Sorry for the small outage of http://blog.chatonka.com. The server that hosts this blog also hosts http://aceministorage.com and http://blueribbonbaking.com. I was making some fairly large changes to the former, and as a result my apache settings for this blog were lost. In all, it was less than half a day of downtime, and it forced me to put the config for this site in a safer location that wouldn’t get wiped out in the future. So, I guess that it ended well =).

I had wanted to go skiing last Saturday, but when I saw the weather forcast, I decided that this wasn’t the right weekend. It’s still January after all, and we’ve got a few more months of winter. Luckly, the weather this weekend wasn’t all bad, and I’m now enjoying a Monday morning (woah, make that mid-afternoon!) snowfall. Beautiful small flakes dance around my window.

I decided to update my Laptop (Thinkpad X61t) to hardy development. I was already running kde4 from svn, and so it didn’t seem like I could break too much.

The upgrade was going great until almost the very end. I suddenly got a lot of failed packages (about 50), all complaining that “The generated cache was invalid”. I figured it was nothing that an ‘apt-get update’, ‘apt-get upgrade’ couldn’t fix, and so I didn’t worry about it. Later on, I tried to install some software. FAIL. I couldn’t install anything without oo.org failing on the same error…

I’ll spare you the details of my efforts to fix apt… but that wasn’t even where the problem was!

It turns out that gtk-update-icon-cache was failing due to some invalid images. Well, it turned out that they weren’t invalid images at all. If icons are placed directly in ‘/usr/share/icons/hicolor’ (or any /usr/share/icons/ subdir) updating the icon cache will throw the “The Generated cache was invalid” error. Autopackage was installing both its own icon and all of the icons for the packages it installed (just SMART-tools for me for a smartboard) in the wrong place, generating the cache.

And now I’m doing the boring ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure –all’ Bah!

I’m at the UMN right now, listening to the FIRST Kickoff event for Minnesota. I’m doing a brain dump right now and I might clean it up later.

8:38 AM
A guy from prior lake gives a pep talk, making a joke about a superstar and a nerd. Then he goes on to say that the scince guys are going to make the money in the future.

8:41 AM
Dean oF IT speaks
The dean tells about the the school and the campus and says “come to UMN IT!”. The regional is March 28-29 at the U. Dean Crouch?

8:44 AM
Tim Young? – Benild coach (Really good team)
It will be an eye-opener. He also warns against overcomplex robots that in the end fail and sit at the starting gate. Nobody expects anthing of you and if your robot goes around annoying everyone else’s robot then you are having a

Funny quotes:
“Buy bandaids”
“Buy Fire extenguishers”
“I guarentee you that your robot will catch fire at least four times”
`”Buy bandaids”
Tank treds don’t turn on carpet.
Mobility is key. You need to be able to position your robot quickly and percisely.
I love this guy. Funny and smart.
KISS! Keep it simple stupid.

Never build things to your maximum size because it will always be bigger
You might need your hacksaw or drill to reduce your size or weight. This is why you need to build inside of an envilope.

“Simple robots win”!!!!!!!!!!! Motto!!!!!!!!!111111oneoneone

“Buy Bandaids!” and he’s done. Beautiful.

9:01 – 30 seconds till the video

9:02 – Video
“Your first everything”

9:04
Govener of New Hamshire. John Lynch
He’s thanking everyone…. doing nothing of extreme importance.
He now says that It’s a chance to have a dream and to make it come true.

9:06
318 rookie teams 1190 veteran teams.
John Ablely speaks
NASA Makes the webcast possible
Not about machines, it is about people. Learning about how to work together because “it is the only way to be successfull in the world.”

Greater than the sum of its parts.
EDIT 9:26:

9:08

Gracious Professionalism. This guy that founded it from MIT talks about the first events and how “well gracious and professionalism go together”.

9:12
This guy is still going on about gracious professionalism and I’m wondering when we’ll see what this year’s event is going to be…

Chariman’s award.

9:19

Pall condonus the charman is now speaking . He describes the multitude of teams present in FIRST Robotics. Record 308 rookie teams this year (We’re one of them!). Applause for rookies. His goal is to make it a high school varsity sport like basketball or hockey. Interesting. I wonder what coatches and teams would say about this.

