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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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and follow modern standards, many parts are more then two decades old -- following obsolete coding principles, using outdated ways of solving problems, and having additions from several persons with different styles.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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Release of KDE Stopmotion 0.8.7

Today marks the release of  KDE Stopmotion 0.8.7 ! About Stopmotion Stopmotion is a Free Open Source application to create stop-motion animations. It helps you capture and edit the frames of your animation and export them as a single file. Direct capture from webcams, MiniDV cameras, and DSLR cameras. It offers onion-skinning, import images from disk, and time lapse photography. Stopmotion supports multiple scenes, frame editing, basic sound track, animation playback at different frame rates, and GIMP integration for image. Movies can be exported to a file and to Cinelerra frame lists. Technically, it is a C++ / Qt application with optional dependencies to camera capture libraries. Changes in release 0.8.7 This release comes with no new features, but improvements to the project itself. Changes The project is now officially called to KDE Stopmotion. The former name Linux Stopmotion is no longer used. Support for qmake has been removed. Use CMake instead. Features Port serial...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more