physos.org

KDE 3.5 is getting near the release date.

I know I am late for that news, but I was away from my keyboard for the weekend.

So, today will see a recompile of the RC1 and a resetup of my marketing material production tools. I will write some documentation this time, so I do not have to reinvent the wheel everytime I reinstall my computer.

May you live in interesting times. (T. Prattchet)

Not exactly news, since Aaron already linked to it.

I was a bit bored yesterday, while waiting for a compile to finish. So I decided to act through on an idea which came up on IRC.

Using LOC counting statistics on KDE.

I decided to only count the upcoming KDE 3.5 branch. No qt-copy, no extragears, no office, just plain KDE as it is released next month.

Here are the complete statistics.

Some significant numbers:

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 4,231,914

Some fun numbers:

estimated Person-Months:            15,419.66
years of schedule:                  8.13 
with estimated number of devels:    158
estimated cost:                     $ 173,582,244

generated using David A. Wheeler’s SLOCCount

The tool is pretty good at getting numbers, but as any statistics, it has limitations.

Do not get too excited by these numbers, especially the amounts of money.

The LOC count, which is why I did this in the first place, is impressive though. Only 4 Million lines of code provide this level of functionality.

There are other tools out there, but this one worked best with KDEs various languages. I bet the Java count will go up quite a bit in the KDE4 series.

Administrative Sidenote: This server physos.org now uses hotlink prevention. Details here.

After taking a look at my server logs, I realized this site having a PageRank of 6/10, shows up early in Google Images. This means the images I embed in my writings, are a target for leechers.

This is a common phenomenon. People with free homepages and small webspace link big images from other peoples servers. That was OK with me as long it was only a few teenagers showing their liking of the BVB or KDE. Now people started to directly link 0.5MB images and producing more than 2000 links a day. That is a significant amount of traffic and very fast growing.

So I decided to install a hotlink prevention.

I use the solution presented by alistapart.com in the Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention article by Thomas Scott.

This method, using mod_rewrite and a little PHP, prevents effectively the direct linking of images from unfriendly sites.

• You can link to the image (like, a text link) which will redirect to a little page showing the image and the origin.
• you can ask me to list you on the friendly sites list and load the image directly.
• Embedding the image from my site in your page will result in a broken image.
• You can download the image and save it on your server.

At the moment I use a whitelist. I have some friendly sites listed who can link my images. I am thinking about turning this around and making it a blacklist, only blocking unfriendly pages.

If you experience any problems or oddities please contact me.

Hope this is not causing too much trouble for friendly people.

Heya, did you miss me? I dont think so, or?

I needed a break. A break from the internet and from my hobbies around it. And the hobbies which started to turn into a unpaid job.

I took some time to think about where I want to go with all this and how it fits with where I want to go myself. This is the third or fourth time this happens in my five years of a bit deeper KDE involvement. I start to do so many things, that my reality check fails. Ok, my reality check is more than flaky anyway and I should get a replacement these days, but it kicks back in once a year when my computer and the work around it is involved and gives me a very hard and painfull kick in the butt.

Normally this ends in a painfull argument with somebody and hurt feelings. I hope I pulled out before that this year.

Well, long story short. I am back and slowly coming back to my computers after some weeks of sparse usage of them.

This weekend is cleanup time. All computers get reinstalled and old stuff burned away on CDs and DVDs to make room for new ideas. I say weekend and “is” because I am still in the process of it and declared this Monday a “weekend enlargement day”. My mails asking all the advertisers in my mailbox for something like this went unanswered, despite their other enlargement stuff, so I had to steal a weekday for it.

I am converting my parents to KDE in the process, let’s see how that adventure ends.

I try to get back in touch with the KDE world with over 12000 unread mails and estimated 3000 in maillists I should have read. Will take some time. I guess I missed quite some exciting stuff in the meantime.

See you on IRC somewhen the next days and hopfully in SVN much more over the next year until my “run away from computers” side is coming back.

Halftime of a stressfull but exiting week. Two days in Baden-W