There’s big news in Usability & Productivity: Firefox 64 can now use native KDE open/save dialogs! This is optional, bleeding-edge functionality so no distros ship with it yet, but it’s pretty simple to enable yourself:

1. Make sure you’re using Firefox 64
2. Install the xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-kde packages
3. Set GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 somewhere in your environment. Putting it in Firefox’s Desktop file works. Here’s how: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/a5cxwk/firefox_v64_can_now_use_the_kde_file_selection/ebmemp1/

Once you do this, Firefox should use native KDE open/save dialogs! Please give this a shot and test it out so bugs (like the empty filename field) can be found and fixed, which will make distros more likely to turn it on automatically. On that subject, I’ve filed tickets to get this integrated by default for Kubuntu and Manjaro.

Of course that’s not all: a lot of improvements have been made to Discover, Plasma, and, heck, all over the place!

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• Plasma no longer crashes when clicking on the clipboard dialog’s “Disable this Popup” button (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• In Discover, when viewing a Snap app’s available channels, the version of the app available in each channel is now displayed (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover’s app progress detail view no longer visually changes when you hover the mouse over a task, because nothing happens when you click on it (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• In Ubuntu-based distros, Discover now respects the system’s user-configurable check-for-updates frequency setting (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover no longer futilely offers to show dependencies for locally-downloaded packages (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.14.5)
• Discover once again shows a Cancel button in its toolbar when an app is in the middle of installing (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now displays the correct set of information for locally-downloaded Flatpak packages that have fetchable metadata (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover no longer crashes when uninstalling multiple apps in rapid succession (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Fixed a weird bug in Discover that could cause the Featured list to lose entries after installing an app when multiple backends and sources are configured (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In System Settings, it’s once again possible to set a font DPI lower than 96 (David Edmundson, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• When a dialog window is open and its parent window is minimized, the dialog window now gets minimized too (Vlad Zagorodniy, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In Discover and other Kirigami-based apps, scrollable views’ scrollbars no longer overlap the content and no longer unexpectedly scroll to the top under certain circumstances (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• The context menu for Trash icons on the desktop once again shows the “Empty Trash” menu item (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Drop-down menus in QML-and-Kirigami-based apps no longer have background highlights that are sometimes too short (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• SQLite files now get appropriate icons (me: Nate Graham, KDE Frameworks 5.54):
  

User Interface Improvements

• While in Panel Edit Mode, it’s now a bit easier to figure out how to move a panel: the cursor changes to a more appropriate icon when hovered over the Screen Edge button, and when you click on it instead of dragging it, a helpful tooltip appears letting you know what to do (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The button on a panel that allows you to enter Panel Edit Mode and configure your panel now uses the standard “Configure” icon, instead of a hamburger menu icon (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The context menu for desktop icons is now identical to Dolphin’s (me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  

  Folder view on the left, Dolphin on the right

• Improved the user interface of the list view in the Desktop Effects System Settings page in various ways (Björn Feber, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Discover now remembers your preferred sort order on the search results and Installed pages (KDE Plasma 5.15.0, Alex Pol Gonzalez)
• Discover’s Sources page now has a better interaction model: the list items are no longer uselessly clickable, and items that can be somehow interacted with have inline buttons (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

We will be holding a Bug Day on December 15th, 2018, focusing on Kdenlive. Join at any time, the event will be occurring all day long!

This is a great opportunity for anyone, especially non-developers to get involved!

1. Check out our Bug Triaging guide for a primer on how to go about confirming and triaging bugs.
2. Log into KDE Phabricator and join the Bugsquad!
3. Join the #kde-bugs IRC channel on Freenode to chat with us in real-time as we go through the list.
4. Open the shared Etherpad for this event (use your KDE Identity login) to select your block of bugs and cross them off.

If you need any help, contact me!

If you can see this, that means that the migration of my blog to Jekyll should be complete. Yay!

WordPress was actually quite good to me and quite easy to maintain and use. As uncomplicated as the Jekyll approach is, aided by its usage of convention to just do the smart thing, there’s still a fair bit of setup and playing around you need to do to get Jekyll sorted out.

But I have to admit I feel better about being able to maintain a less dynamic server footprint to be able to serve up my blog, especially since it’s so completely low-traffic now.

The theme here is Basically Basic, as installed as a Ruby Gem. I’ve disabled the fancy fonts and analytics (all I could find at least).

