Bloggy

Well, I’m currently in the process of preparing to leave tomorrow for Officer Candidate School. It will be an adjustment to say the least. For those who are wondering, the experience of an officer in the Navy are recounted here.

This blog, and much of my total online prescence, are hosted from my home computer. I will have limited contact to the outside world during the next 9 weeks, so if my computer goes offline for anything that requires more care than a flick of the power switch from my wife, be prepared for some downtime. If that should happen, I apologize in advance. kdecvs-build is also available from KDE CVS, as is kfile_torrent. abakus is also available from appsy.

So farewell all, I will be back, although the various schools I will be attending for the next dozen months or so will undoubtedly leave me very busy.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized | No Comments »

Short story is that it sorta, kinda works at this point. It’s actually sorta, kinda worked on my computer for a couple of weeks now, but I haven’t had time to finish it. Now that I’m about to leave for 3 months or so, I figured I’d let everyone know about the partially completed work. Maybe it’ll be done when I get back. Hint: Help clee finish gst-spc first, as that’s universally useful. ;-)

You can find instructions at http://grammarian.homelinux.net/~kde-cvs/juk-spc/. The instructions should be clear enough to a developer, but I haven’t put the effort into detailing the process enough for Aunt Tillie. That’s OK though, Aunt Tillie isn’t going to want much to do with this until it works better. But it’s pretty cool, at least for now.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized | No Comments »

For those of you who don’t frequent kfm-devel, I’ve posted a patch against KHTML to the mailing list to show the image you’re dragging during a drag and drop operation.

Sample

It’ll probably be a KDE 4 thing unless the KHTML devs really love it, since we’re past feature freeze. I think it’s pretty nifty myself, and it wasn’t hard to do at all. I just wish that QCursor::setCursor() took full advantage of the Xcursor spec to allow translucent pixmaps to be properly supported. Although perhaps it is an X Server limitation that causes this.

One other thing is that this only works for images that aren’t also links. It wouldn’t be hard to do something with hyperlinked images as well, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Also, you’d probably want to be dragging the actual URL, and not the image anyways.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized | No Comments »

There’s a beta release of the next BitTorrent program. My notes:

1. The readme included with the source distribution says that installation instructions are included in the INSTALL.unix file. Unfortunately, you won’t actually find that file with the source. Don’t worry though, I didn’t let a minor thing like that stop me.
2. The application now uses GTK instead of wxWindows. Sort of a step sideways if you ask me, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as pyGTK does seem to be better for cross-platform development than pyQt at this point.
3. Unfortunately, the GUI is, IMO, horrid. I don’t even want to imagine what aseigo would say about it. For example, even though it seems to require GTK 2.4, it still uses the old GTK file chooser dialog.
4. Bonus GUI disaster: You cannot resize the application unless you pass the “–advanced 1″ options to the program. Thanks for saving us from ourselves, BitTorrent devs. What would we have ever done if you hadn’t saved us from making the application larger.

Anyways, I didn’t get a chance to try downloading a torrent with it, as the KNOPPIX torrent I had lying around was apparently expired. Overall the application shows potential, and it’s nice that they’re not leaving it as simply a bare bones GUI example. But I think we should get the protocol figured out for KDE 4.0 (perhaps with KGet NG), otherwise we’re never going to have a good GUI BitTorrent program for KDE.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized | No Comments »

First off, Happy New Year’s Day to everybody. It’s been a pretty hectic holidays for me. Christmas was great, and I even had my grandma mail down some of her absolutely incredible fudge candies. :-). I also got a nifty laser-leveling system, a few video games, some gift certificates, and some Steelers merchandise. Here’s hoping it leads them to a Super Bowl victory for the first time in almost 25 years.

I’ve spent the time since Christmas doing a lot of working out. Today I got some time to work on JuK, which was nice. There’s still more I’d like to do before I leave, but I don’t think I’ll have time. I still need to study the various things new recruits are expected to know, and I need to keep working out as well.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized | No Comments »