KDED & me (& Python)

It's clear that KDelicious needs a background service to periodically synchronize with the server without user intervention. KDED seems the perfect answer to this, right? You can build modules that will be started and stopped with the desktop and managed with the "Service Manager" screen in the Control Center (KControl).

Unfortunately, KDED will only load a compiled shared library, not a script or a generic command (which would have been quite handy). I've no idea why, but I guess the KDE devs had their motives when they designed the system. The latest version of kdedistutils (in the pykdeextensions package, hosted on currently-down simonzone.org) only supports the creation of C++ "glue" modules for kparts and kpartplugins, so once again I'm a bit stuck. I guess what one would need is a stub similar to the one that pykdedistutils generates for KControl plugins, KParts and KPartPlugins... I'm not fluent in C++, but I'll see if I can hack my way through. If I manage, i'll send Simon a patch for pykdedistutils.

On a side note, I noticed a few issues with kdedistutils when building KControl modules:

• it fails creating source distributions (but maybe it's me doing something daft)
• when building a binary distribution (bdist), it doesn't do static linking, which means that the produced libs are not really portable and require libpythonize to be in the exact same position on the target host.

Faster or bigger...? (safe for work!)

In the last few months, I've been living in fear that may laptop's HDD would die on me; it's now more than three years old, and has lived through pretty rough times (e.g. 14 months of Gentoo, and quite a few nights compiling KDE4). Half of the smartctl status codes say "Old_age" and the other half "Pre_fail"...

Last week I took a long-overdue full backup, and I'm now thinking about buying a spare replacement as soon as I can, before ATA-100 (also known as PATA or good ol'IDE) models disappear from the market, now dominated by SATA. My choice seems limited to two models:

1. 100Gb 7200rpm, which is exactly what I have now, or...
2. a more capable but slower 250Gb 5400rpm

In my experience, Linux likes that extra kick from the HDD much more than Windows, but recently I've had to fight with my filesystem for every spare Gb so I'd really fancy soem extra space. I would be happy to do with something in between (say, 160 or 200Gb 7200rpm), but I can't find anything of that sort anymore. For some reason, it seems like one has to choose between size and speed. What should I do?

KDelicious 3.2 out

Just a minor release really, I added some translations (thanks to Oliver Bock for the German one) and fixed a few bugs. I'm still looking for new features to add. Apparently, it might soon be reviewed by a magazine, which would be sweet.

kdepyuic essential patch

This little patch for kdepyuic just made my day.

kdepyuic is a small utility to produce python files from .ui files produced by QtDesigner, ready to be used in PyKDE applications; it basically adds KDE-specific stuff to the standard pyuic utility (a .ui-to-.py compiler included in the generic PyQt distribution).
This i18n patch (courtesy of Stephan Hermann) solves a few headaches with importing the correct i18n function to translate stuff, and I'd strongly recommend everyone writing KDE apps in python to apply it.

(... and this means that a kdelicious release is on its way...)

on Alan Moore and YouTube

First, a must see for everyone that knows Alan Moore, "the Wizard of England" (via Neil Gaiman):

This guy is from MJ Hibbett & the Validators, which is a pretty geeky name already for a band. If you liked this, you probably want to see Payday and the (quite famous) Hey Hey 16K:

Then, a rant on YouTube. How is it possible that a service clearly built on the concept of feed and "web 2.0" makes it so hard to create an RSS/Atom feed to "republish" a compilation of clips? Officially, they only serve "generic" feeds, either by tag (so free for everyone to spam) or by user (as in uploaded-by a specific user). But internally they DO have "playlists" and "favourites" to which you can "subscribe"... they just don't publish the feed for them; you have to sign up, in a facebook-style lock-in. Very disappointing. Luckily, there are unofficial third-party services like this YouTube Favourites RSS republisher, so you can subscribe to my feed of YouTube Favourites anyway. Sad.