy a new phone, the T-Mobile say that the G1 will be actively updated with new versions of software.

If you want to write software for your phone (in Java), this is the phone for you. Writing Android software is very easy, and Linux is a first class operating system when it comes to their development tools. Some parts of the SDK aren't quite finished, but that's because Google hadn't got them 100% stable before releasing the phone, and thought it'd be better to release a stable incomplete SDK that a buggy complete SDK, and I think that's a good way for things to be.

If you want a phone which is exceptionally useful, this is the phone for you. There is already a huge amount of software available for it, and although there's a fair amount of rubbish, there's also loads of very useful stuff, and I'm finding the phone more and more indispensable.

If you want to be in on the ground floor with the mobile operating system of the future, this is the phone for you. I genuinely believe that Android is the way to go with mobile phones, and have no regrets about getting this phone. And I purposefully got a twelve month contract rather than anything longer, because I'm pretty sure that by this time next year there'll be Android phones out there which are ten times better than this one!

The phone's main negatives for me: poor battery life; not enough internal memory; sometimes a little sluggish going back to the home screen (I think it's probably garbage collecting); a few minor niggles with some of the core software (but at least I can branch the code and write a better version if I want to).

The phone's main positives for me: bright, high contrast, high definition screen; real keyboard; sensitive (capacitive) touch screen; well designed operating system; mostly well designed software; easy syncing with Google; infinite possibilities; easy to use; fun to write software for it.

Android Fun

2009-02-08T23:14:00.002Z

On Friday I got myself a nice shiny new T-Mobile G1. Also known (incorrectly) as the GooglePhone. It's pretty darn good. Well, unless you expect the battery to last the day when you're playing on it constantly because it's your new toy. I imagine that once I'm using it 'normally' instead of intensively, it won't be quite so bad. But I'd certainly say at the moment that the battery life is atrocious. Oh well, I was expecting that anyway. Onwards and upwards. It's otherwise a fantastic little device, and has enormous potential.

And it's easy to programme. I used to try to programme my Nokia phone using Symbian. But the number of hoops I had to jump through in order to get anything to work totally put me off, and I never got futher than writing a programme which said 'Hello' on the screen. (I guess 'Hello World' wouldn't have been much more effort, but by that time I'd had enough.) But programming Android is very easy. At first it was a little awkward, because on my six year old laptop (yes, six years old) the emulator was very slow, and used nearly all my computer's memory. But now I have a real phone I can plug the USB cable in and run and debug my programmes directly on the device. And from Linux too, which is pretty good.

I'm currently working on a little programme which will log sensor values to a file. Then I'll be able to plot them on a Google map and see how fast I was travelling and how hard I was accelerating or cornering. Not because I drive 'that way', but because I've always thought it would be interesting to log stuff like that, and now I have a device which can do it. So far I've just written a test programme which shows the values of the various sensors and moves sliders around, but it's been incredibly easy to do.

And just in case there's anyone reading this who wonders how I got the debugging to work in openSUSE 11.1, here's how. (Bear in mind that this is additional info to that which is in the SDK - it doesn't really make sense on its own). I created a file called 50-android.rules in /etc/udev/rules.d containing this line:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0bb4", MODE="0666", SYMLINK+="android_adb"

Then I chmodded it to 755, and, as root, ran 'adb kill-server' followed by 'adb start-server'. Then I ran 'adb devices' to see if the device showed up in the list. If it didn't I killed and restarted the server again until it did. (I don't know if I need to, or if I could just wait.)

After that, I was able to run and debug programmes from Eclipse directly on the device. Although I had to make sure that the manifest file had debuggable set to true, otherwise it didn't work.

Eating my own dog food

2008-06-24T07:19:00.002Z

I've been running openSUSE's KDE 4.1 snapshots on my machine for a while now, and despite the occasional programme falling over (usually konqueror or akregator at the moment), it's being a great experience. I'm particularly addicted to KNetWalk, which is probably going to give me RSI, but I can do it so fast now that I need a new challenge. So I thought I'd get the source and have a go at making it harder. So I did. Get the source, that is. I updated my SVN version of the code, compiled it, and it all compiled without a hitch.

Hang on. That can't be right. I never manager to compile KDE without problems. I must have made a mistake. So I tried logging into my newly compiled KDE, and it works too. I guess KDE is a little better than it used to be!

Anyway, I was so impressed by how easy it is right now, that I had to blog about it. I haven't done any KDE coding for a while, so I'm not exactly eating my own dog food. Maybe the title should be 'Making my own dog food' or something instead. But I will. Oh yes, I will. Probably. There are lots of little rough edges all over the place which I want to iron out, and ironing out rough edges is my forté. Maybe the title should be 'Ironing my own dog food'.

Wow

2008-05-31T22:43:00.002Z

A couple of days ago, I dug out my old laptop, the screen of which had given up the ghost a few months ago, and switched it on. To my surprise, it was working perfectly, which is great, because my work laptop is about to be taken away as they roll out a load of extremely fast desktops. Great for work, not so great for me. But at least my old laptop has decided not to be broken any more.

For the last year or so, since I had my nice new work laptop, I've been running openSUSE on an external USB hard drive (which surprisingly, benchmarked faster than using the internal drive), and I've been using KDE 4.0. I know my last post on this blog said I'd reverted to 3.5, but I tried 4.0.1 when it came out (or possible 4.0.2?), and discovered the actual show stoppers had been fixed, and the irritations were small enough I could live with them.

Anyway, onto the 'wow'. Since my old laptop had a clean install of openSUSE 10.3 on it and I didn't mind about messing it up with an unstable version of KDE, I put the unstable KDE snapshot version on instead of 4.0. And I think the word which best sums it up is 'Wow'. It's really, really good.

There are some bits in particular that I liked: being able to resize the panel; the panel for icons on the desktop; the beautiful highlight for icons; the alt-f2 thingy (I can never remember its proper name) which is brilliant, and looks and works so well I keep pressing alt-f2 and typing stuff in even though I don't need to run any programmes; the way you can style plasma easily; the way plasma styles work so much better than before; the pim programmes being KDE4ified; the sounds; the plus/minus symbols for selecting/deselecting icons (brilliant idea); everything seems more responsive (even on this old laptop); things looking good even without compositing switched on...

So, great job everyone. This beta is fantastic.

Reverted

2008-01-27T19:43:00.000Z

Alas (and alack), I have reverted to using KDE 3.5.8. I wasn't going to, but yesterday then KDE 4.0.0 refused to load for some unknown reason, and I got thinking: Was it worth trying to fix it? Unfortunately, I could only think of four reasons to use KDE 4.0.0, and they weren't very convincing:

Reasons to use KDE 3.5.8

It's a stable, well tested system which has had most of the rough edges whittled away over time - and most of the time, it just works. (This reason could be expanded into many bullet points - one for each thing in KDE 3.5.8 which works which is broken in KDE 4.0.0, but I'll leave it rolled up into a single bullet point to save this looking more like a rant than it probably already does - and leave the bug reports in bugs.kde.org).
I don't have to use AIGLX (the non-compositing version of KDE 4.0.0's KWin isn't very useable), and so everything is much faster, Google Earth works and I can watch videos. (In KDE 4.0.0 kaffeine and codeine just show an empty black box)
I can set up the panels just how I like them. (One medium sized panel at the bottom for the K-menu, the task list (or whatever it is called), a clock and the lock/logout buttons, and a small one at the top for a 'quick launch' bar, the pager and the system tray.)
I think the style I use in KDE 3.5.8 is sharper than Oxygen currently is, which looks a bit blurry somehow - I'm not exactly sure why though. But it makes it nicer to use.

Reasons to use KDE 4.0.0

Plasma on the desktop can be pretty (although it tends to crash a lot).
KWin with compositing looks cool.
Tabs in the Oxygen style look kind of nice.
I can find bugs and report them so that KDE 4.0.1/KDE 4.1 can be better.

I am well aware that KDE 4.0.0 is actually a beta release which has been release as a .0 release to try to get more people to use it so that more bugs can be reported and fixed, so I can't complain too much (although I would strongly argue for not releasing betas without the beta moniker, but that's another rant). I'll still boot into KDE 4.0.0 from time to time (that is, if openSUSE's packages fix themselves soon!) and look forward to KDE 4.0.1.

