Recently I’ve had a couple of ideas for a project (like I need another one of those). The goal would be to make a library which allows applications to easily track their user’s interactions and log them in a central location. Project maintainers/contributors could then look at the collected data to help them make decisions about what they should be spending time on. For instance, a media player might log what types of files are played or if it was synced to an iPod-like device.

As far as technical hurdles go, doing something like this is pretty easy. The main questions I have are around the kind of policies that should exist for such a thing. Obviously, participation should be opt-in. But should it be on a per-app basis, or per-user? Or both? If it is per-app, you would likely get bombarded with a prompt on the first run of every app that uses this system. If that is a small number it might be ok, but hopefully that wouldn’t be the case :). On the other hand, maybe you don’t want certain sensitive applications (email client?) ever sending info.

Then there’s the question of who should have access to the data. My feeling is that the user should always be able to see everything that he has sent. But should he also be able to see everyone else’s individual data? What about the aggregated data? That leads me to the next question. Should there be a cookie that identifies a single user throughout all applications? Or even a cookie per-application? I think having a cookie across all applications would definitely make the data more useful, but I’m not sure if people would be opposed to such a thing. Of course, this leads to yet another question. How do we keep personal information out? I don’t believe there is a technical solution to keep things like this from making its way in. Developers will need to be very careful, and that kind of bothers me. If all of the data on the server is available to everyone then maybe public scrutiny will help keep things in check, but who knows.

These are just a few of the questions I have come up with, and I am sure others can think of plenty more. Is it possible to come up with something that benefits the development community without infringing on user’s privacy? Even so, would users participate? Comments are open.

Surprisingly enough, no one has flamed me yet for being disappointed with the quality of KDE 4.0. I must try harder. I used to be able to attract flames much more easily.

Well, I've had KDE 4.0 on my machine for a day or so now, and I'm getting used to it. I've switched to running AIGLX so that I can use KWin's OpenGL mode instead of the XRender mode, and it's a lot more stable, although I can't run Google Earth any more. With the OpenGL rendering, the desktop look great, and the beauty of the desktop alone is probably enough to stop me switching back to KDE 3.5 at the moment. A few times I have clicked on a window only to have it completely disappear without warning - not sure what that's about. There are a few niggling little bugs in the behaviour of a few things, but I'm sure they'll get sorted in a minor release before too long. (Such as icon widgets not working with a graphics tablet, not being able to hide the plasma blob, konqueror not loading images or styles, etc.)

I am inspired to try writing some plasma applets to do things properly. And when I say properly, I mean how I want them to work. I've had a look at some of the source for existing stuff, and it looks relatively easy, so instead of writing any more of this, I'm now going to go off and write some code. Perhaps. If I can stop gazing at the beautiful desktop.

So, KDE 4.0 is out, and I have installed it on my computer. I've had it on there for a while actually, in one form or another, but this is the first time I've used the actual released version, and the first time I've logged into my main account using it.

And what are my first impressions? Well, the first impressions are that it has, again, improved over the previous pre-release. A nice new wallpaper, a slightly sleeker panel, and a number 4 instead of a 3.97 or something.

My second impressions are that it's still very unstable, very unpolished and, to be honest, somewhere between an alpha and a beta in quality. I had been expecting the lack of features, as that was well advertised, but I had at least expected the released features to work. Anyway, I'm going to stick it out - it's going to stay on my computer for the next week at least, and I'll start writing bug reports., and looking forward to 4.0.1, or whatever comes next.

Just giving more voice to original announce: Tomorrow, Saturday 12 January, at 17 UTC an irc meeting will take place on #strigi channel (it’s on freenode if you don’t know).

During the meeting Strigi developers will discuss about the future developments of Strigi.

Special guest: Aaron Aseigo. You’re all welcome.

As you may know, KDE4 will use Strigi for meta information extraction instead of the old KFilePlugin classes.

Since Strigi’s analyzer work in a different way, lot of code has to be ported. Unfortunately, after a good start, some relevant analyzers were still missing.

But in the last weeks Strigi gained support of:

• wave file
• avi files
• txt files
• dds files
• rgb files
• sid files
• ico files

I’ve also updated this summary page. As you can see there’s still some work to do, but don’t worry… I’ll try to do the best ;)

Why I waited so long to install flashblock I may never know. But I'm glad I finally did.

