Skip to main content

I am getting old, I just started blogging

Hello, world! I just started blogging, when sane people video blog for five years, moved over to YouTube Shorts, or wrote complete books. Still, I think I have thoughts worth sharing, discussing, and getting proven wrong. I am a Free/Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) contributor, developer, promoter, activist, and patron.

My main contributions are to numerical software. From time to time I contribute to CMake and I am co-maintainer of KStopmotion. I also update a couple of openSuse packages, if I am interested in getting the lastest version released by upstream.

But open source is so much more then just software: It is a way to improve humanity, to enable people, get projects started rapidly, have high-quality and secure software, liberate users (and governments) from vendor lock-ins, politics, and an art of living. I am going to share my adventures and thoughts with you. Please comment, correct, reach out to me, start contributing, and advocate open source yourself!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

KDE Stopmotion release 0.9.0 ported to Qt6

Being the workhorse for more than a decade, it took me by surprise that Qt 5 is going to run out of support tomorrow . Honestly, Qt 6 was released in late 2020 and I prefer using modern code bases that use features from the C++17 and C++20 standards. So, no reason to hold me back. I am pleased to announce the release of KDE Stopmotion 0.9.0. It consist of the Qt 6 port and has no additional features or bug fixes. Quite boring, it does not even look nicer or different at all. Many thanks to Florian Satzger and Mark Penner for helping with the port when I got stuck. Behind the curtain, we use KDE CI templates for the build pipeline, increased the minimum required version numbers for Qt, CMake and C++, and some minor warnings got fixed. We are back using semantic versioning. New features are added with an increased minor version number. Increased patch numbers are for bug fixes only. Adding sound does not work properly, this is a known bug. You can create the tar ball using the 0.9.0 Git ...

Tidy First? Recommendation to read Kent Beck's book

Most of the time programmers do not write new code. Instead, they read, try to understand,  extend, and fix bugs in existing code. While some parts of KDE are pretty new and follow modern standards, many parts are more then two decades old -- following obsolete coding principles, using outdated ways of solving problems, and having additions from several persons with different styles. Often when we read code, we immediately spot things we could improve. Kent Beck's approach is applying a series of small tidyings that leads to structural change and an overall better software design. In his new book Tidy First? he describes his idea in three parts: Tidyings, how to manage tidyings, and software design theory. In the first part the author introduces generic tidyings like dead code removal, moving declaration and initialization together, introducing new interfaces, or explicit parameters. Most proposals are not new, but it is a good reminder to follow them and fix these things whereve...

New programming language needed for KDE?

Disclaimer: I am not one of KDE's masterminds or spokespersons. I am a mere bystander with few unimportant commits. I follow KDE's ecosystem and other developments in the free software world. In the following, I share some thoughts and my personal opinion. Talks about new programming languages After 30 years of C code, the Linux kernel opens itself to a second high-level language: Rust. Since fall of 2022 the kernel mainly gained infrastructure work. Some experiments show promising results like a Rust-based network driver or a scheduler . Recently, Git developers started to discuss how to allow Rust code in our beloved version control system. Far from having reached a consensus, its media coverage and heated discussions in forums show how interested the public is in this topic. Other projects try to replace established software by rewritten from scratch Rust ones: uutils coreutils , sudo-rs , librsvg , Rustls . Heck, Rewrite it it Rust (RiiR) has become a meme . We already h...