KDE 4.0: The First Week

2008-01-19T08:00:00.000Z

I've now had KDE 4.0 installed for just over a week, and I'm getting used to its quirks. I'm very impressed with KWin - it hasn't crashed on me once. At least, not since I got the right combination of options (for me, the intel graphics driver instead of the i810 one, and OpenGL instead of XRender). And it's a darn sight nicer than compiz. I always got frustrated by compiz because it didn't understand KDE properly, and I couldn't use Alt+RMB to resize and things like that. And it would crash. KWin just works, although rather slowly.

Generally, KDE 4.0 seems a fair bit slower than KDE 3.5, but I think that might be down to the compositing stuff. Also, there are quite a few little niggly bugs which I hope will be fixed by 4.0.1. I've reported a few bugs, but I'm still trying to work out reliable ways of reproducing some of them before I report them.

I said in my last post that I was inspired to start coding for KDE 4.0. Well, as usual, my inspiration has quickly waned as I moved into a new house and have more useful things to do at the moment, such as painting. So don't expect code from me any time soon.

Living with KDE 4.0

2008-01-13T16:27:00.000Z

Surprisingly enough, no one has flamed me yet for being disappointed with the quality of KDE 4.0. I must try harder. I used to be able to attract flames much more easily.

Well, I've had KDE 4.0 on my machine for a day or so now, and I'm getting used to it. I've switched to running AIGLX so that I can use KWin's OpenGL mode instead of the XRender mode, and it's a lot more stable, although I can't run Google Earth any more. With the OpenGL rendering, the desktop look great, and the beauty of the desktop alone is probably enough to stop me switching back to KDE 3.5 at the moment. A few times I have clicked on a window only to have it completely disappear without warning - not sure what that's about. There are a few niggling little bugs in the behaviour of a few things, but I'm sure they'll get sorted in a minor release before too long. (Such as icon widgets not working with a graphics tablet, not being able to hide the plasma blob, konqueror not loading images or styles, etc.)

I am inspired to try writing some plasma applets to do things properly. And when I say properly, I mean how I want them to work. I've had a look at some of the source for existing stuff, and it looks relatively easy, so instead of writing any more of this, I'm now going to go off and write some code. Perhaps. If I can stop gazing at the beautiful desktop.

Giving 4.0 a go

2008-01-11T21:04:00.001Z

So, KDE 4.0 is out, and I have installed it on my computer. I've had it on there for a while actually, in one form or another, but this is the first time I've used the actual released version, and the first time I've logged into my main account using it.

And what are my first impressions? Well, the first impressions are that it has, again, improved over the previous pre-release. A nice new wallpaper, a slightly sleeker panel, and a number 4 instead of a 3.97 or something.

My second impressions are that it's still very unstable, very unpolished and, to be honest, somewhere between an alpha and a beta in quality. I had been expecting the lack of features, as that was well advertised, but I had at least expected the released features to work. Anyway, I'm going to stick it out - it's going to stay on my computer for the next week at least, and I'll start writing bug reports., and looking forward to 4.0.1, or whatever comes next.

openSUSE 10.3: First Look

2007-10-06T07:46:00.001Z

Please bear in mind that this is not a review; it is just a few initial observations after installing openSUSE 10.3 and using it for an hour or so. I'm not a journalist, so even after using it for a week I wouldn't be able to write a well balanced review of openSUSE 10.3. And I'm biased, because I've been using SUSE for at least seven years.

I downloaded the openSUSE 10.3 yesterday and upgraded my laptop from 10.2 in the evening. The upgrade went reasonably smoothly, with just the usual problems: the wireless network couldn't be connected during installation so it couldn't find any online repositories, so I ended up telling it to remove quite a few packages which it couldn't upgrade, and after the installation it had got my hard drives the wrong way round in grub's menu.list - but that's my fault for booting from an external USB drive, which confuses things as the drives do get renumbered on boot.

After installing, everything still worked just as it did before, which was great. They've even put the intel graphics card hack into the boot scripts now so I don't have to have it in boot.local. I switched the graphics driver from i810 to the new intel one, and the wireless driver from ipw3945 to iwl3945, and now my wireless connection comes up reliably. I used to have to connect to a neighbour's unsecured network before it would allow me to connect to my secured one.

Upon trying to play an mp3 file, a message popped up prompting me to install the mp3 codecs, so I followed the instructions, and it gave me a nice wizard which allowed me to choose a whole load of codecs and other 'restricted' stuff. It then proceeded to download it all, complain that all the files on the DVD were corrupt (thought they weren't - they installed fine later), installed the stuff which had worked, and I had mp3 playability. It was much easier than before, except for the spurious corruption messages.

The package management seems to have been overhauled considerably, but it still has the problem of not giving much feedback as to what is going on: instead of showing an overall progress bar and then working its way through all the sub tasks, it'll show a progress bar for one task, and when that has finished it'll show another progress bar. You have no way of knowing whether you have a minute left to wait or three hours. Also, if you move the dialog to the corner of the screen, when the next progress bar appears it'll be back in the default position, which is really annoying. I imagine I'll probably continue using Smart because it is so, well, smart.

The boot and login graphics are back to green, which I like because it means my computer looks different from most. And the graphics are much sharper and more professional-looking, in my mind at least. Especially the welcome graphic when you boot from DVD. I have switched my desktop wallpaper back to the openSUSE 10.1 one though, as I prefer a blue wallpaper to a green one. The icons in YaST have all changed - they don't look better though - they're all grey and nondescript.

I'd like to keep playing with openSUSE 10.3 today, but I have to go to the Grand Designs Live show now. Oh, what a hardship!

KDE4 Won't Start

2007-09-26T20:51:00.000Z

I can't start KDE4 any more - it fails to start dbus. To be more exact, qdbus gives this error message when it is run:

Could not connect to D-Bus server: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Failed to execute dbus-launch to autolaunch D-Bus session

But when I run dbus-launch it works fine. I'm sure it's probably something simple, but I'm about ready to give up.

Hibernate Logging

2007-06-27T09:21:00.000Z

Have you ever tried to get hibernate to log SQL? It's quite easy, just set log4j.logger.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG, and hey presto, you have SQL statements logged. Except it's not too useful, as most of them are parameterised queries, with lists of question marks instead of values. So you do a search on Google and it turns up millions of entries saying you need to set log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type. But it doesn't help, because all the articles say the value should be INFO, whereas what you really want is log4j.logger.org.hibernate.type=TRACE.

So there you go. Maybe Google will turn up my blog entry instead for you.

My rpmdb is back

2007-05-01T17:56:00.000Z

Thanks to everyone who told me about the rpmdb backup in /var/adm/backup/rpmdb - I restored it and now everything is working beautifully.

Oops, I lost my rpmdb

2007-04-28T07:30:00.000Z

Yesterday my computer started randomly rebooting when I was trying to install packages on my computer, so I booted from a live CD and ran resierfsck on my disk, which fixed a whole bunch of things. But now when I run rpm -qa I get a list of no packages - and running rpmdb --rebuilddb doesn't help. Fortunately smart query lists everything that is installed, so I'm pretty sure there must be some way to get the rpmdb back, but I can't find it. Help!

How To Build A New Freetype

2007-04-08T18:30:00.000Z

I've had several requests for my RPM for freetype2 including sub-pixel rendering for openSUSE 10.2. So here are instructions on how to build your own, including my modified SPEC file. If you're in the USA it might be illegal to download my file, so this file is only for people who live in free countries. Or at least semi-free countries, like the UK.

Download freetype2 source rpm from http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/inst-source/suse/src/ - it might be a newer version by the time you come to download this.
Download freetype-2.3.3.tar.bz2 and freetype-doc-2.3.3.tar.bz2 from freetype.org.
Download freetype2.spec if your government will let you.
Install the source rpm: sudo rpm -ivh freetype2-2.3.1-7.src.rpm
Put the tar.bz2 files in /usr/src/packages/SOURCES
Put the spec file in /usr/src/packages/SPECS
Build the rpm: rpmbuild /usr/src/packages/SPECS/freetype2.spec
The built rpms will be in /usr/src/packages/RPMS/i586

Note that you will need to have any required libraries and tools installed in order to build this. It should just be the basic development tools I think.

