www.michael-jansen.biz

My name is Michael Jansen. I'm 35 years old and a freelance config manager/developer from germany.

You can find my homepage at http://michael-jansen.biz . Only posts related to kde will be syndicated here.

I started contributing to kde in January 2008. That's pretty lame because i wanted to do that for some years. Developing is some kind of hobby for me since my real life jobs started to be more configuration management related.

This is my list of must have Firefox extensions. These are the extensions i can't live without. I put them here for myself so i'm able to setup new firefox installations properly without great hassle.

This is just my list of useful extensions. There are many more out there.

A week ago i started hacking on a python based kdesvn-build substitution. I did that for two reasons:

1. I wanted to use git locally.
2. I wanted to have an interactive tool, that does what kdesvn-build does.

Today i proudly present build-tool. It's not nearly feature complete but it does it's job. And i would like to get some feedback. Keep in mind that it's alpha quality. Noone else but me used it until now. So expect some failures.

Just a short test of kblogger. I neglected this blog for a long time but having a new contract and hacking on kde combined with the good weather here left me no spare time .

I switched to kde4 only 2 month ago. At the beginning i was unable to get the composite effects of kwin4 working with my nvidia graphics card. During that span i started to dislike one of oxygens decisions. I think i read somewhere it was a conscious decision. The following screenshort illustrates that feature. As you may notice there is no visual separation between the windows. The title bar has the same grey as the other windows background. The eyes have no help finding the title bar and that means no help in finding the menu. I hated that and switched to another window decoration.

I was about to do the same, but with Jos Poortvliet doing the work there is no need to do it twice. Head over to the Jos Poortvliet Blog for some screenshot of current plasma themes.

Tomorrow i hopefully will find time to write down some of the points i love and hate about the new kde version.

Mike

When i get into development mode with some time on the hand as now - i have finished my last contract in february and start my new on on 1st of april - it's allways the same. I tend to get up when the sun goes down and hack throught the night. After a good breakfast it's time for bed. During my xaraya time my fellow hackers thought i would live in america and were puzzled when they learned i'm an german.

Just a quick note: Drupal decides to always unpublish some of my blog entries. I'm aware of that problem.

But i'm not aware of the solution :°( . I'm working on it and hope that this entry stays up. If not i think i have to disable that module.

Update: I had to disable that module. I'm running drupal 6.1 which is a very young release. Perhaps the module isn't yet correctly ported.

Mike

One nice thing about setting up drupal was the finding that i still get referers from the xaraya module wizard. That was my first open source contribution. Well received by the community but i couldn't keep myself interested in maintaining it. As you can see i released in May 2003. And i would say i haven't maintained it longer that 3 month.

It's under a week since i have switched my blog from silverstripe to drupal. And i'm astonished. I had expected that drupal would be more mature than Silverstripe but not such a big difference. With drupal i was able to achieve every goal i had set myself in a very short time. Do not assume that silverstripe is a bad system, but for someone like me who only wants a system that works it's not yet there. I'm pretty sure they will get there.