Month: March 2019

The UK Open Source Awards will be a day of celebration of all things Free and open with software.  Open Source is now essential in how the world works.  It creates freedom (that’s the Free Software side), helps education (I only learnt how to program from reading source code to KDE apps), allows cooperation across industries, gives a competitive advantage, encourages sharing and reuse, improves security and builds community.  So it’s worth a day of celebration and recognition.

This is the sixth UK Open Source Awards and it takes place in Edinburgh on Wednesday 12 June 2019.  There will be talks, a panel, a keynote from Frank Karlitscheck and then the award ceremony.

Nominations are now open for the awards, please consider which people or organisations based in the UK deserve special recognition.  The categories are:

I’m heading a panel of judges with Allison Randal and Dawn Foster and we’ll be looking for incredible work being done in the name of freedom, innovation and impressiveness.

Please do come along on the day, it’s free to attend and all are welcome, I hope to see you there.

 

No deal Brexit will mean shutting off most of the supply capacity from the EU to Great Britain, as the government says this will be chaotic. Many of the effects are unknown but in the days and weeks that follow food supplies and medicine supplies will start to fail. The rules on moving money about and even making a phone call will be largely undefined. International travel will get unknown new bureaucracies. EU and WTO law means there also needs to be a hard border in Ireland again, restarting terrorist warfare. Inflation will kick in, unemployment will sky rocket and people will die.

Although the UK government has dropped the dangerous saying of “no deal is better than a bad deal” it is astonishing they were allowed to get away with saying that for so long without challenge. There are still many members of the UK government who are perfectly happy with a chaotic no deal Brexit and the Prime Minister, unwilling to change any tactics, is using more and more Populist language to say how everyone should support her and threaten the whole UK society in the greatest game of chicken since the cold war. It would be trivial to revoke the Article 50 process but unless that is chosen a no deal Brexit will happen.

The political process is broken and has been for many years on this topic, there is no campaign from the normal groups I would expect to have one that I can join. The SNP, Greens and Quakers are not doing what they would usually do and enabling their members to have a voice. Religions in general exist to look after their members in times of crisis but so far nobody in Quakers that I’ve spoken to has any interest in many any practical mitigation steps.

Most people in Britain still think it’ll never happen as the politicians will see sense and back down, but they are wrong because the politicians are not acting rationally they are acting very irrationally and all it takes for no deal Brexit to happen is for no other decision to be taken.

So I find myself waving an European flag in Edinburgh each evening for the People’s Vote campaign, a London based campaign with a load of problems but the only one going. I’ll go to London this weekend to take part in the giant protest there.

Please come along if you live in the UK.  Please also sign the petition to revoke article 50.  Wish us luck.

pulseaudio-qt 1.0.0 is out!

It’s a Qt framework C++ bindings library for the PulseAudio sound system.

It was previously part of plasma-pa but is now standalone so it can be used by KDE Connect and anyone else who wants it.

https://download.kde.org/stable/pulseaudio-qt/

sha256: a0a4f2793e642e77a5c4698421becc8c046c426811e9d270ff2a31b49bae10df pulseaudio-qt-1.0.0.tar.xz

The tar is signed by my GPG key.

 

 

 

I’ve released libqaccessibilityclient 0.4.0.

Changes:

• bump version for new release
• Revert “add file to extract strings”
• add file to extract strings
• Set include dir for exported library target
• Create and install also a QAccessibilityClientConfigVersion.cmake file
• Create proper CMake Config file which also checks for deps
• Use imported targets for Qt libs, support BUILD_TESTING option
• Use newer signature of cmake’s add_test()
• Remove usage of dead QT_USE_FAST_CONCATENATION
• Remove duplicated cmake_minimum_required
• Use override
• Use nullptr
• Generate directly version
• Add some notes about creating releases

Signed using my key: Jonathan Riddell <jr@jriddell.org> 2D1D5B0588357787DE9EE225EC94D18F7F05997E

6630f107eec6084cafbee29dee6a810d7174b09f7aae2bf80c31b2bc6a14deec libqaccessibilityclient-0.4.0.tar.xz

https://download.kde.org/stable/libqaccessibilityclient/

What is it?

Most of the stack is part of Qt 5, so nothing to worry about, that’s the part that lets applications expose their UI over DBus for AT-SPI, so they work
nicely with assisitve tools (e.g. Orca). In accessibility language, the applications act as “servers” and the screen reader for example is a client.

This library is for writing clients, so applications that are assistive, such as screen readers. It currently has two users: KMag and Simon with Plasma also taking an interest. KMag can use it to follow the focus (e.g. when editing text, it can automatically magnify the part of the document where the cursor is. For Simon Listens, the use is to be able to let the user trigger menus and buttons by voice input.