Well, the way to go is obvious for a KDE hacker, no? Right, using Marble, or better: using libmarble as explained in the KDE Techbase. So, what did I end up with? A small pure-Qt application that uses libmarble to display OpenStreetMap tiles, showing some custom placemarks. Those placemarks are collected directly from the OpenStreetMap (online) database using the Overpass API. Then a bit of brute-force XML parsing using QXmlStreamReader and then: pure awesomeness.

This currently is based on Qt4, therefore I use XML and parse it brute-force. Eventually I'll switch to a Qt5-based libmarble, and will use the builtin JSON-support of Qt5. And maybe one day I'll finally find an example on how to draw different graphics for different types of placemarks.

Of course, this is not entirely local. But the information about the extra placemarks can easily be saved locally and restored from there (in fact, that is what the first versions did before I starte using QNetworkAccessManager), and Marble caches the tiles so it will sort-of work even offline. And of course the source code is available for everyone to hack around with it: OSMhyd version 1.

• Opera 12.14 (Build 1738): TLSv1, DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
• Firefox 19.0.2: TLSv1, DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA
• Chromium 27.0.1425.0 (185065): TLSv1.1, DHE-RSA-CAMELLIA256-SHA
• Konqueror 4.10.1: TLSv1.2, DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384

The article suggests that with some fiddling you can get Internet Explorer to support TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2, but I can't test that because of the lack of a supported platform. So, out of the box we have the most secure TLS implementation available. We rock!

While I was distracted from KGpg work I meanwhile did some stuff that likely most of you are already using, probably without noticing. I started pushing a bunch of patches to CMake which finally led to me getting write access to the repository, which in turn led to me doing even more cleanups there. Now most Find*.cmake modules have version selection support, the automatic handling of distinct debug and release versions for one module has been improved (wanted especially by the (KDE-)Windows people), and the usual amount of bug fixes, breakages, and fixes for these breakages have happened.

In the last few weeks I was going even one level deeper, heavily patching KWSys. This is likely something you have not heard of, but you are still using it. This is a collection of tool classes from Kitware (the guys behind CMake and other stuff) that handles platform abstraction. My point of interest was the SystemInformation class, which gives you things like logical and physical processor count (that is Hyperthreading processor vs. core), memory size and stuff like that. It started with getting some more beautiful information about my HP PA-RISC boxes (I own a Apollo 705, a C3600, and a C8000), then fixing some ARM processor flag stuff, finally adding CPU feature gathering to Win64, Irix, the BSDs, HP-UX, and AIX where they were almost entirely lacking before. And then doing the same for memory size for some of this system. Currently under review are some final cleanups to make the code more readable.

That's it from my side for the moment, let's see what happens next ;)

So I created a test page and loaded it in 4 browsers. You see on the picture on top left Konqueror from KDE SC 4.8.4, Chromium 21.0.1145.0 (svn138062) to the right, bottom left Opera 11.64 (build 1403), and finally Firefox 12.0. Just in case anybody complains: I upgraded to Chromium 22.0.1190.0 (144885), Opera 12.00 (build 1467), and Firefox 14.0.1, but the rendering is still exactly the same. Benjamin Dietrich send me a screenshot showing that Safari 6.0 (8536.25) behaves exactly like Chromium. Patrick Spendrin sent in screenshots showing that Internet Explorer 8 and 9 behave the same as Firefox.

So, what's up there? If you download the file and comment out the display:none for h1 you will see explanations what happens in the different versions of the test. I will just talk about the bugs here.

Konqueror

The width calculation is slightly wrong when the content is set to "", which is done right when it is set to none (the first 2 boxes). This leads to a spurious linebreak. (Bug K1 (#304357))

When there is no content at all there is also the spurious linebreak. (Bug K2, example #4).

When there is no content at all the first elemtent shows a content that I have no idea where it comes from, possibly from invalid memory read? (Bug K3, example #4)

When there are 2 consecutive elements of the same classes that differ in their text Konqueror will completely ignore the text content of the second one and use the one of the previous (Bug K4, example #5 and last element of example #6)

CSS 2.1 spec says content applies to :before and :after pseudo elements. Konqueror nevertheless applies it to the main element also if it is specified there. Which is fine as it is allowed in CSS3 (K5 (#304355), example #1 and #2).

Chromium

if the elements have no contents element 2 is drawn on top of element 1, while the width of the ul that I use to hold the elements is big enough to hold both (bug C1, example #4).

Only supports CSS2.1 (examples #1 and #2)

Opera

shares bug K4. I assume this is also the reason why example #4 is rendered wrong here, the "T" text that should be there is just dropped because the previous example didn't have it, but the rest is rendered correctly. (Reported by Martin Riethmayer as Opera bug DSK-371115)

shares bug K5Also supports CSS3.

Firefox

Pass.

Only supports CSS2.1 (examples #1 and #2)

What's missing? I have not seen what Internet Explorer and Safari do. I assume Safari will be more or less the same as Chromium. And I have not reported all of these bugs yet. I'll do myself for the Konqueror bugs eventually, but will not do for any of the other browsers. If you would like to report any of these bugs anywhere please drop me a note so I can add links to the bug reports.

Edit: K5 was actually E1: Opera and Konqueror support CSS3 generated content where this is allowed.

Edit2: Added findings by other people and reference to Opera bug report.

