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2012-12-11 18:53:11 | How to waste a scammers time |
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The phone rings. The first alarm bell was the display which read 'withheld'. I answered it to be greeted with the second alarm bell, the phone ringing, clearly an automated call, which was answered by a kind indian gentleman a few moments later.
Over the next few minutes we established that he was giving me a curtesy call regarding the serious infections on my computer and would like to help.
Now, normally i just hang up when cold called (ive given up even being curtious), but, i wondered how long i could drag this out for.
Playing the part of the gullible computer user i followed his instructions. First, could i press win+r. I was stuck at the first hurdle, the run dialog didnt appear, could this this a limitation of KDE?? Wanting to see what he wanted me to do i fired up virtual box, only to be greeted with the fact i had to recompile the vbox modules! A quick 'sudo /etc/init/d/vboxdrv setup' and some delay tactics and i was ready to resume my Windows XP machine.
I hit Win+R and as intructed, typed e-v-e-n-t-v-w-r very slowly, why he couldnt just tell me to open Event Viewer i dont know! I asked me to confirm if there were any red exclamation marks, to my horror there was, apparently the 'Microsoft Searc Service' was having issues, but his explanation for this was that my computer was infected with many types of the worst malware and that theoves were stealing my details. Im sure if i was someone else i would be concerned, which reinforced my view that i should waste his time.
Next i was asked to hit Win+R again, and type w-w-w-.-f-a-s-t-s-u-p-p-o-r-t-.-c-o-m. At this point i switched back to Chrome on Linux, not wanting to compromise my mostly unused VM, and went to said website. The site asks for a Customer Name and Support Key. I typed something appropriately witty as a name, and he read me out the key. I clicked 'start support session' and was prompetd with an error message from citrix stating that my OS/Browser was unsupported.
He was confused. It should work in Chrome, but alas he failed to as which OS i was in, and assumed it to be a browser problem.
So instead we tried showmypc.com. This site loaded upa java applet. Chrome prompeted me that Iced Tea was out of date and should i allow it. i dont think he knew what Iced Tea was, but reccomended i allowed it, which i did. He was surprised that it didnt download an executable, but i went into great detail about what i saw on the screen. He eventually gave up on that site and deciced i needed to speak to someone higher up as my computer was definitely in trouble!
At this point i was about 30 minuted into the call. I tweeted, and got a few RT's and replies.
There weer several iterations of trying fastsupport.com and showmypc.com, all with the same consfusing outcome, so next up was to try www.ammyy.com. he asked me to download and run the free program which i did, although i couldnt follow his instructions precisely, as i had to drop to a terminal and load it in wine! Now, this was getting a bit more risky, running random execuables, even within wine probably isnt a great idea, but i was willing to risk it. Unfortunately (or fortunatley) it crashed. I relayed the information from the crash window slowly over the phone. This could mean my computer is even worse than previously thought!
We again tried some of the original websites, but then tried teamviewer.com. Unfortunatley for him, the teamviewer site know i was in linux and displayed a different page to what he was expecting. he asked me to click the download button, which took me to the Linux page. I read what i saw, and he prompted me to click on the Windows section, and download the free program.
Again, i ran this in wine, and this one didnt crash. Slighly concerned and ready to disconnect if needed, i read out the numbers and pass code from the window that would allow them to connect and fix my computer. Fortunately, although the program loaded in wine, it didnt seem to have all the functionality and they were unable to connect.
This reinforced their view that my computer was horribly compromised as they were unable to connect.
He asked me to reboot my PC, then hung up. This was at ~57 minutes. I was a little shocked by this abrupt ending, but got back to coding, only to be called again 2 minutes later. The helpful technician asked if i had rebooted (i lied and said i had) and then asked what kind of connection i had. I replied 'wireless' and he asked me to reconnect (i lied again). He then asked me to visit the original fastsupport.com again. Again it errored with my unsupported OS.
His final words, which were spoken by what sounded like a broken man were along the lines of 'right ok then' and he hung up.
And that is how to spend an hour wasting a scammers time. |
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2011-12-28 20:42:32 | Dear Lazy Web: Qt Reference Library |
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Hi
As i got a Kindle for Christmas...I was wondering if the Qt reference library, and other related material such as QtMobility and QtQuick docs were available anywhere in an ebook format such as .mobi??
Cheers |
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2011-12-14 22:18:45 | Site back up and Kexi updates |
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Finally got my website back up after noticing it had failed on database connects..