I’ve tried to ensure all the old URLs don’t break, and even fixed up some stray conversion issues that had come from my last attempt to migrate to WordPress years ago. The RSS feed is now an Atom feed though (hope that doesn’t break your reader).

There are two terms that brings a heavy controversy in the Open Source world: support and stable. Both of them have their roots in the “old days” of Open Source, where its commercial impact was low and very few companies made business with it.

You probably have read a lot about maintenance vs support. This controversy is older. I first heard of it in the context of Linux based distributions. Commercial distribution had to put effort in differentiating among the two because in Open SOurce they were used indistictly but not in business. But this post is about the adjectivet stable…

Stable as adjective has several meanings in English:

• According to the Cambridge dictionary stable is, among others: firmly fixed or not likely to move or change. I am used to this meaning because of my backgroun in Physics.
• One of the definitions provided by the Oxford dictionary is slightly different: not likely to change or fail; firmly established.

Can you see the confusion between…?

1. It is hard to move… or move slow.
2. It does not fail… it is hard to break.

I am not an English native speaker. Maybe because of its latin root (I am Spanish) or maybe eacuase I studied Physics, I do not provide to the adjective stable the second meaning. It has always called my attention how many people provide both meanings to the word, specially when referring to software releases. Looking at the dictionaries, I can tell why in English there is such link between both ideas.

I read today on Twitter another example of this confusion/controversy. The comment has its roots on a different topic but it has embedded this confusion, I think.

Open Source projects used to have as the main testing strategy the collaboration with a group of beta testers and power users. This strategy helped to create this relation between “not moving” and “not failing” that has become so popular. But this relation is not direct if you have a different release/deploy strategy. The way to increase stability (as hard to break) is by detecting and fixing bugs and that can be done moving fast (constantly updating), or moving slow (backporting). I will not get into which one is better. Both are possible and popular.

I think the word stable should be avoided. Many system and application developers or integrators refer to it as “move slow” as “it will not change much“. But what many users hear is “it will not break” which is why “it moves slow“.

Which adjective can we use to label a release that “moves slow“, so it is not mistaken with “it is not expected to break“?

Is this controversy present in other languages as strong as I perceive it in English? Is it just me who see this controversy?

More and more applications invite you to add a pic in your profile, a gravatar. In some applications and specially in social media the size and position of these gravatars are becoming prominent, too much for my taste. I am not a fan of pictures, I have never been. I do not like selfies, I have no Instagram, I try to avoid publishing pics of myself on Facebook… .

I use two different gravatars in internet. One for professional profiles and applications, associated to my corporate account ( agustin.benito@codethink.co.uk nowadays ), which was taken about 4 years ago, and one I took over 10 years ago associated to my personal account. I have hair on that one.

A few months back I started to think about my approach to this gravatars, looking for something simpler that could last, reflect my personality and that could be used for both, personal and professional profiles… and substitute the pic I have in my site.

My first idea was to ask a couple of photographers I know to take a good picture of me. One of those super modern, super cool, super fancy I-enjoy-life-you-should-ping-me-and-I-will-teach-you-how-but-only-if-you-are-cool-enough-to-deserve-my-coolness kind of picture. I was not fully convinced on this approach though. It would only work if the pic is really cool and checking LinkedIn, I had little confidence my pic could be at the level of some of my connections. Yep, I am connected to very cool people.

Then, looking at some gravatars from hackers I know who have zero interest in publishing a pic of themselves, I thought that maybe an illustration could work. Something simple, not a portrait. An illustration that looked like me but is not me, that could work in small and medium size formats… .

Exactly, I did not know what I want. It was more like… I do know a few things I do not want.

With this “crystal clear” idea, I contacted Ramón Miranda.

Ramón is a professional illustrator that has contributed to several Open Source projects, like Krita. He lives only a few kilometres away from my place in Málaga, Spain which is… great.

I explained him in a mail my idea. We have a video chat to polish the concept and a few days later he invited me over his place to show me a draft. A few days later my new representation of myself was done… with Open Source tools (Krita). And yes, I have the source file.

Thank you Ramón for accepting the challenge and for your dedication. I like the result… a lot.

Dear reader, do you? Yep, I will erase you comment if you don´t.

If you ever need a professional illustrator consider pinging Ramón. He is a hell of a professional. Ah, and he provides online training sessions for those wanting to learn or improve how to draw/paint in the analog and in the digital world (with Open Source tools).

