I’ve been testing out rememberthemilk.com for the past few weeks and I love it. It’s very easy to use but lets me organize my tasks how I want to. I’m now curious about their API and I think that I will try and connect it to a simple KResource. KResources are for things like calendar, contacts, etc… you may be familiar with the KResource for a .ical or .vcf file as they are the default ones. By using a KResource I could continue to use the excellent Kontact for my PIM needs while syncing everything to rememberthemilk.com

So I’ve never really been happy with the semi-default image of a road and green trees that used to adorn the header of blog.chatonka.com. Today I decided to do something about it. I wanted to keep a minimalism appearance but still have a simple graphic present. What you see above this post is the result of that, and I’m pretty happy with it. The building blocks aren’t supposed to represent anything in particular, but I think that they fit.

There is (what I assume is) an April Fools joke about Ubuntu system directories here:

http://blog.drinsama.de/erich/en/linux/debian/2008040101-renaming-directories.html

With that said, I honestly wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to take a critical look at the naming scheme. I’m used to it by now, and so placing some apps in /usr, some in /usr/local, some in /opt, etc… seems normal to me. However, it would make navigating directories that much more intuitive if we were able to look at something more like the examples in the above link.

Just my 2c.

Well, I’m exhausted. It’s interesting because we spend most of the day inside, but I think it’s the constant attention that drains my energy. Today started out with CPR (review for me) and finished up with body rolling and carrying injured people. I’m really interested in the theory behind some of what we learn, such as why rescue breaths work. Calling on my chem knowledge I’m pretty sure that they work because there is still a higher concentration of CO2 in a person’s bloodstream than even my exhalation.

Again we had the whole “communicable diseases” talk, which is really important but hard to hear time after time. I’m lucky that town is 5 minutes away as well as a Dunn Bros that I can get free internet at. I think I’m one of the only people on the planet that doesn’t like coffee, but that’s alright because these places usually have hot chocolate (which I adore).

Again, I am very relieved that 3rd quarter is over now. I’m on the home streatch now for school =). And I am pumped to visit Norway (more on that later).

Yay, the week is over! Quite possibly the most loaded week that I have ever worked through and it’s finally over =). I’m exhausted, I still have to pack but that’s alright.

I’ll post more about this WFR course after day one.

Friday is finally on my horizon. After hours of work tonight for other subjects I still have a lot of work left on a poetry project. I know that if I can just last through the next 18 hours I’ll be all done and glad that I didn’t slack off at the very end. I have an amazing spring break planned (hopefully more on that later) that includes a WFR course and the FIRST Robotics Competition. Yay!

One more week. Many are sick, many are busy, some just performed (in an amazing I might add) musical, and some are completely swamped. I think I’m somewhere between the busy and completely swamped categories. It does seem like every class has decided to assign major papers or tests, all due at the end of this week. However, I can keep telling myself that after these 5 days it’s all over. And that keeps me going.

My school uses the Moodle course management software. It’s been around for a couple of years, but this year is the first that all of my classes are using it regularly to hand out assignments and to manage some student-teacher interactions. Unfortunately that means that I’ve become very lax in writing down my assignments because I know that I can always access them on moodle later. However… that means that when the website is down problems arise. Since around midday yesterday all of my school’s forwards-facing internet resources have been inaccessible. This means that I can’t access Moodle, I can’t use their proprietary (UGH) FirstClass email, I can’t even visit the school’s homepage. This is a disaster for me because it makes it excruciatingly difficult for me to complete my assignments for next week. It’s enough to make me investigate alternative ways of doing things such as setting up a script to automatically grab the necessary data from Moodle. Or, maybe even asking for api access so that I can write a program to get everything I need. Interesting…

But for now, I wait until the servers decided to revive themselves. I’ve already IM’d the manager of the Moodle server.

I first started using kdesvn-build to get a trunk build of kde4 back in mid-November. Just to give you an idea of how far we’ve come, back then we still had no artwork for the panel (It was that ugly gradient), konqueror didn’t work with cookies, things crashed hourly and I had to regularly remove my ~/.kde4 because of kwin and other configuration issues. However, I never removed the installed /opt/qt4 and /opt/kde4 directories, instead having kdesvn-build overwrite newly updated files upon each build. While this worked, I noticed that my system had been getting progressively slower and slower. After it broke completely, I reinstalled with Kubuntu Hardy (I think it was about alpha 2 then, more on that in another post) and tried the newly released kde 4.0.0 packages.

That was a mistake.

Many things were broken, such as my icons, and I was already missing the improvements to trunk since the tagging of kde 4.0.0 over a week before. So, back to kdesvn-build. However, I STILL kept my /opt/ directory and hence, I was re-introduced to the slowness. Today I decided to do something about it. I completely removed my build directories and my /opt/, and for a few hours I recompiled everything from scratch. All I can say is that the speed difference is unbelievable! Starting with a fresh everything, kde4 loaded (after a reboot, so nothing was cached) in roughly 2 seconds. Windows open instantly instead of with a noticeable delay, and konqueror is lightning fast. I highly suggest that anyone else who has let cruft build up in their /opt/kde4 directory do the same. If you plan to, make sure you’re either logged out of kde4 and in a text console or logged into the “failsafe” option with kdm/gdm. Then, remove your /opt/kde4 and build away!

- Hmm, it looks like my spellchecking isn’t working. Sorry for any blatant misspellings.

Edit: Ok, I wonder why aspell got uninstalled. Crazy hardy breakage? Possibly. Spelling should be better now! And, ouch, I’m a terrible speller.

Last week it was -20 for a day or two. No wind, but still that’s exteremly cold. The extent of my outdoor experiences that day consisted of walking from school to the car, and one very short walk across the lake. I love how everything is so sharp and clear in the cold. I was pretty well bundled up, but my nose and cheeks still got very cold, cold enough to make me take a hot shower after returning inside.

Today it’s only -7, but the windchil is -30. I can’t believe it, just going out to the car was a challenge. Amazingly, yesterday was 44, which means that in just one day we had a 51 degree shift in temperature…. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that (other than when traveling) before. Tomorrow again is supposted to be quite warm, at least in the teens.