This was due to me reconfiguring the database server so that we (the calligra developers) could have access to a shared database as a test bed for Kexi. That is done now, so anyone with a focus on Kexi has a shared database that can be used for testing and development. #win
Unfortunately, I failed check my site for some time, which was now not connecting.. #fail
Wishing for a better way to update my php than a plain text editor, the kind folks in #kdevelop told me that kdevelop doesnt do a terrible job these days, now that there is no Quanta, and they were right...highlighting and code-completion, thankyou.
So, the site is back and Kexi has a common testing database, so on to Kexi Bugs.
Ive just fixed a bug in the table-import wizard so that you can now no longer import a table with the same name as an existing object...which previously had strange results :) There is some more tweaks to improve that such that if the name clashes, it will try and pick a new one, and tell you as youre typing that a name is Ok. This will come in the following days.
Thats it for Kexi, the only other bit of interesting news is that I now am one of these :)
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comments (0) | link |
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2011-11-02 22:03:44 | Qt on Android |
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By now, most people in KDE land will know about the nescessitas project to bring Qt to the Android platform. Well, version 0.3 has just been released and as a consumer of the project im very impressed, in just an evening, i had ported my QML game to android, making it the 5th platform its available on, the others being Maemo, Symbian, Meego and Harmattan. Most of the time was spent on non activities unrelated to making it work on Android, such as resizing the graphics to fit on my quite old HTC Hero. AFAICT, the only thing not working is QtMultimediaKit, which is known not to work yet anyway.
So, well done to the necessitas devs! |
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2011-07-12 19:57:09 | Kexi Autoform Plugin progress |
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Ive recently updated the kexi-mobile-adam_pigg branch of Calligra with support for editing records in the AutoForm plugin. This brings a fully functional version of Kexi for mobile devices really quite close. I just want to add some additional widgets for different data types, then i'll build a package.
The next idea (which really is just a radical idea atm) is some kind of function that advertises the running database via avahi, and a plugin for the desktop version of Kexi that will detect the mobile version once it appears on the network. This would then allow downloading or uploading data to the mobile version. At the moment, i think it would be either a full up or download, i cant envisage a clever 'sync' feature, but that may be an option.
Oh, and i probably need to add some QML to keep up with the trend on mobile devices
Stay tuned database fans! |
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2011-04-12 15:16:35 | Learning QML via Space Invaders |
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After the April Calligra sprint in Berlin, where one of the topics discussed was QML, I decided to write a simple game as an educational task to learn about the technology. What started as simple experiment taking 2 evenings to get the basics working, turned into a small project that was quite popular on the Maemo forums, and me entering it in the Meego Coding Competitiong 2011. The game is based on (but not intended to be a 100% copy of) space invaders. The ship is controller by the acceleromter or arrow keys, and fires by tapping the screen or space bar. Get it for your N900 from extras-devel. Page |
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comments (9) | link |
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2011-02-16 21:34:38 | Kexi Auto Forms |
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To go with the work i have been doing on a mobile version of Kexi, where already we have a working application and report viewer, the next step, forms, is coming on nicely.
The form plugin that currently exists in Kexi is very featureful. It allows complete control over the design of the form. Unfortnately, it does still rely on a lot of Q3 code from Kexi1. This makes it impossible to run on platforms where there is no Qt3Support.
But, on a mobile device atleast, we dont really need the flexibilty of the current form plugin, infact, there are probably use cases on the desktop where the existing plugin is overkill. That is why i have started an AutoForm plugin. An Autoform is associated with a table, and thats the design done. The intention is for the form to build itself, using appropriate widgets, using an appropriate layout such as using 2 columns if the width is greater then the height.
The first fruits of this work look like:
Look out for a maemo version soon ;)
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comments (3) |
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2011-01-18 22:00:08 | Kexi No longer Missing Features |
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Due to some bad planning on my own part, Kexi 2.3 and 2.3.1 were released with an unfinished feature. The 'External Data' toolbar contained a button 'Import Table' which was supposed to allow connecting to a non-kexi database, selecting a table, im importing it into the current database.
It seems i forgot to implement and test this thoroughly (at all?)!
Well, with a series of commits to Calligra yesterday, most of this should now be fixed (and bugs closed). Kexi can now:
Display the available databases on a MySQL or Postgresql server
Import tables from these servers
Import a table from data in a tab-seperated text file
Provide atleast some feedback that something is happening
I tested the MySQL import from the only data I had available, my Akonadi database. It took some time (working first, speed second), but I now have the entire >24000 rows of PIM data available at my disposal to test other features, such as the interesting, but pointless exercise of creating a 7200 page pdf report of every email and contact I have.
Look out for this in Calligra 2.4, or try it from Git. |
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2011-01-04 21:08:31 | Kexi Leak Fixing |
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Its all very good to have a cool open source report engine, but, its not cool when you have a bug like 234352 where switching beteeen views on a report will literally use megabytes of RAM.