Sub-pixel Antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2

2007-04-07T11:41:00.000Z

Finally, I have sub-pixel antialiasing in openSUSE 10.2. For some reason, it was turned off in the 10.2 release because of something being broken. I haven't been able to find out what. But yesterday I got tired of waiting for it to be fixed, so I downloaded the alpha freetype package from 10.3, only to find that it also has sub-pixel antialiasing turned off. No problem - I just installed the source package, replaced the tar files with version 2.3.3 ones, edited the spec file to enable sub-pixel rendering, disabled the freetype2-bitmap-foundry patch (because it wouldn't compile with it in there), rebuilt the rpm and installed it. Hey presto - sub-pixel rendering!

Last time I blogged about getting fonts to look better in 10.1, I had a load of comments telling me I should just turn of antialiasing because text looks better without it. Well, I like antialiasing, and especially sub-pixel antialiasing. On my 1900x1200 display it looks great. So there!

My Subwoofer Is Woofing

2007-03-10T16:53:00.000Z

I managed to get the subwoofer on my Inspiron 9400 working today. I had read in several places that I just need to add 'model=ref' to the module config file, but I'd tried that without success.

Today I discovered that openSUSE 10.2 uses version 1.0.12 rc2 of the alsa drivers, and they don't support the subwoofer. So I downloaded alsa-driver-1.0.13, configured it with ./configure --with-cards=hda-intel, ran make, and then make install-modules, rebooted my machine, and the sub was working. Oh and that model=ref line was added to /etc/modprobe.d/sound, so now the first line is options snd-hda-intel enable=1 index=0 model=ref.

There's only one slight problem - the master volume control doesn't adjust the subwoofer (shown as LFE in the mixer), and muting the sound also doesn't mute the sub. But other than that it works!

Appreciating KDE More

2007-02-24T23:25:00.000Z

Since I've been Windows XP daily for the last two and a half weeks, due to my new job, I've come to appreciate KDE all the more. I was actually expecting to adjust to using Windows pretty quickly (I haven't regularly used Windows for over five years) - after all, Microsoft throws millions of pounds at it, so it must be a good system, despite what people say. But every day when I come home and boot back into Linux, I'm amazed at how much better nearly everything is. Admittedly, there are a few things from Windows I'd like to find in Linux, but there are far more things I want take take from Linux/KDE and put in Windows. Even simple things like resizing a window - I'm so used to pressing Alt+right-click to resize that I find it quite annoying that I can't do that in Windows. (I'm quite expecting someone to tell me of an addon which does this now.) And KDE just feels more solid to use, and more streamlined, and more productive and slicker and faster, and all-round better. Yay for KDE!

I'm looking forward to version four. I've been keeping an eye on SVN and things are looking pretty cool. It's still too much of a moving target for me to contribute at the moment (I don't have much time at the moment as I have a new job, and need to be learning about work code rather than KDE code right now), but I'm quite excited about the future of KDE.

New Things

2007-02-09T09:10:00.000Z

I just noticed that my feed is back on Planet KDE. So I'm crossing my fingers that Blogger won't screw everything up again.

I now have a new job, which is as a Software Architect. And it's a very cool company to work for, and I'm coding in Java, so I'm enjoying it a lot.

One of the first things I got at this job was a new laptop. It's a Dell Inspiron 9400, with 2Gb of RAM, 100Gb of hard drive space, a 1920x1200 17" display and built in Intel wireless and bluetooth. And it has an Intel graphics card too, which is great, because it means I get to use open source drivers.

The downside is that it has Windows XP installed on it, which I have to use at work. Which means I will now be becoming a big advocate of making sure KDE4 will work on Windows. I'd forgotten just how awkward so many Windows programmes are. Things I particularly miss are konversation, kopete, kmail, rsibreak, knotes, knetworkmanager, kio, alt-clicking to move windows, alt-right clicking to resize them... and the list goes on. At least I get to use IntelliJ IDEA to develop in. It might not be FOSS, but it is a fantastic piece of software and well worth paying for, if you're a professional Java developer.

When I'm not at work however, I get to run Linux. I'm not allowed to dual-boot my machine, but fortunately the laptop supports booting off USB devices, so I've connected an external USB drive to the machine and installed openSUSE on that. I had a few problems getting grub to boot properly - as grub renumbers its drives when it boots from USB, and openSUSE's installer doesn't take that into account. And then I had problems getting the 1920x1200 resolution to work, but I managed to sort that out using 915resolution. So now I have an awesome linux box to play with. (I'll post details off how I got everything working properly later).

I ran hdparm and compared my external 4200rpm drive with the internal 5200rpm one, and with the internal 7200rpm drive on my old machine. And the speeds of unbuffered reads were pretty much proportional to the speeds of the drives, while buffered reads were three times faster on the new machine than the old one. So having the drive on a USB connection seems to be having nearly no impact on performance. Which is nice. I just have to be very careful not to disconnect the drive while it's in use.

Since I have a second external drive, I'm thinking of installing another, cut down version of linux on it, specifically for developing KDE4 on. I want to have KDE3 installed in such a way that KDE4 won't see it at all - so no references to any of it in /etc. I don't want any KDE3 apps to show up in the menus of KDE4, and I don't want any clever openSUSE modifications to things - I want it to be pretty much a standard Linux installation. So I have to decide - should I use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo or Debian? Or something else?

Daily Surprises

2007-01-26T09:29:00.000Z

One thing I do each morning is run Smart to update my system. Most of the time it's just bugfix releases, but sometimes I get the nice surprise of getting a new version of a piece software. It's especially nice when I didn't know it had been released - like yesterday when I was given KDE 3.5.6, and today I got KDevelop 3.4. And I didn't have to pay anything.

Actually, I got a free Vista DVD at work yesterday - sent automatically by Microsoft in their action pack. I tried to update my Windows 2000 VMware image just to see what Vista is like. The installer said I didn't need to enter the product key, but if I didn't I might lost information, programmes and settings, and might need to buy a new copy of Vista. And then when I clicked Next it told me I only had 5Gb of free space so it couldn't continue. Oh well, I'll stick with Windows 2000 for when I really have to use Windows. Which isn't very often.

Simple KDE4

2007-01-21T15:29:00.000Z

I thought it was about time I got to know KDE4's libs better, so I started with the simplest programme I could - a hello world programme, and then extended it to start using kdelibs. So I made it produce an MD5 checksum of "Hello, world" as well. This way I didn't have to bother learning any GUI stuff - I could just concentrate on the very basic stuff. So here's what I wrote:

CMakeLists.txt:

project( test1 )
find_package( KDE4 REQUIRED )
include_directories( ${KDE4_INCLUDES} )

set( SRC test1.cpp )
kde4_automoc( ${SRC} )
kde4_add_executable( test1 ${SRC} )
target_link_libraries( test1 ${KDE4_KDEUI_LIBS} ${KDE4_KPARTS_LIBS} )

test1.cpp

#include <KDE/KCodecs>
#include <QtCore>
#include <iostream>


int main(int argc, char *argv) {
        KMD5 context( "Hello, world" );
        std::cout << "Digest output: " << context.hexDigest().data() << std::endl;
}

Very simple - but now I can start experimenting with the other kdelibs classes until I understand them well. Then I will be able to understand the rest of KDE better.

Powersave Wierdness

2006-12-22T13:04:00.000Z

I'm not quite sure why this is happening, but since upgrading the openSUSE 10.2 (which went like a dream, by the way), kpowersave keeps switching back to dynamic mode, even though I want it to run in powersaving mode all the time. And I need it to run in powersave mode, because my laptop crashes when it's run at full speed. Which I think probably means the processor is dying, since the fans still run fine, and it reports that the temperature isn't getting too high, and I've tried swapping out the memory, removing the wireless card, running with nv drivers instead of nvidia - but it still hangs randomly. It was doing it on SUSE 10.1 as well, and the upgrade didn't fix it, so I don't think it's software. So it'd be nice to get kpowersave to keep the computer running at 1.2MHz again. I thought there was an option for it in 10.1, but I can't find it now.

