Daily Surprises

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

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

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

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

Ah, the wonders of beta.blogger.com.

Not Much

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

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.)