Another improvement that will come with KDE 3.4 is support for vector wallpapers in SVG format (again, based on XML). An important property of vector graphics is that no matter how much you resize it picture always looks nice, without being blocky or blury (unless it becomes very small). And this is just perfect for wallpaper images.

KDE SVG Wallpaper contest started in December 2004 and the winners are now known. All the winning SVG wallpapers are already in KDE 3.4 CVS and they have also added some of the highest ranking ones. You can see all off the wallpapers here:

Andes Venezolanos
Aurora
Celtic
Gear Flowers
Geared Globe
weAreGear
Konqui
Line Art
KDE Moon

Danes ponoči sem zaključil s prevajanjem programa Akregator v slovenščino. Akregator je nov program, ki bo prišel skupaj s KDE 3.4 in je namenjem zbiranju sestavkov prek dovodov (feedov) RSS ali Atom. Tak program še posebaj prav pride tisitim, ki ste radi na tekočem z novicami na raznih spletnih straneh ali pa spremljate razne bloge oziroma spletne dnevnke. Za zaslonski posnetek Akregatorja v slovenščini kliknite tule.

English summary:
I have just finished translating Akregator (a new RSS/Atom feed aggregator to come with KDE 3.4) into Slovenian language. You can see full screenshot if you click here.

As a blogger I sometimes find myself asking where to upload a photo or a screenshot that I would like to show on my blog. So today I have started looking for a service that would allow me to upload and share my images.

I found out Flickr and it looks really nice. It is a free service and it allows you to upload up to 10 MiB of images each month. The largest possible size is 5 MiB per image and they are resized to a maximum of 1024 x 1024 pixels (if they are larger). Flickr even has a special tool to easily post blog articles to several blog systems. Blogger is supported. If you need larger images and more of them, you can upgrade to a Pro account, which will cost you some money.

If you have any other suggestion for a similar service, please add a comment. Oh, you will be able to find a gallery of my pictures here.

For quite some time now I have 10 invitations for GMail waiting to give away. So if you need 1 gigabyte of space for e-mail contact me with Jabber (JLP@jabber.org) or send me e-mail (jlp@holodeck1.com). Jabber users have priority.

Some of you probably already know that all OpenOffice.org (a very good open source office suite) documents are actually XML files. Just take any utility that supports zip archives and, well, unzip the OpenOffice.org document of your choice. XML is an open and very flexible standard. Many web pages are written in it for example and it is also used by instant messaging system Jabber (or XMPP if you like it). If you would like to do more with OpenOffice.org XML dialect, like easily converting it to web pages (or other forms using XSLT) and using all the power of styles, then I highly recommend you take a look at article Hacking Open Office at XML.com. Thanks goes to Peter Sefton for writing it.

As you may have noticed I have just added a new link to the section Other Blogs on the left. Blogs for Firefox is a special blog that lists all the blogs that promote and talk about Mozilla Firefox. If you have such a blog consider joining.

60 years have passed since the liberation of Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. At this time we must all remember the victims of Holocaust and war crimes that happened there. It is our duty to prevent anything like this to happen in the future. There must not be any more preemptive wars and wars based on lies. They can all quickly lead to great human suffering. May all, who had to die to tell us this, rest in peace.

We just got a new TV today: Panasonic TX-29PM11P. It has a flat screen, 100 Hz refresh rate (very good for my eyes which are used to high refresh rate computer displays) and it has a visible diagonal of 68 cm (quite a lot bigger then our previous TV which only had 48 cm). What can I say… The picture is great, the sound is great and all of us are very satisfied with it. It also works very nicely with our KiSS DP-1000 media player. For example: as soon as we turn KiSS on the TV switches to it and when we turn KiSS off the TV switches back to the last TV channel.

I haven’t slept much today. Over night I was preparing my sister’s computer with MandrakeLinux 10.1 to compile KDE 3.4 from CVS sources. I had to do quite a lot of hunting and installing of all the required devel packages, which are not installed by default as they are on Gentoo Linux. But I managed to get all set up and Qt and arts are already installed.

You may wonder why I am not compiling KDE on my faster AMD Athlon 64 machine with Gentoo Linux installed. Well it looks like there is some bug in Gentoo’s GCC which is preventing compilation of arts. So until this bug is fixed I’ll have to do the bug hunting and translation on my sister’s computer.

Sun is preparing to release the source code of their operating system Solaris under the name of OpenSolaris. The license is CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License) and it is approved by OSI (Open Source Initiative). The center of all activity is OpenSolaris.org webpage. Currently the source code is available only for DTrace. But some people (screenshot is there too) already have access to the source code and they managed to build OpenSolaris on AMD64 platform. Can’t wait to try this out and see how it compares to Gentoo Linux on my AMD Athlon 64.

Ever since the release of Mozilla Firefox 1.0 about 76 days ago there were more then 20,000,000 downloads of this secure, modern and fast web browser. Sites all over the world are seeing how users are switching from insecure and old Internet Explorer to better browsers like Firefox and Opera. If you still haven’t switched, then download a copy of Firefox and see how the true modern browsing looks and feels like. Firefox is completely free. And if you are already browsing with full speed then don’t forget to tell all your friends and co-workers about the browser of the future. Spread Firefox can help you with that and you can join here.

Ravnokar sem zaključil s prevodom različice 0.9.3 programa Psi v slovenščino. Psi je program namenjen hitremu sporočanju (instant messaging) prek protokola Jabber oziroma XMPP, kot se uradno imenuje standard. Dokler prevod skupaj z navodili za namestitev ne bo na voljo na uradni strani, me za prevod in pomoč lahko prosite po e-pošti in seveda na Jabberju: JLP@jabber.org. Pohvale in pripombe glede prevodov so zaželene.

The word is out that some sources close to Micro$oft are reporting that 64-bit Windows version for processors supporting AMD64 instructions (like AMD Athlon 64 and Opteron) will be out in April. Release to manufacturing version is expected sometime in March. We will see how it compares to Gentoo Linux and other Linux distributions that have official AMD64 support for quite some time now. Not only that. Thanks to open source nature of Linux apps, almost all can already be compiled into 64-bits. I guess Windows people will have to wait for the good will of software companies for that. At least with Windows for AMD64 available to users, they will have less excuses not to.

First beta version of Mandrakelinux 10.2 distribution is out. Three 700 MiB ISO images are available for download with BitTorrent (I recommend Azureus for BitTorrent downloads) and on FTP mirrors listed at the end of Mandrakelinux 10.2 Beta page.

And what is new in this version of one of the most simple to use Linux distro (even my sister uses it on her computer :))? The Linux kernel is at version 2.6.10, KDE is at 3.3.2 (and with some compiler optimizations for faster applications startup) and GNOME is at 2.8.1. They have also moved Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Nvu into main package selection. Moreover there is also the latest version of GIMP 2.2 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4. CDRecord now has support for DVD+R Dual Layers.

So, whoever is in the mood for some beta testing and bug hunting, go get it and file as many bug reports as possible.

First some words about Einstein@Home:

Einstein@home is a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for spinning compact stars (such as pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. While we are still testing, we are close to deploying a production version of Einstein@home, as part of the American Physical Society’s World Year of Physics 2005 activities.

So if you registered to be notified when more testers are needed, now is the time to check your inbox for e-mail. Let us help to advance science!