Moving hosts!

After many years of (good) service, I’m in the process of moving from Dreamhost web hosting to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) service hosted by the folks at Linode. It’s definitely more pricey but I like the control and freedom that I have at my disposal. Thanks to a number of guides and some help, I was able to set up lighttpd and php-fpm to serve web pages, and Postfix+dovecot+amavisd-new for email.

April 10, 2011

Taking video snapshots quickly: KDE VLC Snapper

Some of the oldest readers of this blog are well aware of [a certain hobby of mine]({{ site.url }}/category/anime). Over the years I’ve always wanted to write more about that, including the stuff I’m viewing nowadays, but I found a hassle to collect snapshots from videos / DVDs, selecting them, and so on. Recently I learnt that VLC has some rather complete Python bindings, and I thought, why not make the process automated?

January 26, 2011

Improvements to the Git hooks

As you may already know, recently the KDE sysadmins completely overhauled the commit hooks used with the Git infrastructure. Written in Python, they have already brought significant improvements to the current workflows. These hooks include keywords that when specified trigger particular actions: the most used are to CC specific email addresses (CCMAIL), to CC bug reports (CCBUG) or to close bug reports (BUG). With the adoption of Review Board to facilitate code reviews, there were also requests for a REVIEW keyword that could close the review requests without asking the submitters to do so manually (which is slow and not always effective).

January 1, 2011

PyKDE4: Retrieve data using KIO

One of the greatest strengths of KDE is undoubtedly the asynchronous and network-transparent I/O access, employed by the so-called “I/O” slaves, part of the KIO class. If you are developing an application that requires file or network access, those classes make things incredibly simple to do, and they don’t freeze your GUI when you are in the middle of a process. In this post I’ll show how to use KIO to retrieve files from network resources using PyKDE4.

October 26, 2010

PyKDE4: Tag and annotate files using Nepomuk

Some time has passed since I last blogged… this was not only due to lack of time but also due to motivation (writing long texts can be discouraging at times). In any case, I’d like to rectify for that. In this post, I’ll talk about Nepomuk, and in particular how to use it to tag and annotate arbitrary files using its API in PyKDE4. Before starting, let me say that creating this tutorial was only possible thanks to the help of Sebastian Trueg, who helped me by pointing out some mistakes I was doing.

September 4, 2010

And so, it begins again...

![]({{ site.url }}/images/2010/09/FFXIV-Title-Logo_1-03_300.jpg) On Septemer 1st the open beta of Square Enix’s new MMORPG, FINAL FANTASY XIV Online was launched. I’ve been playing its predecessor since December 2003, although nowadays my presence is limited to doing the “missions” (quests that advance the main storyline). Of course I was interested in the “new MMO” in the works at Square since it was mentioned in 2006. When the official release was announced, I preordered the so-called Limited Collector’s Edition (it comes with nice items inside, along with an in-game item).

July 27, 2010

What this might ever be?

The rest is up to you to figure out.

July 25, 2010

OCS and KDE Forums - work continues

With my last entry, I announced the start of the work for an OCS library for the KDE Community Forums. Today I’d like to blog again about the recent developments. First of all, now there isn’t one, but two Python modules: _ocslib, _ a pure Python module that can be used to interface with OCS-based forum systems; ocslibkde, a PyKDE4 based module that can be used to interface with OCS-based forum system in KDE applications.

July 18, 2010

Open Collaboration Services and KDE Forums

For KDE developers, web-based forums are often uncommon workflows. Indeed, for communication among developers mailing lists are much better tools, especially since you can handle everything inside a client (most of the time), compared to forums where you have to use a web browser. The ways of reading, replying and interacting with posters are dramatically different. And that is why some developers find themselves uncomfortable with the KDE Community Forums.

June 5, 2010

What's cooking at the KDE Community Forums?

In the past weeks and days, the KDE Community Forums staff has been working to bring new features to improve even more the user experience. A few months ago, the staff was discussing the idea of finding a way to guide users to the most appropriate forum to post their questions or discussions. Now, thanks also to the return in service of one of our admins (welcome back, sayakb!) the feature is now being implemented, as the screenshots below will show.