Time to substitute my pics with this new gravatar.

This week I gave KDE Frameworks a web page after only 4 years of us trying to promote it as the best thing ever since cabogganing without one.  I also updated the theme on the KDE Applications 18.12 announcement to this millennium and even made the images in it have a fancy popup effect using the latest in JQuery Bootstrap CSS.  But my proudest contribution is making the screenshot for the new release of Konsole showing how it can now display all the cat emojis plus one for a poodle.

So far no comments asking why I named my computer thus.

by

OFX is the Open Financial eXchange protocol used by various financial institutions in a few countries. KMyMoney provides an OFX client implementation using the open source LibOFX library allowing users to import transactions directly from the bank’s server without using the detour through a web-browser and a downloaded file into the ledger of the application.

A while ago, a KMyMoney user reported a problem with a single institution using OFX transaction download. Out of a sudden, this feature did not work anymore and the bank did not allow to login anymore and provided the following error message:

We're very sorry, but that content you are looking for can't be found. Please try the homepage again. If you continue to receive this message, please call the Customer Service number on the back of your card. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Since there was no change on the KMyMoney side nor on LibOFX, the problem must have been with the institution. So he contacted their customer support but the answers did not help to solve the problem.

Not surprisingly I got nowhere talking to tech support at the bank. I don’t think anyone answering the phones knows anything about direct connect .”Can you logon to our website” and “reinstall your personal finance software” is about all they could suggest.

A frustrated KMyMoney user about his banks customer support

We know these answers just to well and one can find them on mailing lists and forums of almost any open source finance applications in or another form.

Living in a country where banks don’t use OFX at all, it is kind of hard to support these stranded users. We tried to log the requests and analyze them, but all just looked well according to the OFX specs.

Searching the web, I came across a posting where a GnuCash user reported, that adding a trailing blank to the username and changing the application version in the request solved the problem. This just sounded too strange, so I forwarded this information to the user and he answered:

Not surprisingly… ipwizard does it again!

I changed the APP_VER to 2400 using the KMM online settings as suggested. Then I saved my KMM file in XML, opened the XML and added a space to me user name.

Worked like a charm.

A happy KMyMoney user

I was also able to get it working with KMM 4.8.0. I just unmapped and remapped the account adding a space to the end of the user ID and using 2700 as the version. No XML hacking required.

Another KMyMoney user also being happy

As a side effect of my search, I stumbled across a posting about OFX security issues. Very interesting article which does not surprise me and shows the partial ignorance of banks regarding security on top of their sometimes non-existant customer support if it comes to home banking.

Calamares, the Linux system installer for boutique distro’s, is translated into 50 or so languages. It’s not a KDE project, but uses a bunch of KDE technology like the KDE Frameworks and KPMCore. It doesn’t use the KDE translation infrastructure, either, but Transifex.

There’s two languages for Calamares that don’t have any translators — they were requested, and then added to the system, but there is noone to do the work. Those are Macedonian and Uzbek. That said, there are also translations to Lao, Farsi, Gujrati, Urdu and Swiss French (is that even a thing) that have not seen any actual translation work done.

If you’re interested in any of those languages, the Calamares translators guide can get you started.

PS.: boutique distro for me means anything outside the “big five”, it doesn’t say anything about the size or importance of the distro itself.

LetsEncrypt is wonderful — SSL certificates automatically generated and updated. CertBot does the actual work in one of its many incarnations. Most of my sites use LetsEncrypt to auto-renew certificates. Recently the CertBot at my hoster stopped updating, and now certificates are expiring. The hoster isn’t responding to mail asking them to give CertBot a kick in the pants, so I’m starting to look at other options. It’s weird because for the past 10 years they’ve been good Open-Source-Friendly hosters.

If things move there will probably be a hiccup in access, but I’ll give a shout when it does. The Calamares site runs on GitHub, so is unaffected by this whole thing.

This is a reminder — for those who don’t read all of the FreeBSD mailing lists — that KDE4 is marked deprecated in the official ports tree for FreeBSD, and will be removed at the end of this year (in about 20 days). Then Qt4 will be removed from the official ports tree in mid-march.

