Planet LUUSA

On some days, getting to work is more entertaining than on others:

Today I saw a Porsche 911 GT3 whose hood was firmly fused with a lamp post in front of the main Apple campus. How the driver managed to veer off the 4-lane road (speed limit: 40mph), across the bus stop, onto the sidewalk, and into the lamp... I do not know. But he managed to make the hood about 1 ft shorter, so I'm guessing he totalled his car.

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Endlich breche ich mal das lange Schweigen im Blog...
Nachdem ich seit kurzem eine neue Kamera habe, musste ich die natürlich direkt gestern abend mal bei Rhein in Flammen austesten (*klick* aufs Bild). Allerdings stehe ich akut vor einem anderen Problem: Womit gescheit Fotos unter Linux verwalten?
Bislang habe ich das Standard-Tool unter Ubuntu/Gnome, F-Spot genutzt. Bis ich eben festgestellen musste, dass dort mühsam eingegebene Tags zu den Bildern nicht in den IPTC-Daten der Bilddatei, sondern in einer lokalen Datenbank gespeichert werden. Bei einem Export der Bilder sind die Tags dann futsch, was doof ist, wenn die Web-Galerie diese wieder nutzen soll. Ich hab ja schließlich auch keinen Bock, alles zweimal zu taggen.

Nach etwas googlen bin ich dann auf jBrout gestoßen. Das kann zwar von der Eye-Candiness nicht mit F-Spot mithalten, bietet dafür aber die vollständige Nutzung von Exif und IPTC. Was mir da allerdings fehlt, sind einfache Editier-Funktionen, für die ich nicht unbedingt immer Gimp anwerfen will. Damit meine ich insbesondere das Zurechtschneiden von Bildern, was in F-Spot sehr komfortabel gelöst ist.

Kennst du vielleicht die eierlegende Wollmilchsau, die ich hier gerade suche, die die folgenden Kriterien erfüllt?
Must-Have: Tags werden in IPTC-Daten gespeichert, Nice-to-Have: Foto-Editier-Funktionen.
Ich freue mich über jeden sachdienlichen Hinweis in den Kommentaren :)

Wer kennt das Problem nicht? Man ist mal wieder auf dem Weg zum Kiez, das Mobiltelefon fällt aus der Tasche, man merkt das erst, wenn man am Ziel angekommen ist.

Jetzt fällt einem spontan ein, dass man keine 0900er Nummern gesperrt hat und man wird doch leicht blass.

Cool, wenn man nur eine SMS braucht, um das Telefon jetzt außer Gefecht zu setzen. Wie das geht? Na, mit der Remote Sperre, die hier für das E65 beschrieben ist:

http://mye65.blogspot.com/2007/06/why-nokia-e65-remote-locking.html

Für die E51 Fraktion in meinem Freundeskreis: Natürlich auch mit meinem neuen Firmenhandy ausprobiert; klappt ebenfalls, nur dass der Menüpunkt woanders zu finden ist.

KDE TechBase is the top resource for KDE development specific content. It is an effort originally started by Dominik and me. Since then, we (well, mostly it's him, while I am in charge of causing all the annoying URL changesupgrades and maintenance) regulary monitor the at TechBase, moving pages into the correct place, hinting people to merge pages with similar content, etc. Even though the TechBase is a Wiki, it needs people that take responsiblity on the overall Layout.

However, Since he will be gone for 3 months and I can't manage it all on my own, we are in need of more TechBase admins. So if you drew knowledge from TechBase, this is your chance to contribute back.

PS: we also need a fancy name for TechBase admins. Something along the lines of the KDE bug squad. "Techsters" was my first idea but that sounds a bit dull. Anyone?

It is with great pleasure that I realized your porting efforts to Qt 4 in your 4.3 release of Google Earth. Your software so far lacked visual integration on Linux, but now with "googleearth -style plastique" (KDE) or "googleearth -style cleanlooks" (GNOME) it is now easy to make it look less Windows 95ish and more native. That is until you try to apply e.g. the Oxygen style, or just any 3rd party style.

The reason for that is that your product still ships with a complete set of the Qt libraries which cannot load styles installed system-wide. It would be nice if you could follow the good example of your Qt-using collegues at Skype ^*), who provide both a version with Qt and one that relies on the system libraries. This would also cause your application to look native instantly.

All the best,

Daniel Molkentin

^*) Skype allows to circumvent their forced use of cleanlooks by passing "--disable-cleanlooks" as parameter.

We now break away from this blog for a commercial break:

In an effort to deliver in-depth practical knowledge in addition to its books, Open Source Press, the publisher of my Qt 4 book is now offering practical trainings.

The new company to organize the trainings is called Open Source School, offering a pretty impressive programme. Among the courses: Kolab Groupware Server by Gunnar Wrobel, a very active member and developer in the Kolab community. They also offer a training on Qt 4, conducted by yours truely.

Thank you for your attention, and now back to this blog's regular content.

Just in case the title strikes you as odd: It's finnish and it basically means "Goodbye! I had a great time!" (well, at leastt according to my dictionary). Right now we are sitting in the lobby of the StayAt Hotel in Leppävaara, Espoo waiting for the bus to the airport and fighting the hangover from yesterdays farewell party. The last two week definately were unforgettable and great fun. Tonight I am returning to Germany, hopefully getting some more KDE-related stuff done. Goodbye.

Dear Dot-Lovers,

reports about the death of the flatforty feature on the dot are greatly exaggerated . In fact it seems to be working again, I have no idea why it was gone. Probably some maintenance lead to problems. Anyway, I have always wondered why that feature is so pupular with people, especially since it's hard to see what thread this posting belongs to at first sight. So I have some questions:

1. Do you like/use the flatforty function? If so, why? if not, why not?
2. Would you like to be able to subscribe to Flatfourty as an RSS feed rather than reading it online?

Please feel free to submit your answers in the comments.

Tonight, Crystal and I went to see Zombie Strippers, after first making sure we were drunk enough by going to a bar.

What is astonishing: I was expecting a B-Movie that in the best case might come close to From Dusk Till Dawn, and in the worst case sucked more than Grindhouse. I actually drank alcohol to prepare myself... that should be telling.

But then along comes a fabulous B-Movie that made me laugh tears consistently throughout, impressed me with complex, yet tongue-in-cheek dialog where you least expect it, and with a production quality (screenwriting & visuals) that was beyond anything I've ever seen in a zombie movie (aside from Shaun of the Dead perhaps). And it even had some political satire!

Anyway. It's funnier than Shaun of the Dead (or a different kind of funny), better than From Dusk Till Dawn, and it has really hot Strippers!!!

Need I point out that clearly you HAVE to see this movie?