I saw it on Bram’s laptop at the nieuwjaarsbijeenkomst: QDockWidget.

Today I ran into that Widget again and decided to experiment a little. I think it’s a very nice addition to Mailody instead of using the Sidebar we used until now.

Watch the video (2MB) for a demo…

I see it has been announced on dot.kde.org now, very good. I’m glad we now have a schedule for KDE 4.0. For once I’ve read most of the user comments on the article. Normally I don’t read them because I find the comments usually not so nice to read.

But this time I was pleasantly surprised. Not only by the positive tone of the comments, but also because there are a lot of nice statistics in there.

Take for example the last commenter ‘KDE Astrology’, he, she or it points out that all dates are one day before or after the full moon. I swear the release team did not know that.

Then we have October 23rd, the targetted release date. It happens to be the exact same date as KDE 2.0 was released zeven years ago. See the dot-article. Again, I swear we did not know that.

Anyhow, don’t forget this is only based on 3 beta’s and two release candidates. It might change. I wonder what happens if we do a beta release on a date where there is no full moon ;-)

Today I toyed around with Heartbeat. Not really playing because I was operating on live systems. Recently we have extended our 19″ cabinet with a bunch of new servers, a couple of them are running Xen. But there is one big disadvantage to Xen-hosts, when they freeze you have som major stront-aan-de-knikker (problems). Systems should not freeze, of course not, but in Real Life sometimes they do.

As we have multiple Xen hosts, I setup some new images on different servers and wanted them to take over the service when the other one has died. I had already done that for our caching squid servers earlier who take the load of our main webservers (which is a blessing when digikam.org ends up on some random open source news site). Which worked well, but if the mysql server is down, most sites are dead anyhow.

Today I put up a new image for the ldap connections. Openldap has some nice tricks to replicate to another server and after that I installed heartbeat to float around with the ip-number, so when one dies the other picks up that ip-address.

Then I tried the same for mysql. Things are a bit more complicated, because we are talking about a massive amount of data in our case. For ldap we don’t really care if there is no writing is possible when the master dies (who wants to create new pop-boxes when a server is down?), but for mysql this is not acceptable. Joomla! and other sites won’t show anything if they can not record some user data in the database. So that setup has to work in a way that the slave mysql server will sync untill the master dies and then promotes itself to master. And heartbeat will take care of the ip-number switch. But when the machine is reanimated, the ip-number should not float back to that server, else we would have some major corruptions.

But that’s all done and works. It’s good to see applications have thought about this, provide the possibility to replication and heartbeat being able to do exactly what’s needed to make it high-available.

RSIBreak has been made Package of the Day. It’s nice to get this kind of publicity. I’ve not been blogging about it for a while and to be honest, have not worked on it for a while.

The main reason for it is that it does what I want it to do. I use it daily. Some days I don’t see it reminding me for a break at all – usually slow days – and sometimes it popups up every 20 minutes – busy days. I try to honor it’s suggestions usually.

It’s on my list to port to KDE4, because I want to keep using it there as well. It is interesting to see that when you give regular attention to an application in the form of blogs, the project becomes active and lively. For RSIBreak I see that there are usually no visitors on the irc channel, no patches, etc. While when it was in heavy development there were people in the channel and patches. But I guess there are written multiple e-books about ‘managing an open source community’.

Anyhow, it’s great to be Package of the Day!

Last week I’ve spent some time getting some SVN Guidelines into shape. The document is now on TechBase.

I still need to update the image. The page is about the layout of the svn repository. It describes the lifecycle of an application and the corresponding place in subversion. So if you wonder where to place Your New Application, want to move to one of the KDE Mainmodules, that’s a place where you can look. Hopefully it helps new contributors who want to start a new application but have no idea where they are ‘allowed’ to put it.

Now that is documented we (I hope to get help) can start working on the kdenonbeta area in subversion. It’s the playground area of the past, but it has never been cleaned up or merged to other parts of the repository. That’s a big todo, but a nice exercise to get checklists in order, create some default mails, brush up my communication skills and do complete i18n checkout to move translations around.

It feels good to take a break from heavy Mailody development and do some other tasks. I’ve still a small todo list from items to look at.

When I’ve done those I will make a start porting Mailody to KDE4. We just had a meeting where we decided that we will release a Mailody 0.5 and that will be the last major release based on KDE3. This way we create some time to help with some kdelibs things, akonadi, or other things that we need for Mailody.

But first in queue is the movie The Island.