Since both pieces of software are end-of-life and unmaintained upstream already for several years, the kde@ team at FreeBSD no longer can maintain them. Recent time-sinks were dealing with OpenSSL 1.1.1, libressl, C++17, .. the code is old, and there’s newer, nicer, better-maintained code available generally by replacing 4 with 5.

Users are encouraged to migrate to Qt5 and KDE Plasma plus KDE Applications. The easiest way to do so is to follow the instructions on the KDE-FreeBSD community wiki.

Last time I tried printing with the raspberry pi I had only one machine to try with now I have two. Lets see if the Pi can handle two instances of AtCore and control two 3d printers at the same time. This is a follow up to AtCore takes to the pi. So please read that for more about the RPi setup. This post is in video form, please enjoy.

This week I was briefly in Berlin for the Qt World Summit, or QtWS for short. I was there to run the KDE booth as part of the exposition at the summit, rather than to do any talks (or, for that matter, watch any). First, a bunch of thanks are in order: to Sari and Milja from Moodboard for organising most of the things, to Katica from the Qt Company for doing PR on the show floor, to Kai and Roman from KDE for standing at the booth with me, and to the 700-or-so attendees for listening to us when we talk about KDE as a community, about KDE Frameworks and Plasma in laptops, tablets, phones and embedded. Thanks also to Paul and kde-promo for getting us some nice source material for stickers and shirts.

Kai at the KDE booth at QtWS

The picture shows some of the stuff we did for the booth: a canvas banner, demo machines, and happy T-shirts. If the Italians (from a Sardinian argricultural-technology firm?) who wanted a T-shirt get in touch with me, we’ll make it happen.

One of the nice things about QtWS is meeting all the KDE people who have wandered away from the active KDE community, and are now inside the Qt Company, or KDAB, or all over the Qt ecosystem. KDAB, of course, gave a bunch of talks at the event and also contributes lots of code to both Qt and KDE; it’s still good to actually meet old KDevelop people and such. When talking to “old hands” is the fordness with which they talk about the community and participating in such a large Open Source project.

So the things we mostly talked about were KDE Frameworks — a fair subset of them are useful for small-footprint devices, embedded, automotive — and that Qt is Open Source. Reminder: Qt is Open Source. And so are all the things KDE builds on top of Qt. There’s a large number of very proprietary software companies around Qt in the automotive world. One really cool one does handwriting recognition, and does it well; I tested it in English, French, and Arabic with my untidy scrawl and its accuracy was pretty good. But .. no, not my cup of tea. The Pinebook got a fair amount of attention, but even more attractive to attendees was a prototype laptop that had been 3D-printed the day before. It looked like it had stepped right out of the 80s, but was running a pretty snappy Plasma desktop on top of mainline and Debian (can’t say more than that for now). We installed KDE neon on my Slimbook again, alongside openSUSE, to try out Wayland, and in particular gaming with Steam under Wayland. That .. turns out to work just fine, but people look at you funny when you’re playing CS:GO (please note my ambivalent and inconsistent treatment of proprietary software here) at the stand.

So, here’s to the Qt community and see you next time!

Continuing on this release month idea started last week, here is a release of another project. Today is the first release of qpropgen, a tool to generate QML-friendly QObject-based C++ classes from class definition files.

I started this project because I did not want to manually define the dozen of properties required to represent a sound in SFXR-Qt, which itself got started because I wanted a sound effect generator for Pixel Wheels. Yes, that's a bit of Yak shaving :)

It works this way: first you define your class and its properties in a yaml file:

class: Person
properties:
    - name: firstName
      type: QString
    - name: lastName
      type: QString
    - name: birthDate
      type: QDateTime

Then you run qpropgen person.yaml. It produces two files: person.h and person.cpp.

This is person.h:

// This file has been generated with qpropgen, any changes made to it will be lost!

#ifndef PERSON_H
#define PERSON_H

#include <QObject>

class Person : public QObject {
    Q_OBJECT

    Q_PROPERTY(QString firstName READ firstName
            WRITE setFirstName
            NOTIFY firstNameChanged
    )

    Q_PROPERTY(QString lastName READ lastName
            WRITE setLastName
            NOTIFY lastNameChanged
    )

    Q_PROPERTY(QDateTime birthDate READ birthDate
            WRITE setBirthDate
            NOTIFY birthDateChanged
    )

public:
    explicit Person(QObject* parent = nullptr);


     QString firstName() const;
     void setFirstName(const QString& value);

