KDE 4.2

Some time ago, I made the upgrade to KDE 4.2 from 3.5. It was made available in Debian's Unstable branch so I figured "why not?"

Why not, indeed?

Well, for starters, I can't figure out how to make it react to audio CDs in the CD drive. KDE 3.5 offered a dialog where I could choose what to do with the damned thing. With this one, it's beyond me; nothing happens. I've toyed around in the Settings, but to no avail. I've googled around. I can't make it work.

Just now, I received an email with a MS word attachment, a .doc file. KMail offered Kate as the default choice, a bloody text editor, but the thing is that not too long ago, KMail knew that OpenOffice works for anything with that suffix, and furthermore, KDE knows, from what I can see in the File Associations settings, that OpenOffice is the right application to use. But it doesn't. It won't.

The refurbished Kicker menu gets stuck on the desktop after I click it, until I click on it somewhere near the Search edit box. On my laptop, the task bar (or whatever they want to call it, these days, never remembers how wide it should be if I use the laptop on an external screen (with a different resolution) in addition to the built-in one. For some reason, something switched the sound settings on the Audigy card to the Digital output after I upgraded to a 2.6.29 kernel, without telling me, so I went through hell to get my sound back, before I discovered the switch (that, by the way, is not available on every mixer there is) that needed a click.

Or all those settings that used to require a root password, to change how KDM behaves. Or whatever. Lots of things have gone wrong with the KDE upgrade and I don't know how to fix them, not without some surfing on the net, and I can't be bothered. I think of myself as a power user, I have used computers in various forms since the late seventies and Unix in a number of incarnations through the years, but surely it shouldn't be like this?

And no, I don't want to switch to Gnome because I hate it, I think it treats me lika an idiot, but maybe I need to? What say you? I don't want to spend all my free time on the bloody Internets, trying to find the answers to each and every little problem there is.

Put XSD 1.1 On Hold

In his latest blog entry at O'Reilly, Rick Jelliff asks W3C to please put XSD 1.1 on hold and address the deeper underlying issues that make schemas practically useless.

I'd like to go one step further and encourage the schema working group to consider Relax NG, compact syntax, instead, as a more sensible and compact alternative to XSDs. It does everything we need from a schema language, without being impenetrable or impossibly verbose. If W3C actively endorsed Relax NG, maybe we'd get the software manufacturers to support Relax NG on a wider scale. Yes, I know, Oxygen already supports it, but there are plenty of manufacturers out there that need to follow suit.

Please.

Jean Michel Jarre

I went to see Jean Michel Jarre perform in concert, earlier this week. I've been a fan since the 70s when Oxygène came out but I never thought I'd experience him live. Göteborg's too small a city for the kind of thing he is famed for, painting the Houston skyline with lasers or transforming London's Docklands to a gigantic concert venue, so I was pleasently surprised when he announced his "In-Door" tour, a series of performances indoors, on a fairly small scale.

The Scandinavium is not what I'd call small (U2 paid a visit 18 years ago, and I listened to Paul McCartney dust off his Beatles repertoir there, close to 20 years ago), but I still thought it wouldn't be enough for Jean Michel Jarre.

Boy I was wrong. From the laser harp (you have to see and hear it; there's no way I can make it justice here) to the analog synthesizers, from Oxygène to Rendez-vous... it was all perfect (well, actually he slipped while playing that laser harp, just once, but it happened) and I really only wrote this to gloat.

Slow Keys

The KDE 4.2 desktop on my Debian/GNU Linux laptop install (Sid, the unstable flavour) practically died the other day, after a dist-upgrade. Well, actually, the keyboard stopped responding while the touchpad continued working perfectly. A first Google search (sloppily performed, I'll admit) hinted at changes done in Xorg 1.6 but while I found a few hints, nothing I did with the xorg.conf file could revive the keyboard.

After a few hours of experimenting and general panic, I stumbled on an older post on a KDE message board. The author had managed to turn on the Slow Keys feature in KDE 4, a set of functions designed for the disabled, which resulted in a very slow keyboard. I checked my settings and yes, the feature had somehow been turned on.

Now, relieved as I was, I'm also pretty sure that I have not been anywhere near that checkbox. How is this possible?