I have just built my first KDE 4.1/Qt 4.4.0 application. I was asked to make some modifications to the Excel spreadsheet and it was too complicated to do that by hand. I had to swap first and last names and unpack one column into 6 columns. That wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t about 170 entries which was too much for my copy+paste knowledge So I decided to transform the .xls file into an appropriate .csv file (with % as a separator since other characters were already used in the entries) and do the regexp magick using Qt. Since I am using KDE 4.1 (trunk), and it isn’t needed for this program to be delivered to anyone, I also decided to use KDElibs for GUI. So, here it is – the CEWQO08 program (the name sounds strange, but that’s the name of the conference this .xls file is all about). So I swapped the names (trivially, split the QString into QStringList, push_front(last) + pop_last) and QRegExp-ed the column that was to be unpacked.

You can watch the source at repo.or.cz (or just check it out with ‘git clone git://repo.or.cz/cewqo08.git’).

I am just finishing with building the tagged KDE 4.0 by hand. Tomorrow I will start building the packages so that they are ready for THE release Weasel GNU/Linux 2.0 will be released together with KDE 4.0. Even more, it will include only KDE 4 and just parts of KDE 3 that don’t work in KDE 4 (such as kdevelop and k3b).

Today I took some time and added new functionality to a great new KDE’s file manager – Dolphin. In KDE4 Dolphin will be the main file manager and in KDE3 it is the main file manager only if you setup KDE like I did (change “inode/directory” in KControl->Components->FileAssignments to point to Dolphin as a preferred application).

Well, I have lots of files packed up in the archives and I’d like it to stay that way. Konqueror always could browse through those archives, but dolphin doesn’t have that functionality. That is – it didn’t have until today. Today I made a patch for both new KDE4 dolphin and backport for the “old” KDE 3.5.6. You can find the KDE4 dolphin’s patch in KDE Bugzilla or in KDE Subversion since it has already been integrated into the new Dolphin.

Unfortunately, Dolphin’s version 0.8.2 is the last version for KDE 3 and it is going to stay that way. So, if you want to use new functionality, you will have to take my patch from Gentoo’s bugzilla. While there, you can also download the ebuild and merge it into your system (if you are using Gentoo). If you are not using Gentoo, then just apply the patch to the source and after the usual configure, make, make install, you will be able to use that patch.

Well, that’s all for today. I’m off to watch the brand new South Park episode 01 form serial 11.

Here are some screenshots of Dolphin in action:

Dolphin svn on KDE 4 with new feature and wrong icons (transition to Oxygen)

Dolphin 0.8.2 on kde 3.5.6 with new feature

SOAP->DCOP Multithread

There is a new version of SOAP2DCOP bridge. It is multithread (based on Qt’s QThread) and it is intended to be ran as a program service. At the beginning of the application the server thread is started and at the end it is killed. You should then export dcop calls to soap, but that should be fairly simple based on my example. If anybody needs DCOP over the net, feel free to take it from my repo. The module itself can be found here, but you should use mercurial to clone the repository:

hg clone http://tesla.rcub.bg.ac.yu/~brcha/hg/Opstina.hg

And last, but not least, you should first download your copy of mercurial version control system from here.

SOAP -> DCOP

I have just created SOAP to DCOP bridge. I hope it will work in my upcoming application. I will post details when I get it bugfixed at least a little bit more than initial working version