KDE is moving from X11 only to be a good citizen on Windows and Mac Os X. For those who like to code on Mac Os X, here's a bit of good news for you: icecream in KDE trunk now supports Mac Os X machines as compile servers. This means that compile jobs can be distributed between Mac Os X machines with the same Xcode version. And if somebody goes the extra mile to make a Linux-Mac cross compiler, even between Linux and Mac Os X nodes.

At last year's Akademy, I had the chance to ask Bill Hoffman, one of the key figures behind CMake, a couple of questions about it. One of them was the availability of the full CMake documentation, which seemed to only in print. It turned out that this is not the case: CMake is well-documented and easy to learn. Read on for more.

This weeks c't magazine furnishes an article on ThreadWeaver programming as part of their long-going series on articles on concurrent programming. An interesting feature of the article is that is describes ThreadWeaver as a component of the upcoming KDE 4 platform.

The next step release of ThreadWeaver has been tagged. Say hi to a couple of new features: Queue policies can be used to adapt the queueing behaviour of jobs. Resource restrictions (a kind of queue policy) can be used to limit the number of jobs of a certain group started at the same time. Job queueing priorities are there to control the order of execution. Jobs can now return whether they are successful. The unit tests have been widely extended. The API polished. The interfaces pimpled. MacOs is now a supported platform. That should be enough for a step release, right?

Only recently, thanks to KDAB, I got my hands on one of the brandnew MacBooks running MacOs X on the Intel dual-core CPUs. One of the main reasons to get it was to measure the effect the two cores have on ThreadWeaver's tests and examples. And what do you know - besides a little makefile fix and some adaptions to different dynamic library path setups, all of it runs fine - and amazingly fast. Exact measurements will follow lateron, but so far the results are very promising.

This morning, I went to Tegel Airport by bus. On one hand, this is becoming a routine fast. On the other, it is always enjoyable, because I love the city in the early morning light. The bus (TXL) goes past the Reichstag building and the brand-new Hauptbahnhof (central station). What struck me is the new, open culture when it comes to integrating the government buildings into the city never, a fact that never appeared to me earlier. When I first came to Washington DC, I was amazed at how the Washingtonians played baseball and flew kites right in front of the capitol. I admired the Americans for their openess. Today, there are bars and restaurants at the river Spree located right within sight of the big wigs. How is this for a change in political culture? And yes, you can have a beer outside in the sun and enjoy the view (this is Germany, remember, no brown bags required).

For those who are not familiar with it: ThreadWeaver is like a
multi-threaded make tool for application developers. It provides means to chop
operations into jobs and declare the way they depend on each other. When
started, the jobs will be executed by a pool of threads, which will
automagically try to find the most efficient order of execution. With the
lately released version 0.5, it now has job collections, job sequences, and
qtestlib based unit tests.