Incoming Wedding

3 months from today and counting...

Comparing a wedding to an air raid is probably not the best analogy as some could take it the wrong way. There's just so much to do and so little time. As long as "she" is happy with the outcome, I'll be happy too. ;)

Back up and running

So I've been out of touch for a bit with my recent hard drive failures. Let me just say Knoppix has no problems getting data off of hard drives that contain bad blocks. ;) All my data (i.e. mp3s/digital pics) have been saved and most importantly, my vimrc.

I'm now on a new OpenSuse 10.2 install with 3.5.5 as the default. It's working out pretty well so far. I had to do some installation source magic to get mp3 support for the supplied (read crippled) xine backend. This also means I'll be able to hit the ground running with continuing the KDE4 porting of SK and working on existing bugs for the upcoming 3.5.6 release.

And I'd just like to give kmail some credit. I backed up my .kde/share/apps/kmail/ directory and the kmailrc, and after restoring it on the new install, things just worked. Except for the gui not redrawing between getting emails(all 2772 of them I might add), things are back to normal. Maybe I should unsubscribe from some of those lists someday.

Life marching on

Disclaimer: Beware non-geek post

Recently I've been in the process of purchasing a house. Things have gone pretty well so far with very few hurdles. We should close by Sept. 15th and be in the house by the end of Sept. I also went on vacation to the beach. Got a little sun burnt. Apparently geeks are not meant to be in the sunlight for long periods of time. ;) The big news though is that while on vacation I proposed to my girlfriend of five years. She said yes after she ripped the ring out of the box and expressed her joy. And here's the shot of the ring in all of its glory:

Web Widgets

So I've been following the widget scene for some time now. Keeping tabs on all the ajaxy type stuff and all the myspace-upgrade-to-flash-9-so-we-can-limit-what-you-embed-in-your-page stuff. This on the other hand is something I've been toying with for a short while. And by this.. I mean Meebo. Today they released a alpha/beta of their embeddable web widget. If you have an account on MeeboMe, they provide you some html code to add to your page.. and then any visitor can talk to you and vice/versa. Interested concept that I'm going to try out for a short while. In fact you can try it out right now from my page!

I've seen it be a little buggy where I could send a message out to the visitor, but not able to receive messages back. For the most part though, pretty neat stuff. Enjoy!

Desktop Summit Day One

Yesterday was fun and enlightening. We manned the booth from 9am to 4:30pm. Most of the day was us answering questions, and we received praise for what we(read KDE project) have been doing and how nice our desktop is. I don't think I heard one complaint about any area of the KDE desktop. I fielded questions about ODF in KOffice, Kexi(which I personally have never used), API documentation for ISV's, Mayan calendar support(as a request from a user) and other areas of Linux in general. I got to talk with Marcel Gagné of "Cooking with Linux" fame, Arne Flones from "The Linux Show" and not to mention the other booths at the show such as Mandriva, REALBasic and even Borders. There was even discussions about Women in Linux from a member of LinuxChix. Jes Hall may be getting a ping from them. ;)

Time for Day Two to start. I'll have pictures posted later for everyone to check out Matt and Wade's awesome booth presence.

Short Notice Savior

Before my departure to Desktop Linux Summit, I needed to get my laptop updated with something new and snazzy in regards to a distro. My first thought was to go with the usual, opensuse. Little did I know that the 10.1 RC1 was still a bit rough unlike the 10.0 RC1 that I had on it. Yast had a mind of its own most of the time and would decide when it wanted to open the software management dialog so that I could install rpms. Fighting with this repetedly while trying to compile KDE from SVN proved difficult, too dificult in the crunch that I was in.

I decided to "run away" (a la monty python) and find something else that could possible run better and have 3.5.2 on it since my chances at compiling it on my 650mhz laptop in 2 days were close to nil. Enter Kanotix! It is a Debian-Sid based live cd with a quick (and I mean under 20 mins full install on my slower than life laptop) graphical installer. Only problem I really had was that the network card I have worked fine in the live cd boot, but not after the install. I new what modules to load to get it running, but others may have difficulties with that. I'd also like to say a big "THANK YOU" to devil in #kanotix. Their community left a nice impression on me in their desire to help _everyone_ in the channel. Those guys were just non stop with others even while helping me in my dire times. I'd definitely suggest checking it out to anyone reading this.

If anyone attending the summit reads this, please feel free to come up to the KDE booth provided by Linspire and say "Hi". We're always interested in chatting it up, or answering any questions you may have, especially SuperKaramba related questions. ;)

SuperKaramba 0.39 posted

With the recent update to KDE being tagged at 3.5.2, I thought it would be a good time to get together a changelog and post an update of SuperKaramba to kdelook.org.
Many bugs were fixed that related to New Stuff. Many new functions and examples of how to use them, such as changing the update interval, passing messages between two different themes, the ability to disable/enable the right click menu on themes, etc.

There was a change to how we put themes in the background when they are opened. We were relying on Qt's lower() method to handle this for us, but that wasn't enough when we had multiple themes opened at once. They'd still be above other windows. We are now using KWin::lowerWindow() to do this, and it works great! Using that is somewhat frowned upon, but I've talked this over with a couple of the kwin developers and it is really the only solution b/c of the speciality of the window type we are trying to achieve with desktop applets. I plan to write up a quick spec in the near future on what I think we'll need for kde4/plasma regarding window types.

I've also got an idea on how to spark some interest into SuperKaramba theme development, but I'm awaiting some things to come through first. Stay tuned.