The Lord of the Rings books have always been my favorite recreational reading material. I have no idea how many times I have read these books but each and every one has been a wonderful experience. There is nothing I can say about The Fellowship of the Ring that has not been said before, by someone more articulate than me. I suppose the best review I can make, and the greatest statement of the quality of this book, is the joy I get in its reading and how that joy has not diminished with the number of times I have read it. I may not know how many more times I will experienced the The Fellowship of the Ring, but I know it will be, at least, one more.
Month: February 2005
Wizards and Data
DataKiosk is a KDE database tool that lets you (through an series of Kdevlop style wizards) create custom database query API styles for data access. Anyone familiar with Juk will understand how well this kind of functionality works on generic table structures. Here is a flash demo to help convey the concept. Currently it in KDE CVS (kdeextragear-1)and available for testing.
Learning to Share
Another site claiming to be “The Vault” has a quick how to on setting up KDE Public File Server (aka kpf.) Kpf lets you share files with other users across a network using http. Its basically a personal web server that doesn’t require administrator rights to use and is fully manageable from your KDE desktop. The tutorial is light on information but has screen shots. Oh, and FYI yes those Max OSX looking dialogs are KDE dialogs. KDE/Kwin can be made to look like almost any desktop; OSX, Solaris, CDE, or even one from a company in the northwest United States (who shall remain unnamed.)
What am I Doing Wrong?
A particularly useful KDE application when developing, testing, or debugging is kdebugdialog. It is a single dialog box that lets you turn on/off all of the various debugging, error, and stderr messages for each KDE application and each debugging level. Thankfully, the dialog includes search functionality.
KDE Tips
News Forge has a article on Tips an Tricks in KDE, covering topics like advanced kwin usage and rendering GTK+ apps with Qt. Some of the stuff they talk about I have already discussed previously. Why are people still using Gnome?
The Power of KDE
One of the most advacned development tools of any environment is KDE’s UI scripting environment (aka DCOP) and a GUI scripting tool by the name of Kommander.
Kommander may be a revolution in application development, unlike any other tool created for scripting. What Kommander does is essentially extends the power of RDE to scripting. Language support include Bash, sh, Csh, Zsh, straight DCOP, or even Javascript. linux.com has a two part series on Kommander that should be required reading for anyone who is starting to do development on the Linux/KDE platform.
What is amazing is that the bulk of execution time is actually done by the KDE application binaries themselves; meaning that Kommander applications run almost as fast as stright C++/KDE/QT apps. Peviosuly I have talked about kdialog and its uses as a GUI interface for commandline scripts. Kommander takes this functionality to the Nth power.
Couple other quick KDE tutorials are:
- Listening to Music with KsCD – A tux magazine article on KDE’s CD player.
- KMail in Depth – LinuxPlanet’s article on using KMail. One of the most powerful email clients, anywhere.
Success in a Global Environment
Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States is an article by Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters for the U.S. Army War College Quarterly. The article talks about some major factors that limit a countries military and economic abilities in the world market. The article offers some insights into how developing countries can hold themselves back even when natural resources are abundant. It also does a spectacular job of showing how inter-related the issues of liberty and the free market really are. While most people understand that capitalism is not truly possible without liberty; many fewer people to understand the liberty is not possible without capitalism. Happy Meals and women’s rights have more in common that one might think.
Work Rant
On Tuesday I was called into my managers office. He informed me that someone, who evidently knew I had a blog, had informed him that I might be posting on work time. My boss then proceeded to visit this website and check out the time-stamps on the posts to determine if I had done so. Now, what really happened is that my boss most likely was reading my weblog (on work time) and happen to notice that I posted one entry in the morning, and one in the afternoon and thus determined that I could not have been posting on my lunch break.
Lets ignoring the fact that I ONLY post during breaks (as if lunch is the only break I get during a nine hour day.) And lets totally ignoring the fact that my long post are generally written on the bus on the way to work and then posted when I remember them sometime during the day. And lets skip over the fact that the single biggest obstacle to me getting work done during the day is getting called into meetings to discuss unrelated bull shit (if this place spent half as much time getting me new programmers as it did pulling me into offices to fuck with me during the day, I could have already rebuilt the entire application infrastructure.) No, we are going to ignore all of that and just pass out a big FUCK YOU to either my boss or the person who reported me to my boss.
Because of these developments I will no longer be posting anything during the work day. However (evil grin) I HAVE removed the timestamps from all of my posts, comments, search queries, etc.. etc.. etc.. and I have set up the system to post any waiting Drafts (unpublished articles that are already in the system) to the blog at random intervals during the day. And what is more interesting is that the pages will be rebuilt at random intervals (i.e. the published articles will not even appear on the pages until later the same day.) Evidently I am not the first blogger to have this problem because these tools were ready and waiting for me to install.