Finally he mentions that we have a game to unveil. Now they are showing a youtube video about this one team 3xy

LOL! The people in front of me are sleeping here, and their team mentor just told them to wake up.

On the FIRST Youtube channel the videos we watched are avaliable.

added at 9:46

LOL! The people in front of me are sleeping here, and their team mentor just told them to wake up.

On the FIRST Youtube channel the videos we watched are avaliable.

9:26
The chairman is now talking about the FLL teams and energy savings. I wonder if they are going to continue talking about all of the other FIRST leagues.

9:27
AHA! Now a lady is talking about the unveiling? Wait, no she’s not. It’s time to talk about the sponsorships. FIRST has 9million in scholarships.

9:30:
Peter Arrives

9:36
This guy is on now, I didn’t catch his name because Kword crashed (Boo on alpha software!) and I’m now in OO.o. He says that he is the last speaker before they uncover the competition. Ok, peter says that he is the head of the first something….
He’s saying that he stole from the world of sports to make it every bit as exciting as sports and it worked because FIRST is now huge. Ok, so now he says that that could also be a problem because of things like winning at all costs. And that’s not what [FIRST] wants. He questions how we balance the want to compete with the generosity. Unlike other sports FIRST has a much bigger picture and that’s what he thinks will be the difference. Again he says within a few minutes we will see the new season… and get no sleep.. and all this stuff.

AHA, he now has a difference. With the skills that you learn while participating in first you can chance the world while with bouncing a ball you can…well…bounce a ball. The robots are just a vehicle.
He used a new (to me at least) word here – coopertition. as a competition + a cooperation.

And I still don’t know what time I need to be there…. time to start investigating. Tomorrow will kick off a very busy time of my life (And all of this just after I’ve finished college apps….) which will last for at least six weeks. I’ll try and keep up the blog, but our robot might consume more of my blogging time.

I’ve been working on Tote Notebook some more, and I’ve decided to add kinetic scrolling to its featurelist. The idea is that you would either toggle between dragging (w/ scrolling) or writing either via a toolbar applet or via buttons on the pen itself. Another option, once the linuxwacom drivers become advanced enough to differentiate between touch input and pen input would be to always have kinetic scrolling associated with touch gestures and have inking always associated with pen input. At the moment, the drivers are advanced enough to not be sending touch events when the pen is in range, but the the X.org input device that it uses is the same for both touch and digitizer. Boo! Maybe I should start hacking on those drivers a little bit. Although, I also have to work out redraw issues with Tote and Qt4.3. I think I’m implementing my canvas in the wrong way because applications like Krita or Kolourpaint don’t have the same redraw issues that I do.

This post started out as a reply to PinCushionQueen on the InternetTabletTalk forums.

I’ve been running KDE4 built from svn as my main environment on both my desktop (DIY Build with an AMD X2 and a pair of 7600GTs) and my laptop (Lenovo X61 Tablet PC) using Ubuntu 7.10 as the base. I must say that it is usable for me at the moment in its current state. I use kdesvn-build to keep myself updated, and I have removed my $KDEHOME a few times when weird configuration-related bugs crop up. Here are my thoughts.

Overall I am pleased with the state of KDE4 development. Of course, KDE 4.0.0 is not going to be for general users, and in some ways, it has not achieved even feature parity yet much less config parity. On the other hand, There are many things in kde4 that are simpler than their kde3 counterparts but at the same time maintain all of their flexability and configurability. These are some of my highlights:

Konsole

– I <3 everything they changed. It's simpler to configure, looks sharper and cleaner, and is fast loading.

Kopete

– Once I get support for jabber ssl (I have messed up somewhere, it does work) it will become my main messaging app. Looks clean, beautiful and seems faster. It also is easier to work with. (I’m sensing a pattern here…)

Amarok

– This is still in pre-alpha state, but I like where it’s headed. And, I already love the 1.4.x series.

Plasma

– I feel like we’ll really see plasma shine come kde 4.1.x. It’ll make its debut in 4.0, but you can clearly see that it isn’t even close to finished based on what Aaron Seigo has blogged about.

Step

– I love Step. It is a physics simulator slated for kde edu 4.1. It is fast, nice, and has simple easy to use features. You can create particles, soft bodies, rigid bodies, etc.. and can apply forces, tracers, graphers, labels. I’ve blogged about it before.

