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:

• Design Challenge 09: http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/
• What's next after tabs? http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/
  
• an extension for Firefox to structure the tabs in a tree view: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
• or: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-side/
  
• Some points about the browser as the new operating system: http://softwareas.com/taking-browser-tabs-seriously
• Visualize search results in the dimensions relevance and chronology: http://www.lizblankenship.com/tabviz/?tag=mockup
  

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.

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.

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.

How to convert wma to ogg

How can I convert all *.wma to *.ogg in one directory?
I first tried the approved ffmeg. That one helped me many times with good results.

Version 1:

find -name '*wma' -exec ffmpeg -i {} -acodec vorbis -ab 128k {}.ogg \;
rename 's/\.wma//' *\.wma\.ogg
(Test the renameing: rename --no-act --verbose 's/\.wma//' *\.wma\.ogg)

or

Version 2:

for i in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec vorbis -ab 128k "${i/.wma}".ogg; done

# ffmpeg: -vn => novideo, -acodec vorbis => ogg-encoder, -ab set audio bitrate to 128k (64 is standard. That option doesn't seem to work with ogg :-(
# ${i/.wma} is cutting the filename $i from ".wma"

The quality gets really worse.

Best quality with version 3:

1. Step: Convert wma to flac with ffmeg

ffmpeg -i input.wma -vn -acodec flac output.flac

2. Step: Convert flac to ogg with oggenc

oggenc input.flac -q2 -o output.ogg

# -q quality 2 (1 bad .. 10 excellent)
# -o output-file

Or all in one line to convert the whole directory:

for i in *.wma; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -vn -acodec flac -y tmp.flac; oggenc tmp.flac -q2 -o "${i/.wma}".ogg; done; rm -f tmp.flac

# -y Overwrite output files.
# rm -f delete without further questions

EU Parliament elections and F/OSS

European Parliament election in 1 month and 4 days. The last months before elections politicians are listening very carefully to their voters. http://www.freesoftwarepact.eu has some ideas how to bring FS and OSS into politicians minds. Even if there is no campaign in my EU-country (at the moment there is only one in Begum, France and Italy) it reminds me (and hopefully you) that this is a good time to act. NOW!

I will tease every politician I see and ask him or her about their attitude towards

• software patents,
  
• DRM,
  
• support for F/OSS in schools and gov. administration,
  
• ...
  

And perhaps I'm going to write some emails. So they know there is something like F/OSS and there are many, many voters interested in that topic.