Wie wint?

We hebben gisteren een kleine weddenschap afgesloten tijdens de BBQ. Wie raad welk land het EK wint, krijgt 10 euro van mij. De verdeling is als volgt:

Opa Aad: Duitsland
Oma Margriet: Tsjechie
Tim: Italie
Feline: Nederland
Bianca: Frankrijk
Fred: Portugal

KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is……Great!

I’ve just got my hands dirty with KDE 4.1 beta 1 and all I can say is WOW! I have a kde4daily image running inside a virtualbox on Windows XP and an openSuSE 11 installation on a seperate partition with KDE 4.1 Beta 1 installed. The openSuSE installation had working composite so all the extra goodies like transparency and Wobbl Windows are there. Strange enough the krunner was the old one. Plasma crashed when resizing the panel. I dislike OpenSuSE more than ever. They still haven’t got there package management figured out. As soon as beta 1 packages arrive for Hardy Heron (which are announced), it’s back to Kubuntu in a flash. The functionality is much more stable in kde4daily. Giving the current state of this beta and the enormous amount of development work these days I suspect KDE 4.1 will be great.

Ever since my last post about KDE, in which I had some worries, I am now much more positieve! By the end of this year we will possibly have KDE 4.2 and the ported versions of the super-four K3B, Amarok2, Digikam and KDE-PIM. Also koffice2 is on it’s way. If the quality by then is what I hope and suspect, THE desktop for *nix has arrived and we will see a lot of new users comming from a certain other desktop

Een kleine geschiedenis van bijna Alles

Heb sinds gisteren eindelijk het boek “Een kleine geschiedenis van bijna alles” uit. Als je een leek bent op wetenschappelijk gebied, maar je wilt wel een leesbaar overzicht hebben van de huidige stand van de wetenschap en hoe men daar is gekomen, dan kan ik dit boek van harte aanbevelen. Het is bijzonder leesbaar geschreven, hoewel ik sommige stukken wat saai vond, maar dat is, denk ik, meer door interesse dan door schrijfstijl. De schrijfstijl is prettig en bij vlagen humoristisch. Ik zou wel de geillustreerde editie nemen. Ik had de niet geillustreerde, en ik kan me bij bepaalde onderwerpen voorstellen dat wat plaatjes erg verhelderend zouden zijn geweest.

Blake’s 7 remake?

Looks like Sky One has ordered scripts for 2 60 minutes pilot episode’s for a remake of Blake’s 7. Now, that was a great TV Serie! I really hope it will be in the same league as BSG!

KDE in troubled water

Although I am convinced Qt is a far better GUI toolkit then GTK+, I must admit that Gnome (based on GTK+) is (at the moment) in far better shape than current KDE (based on Qt). I’ve read a lot of so-called “vs” articles and posts (Qt vs GTK+, KDE vs Gnome, LGPL vs GPL, etc). From all those readings I come to these “facts”:

1. Qt requires less LoC (Lines-of-Code) than GTK+. The numbers stated range from 30% to 200%. Also, Qt based code is more readable than GTK+ based code. So, Qt is more productive.
2. Qt has much better documentation, both online as in books. Most GTK+ related educational stuff is outdated. The online reference is there, but not as powerfull as the Qt reference.
3. Both have python bindings, but the same is true for the documentation: The PyQt documentation is much better, both online as in books, as with PyGTK.
4. Qt is natively cross platform and performs well on Linux, Windows and OSX, using their native look and feel. GTK+ is cross platform, but it is said it doesn’t perform on Windows very well.
5. Trolltech, the company that developed Qt is acquired by Nokia. This is very troubling. Nobody really knows what this will do to the toolkit. GTK+ is owned by nobody, which is very positive. The Free Qt edition is protected through the Free Qt Foundation, but if Nokia so desires, it will just let it fork and give the community there own version of it. Who will then maintain it? KDE devs? That only means KDE development slowing down even more.
6. All “big” linux vendors (Redhat, Novell, Ubuntu) choose Gnome as their default GUI, and it shows. There is far more polish in the product. Just try Ubuntu 8.04 and then try Kubuntu 8.04. Kubuntu has one maintainer, Ubuntu many.
7. KDE right now is in the transition from KDE3 to KDE4, a massive undertaking. As a result of that, development in KDE3 has ceased mostly, but KDE4 isn’t ready yet either. It’s mostly a mess.
8. KDE developers are reluctant to replace KHTML with WebKit, while I see this as very important. Browsing the web with KHTML is pretty painfull. Using WebKit will ensure browsing is on par with Safari. Web Developers don’t give a damn about KHTML. They do about Safari.
9. The look and feel of non natvie apps like Firefox and openoffice is very ugly in KDE, but look very integrated in Gnome.
10. The general ugly-ness of KDE. Clearly, KDE developers don’t care about aesthetics or are not able to make things look good. As a result, a default KDE install doesn’t look good. It can be made to look better with modifications, but it is the first impressions that count’s. And it is not a good first implession. There is a role for the distro maintainers here too.
11. People rant about the smoothness of Gnome, how well everything is integrated, how polished everything looks. The time it takes within the KDE project to get out something as simple as HTML enabled signatures in KMail is unbelieveable. If I change my font settings or mouse pointers of whatever in Gnome, it changes immediately. In KDE I have to logout/login. Why? When I plugin a iPod in Gnome, it’s connected and ready to use in the sound app of Gnome. In KDE (Amarok) is needs to get configured, and then “connected”. Why?
12. Word is that OpenOffice under-the-hood is a big mess. It’s bloated and takes a long time to start (getting better though). My great hope is that Koffice 2.0 will be great. It has a much cleaner codebase.