Some month back something unexpected happen: I saw a flow of patches for KJS flow in. And from what I see Bernd Buschinski does an awesome job implementing some stuff that has been missing for a while. He is not the only one working on KHTML/KJS these days, but the one who is mostly visible on kde-core-devel through his review requests and the one who made me look at this stuff. In fact I made an offline JS compliance test through CMake possible as the online test wasn't easily configurable to run only specific tests (or omit some that were not working at all). And I even fixed one or small absolutely minor compliance issues.

So even if you did not hear much about Konqueror for a while, there has been some progress. Here are some things I remember from the not too distant past that made my daily web experience better (or will do so as some of the patches are not yet in a released version). Too bad they have not been in the official changelogs, but better those guys keep fixing stuff and forget to write it down than stop fixing it ;)

• the maximum allowed stack size usable by KJS has been raised, making e.g. the twitter log of a person work again (fixed by Martin Sandsmark)
• fix the usage of "short" variable type for position calculation which too easily overflows (fixed by Andrea Iacovitti, will be in 4.8.5 and 4.9.0, would have fixed the layout of e.g. bugs.kde.org)
• after Andrea Iacovitti found out what is wrong Sayak Banerjee and Ingo Malchow fixed the CSS on paste.kde.org and bugs.kde.org to not use text-indent: -99999px which would overflow the short, but smaller values getting the same effect, so this now even works with older Konqueror versions
• the onhashchange event is now supported by Konqueror, adding support to even more JS heavy sites making probably e.g. even more twitter stuff working (done by Martin Sandsmark)
• do not ask if a mailto: link is clicked, but just open the mail program (fixed by Martin Koller)
• patches currently under review from Bernd Buschinski will e.g. add JSON support to KJS

If anyone wants to gather some good karma then showing up and writing some unit tests for those low level protocol stuff in any kioslave is surely appreciated. Bonus points if you know which film the title refers to.

The trust in those keys is much more obvious than e.g. in systems based systems: you can see who signed a key (and by that verified it), and you can even use websites showing you the possible trust paths between keys (e.g. pathfinder).

Now this signatures need to come from somewhere, i.e. people must sign their respective keys. This is something e.g. the Linux kernel developers are currently doing: only people with a trustworthy key are given write access to kernel.org. While Linus may not trust me (yet), from a global point of view I'm closer to everyone than he is: take my key 69B9FC4E and compare it to Linus's key 00411886. The avarage distance from anyone involved in the PGP web of trust for my key is 3.9, while his is 4.5. The reason for this is not only that my key is signed by more people, it's just that e.g. the fifth most signed key is one of those.

Ok, now everyone is eager to get his or her key signed, but what to do about this? Well, when do you meet next with other geeks? Like a KDE release party? Development sprints? Bring your key, bring your identity card, sign and get signed! More details on this is e.g. in the KGpg documentation (on docs.kde.org, on KDE userbase). Likely even in your language. If not, what about translating it?

$  ls -al .xsession-errors
-rw------- 1 ebeer users 202558869504 Jul 14 09:03 /home/ebeer/.xsession-errors
$  tail -n 2 .xsession-errors

(process:27881): GLib-WARNING **: poll(2) failed due to: Das Argument ist ungültig.

$  ps -p 27881
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
  27881 ?        1-01:40:51 nepomukservices

In case anyone wonders: that is "invalid argument" in German. WTF?

Impressed by the amount of crap people deal with every day. I mean, this is the media player with the most coverage in the media? That everyone that has an iDevice is forced to use? OMFG! I once again learned how much I should appreciate Amarok and all the goodness it brings. I now understand why Wil Wheaton was impressed by Amarok, although he was talking about much older versions of Amarok and iTunes.

It began at the download, they asked you for your email to send you all sort of crap. Instead of giving them my address I removed the two checkboxes and gone for it. Right after the installation you got an "learn how to do" window, similar to the tooltips you are used to from KDE programs, but with pictures. I don't liked it because it wasn't that clear where that window ended and the main window started. Bad UI design by Apple, so don't copy everything. Ok, the main window. And now? The HIG guys will probably second me when I say that if you don't know what to do from the main window of an application you know what it is for you did something wrong.

Ok, somewhere there is a "Music" point, where you get some sort of introduction window where you can scan for your files. Ok, copied something over (WinSCP to the rescue) and let it search them. All found. It also found the ringtones for the old mobile phone of my wife. No idea how they get them out again. No idea how to select which things to sync to the iPod.

So all things were put on the device. Unplugged, it showed the files, mission completed. Now I thought about putting another bunch of files onto the thing. Copied the things over and, ehm, yes, I don't know. Where the heck can you tell iTunes to rescan? The music introduction window is gone, you only get the lists of tracks now that there are tracks. Plug in the iPod again, no idea how to remove tracks from there. So, the pod stayed with the few tracks. And the ogg support is unclear.

Oh, and the license. No, not of iTunes. Of the "iPod software". I only half read it because I had no choice then using this anyway. But hey, I (or someone else in my case) has bought this device. Apple, fsck off! This is my thing. I'm ok when you tell me I must not decompile your crap, but the other things did not sound like they understand the concept of selling.

Ok, this wasn't using iTunes as player. This was only using it to feed the iPod device. And I really hope someone finds out how to write the iPod database using Amarok.

Ah, maybe I should tell that to. You don't plug in an iPod into a computer and just put data onto it. You need iTunes to write some sort of database. It's not that then the advanced features wouldn't be available. It's about no music at all.

I recently read "Love the devices, hate the company." about Apple. I don't think the devices, at least this one, does deserve loving, too. The combination of Sansa Clip+ and Amarok has worked smoothless for me. Nothing near the iTunes experience.