So, on the last day of my christmas break, i decided to learn valgrind, and with many (slow) iterations of:
valgrind --leak-check=full kexi
between myself and jstaniek, we managed to fix all the leaks in koreport, and several in the kexi database engine kexidb (which have already found their way into KexiDB 2 aka Predicate). Infact, the only leaks left are probably false positives coming from Qt and Kross.
So, if i did nothing else this holiday, atleast Kexi 2.4 will eat less of you RAM (including the RAM on your next phone!) |
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comments (1) |
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2010-12-28 18:06:50 | Kexi Mobile - Reports |
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Just got the various bits of Kexi Mobile connected together to allow opening an Object from the navigator. Only forms and reports are currently displayed, and only reports will work because there is no Qt3Support code in there (thats another big job).
This is how it looked exactly the first time it was ran, so excuse the fact that it clearly needs work :)
The top toolbar needs work, and there is currently no way to page, but they are small jobs compared to actually opening the object. |
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2010-12-14 22:24:04 | Kexi Mobile (pre pre pre pre alpha 0.0.0.0.1 ;) |
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After getting an N900 to investigate and develop for Kexi on a mobile platform, i have finally got the first screenshots. It is absolutley nothing fancy ( like the latest plasma QML, or KWIN EGL ..... you guys rock! :), it is basically just a QTreeView showing a list of database objects in a .kexi file.
So why so long?
Well, it turns out, that Qt on both maemo and meego are compiled without qt3support. This poses a large problem for a codebase like Kexi, as we still use qt3support rather heavily (we are mostly only 2 devs working parttime).
So, before I could get anything to even build on maemo, I first had to go through all the Kexi libs, and re-write those parts that would be useful on both desktop and mobile using only Qt4 style code. I went further than this, and ported as-much as possible, that was relatively simple, to Qt4, as I figure this has to be done eventually anyway,
Next, using some CMAKE magic, I set up the Kexi build system to allow a flag that builds all the libs without qt3support. The end result here is a cut sdown set of libraries, that allow access to kexi database files, and several gui components. Which brings us up to the current posistion, a custom GUI, using those libraries to present information to the user.
Whats the point? Who want to run a database on a phone?
Well, i can think of several scenarios...how about, say, inventory management, where you develop a database on the PC, then transfer it to the phone where you wander around, entering data into forms and displaying results in reports. Probably not the most exciting thing to do with a phone (angry birds comes to mind), but potentially useful i think.
Over the coming weeks/months i will keep posting progress on this, aswell as regular Kexi development, which is now part of Calligra-Suite, and still progressing nicely, with version 2.3 around the corner with many improvements!
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comments (1) |
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2010-10-10 19:34:30 | Thankyou Nokia! |
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The very excellent Suresh Chande and Nokia have been kind enough to loan me an N900 to experiment writing a version o Kexi for mobile devices.
My main ideas revolve around a 'runtime' version of the application, allowing data entry on the go. I have an initial plan of attack @ http://wiki.koffice.org/Kexi/Mobile and im sure Jaroslaw, who is great for organising this will help me out.
I'll also take the opportunity to try out all the other KDE and KOffice technologies on Maemo, and if possible, when the time is right, on Meego too!
So, thank you Suresh, Jaroslaw and Nokia for this opportunity!
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comments (0) | link |
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2010-08-28 23:20:10 | Selling Myself |
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Being a hobbyist programmer for KOffice/Kexi implies doing it for the enjoyment. For the years ive been doing it ive had a great time. But there are some small costs involved, like my server hosting, and upkeep of my laptop. So i figurerd, if anyone wants to donate, possibly to have something implemented in Kexi, or have something fixed, then an easy, non intrusive way to do it was to have a Paypal Donate link on my website. Its in the top-right hand corner, so, go crazy! ;) Seriously though, the very excellent Jaroslaw Staniek, Kexi maintainer already donated, even after i told him not to be so stupid, thanks for that! |
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comments (2) |
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2010-02-08 22:55:45 | Kexi, SQLite and Packagers |
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So it seems Jaroslaws post at [1] caused some discussion on the pros and cons of shipping a library internally.
Its likely that Kexi will switch to using the system SQLite (especially as not doing so could cause Kexi not to be distributed by some major distros! ;).
Ive already asked the Mandriva maintainer to use the SECURE_DELETE option, and its been comitted [2]. Ubuntu, Debian, and i think Fedora already use this option.
So what are the options used by other distros? We probably need to build up a wiki page of the options used by different distros, so we can be sure of being compatible with all.