I sure hope the KDE project will get on it’s feet again. KDE4 looks promising, but it’s current state is not good. KDE3 is on a standstill. KDE4 with Koffice2 are my big hope. If it doesn play out well, it will be the death of the KDE project. Right now Gnome is in much better shape.

I _want_ to develop using Python and Qt4. I Like the toolkit and I like the cross platform capability. I already invested in a Qt4 and a PyQt4 book. But, as this post shows, I am in doubt. Should I invest my time in learning (Py)Qt or (Py)GTK?

My ideal development environment

I like Python. It’s a great programming language. Although technically it’s a scripting language and thus interpreted, you can create full blown apps with it. You can use it on almost all OSes in existence. It’s Open Source of course!

After becoming a Linux fan I too had to make the choice: Gnome or KDE. After I investigated the background of both desktops extensively I choose KDE. It’s underlying GUI toolkit, Qt from Trolltech, is superior to GTK+ (the GUI toolkit on wich Gnome is based). Qt is GPL-ed, but you can buy a seperate license if you want to create closed source software with it. Qt is also multiplatform. You can use it on Windows, MAC OS-X and Linux, among others.

Qt is a toolkit to be used with C++. Now wouldn’t it be great if we could use it with Python… Well, we can! Language bindings are made to use Qt classes directly inside Python, called PyQt. For Qt v3.x it’s called PyQt3 and for Qt v4.x it’s called PyQt4 (duh!). The developer of these language bindings follows the same licensing policy as Trolltech does for Qt, so for Open Source development it’s free to use. The same people who made the Qt binding’s also developed Python bindings for KDE. There called PyKDE3 for KDE v3.x (which is based on Qt v3.x) and PyKDE4 for KDE v4.x (which is based on Qt v4.x)

So, with the combo Python, Qt, and PyQt, one can develop GUI applications that run natively on Windows, MAC OS-X and Linux, both as open source or close source.

Neat!

Quo Vadis, VX?

Nog even en dan is het zover. We gaan met VX op trip. Bestemming onbekend. Wat weten we wel? Het is er nu tussen de 22 en 25 graden. We moeten ons voorbereiden op een lange vliegreis. Het is een stedelijk gebied. Qua inentingen wordt DTP en Hepatitus A geadviseerd. Er is het een en ander te bezichtigen. Tenslotte is een visum nodig.

Wie het weet mag het zeggen…

UPDATE: We weten het inmiddels. Het is…..Beijing oftewel Peking. WAUW!

Best quote ever

When filing a bug in openSUSE bugzilla I came across the best quote I’ve ever read:

“Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” — Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

This will be my motto!

WordPress vs Blogger

To create a blog is easy. To select the right blogging software isn’t. My shortlist went to wordpress and blogger. Blogger (blogspot) is owned by Google. WordPress comes as both a service at www.wordpress.com and as a open source blog software kit on www.wordpress.org. After fiddling with both I choose wordpress.com because:

1. WordPress supports “pages” wich means you can create a website as part of you’re blog.
2. Blogger has https authentication and allthough that is more secure, it means I cannot manage my blog from certain places because all they block all https traffic.
3. WordPress doesn’t come with the annoing bar on the top of the blog like Blogger.
4. I’m using WordPress.com right now, but I might “upgrade” to wordpress.org and install it on my own hosting account. WordPress.com gives the possibility to export everything and WordPress.com is based on WordPress.org, so the transition should go well. Blogger doesn’t support all this.
5. WordPress is Open Source.
6. WordPress has a great community.
7. What I miss in WordPress and what Blogger has is blog-from-mail support and slideshow’s in the sidebar.

Start post

Dit is de start post van mijn blog. Op deze plek zal ik alles plaatsen wat ik vermeldingswaardig vindt. Denk daarbij aan zaken als foto’s, werk, familie, hobbies, interesses en opvallende zaken die ik on- en offline tegenkom. Afhankelijk van het onderwerp zal ik bepaalde zaken in het nederlands plaatsen en andere zaken in het engels. Ik zal dan ook iedere post in de categorie “English” of “Nederlands” plaatsen. Als je wilt weten wie ik ben en wat mijn interesses zijn, dan kun je naar de pagina genaamd “Over mij“. Tevens kun je alle posts op deze blog volgen middels RSS.