     QString lastName() const;
     void setLastName(const QString& value);

     QDateTime birthDate() const;
     void setBirthDate(const QDateTime& value);


signals:

    void firstNameChanged(const QString& firstName);

    void lastNameChanged(const QString& lastName);

    void birthDateChanged(const QDateTime& birthDate);

private:
    QString mFirstName;
    QString mLastName;
    QDateTime mBirthDate;
};

#endif // PERSON_H

And this is person.cpp:

// This file has been generated with qpropgen, any changes made to it will be lost!
#include <person.h>

Person::Person(QObject* parent)
    : QObject(parent) {
}


QString Person::firstName() const {
    return mFirstName;
}
void Person::setFirstName(const QString& value) {

    if (mFirstName == value) {

        return;
    }
    mFirstName = value;
    firstNameChanged(value);
}

QString Person::lastName() const {
    return mLastName;
}
void Person::setLastName(const QString& value) {

    if (mLastName == value) {

        return;
    }
    mLastName = value;
    lastNameChanged(value);
}

QDateTime Person::birthDate() const {
    return mBirthDate;
}
void Person::setBirthDate(const QDateTime& value) {

    if (mBirthDate == value) {

        return;
    }
    mBirthDate = value;
    birthDateChanged(value);
}

qpropgen comes with a CMake file to include in your project. Contributions adding support for other build systems are greatly appreciated :)

There is more to it: you can define read-only properties, make setters and getters virtual and a few other tweaks. You can learn more about qpropgen from the README.

Let me know if you find this tool useful!

This week in Usability & Productivity, our flagship Kate text editor got a lot of love–and there’s more in the pipeline too! But that’s not all…

New Features

• Bluetooth devices now show their battery status in the power plasmoid (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The Notes widget now has a “Transparent with light text” theme (KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• The Baloo file indexer is now able to extract and display cover art for .asf, .wav, .aiff, .ape, .wavpack and .speex files (Alexander Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Kate’s File menu and tab context menu now feature a bunch of useful new actions: Rename, Delete, Open Containing Folder, Copy File Path, Compare [with another open file], and Properties (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
  

Bugfixes & Performance Improvements

• When scrolling through lists of Plasma addons in Discover, images are now properly cached so they don’t reload when you scroll backwards (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Plasma 5.15.0
• The names of color schemes are now translatable, and should be translated soon (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• Much more metadata from image EXIF data is now visible in Dolphin, Gwenview, Baloo, etc. (Alexanter Stippich, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• Made some progress on the Samba share discovery issue: when using a modern version of the SMB protocol, now Samba shares for Mac and Linux machines can be discovered (Harald Sitter, KDE Applicstions 19.04.0)
• Konsole now does a better job of rendering box and line characters (Martin T. H. Sandsmark, KDE Applications 19.04.0)

User Interface Improvements

• Improved the user interface and layout for the Digital Clock’s settings window, which fixes various bugs (Marco Martin and me: Nate Graham, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
  
• The wallpaper chooser interface now looks good when using a fractional scale factor and no longer cuts off the text of the “Get New Plugins…” button (Marco Martin, KDE Plasma 5.15.0)
• In the Devices Notifier plasmoid, devices’ eject icons are now better aligned (Thomas Surrel, KDE Plasma 5.15.0):
  
• When you try to copy a file greater than 4GB in size to a FAT-32 formatted disk (which cannot support files of that size), an appropriate error message is now displayed (Shubham, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• The Baloo file indexer now indexes metadata in SVG images (Stefan Brüns, KDE Frameworks 5.54)
• When using Kate’s Build View plugin, there is now better error handling when the build directory cannot be created (Loh Tar, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  
• Improved the user interface for Kate’s Code Analysis feature (Gregor Mi, KDE Applications 19.04.0):
  

Next week, your name could be in this list! Not sure how? Just ask! I’ve helped mentor a number of new contributors recently and I’d love to help you, too! You can also check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and find out how you can help be a part of something that really matters. You don’t have to already be a programmer. I wasn’t when I got started. Try it, you’ll like it! We don’t bite!

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

One obvious aspect of KDE’s privacy goal is eliminating all network connections that are not using transport encryption. That’s however not as straightforward to ensure as it may sound, it’s easy to have a long forgotten HTTP link in a rarely used dialog that should have been changed to HTTPS many years ago already. How do we find all these cases?