[1]http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/4156
[2] http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/sqlite3/current/SPECS/sqlite3.spec?view=log
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comments (3) |
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2010-02-08 20:27:37 | You know you're a member of a project when... |
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You get a T-Shirt!
Thanks Jaroslaw! |
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comments (0) | link |
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2010-01-01 13:44:31 | Happy New Year! |
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2010, a year that is sure to bring great things for KOffice and Kexi!
Keep up to date:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kexi/218171903489
http://www.facebook.com/pages/KOffice/64362859693
http://twitter.com/kexi_project
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2009-12-23 15:54:59 | Kexi on Social Networks |
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The first release of Kexi 2.x will be released with KOffice 2.2. For anyone interested in keeping up with the latest developments, why not check out your favourite social networking site (so long as its facebook or twitter ;). Both sites receive updates from each other (facebook gets tweets as an rss feed, and turns status updates into tweets).
So, whichever your preference:
Become a fan
or Follow
or just get the rss feed from twitter |
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comments (9) | link |
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2009-12-18 12:45:22 | Tux Beer? |
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So im at the pub last night (its thursday, aka pool night...which reminds me, todays my birthday and my very good wife got me a 6ft x 3ft pool table!) and im deciding what to drink, when infront of me I notice a new guest beer, the logo of which appears to be tux from the frozen bubble games. Anyway, it amused me so I had a pint of it ;)
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2009-12-11 18:48:16 | What is KDE worth? |
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I was working quite heavily the last few days, and had the feeling i'd removed a lot of code as i re-wrote the xml handling in the kexi report plugin.
Wondering how much had been removed, i installed an ran sloccount on my version, and the version currently in trunk. I had a net reduction in lines of code of ~300. Not bad without loosing any functionality.
Then I noticed another line in the output:
Total Estimated Cost to Develop = $ 464,573
Thats rather a lot I thought, I wish I had some of that!....Now, that is one, relatively small plugin, for one application, in one corner of the whole KDE project.
So I got to wondering how much overall our community has generously given the KDE project. I dont have all of /KDE checked out, only /koffice, which is worth a stonking $ 34,484,962.
So, if anyone has all the source, what is the total value of KDE, koffice, kdevelop and extragear? Its got to be reaching <inthevoiceofdoctorevil>1 billion dollars</inthevoiceofdoctorevil> :) |
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2009-10-23 20:14:17 | Dropbox |
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In a rather lame attempt to get myself some more free storage, if anyone needs some free online storage space, why not give dropbox a try using my refer link ;). Ive just set it up myself, it seems pretty decent, they have a nautilus plugin, but the guide at http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/dropbox_kde.html shows how to use it in a non gnome environment. Maybe someone out there with an interest in this kind of thing would be interested in making kde integration better, i'd initially think about a kioslave, and integration with the notification system. |
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2009-10-08 21:30:10 | New Kexi Features and a venture into HTML5 |
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Hi, just to show that Kexi development is still at full steam, let me showcase a new feature. I recently added the ability to the migration framework to read *rows* from *tables*. The definition of rows and tables is quite loose, i.e. data fields can be grabbed from a text file (Comma-Separated Values, CSV format or TAB separated), from a spreadsheet, or a real row from a real table of a non-Kexi database.
Up until now though there were no users of this api (the existing migration api only allowed block converting a database into a kexi format). That has changed, with the ability to import data from an external source into the current database.
As a picture is worth a thousand words, then surely a video is worth a thousand pictures (or is that only for a 40 second clip at 25fps?)
The video below is in theora format, and uses the <video> tag. I tested it in firefox and chrome, konqy users will just have to download it im afraid.
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2009-08-25 20:00:43 | Database Design Documentation |
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KDE has a great design documentation tool in Umbrello, but if you just want to create a quick relation design in kword or kivio, it should be possible with kexi 2.0. There is now a koffice shape that can directly interface with a Kexi database to retrieve the design of a table or query for use in an office document. Obligatory screenshot:  The funky colouring comes from using the standard koffice tools for fill pattern :) |
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2009-07-17 19:37:17 | Qt on S60 |
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Qt on S60 is pretty cool, especially as i just got an E71! 'Why not write apps for my phone' i said to myself, so to make sure i got the dev environment set up (it was a bit tricky, and after i got it right, the battery died on my laptop, and because acpi doesnt work properly, it didnt know to shut down, and the ntfs filesystem on the XP virtual machine went a bit screwy so i had to install it all over again) i tried my hand at something simple like porting the very cool PhotoFlow by Ariya Hidayat (http://code.google.com/p/photoflow/). I made a couple of changes like hard coding the path to the images dir on an S60 mem card, and added a label with the filename, but other than that, making something work on Qt S60 is a synch.