It Wasn't Me

2006-11-21T10:55:00.000Z

I'm sorry about my blog spamming the planet again. It wasn't me, honest! I didn't touch my blog, and then I saw all my old blog entries appear in akregator again. I might switch to using my own blog engine soon - blogger is doing my head in.

Lovely

2006-11-14T13:06:00.001Z

Ah, the wonders of beta.blogger.com.

Not Much

2006-11-14T12:42:00.000Z

I'm not up to much computerwise at the moment. But Naomi and I have our own place in Coventry now, and it has a converted loft which I'm using as the computer room. And today we're getting broadband installed, so at least I'll be back on the internet (at the moment I'm using someone else's unsecured wireless - but I don't want to use it too heavily as I don't know if they have a download limit, so it's just for basic stuff like checking emails).

The news about Java going GPL is pretty cool. I'm a big fan of Java. And although I use it anyway, despite it not having been open source, I reckon it'll help it to gain popularity. And hopefully become more important in the KDE world - especially since Qt Jambi looks so good. It's just a shame the Eclipse integration never works on my computer.

Flying to Europe

2006-09-20T18:21:00.000Z

In just a few days I fly off to the British Isles. Oh, the joys of driving on the left, 220V power, meeting other people who use KDE...

Except that I'm not going to Akademy, my wife had her visa granted, so we're flying back to live in England at the end of next week - just too late to go and geek it up in Dublin. (Although we're actually flying to Scotland to go to a friend's wedding, and then driving back to England.)

Documentation

2006-08-27T00:56:00.000Z

I like Microsoft's SDK documentation.

Partially, anyway. I don't like the fact that the navigation doesn't work properly on msdn.microsoft.com/library unless you're using Internet Explorer. And often it's difficult to find which section they've hidden something in this week. And often the documentation is just plain wrong. But I do like being able to have everything in one place. And I like that there are overviews, tutorials and examples alongside the technical reference. So you don't just know what classes and methods are available, you also know how to use them. And I know it's not fashionable to like documentation to look nice when you're a linux developer, but I do find that if class documentation is layed out nicely, it makes it so much easier to find what I'm looking for.

I don't know where I'm going with this. But while I'm blogging about stuff, I thought I'd blog this too.

Features appearing overnight

2006-08-27T00:51:00.000Z

This morning I booted* my machine, and when I pressed Alt-Tab to switch windows, black frames were drawn on the screen so I could see which window would be selected. Which is a really nice feature, and it looks really nice too. But yesterday it didn't do that. I did put a patch on my machine yesterday from SUSE, but it was a minor release so I wasn't expecting any new features.

(* My machine has taken to crashing regularly, so I've stopped using the NVIDIA drivers and switched to the open source nv drivers. But they don't switch my screen off, and I want to save my laptop's backlight - I'm on the third so far - so I'm switching off at night these days.)

The 'amazing' new app

2006-08-27T00:50:00.000Z

Ok, so I was exaggerating a little yesterday. It's basically some ideas for a backup utility, for which I've started coding the UI a little. At the moment it's in the very early stages of development, and to make it more interesting, I've not done much Qt coding before, although I'm finding that Qt 4 is making software development in C++ much easier and more fun than before.

However, I do have a good idea of what I want the software to do, which is often half the battle won. And here is what I want it to be:

A personal backup tool, rather than a system backup tool. That is, it will backup files, but isn't designed to be able to restore a system to working from scratch. It's supposed to be run by a user rather than scripted to run as root.
Backup to CD and DVD. Although it might be nice in future to add other backup media to my programme, it won't have any ability to use anything other than CD and DVD media at the moment, and there won't be any kind of plugin interface for other media. I want to get the software doing one job well before I start extending it.
GUI based. There are plenty of scripted backup tools around, but I want something which is so easy to use that it encourages people to backup their date regularly. ('People' meaning me.)
Robust. If a disc gets scratched, it mustn't make the entire backup set unusable. Only the part which is scratched should stop working.
Easy to restore. Now, this is one part of the design I'm not too sure of yet. I'd like to be able to restore backups using standard unix tools. However, I haven't thought of a way to store my backups in a sensible way and still be able to get the data back with standard tools. I might instead write a very simple restore tool which could be used to restore backups when my app isn't available, and include it and its source code on the backup disc.
Must backup files straight to CD/DVD without making a local ISO first. I want it to be fast, and work on machines that don't have much disk space. Like some of mine.
Needs to make compressed backups.

The programme will keep a record of what files have been backed up, and on which discs they are stored. So when you try to restore a file, it will show you all the copies of that file which are available. You can then choose which version you want (probably the most recent most of the time), and it will tell you which disc to insert. If the disc is damaged and that file is unreadable, it will offer to let you restore a different version of the file, if it is available. It will also mark its local records to say that file is damaged.

I expect I have other requirements too, filed away somewhere at the back of my brain. Hopefully, blogging about it like this will help me to codify what I want.

I am aware of many backup tools out there at the moment, but so far none of them do what I want. If you know of something which does fit the bill, I'll happily stop developing and use it instead. And if you've got any good ideas about how I could progress with this project, I'd also like to hear from you. Once I've got it just a little further I'll put it in KDE's playground.

Amazing New KDE App

2006-08-25T23:44:00.000Z

So, I've just been out at the pub with Aaron, and I told him about my amazing new KDE app which I've been developing, and he said I should put it in KDE playground and blog about it to get people interested. So I will. Except my wife just got home and I'd rather go out and enjoy the nice sunny day at the moment, so you'll have to wait with baited breath to find out just how awesome and fanatastic my programme is.

Why I love Calgary

2006-08-10T21:09:00.000Z

No, scratch that. Make it, 'Why I don't mind Calgary so much at the moment'. And it's basically because I now live in an apartment just a couple of minutes walk away from Tim Hortons, Pizza Hut, Boston Pizza, and lots of other places to get food and anything else in 'uptown' Calgary. I don't know if 'uptown' is a proper term. The only other place I can think of it being used is in 'Uptown Girl'. Anyway, it's what they call 16th Avenue here, which is downtown really. I like being able to walk to the shops instead of driving. Since being in Calgary I've spent far too much of my life driving - and not the fun kind of driving I like to do on winding country roads back in England, but the stuck in traffic in straight city roads kind. So now I can walk down the road, get lunch and sit by the street watching life go by. I don't know if they have wireless, otherwise I could go and work there too. Although I need new batteries - despite having two in my laptop I only get about half an hour out of them combined now.

In other, much more important news: I'm married! I had a great honeymoon on Vancouver Island, and also got to see where my wife grew up near Vancouver, which is about a million times nicer than Calgary, so when we move back here in ten years time maybe we'll go and live over there instead.

Eh!

2006-06-14T17:46:00.000Z

I'm back in Canada. I'll be working from here for the next couple of months, with a break in the middle to get married. Hooray! Probably won't do much with KDE. Except using it, of course.

Nice Font Rendering on SUSE 10.1

2006-05-30T08:13:00.000Z

Fonts on Linux/Xorg are something that people seem to go on about a lot. Usually complaining how bad they look. For years now I've had no problem with fonts - for a while it was because I recompiled freetype packages with the bytecode interpreter turned on, but then SUSE started turning that on anyway, and I had nice looking fonts right out of the box. I think part of the reason I liked my font rendering though was because I like subpixel antialiased fonts, and most Linux people seem to like jagged edges instead. However, something changed in version 10.1, and my once nice looking KDE desktop started to look ugly. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was different, but something had changed.

But now I have nice fonts again. How did I do it? I added David Turner's libXft patches to my system, and suddenly things look nice. It doesn't really make sense though, as SUSE 10.0 couldn't have had those patches as they hadn't been written.

The details of how I did it: I backed up the existing libraries. Then I installed the xorg-x11 source rpm on my machine, ran rpmbuild to extract the source and apply existing patches. Then I applied the libXft patch and ran make from the Xft directory. I then copied the compiled libs into place, restarted X, and it all worked nicely:

cp /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.a ~/backup/
cp /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2.1.2 ~/backup/
rpm -ivh xorg-x11-6.9.0-48.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/packages/SPECS
rpmbuild -ba xorg-x11.spec
cd /usr/src/packages/BUILD/xc/lib/Xft
patch -p1 < ~/libXft-2.1.7-lcd_rendering.patch
./configure
make
cd .libs
sudo cp libXft.a /usr/X11R6/lib/
sudo cp libXft.so.2.1.1 /usr/X11R6/lib/libXft.so.2.1.2

Now, I'm not saying this is the right way to do it. I reckon there's a reasonable chance it'll crash my machine at some point. But so far it's working fine. Oh, and if you copy libXft.so.2.1.1 across while you're still running X, weird things happen!