Scope

First of all, this is not about intentional or malicious attempts to bypass or weaken transport encryption at any level, but about finding our own mistakes. That is, simple typos forgetting the crucial ‘s’ after ‘http’, or legacy code from a time before the corresponding service even supported transport encryption.

This is also not about identifying servers that only offer weak or otherwise broken transport security, and communicating that to the user as we are used to from web browsers. All of that needs to be looked at too of course, but that’s a different task.

Source Code

Naively, searching the source code for http: and replacing it with https: would be a good start. However, it’s a bit more complicated than that, mainly due to http URIs being used both as resource identifiers and as addresses for resources. A common case for the former are XML namespaces, those are not actually retrieved via the network, so http URIs are actually not a problem (on the contrary, changing them might confuse the code dealing with them). In the latter case the URIs are actually URLs and are used for network operations, those we need to fix.

Still, a bit of crude grep work can turn up quite some useful results already. This can be clickable links in code (D16904, R209:33447a) or documentation (D17262), downloaded content (D7414, D17223) or access to online services (D7408, D16925, D16946). But many hits are part of code documentation, automatic tests or license information (R1007:aff001), which are less severe in their impact. Sometimes URLs also appear in translations, so those would need to be checked too.

Compiled Files

Another place to look for http: strings is in the compiled binaries. That’s less complete, but seems to have a much smaller false positive rate. A simple approach is grep-ing through the output of strings and strings -l e (the latter decodes 16bit little endian Unicode strings as used by QStringLiteral), and filtering out common URIs as needed in the source code search too.

Runtime Monitoring

An entirely different approach for identifying clear text connections is observing network activity at runtime. Tools like tcpconnect of the bcc suite seems to be a good starting point, as it allows continuous monitoring without noticeable impact, unlike e.g. capturing the entire network communication with Wireshark.

With this we can also find non-HTTP connections, as well as entirely unnecessary network activity (D7410, D7438). However, we wont notice anything from code paths that aren’t run.

Contribute

This is a perfect topic to get started with I think, fixing http: links is as easy as it gets, and yet that has relevant impact on the privacy or our users. But it doesn’t stop there, as we also need to build the tools to identify these issues more reliably. There isn’t much yet in terms of tooling, so a simple script would already be an improvement (e.g. to automatically check the KIO search provider desktop files), but if you are into elaborate runtime tracing techniques like used by the bcc tools, here’s a real-world problem to use this for :)

Cutelyst, a Qt Web Framework has upped to 2.6.0. This release if full of important bug fixes and is the best version when targeting Windows OS so far. It reached 5 years old, 440 stars on GitHub and since the last release has had many users asking questions, reporting issues and making pull requests.

Until now Windows support was a thing I mostly trusted Appveyor compiling and running tests fine, but this changed a bit in this release, I got a freelance job where some terminals would be editing images to be printed on T-Shirts, then they sent their art to a central server which receives and print, so, after I finished the QtQuick application and managed to convince them of running the terminals on KDE/Plasma as it was basically a kiosk full screen application I went on writing the server part.

Using Cutelyst on the server was a perfect match, the process was a Qt Widgets application, that, when linked to Cutelyst::WSGI could start listening all on the same process without issues, every terminal were connected via websockets protocol, which was just awesome, whenever I changed a terminal config I could see it changing instantly on the terminal, QWebSocketServer class could indeed do the same, but, to create the T-Shirt Art Fonts and Pictures needed to be “installed” on the terminal. Now with HTTP capabilities I simply exported all those folders and the whenever I sent a new JSON with config to the terminals, it contained the URLs of all these files which where updated in a blink.

On deploy time it was clear that using Windows on the server was a better option, first I’d need to give support for them on how to configure printers and use the system, also, printer drivers could also cause me troubles, so whatever let’s just compile it and get the money.

In order to make things easier I managed to get VCPKG to build a Qt5 for me, in a command line fashion, after that I saw how easy it was to create a package for Cutelyst, it’s upstream now, you just need to type:

vcpkg install cutelyst2

This will pull qt5-base package, and get you a working Cutelyst that easy, sadly Qt5 packages didn’t work on Linux nor on MacOS (both with issues filled).

Thanks to this project, several Windows related issues have been fixed, still work to do but I have an app on production on Windows now

I’m still no Windows fan, so I ended up configuring MXE and cross compiling Cutelyst and my application for Windows on Linux with it.

