Recently OpenStreetMap has got a lot of attention, at least in the german media, and of course everybody was comparing it to Google Maps and people started to compain that OSM is incomplete and will never reach the coverage as it has GMaps, but what I find impressive about OSM is the speed of advancements. Ever since I became aware of OSM, several months ago, I kept watching my hometown (<8000 inhabitants). In the beginning there were only two or three major streets in OSM but as of today nearly all streets, including tiny trails which you won’t find in any other map, were properly mapped.
Monthly Archive for August, 2008
For some time now I was trying to setup KMail to work with GnuPG but I did always fail. I did RTFM, but apparently not close enough. After I did manage to get it working I did write down my experiences and like to share them with you. The result is a englisch Howto and an german Howto which try to explain how to setup KMail to use GnuPG. Have fun and notify me in case I made an mistake!
After using KDE4.1 for some days I’m quite satisfied. Most of the applications perform very good and are stable. However, there are still several annoying bugs I have to deal with. They prevent me from recommending KDE 4.1 unrestrained to others.
The first bug when I login is that KWin crashes instantly. Sometimes it takes the whole X Server down but most times it just notifies me that it has crashed and is restarted. Then I can continue working. I did try to make a proper bug report, but as soon as I install the debug symbols KDE becomes unuseable at all. I’ll have to investigate this further as I have much interest in getting this bug fixed.
The second most annoying bug regards Dolphin and Konqueror or, the be precise, the metainformation framework (nepomuk or strigi, I’m not sure). As long as the “information” sidebar is enable Dolphin crashes instantly when I move the mouse over some file (not directory) and the backend tries to load the related information. This is super annoying but fortunately there is a simple workaround: just disable the information sidebar 
But apart from this bugs I have to say: KDE4.1 rocks!
Ever wonderd how you could change your current group without ending your current session (i.e. logging out and in again)?
You can use newgrp to achieve this. Simply enter newgrp <desired group> and you’re done. Of course this only works for groups you are a member in or have the group password.
The Debian KDE Maintainers recently released inofficial Backports of KDE4.1 for Debian Lenny for those who didn’t wan’t to use experimental packages or wait for lenny to become stable. I was waiting for this packages for a long time. Since I’ve used KDE 4.0 at work I did want to use it at home, too. But I did not want to break my system more than absolutly necessary and I didn’t like some of the shortcoming of KDE 4.0, so I had to wait. The 4.1 release looked very promising to me and so I did decide to give it a try. Many people told me not to use KDE 4.1 but I did really like KDE 4 since my first contact. Unfortunately there are known issues with KDE 4.1 and the proprietary Nvidia drivers which I use and the compositing features of KWin only work with TwinView and not Xinerama, so I did prepare myself to some hurdles. I want to give a short report of my experiences on KDE 4.1 on Debian GNU/Linux lenny.
Basically I did follow the steps described on the Backports page:
When trying to create context menus of SWT TreeViewers I didn’t find much documentation on that issue and the snippets I found were quite confusing. Here is an approach that did work out for me. Please note that there are other ways to achieve this as well.
public class TreeView extends ViewPart {
...
public void createPartControl(Composite parent) {
...
this.initContextMenu();
}
private void initContextMenu() {
// initalize the context menu
MenuManager menuMgr = new MenuManager("#PopupMenu"); //$NON-NLS-1$
menuMgr.setRemoveAllWhenShown(true);
menuMgr.addMenuListener(new IMenuListener() {
@Override
public void menuAboutToShow(IMenuManager manager) {
Action action = new Action() {
public void run() {
super.run();
// TODO do something
}
};
action.setText("Title for Action");
manager.add(newEntry);
}
});
TreeViewer viewer = this.treeViewer;
Menu menu = menuMgr.createContextMenu(viewer.getTree());
viewer.getTree().setMenu(menu);
getSite().registerContextMenu(menuMgr, viewer);
}
When deploying you can export the product for any supported platform if you have installed the RCP delta pack. To download the delta pack go to the eclipse download page and select your desired eclipse release. Then scroll down to the section “Delta Pack” and download it, unzip the package somewhere. Open eclipse, go to “Window -> Preferences -> Plug-in Development” and select “Add …” on the “Plug-ins” Tab. Select the directory where you have unzipped the archive. Now you can close the dialog by clicking Ok and open your .product file where you should “Add Required Plug-ins” on the “Configuration” tab.
Sometimes bugs are not faults but just plain nonsense. Take this as an example:
boolean status = false;
for(...) {
if(...) status = true;
}
status = false;
return status;
Nice, isn’t it?
In case you haven’t heard of it: There is a new browser based on QtWebKit. It is fast, small (less than 10k LOC) und cross-plattform due to QT4.4. You can grab it from the project page on google code. I did compile a package for Debian lenny/AMD64, just in case you don’t want to compile it yourself. Ok, my fault, I did underestimate Debian. Arora is already in the archives. I didn’t even do an “apt-cache search arora” before compiling it … ouch.
Along with an update of my theme I have removed Google AdSense, Google Analytics and Feedburner from this page due to privacy concerns. I still use these products on other sites, but I don’t think it does make sense to use them here.
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