Dvorak – Two years later, was it worth it?

January 30, 2010 — Hans

It’s been almost two years since I picked up a new keyboard and started to learn Dvorak. Looking back, was it worth the time and effort? Did it mess up my QWERTY skills? And which layout do I use today? That’s some of the questions I’m going to answer in this post.

First of all, what is Dvorak? Since you read this post, I’m sure you already know a little bit about it – for example, that it’s a keyboard layout developed by August Dvorak and his brother-in-law William Dealey. An example of the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout (United States version) looks like this:

The standard layout nowadays is QWERTY (although some countries use other layouts, such as AZERTY), named after the first six characters on the top row. If you use QWERTY, look down at your keyboard. Have you ever wondered why the keys are arranged in the way they are? It’s not very easy to find a pattern.

Sometimes one can hear that Dvorak was designed to be efficient, while QWERTY on the other hand was created to slow typists down. You could argue about the former, but the latter is just a common misunderstanding. If you want to learn why (and how) the two keyboard layouts were invented, and find out more about Dvorak in general, I highly recommend The Dvorak Zine.

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Building KDE SC from SVN

January 20, 2010 — Hans

Today I finally succeeded to build KDE trunk (development version of KDE SC) after previously struggling with some Phonon-related problems. I decided to start from scratch, and while the overall process was quite smooth, I managed to hit some bumps along the way. Below I’ve shared my experience.

First I want to remind you that this isn’t a comprehensive guide to build KDE SC from SVN – you can find those on Techbase. I followed much of the Getting Started/Build/KDE4 guide to get started.

Introduction

I’ve found it easiest to build KDE trunk using a tool called kdesvn-build. From its Techbase page:

kdesvn-build is a tool to allow users and developers to easily download and build the latest versions of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) from the KDE source code repositories. It automates the following tasks and more:

  • Performing the initial checkout.
  • Handling updates for modules that are already checked out.
  • Setting up the build system for the module.
  • Performing the build and install.
  • Specifying your CMake options or configure flags (so you don’t have to remember them every time).

It’s basically a script that does the hard work for you. And it’s pretty, too.

kdesvn-build in action

Since I want to keep my stable KDE SC version, I have a special user called kde-devel to run trunk. Everything will be install in this user’s home directory – no root access is needed, and if something breaks, the risk is minimal that it’ll affect my whole system.

You can do the same with your usual user and some scripts, see Increased Productivity in KDE4 with Scripts for more information.

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The Road to KDE Devland – step 5

January 1, 2010 — Hans

logo

Are you still with me?

I’ve taken a long break from The Road for some time, but fear not, I haven’t forgotten about my initial goal. But since it’s been so long, maybe you have? Let’s start this step with a short recap:

  • Step 0 – At the beginning of the summer 2009, I started my journey to “KDE Devland” to become a KDE developer. By sharing my experiences I hoped that I could motivate others to do the same, and leave behind useful tips for those who wanted to walk the same path. The first step was mostly an introduction.
  • Step 1 – Before going on a journey, you should be prepared. In this step I shared useful links for soon-to-be developers and wrote about my plan and which books I would use.
  • Step 2 – I started with C++. This post went through pointers, something I found hard to understand in the beginning.
  • Step 3 – Talking about my temporary workspace and which applications I use to write the code.
  • Step 4 – At this point I finally had some screenshots to show. In this step I showed my achievements after the summer and wrote a little bit about Qt programming.

I feel fairly comfortable with Qt now, and try to learn some specific parts of the toolkit when I find the time and motivation. Right now I’m struggling with the Interview framework – I think I understand the theory behind it, but I need to get a feeling for how to actually use it.

In this step I’ll show you some of my own applications I’ve done to familiarize myself with Qt. If you still remember the last step you’ll recognize some of them, however they’re actually all made from scratch. First one out is the smallest application, but also the one giving me the most trouble.

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Posted in KDE, PlanetKDE, The Road to KDE Devland. 5 Comments »