Friday, May 22, 2009

Forget tabs?


I am hoping to get tabs for KWin in a view month and the Mozilla Project is discussing what innovative concept will come after tabs.

"Reinventing Tabs in the Browser - How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?" is the questing of the Design Challenge 2009.

What fascinates me:
  1. Another concept of bringing the Internet to the desktop (compared to KDE's approach of integrating the web into the desktop).
  2. How they are thinking into the future and drive real innovation.
  3. How they designed and started the campaign (nice website, many involved specialists (look at "cooperations with" and "partners" at the bottom of the page), ...).
Keep your eyes open. Always think a step ahead. Perhaps there are some good approaches for KDE, too.
E. g.
  1. To visualize search results from nepomuk not in a list but 2D in the dimensions relevance (top-down) and chronology (time, left-right) (see the last link) or
  2. the idea that content that is opened / used in the same time frame might belong together.
  3. ...

Links:

Mozilla Firefox doesn't start after update

Starting Firefox after the update failed with the following message: "Could not find compatible GRE between version ...".
In the Mozilla Buidservice repo I use (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/mozilla/openSUSE_11.0/i586/) the
xulrunner package is updated to 1.9.0.11 (mozilla-xulrunner190-1.9.0.11-2.2.i586.rpm) while Firefox is still 3.0.10 (MozillaFirefox-3.0.10-3.1.i586.rpm). Just downgrade xulrunner* to 1.9.0.10 and everything should work again.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Destroying Communities

I'm not only promoting KDE and asking stupid questions I also research about community building. The opposite of the questing you want to answer sometimes gives you a totally new perspective of your subject. Therefor my question is not how to build communities but how to destroy them.
  • How can I destroy a community (as a leader or developer or user or troll)? Under which circumstances would you stop contributing to KDE or any other Open Source Project (I've read some tweets about developer leaving a certain distro)?
I would be very happy if you could leaves some comments.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Noise reduction with audacity

I recorded some interviews for my PhD thesis during OpenExpo (in Bern). The background noise unfortunately was very loud so I had to concentrate very hard while listening. Audacity has the nice effect "noise reduction". I tried it and normalized the track afterwards. The difference is magnificent. Now it's easy to understand the answers to my questions, althou the voices sound a little bit unnatural now (but that doesn't matter).

Kudos to wine developers

Yesterday my father was visiting and wanted to show me a CD about Australia. I first thought there were some images or videos on it but it was a MS-Windows .exe file. :-(

I knew I installed wine some month ago. So I just clicked on the file and entered "wine" when KDE was asking for the application with which I wanted to open this file. Really deeply impressed we could navigate through the whole program including animations, music, text, etc.

Kudos to the wine developers. Great work!

Finally I added wine as standard application for .exe files to the file association dialog in KDE4 systemsettings and now I can run .exe files with a simple mouseclick. I'm delighted to see how flexible Linux has become these days.