Unrelated note: I'm now using Smart to manage packages and updates on my machine, and it's a wonderful piece of software.

Sterling Data Type

2006-05-27T23:52:00.000Z

At work we recently moved offices. During the move we threw out a load of old manuals which aren't needed any more. I commandeered some of them, and while browsing through 'A PL/I Primer' (Copyright 1965 IBM) I discovered that PL/I has a facility for handling data stated in terms of British sterling currency value. What's so interesting about that, I wondered? I read on:

A sterling data constant ends with the letter L, representing the pounds symbol, for example:

2.4.6L

This sterling constant represents two pounds, four shillings, six pence.

A working ZMD/rug/libzypp/ZENworks setup

2006-05-19T07:29:00.000Z

I have an updater setup in SUSE 10.1 which seems to work now. There are a few gotchas though. I'd recommend only using the command line tools, as the graphical tools seem to crash too often, leaving the ZMD backend in an unknown state. Also, although it looks like you're supposed to be able to install and remove software without being the superuser, it doesn't seem to work, so I do everything as root (using su).

First you have to register your machine. You can use the graphical version in YaST, but that didn't work for me, so I used suse_register -n from the command line. (If I didn't use the '-n' option it kept killing my network connection somehow!)

Although you can add just about any URL using rug and it says that it has added the service okay, you have to make sure you use the correct URL otherwise strange things happen. Also, if you did use the graphical tools to add a service and used spaces in the service names, they won't work.

First I had to add update services to the updater, whatever it is called (ZMD?). Please note that the name of the KDE-3.5-supplementary service is important - it doesn't seem to work if you give it a different name.

rug sa --type zypp ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/update/10.1/ SUSE-Update
rug sa --type zypp ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/packman/suse/10.1/ Packman
rug sa --type zypp ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/supplementary/KDE/update_for_10.1/yast-source/ KDE-3.5-supplementary
rug sa --type zypp http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.1/RPMS/ SUSE-Guru

You can list the services using rug sl.

Then you have to subscribe to these services:

rug sub SUSE-Update
rug sub Packman
rug sub KDE-3.5-supplementary
rug sub SUSE-Guru

You can list the subscriptions using rug ca.

You can type rug on its own to view a list of available commands. Some useful ones I've used are rug search package, rug install package, rug remove package, rug patches and rug update.

I find it useful to have another couple of shells open watching the tail of the zmd log files, just so I know whether something is happening or if it's all given up:

tail -f /var/log/zmd-backend.log
tail -f /var/log/zmd-messages.log

I haven't found an easy way of just getting rug to update a package to a newer version from another server. For example, I had Amarok 1.3 installed on my computer, and this morning I wanted to upgrade to version 1.4 from the Guru repository. The only way I found to do it was to remove the existing version and the install the new version by specifying the version number:

rug remove amarok amarok-helix amarok-libvisual amarok-xine
rug install amarok-1.4.0_0.3c amarok-helix-1.4.0_0.3c amarok-libvisual-1.4.0_0.3c amarok-xine-1.4.0_0.3c

If anyone knows a better way, please let me know.

Ziprugenypp

2006-05-18T11:06:00.000Z

I've just upgraded to SUSE 10.1 yesterday. When I say upgraded, I mean I replaced my hardrive with a new, 100Gb 7200RPM disc in my laptop and gave myself a fresh installation for a change.

SUSE 10.1 has lots of nice improvements over the previous version - such as being able to use NetworkManager to switch wireless networks on the fly. It also has a fancy new installer/updater called librummikub which offers all sorts of wonderfulness, such as being able to install new software from packman repositories and things like that.

The only problem I have had is that Zmdastardlypp seems to be specially designed to make you tear your hair out. When I was testing betas of 10.1 I saw the new updater icon in the task tray, but it didn't look like they'd finished writing it yet, so I thought I'd hold off playing with it until they had. Now I have a final install of 10.1, and it still looks the same.

Well, at least I was able to find some pointers on the web on how to make this rugmyast thing work, so I added some repositories to it and asked if there were any updates. Afraid not, it said, and then crashed. I played around with it for a few hours until I got it to recognise that there were some updates available, at which point it decided to spend an hour resolving dependencies. It didn't crash this time - I had to kill its process.

Today I had another go. It must be possible to get this zypzenyrug thing to work. So I tried the commandline this time. It started to do an update, and then said 'Update failed' after about 25%, without giving me any idea why. I think it just got tired. I tried again, but a transaction was already in progress. So I killed it. Mwuahaha! Eventually I managed to get it to do a full update. Hooray!

And then I tried to update to KDE 3.5 using the supplementary repositories. I updated a few bits, but then it decided I need to insert KDE-3.5-supplementary in media 1, which was difficult, as I didn't have a KDE-3.5-supplementary to insert. I eventually worked out that if I renamed the repository to match that name then it would work. And I have updated KDE and installed KOffice (although it decided I wanted version 1.4 the first time).

I'd write full instructions on how to get libzubyagrust to work, except I can't really remember any more, it's all turned into a blur of trial and errors. Lots of errors. And trials. But I think if they keep working at it, they might be able to produce a good updating product in a couple of years. (I'd use fou4s, but it doesn't seem to work on 10.1).

By the way, I'd recommend SUSE 10.1, just so long as you don't expect an easy ride. The bits that work (and that's most of it) are great!

Learning Ruby

2006-05-01T22:38:00.000Z

I had a look at ruby a month or two ago, and decided that although it looked nice in concept, the syntax of the language was too horrible for me. After reading Aaron's blog entry I thought I'd have another looks at it, and although I still find large amounts of the syntax to be rather ugly, I really like other parts of the language, and I can see it being a pretty good scripting language. I might use it for prototyping KDE apps in future, and for writing shell scripts.

I'd really like a language which combines my favourite parts of Java, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, C++ and C#. (Maybe some Lisp and Prolog too). I'd rather keep Perl and Bash out of it though. And I'd like that language to be usable for nearly everything, so I could develop KDE apps, shell scripts, web sites (client side and server side) all with the same language. But at the moment I haven't found one language which does everything, and I doubt I ever will. In fact, I'm not sure I really want that, because it'd probably be so complicated I'd never actually be able to use it for anything.

OpenSUSE 10.1 RC1

2006-04-15T21:33:00.000Z

After a week of downloading, I finally got all the CDs of openSUSE 10.1 RC1 downloaded this afternoon, and proceeded to make a DVD out of them and install it on my laptop.

I was pleased to see ndiswrapper was available once more (it was missing in beta 8, the last one I tested) so I was able to get on the internet. NetworkManager is very nice, and as soon as I ran 'modprobe ndiswrapper' it noticed the new network and I was able to type in my WEP key and connect. (WEP because we have a couple of iBooks here which have MacOS X 10.2 which doesn't like WPA).

It also came with KPowersave, which gives a very nice view of the laptop's battery and CPU status when I click on it.

Kerry Beagle was the next thing I checked out, and once again I was able to get it working straight off without any messing around. I just searched for 'kerry' in the K-Menu, ran it and clicked on the link to start the daemon, and there it was. It looks like it'll be a very useful tool, but I haven't played around with it much yet.

I then got Xgl running, which, once again, was very easy. Unfortunately it's not very well supported by KDE yet, but I think I'll still be using it when 10.1 is released, because it's just soooo nice! The problems I came across were that at one point when I was changing some settings it decided to give the kicker a titlebar. So I killed and restart the kicker, and all the tray icons were given little unmovable windows on the desktop. I don't think you can use KDE window decorations with it yet, and in the Gnome decorations I had to use, the maximise button doesn't work. Not that I use that button very often. I was also unable to create more than one virtual desktop in KDE, but Xgl had its own set of four virtual desktops, none of which would show up in the pager, and I couldn't change their backgrounds. But it seems to be minor cosmetics. It's stable and makes my computer look nice. And when I'm using it all day every day, it's nice to have a good looking computer. (And the F11 plugin makes it easier to use too).

