Older blog entries for lkcl (starting at number 265)

ARSE!!! zope is a pain to set up.

well, my svn access to kde was actioned today. the updates i am doing to superkaramba are getting a bit silly, waiting around.

i also noted the playground stuff for kde4: i've been giving some thought to helping with the evaluation use of freedce as a replacement for dcop.

several technologies are under consideration (mostly as "to be evaluated :)" ) but freedce takes a little getting used to.

if you have _big_ applications then it is complete insanity to "roll your own" RPC system - it's just too much of a job to expect developers to have full detailed knowledge of both RPC _and_ of the expert areas they are doing.

that isn't to say that you can stop considering client/server issues altogether...

and that is where DCOP goes a bit wrong. it was hacked together in 20 minutes and it's horribly klunky. any complex data structures it is necessary to create workarounds to communicate information. you can't do "remote" applications which is the whole point of having an RPC mechanism...

anyway :)

many interesting things happened very fast recently.

WheelOfFortune is progressing well. the api (enhancements to Superkaramba) I basically completed within... two days; the rest of my messing has been on the python side to make USE of the new SK functions.

herein lies a problem: superkaramba's mouse-handling is a bit of a mess: there is drag-drop ONTO SK, but no drag FROM SK, which I need, and need to research. the click-hold events are delayed by several milliseconds BUT you also get mouse-move events AND a click event! I can't work out what to do here, to use what event for what.

I am going to have to settle for slowing the mouse "throw" feature down somewhat, then provide an arc of abcde... that you can cliick on to bring the wheel of icons into view much quicker. although this additional display of letters will use up valuable screen space it is I believe necessary as the clicking overload is a mess and the speed required to deal with 1000 icons is radically different from viewing a subdirectory with only 10.

yukk :)

oh my god I am so sad.

I got my xda executive recently and it is basically a mini laptop with a 500mhz arm and internally there is a gsm phone connected via seial. it therefore replaces technology that you couldn't buy 8 years ago at a third of the price and a third of the size too.

and so I just had to write an advogato cos I gotta get my fix of internet access.

I got the superkaramba theme "wheel of fortune" into a workable demo in 3 days. 1000 lines of c++ and only 500 lines of python, and it is... I can't get over how stunning it is.

its difficult to get across: if you've been used to a square boring file manager, if you have resigned yourself to treeviews, GET OVER IT cos this SK theme will bowl you over.

I so look forward to plasma.

_well_... the Superkaramba KDirLister is working far better than i anticipated. i can't get over how _fast_ it it.

i've started to do a whizzey directory lister, where the icons are lined up in a row, and you "throw" the mouse and the line rapidly accelerates in the same direction. you can make the icons move in a much more controlled way by click-hold and move the mouse - but the problem there is damn double-click detection slows down the hold detection - _and_ stops mouse events from entirely reaching superkaramba!

that's pathetic and irritating!

so, whilst the mouse is being held, i don't get _any_ move events, and when it's released, there's likewise a significant delay.

which is why i put in the "throwing" thing.

also i made sure that i put in wheel-button responses, too.

i _love_ this stuff.

the icon update rate i've reduced to 10ms (10ms between one lot of processing and the next) and it's... wild.

the icon moving is so _smooth_. i'm... stunned!

anyway. the next step is to do "clickey" things on subdirectories, and to open another line, showing the contents of the subdirectory below.

if you go back to a previous line and click on that, it will delete all of the other lines. i'm wondering if i should store the "scrolled" positions so that if you come back to a subdirectory, it remembers where it was previously scrolled to.

if there aren't that many files in a directory, finding the one you want in a multi-hierarchy directory tree, if you have a scroll wheel, should be _ultra_ quick - flick bam, flick bam. even if you don't have a scroll wheel, this "throwing" thing should have people going "wha-heeey!"

excellent!!! my mods to superkaramba are finally being integrated, for use in kde 3.5.1.

i'm working at the moment on a KDirLister extension, so that you can do svn:// .... and floppy:// ... and file:///home/ etc. just like in konqueror.

i'd _love_ to do a superkaramba theme that shows your files and directories in a "wheel of fortune" that you spin with the mouse, click on and you get the next "layer" up as the wheel gets bigger.

some people have pointed out to me "why are you considering this instead of helping with plasma (kde 4.0)?"

well... it's because superkaramba works _now_ - plus, there's always the option to port any well-designed superkaramba python themes to plasma, later...

[update] - it works!

superkaramba ROKZ!

i went to a fancy dress ("bad taste") party, yesterday, it was great fun. being a geek i clipped as many of my PDA-phones as i was allowed to my belt.

the people there were horsey people (which is great cos none of them smoked) and they have families, and kids, and dogs and caaats, and horseys.

after a couple of hours, one of the kids came up and said "what's that?" meaning my XDA phone. i started to explain, and then of course another one said "what's that? can i have a go?" so that took care of the 2nd XDA.

now, these devices are touchscreen phones with an approx 3in x 4.5in screen. i had one SD card, so was able to run linux (gpe/familiar) on one, and leave wince on the other.

guess which one i got all the questions "how do i do anything", guess which one i got back in 5 minutes, and guess which one they wanted to swap, and guess which one didn't appeal to a 5-year-old because the scribbling program didn't have colour?

wince, wince, wince, wince and wince.

over a 3 hour period, the 8-year-old had been playing with the phone for nearly an hour, on-and-off.

only one of the adults spotted the "start" word at the top of the wince menu.

this is _fascinating_. everyone raves about windows (because they are ignorant of the alternatives, and even when they do they are _still_ ignorant and whine "but evveryyone eeelllse uses windows"). john spencer, who does the LTSP installations (ltsp.org) for schools provides windows machines on request, but he advises the teachers that they are unlikely to be used - and they don't believe him - and then later on they ask him to come in again and explain how the unused machines can be PXE-booted and used as LTSP terminals to run Linux...

... but i'd never encountered this before with my own eyes.

kids don't find windows to be cool.

HTC Typhoon

well... it turns out the vivien chapperone has been working on porting linux to the HTC Typhoon phone - aka the Orange SPV C500. this phone can be bought in shops for £80... or about £50 on ebay...

one is arriving in the next few days :)

my book's going on amazon.com for $USD 99!!!

okay! my first experiments with qt: to produce a phone program.

a combination of gomunicator, qtiax and libgnokii - good stuff.

i am _hoping_ to find that gnokii already has a "daemon" infrastructure, whereby several programs can simultaneously contact one program that farms out... say... messages, phone calls, contacts, that sort of thing.

fuuuun...