After many years of writing Qt code, most of which has been non-GUI-based, I've gained a great deal of experience with signals and slots. One tricky issue about signals is that they are generally emitted when the QObject is not in a safe state to be deleted. This can often bite the user of such an object unexpectedly, especially when performing resets or invoking QMessageBox. The simple solution is to write all QObject classes in such a way that they are deletable as the result of any signal they emit.

"An intrepid KDE fellow did not hesitate to venture in the bare landscape of ice, snow and rocks of the French Alps to report on the highest Public Internet Access Centre located in the Tourist House of Val Thorens, a ski resort spreading between 2300 and 3200 meters. In these extreme conditions, our reporter found in the hall of the Tourist House, five cybertables full of computers in front of which tourists of all nationalities were sitting surfing the web with intensity after having surfed down the snowy slopes.

Some progress has been made on implementing the Google search bar,
a Konqueror plugin which can be found in
CVS.
It uses the default searchprovider as selected in Konqueror under the Web Shortcuts settings, so
it's not limited to Google only.

For this week's People Behind KDE interview we stay on the North American continent, cross the border and travel down to Philadelphia. The guy I'm interviewing this week is remembered among his friends for trying to enforce a passionate relationship on a Ximian person, sleeps with his laptop and is one of KDE's most outgoing developers.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest: Ruby bindings now have DCOP support.
Reaktivate, a Konqueror module for embedding ActiveX controls, is improved.
RealRekord, an application to record RealPlayer streams, is imported.
KConfEdit adds a property editor.

LWN.net has reviewed KMail 1.6 as part of a comparison of different mail clients. The reviewer also glances at Kontact with some nice words but then concentrates on its mail component and the address book.

Trolltech has released Qt 3.3.1 with many bugfixes. A Qt Developer Conference for Northeast USA has been announced to be held in Boston on May 10th with Trolltech in attendance.

Martyn Honeyford from IBM's UK Labs introduces KDE's desktop communication protocol (DCOP) on the IBM developerWorks site. He describes how to utilize it with the graphical kdcop and the command line dcop utilities with several examples such as instantly messaging a contact in Kopete when he comes online and also how to create a simple DCOP-aware application.

The release is entitled Nine Out Of Ten Linux Developers Refute Sco's Linux Lawsuit, but since I'm the one who wrote up the survey, I can tell you a bit more, although I am not allowed by Evans to "give away the store". But since I've just written about these particular issues for Computerworld (see next week's issue for the column), I can touch on them here.

The KDE Community is pleased to announce the launch of the Quality
Team Project, a community of contributors who will serve as a
gateway between developers and users in the KDE Project, and as a new
way for people to begin contributing.