Unrelated to all that, I've been following the discussions on cmake on PlanetKDE. I don't really have much to say about cmake, but I did have some thoughts about how discussions happen in blogs instead of on mailing lists sometimes. Although I think it's often that discussions that have happened on mailing lists or on IRC then get summarised in blogs.

Because of the published nature of a blog, it can encourage one to think more before writing something, and also discourages 'me too' postings. I think this often can improve the quality of a discussion. It also means that people like me, who are subscribed to a few KDE mailing lists but don't have time to read them all, can get an idea of what's going on, and feedback if we suddenly have a revelation about something. I don't have any such revelations though. Sorry.

My First Qt App

2006-03-25T23:39:00.000Z

Well, not quite my first - I've written Hello World apps before. And I've hacked on plenty of KDE stuff. But this is my first app from scratch, and I'm well on my way. It took a while to decide where to start: KDE3 with Qt3, or Qt4 on its own? KDevelop or Kate? Autotools, Scons, Cmake or Qmake? Well, I plumped for Qt4, Kate and Qmake: Qt4 because it's newer than Qt3 and there's less to learn (and the API looks nicer); Kate because when I'm learning something it's nice to tie things together myself, without having to learn how KDevelop manages it's projects too; Qmake because all the Qt tutorials and things talk about it, and again, it seemed to put the least obstacles in the way of learning Qt.

So I now have a nice main window, a few dialogue boxes, saving and loading Xml files - most of the GUI for my app. All I have to do now is the hard part. The guts of the programme. What is it? You'll just have to wait and see. I don't want to go getting people's hopes up only to dash them to pieces in a few days when I realise I've bitten off more than I can chew.

Oh, just one problem: I have a QTreeView, with a QDirModel attached, and I'm trying to find out when the selection is changed. For the other lists and things I've got it working fine, but I've tried on_listView_selectionChanged, currentChanged, and various other combinations of things from the documentation, but no luck so far. Does anyone have any wonderful ideas how to make that work?

Appreciating SUSE

2006-03-25T23:30:00.000Z

I never appreciated SUSE's installer as much as I did today, when I tried to install Solaris on my test machine (I wanted to test a piece of Java software on it). It timed out while I was reading some messages and made a default selection, which meant I had to restart the install; it offered software selections which I later discovered weren't on the DVD; for a while it thought I was Chinese; it seemed to ask the same questions about software installations several times; it told me I had 0 bytes and 7698Mb free on my hard disk at the same time; it wouldn't boot into X; I couldn't find a key which would work as delete once it had booted to the console; I logged into the console and then it forgot, and went back to the login prompt...

Two days ago I installed SUSE 10.1 Beta 8 on my laptop. Except for it not installing drivers for my wireless card, everything just worked. I guess once Solaris is installed it's probably a more enterprise-ready system. Maybe I should become a qualified Solaris dude - I might be able to make money helping people to install that stuff. If I can ever figure it out in the first place.

Random People Want Ipods

2006-03-12T18:43:00.000Z

I just checked out my freeipods website, and three people have signed up already. One is my brother, but the other two I've never heard of! If those people are readers of my blog - thanks! Only one has completed their offer, so the other two still need to, and I still need two more people on top of that to sign up, and then I get an iPod. Hooray! (If you're in the UK they have some quite good offers to sign up to).

Aye Kororaa!

2006-03-11T11:26:00.000Z

I just downloaded the Kororaa XGL Demo Live CD, and it blew my socks off! Although I'd seen the videos on Novell's website, I was expecting it to be unusable on my machine - just from past experience of flashy graphics on the desktop. But it worked, and it's awesome! It also wowed my non-geeky housemates. It was Gnome rather than KDE, but I hope that KDE will be able to look just as amazing with XGL eventually. I wasn't too keen on the way the menus popped up, but the rest of it looked great.

I also couldn't help liking how clean Gnome was looking. Of course, I wouldn't be able to switch because I like too much of KDE, but I think all KDE developers should occasionally look at Gnome so we can steal their ideas, just as I'd expect their developers to look at KDE and steal ours. Because by 'steal' I really mean collaborate.

Anyway, one of the things I prefer in Gnome to KDE is the way things feel a little more solid and neatly put together. Like when you click on the volume icon in the menubar at the top, the slider which appears is exactly the same width as the highlight on the icon - it makes it look like it was all designed to work together. Whereas KDE I know is designed to work together, but doesn't always look that way.

I just wish I had more time to develop KDE at the moment, but work is taking too much time, and in my free time I'm working on my wedding website, so unfortunately developing KDE is taking a back seat to using it.

Something Changed

2006-03-04T12:41:00.000Z

A while ago I spent ages setting up an .asoundrc file on my computer so that I could get sound to work properly. But I had to use dmix in order to get everything to mix properly. But today I tried to use wengo and it didn't like that I was using dmix, so I temporarily moved my .asoundrc file out of the way, and hey presto! wengo started working, and everything else carried on working as it should. Someone must have changed something while I wasn't looking! (It's happened before - the sound on my laptop used to be really choppy, and I spent ages fiddling with settings until it was nearly ok. And then one day I installed a new version of SuSE and it just worked.)

Now that everything on my computer works really well, it's probably about time for it the give up the ghost, and then I'll have to try to find another laptop which works under linux this well. After all, I've already replaced the CD drive (with a DVD writer), the backlight (twice), the power supply brick, the hard drive, graphics tablet cable (not actually part of the laptop though) and had to solder a couple of bits inside it - it can't have long left. But it's 1.6GHz with 1Gb of RAM and a 1400x1050 display, so it's still a great machine to work on, despite being over four years old, and I can't afford to replace it (not with the wedding coming up this year), so here's hoping it still has a few more years left in it.

Dead Disk, Live Wireless

2006-03-02T15:40:00.000Z

It's been an interesting few days. On Friday my hard drive crashed, leaving me considering sending my disk to a data recovery place and paying hundreds of pounds, as I didn't have a recent backup. I know, I'm an idiot! But first I tried connecting the drive to my desktop machine and running knoppix. Reiserfsck said my disk might be dead, but I didn't give up, I bought another sixty gig disk (unfortunately there weren't any 7200rpm ones at the local shop so I had to make do with a 5400rpm one), used dd_rescue to copy everything across, then ran reiserfsck again, and it looks like I haven't lost anything important. Hooray for ReiserFS! That was quite a relief, when I finally got it working again. So now I'm doing regular backups like a good boy.

Today I bought a Gigabyte GN-WIKG mini-pci wireless network card for my laptop, installed it, booted up SuSE, entered my wireless passphrase into YaST, and I was up and running and connected. I chose the card because of there being native, open-source drivers for it (rather than having to use closed source drivers and ndiswrapper), but I wasn't expecting it to be that easy! Now if only there was a good KDE utility for switching wireless networks on the fly, so I didn't have to use scpm. I'm sure there must be one somewhere. It'll be nice when wireless is as easy as on Windows XP.

Speaking of XP, I'm currently fixing a friend's laptop. They're running Windows XP, which is a mistake to begin with in my opinion, and had a corrupt registry. Which meant it blue-screens when booting. And when entering the recovery console. And when trying to do a reinstallation. But I've finally got it to work by putting the disk in my desktop computer, copying some registry files around, rebooting the laptop, copying some more files, rebooting into the recovery console, rebooting again, and then restoring a previous configuration. Now I'm defragging it, virus checking it, removing spyware, removing 'helper' applications... all that fun stuff. 'As easy as Windows XP' - what was I thinking?!

New KDE Artwork

2006-02-23T11:13:00.000Z

Since aaron blogged about changes to KDE 3.5, I thought I'd share this change I made, which I already added to 3.5.1. It had been bugging me for ages, but I thought since it wasn't strictly a bugfix I wouldn't announce it in the changelog in case I got told off! But I don't expect anyone even noticed it. Now I want to go and compile stuff to see which bevels aaron removed, since that's another thing which has been bugging me for ages.

Over-excited Ebay

2006-02-14T15:18:00.000Z

I just left feedback after making a purchase on ebay, and the message I got was "Congratulations, you've left feedback for 1 transaction". I'm quite sure it was such a feat that congratulations were in order...

