Friday, January 28, 2011

New digikam and kipi-plugins 1.8.0

Another month, another bugfix release from the digiKam team, and it's already in the tree. Enjoy, and remember, this all needs at least KDE 4.5!

As a side note, please don't expect any working ebuilds for digikam-2.0.0_beta1. First, the great new upstream feature is bundling of all the required libraries, including even some pre-release of kdegraphics-4.7(!). Several maintainers have already pointed out that this is not such a great idea, with no effect so far... Second, the entire source tree layout may still change until 2.0.0 release, so this is a bit like chasing a butterfly...

Thursday, January 20, 2011

P=NP, the next try

It could be hot, if it were correct. Now, it has to survive the scrutiny of mathematicians and theoretical computer sciencists from all over the world: Vladimir Romanov has published in his blog and on the arXiv a manuscript with an (as he says) polynomial-time (i.e. "fast") algorithm for the so-called 3-SAT problem from theoretical computer science. Now, that particular problem is known to be one of the class of NP-complete problems, and if any NP-complete problem can be solved in poly-time, then all NP problems (these are "hard ones") can be, i.e. P=NP with P as the set of problems solvable in poly-time. This may sound pretty exotic, but it has enough interesting consequences to make P?=NP one of the fundamental Millenium Prize Problems of the Clay Institute. Interesting times and a potential $1.000.000 bounty ahead...

Yay! Another KOffice version bump!

In a way this blog post is a bit late, since the "big bump" from KOffice-2.2.2 to KOffice-2.3.0 was already a few days ago. But- starting now, we have the brand new zero-day version KOffice-2.3.1 in Gentoo portage, ready for your perusal. Keyword and enjoy!!!

As a side note for those who have not heard it yet, the KOffice 2.3 series will be the last one with that well-known brand name. Owing to certain disagreements and an effective fork of KWord, development will continue as "Calligra Suite", with some less-than-inspired new application names (Words, Tables anyone?). Ah well.