1 Million hits

This blog passed the mark of 1 Million hits. Thanks everyone out there!

1 000 000 – that’s more than I ever expected. And for this kind of blog it is quite a lot. I never expected that. But of course I’m very happy: the blog entertains me, helps others and is the reason why others recognize me.

But I like numbers a lot, so here are some statistics:
It took me roughly 600 days from my first post here at WordPress until today to reach that number – this means an average of 1 600 readers. But of course the number of my readers increased over time, so here more accurate numbers:

• It took me seven month to get the first 100 000 page views, which makes an average of 480 readers a day. The best day ever had 1 673 views at that time.
• Three month later this blog crossed the 200 000 mark, having more than 1 000 views each day. The best day had already 6 375 clicks.
• The 300 000th view came in when I was not around, so there is no official blog post about it. But that one was special anyway because due to the digg effect I needed only a bit more than a month to reach that mark – 3 000 readers a day was quite a lot at that time. The best day ever was at 32 933 at that time.
• Last but not least there was the 500 000 border three month later which equals to roughly 2 200 views a day. The best day ever was still the same, 32 933.

And of course this day, five and a half months later, has its own statistics: my best day ever has exactly (!) 74,000 views (yes, people like screenshot tours), and the statistics are jumping quite a lot so it is hard to determine an average. But technically I got roughly 3 000 views a day since the last mark. Not bad. Also, at this point I posted 631 posts and got 2762 comments.
But anyway, these are just plain numbers, so don’t take them to serious – I also droppped in some statistics: Technorati lists me at 28k at the moment while I was already below the 20k line once. But there is not the time to post daily atm… :/

Besides the statistics, this (entire) blog is now also listed on Planet KDE which brings me some more readers every day, together with the Fedora section of this blog which is listed on Planet Fedora. Hello out there!

As a side note, a friend of mine found out about my blog just today by accident. We realized that we simply never talked about it although we both are interested in computers. Live is funny.

Enough about this blog and dumb numbers, holidays are close and everyone is busy organizing stuff anyways. So I’m just left with a big Thank You to you readers and supporting people – have nice holidays!

Howto: Using newest flash in Konqueror in Fedora

Recent flash plugins didn’t work with newer Konqueror versions. But now the Fedora-KDE team released new KDE packages with support for the newest flash in Konqueror.

For quite some time now the newer flash plugins didn’t work with Konqueror: they required direct Xembed support which was not provided by Konqueror. As a result most Konqueror users sticked to the latest flash plugin that still supported the old-style Window passing. Some newer features were missing, but the rest worked.

However, recently several problems and vulnerabilities were found in the old flash plugin versions – some of them quite serious. As a result the flash plugin had to be updated or deactivated in Konqueror.

In the meantime the KDE project reacted and update the nspluginviewer library to support direct Xembed. The support is not perfect yet but works. And now the KDE-Fedora team took that code and patched the current kdebase and kdelibs: Konqueror can now use the newest flash plugins.

The updates are still in testing and therefore must be installed via

yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update kdebase kdelibs

But: keep in mind that this is still non-perfect code! There are reports that 86_64 could run into trouble of some kind. But you can help improving the packages by simply testing them and report all problems in the corresponding bug report.

Kubuntu’s KDE 4 LiveCD comes with WebKit-enabled Konqueror

The current Kubuntu-KDE-4 LiveCD ships a Konqueror version which uses WebKit as the main HTML engine for Konqueror.

The KDE 4 LiveCD page mentions the new feature:

This CD includes a preview of the Konqueror Webkit engine.

And indeed, if you use the LiveCD to run Konqueror you’ll pretty soon see the difference in the terminal output:

First of all this shows the power of KDE’s kpart technology: you can exchange vital technologies if you want as long as they are provided as a kpart. Second, it also shows the possibilities: while this version had serious problems during my short tests (I was not able to input anything in Google, for example) the WebKit engine is capable of displaying web pages inside of Konqueror. Of course more polishing is needed, but it works.

It is left open if that is just a technical preview or a statement for future development. I haven’t found any further announcement or notice. But in case a statement for future development this step is very brave: WebKit does not seem to be ready yet to be used as the main HTML engine in KDE. It looks like KDE 4.1 would be a better release to ship a KDE version where KHTML is fully replaced by WebKit, also since QtWebKit would be available at that point. Additionally it could also be better to first ship a stand alone browser first and check how the community adopts that move.

However, this step can also be understood as a signal towards the KDE developers: while the situation around KHTML and WebKit is still not cleared Kubuntu now takes a clear position close to WebKit. Since Kubuntu is indeed one of the main KDE distributions out there this is a strong signal – but also might fire up the flame wars again.

Short Tip: Add Plasma widgets to the panel in KDE 4

Several recent KDE 4 snapshots show Plasma widgets embedded into the panel. However, it was never really mentioned how exactly these widgets can be added to the panel. If the user tries to drag the widgets from the desktop to the panel that won’t work: instead, the widget will disappear behind the panel.
The right way to add widgets to the panel is:

Drag the widget directly from the Plasma widget browser to the panel and drop it there.

That just works. However, some widgets are not yet ready for a problem-free panel integration, so the panel might get screwed up – but a simple right click on the problematic widget gives you the option to remove it again.

Klik2 RC to be around in February 2008

The Klik project plans to release the new klik2 RC in February next year. Among other technical improvements the new version will feature a new mount mechanism and simpler dependencies.

Klik2 basics

The first test version of klik2 was released in August this year by the klik project and featured the new mount mechanism based on FUSE instead of the old loop mounts. FUSE will make it possible to mount as many images as the user wants instead of a number which have to compiled into the kernel. Additionally klik2 will not any longer require X to run a GUI but will run on the command line as well.
In September the klik2 project released a first screencast of a new Gnome GUI interface of klik2. ALso it was announced that klik2 will run on any distribution which is LSB compliant, which should be most distributions. While the old klik was targeting on deb distributions mainly klik2 will be fully distribution agnostic.

Since the new klik2 packages can be generated from unmodified rpm or deb packages with the help of specific recipes it should be fairly easy to provide a large database of klik2 packages for all distributions without the need to worry about incompatibilities. As an example I asked if I could use my Fedora packages to produce klik2 versions out of them – the answer was promising:

To answer you question yes klik2 can use your RPMS ! As a bonus your rpms will then work on just about any modern linux
desktop distro including Debian based ones
[...]
You just need to write a simple recipe telling klik which rpms to use.

As a result it will also become much easier to spread packages of Beta software on Linux: the developer will only have to build one proper package for the distribution of his/her own choice (and complying with the Freedesktop menu spec). Afterwards, klik2 will take care of the rest.

However, it should be clear that Klik2 does not aim at system libraries or services – things like X and the basic libraries should already be there!

The upcoming release

In November the project mentioned the February as a possible release date. I asked back to confirm this and was told that indeed a release candidate can be expacted by that date:

> There is just one question left:
> Is 23 February 2008 a final release or a Beta/RC release?
>
At this point I’d say an RC

We will release the final when its finished

I’m looking forward to test-build some beta versions of applications to see how well this works out.