The Future Is Orange

2006-01-18T13:22:00.000Z

When I was at school we were always told that in the future there would be video phones and cars would fly. Well, I've not been in a flying car yet, but a couple of days ago I made my first video phone call. I've actually had a 3G phone for about six months, but I've never had any need or desire to make a video call. A few days ago I still had no need to make a video call, but I found another person with a video capable phone and thought I'd try it out. The 3G signal was rather weak in the house I was in, so we both had to go into the corner of a room upstairs in order for it to work. But it did, and I made my first video call. The future is here! I can't see myself ever wanting to use a video call other than as proof of concept though.

Driving Like A Java Programmer

2005-12-06T07:10:00.000Z

This afternoon when I drove home from a retail park I drove the slightly longer way, because I knew it would be easier to turn right out of the other exit and I would have three blocks to cross three lanes of traffic instead of less than one. And as I did that, I thought to myself 'I'm driving like a Java programmer' - that is, it took longer to get home, but it was easier to get there, less stressful and I was less likely to crash. While the average Calgary driver drives like a C programmer. Or maybe an assembly coder. Still, I prefer driving in England where there are higher speed limits and less potholes, traffic lights, four way stops and snow. And where I own a Golf GTI instead of just a GL. And I get to drive it again next week, 'cos that's when I go home. But I'll be back in Calgary sometime next year - once it starts to get less cold.

Sudoku Solver

2005-11-30T00:08:00.000Z

This afternoon I wrote a sudoku solver in Prolog. I haven't written a Prolog programme since I was at university nearly ten years ago, so it's a bit of a brute force attack really. I tested it on small grids to start with and it worked ok, but on a full sudoku so far it's taken three hundred and ninety-eight minutes and hasn't returned a result. I'll leave it going overnight, but if it hasn't worked it out by morning I'm giving up. Since I have no desire to learn how to code in Prolog properly. I could probably write something in Java to solve it in a few seconds. (That is, the solving would take a few seconds, not the writing.)

I'm Engaged

2005-11-18T23:22:00.000Z

I got engaged a week ago yesterday. I haven't blogged about it until now because I wanted to tell people personally first. But it's official - I'm engaged to Naomi and will be marrying her here in Calgary next July. Hooray!

SUSE's KHelpCenter

2005-11-04T16:51:00.000Z

I just accidentally hit F1 while in konqueror, and instead of the ugly help centre I usually see when I do that, I saw this. At first I thought SUSE had replaced the help centre with their own manuals, but then I realised they'd just changed the style of KDE's help pages. It's amazing how much different a bit of styling can make. It makes the help centre look a lot more friendly and helpful, and I might actually use it in future. Which is silly I know, because it still has the same content! I guess I subconsciously think 'these must be professionally written, useful help files. I will do well here', because it looks good, whereas before I was thinking 'these help files are geeky files. I'm not reading these. I'm going to Azerbaizhan'.

Shocking

2005-11-02T00:52:00.000Z

My Wacom tablet has always been a little unstable on my computer. If I unplug it and replug it in I have to restart X. Sometimes I knock the cable and it makes linux think it was unplugged, and I have to restart X. And now, since coming to Canada, sometimes I get a little too much static on me and it zaps the tablet, and I have to restart X.

But I've found a way to avoid restarting X. At last! I knew it should be possible, because it said it was in the linuxwacom documentation, but I've never been able to before. And just now when my tablet got zapped again I tried to recompile the evdev module, but found that in SUSE it's not compiled as a module, so I can't. And then I saw that in SUSE they already, apparently, have the modifications compiled in anyway. Strange that my tablet doesn't reconnect then. So I unplugged it, removed the wacom module from memory and replugged it in. Still no joy. So I switched to a VT and then back to X and look - my cursor is moving again!

Now all I need to do is see if it's possible to write a script which will do all that automatically. Except I'd rather it re-enabled the pointer in X without switching to a VT first.

SUSE 10

2005-10-16T17:12:00.000Z

I installed SUSE 10 last week. The day afterwards my backlight broke, so I've been unable to play with it. It now seems to be working if I keep the brightness right down, but I'll have to buy a new tube soon.

However, SUSE 10 is great - everything just works. Well, everything except multimedia, but after installing a few packman packages it's running like a dream. It boots and logs in far faster than it used to, and the gnome stuff seems to be integrated with KDE better than before, so when I run gimp and inkscape it's not quite such a chore any more. I'm gradually being converted to using Krita instead, but at the moment gimp is still the winner.

For anyone that's interested in the rest of my life: Calgary seems like a nice enough place. They do a lots of things in a strange way over here, but I'm getting used to it. It's great to be around Naomi again after her six months working on a cruise ship. And her cable internet seems to be a six meg line. Nice! I should be getting myself a VW Golf in a week or so - hopefully before it starts to snow too much here.

I Love AJAX

2005-10-06T16:23:00.000Z

I know it's not in fashion to love AJAX at the moment if you're a real programmer, but I do. Why? Because it's such a cobbled together heap of junk, and everyone is using it. And everyone else is going 'this is rubbish, let's think of something better', and I reckon before too long someone will actually design a proper solution. All because we have AJAX, which sucks, and I love it.

Nearly There

2005-09-15T10:03:00.000Z

Woohoo! Only one week and I'm in Calgary! I can't wait! I like exclamation marks!

I haven't had much chance to play with KDE or SUSE recently - too much time working and preparing to leave the country. I found time to install SUSE 10 RC1 OSS on my desktop machine, which didn't work properly, but then changed its mind and works really nicely now. I'll almost definitely be upgrading my laptop to v10 when it's released.

Sometimes I look through the KDE bug list and close bugs which aren't in the latest release of KDE with WORKSFORME (although I've not closed many). 'Am I right to do this?' I wonder to myself, hoping someone on the planet might know.

Delta ISOs on SuSE 9.2

2005-09-01T10:51:00.000Z

I'm downloading the openSUSE beta4 delta ISOs, but I'm using SuSE 9.2 which doesn't have applydeltaiso in the deltarpm package. If you're in that situation too, here's what to do: Just download the SuSE 9.3 version of deltarpm from ftp.suse.com, and install it instead. Or, if you don't want to risk messing up your nice 9.2 system with odd packages from 9.3, install it like this: 'sudo rpm -ivh --relocate /=/home/james/opt/93stuff/ deltarpm-2.2-3.i586.rpm' (with the path changed for your system of course), and then copy /home/james/opt/93stuff/usr/bin/applydeltaiso to somewhere nice (/usr/local/bin sounds sensible, although I used /home/james/opt/bin) and it should all work. It may also work on non-SuSE systems. Who knows? Anyway, it should save a bit of bandwidth, and hopefully I'll actually find time to install this beta.

Yamaha SY85 Keyboard For Sale

2005-08-29T19:57:00.000Z

I've just listed a Yamaha SY85 Workstation Keyboard for sale on ebay. Want it? Go and bid huge amounts for it then, so I can afford to buy a big rock for my fiancée to be!

Hello Planet SUSE

2005-08-26T15:06:00.000Z

I'm now syndicated on Planet KDE and Planet SUSE - the second person to appear on both planets. Does that make me an interplanetary blogger or something? Anyway, I thought it was about time another KDE user appeared on Planet SUSE, since it was starting to look a bit like Planet Gnome/Ubuntu recently! I'm currently downloading the third beta of openSUSE which should be done by the end of the weekend. I've had a few more of my bug reports fixed since the last beta, so it should be one of the easiest distros to install on my laptop by the time I'm finished with it.

openSUSE beta 2

2005-08-21T10:03:00.000Z

Two and a half days of bittorrenting, and I have the five installation CDs for openSUSE beta 2. Very pleased to see a whole slew of my bug reports have been closed since beta 1 - including extra animation in various splash screens which helps you know the computer hasn't crashed when it's sitting there looking like it's doing nothing. And KDE is now listed first in the choice between KDE and Gnome, which is an improvement, although if my Dad were installing openSUSE he would probably still phone me up at that point because he wouldn't know which one is the right one to choose.

The wireless card still didn't work - the typo I found in the ifup script is still there, despite being reported as fixed in bugzilla. Perhaps they didn't fix it in time for the new beta. And I found another typo which caused my WEP key to be ignored. (I have to use WEP so my Symbol Pocket PC will work on the network).