(title is dedicated to Gary)

Went on a short visit to Dublin. Arrived totally knackered but went to a party. Felt like the sadly decorated christmas tree. When they put a red drink in front of me I took two sips and had to give up. Fortunately got a lift. The next two days I fainted at 8pm, but then I was fit on Tuesday to make my way to the pub. Arrived there after 1,5 h only to find out that I got the wrong one.
Lep' Inn doesn't really sound like Galloping Green, I suppose. My pub companions spotted me on the street though and like a remote controlled robot I was directed to the car and taken to the first pub. Then there was a second and a third where we played billard expertly. The next pubs' bouncers didn't allow us in for some reasons. So the others went on to someone's home. But I was too afraid to join them. My taxi driver nearly run a guy over, but I did arrive at the hotel. When I made my way to the aircoach the next day the sun was shining and there were many seagulls on the river and I didn't want to leave. But now I'm back and went Christmas shopping. What a yearly horror. Bought 5 presents, 2 out of which are for myself. Am curious about this book about the teddy bear who is put behind bars and interrogated. Liked the cover. It says it's not for everyone. Doesn't that sound promising?

Back to the binaries! Yeah!

After all this XML work the binary file formats are a different world. For the fields work I needed to analyze the “form field” structure of the binary .DOC format:

The header: Actually a misused PICT structure:

b10	b16	field	Type	size	bitfield	comments
0	0	lcb	U32			Count of bytes of the whole block.
4	4	cbHeader	U16			Always 0x44
6	6		U8[62]			Contains zero. In fact this is the PICT struct, but since its not need we can fill it with zeros.

The formfield payload (Unicode Variant)

b10	b16	Field	Type	size	bitfield	comments
0	0	cUnicodeMarker	U8[32]			Contains {0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF}
4	4	fftype	U8	:2	03	Type: 0 = Text 1 = Check Box 2 = List
		ffres	U8	:5	7C	Result field for a form field. Values from 0 to N-1, where N is the number of \ffl entries. In case of check boxes: 0==unchecked; 1==checked.
		ffownhelp	U8	:1	80	1 if there is associated Help text, 0 otherwise.
5	5	ffownstat	U8	:1	01	1 if there is associated status line text, 0 otherwise.
		ffprot	U8	:1	02	1 if this field is protected, 0 otherwise.
		ffsize	U8	:1	04	Type of size selected for check box field: 0 = Auto 1 = Exact
		fftypetxt	U8	:3	38	Type of text field: 0 = Regular text 1 = Number 2 = Date 3 = Current date 4 = Current time 5 = Calculation
		ffrecalc	U8	:1	40	1 if the field should be calculated on exit, 0 otherwise.
		ffhaslistbox	U8	:1	80	1 if this field has list box attached to it, 0 otherwise.
6	6	ffmaxlen	U16	:15	7FFF	Number of characters for text field. Zero means unlimited.
			U16	:1	8000	Unknown. Set to zero.
8	8	ffhps	U16			Check box size (half-point sizes).
10	A	xstz_ffname	Xstz_UString0			Form field name
		xstz_ffddeftext	Xstz_UString0			Default text for field. Only if type==0.
		ffdefres	U16			Default resource for list field. Default value for check box (0=default unchecked; 1=default checked). Only if type!=0.
		xstz_ffformat	Xstz_UString0			Format for text field
		xstz_ffhelptext	Xstz_UString0			Help text
		xstz_ffstattext	Xstz_UString0			Status line text
		xstz_ffentrymcr	Xstz_UString0			Macro to execute upon entry into this form field
		xstz_ffexitmcr	Xstz_UString0			Macro to execute upon exit from this form field
		cUnicodeMarker2	U8[2]			Contains {0xFF, 0xFF}; Padding and/or indicator for Unicode?
		fflLen	U32			Num of ffls
		ffl	Xstz_UString[fflLen]			Resource string for lists.

An Xstz_UString has the following form:

b10	B16	Field	type	size	bitfield	Comments
0	0	Len	U16			Len of the String.
2	2	Unicode char	U16[len]			Unicode chars

An Xstz_UString0 has the following form:

b10	B16	Field	type	size	bitfield	Comments
0	0	len	U16			Len of the String.
2	2	Unicode char	U16[len]			Unicode chars
2+2*len		Zero	U16			Trailing “0”

In case of non-Unicode encoding then the Unicode Marker disappear and the string chars have U8 size.

You might also want to take a look at the ffData element in OOXML ;-)