If you are doing embedded stuff, Cutelyst is also available on buildroot.

Besides that Cutelyst 2.6.0 has some other very important bug fixes.

Get it here!

It’s not uncommon to come across some dusty corner of KDE which hasn’t been touched in ages and has only half implemented features. One of the joys of KDE is being able to plunge in and fix any such problem areas. But it’s quite a surprise when a high profile area of KDE ends up unmaintained. www.kde.org is one such area and it was getting embarrassing. February 2016 we had a sprint where a new theme was rolled out on the main pages making the website look fresh and act responsively on mobiles but since then, for various failures of management, nothing has happened. So while the neon build servers were down for shuffling to a new machine I looked into why Plasma release announcements were updated but not Frameworks or Applications announcments. I’d automated Plasma announcements a while ago but it turns out the other announcements are still done manually, so I updated those and poked the people involved. Then of course I got stuck looking at all the other pages which hadn’t been ported to the new theme. On review there were not actually too many of them, if you ignore the announcements, the website is not very large.

Many of the pages could be just forwarded to more recent equivalents such as getting the history page (last update in 2003) to point to timeline.kde.org or the presentation slides page (last update for KDE 4 release) to point to a more up to date wiki page.

Others are worth reviving such as KDE screenshots page, press contacts, support page. The contents could still do with some pondering on what is useful but while they exist we shouldn’t pretend they don’t so I updated those and added back links to them.

While many of these pages are hard to find or not linked at all from www.kde.org they are still the top hits in Google when you search for “KDE presentation” or “kde history” or “kde support” so it is worth not looking like we are a dead project.

There were also obvious bugs that needed fixed for example the cookie-opt-out banner didn’t let you opt out, the font didn’t get loaded, the favicon was inconsistent.

All of these are easy enough fixes but the technical barrier is too high to get it done easily (you need special permission to have access to www.kde.org reasonably enough) and the social barrier is far too high (you will get complaints when changing something high profile like this, far easier to just let it rot). I’m not sure how to solve this but KDE should work out a way to allow project maintenance tasks like this be more open.

Anyway yay, www.kde.org is now new theme everywhere (except old announcements) and pages have up to date content.

There is a TODO item to track website improvements if you’re interested in helping, although it missed the main one which is the stalled port to WordPress, again a place it just needs someone to plunge in and do the work. It’s satisfying because it’s a high profile improvement but alas it highlights some failings in a mature community project like ours.

by

Since I find myself with a bit of down time. I have decided to update you all on the progress of atcore and atelier. We should hopefully be ready soon to start the process of releasing AtCore 2.0. I only have a few things I really want to get merged before I start that process. In the mean time here is what has been landed to AtCore since my last post.

•  Allow for Reconnect without reset on unix hosts. (rizzitello, D13576)
•  AtCore will now process Errors from the serialLayer (rizzitello, D15080)
• Cleaned up Warnings from strict check. (rizzitello, D15861, D15701, D15280)
• Allow for fractional movement. (i.e move X 6.84mm) (rizzitello, D15224)
• New Axis Controller (rizzitello, D15281)
• Use bit percentage for fan speed when needed. (rizzitello, D15700)
• Use C++ Scoped enums (Cjlcarvalho, D16180)
• Typo Fixes (yurchor, NO DIFF)
• Header Typo fix (kbroulik, D17059)
• Encapsulate the SerialLayer completely (rizzitello, D17146, D16200, D16199)
• Fix Crash on reconnect on some cases. (rizzitello, D16616)
•  Clazy Clang-tidy cleaning (rizzitello, D17101)

Atelier is getting more and more polish. Here is what has been landed to atelier since my last post.

• Allow for Transforming Bed based on profile ( ervin, D16129 / rizzitello, D16144)
• Check a file exists before attempting to print (laysrodrigues, D15122)
• Remove Unaccelerated tooltips from lateral area (rizzitello, D16853)
• Update new feeds as they are received (rizzitello,D16597)
• QUrl.toString Not always valid (tcanabrava, D16002)
• Clean up warnings (rizzitello, D16205)
• Adjust icon size in lateral area for better scaling on a range of hidpi screens(rizzitello, D16855)
• Prevent Error dialog if user cancels file selector (rizzitello, D17117)
• Improve UI for mainwindow::askToSave(rizzitello, D17142, D17116)