A little of this, a little of that

In the comments for my previous post, Simon Edwards suggested that I write up some of my experiences with Python and DBus in a PyKDE4 tutorial. Creating (good) tutorials isn’t always easy, especially for the developer who is more focused on his code and only spends his free time helping out. However, when I saw that comment I remembered how crucial the tutorials on techbase were for me when I was just starting out with KDE development not so long ago. I decided to give it a go, and I now have my first tutorial up, the PyKDE DBus Tutorial. For now it’s a general introduction to DBus and qdbusviewer (which is useful to non-python programmers as well) along with some basic information on using already present DBus interfaces/methods from Python. I hope it helps someone out there, and don’t hesitate to add to it ( yay wikis! ) or solicit improvements.

Secondly, I’ve been mulling some more over my pet KDE backup project, TimeVault. I’ve got some pretty high standards for it if I ever get around to making it something releasable, so don’t expect it anytime soon. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on it. At the moment it’s using a rdiff-backup backend to do the heavy lifting. The problem with this is that ideally I would like continuous snapshots. This is theoretically possible with inotify, except that it doesn’t scale well to the entire filesystem. Today I did some research and stumbled upon Dazuko, which sounds like it might fit the bill. It exists as a FS overlay to any path in your filesystem. From there, applications can monitor the file requests and respond to them. It was initially created to allow antivirus applications to do on the fly scanning/cleaning, but it should work well for monitoring changes to an entire filesystem.

Thirdly, I’ve been hearing murmurs of a KDE blogging application called Bilbo Blogger. I had been wishing for something to replace the not-so-great web interface to WordPress, and a KDE4 client seemed like a dream come true. Granted, wordpress’s online editor really isn’t that bad, I just think I’m biased against web interfaces. I use Kontact for my gmail/uni email, Akregator for my feeds, Choqok for my identi.ca needs and so on. While others seem to be moving ‘to the cloud’ I seem to be syncing and interfacing with the cloud instead, which fits my ideas about networking more. Anyways, back to blogging. I downloaded the Arch Linux package for Bilbo Blogger using the excellent yaourt and AUR, and it seems like a great editor on first glance. More on that later.