If you want to see it on your phone, get it here.. You'll need the various support packages and Qt if you dont already have them. Its just a first draft, and image loading is dog slow, maybe i should look for the pre-cached versions that the phone generates.
Next job to see if i can write something KDE related :) |
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comments (3) | link |
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2009-03-14 08:11:18 | Tradeoffs |
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So i tried several things to speed up my grid drawing.
1. As suggested by ZRusing, instead of multiple calls to drawLine and drawPoint, I instead created a vector of each and used a single call to drawLines and drawPoints. This made no difference.
2. Draw lines only. This was super fast.
3. Draw points only. This was still slow.
4. Anholt on #intel-gfx suggested grid-aligning my points to screen pixels. I wasnt 100% sure what this meant, so i changed the drawing code to use integer maths instead of floating point to ensure all drawing of points would be on an actual pixel, but this made no difference.
5. Turned off antialiasing in QPainter. Instant 200x speedup!
So the options seem to be use antialiasing with the raster graphics system, or dont use antialiasing, and have a slightly different look, which I dont mind, and is what im doing at the moment. |
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comments (18) |
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2009-03-12 07:01:15 | Drawing Performance (or not) |
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In my app, I draw a background grid. Its nothing fancy, just some lines and dots but it was quite slow, and would get slower the larger the area obviously. I'm by no means an expert in drawing graphics optimally, but I had a few hacks in there to speed it up, like caching the background and only redrawing the affected rect. But still it wasn't great, it felt sluggish. 'Feeling' sluggish isn't very scientific, so I ripped out he drawing code and put it in a test app which timed it, that app is here. On my system, which isn't a 6GHz oct-core with the latest nvidia sli gfx, its just a run-of-the-mill core2duo with intel x3100, it takes roughly 200ms to draw the grid. Running under Qt4.5 with the raster graphics system, it takes 1ms. Yes, 1. 200x faster using software rendering than using x11. Restarting X using the VESA driver also had great improvements. Even running KDE4 with the VESA driver 'felt' more responsive. So, is it just my system? I have no idea if 200ms is a respectable time for this code, so how about you run it and post the results? |
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2009-01-16 23:55:52 | Kexi Data Access |
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While its been possible to generate great looking reports in Kexi for quite some time, even containing user supplied scripts to enhance the core functionality, one thing that wasn't possible was the ability to access data from the database from within a script.
Well, now that has changed :)
If your familiar with the likes of DAO/ADO on windows/ms access then this should be a breeze to you.
Imaging having a report that contains the data from a table, but then for each record, while the report is being rendered, executing arbitrary queries based on that data to populate other fields....this should now be possible in Kexi.
The following snippet is a small example of opening a query when the report is opened, and getting the first 10 records to populate fields on the report:
function test_kexi_object_report()
{
this.OnOpen = function()
{
debug.message("On open", "open");
test_kexi_object.detail.setBackgroundColor("#dddddd");
var conn = Kexi.getConnection();
var cur = conn.executeQueryString("select msre_desc from weight");
for(i=0;i<10;i++) {
test_kexi_object.objectByName("Field" + (i + 10)).setSource("=" + cur.value(0));
test_kexi_object.objectByName("Field" + (i + 10)).setBackgroundOpacity(0);
cur.moveNext();
}
}
}
Nice, even if I do say so myself ;) |
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2008-10-18 14:29:19 | Charts with child/master fields |
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I guess most database reporting apps can do this, and now Kexi can be added to the list. We could already embed a chart in a report, and assign it a set of data, but what if you want the chart to change depending on the data in the main report? The way to do that is with master->child field links. You specify a field (or fields) in the report (the master) which will be used as an expression on a field (or fields) in the chart (the child). If you're used to msa, its the same as you get with sub forms/reports/charts. This lets you do something like this. The example is a bit boring, but its the first thing I could think of after getting the implementation working :) |
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2008-07-08 14:56:07 | Kexi to ODS |
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After reading the headers for kspread which showed me where I was going wrong, I now have Kexi reports able to output to an ODS (Opendocument Spreadsheet) file by utilising the excellent KSpread libraries. Fields in a report are ordered based on horizontal position, and the text saved into a Cell based on the order. As a test I generated a 20000 row sheet, and openened it up in OO.o, see it here, and download it here. |
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comments (3) |
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2008-06-19 09:44:25 | HTML Reports in Kexi |
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After some initial work, a re-think and re-design, and a re-implementation you can now get quite nicely formatted reports from Kexi in HTML form using some CSS magic.