But now it's all up and running and it's very nice. Looks like it'll be enough to keep me sticking with SUSE for another few years. I mean, there's not a lot different from old SUSE on the surface - some nicer graphics and stuff like that. But I think there is some hardware configuration that goes on differently, since I have everything working on my laptop now and I only had to fiddle with the wireless. And on the final version even that should work. And their version of KDE is close enough to a clean install to not annoy me.

(What's up with blogger and planet KDE? If I post a message I get slashes and chevrons at the end of my paragraphs. So I'm having to use the Edit HTML version of the story poster. Which is also rubbish, because if I leave blank lines it adds extra paragraph tags to my html code. Yuk!)

When Linux Is Mainstream

2005-08-18T12:58:00.000Z

I had a horrible thought the other day: If Linux becomes a mainstream desktop operating system, will people like Canon and Nokia start producing horrible skinned featurelight applications for Linux to work with their hardware? And when they start doing that, will the Linux hackers stop making nice integrated solutions because there are alreay solutions which just about do the job?

And then I had a nice thought: Perhaps third party vendors will start producing nice integrated KDE applications which do things the KDE way. Which would be very nice.

openSUSE

2005-08-11T23:01:00.000Z

I downloaded openSUSE a couple of nights ago - set my work machine to download on our new two megabit line overnight, and had four ISOs ready and waiting in the morning. Last night I swapped out my laptop harddrive and installed openSUSE on the spare. I love the new graphics during boot and install, but the most of the install process doesn't seem to have changed that much - except for offering KDE and Gnome as choices, instead of defaulting to KDE. It didn't explain to a newbie what the difference was though, and why they really should choose KDE rather than Gnome (evil grin).

During the installation I made a list of eleven bugs, usability issues or enhancement suggestions which I duly entered into bugzilla, and was impressed to see that rate at which those bug reports are being resolved.

Once it was installed I tried to get my wireless card to work. I got ndiswrapper working fine, but openSUSE's network scripts were faulty, so I didn't manage to get connected to the internet. And at that point it was one in the morning, so I swapped the drives back and went to bed.

Once installed there wasn't much visibly different from SuSE 9.2, mainly due to both using KDE 3.4.2, so I expect most differences would come in things like hardware support, and up-to-dateness of the core packages. And things like hal and dbus. I expect it would be a good platform for me to use when developing KDE 4, since I won't have to spend half my time trying to update things. And if I can develop KDE 4 on openSUSE, I can make sure the two work together really well. Which would be nice.

Sticking with SUSE

2005-08-09T21:35:00.000Z

I've decided to stick with SUSE after all. Since I have years of experience with its idiosyncratic ways of doing things. I mean, I love learning new things, but it's a shame to waste the knowledge I've already acquired. And now, with openSUSE in the wild, maybe I'll see if I can help SUSE continue to be the best distribution for KDE.

Developing

2005-08-01T10:39:00.000Z

I thought that since I'm now on PlanetKDE I'd better get working on KDE again. So I've just fixed a few bits of KMix which didn't work properly on my twinview setup. And you know what? It was really easy - and that inspires me to do more coding. I'm going to find other irritating twinview problems and fix them before 3.5 comes out, since I'm going to be stuck using it for quite a while until 4 arrives, so it'd be nice for it to work well.

Playing With Distros

2005-07-29T14:33:00.000Z

The last few days I've been trying out Kubuntu and Fedora Core, whereas my distribution of choice has been SuSE since version 6 or so. I thought I'd comment on the experience. Incidentally, this is not a review, it's just some uneducated comments about installing and setting up those distributions. So no posting this on Slashdot and then flaming me, ok?

Kubuntu

First impressions: Text mode installation - does the job, but looks pretty ugly: bad. Didn't ask me which packages I wanted to install - just went ahead and put a default set on: not sure if that's good or bad. Detected my dell laptop display without asking me any questions: good. KDE's defaults didn't look very nice: indifferent - I've never found a distribution which makes KDE look nice yet. Had a nice KDE network control panel: good. Couldn't work out how to make my wireless card work: bad. Didn't give me a root password, and I had to use another computer to google for the answer: bad. The fonts looked ugly - it wasn't using the freetype bytecode interpreter: bad. Plugged in my memory stick and it appeared on the desktop with a sensible name: good (SuSE doesn't put it on the screen, and calls it something like usb-p0-0023932746593249). Couldn't find many nice GUI tools to set things up with: bad.

Fedora Core

Nicest installer I've seen: very good. Nice boot screen: good, but not as good as SuSE - you still get a lot of text before it goes graphical. Needed me to select the laptop display: indifferent - until Kubuntu I wouldn't have expected any different. Default setup of KDE actually looks reasonably nice, although I still needed to fiddle with a lot of settings to make it look really nice: ok. Fonts look as good as SuSE: good. Uses RPMs: good (since that's what I'm used to). Uses firefox and evolution instead of konqueror and kontact by default: bad.

Overall FC4 just feels like a much more professionally put together system than Kubuntu. Which means the choice is between FC4 and SuSE. I think SuSE probably does things slightly better than Fedora, but Fedora has to advantage of being a bit more open, so there's perhaps a chance I could contribute to making it better.

So, I'm currently posting this while using FC4, although I'll probably put my SuSE hard drive back in before too long, since all my work is on it. But it is very tempting to change to FC4, as it's a lot better than I was expecting. The only thing I'm not sure about yet is how well supported KDE is on it. I liked having KDE in /opt/kde3 on SuSE, but on FC4 it's all mixed in with everything else. Which is probably more correct, but it complicates things a bit.

And I noticed that I'm listed down the side of planetkde now. So hi to everyone reading the planet!

Who am I?

2005-07-23T16:58:00.000Z

You can see who I really am by looking at my personal website at www.jamesots.com, but how am I involved with KDE?

My first foray into the KDE world was when I was a student at Warwick University. I don't remember which version it was, but I wasn't impressed. I had a slow computer, and KDE made it crawl. So I used fvwm, and only used my linux box for playing with, and used Windows for everything else. I even bought legal copies of Windows for my machine, although most other stuff I was using was pirated. Then eventually I decided that I should be using legal copies of all my software, but I couldn't afford it. So I wiped my computer and installed SuSE Linux, which I could afford. It came with KDE as the default desktop environment, and it was much nicer than what I'd seen a few years before.

I now use Linux with KDE on my main computer, and only boot up my Windows machine when I need to do Flash development or use Embedded Visual C++ (although with MTASC and other such tools I rarely need to use Flash MX any more). KDE has been improving in leaps and bounds, and when I switch to a Windows machine I'm always amazed at how clunky and inefficient it is. And these days, desipite having a four year old laptop, my system still flies!

I've been delving around inside the code of KDE for a while, but I'm a Java programmer at heart so I've never got too far with it yet. I've fixed a few things here and there, but nothing spectacular. But I regularly read a few of the mailing lists, and keep checking out the commit digests and things like that, to keep up to speed with what's going on. Half the problem is knowing where to start - there are so many things I'd like to do with KDE, but I have very little time as I have my own web design and software development company to run as well. And now there's the added stumbling block of not wanting to work too much on KDE 3 when KDE 4 is around the corner. So I should just set up another machine to play with KDE 4 on, but I don't have the money either...

...because I'm moving to Canada soon, to get married to the most amazing girl I've ever known. Which will boost the number of North American KDE developers considerably! (The moving, not the marrying. Obviously.)

So, what kind of stuff am I interested in doing to KDE? Consistency, usability, beauty, performance. Which in my mind, are all inextricably linked. If a system isn't consistent, beautiful or performant (is that a word?) it isn't usable. If it's not usable it doesn't have good performance (because you take too long working out how to do stuff). BUT... to make a system usable doesn't, to me, just mean that newcomers will find it easy to use. I've been using computers for years, and I want KDE to be usable to me too. So that's the million Canadian dollar question - how do we do that?

I don't know.

KAPITALS IN KALCARY, KANADA

2005-07-22T11:39:00.000Z

SOON, KALGARY WILL HAVE KAPITALS IN KANADA. I WONDER WHAT THE RELEVANCE OF THAT IS?