Languages and vGPU

Now that, despite all the protein supplements, I've lost weight again and got myself a beard (grew not bought) I feel like I really nailed the homeless pirate look.

In the spirit of camaraderie I spent a few minutes yesterday fixing one of the longest bugs we had in KDE which was the inability to spell check Indic, Middle Eastern, Asian and a few other languages. The issue was that the text segmentation algorithm, due to my uncanny optimism, was defining words as "things that are composed of letters". That isn't even true for English (e.g. "doesn't" is a word that's composed of more than just letters and breaking it up at the non-letter produces two non-words) and it was utterly and completely wrong for pretty much every language that wasn't using a Latin like alphabet. I switched the entire codebase to use the unicode text boundary specification, tr29-11 as implemented in the QTextBoundaryFinder and it's fixed now.

In other knews we've released the Gallium3D driver for VMware's vGPU (right now called svga, but we'll rename it as soon as we'll have some time). It means that we can accelerate all the APIs supported by Gallium in the virtual machine which is fairly impressive.

Fixes in Sonnet

As we all know inner beauty is the most important kind of beauty. Especially if you're ugly. Not ugly, don't sue me, I meant to say "easy on the eyes challenged". That's one of the reasons I like working on frameworks and libraries. It's the appeal of improving the inner beauty of certain things. I gave up on trying to improve the inner beauty of myself (when I was about 1) so this is the most I can do.

You can do it too. It's real easy. I took this week off because I'm going to Germany for SVG Open where I'll talk about SVG in KDE and today fixed a few irritating bugs in Sonnet.

One of the things that bugged me for a while was the fact that we kept marking misspelled text as red instead of using the God given red squiggly underline. Well, I say no more!
Our spelling dialog lists available dictionaries now and one can change them on the fly. That's good. Raspberries good. And raspberries are pretty darn good. Even sheep like raspberries. Or so I think, the only sheep I've ever seen was from a window of a car and it looked like an animal who enjoys raspberries. Who doesn't? The only problem was that it liked listing things like "en_GB-ise" or "en_GB-ize-w_accents" as language names which is really like a nasty bug in the raspberry. And what do you with bugs? I'm not quite certain myself but given the way this blog is heading it's surely something disturbing... Anywho. that's also fixed. Now we list proper and readable names. As in:

Working on Sonnet is a lot of fun. A small change in a pretty small library affects the entire KDE which is rather rewarding. So if you wanted to get into KDE development in an easy and fun way go to https://bugs.kde.org search for "kspell" or "sonnet" pick an entry and simply fix it!