Only text is implemented atm, so images, charts, barcodes are still to come, but the output is pretty close to the original page based version, as you can see at http://www.piggz.co.uk/kexi/htmlcss3.png and http://www.piggz.co.uk/kexi/htmlcss4.png.
There will also be a simplified table based version as an option.
Some samples are at http://www.piggz.co.uk/kexi/product_list.html (its 1.9mb representing 10000 records, so be warned ;) and http://www.piggz.co.uk/kexi/rainfall.html.
Enjoy. |
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comments (6) | link |
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2008-04-23 12:56:33 | Now i remember why I dont use Windows |
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My mum pops round last night with her laptop. Earlier it had displayed a message saying the battery was going to run out, and then turned off. It wouldnt turn back on.
I tested the power supply with a multi-meter and it seemd OK. I asked if it had been dropped...'No' was the reply, shortly followed by 'Well, it did fall off the little table but was still working OK'
I decided it was best to get a new laptop, as this one clearly wasnt getting power from the mains. But this particular machine is the one with the entire shop inventory and sales history in it and it would be handy to get it off and onto another machine.
No problem, I whipped out the HD, and installed it in my own laptop.
Windows proceeded to boot and got the the 'Activation' screen. No problem I thought, a quick call to Microsoft will have us running in no time, and I can transfer all the data/documents to a USB stick.
I entered the 60! digit number, and was told to change the license key, which I did, and then entered a new 60 digit number, I must have done it too fast because I got transferred to an operator.
I explained the situation and that i was temporarily using my mums HD in my laptop to recover some data from it. I was quite shocked when I was told that because Windows had been pre-installed on the original laptop, the license couldnt be transferred to another machine. After a short agrument where I told him I thought it unfair as we needed the data and it was clearly a temporary situation as I run Linux he gave me the activation key, and all seemed good.
In went the USB disk......and.......nothing.
Device manager suggested drivers needed re-installed, fair enough as it was another machine (though im sure a linux kernel would have reconfigured itself a bit better), so I reinstalled the usb drivers which got rid of the exclamation marks, rebooted and was sure it would work this time.
The screen resolution was even right now......but shortly after starting up it all went horribly wrong.....BSOD, for no aparent reason.
A cycle of rebootss commenced, along with disk checking...nothing would work, not even safe mode.
'Ah' I though.....i'm being stupid, why not boot off a Linux live CD and copy the files?
In went Ubuntu, the USB drive worked OK and I went to mount the NTFS drive.
Catastrophe!! the drive wouldnt mount....errors suggesting a bad/missing MFT, and I should run chkdsk.
I rebooted again, but this time Windows wouldnt even attempt to load, the partition seems totally corrupt. I eventually got a 'Windows Recovery Console CD' and attempted to run chkdsk from it, but it told me the drive had unrecovereable errors :(
As a last resort I left 'photorec' running over night scanning for .mdb files, and it managed to find some which may reduce the strain of re-entering all orders and transactions for the last year from paper copies.
Ive also left 'testdisk' running to see if it can find an MFT, but I dont hold much hope.
Motto? BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP.... she had even bought a USB stick to backup the shop database to, but she clearly hasnt got the hang of it.....I bet she does it tonight though! |
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comments (30) |
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2008-04-17 19:30:57 | Look out Microsoft, here we come ;) |
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Ok, so we're maybe not quite there yet,but our own office DB app kexi is slowly gaining features. You will shortly be able to create charts directly within a reports. You can already see what it will look like from the designer, it just isnt saved or rendered yet, but because it looks quite cool, i think its worth showing off (atleast the others in #kexi think so). Check it out here. To get an idea on how it evolved, have a look at the 6 prior snaps also.
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comments (9) |
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2008-03-14 12:34:47 | Script your reports |
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So you have a report to produce, no problem for kexi these days, but your asked to highlight certain conditions...what do you do?
Script it!
Write something like this. And get results like this.
I would have made those text boxes transparent, if it didnt crash when i selected them...but thats something to fix tonight ;) |
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comments (3) |
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2008-02-02 15:30:34 | Kexi Reporting - progress++ |
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Im sure if I had milestones, one of them would be printing, which i've just got working so I may aswell show it off :)
print.pdf
The designer is coming on quite nicely too.
As is the on screen rendering.