KDE Edu

– For that matter, everything in kde4edu seems polished, usable, and just better compared to kde3edu. Highlights are KAlgebra and KmPlot.

Oxygen

– I had my doubts when I saw early work on the oxygen theme, but it has REALLY come far, and it puts everything else I’ve seen to shame. This includes Vista Areo and Mac (Aqua?). It’s just beautiful. I feared that it would have too little contrast, or would be too glossy, but honestly it is just perfect for my needs. And, as a bonus, it looks great even with different color schemes (I tried black, green, ice blue, and purple!).

KWin

– Many of the features I loved in compiz/beryl are present in kwin now, including opacity, blur, and shadows. More interestingly, I’ve found two unique plugins I love. The first is “Dialog parent” which dims windows when they create dialogs, which is both visually aiding and reminds me that the window wants my input. Secondly, I’m using a plugin called “Thumbnail Aside” which lets me put mini transparent copies of windows at the bottom-right of my screen with . For example, I almost always have a terminal open compiling something, and instead of having it visible on my work desktop, I put its thumbnail on my screen. Then, when I stop seeing movement on the thumbnail, I know that the compile has finished. This would also work for converting videos (see when the preview finishes) or a file transfers.

– And – For a status update. I’m rebuilding KDE4 for maemo4.0, this time making sure I include as
many optional libraries as I can manage. Maybe I’ll have better luck this time.

A couple of last ideas:

Dolphin vs Konqueror

I love dolphin. It’s really smooth, simple, and just a joy to use. However, Konqueror is still my swiss army knife. I can do anything with it. So, for most simple file management tasks, I use dolphin, but for web/advanced tasks I use konqueror. And I like it that way!

KDE3 inside of KDE4

I can run kde3.x.x apps by running “/usr/bin/3xappname” if they’re installed on my system. However, some of them try to use kde4 resources because of the $KDEHOME setting. So, I have a session where I “ssh -X localhost” to get back all of my normal kde3 environment variables. From there I run for example “kontact & kopete & konqueror & konversation &” and I am greeted with my kde3 apps working perfectly in my kde4 desktop!

Wow, that was a long, involved post. I’m excited for January and the release of 4.0, but I’m even more excited for this spring and the work that will be done on 4.1

I’m playing around with KDE4 in a chinook scratchbox, and I’ve managed to get something that at least partially runs. For example, dolphin loads but complains about invalid protocals. I think that in this case something regarding kioslaves didn’t get built (or installed) correctly. I’m also currently fighiting with plasma. It sometimes half-loads, but refuses to load its plasmoids (ie the taskbar). KWin4 works nicely, as well as designer-qt4 (not really kde, I know).

Once I get kde4 running well enough to give a resonally stable interface, I’ll release an image for you all to play with. Interestingly, even in this broken build, kwin/kde4 are running extremely fast, and so I don’t think that there will be a problem with resources. And, as long as we don’t enable opengl (in kwin, etc…) ram usage should be fairly reasonable.

One last thing. Does anyone know of any imon (inode monitor) support for the maemo kernel? And/or FAM support? Apparently it speeds up kde4 a bunch with respect to monitoring files.

Through the might of google, I was able to find a post from amantia’s blog from over a year ago that described the process of setting up a kde4 development environment for kdevelop3. It got me far enough to be able to restart work on Tote (a planner). I’ve already ported my Qt4 work to KDE4/Qt4, and I’m back up to the same functuality as was present before.

Tote’s Main Window

My initial goal is to have the inking capabilities to be on par with Xournal, and a longer-term goal is to be a sort of Basket for ink. You can follow Tote’s progress at launchpad.

I have a few ideas of small utilities that would help me, and I would love to code them using C++/Qt4 and KDE4. However, while I have found good information on how to develop qt4 applications using kdevelop3, I’m having a hard time setting up a development environment for KDE4. There are some documents on kde.org, but it seems like every third line an old idea is thrown out and a new one is introduced. For example, at first, it suggests that one uses a separate kde4-devel user. However, in the next paragraph, it says that the separate user is bulky and old-fashioned, and that you can and should do it using your main user. In the information about setting up kdevelop specifically, it gives me config options without telling me where to set them… Help!

I would really like to use KDE4 for development, and I can’t imagine that nobody’s done it before, because, after all, we have amarok2, etc… that aren’t a part of kde core but are still being developed.