Ive also prepared another version for Kexi1 that adds a couple of requested features from ppl on #kexi. That version does basically work, but ive got to admit ive neglected it to work on the Kexi2 but if anyone needs something i'll do my best to add it. |
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comments (9) |
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2007-12-31 17:59:04 | Dear Lazy Web |
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I have a subclass of QGraphicsLineItem that i want to interact with on a scene. Suppose the line is 1px wide, 20px long and horizontal starting at 0,0 local coordinates. I can click on the line and drag it around, but i have to click right on it. I'd like to have say, +-5 pixels either side that will select the line, and send hover events to it. I tried reimplementing boundingRect to return QRectF(-5,-5, x2() +10, y2()+10) but to no avail.
Any suggestions?
Cheers |
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comments (15) |
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2007-12-31 17:50:59 | Reports in Kexi 2 |
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Ive been working quite hard to bring my report part for Kexi to the upcoming Kexi2. Finally its starting to look useful. The port has been quite long and boring. I started by re-basing on openrpt 2.2 which is now lgpl, removing the dependencies on Qt3Support and moved the build system to CMake. Then came the long and boring task of basing the designer on QGraphicsView instead of QCanvas. While doing this i also changed the way coordinates are stored and re-used code from koffice where possible (though i'm sure more can be done).
I also did quite a lot of re-factoring to share more code between the designer and renderer components(i don;t need to methods of parsing the same xml).
Anyway, the fruits of my labour (so far) are here and here. |
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comments (3) |
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2007-07-05 22:03:33 | Preview Kexi Report Part 0.0.5 |
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Here is a quick preview if the next version of the report part for Kexi. What you see here is Group Headers/Footers working (they didnt work at all in <= 0.0.4). Unfortunately, to get this to work I had to fix a crash in KexiDB's sqlite driver which affects 'buffered' cursors. Kexi itself doesn't actually use buffered cursors, so im the first to stumble on this problem. The fix is simple, but do I:
a. require users to use an svn version of kexi with the fix
b. code a workaround in the report part (ie, do my own buffering)
Feel free to post other suggestions. To go the svn way, it would also be nice to add buffering to atleast the pqxx driver (it wouldnt be difficult) so reporting (with headers) would also work with databases on Postgres.
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comments (0) | link |
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2007-06-19 10:27:01 | linuxbabe |
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Not exactly kde related, so sorry to planetkde readers.
In the early hours of saturday morning, my wife gave birth to a little girl called Megan. So we're pretty tired at the moment, its been an action packed few days.
From this photo, it looks like she may be joining linuxchix in a few years :)
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comments (15) | link |
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2007-06-07 21:51:17 | Kexi Report Part 0.0.3 |
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After a few nights work, I proudly present Kexi Report Part version 0.0.3. Pick it up on kde-apps at http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Kexi+Report+Part?content=58208. I had to get this out quickly, as its probably the last version i'll get out before my good wife gives birth again :).
New features are:
*Double Buffered for HUGE speed improvement when scrolling
*Labels and Field can have foreground/background colour
*And the editor gets an icon and menu entry
Enjoy |
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comments (3) | link |
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2007-05-15 22:34:08 | Images in a kexi report |
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As the initial version of my kexi report part seems to be going quite well on kde-apps ( http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Kexi+Report+Part?content=58208 ) the current development version just got images. Both static and dynamic (stored in the database) are supported, as can be seen by this screenshot http://www.piggz.co.uk/KexiReportImages1.png. The logo at the top is static and stored in the report, all characters are stored in the database, and returned by the query, sweet. |
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comments (3) | link |
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2007-04-30 15:15:05 | Another Sceenshot |
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This time just a report.
http://www.piggz.co.uk/3rdKexiReport.png
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comments (0) | link |
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2007-04-30 15:13:45 | Kexi Reports |
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Kexi 1.6 is a great program....it can do many things...that is, apart from generate reports.
Until now that is.
Ive been (slowly) working on modifying openrpt (www.openrpt.com) which is a postgresql/odbc reporting engine, so that it works with kexi.
Currently, ive only tried very simple things....the designer works pretty well...it opens a connection to a kexi database, using the kexi dialogs, and saves the report definitions as kexi database objects.
Ive created a KexiPart, which displays the rendered report within kexi, when a report is selected from the database tree.
Theoretically, printing shouldnt be difficult....and now that I can actually see something that looks like a report rendered on screen, i'll have more motiviation to work on it.
Im sure Kexi 2 will have something much greater, but for now, im quite happy that Kexi 1.6 can have reporting.
Obligatory Screenshot: http://www.piggz.co.uk/2ndKexiReport.png
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comments (3) | link |
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2007-03-27 08:09:15 | Only on linux... |
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(and probably other free os's) can you have a piece of hardware with no driver, talk it over with a developer who gets you to generate a log file from windows, give him access to your machine, and watch while in a few hours he writes a driver for your DVB-T USB adapter, on your laptop from the other side of the world.
How cool is that? |
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comments (27) |
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2007-02-19 22:52:41 | Sign This Petition |
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Hi Just found this petition for the use of linux in the UK government. It closes TODAY so please sign it.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Use-LINUX/ |
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comments (21) | link |
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2007-02-04 12:47:46 | KDE3 apps on Windows |
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Ive been writing a little application to allow the management of my mums website database from a desktop app. It uses kde3, soap (using gsoap2) and some xml parsing. I was hoping I'd be allowed to wipe Windows from the machine, but that's a no-no (atm, I may push a bit more).
So i basically have 3 options:
1. Rewrite using QT4 and port to windows. Probably the best long term solution, especially when kde4 comes out, but I needed something quicker.
2. Use cygwin. An ok solution, but the kde in cygwin is quite old, and i wanted quanta to run aswell.
So i went with 3. colinux. It was quite simple to set up, in no time i had a very minimal fc6 + kdebase + kdewebdev + gcc. Networking worked so I copied my app from an smb share on my laptop, compiled and installed.
By hacking rc.local, I had kicker run on startup, positioned in the top-centre of the screen, with some buttons for quanta, konqueror and my app.
It works pretty well, takes a while to boot up, but you cant expect much from a laptop with 256mb ram, running both windows xp and linux!!
Amusingly, konqueror starts up faster than ie7
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comments (15) | link |
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2007-01-04 11:30:00 | Sleep Deprivation |
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I'm sure lots of you have suffered from this......you know how it goes, you get to bed, your lying there and your mind is working overtime. A sudden surge of inspiration hits you for a little project to work on, and you cant help but start designing it in your head. Before you know it, you've missed several hours of sleep.
:) |
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comments (18) |
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2006-12-24 10:16:13 | Comments Section |
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Finally got round to adding a comments section to my blog (the downside of writing your own instead of using something off-the-shelf). Decided to use a captcha to prevent spam as it seems to have worked a treat in the guestbook.
So feel free to leave as many or as few comments as you like. |
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comments (9) |
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2006-12-16 09:23:55 | LINUX Road Show |
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I just got confirmation of a place at the free UK Linux Roadshow. Its at HP's Bristol labs on the 11th January and being run by the HP User Group. Anyone else out there going?
See http://www.hpug.org.uk/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&Itemid=45&agid=24&year=2007&month=01&day=11
for the details. |
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comments (0) | link |
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2006-11-22 22:01:40 | A Tip |
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When you in the psql command line, and you press 'up arrow' for the last command, make sure its the command you want before hitting [Enter], otherwise you may realise that youve just deleted your entire blog and it needs recreating, which will surely cause it to spam the planets. So, im sorry for reposting things you may have already read :). |
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comments (0) |
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2006-11-22 21:59:36 | YardsOfYarn, Amarok, Koffice |
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Its been a year in the making, but i finally got the e-commerce system i've been writing for my mums website into a state where it actually works, infact, a random woman bought 6 balls of wool, and paid smoothly via paypal, before the site was technically ready. I know there are things like this pre-packaged, but i wanted the experience in building a medium(ish) scale website by hand. The main tool I used? Quanta, i'd be lost without it. Now just have to wait for all the money to roll in and take a percentage :).
So if anyone needs wool/yarn/needlwork/xstitch etc, just visit www.yardsofyarn.co.uk.
In other news, the Amarok guys accepted my shoutcast browser, so expect to see that in 1.4.5 (or now if your using svn).
Done a bit more coding in koffice, nothing too substantial, mainly porting, and learning the neq qt4 ways of doing things. |
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comments (0) | link |
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2006-11-22 21:57:31 | Amarok - Shoutcast |
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Hacked together shoutcast support for the amarok playlist browser. You get a folder view containing all the genres, when you double click a genre, it downloads the station list. All you do then is double click a station and it gets added to the playlist. Still a few bugs to work out, but when its ready i'll try and get it into amarok, its the only feature i miss from XBMC on the xbox. |
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comments (0) |
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2006-11-22 21:56:53 | Porting started |
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Managed to get a workable development environment set up for KDE4 (thanks jstaniek). This seems to work well....
1. Add both your main user and development user to the 'users' group
2. Change the group ownership of the source files to 'users'
3. Change the permissions to 664 (or 660)
4. Edit the files from your main users account using kate (or preferred editor)
5. Compile the files using the development user So, doing this has allowed me to quickly port the kspread-kexi import filter to koffice2 without much trouble (by not much i mean i cant get cmake to create the .moc files so i'm doing it by hand). Next job to start porting kexi drivers/migration. |
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comments (0) | link |
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